First, Gog feels the splinters and nail-heads on the side of the barge tear at his back. He opens his mouth to scream, but the water enters, so he has to lose a little air puffing out spray.
Then the blood begins to hammer at Gog’s right temple, then in his cheeks, then his heart.
His shins are still above water, dry. Winch, faster, damn you, Maire. Do you want to kill me?
Spine begins arching backwards on the keel. Body sticks on iron patch, halts, jerks on.
Air in mouth stales.
Lungs pump and pump faster and faster.
Less and less air.
Hurry, hurry.
Head hits keel, bends forward, bumps over iron, floats a little up.
Heart thumps chest, angry fist knock, knock, knock.
Shoulders scrape over keel.
Ribs squeeze out, in, out, in.
No air.
Cheeks blown out, bursting.
Rump jibs at keel, jerks over.
Bellows torso.
Huff out.
Brief relief.
Less suck in.
Huff more.
All body shudder shake.
Force lips close.
Retch belly.
Hold in.
Can’t can’t can’t.
Hold.
Can’t.
As Gog’s lips explode open to suck in water and death, his scalp breaks the surface so that his first swallow is a mixture of river scum and air, and he chokes and gags and pukes all the rest of his slow dragged way up the other side of the black barge onto the deck, where he is laid out and unstrapped and turned over onto his face and massaged until the water runs from his lungs and the splinters are pulled from his back and the raw flesh covered with soft cream and dressed with lint held down by plaster. And he is sat upright and clothed in a clean white shirt and clean white trousers and canvas shoes. And brandy is forced down his throat and becomes fire and strength in his guts and he is walked up and down the deck between Maire and Jules until he is unsteady on his feet and breathing easily. Then Maire says, “Four and a half minutes under. We took pity on you and winched quicker at the end. You want to live pretty much, Gog my friend. Ready for the next roll?”
And Gog nods and he goes back to the cabin with Maire and he picks up the black set of dice with the white spots and she picks up the white set of dice with the black spots. And Gog throws again, this time each dice in turn. Five spots. Six spots. Six spots. Then Maire throws her three dice together, one, one, two. Then Gog throws again, two dice and then one dice. Three spots and three spots, then two spots. And Maire throws again her dice all together, six, six, and six. Her turn again. Again she throws, six, six, and six. She smiles mockingly at Gog and throws again, this time each dice singly. Six. Six. Six. “I shouldn’t prolong the agony, should I? I mean, mental agony, anticipation of pain is worse even than a keel-haul, isn’t it?” And Maire blesses the dice, rubbing them on her sleeve, and throws them once more, four and four and three, making eleven.
“It’s very traditional and sporty, Gog, my second order. It’s the greasy pole with the pig on top. There’s a special collapsible mast on deck, covered with oil. It would be impossible to climb if it weren’t covered with nails as well. You’ll slip on the oil, but then you’ll stick on the nails. There’s a small penalty if you fall, but you’ll see what that is. If you return with the greasy pig safely onto deck, then there’s no penalty, of course. Shall we begin?”
Once Gog is on deck, he sees that Jules has stepped up a mast some thirty feet high above the barge, so that the wood bisects the face of the moon. At the top of the mast is a small yard-arm, from which a screaming piglet is dangling by a noose round its neck. “I forgot to add,” Maire says, “you’d better shin up that mast quick before the pig hangs itself, because if you come down with a dead pig, you’re bacon too.”
So it is that Gog starts up the greasy pole. And the surface of the mast is just as Maire says. If Gog can find a place for his palm among the nails, then his hand slips down until it is driven onto the point of the nail below. Gog can only make progress upwards to the squealing and choking piglet by clasping the pole to his chest with locked arms and thighs and by heaving himself upwards on the nail points. Each foot in gained height starts up twenty trickles of blood from twenty rips in Gog’s skin, so that blood is seeping from his chest and biceps and legs in a hundred places before he has reached five foot up the pole. He is ready to drop back here and risk slaughter at Maire’s hands rather than endure this slow death by the thousand pricks, when he sees that he cannot fall. Jules and Maire have dragged up two steel semi-circular mats under the mast, through which fifty sabres glint their tips upwards in the light of the deck-lanterns.
So Gog is forced to climb, tearing the front of his body to shreds, while the plaster on his keel-hauled back breaks loose and his previous wounds start to bleed again. He is a gory twenty feet high, mounting slowly, slowly, when the piglet stops squealing above him and he sees that the brute is at its last kick. With three great jack-knives of his lacerated body, Gog makes up the last ten feet and swings one arm loose to grab at the piglet. He cannot hold its larded hide, but at least he pushes the piglet up enough for the noose round its throat to open a little and allow it to snuffle in a small breath. Gog dares all at his next attempt, flinging both arms round the piglet and holding onto the pole only with his legs. The piglet kicks its hooves into Gog’s face as he drags its body choking down on the noose, while the nails in the mast drive deeper than ever into Gog’s thighs, now supporting his full weight as well as the piglet’s pounds. Suddenly, Gog’s flesh can stand it no longer. His legs splay apart and he swings out from the pole, spattering a bloody rain on the deck from his myriad wounds, his arms squelching the slippery pig, unable even to hold on to an ear or a tail. By some grace, as Gog swings outwards, the yard-arm breaks, and down come Gog and noose and piglet and all in a parabola that lands him stunned just outside the sabre-toothed mats.
Gog wakes to find himself propped in a chair at the false marble table, the two sets of dice ready at hand and Maire smiling at him from the opposite seat. Bandages have been wound tightly round his body so that he is swaddled like a baby or a Lazarus. He cannot decide whether he is reborn or resurrected, until the pain over the whole surface of his body makes him opt for the second choice. “You really do struggle to live,” Maire observes. “That’s twice you’ve survived. All that tramping’s made quite a Bulldog Drummond out of you. A tough customer. Still, as they say, third time lucky. You’re sure to expire on the next instalment. Your throw, as usual.”
Gog moistens his thick, numb lips. “You throw first,” he says. “It’s your turn.”
“Chivalry won’t get you anywhere with me,” Maire says. “Except to the grave, quicker.”
She picks up the white set of dice with black spots and rolls them quickly out of the side of her hand, as she always does. Two black spots and two black spots and three black spots make seven. “You’ve got a sporting chance,” Maire grins. “A last sporting chance. Don’t say that Maire would deny you that, though the odds are pretty much against you.”
As Maire fans out her fingers in her usual way to bless her lucky dice, Gog makes a sudden effort and jerks out his hand to catch Maire by the right wrist. Underneath his torn fingers he can feel six hard growths beneath Maire’s cuff. He squeezes her wrist tighter and tighter until she screams and six hidden dice, three white and three black, come popping out of her sleeve and fall like cubes of false mosaic on the false marble tabletop. Gog picks up the black set of dice with white spots and rolls them one by one. Four white spots. Three spots. Four. “Eleven,” Gog says. “You lose.”
Maire jerks her cuff into place and massages the blood back into her wrist. “So you had to palm dice into my cuff to win,” she says. “Pretending I was cheating to disguise the fact that you were planting loaded dice on me. Still, I don’t care. If you have to cheat to win, so be it. I’ll do anything you say, even i
f you win unfairly.”
Gog pauses a moment. “I could ask you to stop the propeller screw with your bare hands,” he says.
Maire rises. “Of course,” she says, her face pale even beneath its usual whiteness. “I hope you won’t mind being clawed in future by your wife’s twin hooks.”
“I won’t make you do that, really,” Gog says, also rising. “I’ll tell you my actual terms. We stop playing out this murderous fantasy right now. And you leave me alone till I get to London. That’s all.”
Maire storms in front of Gog, her face suddenly raw with fury. “I won’t have your charity, Gog. I won’t. You’re not better than I am. You just haven’t the courage to work out your fantasies in fact. I do. I act what I think, you repress it, till it’s a hundred times more foul and beastly than anything I’ve ever done. And all the time, that pie-face, that martyr’s look, that beau role! I won’t stand for it, I won’t. I won’t have your bloody nobility. You can go and stuff that saintly bit up your navel. I’ll risk something far worse than I’ve made you do. Come on. Come. The engine-room. I’ll show you, you holy turd.”
So it is that Gog follows Maire down to the engine-room of the black barge. It is a low narrow space with immense pistons driving their way into brass cylinders and cogs grinding round their circular teeth to spin the propeller shaft and steam hissing out of boiling valves and grease making a dark scum on metal and wood. Just above the pistons and the cogs and the steam-heat is the wooden ceiling of the engine-room. Each six inches along the beams, iron rungs have been screwed in, as if they were a ladder for a gigantic fly. Without a word, Maire picks up a spanner and puts it under the tight satin between her breasts and begins climbing horizontally along the iron rungs by hands and feet, squeezing her body up against the beams to keep her shoulder-blades and rump out of the gnashing of the machine beneath her.
“I’ll stop your bloody propeller,” Maire yells above the clanking of the metal. “I’ll put a spanner in the works. That’s what I know how to do.”
As she shouts, the rung supporting her left hand gives way and part of her body drops like a gobbet into the teeth of the machine. Her arm vanishes between piston and shaft, while the giant cog rips the satin from her breast, making the spanner fall and a nipple show in a rose of blood. She screams, as if she is being drawn inexorably into the maw of the machine, first the cheating fingers, then the hiding wrist, then the quick arm, then the soft shoulder, till the thin skull will be pulped and all that trickery and joy in life be mashed into a mud of blood and bone and brain.
As Gog gawps at the imminent end of Maire, he is whirled round by Jules and pushed out of the engine-room. She stays inside the room, slamming the door in his face, and bolting it tight. So the munching machine is shut off from Gog’s sight at the moment it devours the Pearl White, Jet Black Maire. And Gog knows that he’ll have to wait for the next thrilling instalment of the weekly serial, when Maire will somehow be plucked out of the jaws of disaster and appear larger than life in black-and-white on the screen of life or cinema before his eyes.
As Gog walks away from the engine-room onto the deck, he hears a scream, then a shearing whine of machinery. Has Maire’s body or her spanner stopped the works? Perhaps this is really the end of his serial fight with Maire. Perhaps the game of death-in-life has really finished in her dying. But who can talk of dying while the memory of the living still conjures up once-known ghosts to walk with film stars through its nightmares in the Alhambras and Rialtos and Ritzes of the unconscious mind?
Then Gog looks over the stern of the black barge and sees that the propeller has, indeed, stopped. The barge drifts towards the bank and grounds on a shallows three feet from the land. Gog leaps onto the earth and stumbles away across stubble from the hearse upon Avon. And the night presses upon him as heavily as the swaddling bands press upon his body, so that he does not know where or when he falls into a fainting sleep.
XXIX
Gog wakes with the light of day tweaking at his short hairs. He blinks and feels the bandages round his wounds still wrapping his ribs in a strait-jacket. But as he stretches, the bandages crack and split. And when he opens his eyes, he finds that the weight on his back and front is the weight of a haycock, in which he has wedged himself. He pulls himself out of his press of a bed to find that he is smeared all over with thick-caked mud, so that elementary tiles of straw and dried earth hang onto his clothing and case him about as if he were a small tower. He spends half an hour picking off the mud and finding out that his skin is unmarked. He has no wounds except the old one on his right temple and the bruised left shoulder given him by the policeman at Totnes. The game of death-in-life with Maire has been a nightmare unrolled by the projector of his mind. Or has he been healed miraculously, after all? For he has no recollection of how he passed from Old Sarum to where he finds himself, several miles beyond Salisbury and east of the Avon by the village of Whiteparish, except his memory of the voyage in the black barge. He must have truly walked in his sleep for many miles along river bank and over marsh and clay field, to wake up so far away and so mud-armoured in the morning.
Again Gog manages to buy the stodgy things available in the village store for those without the coloured magic squares of coupons. And he wanders on towards Winchester, leaving behind him the curious local church with its small slate spire strayed in from dissenting Wales, but with a fine gold clock to display a bit of Anglican mummery and earn the catholic name of All Saints. On past the White Hart, too, closed as most English pubs are closed when a traveller needs a beer; the albino deer of its sign is also confined by a golden chain attached to the golden crown and manacle round her neck. Closed, too, the garage, where a sign says NO PETROL; but a grey-haired girl canters in on her gelding and fills him up with water.
It is a dull day, with the clouds in a low and threatening stance, but not striking with the rain in their fists. Gog feels the same sense of blunted menace in the things about him; the scarecrow in the cabbage field with a cap pulled over its blank sack of a face and a wooden dummy of a shotgun under its arm; the placard in the main square of the town of Romsey, where the abbey squats like a grey fat hen above the red-chick houses, the placard below an elaborate projection of iron – It is recorded that in the year 1642 Two Soldiers of Cromwell’s Army were hanged from the wrought iron sign bracketed on this wall – This Bracket is a good example of Old Hampshire wrought iron work. Yet, it was good iron-work all right. It bore the necessary weight of guilt. But Gog cannot bear the weight of guilt that hangs on his spirit as heavily as the clouds on the air or the bodies on the gibbet. His is the worst of guilts, the guilt without name that makes the body feel a sodden skin of bogwater, the guilt that has no cause and therefore no limit, the guilt that makes men invent a God and His priests so that their sin can be tagged and filed, the guilt that is the lead in the blood of all men for ever and ever because they are men in a world without end, amen.
So Gog hopes for a cleansing rain beyond Romsey. But the rain will not fall and wash away his sins. The sky is indifferent to his needs. In the wooden-pillared temple of Ampfield Wood, however, a man stops his pony and trap by Gog and cries the one word that can free Gog from his heaviness of spirit. “Pardon,” the man says from the height of his driver’s seat above the huge spoked suns of the wheels of the trap. “Pardon me, sir, would you care for a lift?”
So Gog is elevated onto the seat of the jaunting-car above him by a heave-ho from the hand of the driver. He settles himself in the narrow seat of the vehicle, while his new acquaintance begins lashing the pony into a trot with stroke after stroke of a long yellow whip. “Lazy beggars, ponies,” the man says. “They don’t understand the whip, unless they get it all the time. Like men, really. Anything they get regular gets to be a pleasure. Even intimacy with their own wives, if you’ll pardon me mentioning it, sir.”
“I’ll pardon anyone,” Gog says, “who gives me a lift on a day like this.”
He looks at the driver beside him and sees a f
ace that is all bone and no skin, with white protrusions marking nose and brow and chin and top of cheek. The man wears a black riding-coat and a black round hat, with small cockle-shells sewn around its broad brim.
“Ah,” the man says, “I see you’re looking at my hat, sir. And curious it is, very curious. It’s the badge of my trade. I’m an educated man, sir, I’ve read a lot of books.” And Gog does notice, indeed, the vowels of learning which polish the coarse consonants of the man. “And I learned from ’em just what I was fit to do. I’m a pardoner, sir, the only one travelling in the length and breadth of this fair island. And what you see is a pardoner’s hat. If you’ve got a worry on your mind, something you’ve done, why, I’ll set your mind to rest for a small fee, just to put some hay in the feed-bag of my friend Jonathan. That’s the pony, sir. The labourer’s worthy of his hire, don’t you think, sir, pardon me?”
“You or the pony?” Gog asks. “We’re well-met. I was looking for a pardoner.”
“I can tell, sir,” the Pardoner says, lashing the pony again. “I can tell. It’s a certain light in the eyes. You can see it, if you’re looking, even in a blind man. Of course, every man needs a pardoner, yet I’m the only genuine one left in the trade. Non-union, that is. I believe in free enterprise. I won’t get my cards and join one of those churches. There’s no incentive there, sir, they take the joy out of the job, the craftsman’s pride in the personal touch. And talking of the personal touch, you do have a few shillings, don’t you, sir?”
“Yes,” Gog says, “I do. It’s been funny, this long walk of mine, you know. Just as I’m thinking of people, just as I think I need them, they always seem to turn up.”
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