Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  The fireman with the red moustache like a hairy coal collapses near Gog and drops the brass nozzle of the second hose that he has rolled out so that its water spatters the rubble uselessly. And Gog picks up the nozzle, feeling the force of the screwing jet, and he waters the great dogrose of fire with its pistils of flame leaning forwards out of the white petals of the glow. And the fire feeds on water, opening out as under rain, until the skin on Gog’s eyeballs puckers and his cheekbones feel hot flesh stretch upon them and his knuckles peel open so that he must flick water from the jet with his free hand to douse himself till the heat surrounds him in steam and he cannot see for the thorns in his eyes and his lungs suck and retch and he falls by the hose. And a shiny helmet bows down over him and takes the nozzle from him and speaks from the cloud of steam, “Thanks, mate, but you shouldn’t really, you’re not in the union.”

  Hands come from the hot heaven and reach under Gog’s armpits and support him away from the glozing heat and he turns to one side to see the black round hat of St. Paul’s come to the rescue, but it is a red-cheeked man with a bowler over his thin, long jowls. And on the other side, the original fat lady, her bun falling down from her hairnet in a draggle-tail.

  “All right, lofty?” says the fat lady, speaking so warm and nasal that hot treacle might be flowing out of her nostrils.

  “Take it easy, old man,” says the bowler, clipped and mumbling from white teeth too tight to let the breath through.

  Gog nods, gulping down cool air in deep elastic gasps, and then says, “Thank” and must suck in and out again to say “you.”

  “Not a bit of it,” says the bowler. “Just lending a hand. Like you.”

  “It’s like Guy Fawkes,” says the fat lady. “An’ think what they did to ’im.” She laughs her gurgling whine, then mutters darkly, “But the pussies don’t like the bangs, not the pussy-cats.” Then triumphantly accusing, “They didn’t think of that, did they? Not when they started this lot.”

  “Never liked that block myself,” the bowler says. “Had to deal with a real sod on the fifth floor. Now he’ll have to camp in the basement.”

  “Ain’t every day ’Itler do you a favour,” says the fat lady and laughs with the bowler. Then she turns to Gog, “Chin up, lofty.” And she goes back over the rubble towards the firemen, chatting to the tall bowler beside her with both hands pushing up her hair inside her bun. And when she stumbles, he catches her arm to steady her.

  Gog sits until his ribs have settled back in a tight cage round his frantic heart. Then he stands on his feet and begins picking his way through the débris, back to Maire tucked away in Hampstead. Oh, they won’t bomb Hampstead, Maire knows best, there’s a gentleman’s agreement, if we don’t bomb Heidelberg, they won’t bomb Hampstead, it’s a fair swap of centres of culture, it’s a tip straight from the War Office, an Official Secret, which Maire knows because Maire knows everyone and everything that matters.

  Gog comes to a crater in the middle of the street between tall buildings without windows. Out of the crater protrudes the back of a double-decker bus, as though the red tin mastodon had suddenly become homesick for the womb of a motherly iron mine. Deep in the pit, the bonnet of the bus lies in a pool of bloody water, reflecting the glare from the sky. Severed pipes and wires, the sinews that hold together the body of the city, twist and prick upwards. The mud flat, upon which London rests like a hippopotamus upon its wallow, already seeps through the bus windows over the slanted front seats.

  Ahead, a low masked light.

  A chain of people passing bricks from hand to hand.

  A tea-trolley, the signal of long labour.

  The sound of iron on brick.

  No voices.

  Fatigue must have choked off the speech of the rescuers, for Gog has noticed that blitz brings the gift of tongues. Suddenly the English all talk to one another, as if the Holy Ghost has come down from heaven with the fire-bellied bombs from the Junkers and has touched the tongues of the Londoners with coals so that they can speak freely to one another in any accent.

  A warden stops Gog as he is passing. Under his helmet, only two red spots show, the points of his chin and his nose, the rest of his face is darkness.

  “Give us a hand, chum,” the warden says. “There’s three of them down in there.” Gog turns and looks ahead at a break in a row of terrace houses, a ragged hollow with edges of wrenched brick that makes the symmetry of the houses on either side an affront to this city of destruction. “We’ve been digging thirteen hours,” the warden says, “and we’ve had it. A big chap like you . . .”

  Gog says nothing and walks forward along the chain of people passing bricks from hand to hand, the great chain of the living leading to the dying and the dead, the chain of old men and young girls, of women and weak men, but not of strong men who are conscripted away from this civilian chain of being and ending. For shelter is turned to slaughter; the bricks which housed men now bury men; tiles are bolts from heaven, and the rain cuts with window-glass, and the hail is chips of mortar, and the snow is a powder of plaster, and the sleet is slaying shrapnel, and the bomb blast pierces more than the North wind, and the streets are deeper than dug-outs with hollow walls that fall in to weigh down worse than sandbags. If the telephone wires set over the every man’s land of the city are not barbed, yet the calls for help along them whine useless as spent bullets. The silver barrage balloons float over the parks on cables and the ack-ack guns are sunk within their bunkers and tanks rattle in the streets and the metal of war has forged the chain of the living and dying from Aldgate to Burma, from Aldermanbury to Libya, all Britons equal under the death-dropping clouds in the trenches of city or desert, all Britons the same in front of the total war that hammers their differences into one whole iron of resistance.

  At the end of the chain of people passing bricks, two wardens and a sailor pull and dig and swing at the rubble; the sailor’s hands are bleeding from tugging loose the bricks, and his face seems covered with stitched bandages until Gog sees that the bandages are his unhealed web of plastic surgery. Gog takes a pick from one warden and begins clunking at the broken bricks, enlarging a hole above a beam, an oak timber that has fallen across another oak timber at right-angles to make a chance roof over a hollow in the pile of masonry. Gog makes a rhythm of the swinging of the pick, hup now, ho down, stick, claw, loose and hup now, ho down, stick, claw, loose and hup now . . . till the hole’s large as a shoulder’s width and the warden shines his masked torch down into the hollow and under the end of the upper oak beam, two white parted woman’s legs stretch down from the timber lying across her belly and between her two legs the black hair points down the apex of its triangle towards the entrance to her womb, open towards Gog with the black blood welling out.

  The warden tries to enter the gap between the bricks, but Gog pushes him aside, weeping, and he blunders inside the hollow, scraping the cloth off his shoulders against the broken brick, and he crawls over to the upper beam where there is space between it and the rubble beneath and he hunches himself beneath the timber as tight as a foetus and he settles his lower back against the wood above him and he stretches mightily and the beam moves slightly and the woman beneath the timber gives a long moan and the sailor comes climbing into the hollow beside the legs of the woman and says, “Again, for Christ’s sake. Again.” And Gog crouches on all fours with bent legs and arms, kneeling on the rubble with the fangs of brick cutting into his shins and the teeth of the mortar biting his downturned knuckles, and he straightens his arms and his thighs, bearing the weight of the upper beam along his spine-tree of bone. And the sweat pricks his eyes out and the pain on the backs of his fists and the surfaces of his knees pierces him and his breast splits with the panting of his lungs. And he hears the sailor’s voice say, “Okay” and he sags back on his haunches, the beam slipping and crushing him a little. And he squints sideways through stinging eyes to see the sailor with one arm round the back of the woman he has pulled forward by the legs. The beam has runnell
ed a furrow deep in her belly and, as she sits upright supported by the sailor’s arms, her breasts fall forward beneath her rucked dress in bloody bags. And Gog squirms and scrabbles from under the beam with splinters of wood tearing at his back, and his spine crackles and a stabbing shiver runs up his vertebrae as if the marrow were full of needles. But he rises again beyond the beam on all fours and squints in the torchlight to see the woman’s eyes widen in front of the sailor’s face with its skin-like bandages as if he were not human. She stares, then a corner of her mouth twitches in a tic or a smile, and she says, “Itma,” and she sags on the sailor’s arm. And faintness or death rolls her eyes up into their sockets. And the sailor lays her back on the rubble, weeping and whispering, “It’s that man again,” then fiercely insistent, “Did you hear her? She said, man again.”

  Gog crawls out of the hole and the wardens pull him groaning upright. His spine is a burning spear from nape to rump and he walks away, weeping slowly and softly, cursing at God for having no mercy, so that the crushed woman has to call on Tommy Handley to ease her into limbo.

  The sirens keen, wailing to the street wanderers to scurry into the cellars, as Gog walks on through the burning night City of London. And a lone church bell tolls for no reason on this last December Sunday of the year of Armageddon; it tolls the old monk’s rhyme time and again on four notes through Gog’s scalding skull:

  “Men’s death I tell

  By doleful knell.

  Lightning, thunder

  I break asunder.

  On Sabbath all

  To church I call . . .”

  But the lightning and the thunder fall and the Sunday churches are mass vaults now, empty and shuttered, even the crypts made sepulchres for men’s death by direct hit. God’s in his wrath and all’s wrong with the world.

  “The winds so fierce

  I do disperse.

  Men’s cruel rage

  I do assuage.”

  The bell falls silent beneath the anger of the bombs that are not turned aside. Four crumps of explosions as regular as bell notes, approaching. A warden takes Gog by his unresisting arm and leads him into the square tomb of the entrance to an underground station. “Can’t stay out in that, can we now?” he says, with no more concern than if he’s offering to share his umbrella with Gog during a shower.

  Gog lurches stiffly down the stalled escalators, the people lying in long sprawls down the unmoving stairways. He picks his way carefully down the slatted steps, avoiding heads and arms that lie slack with exhaustion or else twitch at his passing. And he reaches the long burrow of the platform, where the bodies under the blankets are laid out in rows with the regularity usually reserved only for military graveyards. An intermittent snoring and the whimper of sleeping children is all that disturbs the stale air. The overhead lights shine down; some of the sleepers have blindfolded themselves with scarves against the electric bulbs. One pale girl sits up, her back against an advertisement for Cherry Blossom Boot Polish; she is reading Horizon defiantly to separate herself from the war and the slumbering herd packed about her. But as she looks up at the looming Gog and knows that she has to be friendly because the time requires its own idiom, she says, “Penny for the diver,” in the funny voice of the radio diver and Gog has to smile and say, “Can I do you now, miss?” in the funny voice of Mrs. Mop and she has to smile because the catchphrases of the Cheekie Chappie or Big-Hearted Arthur or Stinker or Funf Speaking link the people, who must laugh or there’d be no release in the explosion of the inner ribs from the fear of the explosions of the outer sky.

  Gog sits cautiously on the edge of the platform and strokes with the tips of his fingers the base of his burning spine, but he must escape from the weary overused air and back to Maire and her unalterable arrangements of luxury that allow for no intrusion by war or circumstance. So he lowers himself inch by inch onto the cinders by the track and walks along by the skewers of light on the rails into the tunnel, where far ahead he can see the little glow of the next station. And it is cool and reverberate in the long cavern, with his soles scuffing the clinker, and a smell of soot and buried places, and the relief of solitariness and of moving towards something, anything, just moving away from the people gone underground, the Londoners fled to their caves as all primitive folk do when the thundergod hurls his bolts and burns with his lightning.

  Gog issues forth out of the tunnel long as the burrow of a worm and pulls himself up onto the platform of the next station, which is unfashionable and nearly empty, and he climbs up the stopped escalator and goes out of the square entrance of the catacombs, past its sleeping warden slouched on a chair in his blue overcoat. And the All Clear is sounding in sweet monotony as Gog comes into the smouldering street, and he looks about at the mazy burning of the City with the flames revelling in the alleys in a rout of red and yellow and kicking behind the office windows in a cakewalk of catastrophe, with only the spires of God sticking up indifferent, black and sentry-still among the mighty bonfire.

  A great cloud of jet, darker than the mirrored night, rolls upwards and hangs over the endless arson of London; a ragged canopy of sooty smoke blots out the searchlights and the moon. And Gog sees that the Guildhall is burning, the home of Mayors and maces and worshipful companies, of guilds and grocers and mercers and masons, of pomp and power in gilt and leather aprons, of petty ceremony and almighty consequence. And as Gog staggers down towards the Guildhall with the hot rod searing his back, an edge of the cloud of jet swoops down as the wing of a raven and through his skull sounds the doom of that first Jeru­salem, that golden city which William Blake knew was builded in Albion, by Thames sweet river before machines and moneybags, before Moloch and Mammon:

  They groan’d aloud on London Stone,

  They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook,

  Albion gave his deadly groan,

  And all the Atlantic mountains shook.

  Albion’s Spectre from his Loins

  Tore forth in all the pomp of War:

  Satan his name: in flames of fire

  He stretch’d his Druid Pillars far.

  Jerusalem fell from Lambeth’s Vale

  Down thro’ Poplar and Old Bow,

  Thro’ Malden and across the Sea,

  In War and howling, death and woe . . .

  The wall at the west end of the Guildhall has fallen and the blue firemen are soaking the spluttering rubble so that they can pull their hoses forwards through the steam and douse the burning Council Chamber, where jealous aldermen always scheme for their privileges against King and all comers and win incidental liberty even for lesser people because the legal phrase Englishmen includes more than merchants.

  The Rhine was red with human blood,

  The Danube roll’d a purple tide,

  On the Euphrates Satan stood,

  And over Asia stretch’d his pride.

  He wither’d up sweet Zion’s Hill

  From every Nation of the Earth;

  He wither’d up Jerusalem’s Gates,

  And in a dark Land gave her birth.

  He wither’d up the Human Form

  By laws of sacrifice for sin,

  Till it became a Mortal Worm,

  But O! translucent all within . . .

  Rearing out the smoke and steam before the Council Chamber, two brown giants stand in the fiery furnace. On the right, a Roman centurion with spear and shield, his hair bearing a wreath of laurel. His face is lean in the brown wood, arrogant and sneering from his fifteen foot height. The flames blister his wood with black boils so that dark wax runs down bubbling, but the fire seems to recoil from the authority of his beaky nose and will clamber no further than his chin. Yet, as Gog watches, the centurion splits open and peels apart in black charcoal bending and topples forward in a great hiss onto the paving, where he throws out a scattering of sparks and becomes thirty separate pieces of black wood, gently burning. So perishes Magog, one of the two guards set above the west door of the Guildhall of the City of London. Two and three-quarter
s of a century before, in the Great Fire of Pudding Lane, Magog was also burned; he was reconstructed to rule from the beginning of an Empire until its last gasp, then to burn again. For as long as men rule other men, Magog will stand above their door, and as long as men rule other men, great fires will be raised to burn Magog down.

  Gog turns to the giant on the left hand, the wooden Gog that gives the living Gog his nickname. The flames run about the giant’s­ leggy stand and eat his boots and lick up at his bare knees and at his short trousers under his kilt of wooden armour. A sudden gout of flame runs up the hollow funnel within the wooden Gog’s ribs and sprays out in sparks and smoke from the laurel wreath also upon his shaggy hair so that embers fall over his cheeks and his long face, downcast and bent and brooding over the intolerable burden which the people must always bear because they are the people. His quiver of arrows slung on his back becomes a pile of blazing faggots, his quilted shirt leaps into a shroud of flame until only his right fist holding his spear still stretches forward from the pillar of fire about his body. And as the living Gog starts forward towards the giant, yellow wraiths run over the giant’s hand and up the long spear to its tip, where a spiked ball hangs, the morningstar of the ancient Britons which they used to let the sky into the brainpans of their enemies.

  The flame engulfs the wooden Gog in a great roar and rending and the giant totters and bends and crumbles away as his spear becomes a fiery rod blazing more fiercely than the living Gog’s smouldering spine. Then, in thunder, the giant disintegrates into charcoal and the blazing morningstar falls with the rest of the spear-shaft to the stone floor and breaks free and spins towards the living Gog, who stops it with his foot and rolls it under the sole of one shoe against the ground to put out the flame, then he stoops to pick it up, forgetting about his spine’s pain, which stabs him until he shrieks, so that he has to kneel before the pyres of the giants and scoop up the morningstar as gingerly as a hot potato, changing it from hand to hand so as not to burn his palms. And the morningstar has lost all its spikes and is nothing but a blackened globe.