Not so! –Cassy exclaims, strange triumph in her eyes, For in a few days he has another exhibition in a rival gallery already rallying an audience, sworn rivals of our good selves, a few miles west of here. He kept this one quiet, but it sounds like a riot.
I devoutly thought west of here held nothing but water, Davy Jones’ Locker, my memory retains no name for there but Neptune’s domain, excuse me if it ought to…
Ahh, then you’ve not been in Industria long, friend, or your memory loss is more extensive than my hair loss… Pieter laughs good naturedly, for these steep streets and antiquated quays are but the ancient and smaller part of a vast diaspora of mud flats around the cliffs from here, which stretch out towards the setting sun, where great ships are still built and welder’s torches burn.
Here, Cassy says, fishing in her pocket to retrieve a writhing glossy fish, a leaflet, one of just three left, of boastful superlatives and other advertising pish, declaring Zennad the greatest contemporary painter of his age, nay, a sage of visual prophecy to topple the current mediocracy, to coin a well-aimed phrase I bet they wish they’d thought of, but they’re not half as good as me, hooligan of neologisms wasted on the begging trade. A tirade of brag, interspersed with photographs of two paintings and one of his self-important face, an expression I long devoutly to replace. At the Anchor Gallery at nineteen hundred hours in shirts and ties, canapés, vol-au-vents, petit fours, crap crêpes and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
The man’s a wanker. From this firm conviction I will not be swerved. But too much rancour’s apt to disturb the stomach at this early hour, so let’s leave the knave inside his ivory tower of the mind where we can find him later, the great masturbator. Coffee arrives and I contrive to smile, swallow back my bile and share small talk with my kind benefactors who ask me questions dazzled by my bohemian lifestyle:
Oh how can it be that you escape employment and attain enjoyment consistently, constantly, so fancy-free?
Come, come, don’t look so glum, you talk out of your bum surely, I reek like a lum and kip in tips, sipping nips of industrial-strength booze. Surely that’s no ruse to outwit the glittering lifestyle of gurus such as you? I pay a price to escape the vice of wealth which makes you slaves, measured in my dirty fingers and malnourished gums. Your fears are only phantoms of humiliation and diminution, mere mental irritations, while mine are the urgent peril of whether I shall eat or starve, find a dry bed or writhe in rheumatic damp and chill. My vocation has the power to kill, while yours just to break your will. And there’s the irony perhaps, the grain of wisdom in your effete longing after what heroics you hallucinate in my wretched state. My will is honed and validated daily by the indomitable deathly power it opposes, while yours languishes, soft, unkempt, amid a bed of roses.
We salute you, Ithir, or whatever name you wish to take, for sharing with us your morning break. Your eloquence with words makes all our verbosity seem dull and brown as turds. Fear not on account of your unwashed status. To you we open our hearts and close our noses. It is a triumph of our will to pay this bill and your departure saddens us at the prospect of a long hiatus without your wisdom, your warming air, your cerebral conflatus.
So it’s done. I shake hands and wave my goodbye thanks. That girl’s revealing dress is surely fuel for half a dozen wanks, should my memory and strength be willing now the flesh be weak. Streets open up before me, and my hand grips a little sketch Cassy and Pieter drew me, to guide me to the Industria docks. Overhead, flocks of geese fly south and the few trees I pass throw leaves down at me like lover’s notes. All orange and gold colours, the wind turning cold, autumn murmurs and whispers everywhere, building its insistent insidious argument towards a mighty declamation of wind and fog and rain, a veritable roar to settle up the score with spring and summer.
I walk and walk again until the narrow streets drive me round the bend, quite literally and viscerally, as passing around the base of a headland I am at last released and unleashed into a broader vista. Hey mister! –Croaks a nearby voice and I am amazed that anyone believes I possess the wealth of choice to throw them coppers. Then I realise, tears in my eyes of gratitude, that my breakfast hosts have gifted me a new jacket from off their shoulders, making me look bolder and with attitude, perhaps the means and latitude to attend tomorrow’s vernissage, that’s a Private View, to me and you.
What a vast landscape unfolds before me now, of rusty girdered cranes, of rails and trains, of flat scattered bodies of water stretching to the sea-filled horizon, where steel and iron clang and stammer as ships are built up from scaffold. Tiny figures flicking to and fro, lit orange and red by the frequent glow of oxyacetylene torch and glancing hammer blow. I walk on for hours into the heart of it, the heat and beat of it, passing clanking goods trains and old canals whose cobbled walkways slither hither and thither with moss, the cries growing louder of men at work shouting one to the other from derricks and gantries and gangways and wheelhouses, edifices of riveted steel plates surging and curving, towering and glowering around me and over me.
A relict, a prelate, old derelict entering a derelict sector, with a predilection for good diction and prediction, I rest at last, on an old rusting capstan still twined with frayed ropes and threadbare hopes and consult my makeshift map, a folded square of tat, not much to guide me or make sense of where I’m at. My fingers trace the ink lines like vines eagerly searching for bowers to bear fruit, when a near voice sounds at my oxter, making me jump like a toaster: Are you lost or in doubt, doubting Thomas as I make you out?
What? I spin and turn about, giddy as sin, fractious, anxious not to let this intimate voice raid the sanctum of my cerebrum, hectoring like plankton unstoppably microscopically vectored to in-swim. What did you call me? I find myself facing an old hag, whether bag lady, destitute or prostitute or inmate of an institute I dare not hasten resolutely to avow.
Thomas! –She laughs with open mouth and gaps in blackened teeth, an exotic dancer of the heath no doubt by moonlight when nowt’s about, a witch I mean, clean off her trolley, old dolly with no lolly, dressed in rags. She takes my hand in hers and starts to read it like a book, lifeline, deathline, every clammy cleft and fissure, cranny, crimp and nook. I look around, expecting to spy her pimp then finding none turn to contemplate her fanny, and my cock which needs a sook. But no, that thought’s all rotten, misbegotten and as sordid as the actions such sordid words denote. Christ, for all I can tell, she might be a bloke, a tranny. Best play canny. My name’s not Thomas, madam, you are sore mistook.
Bollocks, Thomas, quit babbling like a brook. I knew you straight off from a distance as I saw you recently in a dream. You are ancient and reincarnate, come by this way again to test the ways of wayward men.
Come again? Queen of rubbish, you dazzle me with your compendium of impudence, your hot air hotter than the synchronised flatulence of ten fat men.
Ah! Haha! How sweet to hear your vile entreaties of abuse break loose again!
Again? Again? I beg you please don’t take advantage of my intermittent amnesia. I entreat you, if it please you, I beseech you, to leave that topic well alone and tell me only truthfully if we’ve ever met before.
Not in this life, then, if answer that I must. But trust me, take it as a primer from one old timer to another, brother, you are True Thomas The Rhymer.
Confused, upright, twisting to go and escape her entwining arms like ivy, these last words make me pause strangely instead, as if I were dead and she picking wildflowers from my grave. All energy leaves me for a second and I slump back down and she takes a place beside me and we both fall still, gazing outwards to the wave-frosted seas and distant trees. Years pass over me, blowing fleetingly, as migrating birds and the sun-dappled tides of falling leaves, shadows of clouds that have passed over centuries of days. And for a second, I lose my place in the order of things, then grasp it more deeply, as a beach shelving steeply at my feet gives way to depths too dark and out of reach to contemplate without barbiturates. Who am I really? Or
any of us, when these momentary faces, customary pleasantries, as curtains: time takes and pulls away? The thought makes me dizzy, as if the ground of all the world were not land at all, but sudden-turned to glassy ocean smoothed flat by some chill and unfamiliar hand, mirrors on which I dare not walk for fear that like ice they’d crack and let me fall.
I remember so little… I say quietly at last. And supposing this the case, what purpose can it serve that man should live and live again?
The witch takes my hand and smiles a small flicker of solace on her lips like the first flame on dried tinder. Live well, is the only answer to that ancient riddle, press on and trust that the great prize before us is great indeed, and who could doubt that who looks about and sees the wonder of creation? What task and goal except a glorious one could summon up such power and invention, mobilise so much beauty and organisation to its cause? Only a fool would hope to meet God. Better to tremble at the thought of being in the presence of such genius and savagery, judging by the evidence he leaves around us. It is enough to be part of it, joy enough and terror enough.
Terror? Savagery?
As the eagle tears out the heart of the dove, as the playing child drowns in a summer riptide, the swollen river plummets over misting cliffs, stars explode and galaxies collide. The scale is too vast to support significance or hierarchy. No conscience could sanction it, nor strong man bear its load.
You are as mad as I am, clearly. I sigh, shall we go?
Where, dare I know? The witch laughs, just where does your little map lead I wonder, heaven, purgatory or that other place below?
Nothing so grand, I say, unfolding it again from my hand. To an art gallery where my scoundrel brother is said to be scheduled to appear, tomorrow or the next day. My name really is not Thomas by the way, but you can call me anything you wish and regale me further with your tales although I think them wind and pish, while we amble there together. One need not be erudite, to see that you are no urbanite with the packed diary of a socialite, but indigent and desolate and rather lonely and eager for respite, a condition I can understand, as well I might. What name shall I call you by?
Mary… she says quietly, falling in at my side to match my stride. Scary Mary to the local youths who uncouthly abuse me for my toothless looks. Fools dodging schools, they should all go read books if they want to escape this hellish nook, instead of honing the skills of torturers. Evening is coming on now, and the rain which has held off the last hour or so out of decency, is now rearing up to strike in sunset clouds of purple, black and blue. A breeze lifts and I fancy we shall be soaked as seals in another mile or two.
Och, tut tut, they’re only children… I sigh, they often hassle me too, my solemn advice would be to kill some of them with bricks, if I were you.
She chortles and we enter some dingy streets of partially inhabited façades, some by ivy and moss and weeds, others by people with glowing lamps and window frames. Cobbles beneath our feet are ruptured and fissured with green veins of decay, that like panicking fever seem ever about to overwhelm the eye and win the day. Who was this Thomas then? Some ancient figure, some hero of yesterday?
You do not know the fairy stories, the children’s rhymes? But if you have forgotten even your own childhood that need not be such a surprise I suppose. He lived eight centuries ago, a writer, a soothsayer who predicted many things. Future battles, the deaths of kings, that London will sink beneath the waves. People said that the fairies gave him his powers in return for the dangerous condition that he must never tell a lie, and neither did he until the day he… I nearly said died. But of course they say he never died, he simply went away one day, abandoned the castle where he lived, when the fairies sent him a sign.
What sign? And what on earth were fairies anyway? –Things so ludicrous that they’ve packed their bags and fled our world because educated people are no longer able to contain such nonsense in their heads?
Ahh… Scary Mary laughs an old dry croak. As if the capacity of human heads for nonsense were in any way limited, as if they haven’t established that with gusto over recent history. Fairies will be aliens now, and ghosts or something else in centuries hence. You protest too much! You’re fooling no one! Tell me honestly, that you have never seen into the future or witnessed passing legions of the dead, felt the very ground shaking where they tread. Tell me that, as you plead anonymous, then I will believe that you are not True Thomas.
The rain has come on now, in huge fat drops, and Mary leads by the arm through some ruined doorway into the shell of a church, the interior piled high with the rubble of its own demise. Like the scene of a sacking or bombing in some chapter of history which must have passed me by. Here, I hide here often, she says, when the rain is heavy or the tide is high, my bread unleavened or the end is nigh.
We walk into the centre of this dismal stage set, surrounded by high ghostly shards of ecclesiastic vault and groin disassembling in the grey mist of rain. What? You talk in riddles… I whisper as she ushers me through a ragged entrance into a cave of piled rubble at the centre of all this, and kneeling down beside her as we kiss, she puts a hand inside my shirt, caressing my nipples until she finds… the dial, and cries out, whether in delight or fright I can’t decide.
‘Tis just like my dream, She wonders wide-eyed in the half-dark, and the wires too trailed down your sleeve. Oh do not leave tonight but stay and show me pictures of the worlds that you have viewed through your strange device. Show me the future of mankind freed of sin and vice. Show me nobility and hope, there’s a nice boy, now.
This is no toy, you silly cow. If I show you your own future, your death, have you any idea how that would send you potty? And the future of humankind, like its past, is one fraught with pointless slaughter. If you were my daughter, I would strike you blind before I would annihilate your mind and brain with the strain of what you’d find there.
Aha! Scary Mary chuckles, placing her old claw hand around my whitened knuckles. So now at last we find an answer, a reason for your loss of recollection. You are a victim it seems of your own contraption. You could not bear the burden of the future any better than I, hence this suture. Her fingers have found the wound on the back of my head, the same one the police found so stimulating. Irritating. And is amnesia so bad? She croons more softly. It was the greatest prize, the Greeks and Romans believed, given to the good at the end of their virtuous lives beyond the fields of Elysium. Wisdom in that you see. Forgetfulness meaning death and birth, is the price we pay for immortality.
And yet, only recollection can be our salvation, our waking up. I sit upright, spurred on by a new realisation. I must wake up and remember. We must all wake up and see ourselves in time, as the watchful head of some great multi-bodied creature rousing, rising from the slime of millennia of grime and crime. But Mary has her hands on my shoulder dragging me down and slumber comes heavy, dancing on my twitching eyelids and the aching in my rheumatic cracking bones, contracting sinews and muscles. No need for tussle, just give in, sleep is no sin but the beginning of all healing and erudition, an appointment with the divine intermission, quenching of ephemeral ambition. The music of rain invades my brain in a grand serenade, a parade of fading images falling as leaves from trees, see-sawing and gnawing on the breeze, fleeing all light and sound approaching the ground, and longing, longing for the shade.
Woken the next day, the air has been washed fresh by the torrents from heaven. I poke my head out of my bomb-crater midden and enjoy the new sun on my face and my place beneath the soaring blue sky. And asking the perennial question ‘who am I?’ this time there are suddenly fragments of answers, jigsaw pieces, shards and slivers tumbling in. I struggle to hold them all at bay, all out of order, a house of cards, ill-fated, images of murder, mayhem and dismay. I killed someone once, an innocent man. The contraption on my chest was once connected to some larger apparatus of which I was master. The power overthrew my reason, made me commit treason against the natural scheme of things, bringing… bringing, all this long sl
ow disastrous season. I clutch an autumn leaf in my hand, borne to me magically by an obliging wind. Yellow, red, pink at the edges, like the burned paper of sheets I once held in my hand, destroying instructions on how to create the monster that I am. The fall of man is as the fall of God, trying to forget his own power, seeking hopelessly some hiding place, some bower in Eden beneath which to bury the memory of a deed. Clang, clang, The Big Bang. The bell tolls for thee. The black dog of guilt will dig it all up, no fear, sooner or later, there will be tears.
In gratitude for the dubious favour of a glimmer of self-knowledge, I turn my dial as I gaze at the sky and tell Mary what I see there, hearing her murmur and wake and take my hand. High above where only aeroplanes traverse the sky, there will in future be canals made of glass or some other material or miracle we lack the current words to grasp. I see what look like slow boats moving in these arteries, although their speeds must in truth be fast, our whole atmosphere one vast net of these conduits converging at vertical roots which dangle from the clouds down to hubs where people wait to be fired up like grapeshot or seed. No war and disagreement only this glorious aerial interconnection as the canals and folds of some ethereal brain…
But what? She is strangely silent, and disengaging my wires from the stones in which they have entwined all night I find that a shaft of slanting morning light has penetrated our den to illuminate a state of things beyond my ken. I see now to my dismay that she is only bones. A skull, femur, tibia, claw of hands clutching faded old fabric shawl wrapped around her. Some fragments of hair still blowing in the air, white as thread, one of the dead, a victim of whatever horror once happened here. War refugees fleeing to a sanctuary which proved fleeting. I hear the bleating of the last cries of their children, then tears in my eyes, cover my ears, tear at the dial on my chest and stand to leave, swaying, bereaved and grieving for the invisible years like glass through which I have unwittingly peered. My friend cannot help me any longer, nor I help her or ever change her fate, and alone again as ever, I must go on.
The Rhymer Page 7