Wounded, haunted, hunted by all the emotion that I flee, I limp again onto the road, my heart sagging from its load of human sentiment and hope. My little map still guides me. As I walk west again along the canalside paths, I find one road rises rapidly and the more I follow it, climbing, I get out of breath, until looking back I can see the waterways below me and the ruined church some way off behind. The hill rises higher still as I go on, until I reach the end of its irrational and unexpected topography. I stand at the edge of a cliff, the ramp to the apex of a vast slag heap of shale from where I ogle at the scale of everything around me, astounding me: the shipyards and the furnaces. The blue sky above growing pale again already, shrouding all too soon in the pall of hazy smoke from all this toil and spoil. Curling waterways surround me as the coils of some vast serpent within whose constricting embrace I am embroiled. A dead end, no easy way back down to ground, I retrace my steps a little then flounder, sliding down some dusty rampart like a refuse chute, vanishing in clouds that choke my lungs, until at the long-awaited bottom, I stand up shaking, emerging like a clown, caked white from head to foot with pink holes for startled eyes, a pretty sight to dazzle passers by.
A passing crowd of dockyard workers in blue overalls applaud me as a variety act, a stray minstrel from an impromptu daytime cabaret, and I pick up a nearby bucket to use as a makeshift bowler hat then take my bow. I grapple in my pockets, my ash-appropriated apparel, looking for my map again, and everybody laughs, thinking this mime is timed for them. I carefully unfold my crock of gold and sit down to interrogate its treasure: some measure of meaning to these streets which delude my feet in ongoing displeasure. There it is, ex marks the spot: Anchor Gallery, emporium of jewellery and fine contemporary painting apt to produce audible awe in educated men and in ladies fits of fainting. Corner of Admiralty Avenue and Tobago Wynd, a voice says not unkindly, head leaning over my shoulder, you’ll get there if you follow this street west for three more miles. He smiles, helping me up. I’ve just finished my shift, could give you a lift that way, if you don’t mind sitting in the back of the truck, seeing as you currently so closely resemble three cubic feet of walking muck.
So I do. So what. A bit of luck at last. Thank fuck.
Jump up. What’s up then? He shouts over his shoulder as he drives, as if such a mode of conversation is normal where he comes from, communicating from astride steel beams a hundred feet apart. What is this lark then? What brings you to these parts and what draws you to an appointment with the arts? You don’t look like the pretentious type I have to say, more the kind for a pie and a pint washed down with some vigorous swearing and a manly game of darts and several loud ingratiating farts.
Nonsense, I laugh, appearances can be deceptive and human beings seldom selective or receptive I find to those whose characters run contrary to all the stereotypes they keep constantly in mind. As you’ll be gathering any minute now, I have the vocabulary of an educated genius and the verbal wherewithal to deploy it any time and place with reckless haste any old how. Silly old cow! I shout aloud to a wobbling hobbling old woman my chauffeur has just narrowly missed mowing down, so sideswiped and blindsided is he by my dazzling diction and grammatical know-how. In summary, I may look like a down-and-out, but in fact I am an intellectual lout, unplugged and disconnected from all the usual rules of etiquette, more inclined to cross my eyes and dot my teas than watch my peas and queues. A ruse, you see, this disguise, to misdirect the eyes, do you not surmise?
Bloomin eck, mate, you’re a flaming nutter, I don’t want no trouble mind, I’ve got no quibble with your kind. I’ll just drop you off at the next available corner where you can reacquaint yourself with the gutter. Sorry, but I like to run a decent law-abiding lorry. Just pose as a ball of dirt again and the next refuse van comes by might take you to a quarry.
No matter, I retort as a last resort, truth be told I was already growing weary of your patter. It would have been football next then doubtless your unsavoury views on immigration, how to save free kicks and this drowning nation by enlistment in The Front, The League, and stave off inundation by the barbarian delegation. Frankly I’m proud to be mad, black or queer, or whatever hallucinated terror you mistake me for in error, to get me out of here. What’s dirtier, my face or your mind? And what place shall I find more of my kind? Not this planet, and not this time. The verbally flamboyant were long since deported, out of sight and out of mind.
No matter indeed, for I surmise my trusty map has failed me not, and my destination requires a walk of just one more block. Thar she blows, the Anchor Gallery, an establishment redolent of outlandish blandishments, manned already I see through its glowing window display, by a regiment of anal artisanal aficionados, connoisseurs, poseurs and raconteurs. Mine’s a glass of Chardonnay, what’s yours? All Armani suits and champagne flutes, silly shirts and giggling flirts. Laughter in bacchanalian baritones and soprano semi-quavers. Oh do come in, don’t stand there, don’t waver, don’t dither, come forth, come hither. A drooping banner all aquiver, substantial signage to declare that Zennad Learmot is here, there and everywhere, with even a photo of his veritable visage to fix passers-by with his studiedly difficult and complicated stare, those brooding eyes to vex and hex and sex and hypnotise. Strong spirits on hand to retrieve the swooning from the land of sighs.
I’m looking all about to find my brother, like a wolf in the henhouse sniffing out the greatest concentrations of fluttering feathers, I find instead the gallery owners who introduce themselves as Eustace and Polly, he somewhat feminine in lace silk curtains, she somewhat macho in braces and Doc Martens, a gender juxtaposition I ponder abstractedly while I help myself to nachos. Their own dress so laissez-faire that they seem to take my sartorial degradation as symptomatic of a new one-man movement of vagrant street art with attitude and court me for a platitude on the painting of the great Zennad. I am unable to resist, while flicking olives with my wrist and other tricks like firing cocktail sticks across the room, to resume my interior monologue, externalised temporarily for the masses, on the subject of my sibling, whilst endeavouring to knock back several wineglasses without dribbling.
Learmot, I would say, in his infinite resistance to definitive definition, is loath to give ammunition to the crass critic and the avid admirer alike, by riding on a trike across the paint-splattered canvas of his reputation with a few careless words tossed over the dyke. Of course I’m mixing metaphors, splitting infinitives, and quoting clichés like there’s no tomorrow, but it would be a matter of sorrow were the man to unmuddy the waters of his complex allegories and thereby to stand naked before you, so it falls to pseuds like me to do it for him. I’d say his work is lewd, crude, food for thought of a kind best served as antipasti rather than a main, which is to say it is not altogether plain nor altogether good nor wholesome, indeed at times it’s rather nasty. Take this one here for instance… I wave my hand and part the retinue, leaving me feeling somewhat lonesome as I continue, I’d say that in this one he has nothing at all to say, but passed a day contriving a whimsical puzzle to keep your muddled brains at bay. But while he may be glib and taciturn, recalcitrant and intransigent, I though apparently indigent, have much to say to him… and come to think about it, I’ve come all this way to cross swords with the master. Where is he hiding amongst you, the bastard?
But… but… says Polly, unable to restrain her giggling as if my lecture has been an entertaining interlude of folly and whimsy instead of my burning of the widespread flimsy drapes of blindness, a kindness that I’m only slightly tipsy. You’ve just missed him. He breezed out an hour ago to return to his ship for a good night’s kip before ploughing the ocean’s waves in coming days. His autumn tour advances as the seasons of the year. Oceania beckons, so up and off he must be out of here.
No! I clench my fist and buttocks, close to tears. He eludes me again, this could go on for years. Can you tell me where the brigand moors his frigate, rests his vessel, parks his barque, corrals his coracle?
What do you
think, oracle? –Eustace leers laconically. The nearest pier to wherever he can bank his anchor, just like parking a motor car, ironically, which is to say: not far, basically. Nine hundred yards straight out that door ajar past the whisky warehouse and the Fishermen’s Mission.
Don’t be a wanker. No need for rancour regards my stupidity at which you’re hinting. Thank you. There now follows a short interlude of sprinting.
*
I find Zennad’s yacht down at the dilapidated dockside without too much trouble. As if contained in a bubble I slither my way on board past his bodyguards using a subtle mixture of blackmail threats and physical violence. Met with silence. They’re black-suited gangsters’ men who Zennad likes to surround himself with for reasons of glamour, clamour, carefully releasing spurious stories to the press every six months about how their bosses are threatening to kill him for unpaid debts and bets. These play almost as well to the adulating millions as his invented mental health issues, stories of which I find particularly offensive, given that I am, in the current parlance, the real deal in that regard. I have read Zennad’s stories in newspapers I’ve pulled from bins, wrapped my feet in and stashed under my head as pillows for my cardboard bed. I fell hard after my diagnosis with schizophrenia, I seem to have been remembering recently. But whether before or after my botched attempts at self-trepanning and putting a bullet through my head, I am more hazy on.
I reach his cabin and it seems confusingly empty until I turn and face its full-length mirror, and I see him there disguised as a tramp. Still rhyming all the time, brother? –He drolls. Come to treat me to some couplets and sonnets in Iambic Pentameter, have you? Or is all this claptrap rap? Chap chap (he taps his head in the age-old gesture) Just what part of the brain did you mess with to start all that stuff up? Pass over that cup, and I’ll pour you a brandy. Handy, a drinks cabinet cabin, wouldn’t you say?
Just dandy. I sit down at his elaborate antique table and he joins me.
And the time travelling, he sniggers, how’s that going? You still got the wires down your sleeve and the dial on your chest? Where you been to recently? Thirteenth century France or the Yucatan meteor strike?
I can only go where people were, I tell him quietly, gritting my teeth. There were no people around in the time of the dinosaurs. I told you, it’s like hypnotic regression, past lives. I can go back down the chain of births and deaths, but only so far.
And forward? Zennad laughs, indulging me, not believing a word, the turd. You’ve been to the future too, right? That’s what you told me last time, that night…
I nod, slowly and silently, starting to shake violently, little splashes of brandy spilling down my sleeve like blood.
And that’s when you really dropped the ball I recall. Just what could you see there, dude?
The w-w-worst thing imaginable… I stutter and splutter into a spasmodic cough, rough, hoarse.
Ahh, I see… your own death I suppose. Hardly a surprise, we’ve all got to go you know. He grabs a Turkish rug from an ebony chest and wraps it around my shoulders to warm me up and stop my shivering and leads me over to the cabin window, from where we both look out at the sea, the patterns of waves, opalescent, transcendent, nascent.
No… I manage, pulling myself together, sipping the drink, trying to remember, trying to think. That was the first time, I should have left it at that. But I took matters into my own hands, killed the man who was going to drive the van that ran me over. Would have run me over. Tenses, damn, so hard.
Which is why you always talk in the present tense now I suppose, as well as rhyme, no crime, one word’s as good as another. But murder, are you serious, brother? And why tell me now anyhow?
Murder’s the least of it. Causality, casualty. The future changed, I changed it. The world ended. Will end… if I don’t die, didn’t die as planned. The butterfly’s wings, changing things with each tiny beat of its tiny wings.
Hence the gun, and the bullet through the head. Zennad nods sagely now, accepting, philosophically. It’s a pity you botched it really, isn’t it, sunshine?
Did I? Or am I, perhaps, I sometimes wonder, are we, could we be, already dead?
It’s always there as an existential possibility, granted, he muses, eyes to the ceiling, –even without resort to amateur ballistics and supernatural statistics. But you’re a whacko, Ither, out of your box, brother, we both know that as well as we knew our own mother. And while we’re on weird thoughts, here’s another: what is a twin sibling anyhow but the ultimate, organic, personified rhyme?
I’m nodding back at him, agreeing, lifting my eyes, and he’s reaching out his hands to embrace my shoulders as I lift mine, to his neck. An embrace, he thinks, but his face now, stunned, chokes, turning slowly blue as I throttle and throttle. Horrible sounds of diphthong and glottal. He catches the bottle, the brandy with his flailing hand, I duck, luck, and it lands against the mirror. Shiver, shuddering of a whole world cast asunder. Thunder. Silver light forever, all tumbling down to the ground, the fragments resounding, surrounding, astounding. Turn around to the glittering sea and run, run like a river.
The thugs let me out without a whisper. Just another one of Zennad’s eccentric excursions, down the gangplank and out to the dirty-black town. Maybe he goes out some nights as a woman, a master of disguises. No prizes for guessing how he gets his kicks and inspiration, undressing all the repressed with his eyes, as he passes them, wearing dark glasses. Sizing them up for a canvas. From the hull, one particularly dull-witted henchman hails me: Still sailing tonight boss? No loss, the loss of my brother. But it hadn’t crossed my mind that I could steal his identity. Heaven sent, if I meant to. If I wanted to.
*
So the plan is laid, and slept on seems almost sane. Soaked by overnight rain and kip in a skip placed next to a drain, I court sympathy at the rear door of a charity shop with my best puppy eyes and emerge some moments later with a whole new attire: smart jacket and trousers not quite completely ill-fitting and a fresh shirt and tie only torn and stained in places hidden from the eye. I stroll back to the Anchor Gallery with growing confidence in every gliding stride, borne up and inspired by my sartorial magnificence to impending acts of verbal munificence, eloquence and sleight-of-hand too quick for the eye or the ear or whatever orifice one’s audience cares to bring to bear. People turn and stare as I pass, an ass come back as a messiah. A liar? But True Thomas would fail at any such endeavour. Therefore some deeper truth must here be being divined, I devoutly opine. I vow to sever any links with my recent past, and emerge resplendent, should anybody ask, not as Ithir but as Zennad, artist and entrepreneur, and catching a glimpse of myself in a passing shop window, pause and decide to go in there where they shall cut short my hair.
Have you had any holidays yet? –Asks the charming young lady who shampoos my head, along with penetrating questions like: Have you always had a beard? In return I regale her with verbal virtuosity for ten minutes as she crops my wig into the debris around my chair, portraying myself with such skill as a freewheeling divorcee millionaire that she is too much in a tiz to respond as I whiz out the door without paying at the conclusion of the procedure. Such behaviour is permissible for sheep, and I forego her steep rates in the hope that she may choose to weave my famous and wealthy plaits into something useful to stave off the winter for a family of three. Now I am free, and several grammes if not a kilogramme lighter. Next time I’ll invite her to my luxury yacht on the seven seas.
And so I breeze into the gallery disguised as my brother and announce my intention to follow my recent sell-out exhibition with another. Aghast, Polly and Eustace smother me with kisses while I grasp their asses, both of them so as not to be deemed sexist, or should an unknown observer exist and insist to my face; as if I’ve just misplaced my glasses. It’s off to the adjoining studio at once with sleeves rolled up and canvases stretched like groaning victims on the rack, and Polly dashing out to buy more paint waving and winking saying she’ll just be right back. Eustace collapses in
a chair and smokes a Gauloise in a state of heady ecstasy as I unfold my troubled psyche in a frenzy onto the easel in front of me. Surprising myself as to how much I remember of all the faces and places I’ve seen in recent days: I watch them all emerge transfigured, transplanted, revealed in different ways for the hidden spirit within them peeled like fruit then pealed out like bells, announcing their taste, their texture, their sound and smells. Belles, beaus and portmanteaus at work, in action and in sweet repose, all the panoply of human kind engaged in financial monopoly, enrichment, enslavement, or decline. I pluck it, crush it, and distil it into wine.
But look, this can’t be me this thing, these graceful curves and skilful lines so unrehearsed but just right each time. The colours sing. It’s as if I’m just a twit, a conduit, for some force unearthly or divine brought to earth through the lightning rod of my current state of possession, obsession. The paint moves as if it is blood from my very veins, the canvas flexes like human flesh, beating, responding to the touch in a way too familiar. I lean a finished canvas on a pillar, and start straight off upon another then another. Damn that brother of mine, this stuff is easy, occult transgression, allowing demons intercession. I’ll teach the twat a timely lesson.
This new work, Eustace groans with hand to temple, it’s the best yet, vigorous and tempestuous, in fact I may be getting an erection.
No problem, I say sportingly over my shoulder, the toilet’s just over there and I’ll hold the fort while you give that some attention. Tension, pent up for weeks it seems in my body like a spring, is easing now in this flood of inspiration and the consolation that it brings. I didn’t know I could even paint, where do these skills come from? –I find myself whispering just as Polly returns and in shame my cheek burns.
The Rhymer Page 8