He had been in a curiously self-pitying state since showing me The Castles of the Kings. I suspect that he regretted revealing even this small corner of his private life. We make ourselves vulnerable with confidences. But whether this was so or not, now he had broached the subject he was unable to leave it alone. I had an uneasy impression that he was approaching some sort of crisis. He had drunk a lot of lager with the barbecued spare ribs, but I could see that it had given him little relief from whatever was worrying him. After I had reassured him about the chicken, which seemed perfectly all right to me, he said:
‘I used to think: “What if the maps were all wrong and the world was full of undiscovered countries!” Undiscovered countries! What a joke.’
His jaws moved slowly from side to side; then he shook his head, swallowed, and pushed his plate away.
‘It was too late even then. The world was full of housing estates.’ He stared into the distance. ‘The twenties and thirties – that was the time to be young. You could still have believed they’d made a mistake then.’
While I was thinking about this a waitress came up and asked, ‘Dya wa’ so’ costa’ na’?’
‘What?’ I said.
She giggled.
‘Wan’ costa’? Rass pa’?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lucas. ‘Custard and rice pud.’ He nodded vigorously at her. ‘I’ve been having that all week,’ he explained to me. ‘They soon get used to your habits here. Sometimes I can’t understand a word they say. I think that’s why I come.’
She brought him his sweet.
‘As a kid (and you’ll laugh at this, I warn you),’ he said, ‘I used to believe that I’d been born on some unknown continent and brought here by slavers. When I shut my eyes at night I could hear voices like hers, above the sound of the breakers on some rotting beach. It was the most frightening country in the world. The river deltas were full of radioactive silt. The natives mined a kind of green gold. They were beautiful – almost white, very intelligent, very tall and kind. It was somewhere in the Antarctic.’
He put down his spoon and stared around. He gulped suddenly. ‘Christ,’ he whispered. ‘I’d still rather be there than here!’ And he looked quickly down into the sticky mess on his plate.
I didn’t quite know what to say.
‘I’m sure we all feel like that sometimes,’ I tried. ‘But isn’t it escapism? Perhaps the housing estates are the real undiscovered countries–’
He gave me a look of contempt.
‘Very clever. You’ve never lived on one of the fuckers.’
He was silent for a long time after that. The place had been full of clerks and secretaries having their dinner before they went to the cinema round the corner on Deansgate, the women in their winter boots, the men in their three-piece suits. Now it emptied itself steadily, marooning me with him. The manager, who spoke no English though his arithmetic was perfect, came out from behind the bar; and, with the girls clustered twittering around him, began some sort of game at a vacant table. Lucas stirred his pudding round in its thick white dish until it was cold, taking small sips of the sticky, coffee-flavored liqueur he had ordered earlier. I bit my lip and concentrated on the wall, embarrassed. Suddenly he looked up again. Tears were running down his cheeks.
‘Are you sure you’ve heard nothing about Egnaro?’ he said. ‘The thing is,’ he continued, before I could say anything, ‘that I’ve just about convinced myself a place like that exists.’ He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘I’m sorry. It’s that I get the feeling everyone else knows, you see: and they aren’t telling me.’ He laughed. ‘Stupid, isn’t it? I suppose we all get stupid ideas.’ He got up and pulled a roll of dirty five pound notes from his pocket. ‘Will twenty quid do you this month? I’m a bit short at the moment. You know how it is. I’ll get the bill.’
I made him sit down and drink a cup of coffee. I made him tell me about Egnaro, and now I wish more than anything else in the world that I hadn’t.
The dead miners of Egnaro lie looking up at the sun, the blackness of their flesh tarring the long bones. A gull spread-eagles itself on the air above them; a hot wind blows along the shore, peeling off a few flakes of gold leaf that still cling to their darkened skin. Egnaro! – it is a dangerous place, which steals over you like a dream. It is the name of your most basic questions about the universe, it is the funnel-tip from which your life fans back. All myths are perversions of its history; it is the secret behind the apparent history of the world. It is at once inside and outside you, and it signals all men at some time in their lives, like a flare of electricity along their nerves. It is as simple as a conversation half-heard on top of a bus –
‘A woman sitting near me spoke to her neighbor. It was my stop. The bus gave a lurch and I had to get off. Standing there on the pavement in the rain I realized she had said: “Egnaro, where they have so many more senses to choose from!” I knew immediately I had misheard her: I laughed and walked off. But I recalled it later, and it has come to haunt me.’
This was how Lucas began his explanation, under the dripping raincoats in the Lucky Lotus that evening at the end of February. I had to prompt him to begin with. (Had he, for instance, heard the other woman’s reply? It turned out he hadn’t.) But as his confidence grew, though he was often confused and incoherent, he seemed to exchange his self-pity for a kind of puzzled wonder: his eyes took on a watery glint of enthusiasm, his speech a crude lyrical quality. He spoke for a long time. Couples came in, ate under the dim lights, and went out again. The waitresses eyed us benignly and giggled. After all he was a fixture there. Would he like some more costa’?
‘Egnaro, where they have so many more senses to choose from!’
From the moment he heard that meaningless half-sentence, a kind of dam seems to have burst in his brain. ‘It was like rubbing condensation off a window pane and looking out at a landscape you don’t understand.’ He was inundated by hints and clues, often of the slenderest nature. In an issue of the Sunday Times Business News he had picked up from the floor of a train he read: ‘Exploration budget cutbacks could still stall our industrial recovery.’ He knew exactly what he was supposed to gather from that, but he couldn’t say how. In two critical lines of Louis MacNeice’s Streets of Laredo he discovered this misprint: ‘Egnaro the golden is fallen, is fallen/Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake.’ It was someone else’s copy of the book. And once, sheltering from a thunderstorm in the doorway of Tesco’s, he had this bizarre experience –
The lightning flickered like a broken fluorescent lamp. Between flashes the sky was dim and greasy. The porch began to fill up with cripples also sheltering from the rain. ‘Every poor handicapped bastard in Blakely seemed to have ended up in that porch.’ They had been gathered in, Lucas felt, not by the wind and the rain, but by omens and premonitions experienced that morning in front of the gas stove. They came prodded by ‘instincts that last meant something when we were all frogs.’ There were old ladies with blasted arthritic fingers and great varicose carbuncles; a tall man staring at the shiny stump of his left arm and singing hymns; a girl with a deformed lip and leg-irons. There was a very small woman with a hump on her back. ‘You felt,’ Lucas said, ‘that if you asked them why they’d come here the answer would be: “My dog spoke to me of Egnaro, the queer old thing, and I came”; or, “I heard we would all be cured there”. I felt that very strongly.’ But they only looked at him; and, when the rain had stopped, left him there with his shoes full of water. ‘None of them actually spoke.’
Thus Egnaro simultaneously hid from and revealed itself to him; in obliquities. ‘It was impossible to verify anything,’ he complained. ‘The taxi was always driving away from me; by the time I looked up it had gone. I always found I’d used the newspaper to light the fire. People took back books I hadn’t finished reading.’
He searched through all the atlases and encyclopedias he could find, but discovered nothing (although once, in Baedeker’s Northern Italy, he came upo
n a typographical error which looked like ‘Ignar’ or ‘Ignari;’ it was on a map of Livorno, near the new port). Nothing was made public, but by now he could hear the conspiracy all around him. It made an expectant sound, he said, like people filing into a cathedral or an empty concert hall. It had affected the economy of the country, he believed; it had soured and complicated international relations. Fleets were outfitting on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Channel, the Baltic, and all along the Mediterranean seaboard, in a race to exploit the new country. Whoever got there first would reap enormous wealth from its mineral resources, the new sciences of its mysterious inhabitants, its incredible new animals; besides an immense strategic advantage. As soon as its exact whereabouts were known they would put to sea. Although this secret was jealously guarded, preparations so massive were necessarily known to many; ordinary people had been quick to pick up the rumor.
‘They discuss it as a place to go for their holidays!’ said Lucas, in tired disgust. ‘Will it be cheaper than Majorca? Its beaches less crowded than the Costa Blanca?’
(‘Costa’? Costa’?’)
Suddenly we were back at the beginning. His face had collapsed into self-pity again and he had buried his head in his hands. ‘Don’t you see?’ he appealed. ‘If I don’t find something out soon they’ll get there before me!’ His shoulders shook. ‘That’s the real horror of it, don’t you see? If there really is such a place then by the time I get there it’ll be just the same as it is here!’
And he stared miserably at the maroon flock walls of the Lucky Lotus, the tears streaming down his cheeks again.
What could I do? I was appalled by his condition. And yet what he had said did not really touch me. I had always rather admired his cynical resilience; I couldn’t begin to imagine as yet the state he had got himself into. I remember thinking, ‘How can anyone have become so desperately lost?’ But that may have been much later; and besides we never quite know what we mean by thoughts like that. Somehow I got him to cheer up and pay the bill. It was nine or ten o’clock at night by now. The waitresses fussed round him but he didn’t seem to notice them. He forgot his briefcase and they came running out after us with it. He thanked them absently. All it ever had in it was an old copy of Rustler and some broken pencils. When we emerged onto the deathly quiet streets behind Deansgate he said he’d walk up to the cab rank in St Peter’s Square. I went with him that far but I couldn’t wait.
‘You’ll be all right?’ I asked him.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got a bit of headache now. I’ll have a couple of Veganin at home. They’ll get me off to sleep.’ He got hold of my arm. ‘It’s just a silly idea, all this, you know. I’ll get over it.’
There he stood, looking battered and out of place in the February wind, his loneliness outlined by the great doorway of the Midland Hotel behind him. There didn’t seem to be many taxis about.
The city center was slow to recover from that winter. March was bitter; late snow in April flattened the daffodils and filled the gutters with brown slush; Easter came early but did nothing to help trade. People were reluctant to come out in the sharp unseasonable winds: they had no money when they did. Turnover fell in all the luxury shops and most of the supermarkets. Deansgate took on a deserted, shabby appearance. You could find a few office workers hurrying out at lunchtime, but they were avoiding the pedestrian arcades of King Street where the spring fashions made colorful but somehow remote displays behind the plate glass windows. The sandwich bars were empty. How much of Lucas’s failure was part of this wider picture, how much his own fault, is hard to say.
Towards the end of March, government waste committees threatened to cut the student grant for the third time in twelve months. (A few puzzled protesters marched down Peter Street with placards and a petition, only to drift off aimlessly when they reached the Square.) Shortly afterwards Lucas fell out with his main paperback suppliers, who were justifiably sick of him not paying his bills. Then, as the students trickled back and trade picked up, a series of leading articles devoted to ‘these brokers of porn and purveyors of filth’ appeared in the Evening News; and for a while the shelves at the back of the shop were raided almost every afternoon. This made Lucas’s staff nervous and edgy: they ran out of false names to give the police and, tiring of Lucas’s promises to have the tape player mended, left him one by one.
Throughout this period he was preoccupied and indecisive. He fobbed his creditors off with increasingly dull excuses; absent-mindedly signed his own name on agreements he could not hope to keep; and, whenever he could find someone to look after the shop for him, sat upstairs trying to control his headaches with handfuls of Veganin. ‘You’d better start coming twice a month,’ he told me, sensing that someone had to keep track of his called-in loans, convoluted trade-offs and trails of broken promises. ‘Why don’t we work out a system for you?’ I suggested, but he couldn’t follow it, and he never wrote anything down now anyway. The take went straight into his trouser pockets at the end of each day and he paid off his bills in cash installments, twenty or thirty pounds at a time. When I complained that the VAT people weren’t happy with his figures he asked pettishly, ‘What sort of figures do they want? Surely that’s your job!’
‘I won’t just make things up,’ I warned him, and he shrugged. It was an argument we had been through before. ‘Everyone’s corrupt,’ he said. ‘In the end.’ I couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a prediction. A worse row blew up between us in mid-April, when I found among his ‘accounts’ a bit of paper on which he’d written, Egnaro! My heart yearns for some sight of your cloud-capped cliffs! It was hard to read the rest, which had something to do with an oil rig disaster and a ‘secret’ television play.
‘I thought you’d got over this,’ I said, as lightly as I could. ‘I’m not sure what George will make of it.’ George Labrom was the Customs and Excise inspector. We were expecting him that afternoon. I knew him slightly: he was a decent, even indulgent man, but he disliked Lucas, and his patience was diminishing. ‘Still, if you want me to I’ll try and fit it in somewhere…’ But Lucas wouldn’t let me make a joke of it. He bit his lip, sighed heavily, and went over to the window where it would be easier to ignore me.
‘Come on Lucas,’ I said angrily. ‘Don’t make me do all the work.’
He shrugged.
‘You never “get over it”,’ he whispered. ‘I thought you understood that. It never lets you go.’ Then he laughed sourly. ‘What use is all this anyway? I’d rather have Egnaro than bloody George Labrom. If you don’t want to help me–’
‘I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,’ I pointed out. ‘Fuck off then if that’s your attitude.’
And we faced one another across the desk, the litter of unpaid bills and falsified invoices stretching between us like a paper continent neither of us remembered how to cross. After that I got used to his silences as I had got used to the smell of his waste bin. Every fortnight when I pushed open the office door I would find him staring out of the window at the pedestrians below. ‘Christ, how I hate those bastards!’ he would say, apropos of nothing; or, pushing out his lower lip petulantly, complain about the headaches that stopped him from sleeping. ‘I had a sickener last night. A real sickener.’ I caught him pasting press cuttings into a series of scrap books he had kept since he was fourteen – recording with a kind of morose glee the bankruptcies and deaths of the fifties pop stars who had been his adolescent heroes.
In his absence (for it was an absence, as I now know from experience, even if he sat there all day) someone broke the shop window and stole most of the more valuable comics; he had allowed the insurance to lapse, and it was never properly reglazed. Inside he put up notices saying, We do not want people reading these magazines if they have no intentions of buying! – but by now his stock was so old that even the businessmen had abandoned the back shelves. (They were the last to go: years afterwards, you felt, they would still be wandering hopefully along Peter Street in their lunch hour,
like animals searching for a lost waterhole.) Once or twice I sat behind the desk myself, putting books in bags under the dusty, flickering strip lights. It was a novelty at first but the cold cavernous silence, the filthy blue carpets, and the innuendos of the debt-collectors soon frightened me off. One Tuesday morning in May I had the bailiffs in, two heavily built men in sheepskin car-coats, who knew Lucas of old.
They leafed through old issues of Cockade while they waited for him to turn up with his last quarter’s rent. It was, they said, a month overdue. When he arrived he was smiling, puffed, red in the face, the jacket of his safari suit flapping open as if he had been running all over the city since eight o’clock in the morning. ‘Oh, hello, gents,’ he said. ‘If you’d given me a bit more time…Still, I’ve got just under half of it here, and I’m off for the rest now.’ In fact he only had a third, and when he came back again he had nothing at all, so they took his keys, locked the shop up, and over the next few days sold off the remaining stock by auction. It went for an average of ten pence a book, I believe, and certainly didn’t fetch enough for the rent.
Included among all the bales of Count, Peaches and Chariots of the Gods was Lucas’s collection from the upper room: every one of his Beardsleys, Harry Clarkes, first editions of Ishmael Reed.
He wanted to try and buy some of the stuff back, so I went with him to the auction. It was a dismal affair conducted in a large empty Edwardian room. A lot of his competitors were there, nodding to him nervously as they bought up his assets, hoping he wouldn’t commit suicide in the lavatories and wondering who would ‘go bump’ next. He hardly bought anything. Lysistrata had gone at the beginning, stuffed in among a bunch of old science fiction magazines. He seemed stunned that no one there could tell the difference. ‘They can’t even bloody pronounce it,’ he kept saying. ‘The bastards!’ He drank a lot at lunchtime and began to complain of a headache. He seemed reluctant to be on his own and in the afternoon insisted we go to the cinema, where we watched uncomprehendingly some sort of comedy. The flickering of the screen made his migraine worse, and when we came out he was blinking and shaking his head.
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories Page 127