The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  “Hardly my concern.”

  There fell a small silence.

  “Oh! By the way,” said Rob, “I was supposed to put these in your pigeonhole.”

  “I can’t abide missionaries. What the fuck is this?”

  Rob shrugged.

  “Uncle Arthur had me doing them this morning. He called them Completions.”

  “Completions?”

  Tim took them.

  When I grow up, I want to

  be plesman

  have big musls

  get tatu

  go home

  Tim clanged the wad of papers into the metal waste bin.

  “So, what you said earlier,” said Rob, “your files, you were suggesting they weren’t…”

  “My files,” said Tim, “are entirely useless but in good order. They will pass muster. They contain anecdotal reports, teachers, parents, social workers, police, vicars—that sort of thing—and some numbers that purport to be the results of the usual voodoo tests, the Wechsler-Bellevue, Stanford and Binet, Terman and Merrill, the Multiphasal…”

  He flapped a dismissive hand.

  “When you say ‘purport,’ do you mean…”

  They’re numbers. They purport to show I ran tests, was conscientious in the execution of my duties.”

  “But they’re not accurate?”

  “Accurate! I assume you’ve seen such tests? How could they even be administered to them,” he said, pointing to the Completions in the bin.

  He raised his arms as if in surrender and then locked his hands behind his head and seemed to be staring at the Portrait of the Queen.

  “Even under optimum circumstances,” he said, “these tests are like… Blind Man’s Buff or Pin The Tail On The Donkey.”

  Still staring up, he tapped his fingers on the arm of the chair.

  “Although—”

  He got up and gathered the Completions out of the bin.

  “Although… Is this a pawn opening?”

  Rob shrugged.

  “Rejection of assistance by duly constituted Authority. Might he be playing that one?”

  “Well, whatever he’s doing,” said Rob, “you probably shouldn’t let him see them in the waste.”

  “Of course,” said Tim walking over to the door. “Yes, of course. Thank you. I shall file these,” waving the wad, “with promptitude, promptissimo. I think, Rob, I think we might just have countered a probe, an opening move.”

  *

  Rob soon lost his nervousness of these boys under his charge. As the days passed, he stopped seeing them as exponents of theft, rape, breaking and entering, aggravated vandalism, arson, and affray, and saw them for what they were—working-class boys of low-average intelligence or mildly retarded. With, as Tim described them, an occasional “dull normal.”

  They laboured on with phonics, handwriting, spelling, reading.

  Of all the boys, Rob was most drawn to Dennis. He looked a waiflike ten but was actually sixteen. He was much like all the rest but unfailingly cheerful and co-operative. Dennis could chant the alphabet from A to Z without faltering, but he had to start at A. His mind was active, but the connections it made were singular.

  If Rob wrote CAT, he would stare at the word with a troubled frown. When Rob sounded out C-A-T, he would say indignantly: Well, it’s cat, innit? We had a cat, old Tom-cat, he was. Furry knackers, he had, and if you stroked ’em…

  F-I-S-H brought to mind the chip shop up his street and his mum what wouldn’t never touch rock salmon because it wasn’t nothing but a fancy name for conger-eel.

  C-O-W evoked his Auntie Fran—right old scrubber she was, having it away for the price of a pint…

  Such remarks would spill over into general debate on the ethics of white women having it off with spades and pakis, they was heathen, wasn’t they? Said their prayers to gods and that, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Well, there you are then. And their houses stank of curry and that. You couldn’t deny it. Not if you knew what you was talking about.

  These lunatic discussions were often resolved by Paul, Dennis’ friend, who commanded the respect of all the boys because he was serving a second term and had a tattoo of a dagger on his left wrist and a red-and-green hummingbird on his right shoulder. He would make pronouncement.

  I’m not saying that they are and I’m not saying that they’re not but what I am saying is…

  Then would follow some statement so bizarre or so richly irrelevant that it imposed uncomprehending silence.

  He would then re-comb the remnants of a pompadour.

  Into the silence, Rob would say,

  “Right. Let’s get back to work, then. Who can remember what a vowel is?”

  Dennis’ hand.

  “It’s what me Dad, ‘ad.”

  “What!”

  “It’s yer insides.”

  “What is?”

  “Cancer of the vowel.”

  *

  The long summer days settled into endless routine. The violent strangeness of everything became familiar chore. Uncle Arthur left Rob more and more entirely on his own. Showers and the Inspection of Teeth, Meal Supervision, Sports and Gardening, Dormitory Duty, Evening Rounds.

  The occasional morning appearances of the Headmaster were predictably unpredictable. The Lord’s Prayer was interspersed with outbursts about what would happen if boys did not pull their weight, and did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green? the excessive use of toilet paper, incoherent homilies concerning the bravery of The Few, the flotillas of small craft which had effected the strategic withdrawal of the British Army from Dunkirk, all with promptings in the aphasic pauses by a sotto voce Uncle Arthur.

  What was that, Arthur?

  Every afternoon was given over to Sports and Activities.

  Cricket alternated, by Houses, with gardening. Gardening was worse than cricket. The garden extended for nearly one-and-a-half acres. On one day, forty boys attacked the earth with hoes. The next day forty boys smoothed the work of the hoes with rakes. On the day following, the hoes attacked again.

  A few petunias were once planted but died.

  The evening meals in the Staff Dining Room, served from huge aluminium utensils, were exactly like the school dinners of Rob’s childhood, unsavoury stew with glutinous dumplings, salads with wafers of cold roast beef with bits of string embedded, jam tarts or tinned mandarin-orange segments accompanied by an aluminium jug of lukewarm custard topped by a thickening skin.

  Uncle Arthur ate in his apartment with Mrs. Arthur but always appeared in time for coffee to inquire if what he called “the comestibles” had met with satisfaction.

  Browner Austyn always said:

  May I trouble you for the condiments?

  Between the main course and dessert, Mr. Brotherton, usually boisterously drunk, beat time on the table with his spoon, singing, much to the distress of Mr. Austyn:

  Auntie Mary

  Had a canary

  Up the leg of her drawers

  And:

  You can tell old Joe

  I’m off the Dole,

  He can stick ’is Red Flag

  Up ’is ’ole

  Every two days, Mrs. Chert—Doris—appeared to receive plaudits and requests.

  Lancashire Hot Pot!

  Boiled Onions in White Stuff!

  Fish Cakes!

  “Now, gentlemen,” cried Mrs. Chert. “You’re getting me all flustered.”

  Haunches, Doris!

  bellowed Mr. Brotherton

  Haunches!

  Mr. Grendle drizzled on about recidivists and the inevitability of his being dispatched in the metal-work shop. Mr. Hemmings, who drove an MG, explained the internal combustion engine. Mr. Austyn praised the give and take of sporting activity, the lessons of co-
operation and joint endeavour, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, Outward Bound, the beneficial moral results of pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.

  But conversation always reverted to pay scales, overtime rates, the necessity of making an example of this boy or that, of sorting out, gingering up, knocking the stuffing out of etc. this or that young lout who was trying it on, pushing his luck, just begging for it etc.

  The days seemed to be growing longer and hotter; clouds loomed sometimes in the electric evenings, promising the relief of rain, but no rain fell. The garden had turned to grey dust; cricket balls rose viciously from patches of bald earth. Someone stole tobacco; there was a fight in the South Building dormitory. Comprehension declined; pencils broke. Showerings and the cleaning of teeth measured out each day.

  *

  “Tim? How about this?”

  “Have you cut the bit about being in the vanguard of the—what was it?”

  “The Church Militant,” said Rob.

  “Fucking ridiculous,” said Tim.

  “OK. OK. So how about this?

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  Robert Forde, Rob to all our boys and girls in the Sunday School, has been one of my parishioners at St. Michael’s for all his years at Bristol University. He is a young man of the utmost probity and has been a vibrant presence at our Thursday evening Bible Study Group. I am entirely confident that as a teacher he will be a tower of strength within the school community and a source of inspiration to those committed to his care.

  Rev. Ernest Fildes, M.A.

  St. Michael and All Souls

  Tim nodding approval. “Nauseating,” he said. “But shouldn’t it be ‘The Rev’?”

  Rob shrugged.

  “But did you like ‘All Souls’?”

  “That Sunday School stuff’s a bit queasy, too.”

  Lounging about every week with the Sunday papers, they read the advertisements for jobs, trainee tea-plantation manager in Assam, rubber plantations in Malaya, House Master in private schools in Trinidad, Nigeria, and Goa (Oxford and Cambridge Syndicate Examinations, generous emolument, two weeks’ paid Home Leave per annum), the Hong Kong Police Force, Singapore, Significant Careers in H.M. Customs…

  One week they had noticed that representatives of The Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal were interviewing graduate teachers for positions in all subjects and that Bristol was one of the cities they would visit.

  “Do you think that’s a misprint?” Rob had said, leaning down across Tim’s shoulder and tapping the Salary Range.

  “Christ!” said Tim.

  “How much is that in pounds?”

  Tim lowered the paper.

  Stared at the wall.

  Rob watched his blank face.

  “It’s…”

  “What?”

  “A lot.”

  “Should we?” Rob had said.

  “It is impossible,” Tim had said, “for Montreal to be worse than being locked up with one hundred and three smelly boys.”

  The interview, in a suite in the Avon Hotel, was little more than a formality. Beyond furnishing degree certificates, the only complications were a letter attesting to general sobriety and good moral character from a Vicar, Priest, or Equivalent Figure and a negative result from a Wassermann Test.

  What the fuck’s an Equivalent Figure?

  Do stop being so tiresomely literal, Rob.

  But we don’t know any vicars.

  We shall become vicars.

  *

  The VD Clinic was in the bowels of the General Hospital and was referred to as The Annex. The waiting room offered six plastic chairs. At the end of the room, a further room, frosted glass, two figure-shapes inside. Two of the chairs were occupied by West Indian men, the whites of their eyes in one case yellowish, in the other bloodshot. Neither one looked affable. Rob sat beside a scruff wearing a leather jacket and clunky motorbike boots.

  The door in the frosted room opened and a man with hair bleached yellow and wearing a white coat called, “Has everyone filled in the questionnaire? Ooh, no! You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “I’m here because I’m emigrating,” said Rob.

  “Don’t be embarrassed, dear. We’ve heard every story known to man.”

  He collected clipboards and papers from the other three, gave a set to Rob, went back into the frosted-glass room.

  While Rob was filling in the form—Discharge—Contacts—the man beside him started talking. He was so Welsh Rob had to concentrate to follow what he was saying. The account rambled, mumbled.

  “It was just the once, see. In the park. The trees all flashy green in the street light after the rain.”

  His hands conjured the night.

  “She said she was a virgin, like. Hadn’t done anything like this before. Quiet, it was. I’d spread my jacket on the bench, see. Quiet. Stars. ‘No cause to be frightened, my lovely,’ I said to her.”

  He gave a profound sigh.

  “She was tight as a mouse’s yearole.”

  Rob turned to him full-on.

  “As a…? Oh! earhole.”

  Shaking his head, the Welshman gestured at his crotch.

  More Welsh-inflected mumbling through which Rob thought he caught the word “weeping.”

  He patted the man’s knee in a gesture of sympathy.

  “The cure’s pretty simple these days, you know. And I know it must be hard, but really, is she worth weeping over?”

  “No, no,” said the Welshman, turning to him. “I didn’t say—”

  “You’ll be sure to meet another girl—”

  “No—”

  Cutting him off again, Rob said, “Oh, I’m sure you will.”

  “I didn’t say I’m weepin’,” said the Welshman. “I said it’s weepin.’”

  The frosted glass door opened.

  “Blood serum?” called the man with the bleached hair. “Who’s for syph?”

  Just a Closer

  Walk with Thee

  After the horror of their first winter in Canada, hacking and scraping morning ice off the windshield, ice chips up one’s sleeve, breath hanging in the car’s interior, frozen vinyl seats unyielding, the fear, daily, of piles, they were heading south for New Orleans.

  Or, as Rob thought of it:

  South.

  On the road, he thought. They were on the road.

  Though actually they had not yet left Montreal, the car jammed in traffic on the Champlain Bridge.

  Tim’s car was a red barge of a thing, a used Pontiac Laurentian with white vinyl interior and whitewall tires. Rob thought it vulgar.

  “Precisely!” Tim had said.

  Unable to contain his pleasure in the day, Rob said, “‘Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.’”

  “What?”

  Tim’s thumb was tapping on the steering wheel; it put Rob in mind of the thrash of a displeased cat’s tail.

  “Chaucer,” said Rob.

  “I hadn’t supposed it was Little Richard.”

  They gained another yard.

  “‘Than longen folk…’ well, it is a pilgrimage,” he said, “sort of…”

  “Good Golly,” said Tim, staring steely ahead, “Miss Molly.”

  One of those mornings.

  After a few heavily silent minutes, Rob said, “I was reading… Sharkey Bonano’s got a regular band, his own place on Bourbon Street.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “A lounge, they called it.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “The Dream Room.”

  *

  For much of the journey south there was little really to see because Tim was driving on Interstates. Rob had never learned to drive so felt he had little say in how they got to New Orleans. They had planned the journey south a s
crimping one because their reservation at the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in the French Quarter was very expensive. Rob had tentatively proposed it as it had, at one time or another, housed Faulkner, Hemingway, and Truman Capote; Tim had merely shrugged saying, “Bring on the the fleshpots.”

  They slept in the car fitfully. When they woke, usually at first light, the car smelled. They washed and shaved in gas-station washrooms. Tim always emerged looking spruce and elegant; Rob shambled out.

  They turned off the Interstates for meals.

  Tim fulminated about small-town eateries where the only cheese was bendy.

  Rob was amazed to discover that chicken fried steak wasn’t chicken.

  In a shirt-pocket notebook, he noted things that caught his attention, advertisements, the names of stores, ads on the radio offering a dozen day-old chicks with a bonus photo of Jesus.

  VENETIAN BLINDS & GUNS

  Bread was another disappointment.

  “On the plus side,” said Rob, as Tim pointed at the dingy thumbprint on his white sandwich, “you’ve got perfect proof of who did it.”

  The frigid lagers, the only beer available, Millers, Coors, and Bud, prompted another of Tim’s diatribes that began with the temperature and alcohol content of this insipid piss and moved on to hops… some way into it, de Tocqueville was involved…

  On eatery TVs they caught footage of the civil rights uproar, desegregation, voter registration, police in riot gear, the marches, churches burning…

  Tim liked the driving and liked the radio on so that, hour after hour, the commercials, the songs and singers, the newscasts, the holy rollers, the yatter and blather, became numbing noise, a noise in some odd way like deep silence, Rob’s mind drifting into erotic remembrance of Jenny so vivid he had to cover tormenting erections with the unfolded road map, drifting into imaginary conversations, into remembered conversations with Jenny, awkward, sad, sometimes recriminating, all regretted, her attic room in the shared house, her canvases standing along the walls, she, Jenny, the mess of it all.

  A peculiar painting of hers strong in his memory, a night painting, a passageway along the side of a building, a wooden door painted green, a section of brick wall, a bulb in a wire cage casting a partial yellow light. She’d been taught in Bath by William Scott so there was an obvious abstract quality about the painting—but the construction of it, the shapes and feel of it had reminded him, he didn’t know quite why, of Walter Sickert.