Barefoot in the Head Page 12
He pitched forward on his face as Angeline ran forward to break his fall. The uniformed police, the tatty audience, sunspecked, entropised again. The day hinged forward with mobility-gain.
Koninkrijk saw his chance. Running forward to two police, he said lowly, ‘Get him into my car and let’s take him back to HQ. The coming prophet!’
He was sitting up on the hard white bunk picking with a fork at police hamandbeans on a hard white police plate in the hard grey migrainey room, with Angeline hard by him, and Koninkrijk respectful standing.
‘Another miracle? I’m only moving on the big web. But I will see your wife, yes, bombardment of images tells me. It all floats us nearer to the Iithocarp Brussels and her alternatives to transpelt for Burton’s. Also I intuit she could have a need for me. Or a sort of need for which we could substitute a fulfilment.’ He half-smiled, sipping at a tumbler of water, sifting the water across his palate, seeing the plastic glass was made in France: Duraplex.
‘He has a sort of impersonal thing helps people,’ Angeline said.
‘I think she is schizophrenic, sir. She flushes the what’s-it when I come in.’
‘We all do, most of us. The wish to live more than one life — natural now, as the brain complexifies from generation. The world will soon tolerate only multi-livers. All pedestrians are at their exits. You too? No dream world or semi-realised thing aborting in the mental motorways?’
Slight bricky flush concealed under Koninkrijk’s jowls. All the joys and sorrows really aborted into a secret drain-life of autoplexy none shared except for her blue eyes, the tired willowy hand stretched over the sports page of a Maastricht paper.
‘They do clash sometimes. I’ll drive you to my house. She’ll be there.’
The girl Angeline came too. So he did not live entirely inside himself, or else found there echoes from those about in her head of weeping black hair. So he could be a genuine messiah — but what nonsense when he himself claimed but semi-messiahhood, and after all Europe wasn’t the Levant, was it? In under a kilometre, small space to burn the gas and the thin house present.
Wondering where he was he recalled all past confidence and frenzy and signed to them that he would enter the thin coffin door alone.
‘Very well. I warn you, you’ll find her reserved.’ Nervous glance at the woman Angeline. ‘Not pretty, my wife. Very thin, I think the spring disagrees with her, she can’t unwind.’ Who was without these failures in their stationary time?
And father had said that she should have a new bicycle
On her birthday at the end of May, as summer
Began; but they had been too poor when her birthday arrived
And he had given her instead a carton of crayons —
The very best Swiss crayons —
But she had never used them just to show her displeasure
Because she had wanted to rove the Ardennes countryside;
And perhaps it was since then that her father had been cold
To her and ceased to show his love. Sometimes it almost seemed
That if she kept rigid still he might appear stern
In one of the other noiseless rooms, dark
And showing his slight and characteristically lop-sided smile,
Saying, Marta, my child, come to your old Papa!
She had arranged the mirrors differently in the rooms,
Stacking them so that she could also observe the landing
Via one of the violet-tinted screens
The maureen-coloured mirrors
With a side glance down along
The melancholy perspective
Of the stair-
Case.
Later, she would have to move herself
To clean the house; but she so much preferred the sight of her
Lair in abstraction through mirror and screen
That first she must be permitted
The vigil of watching and listening the morning through,
Of watching and listening all mornings through.
All her private rooms were unused by other
Persons; nobody was allowed
To come and go in them; their silence was the sanctity
Like even unto the sanctity
Yea of St Barnabas Church
Yea wherein she had visited, visited every Sunday
As a child with her parents every Sunday stiffly
Dressed in Sabbath clothes;
But this secret silence was of a different quality;
Each room she surveyed possessed individual silences:
One, a more ricketty silence,
Another a more rumpled one;
Another a veined silence;
Another like a cross-section through calfs meat,
With a young-patterned texture;
Another with a domineering glassy silence;
These deserted quiets were more bamful and constricting
To her viscera than April’s flowers.
A starker shape of silence ruled the stairwell.
Stealthily she moved her attention to it and
Came upon her father standing
There waiting amid the shade.
In his attitude of great attention she knew him. ‘Marta!’ ‘Father, I
Am here!’ ‘Don’t be alarmed!’ ‘Oh, Father,
You have come at last!’ She could not understand but
Delight grew high and flowered in the stalks of her confusion
Telling itself as always in a burst of penitence
And self-reproach, till her lips grew younger. He
Attempted no answer to her flow, advanced
Towards her through the mirrored rooms, walking
Delicate as if he saw
The ancient barbs she still cultivated sharp
About his path. She flung herself at him, all she had to give
As she gave her self-denigration, closing her eyes, clutching
Him. He half-leaned, half-stood, half-understanding
The scent of trauma in the scene, glancingly taking
In the fetishistic idols of emptiness on the bare walls, seeing
Again the clever duplication of life she had contrived
Imaged in the bottom of his French plastic tumbler: Duraplex:
She has her alternatives. ‘Live
In both worlds, Marta, come with me!’ ‘Father, you give
Me your blessing once again?’ ‘I give
You my new blessing — fuzzy though you may find it, you must
Learn to live by it, you understand? My wish is this,
That you sojourn with nobody who desires to force you to live
On one plane at a time all the time: time must be divisible
And allowed gordian complexities. You must be
At once the erring child as we all are
And the reasoning adult as we all try to be
No strain placed on either
The two together tending towards
The greatly hopeful state we half-call godliness
Is that semi-understood?’
‘And Jan, Papa?’
‘For a while you come to live with me and Angelina
And let your man go free, for he has been more cut
By your trammels than you. You must learn to bide
Outside
Where constriction binds less, so one later spring you may
Come together again to find water flushing in the earth
Closet.’ ‘I see father.’ Now she looked at him and realised
Like a trump turned up
He was not entirely her father, but the revelation had no
Poison: beneath the last moment’s hand of mighty truth
Another shuffled: that in truth Marta did not want her father
And would now sprout free of him and his mirroring
Eyes that saw her only with disfavour: so her lips
Growing younger a mask cracked and fluttered
To the carpet unnoticed. ‘Jan
With my hateful secret passion all these over-furnished
Years? There is no final parting?’ ‘Well,
There’s really no final meeting.
It’s your own collusions that conspire or not towards
Another person — but you’ll see directly... Come along
There’s a daffodil or two left outside in the wet and soon
Sweet rocket will flower in your secret garden, Marta.’ She
Looked at his eyes. They went down the stairs, undusted
That and every following morning, leaving the omnivision working
Still. The cracks rioted on the walls like bindweed, flowering in peeled distemper; and as they grew more open-lipped, the rumbling town-destroying machines downed over the roof-tree and day pouted through the fissures. The mirroring screens showed how the earth soiled in through every whispering room, bringing familiar despoliation; but by then the sweet rocket flowered for Marta.
Jan also, as the reformed crusade turned south, turned east, burning his tyres and singing the song whose words he had forgotten and never known, towards freer arms whose meaning he had never known, where the Meuse became the Maars.
AUTO-ANCESTRAL FRACTURE
For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.
But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.
Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.
Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.
You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speeddeath up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.
There lifespendulum ticked upside down and the time was rape for legendermoan: for the hard heads and the business hearts found that their rhythms now worked only to a less punctilious clock and speculation had another tone. War had turned the metrognome off chime in general pixilation to a whole new countryslide upbraided.
What raised the threshold a bit was the Brussels haze. The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down. Life was newly neolithic, weird, and drab or glittering as the hypo-glossal towers staggered. Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered. Occult lights still veiled the rooftops and aurora borealis clouded the corner of the eye. Jamming their stations signals of new bodies scarcely suspected before or different birds of intent. It was a place for the news of New Saviour Charteris to nest.
Many came, some remained; many heard, some retained. Food was short and disease plentiful, plague grunted in the backstreets of the mind, and cholera in the capital, but the goodfolk had thrown off the tiresome shacks of Wesciv and unhoused cults of microbes and bacteria; this was the spontaneous generation and neutral Pasteur had been wrong. These circadian days, you could whistle along your own bones and the empty plate held roses. In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war’s aftermyth. Gristle though the breast was all were at it. So it was gregarious and who cared.
Of these the Escalation was foremost. Among the petering cars they made their music, Bill, black Phil, Ruby Dymond with his consolations and Featherstone-Haugh, plus Army and their technicians who saw that the more sparky sounds reached tape. This day they had escalated to a new format and a new name. They now bit the note as the Tonic Traffic and had infrasound, ground from Banjo’s grinder machine worked by Greta and Flo, who shacked with them and other musicniks.
Through mirror-sunglasses they peered at the oneway world, frisking it for telling dislocations in which to savour most possibility. The flat wind-smoke covered them part-coloured. They had a new number going needling into the new stations to really pierce wax called Famine Starting at the Head. Sometimes they talked round the lyric or with laughter sent it up.
On the Golden Coast cymbals start to sound some place like a magic garden I’m just a demon on the cello. Play the clarinet pretty good too man!
In his tent-cave Charteris with two women heard the noise and distant other flutes in flower-powdered falsetto, but had his own anguish to blow through the stops of strained relationship.
Stranding his pearl underseers to glaub the timeskip of Ange Old’s farce its tragictory of otherwhens and all plausticities made flesh in the mating. Like him fashioned from parental lobotomy truncated by the mainspring glories of a rain shower slanting through the coral trees where greened the glowing white of landscape. Figures moving dragging dropping enduring in her glowworm eyes the candlesphere of hallucidity she’s the mouth and cheekbox of my hope’s facial tissure to come back like soft evening’s curtains. It’s what I see in her all all the peonies the blackbirds the white-thighs all and if not her all all I see of any voyaging.
Yet Marta has her own unopened chambers of possibility the locked door calling to my quay my coast Bohemian coast my reefs that decimate steamships. On the piston of this later Drake lost in spume rankest alternature.
‘Do me a fervour! I try to work on this document of human destiny and you want to know whether or not I took in the slack with Marta last night. Why not trip out of needling my alternatives? Get from me!’ The ceiling was only canvas billowing, standing in for plaster in a ruinous convent later old people’s home, which the autobahn-builders had half-nudged out of the way as they drove their wedges into the city-heart. Undemolished now almost self-demolished this wing flew the Charteris flag; here his disciples clustered elbows brick-coloured as plaster peppered down like the dust of crunched hourglasses. As starving Brussels besieged itself for a miracle domestic drama flourinched.
‘Oh entropise human detestiny!’ Angeline was washed and white like concentrate campallour, still calculating against the aftermaths of warcalculus, still by the chemicals not too treblinkered. ‘I don’t want to know if you slacked because I know if you slacked you slackered Marta tonight last night every night and I just damned won’t stand it, so you just damned fuzzy-settle for her or me! None of your eitherwhoring here!’
‘All that old anti-life stuff snuffed it with your wesciv world — from now it’s a multi-vulval state and the office blocks off.’
‘Your big pronounce! Hotair your views to others, stay off top of Marta, you grotnik!’
‘Meat injection and the life she needs, Angel, pumped in, like the big gymnastic sergeant you sing. She h
as no impact with frozen actions like long disuse now quickened with the fleetsin for her. If I poke some import all’s love in fair unwar and the sailor home from the seizure! Be pacific!’
‘Sea my Azov! And you messiah on a shemensplash as and when is it, eh? A matlottery! Over my bedboddy! Don’t you kindermarken me mate why how you can come it I don’t know — look at the consolation! Prize her legs a part you’d be licky! Caspian kid! — All dribbled-rabble and emuctory!’
‘I’ll baltic where my thighs thew my honey, I the upandcoming!’
‘You subserbiant Dalmatian! From now on you go adriantic up some mother tree — just don’t profligainst me! Didn’t I the one who moist you most with nakidity remembrane to membrainfever pudentically, or if not twot hot hand gambidexter pulping lipscrew bailing boat in prepucepeeling arbor of every obscene stance?’
She now had the big bosombeating act, buckaneering in the dusty half-room before his ambiguity, riding to master and be mastered, knowing he punched her husband in the traffic, gesturing with scatologic to the greyer girl, Marta on the master’s corner couch cuckoobird unsinging. Phantom nets of mauve and maureen joined them like three captured parrot fish, web of twain, chain of time.
‘Did I ever say you were not the sparkiest? Or the bellringing belle-blottomed? Sap out of it angelfish and don’t parrot membrain there’s suck a thing as polygam.’
Among the dark hair the branches of her face in tempest.
‘Bombastard it’s to be she or me and now’s your morment of incision. Cut it out or cut your rigging!’
But he broadsided advanced grasping her by the united fronter so that when she tugged away the blouse torn buttons falling like broken teeth and one escampaigning teeter. He laughed in lust and shrouds of anger. She slapped him across his molar plex he a quick one to her companion way and they cavorted in a tanglewords the nettingroll.
For first time Marta brought her unbending mind and body to attention scudded to his rescue from the bedspace where they had seemed and tuckered and with a dexterritory he landed them both judies with squirming gust for keel-whoring and his digit rigid as he had voided mannymoon to squire their accunts and cummerbendle in their scrubberies dualigned by real and pseudoprod tongs and clappers circumjascentedly. In out in out moonlight moonlight.