Barefoot in the Head Read online

  He recalled he had had a pre-vision of this illumination upon entering the Hôtel des Invalides, although he could not precisely recall its nature.

  Charteris sat unmoving. If it were so, if all were hallucination, then clearly he was not at this restaurant table. Clearly there was no plate of cooling veal before him. Clearly Metz did not exist. The autostrada was a projection of temporal confluences within him, perhaps a riverine duologue of his entire life. France? Earth? Where was he? What was he?

  Terrible though the answer was, it seemed unassailable. The man he called Charteris was merely another manifestation of a time/emotion node with no more reality than the restaurant or the autostrada. Only the preceptual web itself was ‘real’. ‘He’ was the web in which Charteris, Metz, tortured Europe, the stricken continents of Asia and America, could have the being, their doubtful being. He was God...

  Someone was speaking to him. Dimly, distantly, he became aware of a waiter asking if he might take his plate away. So the waiter must be the Dark One, trying to disrupt his Kingdom. He waved the man off, saying something vaguely — much later, he realised he had spoken in Serbian, his native tongue which he never used.

  The restaurant was closing. Flinging some francs down on the table, he staggered out into the night, and slowly came to himself in the open air.

  He was shaking from the strength and terror of his vision. For what passed as an instant, he had been God. As he rested against a rotting stone wall, its texture patterning his fingers, he heard the cathedral clock begin to chime and counted automatically. It was ten o’clock by whatever time-level they used here. He had passed two hours in some sort of trance.

  In the camp outside Catanzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from the Caucasus. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

  The ten thousand caused little trouble. Most of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs concocted by the Arab state were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made, easily delivered. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

  So the ten thousand wandered about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, still as bemused as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes. Their guards were not immune.

  The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected — in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their actions — and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

  And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina...

  I am going psychedelic. That godlike vision must have come from the drug. At least rainbows will flutter in those dark valleys where I shall tread.

  He had moved some way towards the Hôtel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough angles of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

  ‘You were waiting for me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are deliberately waylaying me. You’d better go to your room before Madame locks up.’

  ‘I — I may be ill! You must help me!’

  ‘Speak Italian. I told you, I don’t understand German.’

  ‘Help me, Angelina. I must be ill.’

  ‘You were well enough before.’

  She had sensed his strong angular body.

  ‘I swear...I had a vision. I can’t face my room. I don’t want to be alone. Let me come back to your room!’

  ‘Oh no! You must think I am a fool, Signor!’

  He pulled himself together, recalling the way of thought.

  ‘Look, I’m ill, I think. Come and sit in my car with me for ten minutes. I need to get my strength back. If you don’t trust me, I’ll smoke a cigar all the time. You never knew a man kiss a pretty girl with a cigar in his mouth, did you?’

  They sat in the car, she beside him looking at him warily. Charteris could see her eyes gleam in the thick orange light — the very hue of time congealed! — slicing off the walls of the cathedral. He sucked the rich sharp smoke down into his being, trying to fumigate it against the terrible visions of his psyche.

  ‘I’m going back to Italy soon,’ she said. ‘Now the war’s over and it is certain that the Arabs will not invade. I may work in Milano. My uncle writes that it’s booming there again now. Is that so?’

  ‘Booming.’ A very curious word. Not blooming, not booing. Booming.

  ‘Really, I’m not Italian. Not by ancestry. Everyone in our little village is descended from Albanians. When the Turks invaded Albania five centuries ago, many Albanians fled in ships across to the South of Italy to start life anew. The old customs were preserved from generation to generation. Did you hear of such a thing in Catanzaro?’

  ‘No.’ In Catanzaro he had heard the legends and phobias of the Caucasus, chopped and distorted by hallucination. It was a Slav, not an Illyrian, purgatory of alienation.

  ‘As a little girl, I was bi-lingual. We spoke Tosk in the home and Italian everywhere else. Now I can hardly remember one word of Tosk! My uncles have all forgotten too. Only my old aunt, who is also called Angelina, remembers. She sings the old Tosk songs to the children. It’s sad, isn’t it, not to recall the language of your childhood? Like an exile?’

  ‘Oh, shut up! I’ve never heard of Tosk. To hell with it!’

  By that, she was reassured. Perhaps she believed that a man who took so little care to please could not want to rape her. Perhaps she was right.

  They stared out at the tangerine stripes of the square. People passed slowly. The used cars slumped on their haunches listening to the distant noise of traffic, like new animals awaiting battle.

  He asked. ‘Did you have a mystical experience ever?’

  ‘I suppose so. Isn’t that what religion is?’

  ‘I don’t mean that stuff!’ With his cigar, he indicated the illuminated stone outside. ‘A genuine self-achieved insight, such as Ouspenski achieved.’

  ‘I never heard of him.’

  ‘He was a Russian philosopher.’

  ‘I never heard of him.’

  Already he was forgetting what he had seen and learned.

  As he nursed his head and tried to understand what was inside it, she began to chatter, tongue delicate against teeth and lips redeeming the nonsense.

  ‘I’ll go back to Milano in the autumn, in September when it’s not so hot. They’re not good Catholics here in Metz. Are you a good Catholic? The French priests — ugh, I don’t like them, the way they look at you! Sometimes I hardly seem to believe any more... Do you believe in God any more, Signor?’

  He turned and looked painfully at her orange eyes, trying to see what she was really saying. She was very boring, this girl, and without alternative.

  ‘If you are really interested, I believe we each have gods within us, and we must follow those.’ His father had said the same.

  ‘That’s stupid! Those gods would just be reflections of ourselves and we should be indulging in egotism to worship them.’

  He was surprised by her answer. Neither his Italian nor his theology was good enough for him to reply as he would have liked. He said briefly, ‘And your god — he is just an externalisation of egotism. Better to keep it inside!’

  ‘What terrible, wicked blasphemy for a Catholic to utter!’

  ‘You little idiot, I’m no Catholic! I’m a Communist! I’ve never seen any sign of your God marching about the world. He’s a capitalist invention!’

&
nbsp; ‘Then you are indeed sick!’

  Angrily laughing, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. As she struggled, he shouted, ‘Let’s make a little investigation!’

  She brought her skull forward and struck him on the nose. His head turned cathedral-size on the instant, flooded with pain. He hardly realised she had broken from his grip and was running across the square, leaving the Banshee’s passenger door swinging open.

  After a minute or two, Charteris locked the car door, climbed out, and made his way across to the hotel. The door was barred; Madame would be in bed, dreaming dreams of locked chests. Looking through the window into the bar, he saw that M’sieur still sat at his special table, drinking wine with his crony. Madame’s dog sprawled by the radiator, still restlessly changing its position. The eternal recurrence of this evening, a morgue of life.

  The enchanter Charteris tapped on the window to break their spell of sleeping wake.

  After a minute or two, M’sieur unlocked the door from inside and appeared in his shirtsleeves. He stroked his tiny puff of beard and nodded to himself; as if something significant had been confirmed.

  ‘You were fortunate I was still up, M’sieur! Madame my wife does not like to be disturbed when once she has locked and barred the premises. My friend and I were just fighting some of our old campaigns before bed.’

  ‘Perhaps I have been doing the same thing.’

  ‘You’re too young! Not the pesky Arabs, the Bosche, boy, the Bosche! This very town was once under Bosche rule, you know!’

  He went up to his room. It was filled with noise. As he walked over to the window and looked out, he saw that a lock gate on the dry canal had been opened. The bed of it was full of rushing water, coursing over the car body and other rubbish, slowly moving them downstream. All the long night, Charteris slept uneasily to the noise of the purging water.

  In the morning, he rose early, drank Madame’s first indifferent coffee of the day, and paid his bill. Angelina did not appear. His head was clear, but the world seemed less substantial than it had been. Something was awakening and uncoiling within him, making the very ground he trod seem treacherous, as if invisible snakes lay there. He could not decide whether he stood on the edge of truth or illusion, or a yet unglimpsed alternative to either. All he knew was his anxiety to escape from old battle pictures and stale caporal smells.

  Carrying his grip out to the car, he climbed in, strapped himself up, and drove round the cathedral onto the motorway, which was already roaring with traffic. He turned towards the coast, leaving Metz behind at a gradually increasing speed, heading for his imagined England.

  Metz Cathedral

  Strong vertical lines familiarise

  An alien love. Yet the cathedral

  Escapes its statement after dusk

  When for the tourist trade they floodlight

  It and all-too-solid piety

  Fragments in its own enormous shadows

  Of buttresses, porches, peeling pillars.

  Nothing familiar then: a cage

  For something frightful? So you park

  Outside and maybe make a joke

  About the modern restorations

  Being turned into a 3D Braque:

  So much worse than it’s bright:

  And head towards the nearest bar, where

  Horizontal lines familiarly

  Provide the indifference of a bed.

  Night-time

  Night-time

  The town sleeps...

  I pretend to sleep

  By the cloaca maxima

  The clock strides

  Midnight — yes, that’s true

  Enough. How goes the song?

  A boy wanders across

  The fields among the peonies

  O Serbia I have another name

  All things have other names

  And will that change them

  And will that change them

  As I am changed?

  Looking for his loved one’s

  House... Let’s hope her

  Bed springs did not clang!

  Night-time

  The town sleeps

  The springs strike

  And I wander across

  The midnight fields

  Looking for the house

  The house where dancing is

  The Girl at the Inn

  The city was open to the nomad

  The fountain sparkled for his lips

  But at the inn the girl who served there

  Had nothing to spare a traveller

  The traveller settled at the inn

  Although he left his bill unpaid

  The girl no longer held him strange

  One day she let him clasp her lightly

  And then that night he clasped her tightly

  Now she lets him clasp her nightly

  Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

  The traveller sang He loved the girl

  And was captive of the city

  This was their tiny personal story

  Like perhaps to many others

  Or why else should he say the curious thing

  When smiling to her smiles one day

  Although I love you dearly love

  There’s nothing personal in it

  And then that night he clasped her tightly

  Still she lets him clasp her nightly

  Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

  The Knowledge That the Car is Going to Crash

  The knowledge that the car is going to crash

  The ponic jungle blowing through its tunnels

  The certainty that bodies burst apart

  Is with me as I put my foot down

  And racial memory’s the dangling chain

  That earths me to a neolithic road

  Earlier youths and stabs of unearned knowledge

  Milano blinds my eyes its dust

  Somebody said ‘I knew the blazing plane

  Was going to crash before I clambered in’

  A premonition isn’t quite the same

  Thing as the suffering

  What if I knew that every word I spoke

  Fell into silence deep as any sea

  Or sailed it drunken derelict should that

  Stop up a throat others have used

  I am not powerless even though the power

  Was never mine the blazing plane came down

  Though vulnerable I keep the power to wound

  Draw blood from bloodless faces

  The knowledge that my car is going to crash

  Is my inheritance and monkeys take

  Their seats before the jungle blurs again

  Can’t daunt me as I put my foot down

  Zimmer Twenty

  The glories of La Patrie in coloured lithographs

  All up and down the airless stairs

  The Huns are always running. Not my battle. But he laugh;

  Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cares?

  This bed’s a battlefield for unconsumated doubts

  Madame would charge more for it if she dared

  It’s so familiar worn sheets dry canal. Before she shouts

  Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cared?

  To speak to him of childhood — and in my native tongue

  Or foreign in my old aunt’s prayers

  Exiled committed in this beastly town and not so young

  Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cares?

  How often Zimmer Twenty seems to care

  The sluice gates open every midnight to the good

  Every dawning morn more debris thrown down there

  They’re not good Catholics in this rotten town

  Fat old M’sieu with fingertips all brown

  In Milano Milano there’s better blood

  Behind the other shutters neutrality is lying

  I give myself defy them. There

  My body’s breath mists up the pane crying crying

  Who’s Zimmer Twenty? Should I care?r />
  THE SERPENT OF KUNDALINI

  At the French port, they were sceptical, smiling, nodding, looking wizened, walking behind their barriers in a clockwork way. He stood there waving his NUNSACS papers which later, on the ferry going across to England, he consigned to the furtive waters.

  They let him through at the last, making it clear he would find it harder to get back once he was out.

  As yet he had nothing to declare.

  Once the French coast and customs were left behind, he fell asleep.

  When Charteris woke, the ship had already moored in Dover harbour and was absolutely deserted except for him. Even the sailors had gone ashore. Grey cliffs loomed above the boat. The quays and the sea were empty. The void was made more vacant by its transparent skin of flawless early spring sunshine.

  The unwieldy shapes of quays and sheds did nothing to make the appearance of things more likely.

  Just inside one of the customs sheds on the quay, a man in a blue sweater stood with his arms folded. Charteris saw him as he was about to descend the gangplank, and paused with his hand on the rail. The man would hardly have been noticeable; after all, he was perhaps thirty yards away; but, owing to a curious trick of acoustics played by the empty shed and the great slope of cliff; the man’s every sound was carried magnified to Charteris.