Barefoot in the Head Read online

  ‘Can you give me a lift, I say? Going north by any chance?’

  The difficulty of the cadence of English. Not the old simple words so long since learnt by heart as the gallant saint slipped into the villainous captain’s cabin pistol in hand but simply the trick of drawing vocal from the mouth.

  ‘I am going north yes. What part of it are you wanting to reach?’

  ‘What part are you heading for?’

  ‘I — I — where the christmas cactus blooms and angelina flowers — ’

  ‘Heck, another acid nut, look, lad, are you safe to be with?’

  ‘Forgive me I it’s they you see I take you north okay, only I’m just a bit confused by anywhere you want I go why not?’

  He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t aim straight though he sighted his intellect at the target the bullets of thought were multi-photographed and kept recurring and stray ricochets spanged back again and again like that succulent image that perhaps he thought sniped him from his future and why not if the Metz vision was true and he no more than a manifestation on a web of time in which matter was the hallucination. Bafflement and yet suffusing delight as if a great havering haversack was lifted off his back simplifying under its perplexities such personal problems as right or wrong.

  ‘If you feel that way. You are a foreigner? France was not affected they say played it cool stayed neuter. Friend to the Arab world. Lost all loot, I say. Okay I’ll get my gear name’s Banjo Burton by the way.’

  ‘Mine’s Charteris. Colin Charteris.’

  ‘Good.’

  Burly of shoulder he ran back to the van all conked and hunched fifty yards back, struggled at the rear and then returned for help. So Charteris not unloath climbed into the silent stage set of this quartier looking about licking the desolation — London London at last this ouspenskian eye beholds this legendary if meagre exotic scene. Lugging at the back of the van the other man Banjo Burton pulls at something and between them they drag it machinery across the indoor road: a passing speedster and for a moment they are both outdoors again.

  ‘What you got here?’

  ‘Infrasound equipment,’ as they load it into the back of Charteris’ car backs bending grunting in work lonely company under the night eyes. Then stand there half-inspecting each other in the semi-dark you do not see me I do not see you: you see your interpretation of me I see my interpretation of you. Moving to climb into the front seats heftily he swinging open the door with unrecorded muscling asks, ‘So you’re French then are you?’

  ‘I am Serbian.’

  Great conversation stopper slammer of doors internally quasi-silent revving of engines and away. The start and bastion of Europe oh they know not Serbia. O Kossovo the field of blackbirds where the dark red peonies blow but then on into the Turkish night of another era of the mobility soothed soon the shouldered man begins to manifest his flat voice as if speed harmonised it.

  ‘I’ll not be sorry to get out of London and home again though mind you you certainly see some funny things here make you laugh if you feel that way I mean to say people are more open than they used to be.’

  ‘Open? Minds open? You don’t mean thoughts flowing from one to another like a net a web?’

  ‘I don’t mean that as far as I know. I don’t get what goes on in the heads of you blokes though I don’t mind telling you. And when I say laugh it’s really enough to make you cry. I was up in Coventry when they dropped the bombs.’

  The light and lack of it played across his cragged face as he fumbled for a cigarette and lit it very close to his face between a volcano crater of cupped hands all afire to the last wrinkle and looking askance with extinct pits said through smoke, ‘I mean to say this is the end of the world take it or leave it.’

  But this goblin had no hex on the charmed Charteris who sang ‘In English you have a saying where there’s life there’s hope and so here no end — one end maybe but a straggle of new starts.’

  ‘If you call going back to caveman level new start, look mate I’ve been around see I got a brother was in the army he’s back home now because why because the forces all broke up — no discipline once the air is full of this cyclodelic men’ll fall about with laughing rather than stand in a straight line like they don’t get it, eh? So similarly where’s your industry and agriculture going without discipline I tell you this country and all the other countries like Europe and America they’re grinding to a standstill and only the bloody wogs fit to hold a spoon and fork.’

  As they clattered up a long forlorn street built a century back archaic blind shuttered shattered in the stony desert just for the sheer delight of going Charteris thus: ‘New disciplines grind from the stand only the old bind gone I can’t argue it but industrial’s a crutch thrown away.’

  Can’t argue it but one day with a tuned tongue I will my light is in this darkness as his face splashes flame so the sweet animal lark of my brain will be cauterise a flamingot of golden flumiance.

  Though by the deadly nightshade sheltered figures rankled in vacant areas moving in groups with new instinct and on missing slates derisive the city’s cats also tabbied in doubled file for every shadow a shadower.

  ‘Your army brother got the aerosol vent?’

  ‘Got some sort of religious kick like his whole brain’s snarled up. Wide open to whatever comes along.’

  ‘As we were meant to be.’

  Banjo Burton laughed and coughed at the same time pouring smoke as if it were all he had to give.

  ‘Bust open I’d say that’s no way to go on like. Mark my words it’s the end and cities hit real bad like London and New York and Brussels they copped it worst they’re sinking with all hands and feet. Still a man does what he can so I run the group and hope like I mean not much one man can do after all if people aren’t going to work proper they’ve got to do something so they trace for the sparky sound right?’

  Tunnelling in his own exploding reverie where a whole sparse countryside under the sun rustled with the broken dreams of Slavs he signalled ‘Sound?’

  ‘I got a group. I manage them. I also launched the Nova Scotia Treadmill Orchestra. Used to be the Genosides. Remember their “Deathworld Boy”?’

  ‘I was thinking your van should you just leave it?’

  ‘It wasn’t mine. I picked it up.’

  Silence and night fading between them and between furry teeth the jaded taste of another sunrise until Burton huddled deeper and said again, ‘I got this group.’

  The camp had been full of eyes and there it had all started his first promptings on this solitary migration. ‘What group?’

  ‘A group like. Musicians. You know... We used to be called the Dead Sea Sound now we changed to The Escalation now we’re going to have infrasound like and the great roar tiding in over the heady audience in surges of everyone doing, his fruit-and-nutmost.’ He waved his hand at the sky and said, ‘There’s no equation for a real thing what you think?’

  ‘Musicians eh?’

  ‘Aye damned right musicians.’ He began to sing and the lost references added one more stratum to Charteris’ tumbled psychogeology where many castled relics of experience lay. Untaught by his old politico-philosophical system to dig introspection he now nevertheless eased that jacket and shovelled down into his uncommon core to find there ore and always either/or, and on that godamnbiguity to snag his blade and whether there in the subsoil did not lie Kidd’s treasure of all possibility, doubloons, pistoles for two, and gold moidores to other ways of thought.

  Blinded by this gleam of previous metal he turned upon the singer huddled in his shadow and said, ‘You could be another strand to the web or why not if all routes I now sail are ones of discovery and screaming up this avenue I also circumnavigate myself with as much meaning as your knighted hero Francis Drake.’

  ‘I reckon as you’ve gone wrong somewhere this is the Portobello Road.’

  ‘In my hindquarters reason’s seat I see I sit sail unknowing but that Christmas cactus may be a shore and is
there not a far peninsula of Brussels? Trying to look into a possible future port.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean man look where you’re going.’

  ‘I think I look I think I see. Enchanted mariner ducks into unknown bays and me with a laurel on my brow I see...’

  Charteris could not say what he saw and fell silent in a daze of future days; but what he had said moved Burton from his trental mood to say, ‘If you’re keeping on down the Harrow Road I have a friend in St John’s Wood name of Brasher who would also be glad of a lift north like a sort of religious chap in many ways a prophet with strange means about him and god’s knuckleduster when he’s crossed.’

  ‘He wants to go north?’

  ‘Aye his wife and all that that. And my brother that I told you he was in the army well he acts as sort of disciple to Phil that’s this bloke Brasher he’s a bit of a touch nut but he’s reckoned a bit of a prophet and he was in this plane crash and don’t tell me it wasn’t god’s luck he managed to escape...’

  The slow bonfire of unaccustomed words flickered on the tired minds consuming and confusing leaves of yesterday but for Charteris no meaning sunk low in the cockpit of his predestined dreams where the ashes of father domination were a trance-element and just said lazily ‘We can pick him up.’

  ‘He’s in St John’s Wood I’ve got his address here on a bit of paper wait a bit like he’s shacked up with some of his disciples. I tell you saints and seers are two a penny just lately, better turn off at this next traffic signals.’

  Weren’t these lay songs and carnal fictions a brighter fire than any burning in a regulation grate blessed by clergy or a funeral just the darker extension of forests lights illusions the frustration of material branches in leaf-fall or flooded delight where my dad went down.

  The whole town had turned out to attend his father’s funeral. Only he stayed at home. Finally, impulses of guilt and love sent him out, dressed as he was, to join the mourners.

  Heavy rains had caused flooding, and the floods had delayed the progress of the funeral. It was growing dark. He drove along the winding valley road in the car: lately his father’s car now his by inheritance. His father’s old raincoat lay on the back seat. He did not like to throw it out. The car held the smell of his father.

  It was dark under the mountain. The swollen river glinted. Between him and the river were broken and twisted trees where people went to laze on summer afternoons; lately, parties of picnickers had taken to driving over here from Svetozarevo, leaving their beer cans under the bushes. Now the beer cans were afloat. It was not easy to see where the deeps of the river began. The water was running fast and stern.

  He could see solitary people walking on the other side of the river. The bridge was down; he could not get across. He drove on, winding and twisting round the rumps of mountainside.

  A few lamps marked the other bank of the river now. A small rain began to fall, smearing the lights. He could just make out knots of people. When he came to the second bridge, he saw that a large area in front of it had flooded; he could not drive across. Stopping the car on a bank, he climbed out and started to wade through the flood. Music was playing on the far bank, coming to him fitfully. He caught his foot on something submerged under the dark water and fell, landing on hands and knees. With a curse, he got up and went back to the car. He drove on.

  Now he could see the cemetery across the intervening waste of waters. His father had been a good Communist; he was going to get a good funeral, with an Orthodox priest presiding, and members of the Party present, humble in their raincoats.

  The light was ragged from wild clouds. An island, a mere strip crowned with elders and beeches, stood between him and a clear view of the funeral party opposite. When he stopped the engine, he could just hear the voice of the priest, and could make out the man’s head under a lantern.

  He drove farther down the road, then back, looking for a better vantage point. There was none. He contemplated going all the way back to the village and then starting again down the other road; but it would take too long, and by then the ceremony might be entirely over. Painfully lack of alternative. Eventually, he backed the car across the road — there would be no more traffic on it today — so that its nose faced out towards the flood.

  He turned on the headlights, letting them glare across the river, and stood by the car with the door hanging open, staring across himself. Rain clung to his face. It was really impossible to distinguish what was going on. He paddled among the flooded trees, staring, staring, at the far bank.

  ‘Daddy!’ he cried.

  And past the greeneyes swinging right past Stones with headlights and Leeds Permanent all bordered up a glimpsed group of girls running down a dark turn legs and ankles what the blackbirds on the bloody field or through my poppied dark autobreasted antiflowered the desired succubae come to me with their dark mandragoran flies.

  Lost vision. Other avenues. The natural density of loins.

  And all these drunken turnings as again they lost themselves a simplified pantographic variablegeometric seedimensional weltschmerzanschauungerstrasshole of light-dashed caverns rumpussed in the stoned night were names to beat on inner ears with something more than sense: Westbourne Bridge Bishop’s Bridge Road Eastbourne Terrace Praed Street Norfolk Place South Wharf Road Praed Street again and then more confidently up the Edgware Road and Maida Vale and St John’s Wood Road and past Lord’s with the unread signs and now more rubbish in the streets and on the rooftops gliding unobtrusively another turning worlds day and so to where the man called Brasher lived.

  Here so long had been his drive that when the man called Burton left to give a call Charteris dozed in a dover head down upon the steering wheel and let this longplanned city substantiate itself around him in dawning colour. In his shuttered sleep he saw himself drawn from the ground multi-pronged and screaming with several people standing ceremonially but their heads averted or under cowls to whom he was then able to speak so that they moved through whole sparse countrysides of rooms and chambers and compartments, always ascending or descending stairs. Though all was malleable it seemed to him he had a winged conversation with two two women but one of them was maimed and the other took wings and burst out from a window for some sort of freedom although they heard an old man cry that beyond the sprawling giant of a building the buildings began again.

  When he was aroused he could not say whether it was he that woke or the serpent within him.

  Banjo Burton was talking at the car window without making himself understood his face landscaping so Charteris followed him towards crumbling semi-daylight house and that appeared the correct procedure. Mention of breakfast chill cramped in the dull limbs part still down in cup of coffee at least hospitally south of Italy and my nose still smarting from that blow in Metz they’re upstairs he went after along the million gravel.

  Old grey steps to the old brown building tucked in iron railings curled to a dilute Italian mode and in the grey—brown hall black-and-red tiles of the same illusory epoch and everywhere on every side apart from the murmuring of voices rich dull rich dull patterning making claims delaying senses — asking always of each moment was it eternal could one walk through the hall and walk forever through the hall: become no more than an experience of the hall as stiff-legged from the car one in the hall’s embrace and the murmuring these ephemeral halls eternally retaining.

  Then again another sumptuous time-bracket and the millenial-ephemeral world of the worn stair-carpet asking always what can be the connection between this and that moment except deep in the neovortex of old apemen in masquerading mansions and the smell of England tea old umbrellas jam trees and maybe corsets? And the voices nestlings at the rocking lifetop.

  Utters at the top of the stairs and another time-bracket somehow one comes through them with people milling and what really goes on who sees or in my father’s head. Patterny people all minority men and women with hands Byzantine and kindly expressions born to ingenuflect. Pinkness below th
e high hair. Dove voices with one voice angry madbulling the china-shoppers about it: the bullman for the crestfallen times all head and shoulders all bitumen surface blunt as a block shaking Charteris’ hand saying ‘My name’s Phil Brasher I’m you will have heard of me I lead the people the new Proceed making extricate from the dull weavings of mundanity — ’

  ‘Proceed what?’

  ‘The name of the new religion you should of heard of it they know me better in Loughborough a failed saint there Robbins announced me inadvertently in the market with crowds howling like dogs in great schemuzzle of relevation I was born.’

  And now they gazed at each other under a naked bulb with Charteris all a smooth man but for the starting English whiskers his tongue always in an easy niche and only sound within the eternal squeal of tyres too late and the erotic gridlestone of bodies lying lively on the highway jumped up and jerked off speedwise. Opposed to him Brasher everywhere chunky and wattled from suitor cheeks or breeks a fine managerie odour and premeating him no favourable aspect of the future. They were both betrayed as beyond the recording old records began again.

  How they saw each other. Each in isolation shipwracked. Always a farther coast beneath the coastline. I now my own mariner seized from sealess Serbia crossed at last the saint rowing with muffed oars down foggy Port of London to the crimeship or Sir Francis circumaggraving the globe under my own prowess crossed the eggless waters to these shores this man this mantle.

  They saw each other in a frost of violence crystallised recognised — a thousand self-photographing photographs fell about them on each a glimpse without its clue a fist a wrist a shoe a wall a word a cry Charteris we cry we hear his voice cry Paradise. What crazed triumph as Charteris foresuffers in utter puzzlement but yet did he not already do it all, in menace of future hour.

  In contrast Brasher he. Ashen he mounts back his anger on an unsound rampant saying, ‘I’ll not ride anywhere with you or where the lorries sweep. Isn’t there’s a limit a limbo a limit somewhere isn’t there. You must know that I am the great Sayer and cannot in my mouth’s teeth be dumb before these my fellowers.’ They cheer and bring thin coffee always offstage like little paper faces. ‘Now you arrive here and fatal events begin spreading forward along my trail and every premonition to an ashtip. See all how even death is multi-valved and in its colour black nearest brown. Back into the traffic no not I! No more moving no more movement only to still and take what I teach.’