Barefoot in the Head Read online

  ‘I know,’ Angeline said. The heart always so laden, the gulls always so malignant.

  In the old kitchen among gash-cans where a single brass tap poured a thin melody out of one note, Ruby had her alone at last clasping her thin wrists by each tapering tendon her face still with youth in its whole imprint.

  ‘Don’t start anything, Ruby, get back to play your piece with the boys.’

  ‘You know how I feel about your continued days, how you always play my piece, and now I see you lay with Charteris.’

  She pulled from him and he caught her again, a slight look of ox under his eyebrushes. ‘I mind mine, you mind yours, you hip me Ruby though I know you mean well!’

  ‘Look, the rumour is he killed Phil — ’

  Frantic, and a churning mound of rubbish at the sill, ‘Ruby, if you are trying to make me — ’

  ‘I won’t kid, I never liked Phil, you know that, but to go round with the guy who did it — ’

  She was as thin from her lethargy as stretched teeth could make her. ‘He has something that’s all I know, and hope I need among you scenemakers, I don’t have to trust him...’

  In the next room they were calling and formationed birds dipped like sleet across her vision. ‘Remember me? I was around before you met Brasher, I knew you when you were a little lanky girl I used to come and play with your brothers, gave you your first kiss — ’

  ‘It’s looking back, Ruby, looking back,’ despairing.

  ‘I thought you loved me, you used to ride on my cycle.’

  ‘It’s past, Ruby.’ She was afraid of her own tears the very nature of her grottoed self. Leaning back over the choked draining board, she saw the face of him move across her visage like a lantern burning impatience, mutter, turn under its hairbush and leave her there with the one-note melody unlistened to but ever-piercing.

  Creaming crowds in Nottingham to greet the Escalation, teenagers blurry in the streets, hardly whispering, the middle-aged, the old, the crippled and the halt, all those who had not starved, all those who had not died from falling into fires or ditches on roads, all those who had not wandered away after the aerosols drifted down, all those who had not fallen down dead laughing, all those who had not opened their spongy skulls with can-openers to let out the ghosts and the rats. All were hot for the Escalation under the seams of their grey clouts.

  After two numbers, the boys, sensational and smelly, had the crowds throwing noise back at them. Burton stood up, announced Saint Charteris, asked if anyone had seen a stray dog wearing a red and black tie. The Escalation howled their new anthem.

  Obdolescent Loughborough

  With slumthing to live through

  Charteris we cry

  Is something to live by

  Try a multi-valued slant

  On the instant instant

  He had scarcely thought out what he was going to say. The pattern was there, misty or clear. It seemed so apparent he felt it did not need uttering, except they should wake and know what they knew. The slav dreamers, Ouspenski and the rest, sent him travelling with his message through to his outpost of Europe. If the message had validity, it was shaped by journey and arrival. He couldn’t always stand helpless across the river. In Metz, he had realised the world was a web of forces. Their minds, their special Midland minds had to become repositories of thinking also web-like, clear but indefinite, instant but infinite.

  If they wanted exterior models, the space-time pattern of communicationways with which their landscape was riddled functioned as a master plan, monster plan of mind-pattern. A1 the incoherent repirations that filled their lives would then fall into place. The empty old nineteenth-century houses built by new classes which now stood rotting in ginger stone on hillsides, carriageways either approached or receded like levels of old lakes, they were not wasted; they functioned as landmarks. No more eggless waters. Nothing should be discarded; everything would reorient, as the ginger stone mansions or the green stone churches were reoriented by the changing landscape dynamic, and the crash-ups escalated to a love-in. He was lead of the New Thought. The Fourth World System, Man the Driver, would appear soon, all would wake.

  So the words sprang up like bolted birds.

  Greta stood and screamed, ‘He killed Our Mum! Poor old girl with her flowers! He caused the multi-maxident on the Inner Relief. Kill him! Kill him!’

  ‘Kill him!’ also cried Ruby.

  White-faced Angeline said from the platform for all to hear, ‘And he killed my husband, Phil, you all knew him.’ It was sin to her whether she spoke or not; she worked by old moralities, where someone was always betrayed.

  Their troubled eyes all turned to his eyes, seeking meaning, like stars in the firment.

  ‘I thought they were going to crucify you,’ said Featherstone-Haugh after offering the Serb a glance through perspectives later to be of more transfixion over the desiccated lustrums of western worships, crowns of thorns, crosses of scorn, the love-kill. You couldn’t tell the bits of wreckage from the bits of victims. He couldn’t stop his heart beating.

  ‘It’s true! The lorry was sweeping along the great artery from Glasgow down to Naples, In Naples, they will also mourn. We are all one people now, Europeople, and although this massive region of yours is as special as the Adriatic Coast or the Dutch Lowlands, or the steppes of central Asia, the similarity is also in the differences. It’s the impact, as you must feel. You know of my life, that I was Communist like my father, coming from Serbia in Jugoslavia, that I lived long in Italy, dreamed all my while of England and the wide cliffs of Dover. Now I arrive here after the dislocation and fatal events begin, spreading back along my trail. It’s a sign. See how in this context even death is multivalued, the black nearest brown Brasher falling back into the traffic was a complex impulse-node from which effects still multiplicate along all tension lines. We shall all follow that impulse to the last fracture and serial of recorded time. The Escalation and I are now setting out on a motorcrusade down through our Europe, the autobahns, the war, dislocation, to ultimate unity. All of you come too, a moving event to seize the static instant of truth! Come too! Wake! There are many alternatives!’

  They were crying and cheering, discarding I’s. It would take on truth, be a new legend, a new communication in the ceaseless dialoga; the ground complexes given younger significance. Even Angeline thought. Perhaps he will really give us something to live by, more than the old fun grind. It surely can’t really matter, can it, whether there was a dog with a tie or not; the essential thing was that I saw it and stand by that. A phenomenon’s only itself eh? So it doesn’t matter whether he is right or not; just stay in the Banshee with him. Pray the warmth’s there, the loot.

  You couldn’t tell wreckage from victim in the fast-turning shade-shapes of obliquity.

  He was talking again, the audience were cheering, the group were improvising a driving song about a Midland-minded girl at the wheel of a sunlit automobile. An ambiguity about whether they meant the steering or the driving wheel.

  Plugging the night’s orifices with solid sound.

  PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND

  The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce

  The moonlight of a June night

  Casts shadows of crashing airliners

  Onto the orthostrada of gaunt erections

  Moonlight moonlight

  Filing empty patios

  And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching

  And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce

  Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl

  Oh love’s a crash a parade-ground bash

  An auto-immune disorder from which issues

  A pair of bodies destroying their own tissues

  Left right left right left

  In out in out on guard

  Lovers of the world unite

  You’ve nothing to lose but appetite

  If winter comes can the following one

  Be more than a year away

 
; Could this be loot because I feel

  The flying human parts and the bits of steel

  In an uato-concussion are the modern way

  The military way

  Of committing love

  And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching

  And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce

  Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl

  Oh love’s a smash a uniform cash

  Negotiable when the moving parts peeling

  Can autocade feeling anti-flowered healing speedily stealing

  And the big gymnastic leather-cheeked sergeant’s marching

  marching marching

  And the intermittent inter-continental tattered tattooed

  prepuce prepuce

  Does bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic

  syphilitic

  Bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

  Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

  Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic

  Supergirl

  Left right left right

  Moonlight moonlight

  Up the motorways of love

  PHIL, BILL, RUBY AND FEATHERSTONE-HAUGH

  SMALL DOGS HOWLING

  When you sank on my knee in the buggy

  You forked your loving tongue in my mouth

  And you worked me and made me come

  Though your hair didn’t fit you properly

  I still resemble the blur of your fingers

  When the small dogs are howling

  Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem

  Oh throw your acidhead at them

  Lives deprived and broken

  Bottles empty by dawn

  While we were crotching together

  Did you mind my shoes was torn

  Some place like a magic garden

  My friends all call me Rajah

  And I’m a demon on the cello

  Don’t ask me what we’re doing on the heath love

  Because the estate has become divided

  And we’re one with the ones who won

  This place well the car broke down

  But the street lamps were your tall wild lilies

  And I couldn’t hear the small dogs howling

  Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem

  Oh throw your acidhead at them

  THE MELLOW BELLOW

  DREAMING

  Swept under sleep’s terminator

  We send out blindfold signals

  To a listener in dim Andromeda

  We send out our folded signals

  To the listeners in all Andromedas

  Hoping dreading response

  Beyond the lighted alleyways

  The multi-motorways of time

  Yesterday’s day regurgitates

  Itself back through the limbic brain

  Backwards rattling through orifices

  Of ancient bugging systems

  Alpha rhythms delta rhythms

  Dark transmissions old as sandstone

  Wild as pop

  Between communiqués

  Another sleep-form new-invented

  Topiaries upwards outwards

  Through our

  Dull planetary bodies other

  Messages secreted in the pores

  Are also played out backwards

  On an unknown waveband

  These thin signals

  Pipe from us in automated

  Bursts

  To be picked up on stars

  White dwarfs

  Monitored in nebulae

  Identified

  In other galaxies as

  ‘Dark

  Bodies hitherto quite unsuspected’

  And still between all human noises

  Our figures with their own intent

  Run daylight and silence backwards

  When you target in to my

  Perceptions

  Am I reading you?

  My fullness is a part

  Of your thin signals

  My visions

  Wreckage of your orbit

  From ‘The Threepenny Space Opera’

  Another Dreaming Poem

  My letters delay in their personal boxes

  Uncertainty is on the whole my element

  And the astrabahns bifurcate steeply

  Low temperatures

  Curtains drawn tight

  A blur on the papered walls

  And the night branches drooping

  On the furred paths of grass

  What you might call my pessimism

  Is merely a long dedication

  Of involved enquiry

  Passionate and still deepening

  Into the lost events of everybody’s

  Days those past and those to come

  And those standing on end unsorted

  In the night’s post orifices

  The great well of personal stuff

  I don’t know or wish to know

  Floods me with messages

  Is it myself

  I walk with or happiness

  Found in the low night street

  Footsteps on the pavement

  Echoing in more than one house

  PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND

  The city has built-in pattern city

  city pattern

  city

  built-in pattern

  Mind is more than city more than city Mind more

  more than Mind city

  Roads run like fossil thought

  run

  fossil fossil like fossil

  Mind more

  city

  roads

  fossil

  Built-in thought

  Cities

  Cities have patterns

  built-in

  Cities

  Cities have built-in patterns more

  Minds are more Minds

  Minds

  Minds are more than cities

  road thoughts

  A road fossilised

  road runs road runs A road runs like fossilised thoughts

  Roads patterns

  runs

  cities

  fossilised

  Thoughts minds

  WE’RE ALL FOR THE DARK!

  Or, Life’s Never Been Better!

  If you’ve ever sailed on the ocean

  Or cheered when a port hove in sight

  There’s one thing you’ll know — that emotion

  Is better indulged in at night!

  Since the time when old Noah

  Spent those nights in the Ark

  With the animals pairing

  It’s best after dark!

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better!

  Each night lasts a year

  Stuffed with women and music

  And piss-ups and beer!

  The girls that by daylight

  Would blush to be stark,

  Decide that their blushes

  Won’t show in the dark!

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

  Just yesterday breakfast,

  We got lit in the park —

  And the fire went on burning

  Till long after dark.

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

  Next morning so early,

  We were up with the lark.

  We shot it down dead and —

  Crawled back in the dark!

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

  If you lose your way travelling

  And the small dogs do bark,

  All the signposts will tell you —

  ‘This way to the dark!’

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

  As Jesus remarked once

  To Matthew and Mark,

  ‘To Hell with Big Daddy —

  We’re all for the dark!’

  CHORUS: Life’s never been better!

  Each night lasts a year — />
  Stuffed with women and music

  And piss-ups and beer!

  Stuffed with women and music

  And piss-ups and beer!

  ANONYMOUS

  THROUGH THE NEW ARCADE

  My sweet sweet Phil so often brutal

  My bloody Phil so sometimes gentle

  The trouble was you didn’t love enough

  You didn’t have to hit him

  Those years

  I’m too sentimental

  You were always too bloody sodding rough

  You were too much like my mother

  Completely misreading universal patterns

  Thinking you could always have your way

  Oh Christ my sweet damned Phil

  You burst apart

  Bits of body wreckage

  I never knew I never knew another

  Human being was that frail I always hated

  All that ranting made me ill

  Deep in my heart

  You tired me

  Even before my sticky-fingered schooldays

  I’d learned to sweat it out and all about

  But I’m too sentimental

  Hanging on to any hand that waited

  Well you inspired me

  You burst apart

  Once and so I stuck by you

  The fool I was

  When you’ve been crated

  You’ll see you’ll see I saw

  The way he looked at me I liked it

  And he took your blows so gentle

  And he spoke as if he knew

  Of universal patterns far beyond me

  Perhaps he recognised I could be true