Babel Tower (98 page)

They are in a bare concrete landing outside a blue door with peeling paint. On the landing is a plate with a chicken bone (the rib cage) and a smear of tomato ketchup. They knock. No one answers. They knock.

A voice from the floor below says, “Ben doesn’t come out.”

A girl is standing there, neatly dressed in a pleated skirt, a jumper, and white school socks. She is perhaps ten years old, round-faced, and has a mixed inheritance, wiry African hair, dark red in colour, dusky cheeks, a large mouth.

“Do you know him?”

“We feed him. Mum does. We put his food, and he fetches it in when we aren’t looking. He doesn’t like to come out. Mum says he’s a bit simple.”

“What does he look like?”

“We haven’t seen him for yonks. He used to be a weirdo. A long-hair. He used to get beat up. Now he don’t go out.”

“Can we get to see him?”

“Not if he don’t answer.”

“Has nobody got a key?”

“It isn’t locked. No one wants to go in there. It stinks something dreadful.”

Daniel tries the door. The hall is empty, the floorboards bare. There is a smell. A decaying version of Jude’s lively odour. They go through a dark passageway into a largish room, which has a whole wall of glass, and is therefore full of grey light, which shows old wallpaper covered with autumn leaves, stained and sprouting salt and fungi. There is almost no furniture. A mattress, with a heap of blankets, in one corner. A table, with a row of coloured ink bottles and a pot of calligraphic pens. A Baby Belling, on the floor, encrusted with layer upon layer of burned food like the crust of an extinct volcano, black, mouldy, verdigris, soot-brown.

In another corner is a very neat heap of books, arranged in several flat towers, by size.

There is someone curled in the blankets, but he does not move.

“Jude,” says Frederica.

“Out,” says the ghost of the sawing voice.

“It’s us. Frederica and Daniel. Your friends, we hope. We want to talk to you.”

“Out.”

Daniel advances and turns back the blankets. Jude is lying there in the respectable shirt he wore to the trial, which looks as though it has never subsequently been taken off. His hair is growing—it is tousled and filthy, but it is a good nest of grey wires, not a grey skull cap. Daniel sees that Jude is dangerously thin. He says, “We’ll have to get you out of here. You’ll have to come with us. I could get you into a hospital.”

“You—need not strive. Officiously. To keep alive.”

Frederica says, “They need your signature. For the appeal.”

“There is no need. They will lose.”

“Jude—come on—you used to
fight,
in your way—”

“And now I am dying in my way. Go away.”

In the end, they carry Jude, more or less, down the twisting stairs of the tower, and into a taxi, whose driver sniffs Jude’s smell, thinks
of rejecting him, looks at Daniel, and accepts. Jude begins to cry when Daniel suggests a hospital. In the end they take him to Daniel’s own bedsitter, which is in Clerkenwell, and is spartan in a more cluttered way than Jude’s echoing eyrie, is small, and overfurnished. Jude is bathed, by both Daniel and Frederica, moaning a little. His hair is washed, and becomes oddly floating and electric, giving him the air of a Blakean sage. He closes his eyes throughout the operations, and is dressed in Daniel’s pyjamas, and put into Daniel’s bed. Daniel will sleep on the sofa. “Not for the first or the last time,” says Daniel. Frederica says she would have Jude, but there is Leo, there is Agatha, there is Saskia. “No,” says Daniel, “he’s my job. For the present.”

“He’s got to sign the appeal form.”

Jude opens his eyes. “If you keep them from me, I will sign it.” He closes them. He opens them again. “I wonder, did you find my original garments?”

“No,” says Daniel.

“They were in a paper box somewhere there. They are all I have.”

“You want me to go and look for them?”

“I have no others. Yours will not do for me, and you would not care to lend them. Thank you.”

He closes his eyes again, and settles back into Daniel’s pillow. He murmurs, “You are a man of God.” There is a note of satisfaction in his voice.

Daniel lets Frederica out. He says, “I wonder how long I’ve got
him
for.”

Frederica says, “You’re both as tough as old boots. You’ll get him out, when the time’s right.”

“Aye,” says Daniel. “I will.”

The Space is mysteriously hung with silken draperies, painted with symbols, cups and swords, suns and moons, sunflowers and compasses, crowns and chains. It is lit by glancing rays of coloured lights, and scented with strange smoky perfumes. Two parties of travellers advance across it and meet. One party are fair tall folk, cloaked in shimmering grey cloaks over flowing green robes belted with silver belts wrought of leaf-shapes and clasped with emeralds. All wear crystal wings that flash in the changing light and silver bands in their flowing hair, from which simple jewels hang to rest on their brows. They are led by a white-robed figure, hooded, with a tall stave in his hand, and they are singing quietly.

Their feet are sandalled or shod with fine boots in pale leather.

The second party are white-robed and masked with sun and moon masks in silver and gold. They are crowned with mistletoe, and in their midst are figures partly naked, but with bright metallic sunbursts and crescents covering their sex. They are led by a Bard who introduces them:

The Bard steps forward. He says:

“Let us celebrate the mythopoeic imagination of Albion. Let us celebrate the Makers, who made systems and were not enslaved by those of other men, but broke through to the Vision of what lies beyond Language, to the eternal symbols and the unchanging Light. Let us celebrate the sevenfold vision of William Blake and the true Jerusalem; let us celebrate also J. R. R. Tolkien, who single-handed forged the Elvish languages and the myths of Middle-Earth and the lands beyond the Western Sea. What you are about to see is a Rite and an Invocation, a Calling and a Dance, and who knows what shadowy forms, or creatures of light, may not come into our ken as we weave together these two powerful nests of language, text and textures, into the warp and woof of a new Cloth of Dreams …”

The figures on the stage begin to chant, and to pass long, shining threads from one to the other. The Elves sing of Earendil and Luvah. The Bard describes the work of the Emanations.

The threads are now mixed with red threads, and one of the Bards is turning in the weaving like a bobbin.

The Elves sing of the terrors of Orthanc and Minas Morgul; of the web of Shelob and the Eye in Barad-dur. A soft voice sings of the hope of severing the bonds, breaking the bounds, making a bridge of rainbow light.

Happenings are happening all over London. Frederica has come to this one with Alan Melville. The Bard is Richmond Bly, and Alan and Frederica are present out of morbid curiosity. It is hard to see what is happening as the stage is full of smoke and threads of silk and swirling garments and weaving, and it is hard to hear, as there is an accompaniment of breathy flute music, pan-pipes and tinkling bells. There is also a vague noise of disturbance from outside, from the car park which adjoins the theatre-department building where Richmond Bly’s Rite is being performed. It is a noise of motor bikes revving, and drumming, African drumming, Frederica thinks vaguely, and gongs, and tambourines, and cymbals. This noise swells. The mythopoeic celebrants of Albion dance meditatively on. A voice says, “I am the Lady Galadriel, I wear the Ring of Water.” The noise from the car park has
diminished, and appears to have gone away, but then returns in a much louder burst. It is clear that the noisemakers have left the car park and entered the building through the basement. A kind of rhythmic drumming and stamping begins to mount from the depths. Alan Melville says, “I knew we ought to come, I knew it would be interesting.” Frederica says, “Interesting might be the wrong word.”

The invaders swarm through the theatre. Many of them are naked, painted with flame-shapes in red lipstick, or corkscrew patterns in what looks like woad. They are carrying posters on sticks, most of which depict the Buddhist monk who immolated himself by fire in Vietnam, a cross-legged seated body clothed in saffron, clothed in flame, clothed in smoke, keeling over on stone. Others are carrying stout staves on which are impaled pigs’ heads, sliced in half, showing teeth and vertebrae and brains. They run up to the stage. They are many, they are male and female. The drumming intensifies. They fight with the robed figures. They seize the pipes and little bells, they play their own rhythm. A figure in black, a kind of blond demon, leaps to the front of the stage, swaying to the drumming, and takes the microphone from its place beside the Bard. “Let’s have a poem,” says the poet. It is Mickey Impey. “Let’s have a poem! Zag is coming! Let’s have a proper poem.” He begins to chant:

The audience laugh and chant with him. Paul-Zag in his white satin trousers and jester’s jacket comes through the audience, unsmiling and beautiful. He steps up on to the stage. He is followed by his Group, all in white satin, carrying baby-baths, pink plastic baby-baths full of something dark and slopping. Richmond Bly, masked and robed, steps forward to confront the intruder, tripping over the microphone wire attached to Mickey Impey, recovering himself.

“Excuse me,” says Richmond Bly, behind his sun mask. “This is a serious Rite.”

“I know,” says Paul-Zag. “It’s a Happening, It’s all happening. You’re happening, I’m happening, we’re happening, it’s really happy. Take delight in the unforeseen. Allow me to make you an honorary member of Zag and the Szyzgy (Ziggy) Zy-Goats.”

He waves forward his followers. The stage is crowded with grinning half-pigs’-heads on sticks, with burning monks, with singing and dancing.

“You are a jolly goodfellow,” says Zag to Richmond Bly. “And I am a jolly goodfellow. Let us be joined.”

A young woman wearing a dead poppy and a few feathers dips her arms into the baby-bath, which is full of pale intestines in dark blood. Zag lifts a string of them above his head and winds them round the neck of Richmond Bly, round his own neck. The red runs down their white clothes, both their white clothes.

“No,” says Richmond Bly. “I always—faint at the sight of blood.”

“Loss of consciousness is good for you,” says Mickey Impey. “Dissolve the one in the many.”