Barefoot in the Head (17 page)

‘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

And I will meet again, Father? After I have duped him so badly

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.