Gazooka (2 page)

A lot of voices around Cynlais applauded his willingness to undergo torment by Uriah's torch.

‘Now tell me, Cynlais, my boy,' began Uriah. ‘I have now watched you in three carnivals, and each time you've put me down for the count with worry and shock. Let me explain why, Mr Chairman. He marches at the head of a hundred young elements, all of them half naked, with little more than the legal minimum covered over with bits of old sheet, and Cynlais him self working up a colossal gleam of frenzy in his eye. He does a short sprint at Powderhall speed and then returns to the head of his retinue looking as if he's just gone off the hinge that very morning. Cynlais is no better dressed than his followers. His bits of sheet are thicker and whiter but they hang even looser about the body. He also has a way, when on the march, of giving his body a violent jerk which makes him look even more demented. This is popular among the thoughtless, and I have heard terrible shrieks of approval from some who are always present at these morally loose-limbed events. But I warn Cynlais that one day he will grossly overdo those pagan leaps and find his feet a good yard to the north of his loin cloth, and a frost on his torso that will finish him for such events as the Powderhall Dash, and even for the commonplace carnality that has been his main hobby to date. His band also plays “Colonel Bogey”, an ominous tune even when played by the Meadow Prospect Silver Jubilee Band in full regalia. But Coleman's boys play it at slow march tempo as if to squeeze the last drop of significance out of it. Now tell me, Coleman, what's the meaning of all this? What lies behind these antics, boy? What are you supposed to be, and I ask with a real fear of being answered.'

‘Dervishes,' said Cynlais Coleman. ‘We are dervishes, Mr Smayle.'

‘Dervishes? What are they?'

‘
A
kind of fanatic. We got the idea from Edwin Pugh the Pang there. When we told him that we were very short of fabric for our costumes and that we'd got no objection to going around looking shameless, out he came with this suggestion that we should put on a crazed, bare, prophetic look, as if we'd just come in from the desert with an old sunstroke and a fresh revelation.'

Uriah was now nodding his head and looking horrified as if his finger, eroded and anguished by a life's inquiry, had now found and fondled the central clod from which all the darkness of malignity flowered.

‘You've been the tool of some terrible plotters, Cynlais. And is that leap to show that you are now shaking the sand out of your sash?'

‘Oh no. I'm not worried about the sand at all, Mr Smayle. This leap in the air is just to show that I am the leader of these Dervishes, the Mad Mahdi. I got a lot of information about him from that very wise voter who never shifts from the Reading Room downstairs, Jedediah Knight the Light.'

‘I'm here,' said a voice from the back. It was Jedediah Knight, resting his eyes in the shadows of the back row and looking, as he always did, shocked by understanding and wearied by the search for things that merit the tribute of being understood. ‘But I told him that the Mahdi would never have advanced against the Empire playing so daring a tune and with so little on.'

‘What do you say to these charges, Cynlais?' asked Gomer.

‘Fair enough, Gomer,' said Cynlais. ‘When we get enough money for new costumes we'll come in out of the Middle East at a fast trot.'

‘
A
ny more, Mr Smayle?' asked Gomer.

‘
A
lot more. I have a pint of gall on my mind about that woman's band organised by Georgie Young but that will have to wait.'

He made for the door with long, urgent strides and the two ushers fell back.

‘Goodnight,' we all shouted, but the sound that came back from Uriah was just a blur.

‘Come on, Edwin,' said Milton Nicholas. ‘Let's go and have some tea and beef extract at Tasso's.'

Later that night, at Paolo Tasso's Coffee Tavern, my Uncle Edwin was a lot less serene than usual. Over a glass of scalding burdock, which he drank because someone had told him it made a man callous and jocose, he admitted that he'd been thinking a lot about what Uriah Smayle had said. He made it clear to us that he was in no way siding with Uriah. The pageantry of life had long passed us by in Meadow Prospect and he was glad of the colour and variety brought into our streets by the costumes worn by some of the boys. It would help us, he said, to recover from the sharp clip behind the ear dealt us by the Industrial Revolution. But all the same, he claimed, he could see dangers in this eruption of Mediterranean flippancy and joy.

‘We have worn ourselves over the years bald and bandy try ing to bring a little thought and uplift to this section of the fringe. Not even a Japanese shirt shrinks more swiftly than awareness. It's been cold, lonely work trying to push the ape back into the closet. Now with all these drum beats and marching songs the place could well become a mental boneyard overnight.'

There was such a plangent tolling in his voice that the steam ceased to rise from his burdock and Tasso offered to warm it for him again, but Uncle Edwin said that at that moment a stoup of cold cordial was just the thing for him.

But few of us agreed with Uncle Edwin. For all the young a tide of delight flowed in with the carnivals. At first we had two bands in Meadow Prospect; Cynlais Coleman's Dervishes and the Boys from Dixie. The Boys from Dixie wore black suits and we never got to know where voters with so little surplus to buy bottles ever got the cork from to make themselves look so dark. They were good marchers, though, and it was impressive to see these one hundred and twenty jet-black pillars moving down the street in perfect formation playing ‘Swanee' in three lines of harmony.

There were some who said it was typical of a gloomy place like Meadow Prospect that it should have one band walking about in no tint save sable and looking like an instalment of eternal night, while another, Cynlais Coleman's, left you wondering whether to give it a good clap or a strong strait-jacket. But we took some pride from the fact that at marching the Boys from Dixie could not be beaten. Their driller and coach was a cantankerous and aged imperialist called Georgie Young the Further Flung, a solitary and chronic dissenter from Meadow Prospect's general radicalism. Georgie had fought in several of our African wars and Uncle Edwin said it gave Georgie some part of his youth back to have this phalanx of darkened elements wheeling and turning every whipstitch at his shout of command.

Most of the bands went in for vivid colours, though a century of chapel-bound caution had left far too little coloured fabric to go around. If any voter had any showy stuff at home he was well advised to sit tight on the box, or the envoy of some band would soon be trundling off with every stitch of it to succour some colleagues who had been losing points for his band by turning out a few inches short in the leg or deficient in one sleeve. We urged Georgie Young that the Boys from Dixie should brighten themselves up a little, with a yellow sash or even a scarlet fez, a tight-fitting and easily made article which gave a very dashing look to the Tredomen Janissaries, a Turkish body. But Georgie was obdurate. His phobias were down in a lush meadow and grazing hard. It was black from tip to toe or nothing, he said. However, he relented somewhat when he formed the first women's band. These were a broad-bodied, vigorous crew, strong on charabanc outings that finished on a note of blazing revelry with these elements drink ing direct from the petrol tank. Their band had uniforms made roughly of the colour and pattern of the national flag. The tune they played on their gazookas was ‘Rule, Britannia'. They began well every time they turned out, but they were invari ably driven off-key by their shyer members who could not keep their minds on the score of ‘Rule, Britannia' while their Union Jacks kept slipping south with the convulsive movements of quick marching on sudden slopes. They had even called in Mathew Sewell the Sotto as musical adviser and Mathew had given them a grounding in self-confidence and sol-fa. But they went as out of tune as ever. Jedediah Knight the Light, fresh from a short brush with Einstein, said that if they got any worse they would surely reach the bend in musical space which would bring them willy-nilly back to the key first given them by Sewell the Sotto on his little tuning fork. Nevertheless, both of Georgie
'
s bands, the dour Boys from Dixie and the erratic Britannias, had a smartness that completely eclipsed Cynlais Coleman's bedraggled covey in their flapping fragments of sheet.

So it was decided by the group that met at Tasso's that the time had come to arrange a new deal for the Dervishes. It was agreed that they were altogether too inscrutable for an area so in need of new and clear images.

It was left to Mathew Sewell, who knew more about the bands than anybody else and had operated as a judge in half a dozen smaller carnivals, to put the matter to Cynlais.

Cynlais came along to Tasso's one Thursday night for a talk with his critics. It was still July but Tasso had his big stove on full in the middle of the shop because he had a group of older clients who had never been properly warm since the flood of 1911. Tea all round was ordered and Mathew Sewell stood in the middle of the room, with his hand up, ready to start, but he had to wait a few minutes for the hissing of the tea urn and the rattling of teacups to abate. As a specialist in the head voice, he hated to speak in a shout.

After a sip of tea Sewell summarised for the benefit of those who were new to this issue of Cynlais' band the findings of Smayle and the other censors. Then he addressed Cynlais directly:

‘So you see, Cynlais, there are no two twos about it. You've got to put a stop to this business of going about half nude. It's out of place in such a division as this. I speak as an artist and without malice. But it's about time you and the boys dressed in something a bit more tasteful. Something soft and sensuous, that's what we want.'

Cynlais drank his tea while Uncle Edwin stroked the back of his head, encouraging him to be lucid. Then Cynlais put up his hand to show Edwin that the message had worked and he said:

‘I say to you, Mathew, what I said to Uriah Smayle and Ogley Floyd the Flame and those other very fierce elements. Get us the costumes and we'll all be as soft and sensuous as you like. Like cream.'

‘That's the spirit,' said Mathew. ‘Think it over now, and when you're fitted out consult me about the music and I'll pre scribe some tune with a lullaby flavour that you can march to.' Mathew threw such hints of the soporific into the word ‘lullaby' that some of the people in Tasso's looked disturbed, as if afraid that if Sewell were given a free wand Cynlais' band would be the first in the area to wind up asleep on the kerb halfway through the carnival. Mathew saw their expression and, always averse to argument, said: ‘I've got to go now. Bono notte, Signor Tasso.'

‘So long, Mathew,' we all said, feeling a certain shabbiness on our tongues. Cynlais was staring at the door that had just shut behind Mathew.

‘Did you hear that?' asked Cynlais. ‘Oh he's so smooth and operatic, that Sewell the Sotto. A treat.' He turned to Tasso, who was leaning over the counter in his long white shop coat, his toffee hammer sticking out of the breast pocket, his face grey, joyless but unwaveringly sympathetic. ‘Don't you like to have Sewell come out with these little bits of Italian, Tasso?'

‘It is true, Cynlais,' said Tasso. ‘More than once Signor Sewell the Sotto has eased the burden of my old longing for Lugano.'

Gomer Gough the Gavel got order once again by tapping with his cup on the cast-iron fireguard.

‘Now let's get down to this,' said Gomer. ‘We've got to fit Cynlais up with a band
that will make a contribution to beauty and keep Uriah Smayle out of the County Clinic. We can't leave the field undisputed to Georgie Young and his Boer War fancies.' There was a silence for a minute. Hard thought scoured the inside of every head bent towards the stove as history was raked for character and costume suitable for Cynlais and his followers. Tasso tapped
on
the counter with his toffee hammer to keep the meditation in rhythm. Then Gomer looked relieved as if he had just stepped in from a high wind. We all smiled to welcome his revelation but we stopped smiling when he said:

‘Have you got any money, Cynlais?'

‘Money? Money?' said Cynlais and our eyebrows backed him up because we thought Gomer Gough's question pointless at that point in our epoch.

‘Forget that I asked,' said Gomer. ‘But I think it's a shame that a boy like you who made so much at the coal face and at professional running should now be whittled down to a loin cloth for the summer and a double-breasted waistcoat for the winter.' Gomer's eyes wandered around the room until they landed on Milton Nicholas. ‘Come here, Milton. You've been looking very nimble-witted since you were voted on to the Library committee. How do you think Cynlais Coleman could get hold of some money to deck out his band in something special? I mean some way that won't have Cynlais playing his last tune through the bars of the County Keep.'

‘Well, he's still known as Coleman the Comet for his speed off the mark. Wasn't it Paavo Nurmi, the great Finn, who once said that it wouldn't surprise him if Cynlais Coleman turned out to be the only athlete ever to be operated on for rockets in the rear?' We all nodded yes but felt that Milton had probably never heard of this Nurmi until that morning and was only slipping in the name to make a striking effect. Gomer urged Milton to forget the Finn and get back to the present. ‘Let him find somebody who wants to hire a fast runner,' added Milton.