Inner Circle (19 page)

The hour was right for a comfortable journey, the train almost empty, and no bottle-neck drawing reminded Patrick from the opposite wall that things could be otherwise. He relaxed with his feet stretched out, and in her travelling basket Miss Siam purred a seductive welcome to her oriental dreams. From the other end of the carriage a lanky youth approached them and slouched into the seat next to Patrick. Aha—another knee grabber. Patrick was ready to tick him off, but the chap didn’t seem to want any rude sport after all, he just sat and sighed. Patrick looked at him sideways. Must be my age, or a little older; his hair is neither greasy nor dusted with dandruff, but it could do with an occasional rinse. Not blue, no. A funny sort of face, coming out from the chin and sinking into the forehead.

Now the youth started to rub his reddish hands. He put his left one into his mouth, chewed at the fingers for a while, then tried swallowing the whole lot. Since that was impossible, he took his hand out, examined each finger carefully, in case one of them was missing, and gave the drying saliva a powerful lick. He did the same with his right hand, except that he pushed it across Patrick’s seat straight into Miss Siam’s whiskers and waited for her tongue to come out. Patrick would have objected to this as unhygienic for the cat, especially so soon after a medical examination, but something else puzzled him about the chap’s appearance and behaviour.

Where had he seen that face before? He saw hundreds of people, had chums in every district in London, was himself a well-known character in the South-West. True, he was often bad at remembering names, but this face seemed to be reaching him through a dense haze, from somewhere far and drowsy. Well, he could have met the hand-eater in one of his nightmares, at the other end of the sleep tunnel. The best way of finding out was to ask the hand-eater whether he happened to be a chum well met and well lost.

But the anonymous chum forestalled Patrick.

‘Cools the skin,’ he said and made a throttling noise.

‘What?’ Patrick decided to be extra polite in case his memory had slipped up badly, so he corrected himself: ‘I beg your pardon, I didn’t quite catch. . . .’

‘The licking cools the skin,’ the youth explained and withdrew his hand from under Miss Siam’s tongue. Patrick was glad the hand had cooled off in the meantime.

‘Ah—’ Patrick produced his dad’s expression to the best of his abilities. The youth needed no prompting.

‘It’s like this, you see,’ he bent towards Patrick confidentially, ‘I’ve escaped with my skin. Hot that, escaping.’ Then he mumbled something which Patrick failed to catch, partly because of the doors breathing out. Bayswater; three more stations to complete a circle. That word: he muttered it again and it sounded very much like telepatho. Strange, the chap should be speaking Patrick’s special lingo.

‘Telepatho?’ Patrick repeated in a loud voice. The carriage doors were breathing in at that moment. The chap nodded, then rubbed his left hand against the seat.

‘You mean, you tried to electrocute your cock in the telly, or something like that!’

The youth objected with a violent rubbing of his right hand. His line of psychic trouble, he said, was telepathy, which impressed Patrick as much as his new Scandinavian dye had impressed the cinema-goers.

‘Do they lock you up for that?’ he asked, clutching Miss Siam’s basket.

‘They try. But I get away with my skin and hide here in the Tube. It’s okay as long as my telepathic current works. When the power fades, I’m sure in trouble.’

‘Is it fading now?’

‘Not yet, but it might any minute.’

‘What does it do when the current works?’

‘Chum, I can see things above the surface and below; things creeping along now and things which will whirl, jostle and suffocate five hundred years from today.’

‘Golly!’ said Patrick and put a finger deep into his mouth. He forgot the pleasure of being called chum by such an important telepatho.

‘Don’t swallow it,’ said the chum.

‘Oh, no.’ Patrick dropped his hand and rushed a question which tickled his curiosity. ‘Tell me, does it hurt your eyes to see so far ahead?’

‘Not at all. Do I wear glasses?’ Patrick shook his head in a silent no. ‘As it happens, chum, I am longsighted. But those crowds thudding on the surface give me a terrible headache five hundred years too early. Poor island, no free space left to grow a tree, how it weighs on my head, each pair of stamping feet here, boom-boom inside my brain.’

He pressed his temples and Patrick felt a quick pulse of sympathy throbbing in his finger-tips and behind his hot ears. What could he say now, at once, to cheer up a chum, a brother in patho, a traveller on a circle!

‘As a matter of fact,’ he began and the phrase gave him confidence, ‘I am a bit simple in the head myself. On account of my mother being Bulgarian.’

‘What a coincidence, my father was very vulgar, too.’

‘I would like to know your name.’ Patrick at once regretted saying this, because the nameless chum pushed three fingers between his teeth, bit them hard, and replied with visible pain.

‘Don’t you know they’re chasing me from tunnel to tunnel, all over this Underground and the other as well, from Leeds to Durham, from Cardiff to Dover.’

‘It’s terrible, positively frightful, I must say.’ Then Patrick had a most chummy brain-wave. ‘May I call you Boris! I am Patrick—how do you do. I would very much like to call you Boris.’ The chin came forward, the low forehead sank deeper, and the prospective Boris whispered yes. This filled Patrick with brotherly euphoria. Question after question, answer after answer, station after station-they were all going round in circles on the Inner Circle.

‘Boris, you said something about another Underground. It sounded much bigger than this. From Dover to Cardiff, that’s quite a tunnel.’

‘It is. It will be.’

‘What, Boris?’

‘Makes no difference, if you can see ahead.’

‘Wait a minute—’ Patrick wriggled in his seat and nearly pushed off the basket with Miss Siam dreaming blissfully. ‘Do you know what, Boris! I too once saw Leeds instead of Bayswater. A long time ago it was, and my dad looked so funny when I said Leeds. Look, Boris, and here it is, Bayswater—once again.’

The doors were breathing out and in.

‘Leeds,’ said Boris the hand-chewer.

‘Was I telepatho then?’

‘Yea.’ Boris didn’t sound too happy about admitting it. But he brightened up when Patrick with an euphoric gesture offered him a handful of toffees from his right pocket and a crisp quid from a secret slit in the lining of his jacket.

‘Would you like another?’

‘Yea,’ said Boris.

‘Another toffee?’

‘No, thanks.’ The telepatho chum was chewing a big problem. Then he said: ‘I’ll tell you a top secret, Patrick.’

‘How top?’

‘Telepathy top.’

‘That’s awfully nice of you, Boris. I am most grateful.’

‘Wait—’ The doors were opening again: Gloucester Road Station. Boris glanced sideways and telepathically at the immediate present. Another glance, this time round the carriage. ‘Patrick, the secret is: whatever you or anyone else can imagine, exists.’

Patrick gasped. Miss Siam woke up and purred her confirmation from the basket, a mysterious glint in each of her blue eyes. He stroked her throat, a sign that he approved of her approval. They both existed, and so much existed with them, in the underground, on the surface, in the sky, now and wherever the now could be imagined.

‘Boris, how long have you been going round?’ Patrick touched his hand and the skin was cool.

‘Round or around?’

‘I mean here, Boris, on the Inner Circle.’

‘Oh, maybe a week, maybe less.’

‘It’s impossible, Boris. They switch the power off after the last train at night. I know. I once walked in the tunnel.’

‘So what? I did, too. But imagine what happens when you are on the big circle line, under this overcrowded island, from London to London via Cardiff and Durham, people sleeping in the tubes, being flooded, all those kids everywhere. . . .’

‘I can imagine, Boris.’

‘I slept on the Underground platform. That’s not from telepathy. I was a baby.’

‘Why weren’t you drowned then?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Must have been my mum’s fault. She loved me, terribly.’

‘Just like my second mummy,’ said Boris. ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ With brotherly sympathy he surveyed Boris’s features and compared them with his own reflection in the window opposite. ‘Nice to be a bit simple though, don’t you think, Boris! It sort of goes with all those huge stupidities in the world.’

Boris nodded, rubbed his hands, sniffed at Patrick’s hair and remarked that he would prefer it blue any day. Finally, he made a sign that he wanted to leave the train after all. The station was Victoria.

‘Durham,’ Patrick announced, stepping through the sliding doors.

‘Don’t be stupid, it’s Victoria,’ said Boris and helped Patrick with the basket.

They walked up into the main line station. ‘Get me a couple of buns, I haven’t got change.’

Patrick took a pound out of his secret pocket, left Miss Siam with his chum by the telephones and went in search of a trolley. When he returned with three buns and a carton of milk, Boris stood inside a telephone kiosk, pissing, and Miss Siam hung on a string.

The basket lay crushed with Boris’s foot.

Patrick pulled the door, broke the string at the top and the cat started miaowing at once.

‘Why did you do it, Boris!’

‘Don’t ask me. Ask Leeds.’

‘You said yourself it was Victoria Station and not Durham or Leeds, or. . . .’ ‘He does exist, you know,’ Boris answered and pushed the whole bun into his mouth.

Sky

1

I heard about Adam’s illness and his dying from the old trees. They talked at first in whispers, then they intoned a loud chant to the clouds in the first sky and to the light above them. Yet I wouldn’t believe them. I wasn’t sure whether I still understood their speech. But birds, thousands of them, flocked from every nest on my land and with their wings showed me a fluttering path across the sky: in this direction I should go.

And the big lake, Eve’s lake, began to weep, and beat its head against the reeds and the rotting boats of Amo on the shore. I took no food with me, I took no companion, for I had none, and followed the bird signs overhead.

Once I was on my road towards his death, every living thing aided me: the thicket parted and drew in its thorns, the branches hung higher to let me pass unharmed, the moss bedding lay prepared for me whichever place in the forest I chose for my rest; and during my sleep no chill of night in the air touched me, no hooting owl awoke me, and no dream came to disturb my darkened thoughts.

Fruit trees and plants nourished me with the best offerings wrapped up in the freshest leaves; new springs bubbled in the grass reminding the ears that the mouth was thirsty. I had the moon with me when I preferred to walk by night, and I had the sun behind the clouds when I ignored the heat of noon. How long was my journey, how brief was my toil, I could not tell either by the measure of my steps or by the odour of my sweat. The earth seemed to be moving with Eve, its surface small enough now to fit the size of her feet.

The old trees remembered all the sounds of our beginning and strewed their shades with them, so that the music had autumnal colours, red, yellow and brown, the dying colours.

Suddenly, the music of the trees stopped. Silence stood upright like their trunks, from the ground to the sky, a line of arrested motion. Then my name opened within the crown of a cedar, the cedar that had been waiting for me and for this cry.

‘Eve, Eeeve, Eeeeve. . . .’ the cedar was wailing from the top of its height and the cedar’s children lifted the cryan their branches, and swayed it darkly over my staring eyes. ‘Eeeeve!’

No, it couldn’t be their own lament, born from the pain of their roots; it was my husband’s voice calling me, and they carried the name spoken by him, augmenting it in echoes, wider and lower.

‘Adam,’ I spoke within a small frightened thought. ‘Adam.’

He was dead when I reached Cain’s tower on a narrow rocky island. A boat was waiting for me, but I had no need of it, for the water had fallen and uncovered flat stones in a line, surrounded by brown weeds and shells. I stepped from stone to stone, knowing that each of them lay there to feel the fear of my feet.

Cain knelt before me, he always did that, and I touched his grey hair. Old, he too looked old, in the eyes, and on his forehead which the Sky Man had furrowed with his finger. He said nothing. There couldn’t be any greetings exchanged between us. Cain took my hand and in silence led me to the end of his barren rock. His father was waiting in death for Eve’s greeting and homage.

Besides the tower of stone and clay, there stood only one tree on this small dark island. It was no taller than a man, and Adam before his death had asked Cain to strap both his arms to a branch at the top. Now I was looking at his body, naked as the white bark of the tree, his bound arms stretched out in a gesture welcoming us both, his son and his wife, to the two skies beyond us. Adam’s eyes were closed, his legs drawn together, and with his body thus propped up against the tree, he appeared to be resting after a long journey on foot, too exhausted to lie in the shade, to sleep, to eat.

I lowered my head and, like Cain kneeling before me, I fell on my knees before Adam. I kissed his feet and the rock which they had made sacred by leaving on it the last throb of Adam’s life.

I rose and said to my son:

‘Tell me how Adam died. Tell me all you can remember.’

‘Mother,’ he knelt again and kissed my hand, ‘mother.’ He never called me Eve.

Like my other children, except Amo, he was afraid to join his lips with my name. But now I preferred this warm word to any other sound, and I welcomed the silence which kept the warmth.

‘Tell me about your father.’

‘My father asked me to stay alone with him. I have three wives now, and ten of our children are living with us, two sons and eight daughters. I sent them all by boat to the mainland, and prepared a bedding for my father. But he didn’t want to lie down. He talked to me, he taught me again the things I had once known and lost in growing old; he said, I remember, that the coming of death was like the coming of age, slow at first but sudden at the point of arrival. A day passed and a night. And the next day before noon he spoke about the trees; how he told them of his approaching death and how they promised to take his message to you across the forests.’