Kleinzeit (13 page)

Underground
– ‘Are you Orpheus?’

Folger Bashan
– ‘I’ll get you after school.’

Wife
– Remarried.

Children
– ‘Bye bye, Dad.’

Father
– ‘I didn’t know.’

Mother
– ‘I knew.’

Brother
– ‘Nobody can tell you anything.’

Tracksuit,
socks, running shoes – Buy tomorrow.

Kleinzeit studied the list, drew brackets in the margin connecting various items. Then he made another list:

Barrow full of rocks.

Harrow full of crocks.

Arrow in a box.

YARROW – Fullest Stock

SORROW; FULL SHOCK

Morrows cruel mock.

He shook some dandruff over that list, made a third one:

Flashpoint
– Distended spectrum – Hendiadys – Zither? – Yellow paper?

M. T. Butts
– Ullage – Fruity buns

Schwarzgang
– Ontogeny – Tobacconist – Yellow paper

McDougal
– Glaswectomy

Smallworth
– Enlarged proscenium

Raj
– Hesperitis

Damprise
– Efflorescence

Piggle
– Imbricated noumena – Office? – Conrad? – The Secret Agent? – Code? – Yellow paper

Drogue
– Fusee trouble

Old Griggs
– Palimpsest

Redbeard
– Slipped fulcrum – Yellow paper – Mouth organ – Fruity buns

Kleinzeit
– Hypotenuse – Diapason – Asymptotes – Stretto – Glockenspiel – Yellow paper

Kleinzeit pondered the three lists for a long time. Very good, he said. I don’t know any more than I did before. The yellow paper had gone to sleep. Without waking it up he wrote a second paragraph, a third, finished the page, wrote a second page and a third.

He went to the door, listened, heard Death breathing. You there? he said.

Not half, said Death.

Do me a favour, will you, said Kleinzeit. Run down to the off licence and get me twenty Senior Service. I’ll give you the money through the letter box.

I’m bloody not fagging for you, said Death. You run down yourself.

You won’t do it because you’re not real, said Kleinzeit. If you were real you’d take this real money and nip down to the real off licence and buy the real cigarettes. Here’s the money. He dropped it through the letter box, heard the coins fall on the floor outside.

You there? he said.

No answer. Kleinzeit unlocked the door, opened it. Nobody there. He picked up the money, went down to the off licence, bought the cigarettes himself.

When Kleinzeit got back he picked up Thucydides, held the book in his hand while he thought about things. When all the existing data have been correlated and analysed, said Kleinzeit, we find nothing whatever.

That’s firm thinking, said Thucydides.

Thank you, said Kleinzeit. There may be, however, some evidence, as yet unconfirmed, of the existence of a group of yellow-paper men. There may possibly be a whole ward of them in Hospital. Dr Pink diagnoses, prescribes, operates, Drs Fleshky, Potluck, Krishna, assist, Sister and her nurses minister to the patients in Ward A4. I am one of the A4 men.

Be patriotic, said Thucydides. Don’t let the side down.

The etiology of the various malfunctions and diseases in Ward A4 is unknown to me, said Kleinzeit. If, as we suspect, yellow paper occurs in all cases, it might be interesting to learn the histories of those who recover.

He rang up Sister at the hospital. ‘Do you know anything about the men in A4 who’ve been discharged?’ he said.

There was a silence.

‘You know,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘the ones who’ve recovered and gone home.’

No answer.

‘Are you there?’ said Kleinzeit.

’Yes,’ said Sister. ‘There haven’t been any since I’ve been here.’

‘How long is that?’

‘Three years.’

‘But that can’t be. I mean, look at me.’

‘You discharged yourself. There haven’t been any who
were
discharged. And you’re the only one who’s discharged himself.’

‘But they aren’t all the same patients who were there three years ago, surely,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘Oh, no. We’ve lost a good many.’

Surprising how cold it is in here, thought Kleinzeit. Redbeard needn’t have flogged my electric fires.

‘Are you there?’ said Sister.

‘For the time being,’ said Kleinzeit.

HELLO, LOVER BOY, shouted Hospital into the telephone.

HOO HOO! yelled Death through the letter box.

‘But it isn’t,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘a terminal care ward or anything like that, is it?’

‘No,’ said Sister. ‘It just sort of happened that way.’

Kleinzeit said goodbye, rang off. If the Athenians lost I’m not sure whether I can keep going, said Kleinzeit.

Think Athenian, said Thucydides.

Kleinzeit read for a while, came to the part where the Spartans asked the Athenians to stop the war. They had a good chance for peace there, he said to Thucydides. Why didn’t they take it?

You know how it is, said Thucydides. You’re winning, so you think why quit now.

I’ve done three pages, said Kleinzeit, but nobody’s making peace offers.

Win some more, said Thucydides.

I feel a little faint, said Kleinzeit. He leaned back, found that he was leaning against Word.

Yes, said Word, in the immortal words of William
Wandsworth: ‘hoof after hoof …’ Keep that in mind, my boy.

Wordsworth, said Kleinzeit. Wandsworth is south of the river.

But ahead of his time, said Word, and don’t you forget it. After all, he conceived the caterpillar tractor, or at least the caterpillar tractor horse. Army tanks and all that. Where would modern warfare be without Wormswood?

Wordsworth, said Kleinzeit. What are you going on about?

What I said, said Word: the caterpillar tractor concept. ‘My horse moved on,’ he said, ‘hoof after hoof’. It’s perfectly obvious, I should think, that he had in mind an endless revolving tread shod with horses’ hooves, thus prefiguring today’s machines of war and peace. The industrial revolution, the breaking up of rural patterns. All that, you know. He was a deep one all right, was Whatsisworth. And under and over it all, ‘hoof after hoof,’ red in tooth and claw. Like Old Man River, it just keeps rolling along, eh?

Kleinzeit had stopped listening. I’ll start running again in the mornings, he said. Buy a tracksuit tomorrow.

Good show, said Thucydides. A running mind in a running body.

Right, said Kleinzeit. He went into the bathroom without turning on the light, washed his face and brushed his teeth in the dark, peed by ear.

What’s happening? said the mirror. Who am I?

Morton Taylor, said Kleinzeit with a sinister chuckle, and went to bed.

The next day Kleinzeit took time out from his business in the Underground to buy running gear, also a shirt, trousers, underwear and socks. Still enough in his cheque account for three months, and the busking was covering his daily expenses. In the evening he went to the hospital.

‘What do you think now?’ said Redbeard. ‘Still nonsense? I heard what Schwarzgang said. I saw Piggle give you a piece of yellow paper.’

‘Two cases don’t make a whole ward,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘Two plus two is four,’ said Redbeard. ‘You forgot to count you and me. Try some more.’

‘I’m not sure I want to.’

‘Brave, aren’t you?’

‘I never said I was.’

They stared at each other for a while without saying anything. Kleinzeit went over to Nox’s bed.

‘How’s it going?’ he said.

‘I don’t think I’ve got much time left,’ said Nox. He looked and sounded not much more than a shadow.

‘Nonsense,’ said Kleinzeit like a pipe-smoking vicar with twinkling eyes. ‘You’re looking much fitter than you were when I first came here.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Nox. ‘And they’ve done three refractions already. It’s going to be total eclipse for me next time, I think.’ He laughed.
’A
to
B
is how it began, but
Z
is coming up quite soon.’

A little more blackness in the air than usual, thought Kleinzeit, staring hard. Pollution.

‘
A
to B,’ said Nox. ‘At one time I even thought of writing
a story about it. Never finished it, though. Actually, I think I’ve got it here somewhere.’

Kleinzeit shut his eyes and held out his hand. He heard Nox shuffling papers in the drawer of his locker, felt several sheets of paper put into his hand.

‘Why’ve you got your eyes shut?’ said Nox.

‘Sometimes I get headaches,’ said Kleinzeit without opening his eyes. ‘It doesn’t feel yellow.’

‘It isn’t yellow,’ said Nox. ‘It’s just ordinary foolscap.’

‘Ah,’ said Kleinzeit. ‘Ordinary foolscap.’ He opened his eyes, looked at the paper. Ordinary feint-ruled foolscap. Nox’s writing was a firm black chancery hand. Kleinzeit read:

There it was again, like a shadow on the sun: a rounded shape of black overlapping a bright circle, intersecting the perimeter at A and B.

Kleinzeit closed his eyes again. ‘Difficult to read,’ he said. ‘My eyes are bothering me. What happens next? Do you pick up a piece of ordinary foolscap in the Underground, go to your office, ring up your doctor, write something on the paper, and get sacked?’

‘How in the world did you know?’ said Nox. ‘I picked up the foolscap in the corridor, it was lying on the floor, quite clean. I went to the department store where I work (Glass and China, Ground Floor), rang up my doctor, then had an absolutely overwhelming urge to write something on the foolscap, which I did.’

‘What did you write?’ said Kleinzeit.

Nox took from the drawer a folded sheet of foolscap that looked as if it had been carried in a rear pocket and much sat on. The chancery script was larger and less firm than the writing on the other sheets. Kleinzeit read:

Narrow, cool. The flock.

‘I had a display of Spode to arrange,’ said Nox, ‘so I set up a pair of steps by the shelves and got on with it. There’s a pattern called the Italian Design, quite pretty, all in blue. Dotted clouds, lacy trees, an attractive ruin, five sheep, and a lady kneeling by the river while the shepherd approaches her from behind, flourishing his staff. Nearby in a posh little cave sits an indeterminate figure telling beads perhaps, or meditating. Well, there I was standing on the steps with a teapot in my hand when I found myself possessed by a strong desire to get into the picture, push the shepherd to one side and have a go at the lady myself while the indeterminate figure in the cave either looked on or didn’t.’

‘Did you,’ said Kleinzeit, ‘get into the picture?’

Nox stared at him for a moment. Kleinzeit’s eyes were closed again, but he could feel it. ‘No,’ said Nox, ‘I didn’t. I became aware that my governor was standing there looking up at me, had been for some time. He’s got a face like a baboon’s bottom but deeply lined, which baboons’ bottoms generally aren’t, I believe. “Well, Nox,” he said, “when you’ve finished posing for the monument or contemplating infinity or whatever it is you’re doing, perhaps you’ll get on with it.” All this time I was more and more inclined, quite literally I mean, towards the lady kneeling by the river. I inclined so far that I toppled off the steps, grabbed at the shelf as I fell and brought it, with about
£
100 worth of crockery (retail price, that is) and myself down on the governor’s head.

‘He was quite reasonable about it actually. All he said was that he thought my talent might possibly lie elsewhere than in Glass and China, wondered whether demolition work might be worth a try, and suggested that I have the goodness to look about for something whenever convenient. I was still looking when I came to hospital. Dr Pink had suggested a few tests. I should have liked to finish the story, the idea
of getting into that pretty blue picture absolutely fascinated me, especially with the teapot, which struck me as somehow more mystical than the other pieces. But I haven’t the talent. Nor, it seems now, the time.’

Kleinzeit opened his eyes, gave the foolscap back to Nox, shook his head, made a thumbs-up sign, and went over to Drogue’s bed singing under his breath, ‘Narrow, cool – the flock.’

‘Funny you should be singing that,’ said Drogue.

‘Why?’ said Kleinzeit.

‘Because I didn’t know there was such a song. Thought I’d made it up myself. Not precisely the same tune, mind you, but the same words.’

‘ “Narrow, cool – the flock”?’

‘Oh,’ said Drogue. ‘I thought you were singing “Sparrows rule the clocks.”’

‘Which you made up?’

‘As far as I know,’ said Drogue. ‘As a matter of fact it was on the very day my fusee trouble began that I first sang the song. Curious, really.’

‘How?’ said Kleinzeit.

‘I’m a traveller for a clock company,’ said Drogue. ‘Speedclox Ltd. I was out with the new line, coming down the M4, when a tremendous lorry hurtled by …’

‘Morton Taylor?’

‘Not at all. Why should I be afraid of a passing lorry? As I was saying, the lorry hurtled by, my car rocked a bit in the slipstream, and the day suddenly seemed darker than it had been, less light in the light if you follow me.’

‘I follow you,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘And at the same time,’ said Drogue, ‘I had the feeling of being strained to the limit by a heavy dead weight pulling me down. If I could unwind somehow I knew I could relieve the strain, but I couldn’t unwind. I was still feeling that way when I got to my hotel. When I walked in I saw
an orange packet of Rizla cigarette papers lying on the floor, and I picked it up. In my room I took a leaf out of the packet, and on it I wrote:

Sparrows rule the clocks.

Odd thing for a Speedclox traveller to write, wouldn’t you say.’

‘Yes,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘I found myself singing the words,’ said Drogue, ‘and since then I’ve written other little songs on Rizla papers. Have you ever written on Rizla?’

‘Not yet,’ said Kleinzeit.

‘It seems to me to be a universal sort of paper to write on, and I only write songs about universal things.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Have a look,’ said Drogue. He took a little sheaf of cigarette papers out of his locker and gave it to Kleinzeit. The writing was tiny, neat, and compressed, like something to be smuggled out of prison. Kleinzeit read the top one: