The Paper Men (15 page)

“No.”

“Curse you. A
jeu
d
’
esprit
,
of course. You have no sense of rhythm, I’ve always thought so.”

“I’m tired.”

“As I was saying, you need a chum. You see, my dear, I know a thing or two. You think I’m an ageing queer in your categorizing way, and of course I am, among other things. I don’t think I’ll try the snail soup. It’ll have to be mousaka again. Isn’t Greek food perfectly loathsome? If it weren’t for bloody Sappho— At the very
least
you need a woman. Or are you the sort who discovers himself late in life and goes overboard for some handsome young fellow?”

“Oh for God’s sake, shut up!”

“All that must have gone from you, drifted away into the far beyond, yes, my dear, gone from you in the battle and strife. Yes. You need a woman.”

“Have you anyone in mind?”

“Therein the patient et cetera.”

“
Macbeth,
q.v.”

“Do you know what Apollo said? Well, of course you do! Know thyself. Perhaps you’ve gone all these years without knowing yourself at all. You need a chum. Start at the bottom with a dog.”

“I don’t like them.”

“Worms under the carapace isn’t just human sadism, you see. It’s the pure poetry of the art. Only One Above could be as inventive as that.”

“I’m tired of talking of Halliday. I mean—”

“Ah well. You always were a prose person, weren’t you?”

“With wit.”

“And where has your celebrated ‘callous wit’ gone,
je
me
demande?
”

“I’m old. I’m going faster and faster—”

“Where?”

I think I must have shouted.

“Where we’re all going, you bloody fool!”

I
think
I can remember what he said after that word for word, because I have a very clear picture of his face coming closer to mine across the little dinner table, so close I could see he had pencilled his eyebrows.

“Wilf, dear. Once more in return for the loan. See a priest or a shrink. If not, at least keep away from doctors acting in tandem. Otherwise they’ll have you inside before you can say ‘dipso-schizo’.”

This isn’t a biography. I don’t quite know what it is, since there are enormous gaps where I don’t remember what happened and other gaps because I remember that nothing happened. If all that wasn’t bad enough in the attempt to get some kind of coherence into this mass of paper, the months after Lesvos and Johnny are patchy because of the state I was in. I remember seeing clearly, that same night after Johnny had done his ridiculous diagnosis, that I must get away at all costs. But instead I got sodden, moving in a haze of Minos from day to day and seeing little of Johnny, who didn’t number excessive drinking among his several vices. At last I did manage to get myself transported to the airstrip and flew off. (Forwarding address: Rinderpest, Bloemfontein, SA.) Thank God for planes! They can alter the whole outlook in the merest fraction of time like at the Last Trumpet. I remember sitting next to some chap, a Canadian I think, and maundering on about how marvellous flying was because if you flew enough you were bound to crash, and if you crashed in a jet death was instantaneous, much to be desired,
Julius
Caesar,
q.v. This Canadian was what Johnny would call a cowardy cowardy custard and did not like to be reminded that we were suspended by a crazy application of the laws of aerodynamics over a lot of nasty deep water. He went and changed his seat. Well, I knew Athens would be stuffed with chaps from Great Britain or the States, so I simply changed planes and flew to South Africa, forgetting that South Africa was what I had given as a forwarding address. I remembered that on the way there and determined to come back by return. But—and here the patchiness comes in—I got into a nursing home somehow. I’d had a vivid encounter with the red hot worms under my carapace and a nice female doctor got them out of me through various chinks which she demonstrated by showing me a live lobster from the fish market and then again sometimes I think I dreamed the whole thing. Of course, she left the heat inside me but I thought I could put up with that. I felt that a milder climate would make the heat bearable perhaps but what with one forwarding address and another I was running short of countries where I’d not been compromised. So I flew to Rome (forwarding address: Shangri La, Katmandu, Nepal) and no sooner had we landed than I remembered Rick in the Piazza Navona. So I doubled back on my tracks, taking a local flight with a hire car at the end of it. I drove off very slowly for I hadn’t made much of a fist at signing my name to the thing you sign.

Now I have to tell you about that island although I don’t want to, it still gives me the jitters. But I have to tell about the island because it’s the first half. I’ll write the second half later. As a matter of fact I’ve been screwing myself up to do it for some time and I can’t do it sober, that’s the fact of the matter. Oh I know in the morning I’ll be going down to the kitchen to count the empties with no Liz to glide in like the ghost of something in
Vogue.
No Rick to go through the dustbin, the ole ashcan. He’s probably wandering about outside somewhere to keep an eye on me. Since Liz had the ashes cut down I can look straight across the lawn from where I’m sitting to the woods on the other side of the river or I would if I could but I am not able, it being about three o’clock in some morning. That’s where the badgers come from to badger me and Rick too.

Well. I got one ferry and landed up in the city where they incontinently shot the chief of police in the main street before my very eyes. It was the Mafia and I had some sort of idea that Halliday was using them so I took another ferry. I don’t mean back to where I’d come from but onward, ever onward, and found myself with car on a quay whence the streets were too narrow to drive along. So as I didn’t much like the look of the combined slum, hovel, bar, knocking shop they called the hotel Marina, I walked off into the town, to find something bigger and better with a decent bar instead of a plank held up by two ancient slatterns. I came to a gate, opened it and walked to some houses which seemed to suggest they might conceal one of those Italian villas that always get turned into hotels. I should have noticed that these houses didn’t have windows. Silly of me. Well, I walked into a kind of long corridor in one and of course they had ancient corpses all dressed up and standing against the wall for support, you couldn’t expect them to stand up without, I mean. I was shaking when I got out of there but the odd thing about these shakes was that when they should have stopped because I was no longer more frightened than usual the shaking went on. I stopped there among the windowless houses and shouted at them.

“The island’s shaking!”

So it was, too. Telling the living or the dead about shakes in that island was taking coals to Newcastle and no mistake. Well, I did find a hotel with windows and no visible corpses except the barman who hadn’t been used for years and they fetched my bag from the car and I sat up all night on the side of the bed waiting for the shaking to stop but it didn’t. I must have slept, but the thing was that either I’d invented an unconscious or had had one all along despite what Liz said and I dreamed, my God how I dreamed! I must have had breakfast because I remember wandering about and seeing that the island consisted of powdered pumice with knives of black glass sticking up through it like a feast of steeples. An interesting place for normal people but not for you if you are creaky on the hinge. I suppose it
was
there? Yes, of course it was because of what came after.

At some point I decided I would stick to coffee and I spent the morning with buckets of it. Then to keep myself sober I decided to go for a walk, avoiding the
centre ville,
  the dead centre, ha et cetera. Sicilian burial customs, q.v.

So out I went, cautiously hugging the walls. There was a big hill and I began to stalk it. Yes, I know quite well it sounds crazy; but then, it was. I began to approach it as if the old man himself, I mean my contemporary, according to Mary Lou—why, he’s no older than you are! What a liar the girl is. I was deceived in her. He is older than the church on which he shits. Pretty squalid the streets were, even for that area, I can tell you. I saw soon that the building that came into sight on the top was a church, probably a cathedral; and feeling so hot inside I thought I would case the cool joint for glass though the chance of anything other than atrocious stuff presented by the Mafia in about 1900 was minimal. After a time I had to stop, being out of puff, but no matter how long I waited I could feel the heat inside me and the heat outside me for the day was sweltering. It wasn’t ordinary daylight, it was incandescent daylight, not sunlight at all but an atmosphere with a luminescence in it. I thought at first it might be the drink but then realized if I could think that I wasn’t as bad with drink as I’d thought but with the other thing—being chased, I mean, and spied on, that not to put too fine a point on it was unbalancing my judgement just a little. As far as booze was concerned I hadn’t a trace of hangover which is a bad sign. Even the circle of sea round the island had an odd, brassy look about it. There was an islander coming down the hill past me and he was crossing himself like a mechanical doll.
Then
I saw what was up and why the island had the shakes. At a point on the horizon, God knows what the direction was, there was the plume of black smoke like you’d get from a megaton.

You can say what you like but the earth shaking is worse than the shakes. It destroys the last little bit of human security, I mean the feeling that in the last analysis your feet have something solid to stand on. But the earth shaking is a reminder of the crazy ball flying through space which if you care or have to think of it is an enormity verging on, no, surpassing outrage. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a description of the horrors of an eruption or earthquake you won’t find it here because as I now see I was too far gone to do anything but accept the whole thing as a personal insult or tribute and anyway the shakes—I mean the earth shakes—died away: and of course when I came out of that place on top of the hill I couldn’t have cared if the whole island, glass knives and all, had sunk into the sea.

There was a vast ascent of steps, vast not only in extent—they seemed to go straight up to the sky—but vast in width. You could have marched a company up them in line abreast, and very appropriate, for they were donkey steps, the rise small, the step wide as wide, or perhaps the correct architectural term would be deep as deep. So up I went, brother ass protesting for all that he had these specially constructed steps for his convenience, until I reached the flat space in front of the main door of the huge building. It was the west door and it’s just possible I suppose that what happened after that couldn’t have happened in any other place but who can tell? There was an ancient lady sitting outside the central door of three on a rush chair and spinning a fine thread.
No,
she wasn’t one of the Fates, she was an ancient lady put there to see that none of the tourists who visited the place every ten years or so had a camera with him. Why? They don’t like pics and very right and proper too. It was a change to find people who know as I do that a pic takes something away from you, so I spoke my best broken Italian to her, assuring her that I wasn’t the sort of man to carry a
machina
photographica
round with me. But she quite clearly didn’t understand, speaking nothing but whatever it is they speak in the island. However to show willing I pointed at the plume of smoke on the horizon and raised my eyebrows, whereat she started crossing herself, all rhythm of spinning interrupted.

“Volcano!”

She knew that word all right. Well, at least it wasn’t the bomb. A pretty place I’ve been led to, I thought to myself, it’s ho for those homely motor roads, Wilf, when the ferry comes back and be damned to Rick and Halliday and their Mafia. So in I went and it was very, very dark, even for a church.

That was when I realized I still had my outsize sunglasses on; and I inferred from that they’d been in position for some days even when sitting on the side of the bed, or possibly dreaming. It was odd, standing inside the kind of preliminary wooden box between the inner and outer door to consider that it also implied I hadn’t washed for some time. So I took them off, pushed open the inner door and sidled in.

It was a cathedral all right because I could see the cathedra. I took a step or two forward, glancing round and I saw at once that the glass wasn’t worth a second glance. I went forward a bit more, noting that the roof was the best bit as the spandrels were full of quite early mosaic. Mosaic is like glass—the earlier the better. I took a step or two forward, thinking that I’d case the joint quickly then concentrate on the good bits, when a piece of mosaic fell at my feet with the day’s last shake.

Now. I had been advancing slowly. That tiny fragment of dirty blue stone fell a yard in front of me and I stood on my right foot, about to put the left one down but I kept it there in the air and looked at the stone. It was less than half an inch square. It lay directly in front of me. I put down my left foot and stood. Mountains throw cannon balls at me, churches drop a bit of stone the size of a finger nail. Well, I thought, remembering what had happened because I didn’t take any notice of the mountain’s warning, we’d better go carefully here. You don’t want to fall off the edge. What is more, there was something about that cathedral, an atmosphere. It was, now I saw in the absence of sunglasses, still darker than it had any right to be, seeing that the sun was brassy outside and most of the windows stark plain. You could call it a complete absence of gentle Jesus meek and mild. I didn’t like it and was in half a mind to leave but knew that if I did I should only find myself in an endless stream of time with nothing to help me forget it. I went on.

How long did all that last? I sat on the surround of a pillar for a bit and was hot inside by contrast with the church’s coolth. I had a strain inside my chest like being held up on tiptoe. The strain made sitting down to rest quite, quite pointless, so despite the bit of mosaic that had fallen in front of me, I went on.