Babel Tower (97 page)

Cassius Clay tears up his draft papers and refuses to join the war against the coloured people of Asia in Vietnam. In June the Israelis win an efficient and passionate Six-Day War against the Egyptians and the Jordanians: they take possession of Jerusalem, and process to the Wailing Wall, despite booby-trap bombs which explode amongst the trumpets.

In July the Round House is given over to a Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, which is addressed by anti-psychiatrists who believe that the human race is being destroyed by illusion and mystification; by
Stokely Carmichael, who believes the Third World and the American blacks must get the guns from the white man and use them; by Herbert Marcuse, who is happy to see flowers and believes in a Marxian liberation of the instinctual self from technology. Violent attacks are made, verbally, on mass suicide and mass murder, and David Cooper sums up, calling his summing up
Beyond Words,
calling for an end to “the opposition between subject-object, white-black; oppressor-oppressed one; colonizer-colonized; torturer-tortured; murderer-murdered one; psychiatrist-patient; teacher-taught; keeper-kept; the cannibal-the one who is eaten up; the fucker-the fucked; the shitter-the shitted upon.” There is an orchestra of piano frame, metal pipes, milk crates, tin cans. There are flowers everywhere, blooming and wilting.

Plans proceed to appeal against the
Babbletower
decision. There is concern over the non-appearance of Jude Mason; there is a theory that he has fled to Paris again and an underlying, suppressed fear that he may be dead. Another person who has not been seen is John Ottokar, who has made no sign of life since he was called a co-respondent. Frederica has given him up; she is proud, she will not telephone his place of work; if he does not want to see her, she has other things to do. She goes back once or twice to Desmond Bull’s studio, goes dancing with Hugh Pink, who dances badly, but has sold a volume of poems—
Orpheus Underground
—to Rupert Parrott. It is a strange, hectic time. It will come to seem much longer in memory than it is, as though Flower Power went on and on. To most people the noise, the smells, the brilliance, are peripheral, are words only, go past whilst they cook or push pushchairs or nurse the elderly, or work in shops and banks and laboratories, wandering into clubs or festivals, once, or twice, or more often. In June 1967 the “spontaneous underground” UFO sprouts the Electric Garden in Covent Garden, which opens with a fight between supporters of Yoko Ono and the Exploding Galaxy. Avram Snitkin is now conducting ethnomethodological research into flower people, electric gardens, Technicolor dreams and alchemical weddings. He has taken a fancy to Frederica and invites her to come along with him from time to time, but she does not go until August, when the Electric Garden has folded and re-opened as the Middle-Earth.

In July Leo is seven and Frederica is summoned to see his teacher at a parents’ evening. She sits with Agatha in the school hall, under a
dangling forest of paper streamers of paper flowers, pinned to cotton threads attached to the paint with blue-tack and drawing-pins. They wait in line, until the teacher—a young woman in a kind of suede tunic, with long hair like Minnehaha’s and eyes painted round in black—can give them their ten minutes. Frederica sits, when her moment comes, hunched over the low desk.

“He’s doing just fine, Mrs. Reiver. Such a bright little boy.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“His relationships with the others are good, no problems there, he has lots of friends.”

“I’m so glad.”

“He hasn’t started reading independently yet, of course, he’s a bit late with that. I expect he’s a slow developer.”

“What?”

“I expect he’s a slow developer. As far as reading goes.”

“There must be some mistake. He has an enormous vocabulary. He said ‘incandescent’ the other day. He talks about ‘prototype’ jets and ‘machinations.’ ”

“I expect he does. He probably doesn’t have the motor skills. Don’t worry.”

“Listen—he can read
all Beatrix Potter.
He reads them to
me.
”

“Reads, or recites, Mrs. Reiver? He’s probably too clever for his own good, for his reading, that is.”

“He reads them to Saskia.”

“Saskia is a fast reader. Don’t worry, Mrs. Reiver, all children develop at different speeds. He’ll learn.”

“But my family is a reading family—”

“I expect you put him off. A bit, you know. Too much emphasis, too many expectations. Go easy on him.”

“But if he
can’t read
—he can’t learn
anything
—”

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Reiver.”

She looks at her watch.

Frederica talks to Agatha. She says, “He can’t read, I didn’t notice, he talks all the time, I’m dreadful—”

“I did wonder,” says Agatha. “I tried him out once or twice. Saskia’s quick. He’s impatient. He can’t be bothered with the little words, and he can’t run at the big ones. They teach them with all sorts of methods, look-and-say, ITA, all sorts of experiments, some of
which work with some children, some of which don’t. Don’t worry. There are people I know who can help. It’s early days.”

Frederica is desolate. She says nothing to Leo. She listens to him “read”
The Tale of Mr. Tod
and feels, when he goes to Bran House for his summer holiday, that she deserves to lose him. It has not occurred to her that Leo could be
her son
and not read.

August comes. The Beatles go to meditate with the Maharishi and Brian Epstein kills himself. The Beades return. They say the Maharishi has told them not to mourn. Jude Mason is still lost, and Frederica, restless and lonely, goes to the Middle Earth with Avram Snitkin. Avram Snitkin is observing, not dancing. He has brought with him a notebook with an
art nouveau
cover in purple and gold and silver, and a paper bag full of fudge. He takes out the pieces of fudge and arranges them in a row on the edge of the table in front of him. “Have some,” he says. “It’s hashish fudge, it’s a good recipe, it’ll do you good.” His eyes are moist with happiness, his hair floats gingery towards his shoulders, his beard bunches, his bare crown gleams purple and green, orange and rose, yellow and crimson, in the strobe lighting. He squats like a stolid dwarf in a corner and smokes his own rolled cigarettes, reaching out meditatively from time to time and ingesting the hashish fudge. Frederica wants to take a piece, and does not. She is a northern Puritan, getting back control of her own life. She has a little flowered shift, with cut-away armpits, a little girl’s shift, covered with great innocent white daisies and brilliant blue convolvulus, on a black ground. The points of her red helmet of hair lick her white cheeks.

“Do dance,” says Avram Snitkin, “if you feel like it.” He takes another chunk of fudge. Frederica looks around. The place is like a warehouse, or a hangar. It is concrete, coloured only by the moving lights, which weave and dance and swirl, giddy and violent. It is full of scented smoke; the smoke changes the light, thickening it, filtering it, catching it and twisting it. The noise threads through the light. Somewhere, a long way away, a band is playing, a group is singing. Avram Snitkin likes to be marginal; they are in an alcove, round a corner, they cannot see the players.

Frederica is not musical. She is a not a child of her time in this. She is torn apart by the noise. By the amplification of the throb, by the
howl, by the blast. By the thrum, by the beat, by the rhythm, by the reprise, by the clash. It gives her no pleasure. It explodes the blood in her ears, it appears to be jabbing through her kidneys, it is pain, it is pain, it is pain.

They are dancing. They are gyrating, dreamily, in their conical witch-shifts, in their elven robes, in their falling black layers of cheesecloth, in their silver-and-white net, in their
fleurs du mal,
purple and black, in their white roses and moonflowers. They sway like snakes piped to, they twist and turn slowly, they move all together to the rhythm, smiling slightly, intent in their incantations and evocations. They are all dancing together, but there are no couples. Frederica is good at jiving—she can twist and turn at the end of a man’s arm, spiral away and stamp and laugh and come back. Jive is sex, jive is a swing, jive leaves you laughing and breathless. These creatures—most of them are girls—are like mushrooms, like twining flowers, they go round and back, all together, all separate, a group, no individuals, no pairs.

“I do empathise with these people,” says Avram Snitkin. He pops in another cube of fudge. His smile is beatific. “I do empathise with these people.” Frederica looks at his notebook. He has written, “I do empathise with these people,” drawn a smiley-face, added a copperplate alphabet and a series of loops followed by another, round which he has drawn a snake.

He repeats, “I do empathise with these people.”

Frederica gets up and walks carefully round the dancers, looking for the loo. The noise increases. It is a not-unsubtle noise, turned up to a howl, to a screech, to a scream. She catches a glimpse of the group that is playing. The lead singer has a loose coat of multicoloured satin patches with huge silver cuffs and lapels. His trousers are white satin and he wears a kind of Augustus John hat in white satin. He is waving a white stick wound round with flowers and ribbons. His head is thrown back, his throat throbs with his ululations, his face is John Ottokar’s face.

Frederica turns round and starts walking back again. She thinks she must go home. Her teeth are blue, her hands are green, her hair is murky purple. She sifts smoke, she slides between dreaming figures.
She makes her way back to Avram Snitkin, who says or shouts, “I do empathise with these people.”

Frederica cannot speak. Two lines of Herbert come into her head.

She begins to say them to herself like a mantra. Later, whenever anyone says “the sixties,” this is what she will think of, Zag and the Szyzgy (Ziggy) Zy-Goats singing in the Middle-Earth, the hum become a howl, the maze of light, the crowd of single dancers. Thus thinne and leane, without a fence or friend,
I do empathise with these people,
I was blown through, by every wand’ring wind. Blown through, blown through, blown through.

“We need Jude to sign the appeal form,” says Rupert Parrott. “Frederica, you were always our lead to him. Can’t you find him?”

“There’s not been a squeak out of him. All the Press fuss, no one has had any idea.”

“You don’t think he’s jumped in the river?”

“I would have thought,” says Samuel Oliphant, “that he’d have made sure we saw him jump, or at least found his floating body.”

“I thought that at first. I’m not so sure now. Don’t we know
anyone
who might know where he is?”

“Daniel,” says Frederica. “He used to phone Daniel, in that crypt. Daniel and Canon Holly.”

Frederica and Rupert Parrott go round to St. Simeon’s. Daniel is sitting in his egg-box cubicle, talking to a schoolboy who has failed his A-levels and taken six codeine pills. He is persuading him to go to a hospital. After a bit the boy puts the phone down, whether because he is bored or because he is sleepy or because he has despaired is not quite clear. Daniel writes up the conversation, ending, “I think he knew six codeines won’t kill him but I may be wrong.” He says, “What brings you here?”

“Jude. We can’t find Jude. We need him to sign the appeal form. And we’re worried about him, of course. We’d like to be sure he’s all right. Obviously we would.”

“He hasn’t been here.”

“Has he called?” says Frederica.

“That would be confidential, if he had. But he hasn’t, no.”

“Do you have
any idea
of where he lived?”

“Not really. South London, I had the impression, I don’t know why.”

“He came ‘home’ on the Tube with me once.”

“South London’s very big,” says Rupert. “And he might have gone elsewhere. Anywhere else, except he had no money.”

“No bank account?”

“No. He took postal orders. Or cash.”

Daniel turns over the log of the early days, when Jude Mason was the anonymous and irritating Steelwire. Whilst they are doing this research, Ginnie Greenhill comes in, offers tea, and asks what they are doing.

“I remember something,” she says. “I do remember something.” She thinks.

“I almost had a conversation with him once, when Daniel was away, in Yorkshire. He talked about living at the top of a tower.”

“That was his book.”

“No, no. He said, ‘No one wants to live where I live because a child fell from here, from the top of the tower.’ ”

“That was
his book,
” says Rupert Parrott. “A child fell from the top of Babbletower.”

“Well, perhaps he put the fall in his book,” says Ginnie Greenhill, who has not read the book.

“He says all sorts of things,” says Daniel.

“We could try,” says Ginnie Greenhill. “We could ask the local newspapers and the social services about children who fell from the tops of towers. In South London.”

This search takes time. More children have fallen than they expected, from towers in Rotherhithe, in Brixton, in Peckham, in Stockwell. They ask the councils who lives in the flats from which the children fell, and find no one resembling Jude Mason. The most hopeful is the Wastwater Tower in Stockwell, on an estate called the Wordsworth Estate, where all the towers are mysteriously and perversely named after lakes—Grasmere, Derwent, Ullswater. A small girl did fall from the top of this tower in 1962; she was two years old, the daughter of a seventeen-year-old mother who was accused and acquitted of pushing her. Her name was Diamond Bates. This is all anyone knows. The flat is now occupied by an unemployed man—“a bit simple,” called Ben
Leppard. Frederica frowns in thought. She says “Monckton-Pardew. Benedictine Pards. It could be him.” “He’s lived there since 1962,” says the council official they are talking to. “Let’s try it,” says Daniel.

The Wordsworth Estate has, though it is already unfashionable to say so, a certain presence, a certain style. Its concrete towers are uncompromising and erect; wide open spaces spread between them. There are little balconies and the windows vary in form—some are circular, some are small rectangles, some are large. Their frames were once painted pale blue, but are now smeared and peeling. The idea of the architect was to expose the natural materials, the concrete, the metal, so they would weather as granite weathers. But concrete does not weather as granite weathers, and the smears and stains on the tower-surfaces look like great expanses of splashed and drained dirty dishwater. The space between the towers, which on the maquette was green, with bushes and trees, is cracked asphalt, with the odd spike of a ripped-off sapling, dying in its round hole; there is green between the cracks, where the earth bulges, the green of moss, green of algae. It is a grey day in early autumn when Daniel and Frederica arrive. The wind blows fish-and-chip papers across the asphalt. The entry to Wastwater Tower stinks of urine and is stained with smeared faeces. These are clichés, and like clichés, are depressing most of all because they are commonplace and inescapable. It would be nice if the lift worked, but it does not. Frederica skips up several floors, and then, the hare to the tortoise, waits for the steadily toiling Daniel. They are both completely out of breath when they reach the thirteenth floor. Frederica’s lungs are bursting, her heart is hammering. Daniel wipes his face with a handkerchief.