Barefoot in the Head (15 page)

Always when he mounted the narrow stairs it was to this sound of rushing water. He put his wet one-piece neatly on its hook before he turned and embraced his wife her fudged vents of concussion. Dry compressed inflexible orifices tangentially met. When he moved restlessly round the room, disrupting all the eons of stillness, the furniture shook; and from without, the obscene grunts of a dirt-machine, pigging in to clay layers. Life had lost all its loot, as they said.

‘Any news?’

‘I haven’t been out. The machines. I didn’t really feel...’

‘You ought to get out.’

‘It’s menacing. Even the daffodils.

He crossed to the omnivision, switched over to Brussels. Momentary warming images. Bursting latticework, phantom casements. Some confused scenes as if settling into deep water, in some sort of a stadium. The cameraman could be on a perpetual trip judging by his random hand. Unlike Germany, here a government of sorts still held. Perhaps it was some kind of a beauty contest; girls in bikinis strutted, rakish of breast and mons, and many older women had turned up too — some at least in their seventies, flesh grouty and wrinkled, all foxed pudding. One of them was shouting, angry perhaps at getting no prize. Crowds in tight macks, looking all ways, and the stripped shots of a grandstand roof. A band played — not ‘Low Point X’. He left it, looked at her, smiled, crossed to a narrow table and picked up the paper, neatly folded. The noise romping across her unwakened room.

‘You haven’t opened the paper.’

‘I didn’t have time. Jan — ’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. How was Aachen?’

‘We’ve got this British saint, Charteris, coming through Aalter tomorrow, big crusade and fun you ought to take in.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘I’ll have to be on duty early.’

‘Do you think he’ll — you know — ’

‘He’s a great man,’ spoken not looking up as he searched the muddled columns. Renewed piracy in the Adriatic. The Adriatic. New ocean, unknown to pre-psychedelic man. Many such hideous discoveries made every day. Of what degree of reality?’A saint, at least.’

On page four he found it, a brief mention. New Crusade. Thousands rallying to support new prophet of multi-complex event. From Loughborough in the heart of England’s stormy industrial midlands may emerge new movement for washing at least ten times brighter smiled Mr Voon and eventually embrace all of war-torn Europe says our London correspondent. Prophet of multi-complex event, soap powder with new secret psychotominietic ingredient Jugoslav-born Colin Charteris is rallying take place in absolute darkness and Flemish observers agree that no thousands to his inspirational thinking. His first crusade motorcade through Europe is refrigerators at Ostend at four p.m. today and leaves tomorrow for what one commentator describes as several hundred incinerators automobiles pouring down here past Aalter at full speed, I’m bound to have more than one crash to deal with; better ring area squads now. Permanent alert from five tomorrow. Inform all hospital services too. Show eager. The tumbling bodies doing their impossible catagasms among ricochetting metals the dirty private things too beautifully ugly to be anything but a hoke. Oh in my loins oh Lord disperse do they have the orange tip butterfly in England these killing years?

Both in their frail beds, a gulf of fifty-seven point oh nine centimetres between them. Darkness and the omnivision switched off but that connection nevertheless merely dormant: there would be another time when the currents would flow and the impulses reestablish that which ancestrally was where the glades of the forest stood like wallpaper all round in murmurous shade when the murderous mermaid pulls aside her jalousie and letting in the whispering brands of braided hair stretching to the closed clothed pillows. Koninkrijk he, suddenly rousing, felt the vibrations welling up through him. It was true, one was the diagram of the others and nobody could decide which. Either vast machines were passing a hundred yards away on the arterial toad, shaking the house minutely in its mortared darkness; or else accumulated fats and silts were building up in the arteries about his heart, stirring his whole anatomy with the premonitions of coronary thrombosis. If he woke Marta, he could presumably decide which was happening; yet even then there was the growing ambiguity about what a happening actually constituted. He could now recognise only areas in which the functionvectors of events radiated either inwards or outwards, so that the old habit of being precise was misleading where not downright irrelevant. And he added to himself, before falling again into trembling sleep, that the Loughborough gospel of multi-complex was already spreading, ahead of its prophet, like disease outrunning its symptoms.

Angeline was crying in the arms of Charteris on the long damp beaches of Ostend, timescape all awash. The Escalation dirged by a dying fire: Her mother married a sunlit Ford Cortina. All the cars, most of them oparted, many stolen, clustered about the red Banshee along the promenade where Belgians loitered and sang, switched on by the rousing words of Charteris, goaded by music’s grind.

Take pictures of yourselves, he had said, pictures every moment of the day. That’s what you should do, that’s what you do do. You drop them and they lie around and other people get into them and turn them into art. Every second take a picture and so you will see that the lives we lead consist of still moments and nothing but. There are many still moments, all different. Be awake but inwards sleeping. You have all these alternatives. Think that way and you will discover still more. Cast out serpents. I am here but equally I am elsewhere. I don’t need so much economy — it’s the pot-training of the child where the limitation starts. Forget it, live in all regions, part, split wide, be fuzzy, try all places at the same time indecisivise time itself; shower out your photographs to the benefit of all. Make yourself a million and so you achieve a great still trajectory, not longwise in life but sideways, a unilateral immortality. Try it, friends, try it with me, join me, join me in the great merry multicade!

All Angeline said after was, ‘But you aren’t indestructible any more than I really saw a dog in a red tie that time.’

He hugged her, half-hugged her, one arm round her while with the free hand he forked in beans to his mouth, at once feeding but not quite feeding as he said, ‘There’s more than being just organical, like translaterated with the varied images all photopiled. You’ll soon begin to see how fuzzy-set-thinking abolishes the old sub-divisions which Ouspenski calls functional defects in the receiving apparatus let go on too personal a closure. Be anti-breasted in a prefrontal sense. As I told the people, self-observation, the taking of soul photographs, brings self-change, developing the real I.’

‘Oh, stop it, Colin, you aren’t fun to be with any more when you talk like that! How do you think I can hang on as I do, not without my own traits unappeased anyway. Did you or did you not kill my husband, besides, I don’t see how you can get away with this multiple thing; I mean, some things are either-or, aren’t they?’

With Angelina hanging crossly on his arm, he got up from the voluptuous sand and, moving to the water’s edge surrounded by midnight followers, flung the bean tin into the galilean dark.

‘What things?’

Well, either I’m going to have your child or I’m not, isn’t that right. I suppose a pretty straight answer.’

‘Are you going to have a child?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then there’s a third possibility.’ The chill thing flew to her.

Some of them had lights and ran clothed into the water to retrieve his tin, sacred floggable relic, unmindful of drowning, their beads floating about them. And the bean can moved over the face of the waters, out of reach, oiling up and down with orange teeth, beyond the Sabine music. Beyond that, the ambiguity of lunar decline and terrestrial rotation filtering into the dischance of blank night powder with new secret psychotomimetic ingredient.

A dirty boy there called Robbins, once been acclaimed a saint in Nottingham, ran into the water calling to Charteris ‘You are greater than me! You contain all cross-references! So stop me drowning myself!’

Charteris stood by the margin of the sea ignoring Robbins as he floundered, reading momentarily the pinched timescapes of her countance. Then he turned towards Ostend and said, ‘Friends, we must defy the great either-orness of the crass life that lived us like automata, howl like dogs if needed! Hunt! Hunt! Among the many futures scattled about like pebbles on his beach are a certain finite number of deaths and lives. Hunt them! I see us speeding into a great prongessional future which every blind moment is an eight-lane highway. Beside our catceleration rides splinternity, because the bone comes where the meat is sweetest. Hunt me, hunt the true me, the true you. Tomorrow, I precog that death will swallow me and throw me back to you again, and you will then see I have achieved the farther shore of either-orness. I will discard the dislocation!’

‘A miracle!’ cried the pop group and the hepos and motorcaders and all weirdies adjacent to the night. Angeline hugged him close, aware that he had to say nothing she could understand and still be wonderful. Near him was happening and the general stamnation broached. Behind them, clutching the holy relic of the bean tin, struggling and evacuating, Robbins went down into an unlit road beyond all terrestrial trajectory.

The promenade like a grey ridge of firn in early dawnlight, life, lootless.

Beyond the post-glacial shelf, where lights burned between night and day, stood derelict projects of hotels, petrified by the coming of French-built Arab aircraft; some half-made, blueprints in girder form, some half demolished, all blank-eyed, broken-doored, with weeds in the foundations and leprous remains of human habitation. Here from their cattlepsy crawled the crusaders, scratching themselves in the ambiguous morning and blowing acid breath.

Knee-deep in his groins, thin in his increasing thicket, cult-figure Colin Charteris the Simon Temple of himself makes his own mark in the greylight, emerging like a lion from his lair, his mange of hair all about him. Some of his larger jackals call a greeting, the Burtons, Featherstone-Haugh, little Gloria, thin dark Cass, Rubinstein with an early reefer glowing. The hero half-coughs in answer, scans craftily the stoned reigns of the beach, checks to see no great sweet jail trees sprang up there in the constabulary of the night, impoisoning them among writhing branches and the rough unshaven cyanightmarine light in a cellout.

The old church in the Šumadija rags sweet hum of rotten fallen flesh and flowers and a buzzing bee where the old fellow on his last stone bed of all. Going with his so respected father and not a word spoken. The very scent of the grass and walls and a fine checker of stone. The prone face of shagged hair and gristle-vaulted nostril and his father lifting up a mottled hand detached from the slab. Words droning like a bee. The same sick false light in the cell. His own fear and comfort like key-in-lock and then the sick man heaving himself onto a spike of greaseflesh to reach — don’t flinch Dusan! — and pat the budding coconut of Colin’s mange of harum —

Angeline wondered if her period would not come again today and boiled coffee for her lord and master on a fold-up stove; she was uncertain whether or not she felt sick and, if she did feel sick, whether it was because she was pregnant or because she dreaded the prospect of another day’s crazy part-automatic driving. Well, it was a fuzzy set world like her shaman said and she of and with it.

Some of them were already revving their cars or driving them over the ice-rim onto the sand as being the quickest way to extricate from the muddle of beached beasts crouched like whales with beetle wings. Maintenance was going on to a limited extent, mainly in the sphere of bits of rope tying on bits of machine. The sparky thing currently was to fill blown eggshells with paint and then stick them on to the bonnet with adhesive plaster; when you got moving, the paint peed out in crazy trickles or blew across the windscreen and roof of the automobile or, under sudden acceleration, the egg burst like a duff ventricle. Only Charteris’ Banshee was unadorned by such whims. Like France, it was neutral. And Red.

‘Where we going today, Col?’

‘You know.’ In the background, flutes and gritars.

‘Brussels?’

‘Some name like that.’

‘Then where? Tomorrow? The day after, where?’

‘That’s it. You hit the mood exactly. The question marks the antidope for auto-motion. More coffee there?’

‘Drink the first lot, darling, then you get some more; didn’t you learn any such thing when you were a boy? Didn’t your father tell you? You know, this isn’t a crusade — it’s a migration! Animals not spirits, revolt of youth you make me laugh!’

The coffee ran down his chin, he was only half-drinking, as he nodded his head and said, ‘Sheer inspiration, yes! Crusade has only one object. What you thinks deported but the oldtime? Migratory is more instinctive, more options open.’

He expanded the theme as they climbed into the car, talking not only to her but to big mottled machine-face Banjo and other people who impinged, Burton now nagging for favours. The Serb had ceased to think what he was saying. It was the migratory converse; the result was that he astonished himself and this elation fed back into his system, rephotographed a thousand times, each time enlarged in a conflagration of spongation in idation or inundation of conflation, so that he could pursue more than one thought simultaneously down into its deep loughburrows snooper-trooper fashion.