Barefoot in the Head (26 page)

Breathing deep to force out his voice drown the sense of drowning be said, ‘We bit the present aimèd alternative friends. So let’s doss down and tear off a new chain tomorrow rate where we stunned.’

Wraithlike in the dying beams, they pulled out sacks or piled together on backseats or a few took pains to boil up coffee or tea with pale flames dazed upon their chained eyelids or fleeting countrysides pillowed on their greasy locks of sleep. So was Angeline’s belly mountained with the Drake-Man’s seed but she nestled alone under blankets. He harboured to the girl who had joined the motorcad at Luxembourg Elsbeth with her fine young jewish warmth.

Humbly they all had to narrow to the enemy breath of night flood with their closing rhythms lowered body temperature slatted Venetian thoughtpulses that all blankets and small fires and pillows could not dam or defer for more than

Deeper limbos other deaths crueller sleeps exist in which the fuzzed alternative Is stand watching peeling off from the spool of probability like negatives that never reach the developer haunting the slumberer click of shutter snicker of rapid eye movement old self-photographs number the data-reducer

Aged amokanisms of comprension guttering

Mending morn he takes delight knowing her juiciness in feeling the tousled dryness of crutch and turning that unseen smile to mossture Whereon she wrickles and strokes his semierect griston with a thigh giving him mandate pulling plump arms compulsively about his neck constrictly harsh acid breath of morn mingled and the high old stinkle of feet and bum and body in the bag mantling them as he mounts smelsbeth all here and now be physical like all stubble on the rolling summer mountains where the skies steam upward over the incredible brow and motion everywhere in the sapient earth multilimbed freedom of the heat —

Breaking in the harsh cries of uniform throats and yells of drivniks together with some rumpling and footmaching where the pace is fractured. This Rhine-bridge and engines roaring all hell out there and my juices seeping unporpelled sort of semi-ohgasm shit it’s just a slimeoff this time Elsbeth honeypit.

Big boots by his nose passing and Charteris emerges to dianoise the seem. Oh boy the metal camp or mobile scrapdump wheeled junkade raddling the end of bridge nose to nose or tail like they just beetled out the Rhine and disciples heads among them flowering in cool dazes like they stargazed an astrobahn.

Bucketing about bigbooted the Deutscher polizei falling around the bumpers and crying for order.

Charteris laughing and feeling for his jeans propped on one elbow.

‘Hey, dig the inspired popular image of worldorder in this pure pink faces of authority shining and lovely smarched uniforms spruce like pressed plants running!’ But gathering his mind to take a closer fix on them he snuffed that the Schwabe fell apart uniform-wise many without belts or buttons or boots or Klimpenflashengewurstklumpen to their name and even the jackets hung upon a bygone hook elsewhere. Still for effect they scraped trafflnk jam noises from their throats.

One crusader broke from the autodump with his bedroll yelping and the big lorries had him down and up and a one-two round the shaggy side-chops left right left right moonlight moonlight to the fuzzwagon.

‘You try the uncivil disobendiate! God help you!’ they yelled.

‘Get this goddamned mobile scrap mobile!’ they yelled.

‘This is a nice tidy police state not a drosshouse!’ they yelled.

‘We’ll have you Schrott-makers shot!’ they yelled.

‘Clear the way for the traffic!’ they yelled, though the road flowed as silent as the river straight back to Switzerland like cut cloth and Army jumped up with his flute and piped and others sang, ‘Clear the way for the traffic Nice clean autobahns we want to see Leave no human litter lay Clear the traffic for the way’ as the cops schwarmereid in among their vehicles.

One looked down at all Elsbeth showed as she sat up, yelled, ‘Ach ein Zwolfpersonenausschnitt!’ and she snatched her vest about her vocal bubes, crying back abuse at him with a vingor jangled decibels adding to the general racket where one or two cars started up and backed or bucked smokily on the region great dizzy din.

Angeline came hurrying as he bent up and with attention in another part pulled at his jeans saying, ‘Colin you see they’re going to take our kids off to the nick if you don’t do something quick we defied law and odur by settling right down here in the traffic route forgetting it was going to be sunrise boon or something mad or else just tired I don’t know but you better do something quick.’ On Elsbeth she could not look the dark hair round her shoulders and all entrances slack.

‘Only we’re traffic the only traffic apart from us there’s no another car in slight it don’t make a hold-up holed up here.’

‘Better go and tell that to the Fuehrer here he comes!’

Pointing to a big white police car like a spaceship a yacht a heinleiner beyond reach of storms opening all ways and spilling most noticeably a mighty man in a white uniform big patched with a thousand medals like over-stamped bundle of laundry and boots and a cap with bright peak while rammed in his bathysphere a monster cigar approaching and two minions round him crying the Kommandant.

Then all the Schwabe crying ‘Who in charge here?’

Sawn trees on parade streetside.

Time like a never-rolling steam.

Bridge of nerve-defying metalangles.

Slowly the cries silence the scene and all stock-still except a little morning breeze through which the drivniks are thin and pale with hair that made them in England part of nature growing right down sweet and unswept from hair and head and lips and cheeks and shoulder part of the pubic earth itself but here on this barren not so damned good and analogous. ‘Who in charm hair?’

All get a charge or no one. Petrifaction of inner posture though Army pipes.

Heaving still his unzipped hipjeans Charteris he moves among the carmaze towards the white man Angeline at his side small but big seeing the eternal pattern as the object arrangement makes a readymade more beautiful than planned

an emblem of eternity capable of slowing time something he had known before this marvellous be inside the ducks-and-drake man skimming over a deeper ocean of truth in which he wished to dive deeper and deeper away from the times too grave for mere communication on an average plane or old grey steps misleading to old brown building nicked in railings curled to dilate Italian-made and now up he’s in a grey-brown room black-and-red tiles of a transcendental patterning oh rest me again for ever in the minds murmuring mysteries where I belong and could walk through and walk through forever the hall the long within withit for ever the pattern where time stalks sideways birds flying backwards reemerge as lizards before the days never-ending.

‘You are in charge of this rabble?’ The brilliant laundry bundle before his unzipped eyes and what was that place where I was I was there for a minute? eternity? Metzronome tick? In some late time-bracket feasting beyond this schwabian illusion of the present tell them why not.

Did they hand me over old betrayal?

Raising his voice, ‘I am in all command and to me time swings back off its hinge mersing the tiny present — no, no, I tell you — I am Charteris. Paradise is in me I feel it I know it!’ Now he waved his arms saw them above him making off in the sky this way that seeking the new dimensions or old dimensions seen as fresh alternatives as the birds cryrated into lizards and the new anima instantly back to stone. ‘What we have seen is worth all collapse and the old Christianity world so rightly in ruins if you forsake all and live where there is most life in the world I offer. There the laternatives flick flock thickly by and again with his hands and hair he conveyed to there the great intellectual system that Man the Driver synthesised relating all phenomena and postulating a new map — a map he said wandering in and out of speech as dropping his jeans entirely he climbed hair-legged onto the heinleiner car and rallied them all — a man deminiating the topography related belaying a sparky relevationship between this

Europlexion and the explexion of conventual time the time by which predecyclic man imposed himself against nature by armed marching cross-wise to conceal body-mind apart hide dissillusion.

Cheering and singing only the cops stamped around and offered dials of non-radiance. He still upbraidcast.

‘And to these levels also another pirate transmitter with emissions on the self-life-mitter band for you got to mash your own consciousness into the introwaving road routage and the general timeweb only achieve by the disciplation of my thought the disciplation of proper erectitude like a disciplation of any distinct order and to achieve finally well you need what Ouspenski calls certain luggage and then the true sidereal time can faze with your arcadian rhythms of living.’

‘Get off my automobile!’ said the big pink white laundry-bundle chief of police.

Two policement hupped Charteris down as he called, ‘For all of you also timeflow can bold the orbital radiance of a spyers web if you will follow me. Let your circharacters centrifuse in the spinrads of centricourse! Follow me or you will drown in the flowing timeflow!’

So he comes away kicking as they assimob and fling his pants at him wrapping round the timeflapperture. You are not asleep at this moment. Many things were like sleep many things had no relationship to reality. Truer: reality had no relationship to the true things. They just built these wooden walls with wooden windows to sail on regardless. Many things that I said at that time must have surprised my companions in this strange adventure very much. I was surprised by much myself. I stopped and turned towards G. He was smiling. His old friendly fallible familiar smile. ‘Afterwards it was very strange for me to remember the things I had said.’ I was walking along the Troitsky street and everyone was asleep.

The Schwabe officers conferred with rapid eye movements and a thin cracked music started from the escampade. Many things that I said at that time. The brilliant laundry bundle made clockwork gestures parabola starting and ending at low point X and two polizei grabbed Ouspenkian I.

Set a speech to clash a speech.

Orated the laundrobund in machine-style ‘Fine leadership I have appreciape and the exhaustation but even god almighty must here be circumstrict according to the authority of law and not park his car contrary to stated regalations. Else there’s distrumblanches and the crumble-off of state and diction but right here is still my desportmeut and you hippies are all contravemed. So it’s a rest this hairshirted malefracture do his freakout in a cell! Move!’

‘Hey, they’re going to take away our saviour!’ warcried Ruby Dymond running to Angelside. He flung a realityobject of unvariable geometry and metallic origin in semilethal parabol and the other sleep-runners started to mill marvelously unstewing from their rancid and autobreasted pluckered in to the uniform defeat. Hit a Kraut for Easter. Then leaped the bold gendarmes also acid-hipped but swinging in the name of Ordentlichkeit to let battle commensurate with duty the PCA bombs when dissembling produced according to each character in its own intensification.

By the perspective transfixed was the police point with its flags and signs and from here gorged more polizei slowly inflating themselves with self-pumping steps as they evolved themselves from the middle distance becoming part of the fore-grind where the mass milled and Herr Polizeikommissar Laundrei clasped enchanted Charteris to his postage stamps.

Ordenthchkeit having boots and truncheons won.

So a march began slowly and with bloody eyes and ripgear and straggling struggle to the lock-up all baretoed hepos while by the cobbles a few wooden pudestrials started at the delinquents Herr and Frau Krach and little Zeitgeist Krack who when pushed bobbed up again and soberly registered gut show nodding as the procession hobnobbed to the great slapup HQ with many drivniks still plunching.

Now the harsh bones of that great creature were stone and its flesh mortar and plaster painted democrappic yellow lying in feigned fossil sleep and all its viscerca dark and cool with powerf allure or the awful processes of parquet flooring turning corridors reflected dim outside light entrailing from all surfaces constantly interupted returning interupted broken continuous of a special manufacture greylight patent. You are no longer awake many things that I said.

The blundering polizei themselves bemused. Pattern of bars no more italianate where the reverie bursts into the old brown building but industrial north dull parallels to close the mind unblown. Clash of bars and swinging blatterplang with no regard ringing unanswerable. The sittlichkeitsvergehen of German standingrheumonly.

Blundering they grey big honey cops with striding arms dull in the confinement space swing swinging to the repetitive doors themselves trapping on the wrong side and commense hammercry which the disciples stand dumbfloundered like a whole new range of unfeeling in a brown nearest black till one judy shrieks that they are merely stacked in the corridor. All begin panicake panicake round the shattered vision down or up stone steps or mindless groins digested seeking exit. Bars bars false leads dead ends long vistas dim greylight like a broken circuit entrailing from all sourplaces in the harsh bones time’s loot-out rings unanswerable. More cops flushtuate in the hide-and-seek. Now bellies the whole building rangorously. Mindfallen new race rapidly cell-dwells and all anti-flowered. Garish alarms zibbernaut into cavities the grot graves. Life down to the low point of textbook level. Lungs hammer limbs scissor feet clatter in the machineage moment.