Between the Bridge and the River (6 page)

Fraser talked of Morris’s love of the Glasgow Rangers Football Club, and steered clear of the dead man’s reputed fanatical allegiance to the bigoted and medieval Orange Lodge, a band of über-Protestants who had a very confused allegiance to William of Orange, a noted pederast and Dutch monarch who had successfully suppressed Catholics some hundreds of years previously. He talked of Morris’s charm, his wit, and hinted at his fondness for strong alcoholic beverages (which is seen as a great character asset in Scotland). And then, the stroke of genius.

He finished with—

“—so as we are hanging up our stockings tonight and leaving carrots and whisky out for Santa and his reindeer, Morris Cuskerton will be arriving at the pearly gates. A Christmas present for heaven.”

A grieving country was grateful for his words.

Fraser had landed the God spot. The G spot.

It was about this time that the late Carl Gustav Jung started working with Fraser. Jung, of course, had died in 1961, which was the year before Fraser was born, so the conditions under which they met were slightly unconventional, but as Fraser had never had any form of treatment before, he had nothing to compare it to. It seemed normal to him and was certainly much cheaper than paying a living therapist, who, chances are, would be nowhere near as good as Carl.

Fraser had gotten drunk on fame and champagne after the broadcast of Morris’s death. The next few days he was lauded in the Scottish press as a hero for capturing the mood of the nation. He was a star, and by the end of January the following year he had his own
show. Every night. People wanted him to talk about God, so he did. For cash.

As it is with success, sometimes he got too excited to sleep. He thought about taking pills to help him but he didn’t want to get hooked on anything, so he just drank whisky instead. One bright night in April, Fraser concluded that he was drinking too much. He had become a little concerned about how much he was throwing down, and the last thing he wanted to do was end up in some crappy rehab or “show business hospital,” as Jack Trampas called it.

He decided that he would abstain for two nights a week. The first night, a Tuesday, was rough and he didn’t drift off until seven
A.M.
, when the sun was peeking in through the heavy crushed-velvet drapes of his West End flat. As soon as he was asleep he found himself in a lovely meadow in Switzerland. A round tower was off to his left and he felt an urge to walk toward it; as he did so he became aware that instead of getting nearer to the tower he was sinking underground.

He found himself in an underground chamber that had curtains not unlike the ones in his flat. He opened the curtains. But instead of sunlight behind them, he saw a giant penis, about the size and color of a bull African elephant, veiny and erect and pointing to the sky.

Carl appeared behind him.

“Do you mind?” said Carl in a deep voice, laced with a sweet accent.

“Mind what?” said Fraser, without talking. He just thought it but he knew the old man could hear him.

“Do you mind not looking at my penis!”

“This can’t be your penis,” Fraser thought.

“It bloody is,” said Carl. “Stop staring at it.”

“But it’s about a hundred times the size of you, it’d never fit in your trousers.”

“I don’t want it in my trousers. I like it in this big hole in the ground.”

“You’re nuts!”

“No, just the penis. My nuts are in my underpants. Boom-boom!”

Fraser woke up in a flop sweat. He checked himself. He had a massive erection.

Jesus, thought Fraser, but he was wrong.

Fraser and Carl met in the oddest of places. Carl, being dead, didn’t have an office and could only appear to Fraser in his dreams, which in itself was very Jungian. He would only appear if Fraser had taken the requisite break from alcohol, so in a way Fraser could control the visitations, drinking when he wanted peace and stopping when he felt like therapy.

Although the dreams were Fraser’s, he got the distinct impression that the old man chose the venue and implanted it in his psyche. They met in ancient Greece, in Studio 54 at the height of the cocaine seventies. They chatted as they walked through no-man’s-land between the besieged armies in Ypres in 1917 (Carl had a fondness for the years 1914 to 1918, as, during life, he had had a bit of a breakdown during this period and felt he had missed a lot of what was going on in the temporal world, although he had been extremely busy elsewhere). The collective unconsciousness was their oyster.

Jung took full advantage of living in dreamland to appear in any guise he wanted, because Fraser would always know it was him, although Fraser put his foot down when he appeared as a ferocious grizzly bear.

“I don’t feel comfortable with you like this,” said Fraser, using the language of analysis that Carl had taught him. “I find it difficult to confide in an entity that may rip my head off and drink my blood at any moment.”

“Sorry,” growled Carl through his massive saliva-dripping fangs, and promptly returned to the stately European gentleman he had been in the latter years of his life.

Carl slowly got to know Fraser and Fraser got to know Carl. Through the dream therapy, the two became rather friendly.

Carl explained to Fraser that, since he had died, his challenge had been to stop becoming extremely smug because he had guessed so much correctly during his lifetime. He told him that even Freud conceded that he had been on the money and, after death, the two men had rekindled their friendship, enjoying regular Pictionary evenings with Socrates and Tony Randall.

Fraser was curious as to why Jung had singled him out for treatment. One night, in a fitful sleep instigated by an excellent lamb pasanda from the Crème de la Crème Indian restaurant in Argyll Street, Fraser met him by the statue of Dostoyevsky outside the Lenin Library in Moscow.

“You are a perfect patient for me,” said Jung, who had appeared this time as a beautiful young English actress named Emily. “You are the totally dual entity. You are an amoral boor with the potential for sainthood. An intellectual moron. An atheistic priest. Plus I don’t really get to choose my patients these days. I can only treat people who dream about me. You seem to do so on a regular basis. Can you explain that?”

“Not really,” shrugged Fraser. “Although I read about you a bit when I was shagging a psychology student at Glasgow University. The only books she had in the house were by you and Freud and Adler and all that bollocks. She said you were a bit of a Nazi.”

“Oh dear, where do they get this nonsense? Freud was convinced I was anti-Semitic because I disagreed with him on certain theories, and also, I made a couple of mistakes politically in the thirties, but no, never a Nazi. Simply because they were spiritually dead. Of what possible interest could they be to me?”

“Point taken,” Fraser concurred. “You know any Nazis? Must be a lot of dead Nazis around.”

“No, not many. Like I say, they were spiritually dead, so when the body goes, well, that’s kind of it.”

“So there’s only spiritual people in the afterlife?”

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that but you’re on the right track. If the spirit is the only thing that survives, then there’s not going to be much left of you if you have no spirit.”

“What about evil spirits?”

“You’re not ready for all that yet. Let’s talk about you.”

Fraser couldn’t resist Carl’s beautiful blue eyes, his high cheekbones, his full breasts pushing at his bodice. He kissed him on his soft, womanly lips.

“Hey, it’s still me,” said Carl.

“I know, but you’re so beautiful.”

Fraser woke up embarrassed and guilty that morning. He took a long shower before going to work. Jung’s appearance in the taxi to the airport was unusual. Fraser had not been abstemious for the required time and Carl had never appeared during a catnap. This was a change.

Fraser was unnerved, hung over, and anxious about the long flight ahead. He brought out the invitation and looked at it again, feeling the raised golden letters beneath his fingers. From the Holy United Church of America.

Dear
Fraser Darby

Your name has been selected by the Lord.

Working through our committee, Our Heavenly Father

has chosen you as the top religious media figure in your region.

You are most cordially invited to a gathering of Christian

believers in Birmingham, Alabama. Christian Broadcasters will

come together in celebration and discussion of how better to serve

God through the media.

We pray that you will attend.

Pastors Leon and Saul Martini.

There was a 1-800 telephone number to make hotel and flight reservations at discount rates for the faithful. Fraser had already called. He had to get out of town for obvious reasons, and Birmingham, Alabama, although nobody’s first vacation destination choice, was as good a place as any.

No one would have heard of him there, there would be no Press Bar or
Sunday Recorder,
and who knows, he might just be able to wrangle some kind of job in American TV. You never know. Fraser figured it was an investment in his future, if he had one.

GEORGE MUST HAVE SAT LOOKING
at Tower Bridge for four hours before he came to the conclusion that today was not the day he was going to jump. Today would not be the day that he offed himself, so he went for a beer instead. Actually he had three before he noticed that he felt pretty good. He felt amazingly good for a terminally ill suicidal vagrant, although he wasn’t technically a vagrant, given the wads of cash he had secreted around his person. He had three hundred pounds sterling in fifties in each sock, five hundred in his wallet in twenties—he liked the way they made his wallet fat, like a Cockney gangster. He also had two thousand in an envelope in the zip-up pocket of his anorak.

He never thought he’d have time to spend it all but now he was beginning to wonder. But it wasn’t the money that made him feel good. He had plenty more in his bank accounts and stock portfolio and time share in the Algarve.

It was the freedom. Sheila could keep the money now. Get a new car, get Nancy some ridiculously expensive girly shoes that tubby teenagers think make them look like anorexic television actresses.

He felt free, he was enjoying the absence of responsibility and routine. He liked being self-involved and thoughtful and alone. He felt honest. Totally honest.

This is what it must be like to be Holy, he thought.

It was very good beer.

He ordered a fourth from the red-faced, mutton-chopped barman, who looked like a drawing of an Englishman on a Napoleonic propaganda leaflet, or an early naturalist’s drawing of an orangutan.

“You Scots love to drink, don’t cha?” commented the Anglo gibbon as he poured George another pint of the warm, sudsy nectar.

“Yes we do,” replied George.

“No offense, mate,” mumbled the monkey.

“None taken,” said George. “It’s true. We’re a bunch of backward inbred savages whose erroneous self-importance is matched only by our national obsession with intoxication.”

It was very good beer.

“All right, mate, keep it down. We don’t need any of that kind of talk,” warned the Saxon simian.

George nodded, feigning contrition, a delicious tickle of rebellion and cheekiness pushing up his heart rate. He paid for his beer and sat down in the corner of the tacky pretend stabley/countryish, totally imitation pub.

What now? he thought.

He looked around at the other drinkers, fat, white men in suits and ties, their open pores oozing boozy heat like New York manhole covers. His eyes rested on the “salad bar” that offered baked beans and croissants.

Jesus, baked beans and croissants. No wonder the French hate the English.

That’s it. The French.

The ghastly nature of English pub meals had delivered a kick in the eye to George and he hadn’t even had to eat one. He suddenly knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he couldn’t take his life in this damp and grisly Germanic dump. Why on Earth would he want England to be the last thing he saw? France, the French, the frogs know a thing or two about romantic and tragic death and they have plenty of bridges in Paris, he thought, although for some reason he couldn’t sufficiently explain to himself, he had never been there to see.

“A man should see Paris before he dies,” George said out loud.

He drew a few suspicious glances from the surly Londoners around him but no one said anything. The gorilla stroked his facial hair, puffed his chest, and paced behind the bar.

George downed the rest of his beer and left. He would have liked another, it was very good beer, but now he had a mission.

Paris.

Like a lover in a movie, George hailed a hackney cab outside the pub.

“Waterloo Station please, the
Eurostar
!”

“Yes, mate,” smiled the Sikh cabbie through excellent dentures. “What time’s your train, guv’nor?”

“As soon as I can get it,” said George.

Fuck, I hope this drunken Scottish prick doesn’t throw up in the cab, thought the driver in Urdu.

WHITE AMERICANS HAVE A VERY UNUSUAL SENSE OF HISTORY
. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen-lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.

I-40 runs all the way from Nashville, Tennessee, to Barstow in California, where it joins I-15, which can either take you north to Las Vegas and then on to Salt Lake City or south to Los Angeles and Mexico. For most of the way it follows old Route 66, a highway White America remembers fondly because for them it conjures up a time of innocence before cigarettes gave people cancer and gasoline fumes burned a hole in the sky. A time before homosexuality and drugs, a time when the only threats to the world were Soviet Russia, aggressive extraterrestrials, or perhaps the occasional mutant insect that had inadvertently fallen into a nuclear reactor and grown to five thousand times its original size and was intent on eating Chicago.