Gazooka (10 page)

‘Gomer, Gomer,' he said. ‘This is a wonderful band you've got here. The Matadors are a credit to Meadow Prospect, but I've just seen the Sheiks of Aberclydach and you've got a surprise coming to you.'

‘What's up, Onllwyn?'

‘I've just seen them. They're wearing grey veils and dressed like they think Arabs dress in Aberclydach. They're playing some slow, dreamy tune about Araby and swaying from side to side with the music, looking and acting as warm and slinky as you please and promoting a mood of sensuous excitement among the voters.'

‘Come on, boys,' said Gomer. ‘Let's run ahead and see these Sheiks. I don't like the sound of this. Ephraim Humphries is one of the judges today and by all the rules of nature he should be in favour of the band whose uniforms he helped to buy. But he might well operate against the Matadors on the grounds of discouraging self-pride. And did you hear what Onllwyn said about these Sheiks wearing veils?'

‘To keep the sand out of their mouths,' said Onllwyn. ‘I was puzzled about these veils and I asked their secretary why sheiks should be wearing veils and he said that about the sand.'

‘Ephraim Humphries is going to like the idea of those veils. In everything except his doctrine of damnation for the great majority, he is against the overt. A wholly concealed humanity, beginning with these Aberclydach sheiks, would be quite welcome to Humphries.'

‘No doubt indeed,' said Onllwyn Meeker.

‘
A
nd when he takes a look at Moira Hallam, with that stem in her mouth and the shapes she's making, he'll think she swallowed the petals of that rose herself to keep fresh for some new round of sinning.'

The word ‘fresh' seemed to remind Gomer of something and he told Cynlais to break ranks for a few minutes and take a rest on the grass bank that flanked the road.

‘They can sit down if they like, but carefully and primly so that there won't be any creases in the uniform. They've got that old Colonel Mathews the Moloch, the coal owner, on the panel of judges, and they say he's a hell of a man for spotting creases.'

Cynlais passed this warning on to his followers as they were taking their places on the grass bank, and there were a lot of interesting postures.

‘There's another thing,' said Uncle Edwin, sucking at two blades of some healthful type of grass that had just been passed to him by Caney the Cure, who was with us as a supporter and because there was never much doing in the herb line during the summer. ‘There's another thing. Don't forget Merfyn Matlock.'

‘Explain about Matlock,' said Gomer.

Uncle Edwin explained. Merfyn Matlock owned the depart ment store in Birchtown and by the standards of the zone he was a kind of Silurian Woolworth. Merfyn had served in the Middle East with Lawrence of Arabia, dressed as a Bedouin and blowing things up, and he had been flat and sad and bitter ever since he had come back to Birchtown, blue serge and verbal negotiations.

‘Remember what he said in 1923.'

Everybody had forgotten what Merfyn Matlock had said in 1923 and Uncle Edwin was asked to remind us.

‘We had been having a chat about Matlock and the eager, wolfish way he had of stalking about Birchtown showing contempt for the voters. When he was in the Middle East he believed in explosions in a way that had little to do with the Turks. He made the Bedouin twice as nomadic as they had been before, largely to get out of Matlock's way. So we debated a motion in the Discussion Group that “The shadow of the Boy Scout, with all the attendant ambiguities of his pole, lies too heavily on British society and politics.” Many references to Matlock were made in the debate and there was not a single vote against. Matlock commented on this. He said that given a supply of dynamite and a few helpers to keep the matches alight he would deal with the dialecticians of Meadow Prospect in under five minutes.'

‘
A
nd you say this Matlock is a judge.'

‘He is a judge because he is the donor of the silver cup for the best character band. Mathews the Moloch is donating the cash part of the prize.'

‘Why not make it plain that we have given up all hard thoughts about Matlock and politics. Why not have a kind of placard carried in front of the band just saying “The Matadors. Above Party. Above Class”.'

‘
A
ny kind of placard or slogan in front of the band would clash with Moira in that fine romantic costume of hers. But the slogan you've just mentioned would put the judges out for the count. We'll have to rely on the goodwill of Matlock and the others. We'll have to convince them that through these carnivals we are now making our way towards the New Jerusalem by a blither route, thinking no thought that cannot be played on a gazooka. Now, that's enough defeatist talk for one morning. I'm going to get a new rose for Moira. She makes a wonderful picture with that flower hanging from her lips.'

Gomer looked around. The only dwelling on that part of the road was an old cottage in which lived an ancient couple, secluded and somewhat petulant, still closer in spirit to the peasantry of the distant country of their origin than to the loud beetle-browed valleys where they had come tetchily to settle. If they had seen any of the carnivals' bands pass their cottage they had probably taken them as being quite seriously a part of the crudescent lunacy they had always spotted at the heart of the life around them.

In the front garden of the cottage were hundreds of roses in full bloom and of as deep a red as that which had been given to Moira by Jenks the Pinks. If Gomer had had a less sonorous approach to living he could have put his hand over the fence and helped himself to a handful. Instead, he went up the garden path and knocked on the door. The woman appeared and peeped out. She looked as if Old Moore had been keeping her prepared for the coming of Gomer for years. Gomer held out to her the unpetalled stem of Moira's first rose.

‘Since the beauty has slipped from this,' he said and gave a light laugh which did not help, ‘could I prevail upon you to furnish the lips of Meadow Prospect's Carmen, Moira Hallam, with a rose on a par with that grown by Naboth Jenks the Pinks?'

Every reservation she had ever felt about her days on this earth crowded on to the woman's face. She slammed the door shut and started crying out for her husband, who was some where in the back of the cottage. Then the woman's face appeared at one of the front windows, her eyes two pools of shock. A few of Cynlais' matadors, hearing the bang of the door and wondering what Gomer was up to, strolled over the brow of the grass bank and came into view of the cottage. The woman behind the window saw them and the door was instantly locked and barred. Gomer left the garden and picked up a rose on the way.

The band fell once more into line. At the sight of the fresh rose and after a round of servile attendance from Cynlais, Moira had picked up her spirits and the first notes of ‘I'm One of the Nuts of Barcelona' had a swirl of optimistic gaiety as the matadors set forth on the last lap of their journey.

‘Now let's hurry ahead and see about these Sheiks,' said Gomer.

We reached the centre of Trecelyn at the double. We had passed a group of bands all dressed in chintz, unstitched from looted curtains in the main, and all playing sad tunes like ‘Moonlight and Roses', ‘Souvenirs' and even a hymn, but those latter boys were wearing a very dark kind of chintz and from their general appearance were out on some subtle branch line of piety. Then we saw the Aberclydach Sheiks and they stopped us in our tracks. What Onllwyn Meeker had said was quite right. The grey veils worn high and seen against the dark, rather fierce type of male face common in Aberclydach, high cheekbones, eyebrows like coconut matting, was disquieting, but in a tonic sort of way. But it was their style of marching that hit the eye. They played the ‘Sheik of Araby' very slowly and their swaying was deep and thorough. Their leader, in splendid white robes and a jet black turban about two feet deep and of a total length of cloth that must have put mourning in Aberclydach back a year, was a huge and notable rugby forward, Ritchie Reeves, who in his day had worn out nine referees and the contents of two fracture wards. The drummers also wore turbans but these were squat articles, and it was clear that Ritchie Reeves was making sure that it was only he who would present the public with a real Mahometan flourish. Gomer Gough went very close to the boys from Aberclydach and then turned to us.

‘The boys between Ritchie Reeves and the drummers are not sheiks at all. They are houris, birds of paradise, a type of ethereal harlot, promised to the Arabs by Allah to compensate them for a life spent among sand and a run-down economy, but I can see three Aberclydach rodneys in that third row alone who wouldn't compensate me for anything.'

Teilo Dew was staring fascinated at the swaying of our rivals.

‘If these boys are right,' he said, ‘then the Middle East must be a damned sight less stable than we thought.'

‘They are practically leaving their earmarks on either side,' said Uncle Edwin. ‘They are wanting to suggest some high note of orgasm and pandering to the bodily wants of Ritchie, who has made it quite plain by the height of his hat that he is the chief sheik.'

We looked at Ritchie. His great face was melancholy but passionate, and we could see that between his rugby-clouted brain and carrying about a stone of cloth on his head his reactions were even more muffled than usual.

‘Where are the judges?' asked Gomer, pulling a small book from his pocket.

‘Over there in the open bay window of the Constitutional Club.'

We looked up and saw the judges. Right in front was Merfyn Matlock, very broad and bronzed, and smiling down at the Aberclydach band. At his side was the veteran coalowner Mathews the Moloch, and he did not seem to be in focus at all. He was leaning on Matlock and we could believe what we had often heard about him, that he was the one coal owner who had worked seams younger than himself. Behind these two we could see Ephraim Humphries in a grey suit and looking down with a kind of hooded caution at Ritchie Reeves and the houris.

Gomer stood squarely beneath the judges' window, slapped the little book he was holding and shouted up in a great roar, ‘Mr Judges, an appeal, please. I've just seen the Aberclydach Sheiks. They are swaying like pendulums and I'm too well up in carnival law to let these antics go unchallenged. The rules we drew up at the Meadow Prospect conference, which are printed here in this little handbook, clearly state that bandsmen should keep a military uprightness on the march. It was with a faithful eye on this regulation that we told our own artistic adviser, Festus Phelps the Fancy, to avoid all imaginative frills that make the movement of the Meadow Prospect Matadors too staccato. And now here we have these Aberclydach Sheiks weaving in and out like shuttlecocks in their soft robes. This is the work of perverts and not legal.'

Merfyn Matlock pointed his arm down at Gomer and we could see that this for him was a moment of fathomless delight. ‘Stewards,' he said, ‘remove that man. He's out to disrupt the carnival. Meadow Prospect has always been a pit of dissent. Here come the Sheiks now. Oh, a fine turnout!'

We turned to take another look at the Sheiks as they moved into the square and as we saw them we gave up what was left of the ghost. The Sheiks had played their supreme trump. They had slowed their rate of march down to a crawl to confuse the bands behind them. And out of a side street, goaded on by a cloud of shouting voters, came the Sheiks' deputy leader, Mostyn Frost, dressed in Arab style and mounted on an old camel which he had borrowed from a menagerie that had gone bankrupt and bogged down in Aberclydach a week before. It was this animal that Olga Rowe caught a glimpse of as she was led back into position on the square. It finished her off for good.

At the carnival's end Gomer and Cynlais said we would go back over the mountain path, for the macadamed roads would be too hard after the disappointments of the day. Up the mountain we went. Everything was plain because the moon was full.

The path was narrow and we walked single file, women, child ren, Matadors, Sons of Dixie and Britannias. We reached the mountaintop. We reached the straight green path that leads past Llangysgod on down to Meadow Prospect. And across the lovely deep-ferned plateau we walked slowly, like a little army, most of the men with children hanging on to their arms, the women walking as best they could in the rear. Then they all fell quiet. We stood still, I and two or three others, and watched them pass, listening to the curious quietness that had fallen upon them. Far away we heard a high crazy laugh from Cynlais Coleman, who was trying to comfort Moira Hallam in their defeat. Some kind of sadness seemed to have come down on us. It was not a miserable sadness, for we could all feel some kind of contentment enriching its dark root. It may have been the moon making the mountain seem so secure and serene. We were like an army that had nothing left to cheer about or cry about, not sure if it was advancing or retreating and not caring. We had lost. As we watched the weird disguises, the strange, yet utterly familiar faces, of Britannias, Matadors and Africans, shuffle past, we knew that the bubble of frivolity, blown with such pathetic care, had burst for ever and that new and colder winds of danger would come from all the world's corners to find us on the morrow. But for that moment we were touched by the moon and the magic of longing. We sensed some friendliness and forgiveness in the loved and loving earth we walked on. For minutes the silence must have gone on. Just the sound of many feet swishing through the summer grass. Then some body started playing a gazooka. The tune he played was one of those sweet, deep things that form as simply as dew upon a mood like ours. It must have been
‘
A
ll Through the Night' scored for a million talking tears and a disbelief in the dawn. It had all the golden softness of an age-long hunger to be at rest. The player, distant from us now, at the head of the long and formless procession, played it very quietly, as if he were thinking rather than playing. Thinking about the night, conflict, beauty, the intricate labour of living and the dark little dish of thinking self in which they were all compounded. Then the others joined in and the children began to sing.