Grimus (3 page)

IV

T
HE
S
HAM
-M
AN ENTERED
Flapping Eagle’s tent brandishing his ju-ju stick like a sad, sadistic schoolmaster, filled with deep regret for the grief he loved to cause. The Sham-Man said he only loved bringing pain to others when it was forced on him by his duty, for he loved his work. He was a huge, shambling, beaded walrus to Flapping Eagle’s tense, terse, silent oyster.

—My apologies, said the Sham-Man mournfully, for intruding. I believe we have a slightly delicate matter to discuss. (Flapping Eagle noticed his mouth; it was watering at the edges.)

—Ahem, continued the Sham-Man, I just wondered, have you any idea at all where … she … is? In common with most of the Axona, he was reluctant to concede to Bird-Dog her right to a brave’s name; also in common with most of the Axona, he’d forgotten what she had been called before.

—No, said Flapping Eagle. But she’s not here. Not in Axona.

—Precisely. You realize this puts us both into a rather awkward position? Vis a vis the law, you see.

It really was very simple. Bird-Dog’s sudden disappearance meant Flapping Eagle, as next of kin and sole surviving family, was at last open to attack by the Axona. As the lawbreaker could not be punished, so her guilt fell upon him. There was only one punishment: exile.

All that Bird-Dog had said was: I saw Sispy again today. We’re leaving. That was in the small hours of the morning. It was only later that Flapping Eagle had been struck by the thought that he was exactly as old today as Bird-Dog had been on the day she first met the pedlar. Thirty-four years, three months and four days. It was as if his future had touched her past.

It was an abrupt departure, but then the two of them had been growing away from each other ever since Flapping Eagle’s refusal to drink the yellow elixir. To him, it had been faintly nauseating to watch Bird-Dog petrified at an immutable age, her cells reproducing perfectly every day, not a hair falling that wasn’t replaced by a new one. And for Bird-Dog, the spectacle of her little brother growing up towards her daily was a constant rejection of herself and the decision she had made. It was the first and only important thing in which Flapping Eagle had not followed her lead.

They hadn’t even made love for several years; both of them missed it. Still, thought Flapping Eagle, now she’s got Sispy. A pedlar’s woman: tame ending for her.

The Sham-Man was clearing his throat again. Flapping Eagle forced himself to listen to his equivocations.

—Health, you know, said the walrus pontifically, is a tricky thing. Awfully tricky. The thing is to make sure one is always one jump ahead. Craftier than the slinking germ, if you follow me. Catch the worm before it turns, eh, eh?

The Axona were obsessed with health and cleanliness. They used more metaphors deriving from this preoccupation than the wildest hypochondriac.

—At this moment (the Sham-Man’s face shaped itself into a mask of tragedy) I’m afraid the corpse of opinion is dead against you, old chap.

—Corpus, said Flapping Eagle.

—Exactly. Dead against. Temperatures are rising. There is a fever abroad in the land, if you take my meaning. There are those who diagnose a modicum of bloodletting (his lips curled into an expression of elegant distaste) but of course I’m not wholly in agreement with them. See their point, mind you. Just don’t happen to agree. Must be my liberal upbringing.

—What is your position, asked Flapping Eagle.

—Ah. My position. Ah. Now there’s a question. I quote the sayings of Axona, correct me if I get anything wrong: “All that is Unaxona is Unclean.” I’m afraid we really can’t have contamination around here, you know. Spreads like wildfire. And before you know it, poof, there’s a disease. Nothing against you personally, naturally. Always thought you more sinned against and so forth. But there you are, what can one do, she’s got you for the high jump, I’m afraid. After all you may already be infected.

—So what do you suggest?

—Tell you what, TELL you WHAT. Why not, this evening, under cover of darkness, you follow, why not just slip away completely? Save a lot of unpleasant scenes. That’s what I suggest. Think about it. I’m really very sorry about all this.

Flapping Eagle, alone in his tent, scrabbled furiously at the floor. Then he had them: the yellow and the blue. —At least, he thought, if I am to live in the Outside, I may as well give myself one advantage. He drained the life-giving fluid. It tasted bitter-sweet. He put the blue bottle in a pocket.

I mentioned that life among the Axona prepared me in many ways for Calf Island. One of the ways was this: it taught Flapping Eagle the power of obsession.

The town was called Phoenix because it had risen from the ashes of a great fire which had completely destroyed the earlier and much larger city also called Phoenix. Nobody knew why the city had been given that name. It was a small town now.

When Livia Cramm drove through towns like Phoenix, she kept her eyes skinned, while affecting a pose of languid boredom. Mrs Cramm was a human predator; she consumed the passions of men with an entirely unwholesome glee. The unfortunate Mr Cramm, a small, bespectacled, inadequate billionaire, had long ago been drained by her of all his vital juices and expired in her crushing embrace, murmuring words of endearment and leaving her all his billions in his will. He also left her his vehicles, his horses, his Amerindian and Caucasian estates, and best of all his yacht. If there was one thing that could seduce Mrs Cramm away from seduction, it was the sea. It was a love she and Mr Cramm had shared: the only love they had shared.

—Mr Cramm, Mrs Cramm was fond of saying, in the days before she refined her speech, had a favourite joke about the sea. Whenever you’re sad or confused, he would declare, the thing to do is contemplate your naval. Navel, you see. Mr Cramm always did have a terrible sensayuma. He used to call me his Jungfrau, being something of a polyglot. When I asked him why he’d say quick as anything, baby, you sure ain’t no Freudlein!! Oh, Jee-Zuss, that sensayuma. I like a man that makes me laugh. Especially when he’s got a maritime background.

These days Mrs Cramm, being past her prime, was more refined and less choosy. She liked them young, but not too young; tall, but not too tall; fair, but with a hint of dark, Otherwise she took them as they came. She kept her eyes skinned in towns like Phoenix because they were full of youngish, tallish, fair-to-darkish, hopelessly broke possibles.

So seeing Flapping Eagle quickened her pulse noticeably. The thrill of the chase had never palled on Livia Cramm. Yoicks, she thought.

—Hey you there with the big eyes, she called. Coo-eee.

Flapping Eagle stopped mooching idly down the street. The can he had been kicking came clattering to rest.

—Like a job?

—Doing what? Flapping Eagle tried not to show his eagerness.

—Oh, you know, earning money, shouted Mrs Cramm. Odd jobs. Stuff like that.

Flapping Eagle considered for about one second. He came up to her huge car.

—Ma’am, he said, where I come from, we have a saying. A live dog is better than a dead lion, but death is preferable to poverty.

—I can see, said Mrs Cramm, we’re going to have a fascinating relationship. I like a man with brains.

As the car swept them off, Flapping Eagle reflected that once again he was being ruled by an older woman. Hot on the heels of this thought came the notion that he didn’t mind. I was an adaptable sort of man, more a chameleon than an eagle, better at reaction than action. Whereas Mrs Cramm looked good for some action.

V

F
LAPPING
E
AGLE NEVER
liked Nicholas Deggle. He couldn’t understand, for one thing, what he was to Livia Cramm. He appeared to do little more than the occasional conjuring trick and receive large sums of money—and the odd jewel—for doing it.

—Gifts, darling, was Mrs Cramm’s explanation. He’s a friend of mine and a genius what’s more. A real
malin
talent. Can’t I give my friends presents?

Nicholas Deggle never looked like a genius in Flapping Eagle’s eyes: except perhaps in that he had a genuine gift for accepting his benefactor’s munificence graciously. Nor, in his dark svelte finery, ring-laden and perfumed, with a rose in his buttonhole, did he look as if he needed the gifts.

Being absolved from the depredations of age, Flapping Eagle missed the key to Livia’s dependence on Deggle. As she aged, she became increasingly absorbed in the supernatural. She devoured the tarot, the scriptures, the cabbala, palmistry, anything and everything which held that the world was more than it seemed; that the physical end was not, in fact, the end. Since Deggle shared her interests and was a good deal more expert than she, Livia Cramm found him indispensable.

Deggle was in the habit of carrying around what he called his wand. This was an extraordinary object: cylindrical, some six inches long, slightly curving. The extraordinary thing was that it was made of solid stone. Flapping Eagle had never seen the like.

—Where did you find that? he once asked. Deggle looked at him quizzically and replied:

—It is the stem of a stone rose; I broke it off. Flapping Eagle felt foolish; by asking the question he had laid himself open to the ridicule of the answer.

The wand would be used in Deggle’s occasional displays of conjuring skill. He would stand, long-nosed and dark, in a black cloak, and conjure marvels from the air. Even Flapping Eagle was impressed at these displays, and disliked Deggle even more for impressing him. The conjurer never revealed his secrets, but they made Livia dote upon him.

Once, after such a display, Livia was eager to show off her own supernatural skills. She beckoned Flapping Eagle imperiously. —Come over here, she said, and let Livia read your darling hand.

Flapping Eagle approached suspiciously. Livia looked and squeezed and felt and prodded; and assumed an air of great gravity.

—Well, my Eagle, she said, What a terrible hand it is,

Flapping Eagle’s heart missed an involuntary beat.

—Are you sure you want to know? asked Mrs Cramm seriously.

Flapping Eagle thought: she makes it sound as though I have a choice. He looked into her eager eyes, glistening with their dread knowledge, and nodded.

Livia Cramm closed her eyes and intoned:

—You will live long and except for one serious illness be very healthy. The illness is an illness of the mind, but you will recover from it, though it may have a profound effect upon your career. You will neither marry nor father children. You will have no profession; nor do you have great talent. Your luck is bad. It is your lot to be led by others; in the end you will accept this. But most of all you are dangerous. You will bring grief and suffering and pain to those you know. Not intentionally; you are not malicious. But you are a bringer of ill winds. Where you walk, walks Death.

Flapping Eagle had to tense his muscles to prevent his hand from quivering. Without knowing about it, Livia Cramm had reiterated the curse of his birth and his given name.

She looked up and smiled as if to comfort him.

—But you are very attractive, she said in her usual voice.

Deggle smiled too.

Mrs Cramm’s dependence on Deggle grew unceasingly. Whenever Flapping Eagle made a suggestion, that they should sail here, or winter there, or even eat at such and such a place, it irked him to observe the slight questioning inclination of her head in Deggle’s direction before she delightedly agreed or gently demurred. There was no appeal from her decisions.

Two phrases usually formed the focal point of Flapping Eagle’s irritation. One was Livia Cramm’s. Whenever Deggle let drop some dark conversational flower from those saturnine lips, she would clap her hands excitedly, like a pubertal girl shown a naughty thing behind a rosebush, and exclaim (meticulously cultivated accent slipping in her transport) —
Ain’t that the Deggle himself talkin’ to you
. And she would look gleamingly pleased with the wickedness of the pun. At which Flapping Eagle clamped his mouth shut and stifled his thoughts.

The second phrase was Deggle’s own. He came and went his unknowable way, sauntering in and out of Mrs Cramm’s villa on the southern coast of Morispain, and every time he left, he would wave unsmilingly and say: —Ethiopia!

It was a complex and awful joke, arising from the archaic name of that closed, hidden, historical country (Abyssinia … I’ll be seeing you) and it drove Flapping Eagle out of his mind every time it was said. Ethiopia. Ethiopia. Ethiopia.

Deggle made Flapping Eagle wonder if he could bear his chosen fate.

He had been with Livia Cramm now, her personal gigolo, for twenty-five years. His reasoning was very simple: He had time, more than any in the universe but he had no money. She had a great deal of money and very little time. Thus, by sacrificing a small amount of his time he could very likely acquire a large amount of her cash. It was his most cynical decision, born of desperation, born from the future of dead possibilities that stared him in the face when Mrs Cramm had noticed him in Phoenix. He would have felt a great deal of guilt about it except for one thing: he did not like Livia Cramm.

Livia had been forty-five when she first met Flapping Eagle, and was then a ruined beauty of still-considerable sexual attraction and magnetism. Now, at seventy, the sexual attraction had gone. The magnetism had become an obnoxious, claustrophobic clinging. She clutched Flapping Eagle fiercely, as though she would never let go until he died on her as the unlamented Oscar Cramm had done so many years ago. In public her bony claws of hands never released him; in private she lay, her head eternally on his lap, gripping her own legs till her knuckles stood out whitely; in bed, she squeezed him with a strength so remarkable, it often left him winded. If she saw him speak to another woman she would descend upon them and in her cracked old tones deliver herself of a ringingly vulgar insult which sent the unfortunate female scurrying for shelter. Then she would apologize to Flapping Eagle, trying to look little-girl-coy (which was a sickening sight) and say: —I’m sorry, loveliest, did I spoil your fun then, did I?

There was no escape from Mrs Cramm.

Deggle had arrived on the scene comparatively recently: only eighteen months or so. This had made life even less supportable because Flapping Eagle was now no longer even the one who helped Livia decide the next step in her trivial, perpetually-dying life. He was just a symbol of her pulling power, male physical beauty incarnate, and thinking was no part of his duties. He was her refuge from the lonely blasts of antiquity.

—My Eagle never grows old, she would say proudly. Look at him: fifty-one (Flapping Eagle had lied to her about his age when they first met) and doesn’t look a day over thirty. Wonderful what good screwing can do.

Her politer acquaintances replied: —He’s not the only one, Livia. You’re incredible yourself, you know. Which had been the point of her comment. There were less and less of these acquaintances left.

Flapping Eagle’s only permitted source of regular human contact was, of course, Nicholas Deggle. And so cramped, so enclosed by the engulfing Mrs Cramm did he feel, that every so often he would make use of this source. He tried to tell himself that he treated Deggle as a social whore, in the same way as he was Livia’s sexual whore; but Deggle got the better of their exchanges too regularly to be so described.

Deggle reclined on a brocaded sofa.

—The issue is beyond doubt, he drawled. Livia Cramm is a monster.

Flapping Eagle said nothing.

—La Femme-Crammpon, said Deggle, and laughed, a shrill, falsetto noise.

—What?

—My dear Eagle, I’ve just realized. Do you know into whose clutches you have fallen? He was beside himself with laughter at his incomprehensible joke.

Flapping Eagle gave him his feed-line. —Go on. Tell me who it is.

—But my dear,
c’est la Femme-Crampon!
The clutching woman. Or, as you’d say, the Old Woman of the Sea! The Vieillarde herself!

He clutched his sides in agonies of mirth. (I sat ashen-faced and silent. There were times when Deggle frightened me.)

—It’s all true, he burst out between uncontrollable spasms. She’s old enough. She’s ugly enough. She lives for sea-travel. She picks up wandering youths like yourself, though you’re not as young as you look. And now she’s got you in her clutches, to squeeze and tighten and constrict until there’s no breath left in your body. Livia Cramm, the terror of voyagers! Why, she’s even taught you to love the sea to make it easier to rule you! Poor sailor, poor pretty-faced matelot that you are. You’re no more than a walking corpse with the Old Woman on your back, her legs gripping tightly, tightly, like the knot that tightens as you wrestle with it, tightly round your, ha ha, windpipe.

I wouldn’t even bother to struggle, he finished, wiping away the tears.

And this was another conversation with Nicholas Deggle:

—Have you ever wondered about old Oscar Cramm?

—Not really, said Flapping Eagle. He had had too many other things to wonder about.

—He never had a chance with that old man-eater, said Deggle. They say he passed on while making love to her, you know. I wonder if there were any bite-marks in his neck.

—Are you saying … began Flapping Eagle.

—Possibly I am, smiled Deggle. He wasn’t all that old, you know. Now if Livia were to think that you were getting on a bit yourself, she might begin to fancy a change.

—You have absolutely no reason … began Flapping Eagle, but Deggle interrupted again. It was quite remarkable how few of his sentences Flapping Eagle ever finished when in conversation with this dark smiler.

—I merely mean, said Deggle, that for some unknown reason I feel quite attached to you, I shouldn’t like to see you come to any harm, pretty-face.

After this conversation Flapping Eagle found himself watching Mrs Cramm; and when her legs constricted or her arms squeezed him, he remembered the passing of Oscar Cramm and became nervous. Which hampered his sexual duties on more than one occasion, and on these occasions he saw Livia Cramm frown thoughtfully and purse her lips before assuring him that it didn’t matter. She would sip from the jug of water that always sat by her bedside, surrounded by her army of pills, and turn away from him to sleep.

One night, Flapping Eagle had a curious dream. Livia Cramm had both her attenuated hands fixed vice-like around his throat and was pushing, pushing with her thumbs. He was sleeping in his dream and awoke in it to find his life being squeezed away. He wrestled then, wrestled for his life, and as he did so she changed continually into all manner of wet, stinking, shapeless, slippery things. He could not grip her and all the time her hold was tightening. Just before he fainted he forced out these words:

—You are old, Livia. Old hag. You’ll never find another.

All of a sudden (he could see nothing now: it was black inside his eyes) the hold relaxed. He heard Livia’s voice say: —Yes, my eagle, my soaring bird. Yes.

When he awoke, he found Livia Cramm dead as a stone, both hands fixed clawingly about her own neck. The jug of water was upset; her army of pills was substantially diminished.

It was only later that morning that Flapping Eagle discovered that his own precious bottle, the phial with the blue, release-giving liquid, had disappeared. He went to confront Deggle, who reclined as usual on the brocaded sofa in the drawing-room, his habitual dark clothing for once appropriate.

—Livia didn’t seem the sort to commit suicide, he said.

—What sort is that, foolish boy? asked Deggle. She was old.

—You don’t know about a certain bottle disappearing, do you? asked Flapping Eagle.

—You’re overwrought, said Deggle. I like you, you know. What you need, my boy, is to get away from all this. Take the yacht. Sail into the, ha ha, blue.

What can you say to a man who may or may not be a murderer, who may or may not have saved your life?

—You really are remarkably well-preserved, smiled Deggle. You must have a guardian angel.

Flapping Eagle thought:
Or devil

The will left me the money but it left Deggle the yacht. The verdict was suicide.

Since Deggle didn’t want the yacht, and since I wanted desperately to get away, I accepted his offer and set sail, alone for the first time in a quarter of a century, for ports unknown.