In Another Country (16 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Goat

 

 

 

T
hat Christmas, the coldest in living memory and his last, Goat skippered in the old Bluecoats School. Long before winter the lads had ripped out all the lead and copper they could reach and when Goat moved in the place ran nearly everywhere with water. The main staircase was a cascade. But he set up home in the headmaster's study and even when the freeze came, since he had a fire in there, he thought himself well off.

The Canon never forgot his one and only meeting with Goat. During the dismal endgame of his life, in the home his family chose for him near the M25, he would talk of Goat and that famous Christmas Eve to anybody who would listen or indeed to nobody. Yes, he said, I was crossing the marketplace on my way to the midnight service, when close by the equestrian statue of Lord Londonderry, under the Christmas tree, I met a young woman called Fay. Where are you going? she asked. To the cathedral, I answered. She wore hiking boots, jeans, a navy-blue pea jacket, red mittens, red scarf, red Phrygian cap. Then just as well come with me, she said. I'm doing my soup run and my next and last is Goat. So the Canon accompanied Fay back up the hill he had just come down. A few people who knew him, hurrying to divine service through the cold, raised their frosty eyebrows as they passed.

I'm sure you've seen me around, said Fay. I've seen
you
around. I've often wondered what you think about when you're shaving. I mean that face of yours in the mirror must surely make you think.

Halfway up the hill, which the Canon had climbed and descended several thousand times during his long residence in that northern town, Fay halted between a cobbler's and an auction room at a pair of iron gates whose existence he had overlooked and which she pushed open now and tugged him through under a ruinous apartment straddling the gap. Here we are, she said. Having quitted the street, their light was starlight, glittering frost and the dull gleams of broken glass and broken ice. Iron, concrete and the smashings of bricks and wood were furred in a delicate culture of bright grey frost. This was their yard, she said. Those are the old toilets. Little Harry gets in there some nights but it's too cold at present. Goat won't let him share the warm. The school with its scores of shattered panes, its dangling gutters, keeling drainpipes and desquamated roof, bulked up enormously before them. From one of her deep pockets Fay took out a torch. Careful, she said. The ice. I needed wellies when I first came here. Now we need crampons.

Far south, till the end, the Canon would speak of the ice as a sort of Xanadu. He recalled the mouth of the old Bluecoats School, a charitable foundation awaiting demolition, as the gob of a hellish paradise, fangs either side and a long hard undulation tempting him up like the best, most forbidden, entertainment at a fair. The seven steps were perilous, he said. We clung to the stumps of what had been a wrought-iron handrail and reached the great doors which were busted open.

In the large vestibule Fay and the Canon stood together for a moment's silence. She played the beam of her torch over the high ceiling through which—through shattered laths and clinging plaster—hung swords of ice. The parquet floor below them, unevenly glazed with ice, was nubbed and bumped with the beginnings of stalagmites. Here and there lay the corpses of rats and pigeons, more or less gnawed or decomposed, in the fixative of ice. And bottles, cans, syringes, magazines and condoms, set fast in the glistering cold. The Canon, remembering his own school days, was most moved by the rolls of honour high on the walls: the captains, sportsmen and the dead in wars, their names in letters of gold under a patina of frost. Stillness, not a whisper of the water whose present form was ice. You would have loved the water, Fay said. This main stairs was like a stream you'd climb in Wales to a cwm and a lake, springs bubbled up wherever you trod and your head was wetted with sprinklers. Present in the ice, the Canon felt himself rapt by Fay's words into visions of the waters of life unleashed, in spate, unstoppable. I thought you'd look like that if I brought you here, she said. Goat's upstairs. Be careful. Why do you call him Goat? the Canon asked. That's his name, said Fay. Just right. He's got two bumps on his forehead that look as though they might be horns. Also he's very randy. He suffers from priapism. Suffers? said the Canon. But Fay had begun the climb.

Of the banister here only the brackets had survived, and by these, step by step, very slowly Fay and the Canon climbed the glacier stairs. Often she turned round to him, shone the lamp, urged extreme caution. Perhaps I'll fit up a rope next time, she said. The Canon, never a mountaineer, was amazed how little fear he felt. My shoes are quite unsuitable, he said to himself. And she's got boots on. She appraised him coolly. You're doing okay, she said. I'm doing okay, he muttered. I should get her to stencil that across my forehead.

They reached the landing. There was less ice. But watch your step, said Fay. Some floorboards had been ripped out, to get at the pipes or wiring or for fuel. Don't fall through. Goat's along here. They passed a couple of classrooms and the art room. Much breakage everywhere, nothing systematic, more an exuberance of beginnings, desks and chairs with only a lid or a couple of legs missing, skirting wrenched off intact. You might pillage for years in this place, the Canon thought. Fuel in plenty till the ice retreats. Around three walls of the art room, quite high up under the broken windows, ran a cast of the Elgin Marbles, scarcely more damaged than they were by the robber baron himself. The Canon stood looking up, the frost light was spectral, the horses, men, women, sacrificial beasts, trooping like ghosts. He stood so long Fay came back for him. The tears on his cheeks had begun to freeze. It's warm at Goat's, she said, having stood with him a while.

Goat's quarters were at the far end of the corridor behind a barricade. He doesn't like visitors, said Fay. Except me. Will he mind me? the Canon asked. No he won't mind you, she answered. I've already mentioned you. More floorboards were missing in this corner but a couple had been laid back loose across the joists. That's his gangway, said Fay. He'll pull it up when we've gone. They crossed, and climbed over the barricade. That's the toilet, said Fay, shining the torch. The door had been torn off and added to Goat's defences. Of the thing itself not only the seat, burnable, but also much of the bowl had gone. Wash basin likewise. Sledgehammer work, by the looks of it. This room with running water was an ice cave now except for some damping on the wall against the study. At least the shit's all in one place, said Fay, illuminating the ruined bowl. And in the ice it doesn't smell. Admirable, said the Canon. In bouts of coprophilia in his final years he would talk for hours, if let, about Goat's convenience, that had once been a headmaster's. Next door is cosier, said Fay.

She knocked, and she and the Canon laid an ear, her right, his left, against the door. Their frost breaths mingled. Fuck off! they heard loudly. Then softly, Unless it's you. It's me, said Fay. Enter, said Goat. They entered. The room was lit with fire and a couple of candle-ends. Goat sat barefooted (and the feet were black) in baggy trousers, a cherry-red shirt and the headmaster's gown, leaning back against the wall, his tobacco and a bottle in reach and a sheaf of paper propped in his lap. He had a broken nose, crinkled and soiled grey hair, some teeth and, yes, knobs on his forehead that might once have been or might be striving to become, horns. His mattress, and on it an overcoat and a stack of papers, lay along the far wall. Happy Christmas, Goat, said Fay. I've brought you some soup. Happy Christmas to you, sweetheart, said Goat. And to you too, Vicar. Peace on earth and God rest the slaughtered innocents. He's a canon, said Fay, taking a thermos, a cup, a bottle of wine and a penny whistle out of her rucksack, I told you. Ex, said the Canon, suddenly driven to say so. Ex, former, erstwhile canon. Ex-man-of-God. I'm going before they unfrock me, later today perhaps. I may announce it publicly later today. Meanwhile, dear Fay, dear Goat, be the first to know. And address me how you like. Once a canon, always a canon maybe. After this speech he rummaged under his greatcoat for the hip flask which—he told them—he could never get through divine service without. Drink with me, friends, he said, stooping first to Goat.

The room was hot. The frost flowers on its unbroken panes could not survive. Goat was burning the headmaster's desk, a good mahogany thing, all smashed and ready on the hearth, burning it as though there were no tomorrow. And see what I found in his bottom drawer, he said, handing the Canon a wad of photographs. Confiscated, no doubt, said Fay. Give them to me. They curled and blackened and vanished in the flames. Here's soup instead. Here's the blood-red wine. Here's bread. She took off her pea jacket. Goat folded his gown over the papers in his lap. Pardon me, he said. My old complaint. Very embarrassing. And how's family life for you, Father? Very poor, said the Canon. And it may end completely this afternoon. There may be an announcement. Herself had enough, has she? She has, said the Canon. My son and daughter married south, they board their children in expensive penitentiaries and with their spouses toil in the Golden Mile to raise the necessary cash. My wife has told me candidly she prefers them to me.

Goat took out his papers, propping them as before, and began to write. The hip flask circulated clockwise, the red bottle anticlockwise. Soup, bread; then from a sack, quite absently, continuing to scribble, Goat fetched out a tin of mince pies. The Canon took off his greatcoat and cardigan to reveal, below his snow-white collar, a shimmering purple front. It's a bishop's, he said. I bought it for fancy dress. Suits you, said Fay. Goat looked up and, eyeing her, threw on more splintered mahogany. Fay pulled off her sweater. And that's it, Goat, she said. Heat the room as hot as hell, that's as far as I go. But I will play you both a tune.

She moved to a corner, sat with her knees up and began to play. The flames, already dancing, lit her flickeringly, they moved on her face and bare arms like the ghosts of caresses, released, disembodied, become elemental, living forever. The Canon saw this at once and might have stared all night. But the reed pipe would not let him be still. Again, as when Fay had described the time before the ice, he heard water. Her playing attuned him immediately to all the hidden ways and energies of water. He felt those biding their time in the frozen pipework of the abandoned school, felt them keenly, from the deep municipal mains up to the stray ends in Goat's own privy, all of them waiting for warmth so that they could whisper, murmur, chuckle and exult in anarchy once more. That intricate life in waiting was made palpable to him as Fay played. But so too was the river under its casing of ice, he felt the sluggish flood still moving underneath over the ooze, the mud and all the deposits of bikes and trolleys, bottles, knives, angry women's rings and bombs from the last war. All that and more, but not just that, also the gnarled streams in the frozen hills to the west, hardened, silenced, clamped into inertia, set there waiting under the sheer ice of the milky way and billions of sharp points of unimaginable cold. That too, but also—the reed was very insidious—he felt in that hot room every highway and finer and finer branching, every thinnest ramification of the liquids of his body, all flowing in him in a sanctuary of warmth in a wrecked colossal palace seized and held fast by ice. He felt himself watered through and through and sensations shot electrically down all the moist conductors in his frame.

Fay slowed, she simplified her playing to half a dozen repeated notes, rising in interrogation, like a bird call, again and again, asking, summoning, her black eyes smiling at the men over her pipe and clever fingers. Goat set down his papers and pencil. With the ball of his left hand he rubbed his bumps. The Canon removed his Oxford shoes. Goat began to chortle. Eh, Bishop, he cackled, give us a turn, Holy Father. The Canon began to dance, in a slow twirling at first, his hands raised as though in surrender above his craggy head. Fay's whistle insisted. Goat began to clap, her bird call and his clapping marking time. Then the Canon was launched. Down came his arms, fists on his nipples, elbows out like residual wings, he tilted back his head and began to stamp and yodel. Now
he
made the beat, Goat and Fay, clapping and piping, had to catch him, and pretty soon, flapping like a dodo, knees up and crooning, he raised the grinning Goat to join him in the firelight. Fay whistled faster, she seemed able to keep both men in mind, to be playing for both, getting to the pit of the belly of each. They linked arms, they turned with time and against time, they parted, bowed, went solo, lumbering like grizzlies. Goat fluttered like a bat in the headmaster's gown, up and out through his flies burst his cheerful affliction, dark as a donkey's, so witless, clownish, helpless, Goat and the Canon laughed to see it. Ghost in the machine, cried the Canon, popping out in flesh. There shall I be in the midst of you, cried Goat. And Fay raised her pipe and with slant notes climbing, with a spiralling and rifling of notes, faster and faster, higher and higher, she led. Then the Canon unbuttoned his immaculate collar, his collar of office, removed it, buttoned it again and with unrepeatable sureness of aim, with the skill suddenly given you in dreams, he hoopla-ed it over the risen vicar of Goat.

Fay ceased. Time, gentlemen, she said. Goat covered himself and sprawled with the Canon on the floor. Fay dressed. Time to go, Canon, she said. Obediently he found his cardigan, his heavy coat, his shoes. Goat sat up, looking sad. You coming again, girl? And you, boss, you coming again? The Canon nodded and shook him by the hand. Very soon, he said. I think I'll be a free man by tomorrow. Fay stowed away the flask and pipe and took out a package. Your Christmas present, Goat. She bent and kissed him on the forehead. He unwrapped his present at once. It was a notebook with black moleskin covers, he opened its white pages in his lap. Write me something, she said. Heart and soul, said Goat, the best I can.