Inner Circle (17 page)

‘Leeds, have you no pity? It’s your child.’

‘He’s contaminated with life.’ He answered through the chink under that plastic weight. ‘I’m trying to save him. He must be cleansed. Your real rain does, in fact, stain.

Remember, Dover, remember, next time you lie on September.’ He laughed horribly, a monstrous Atlas carrying the dome on his neck. ‘Did you say Atlas?’ Leeds spat with each word at my thought.

If I were Rain, I would have prayed then to the child tree; if I believed that the skymen were at least on the side of justice, I would have implored them to be just; if I were then told that the cat had the luck of heaven on his black fur, I would have invoked the cat’s name. All I could do and feel was to stare with hatred at that treacherous invader of my circle.

The foaming light rose higher and lost its liquid thickness. I saw the boy Sky half propped up, then something pushed him away from the luminous foam. A wig-like mop of hair emerged. crinkling inside the same substance and a voice snorted out of it. It was the best impatient snort ever produced by Joker, my true brother, my brother-in-law, my brother under the domes and the real sky.

‘What the hell is it?’ A bubble bath or something. Couldn’t get out of that stinking tunnel.’

‘Joker, take care! Joker, the wall!’ I shouted, now crouching to get hold of the descending dome.

‘Ah, cousin Leeds! He’s a bloody awful cousin if you ask me. And who’s that!’

Sky grabbed Joker’s thigh and helped himself to stand on his feet.

‘It’s the boy Sky.’

‘What, a young skyman in the flesh? Blimey!’

‘Help him, Joker.’

‘He’ll sure help me, if he’s a real boy skyman.’

And they helped each other. Joker bashed Leeds on the head. ‘That’s for pushing Sailor into the water,’ I heard, and another bash followed. Meanwhile Sky was pushing a boulder into the space between the dome and the hard, flat ground. What strength he had; all that stupendous quick growth must have wound coils of energy in his arms and legs.

Then they both dragged Leeds to the tunnel. The job was done when they put the metal lid over the opening. The foam of light disappeared under the disc together with cousin Leeds.

‘That’s not the end of him,’ I muttered with a prophet’s customary caution.

As soon as Joker and Sky had crawled out of the cupola, the final stampede began. People pushed, hit and trampled one another, they were carried, trailed, held under the arms, held upside-down; some sat astride necks or linked arms, a few mounted the wretches who were on all fours and tried to ride on them. The commotion ended flatly, the foreheads, the noses, the palms of the hands pressing against the translucent obstacle.

Thousands of human insects, with limbs intertwined or broken, squealed and buzzed on the enclosed jewel of a land, unable to leave its surface by sliding off into the sea or flying up to the clouds. Through the wall they could see the trees against the sky and our horrified eyes, distant and safe, hiding in the greenery. There wasn’t any point in calling to them: they wouldn’t even hear our uneasy sympathy.

‘We’ll be afloat any minute now,’ Joker said. ‘Our surface, you know, was protected below by a huge disc the size of this whole ruddy island, and they’ve just removed it to flood or maybe to save the Underground, one never knows what those skymen are up to. Your guess is as good as mine, Dover.’

I didn’t attempt a guess. The island was already moving, slowly, smoothly, probing the depth with musical echoes. We joined our hands, ten hands in all, as in the beginning of my circle. And Joker was telling us what he had seen in the Underground.

The air on our faces grew warmer and the colours in the clouds changed from grey to yellow, green and blue. Rain’s lips moved as she was shaping silent words.

Perhaps she had some secrets to tell her cedar. The circle veered down the sandy slope towards the sea. Joker told Sky to peer into the water. He wouldn’t do it himself. And Sky put his head down, clutching the edge of the land.

‘It’s a floating island all right, isn’t it, Sky? Just like the raft Sailor and I wanted to build.’ And Joker became silent and gloomy.

Now Sky was talking:

‘I can see roots under our island, red, violet, very beautiful and so long.’

‘Those are Rain’s trees, Sky,’ said September. ‘They will keep the balance and steer the island for us.’

‘And I can see another sky, mother. A sky in the water.’

‘It’s you, my child. You are reflected in the second sky.’

It was Rain who first noticed the sudden change inside the cupola. It became completely dark, a huge black diamond surrounded with a green and yellow strip.

‘He’s switched off the lights for the emergency.’ Nobody asked me whom I meant, and I didn’t want to speculate whether the closed dome was already empty or filled to the top, choking in the final solution. For how long was this monster to keep us dark company while we floated away, from the future into the sky?

‘Rain,’ I whispered, ‘pray for the safety of our voyage.’

She didn’t reply. I only heard Joker calling the sun patches which swayed like rafts on the waves.

‘Sailor, Sailor! ahoy!’

Underground

1

And there he was, gaily striding along the King’s Road in his new bowler hat, with a Siamese cat on his shoulder, one day Patrick, another day Boris, it didn’t matter which, for his numerous chums knew both his names and called him hello Patrick! Boris, how are you? hi, Boris Patrick! He was, in fact, a well-known character, not only in the King’s Road and Fulham Road, but also within a one-mile radius of the Albert Memorial.

Naturally, the cat attracted most attention, and children would always try to pull the silk leash which dangled at the level of Patrick’s knees. They soiled his trousers with ice cream and chocolate. The bowler hat gave him the air of a young man doing rather well in the City, a bit eccentric perhaps, but he could afford that as much as the hours spent away from his office. To maintain his prosperous panache he bought himself a new bowler every other month and as often changed the style of wearing it to baffle the ignorant clerks.

Then one chum said near the fountain nude in Sloane Square:

‘Patrick, you should have blue eyes to match your Siamese.’ This set him thinking. Naturally, he couldn’t change the colour of his eyes to please friends, but he did the next best thing. He dyed his hair blue, Bulgarian blue to be precise, after his first mum, bless her operatic lungs. The bowler had to go, of course; never mind the City, he wasn’t all that attached to the idea of big lolly.

Patrick’s blue hair, however, achieved far more than he intended: now people stared at him first, next they noticed the cat, finally the silk leash. Even children seemed less keen on pulling the leash, because the hair made them say ‘golly!’ and run away.

Policeman never said golly or anything like that, but they were rather nasty, looking him up and down. Once when Patrick was carrying an empty case to have the lock mended, a policewoman asked him to open it in the street. He nearly refused as the street happened to be in the World’s End where he and his dad were quite well known. She found nothing inside, apologized for the inconvenience, and excused herself by saying:

‘I thought you were Lady Pauline. She’s a famous shop-lifter and was caught at Peter Jones wearing a blue wig.’

Then a big policeman with a squint and a Welsh accent accused him of soliciting outside the Classic cinema while they were showing
Night and Day
for the second time.

Patrick pushed Miss Siam’s whiskers straight into that squint, so outraged he was, and the man became very polite afterwards, and even made an immoral proposal himself on the steps to the police station.

Queers or homopathos, as Patrick nicknamed those with gloomy faces, accosted him in public lavatories, partly on account of his blue hair, partly because of his foul sublimations which, however, erupted at unpredictable times. There he stood dangling his thing and being watched by a gloomy homopatho from either side, when suddenly he felt peculiar all over, and a horrible taste filled his mouth, so he had to get those mucky words out as quickly as possible. They had a dynamic effect on the homogloomies gathered at this lavatorial reunion: they either rushed at Patrick, or rushed outside, pattering up the stairs.

Now and again he allowed some nice elderly gentleman to adore his bum and take him out to the cinema, the Zoo or Battersea pleasure gardens, but, in fact, he didn’t much like that kind of sport. The phrase was not his, but dad’s. Augustus discussed such matters with him frankly, as it should be between real chums, and the army so-and-so days were usually recalled on these occasions.

‘One of my rifle-cleaning sergeants, you know, would always say: “Bad for piles, good for constipation.” So, if I were you, Patrick, I wouldn’t go on a holiday with that barrister chum of yours. The food in the South of France, my boy, is on the oily side. Ho-ho-ho!’

And Augustus followed his laughter with a firm pat on Patrick’s head. Whenever this happened his father seemed to be surprised that the head was higher than he expected. ‘Are you still growing up or something?’ Patrick was almost twenty-one and his height remained stationary. He knew that, because he measured himself once a week against the door of his daddy’s bed-sitter, and marked the place with blue chalk.

Being a friendly boy and proud of knowing practically everybody in two S.W.

districts, he couldn’t help it if a few homopathos were after him for weeks. When they became too attached to his bum, he resorted to the same explanation.

‘Sorry about that. Had too much sex in childhood, you see. Would you like to meet a psycho-analyst friend of mine to discuss this particular attachment with him? It isn’t really expensive, you know, when you compare it with the price of cigarettes. Two guineas per session, reduced fee, but I’m afraid you have to go as far as the Finchley Road. Horrid street, isn’t it?’ And he gave the man his most charming, irrefutable smile.

The psycho-analyst friend varied from situation to situation.

And Patrick wouldn’t dream of inflicting a financially irresponsible chum on any of them. They worked so hard, listened for hours and hours to all sorts of cases, and foul sublimations, and to occasional snoring as well. He knew them all: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, neo-Freudians, Jungo-Catholics and Sindrians, too.

Sindra remained his best lady chum. She had made a big name for herself after treating Patrick for five years, 1,440 guineas in fees, discounting two fortnights each year for her holidays. Sindra was worth every quid out of his daddy’s wads, and daddy never bothered to count the total sum.

She did, oddly enough, marry Doctor Patho, Vera’s friend with the thick American glasses, and went about calling herself Mrs. Whitestones which didn’t suit her beautiful Indian lips at all. She must have come to the same conclusion a couple of years later, because she divorced the bulging glasses and set up an amicable
menage
with a certain Scotsman who bred greyhounds for dog-races. Sindra discussed the whole thing with Patrick during a long walk in Regent’s Park; she couldn’t find a more understanding listener in the whole of London than her prize patient, the celebrated piss-boy and nocturnal Tubewalker. She titillated his heart with darlings, and Patrick, like an affectionate good boy that he was, reciprocated Sindra with darlings. Sometimes, in living memory of that five-year course, he would say ‘Sindra-mum’, but it sounded a bit like laying a wreath on the tombstone of Dolly-mum.

Apparently things had been written about Patrick Boris; he had passed from pads to files, from script to print, and if he had known how to use modern reference books, he could have looked himself up. His reading habits, however, were desultory. Sometimes he picked up a Soho classic and refreshed his visual memory of the words he used to spell out in chalk and in public, but on the whole he found printed letters a frightful bore for the eyes to follow. Like his psycho-analytical mentors, he preferred the oral tradition and would, if asked by a drunken chum in a pub, recite, intone or shout the whole glossary of psychiatry, from Freud to Sindra and back, which for a backward boy was some feat of memory.

The short list of Patrick’s mummies required nothing of this kind from memory.

Dolly-mum upset his recollections in a different way altogether. He therefore played a conversational game with his father as though she were still living in her doll house, and Augustus were Boris and not daddy ho-ho.

‘And how is good old Dolly-mum these days!’ Patrick asked on Dolly’s sixtieth birthday, imitating his father’s tone to perfection. Augustus sat up, knocking his ancient headboard which now had only grease stains and no flowers. Each time this obsessional question reached out to him in his own voice, Augustus the father hit some object next to his head.

‘Ah, Dolly! good old Dolly. She’s fine, ho-ho-ho! she likes living in the country.’

As soon as Augustus said ‘in the country’, he seemed to be puzzled why on earth he had said it. Patrick knew his father loathed cottages, cows, cow-dung; the very idea of spending a week-end in the country made him sick.

‘Is she still in Dorset, father!’

‘Ah, Dorset! Did you say Dorset, Patrick!’

‘I said the cottage covered with a square, thick turf and a marble chimney on top.’

‘Turf? Ah—’ And here Augustus dried up all of a sudden. He knocked the headboard again and looked horrified, as if he had touched a cold marble slab. ‘Ah—’ he stared at the telephone directories, under which the matches usually got stuck. ‘Where the hell. . . .’

‘You’re not lit, dad.’

‘I know. Fetch me the phone books like a good girl.’

And Patrick fetched the volumes, one by one. Then he took a box of matches out of his pocket.

‘Well, dad,’ he said, ‘it’s time we paid a visit to Dolly-mum in the country, you and me, don’t you think so!’

‘The country?’ Augustus bulged his watery eyes. ‘Have I ever told you, Patrick, about my rifle when I was in the army’/’

‘You have, father.’

‘Ho-ho-ho, the good old rifle,’ Augustus inhaled deeply, rested his weary head and puffed out a few rings of smoke. ‘Would you like a quid or two!’