The Book of Fame (14 page)

Afterwards, we strolled through Montmartre

listening to our alien voices

gauging our mystery.

In Paris—how we liked saying that—

In Paris we visited the sights:

acted the goat along the Champs Elysées

put a scrum down before the Arc de Triomphe

wandered the halls of Versailles

explored the Grand Trianon, the palace

Louis XIV built for his mistress.

We marvelled that a private affair

could materialise

into such a monumental thing.

Here, in the Tuileries, you saw how trees grew

wanting to do their best.

You saw spires

and understood that where thoughts went to

was exactly the same place where ideas were fetched down.

In Paris, we let our eyes wander the fabled skyline.

In Paris, the clouds moved sedately

like debutantes

very aware, we felt, of where they were

as we were.

In Paree—how we liked saying that—in Paree, we saw our own ideas promoted in art. In England we were celebrated for never producing the same move twice in a match while in Paree, we saw the same idea magnificently expressed in the stained glass window of Saint Champelle where no two panels of glass are alike.

In Paris, we went our different ways—

The loosies went off with O’Sullivan

to soak up the atmosphere

of Place de la Concorde

where the heads of aristocrats had rolled.

A man from Cooks, a scholar of Latin and antiquities

escorted Billy Stead to see the ‘green woman’ by Matisse

& the Venus de Milo

in the afternoon Billy sat at Emile Zola’s desk picturing the Aegean filled with sailing vessels

their decks crammed with statues—Zeus, Hermes, Apollo roped to a mast, Diana playing her harp on the bow of an Albanian schooner.

History. It felt good to work yourself into that old story.

George Smith and Eric Harper posed for their photo beside a statue of one of Napoleon’s generals.

Carbine, Massa, Bunny Abbott, Eric Harper and Jimmy Hunter went off with a horse and guide and came back with a horrific tale of dashed hope. They were driving along the Seine when the driver stopped the
dray outside a nondescript building. Jimmy says they were expecting more works of art. But no, presently they enter a room where a dozen people are sitting around in chairs. It’s cold as hell, and already Massa is looking for the door back to the street. The air is a bit strained. A waiting-room type of silence. No one saying anything. Bunny says ‘Bonjour’ to one Frenchman, but is given the cold shoulder. About then Jimmy notices a stream of water running down the front of those sitting down. Then he notices that each one is tied to the chair. And it’s left to Massa to burst out, ‘They’re dead!’

The driver who has brought them to the Paris morgue looks the least surprised. His hands are held respectfully at his sides. His fawn-coloured eyes sympathise with a woman in a nightdress. She has on a hotel doorman’s jacket and one slipper. Her foot looks solid, like blue porcelain, and her eyes have the shattered quality of coloured church glass. The director of the morgue, an immaculately dressed man, cane, bow-tie, moved out of the shadows to rest a hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘Ma petite chère.’ And made a tsk-tsk sound as he shook his head.

In a chair next to her sat a man with a drooping moustache and sad bags beneath his eyes. Bunny thought he looked depressed—as if between jumping, falling and landing he’d changed his mind three times.

‘Ah oui,’ said the director. A tragic case of an inventor hoping to impress the world and in particular, a young woman from the sixth arrondissement, with a special chemical solution that made short men taller.

It worked! No, listen. It worked but with a depressant side-effect.

They found the spurned lover with the wings. There was a rib of built-up scar tissue where the wings had been attached.

They tiptoed around the other suicides, looking in their faces, searching for clues. Then, it was time to leave; all the way back to the hotel they talked among themselves of opportunities, lost chances and spilled ball. Hearts not really in lunch, apparently.

‘Cheerful lot, aren’t we?’ said Jimmy Duncan, and stood up to distance himself. We were back at the Gard du Nord waiting for the train to Calais. To buck us up Mackrell said he’d seen a pigeon resting on the tipped wing of a sculpted angel. But no one could get their thoughts away from the morgue.

Then Bill Glenn said he’d seen a sailing boat transporting an automobile across a lake.

No one could be bothered with taking this up.

‘Quite odd, actually, when you think about it,’ Bill said. We could accept that too and sank back into our silence.

Jimmy Duncan, jiggling his pocket change, said, ‘You know today I saw a bald man selling eggs.’ No one believed him. A bald head. Eggs. A bit obvious, Jimmy. ‘Down from the hotel a bit, on the boulevard,’ he added, and out of obligation our interest shifted back to Bill Glenn’s sailing boat and the automobile. What kind of automobile? How big a boat? Which lake? Until Jimmy said, ‘Bugger it, I’m going to go and try some of that French café.’

We slipped back into London without fanfare and with two weeks to fill before we set sail for New York, we went our separate ways—

Billy Wallace up to Newcastle where at Freddy Roberts’ cousin’s house
they recorded ‘Tenei te tangata pai rawa atu’ on a wax cylinder.

Smith, Tyler, Cunningam and Stead to a Fulham boarding house.

For others, London meant a return to those temporary loves we had met and now needed to say goodbye to …

Lori’s story

That night, well, we’d been playing with a make-believe future. We’d worked it all out. He said he would become a professional. I said I’d sell flowers at the club gates. He said, ‘No fear, Lori. No you won’t.’ Then he leant over to tap his pipe on the floorboards. He says to me, ‘Who’ll look after the kids?’ I laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’re out there selling flowers and everything …’ I said, ‘What kids would they be?’ And he answered quick as anything, ‘Tom and Beatrice’, smiling like he’d already met them and I should know them too. He caught my eye and we both burst out laughing. Then a funny thing happened. After he fell asleep and I lay back looking up at the ceiling, I began to think about Tom and Beatrice. What they might look like. Red-haired, I hoped. With fair skin and eyes like black coals.

In the morning … well. In the morning everything was hurried. Everything we’d said was left behind in the night. There was a rush for the bath along the hall. We left our teacups half-drunk. I lost a glove in the hurry to get to the station. There was just time for a thanks-love-write-to-me-won’t-you-peck-on-the-cheek, then the train snatched him from me. I could see them in the windows. And they were smiling. They looked so happy to be on their way. I could see the shadows of those others getting on and moving behind all those smiling faces. I imagine his was one of those laughing and joking. They were going home and it made me sick to think it might be to somewhere better. I watched
them. There was a cloud of steam, a burst of the train’s whistle, until everything was of itself. The platform. The wooden seats. The withered sky. And my life—as he had found it.

Steaming down the Solent past the Isle of Wight, Cunningham turns to Stead and says, ‘You know, it has just dawned on me that corned beef and cabbage are not far off, and I suppose it will be back to the old pick.’

The first night out into the English Channel, a French tender met us off the coast of Cherbourg with ‘400 emigrants from mid-Europe’.

It was a wild night, the moon hidden by thick cloud and a blinding rain flew at us. Waves hit us beam on.

We were out on deck whacking the dried mud from the cleats of our boots when we noticed the narrow bow of the French tender rise and drop into a trough, and as it rose again tiny voices could be heard. The tender swung the mail across on a wire hawser. After the mail the basket came back with a woman and two tiny girls. The basket hit the rail and the girls spilled on to the deck. Sully and Nicholson were quick to help them to their feet, and the tiny girls stared at them bug-eyed and clung to their mother. Back and forth the basket went. Someone said they were Russians. Someone else altered that to ‘Jews’. A third person mentioned Odessa and it dawned on us that two stories had found each other. In the months of October, November and December we’d shared column inches, side by side, in
The Times
, and now we were sharing a boat to New York. The basket went back to the tender and soon after swung on to the SS
New Yorker
with an elderly man clutching a violin. We
stared at one another. Us at the violinist’s white beard and pink eyes. The violinist at us with our football boots in our hands.

The wind had got up and now a sea washed against the side and tipped over the deck to cries of, ‘Get back with you! Get away from the rail!’ The basket went back for one more family: two boys and a terrified woman swung out of the sleet screaming in their foreign language. Then the captain said, ‘Enough.’ We left with families split; some with us, fathers, grandparents wailing into the wind from the deck of the tender.

America. As it came into view we took our place at the rail with the refugees. At Sandy Hook we took on doctors, port officers and customs officers till we were up the Hudson River ‘under the shadows of New York’s skyscrapers’. Along with the Russians we stared at what we had failed to imagine ahead of our arrival.

We had loosely thought about Indians

Wild Bill, hillocks, bison, and prairie

Time and again, the city galloped away from us.

In New York we attracted a different crowd

Curious onlookers shopping for a game

Professors from Princeton and Yale

A young reporter from the
Brooklyn Eagle

A group of bank vice-presidents who chomped on cigars at our practice

An officer from West Point, his sabre at ease alongside his striped leg

A clothing company’s representatives

A publisher of popular postcards

A boot manufacturer who souvenired one of Steve Casey’s

We played New York on a hard baseball field in Brooklyn

or ‘Brooklands’ as Billy Wallace called it

We lent New York Abbott, McGregor, Duncan, Casey, Newton and Mynott, and walked and talked the game’s finer points on our way to a 46–13 win.

From England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and France we carried injuries, bruises that showed no sign of healing, boils, slow-mending cuts from areas lanced to release the poison.

Now we passed through America in a haze of fatigue and dream.

In Chicago Billy Wallace and Jimmy Hunter visited the meatworks which boasted they used every part of the animal except the squeal: ‘…the pig goes in one end of the machine and comes out the other as hams, sausages, lard, margarine and binding for Bibles …’

At the station men with shovels and grain bags and suitcases boarded with their wives and children with red-rimmed eyes and combed wet hair. Swedes, Germans and some Dalmatians. Men who held the handle end of their shovels between their legs for hundreds of miles across an unchanging prairie. How they knew where to get off and why this place recommended itself ahead of any other was a mystery.

We watched them from our window take a deep breath, the men putting on their hats as they turned to face their future.

One woman—she refused to get off. She’d looked out the window and
seeing the prairie grass waving in the wind and nothing else but sky and a horizon froze her will.

We watched to see what would happen. Outside, her old man with the shovel looked back over his shoulder, dug in his shovel, and turned his whole slow body round to the carriage door. We saw him say something to the boy. The boy came back down the carriage. We waited to see what would happen. The boy spoke to his mother in a foreign language. He pulled his mother’s sleeve. She tucked her elbow in and closed her eyes. Her mouth cut a hard line. She wouldn’t look out the window at her old man either.

Finally, Jimmy Duncan got up and went and sat next to her. He said, ‘Pardon me’, American style. We watched Jimmy cross his legs and look down the aisle. He winked at the boy, and to the boy’s mother he spoke in a gentle voice about the business of arrival, which is something Jimmy could claim to have first-hand knowledge of, the opposition’s field, an unfamiliar ref, nasty changing sheds, a home crowd; that, and anxiety for how it will all turn out. Can I do the job? By now the woman was looking at him closely. Jimmy kept firing his words down the aisle. Now he uncrossed his legs and easing himself forward and taking hold of her wrist, he said to her, ‘Go on. Take the bit between your teeth. I see your old man and kid waiting for you beside the track. Go out there and make history.’

A week later, in Frisco, we were to read a newspaper account of a prairie woman who’d arrived in town penniless.

She said her boy was bit by a rattlesnake

That was okay, though

Then a horse kicked the side of his head

He’d taken to his bed and not woken up

Then her husband had left—where? she couldn’t say

She woke up one morning, the door open to the prairie

and his favourite hairbrush gone

We were still on the train and it didn’t feel like we were any closer to home. From England the world just stretched farther west. Distant hills gave way to more plains and start-up towns; then the whole thing repeated itself, hills, plains, start-up towns.

On to Cheyenne where we got off to walk beside the tracks, in night air

so cold it was thin and brittle and stung our nostrils.

We spoke in whispers and stood with our backs to trackside fires.

In the window of the station we could see Billy Stead and Mona Thompson studying their hand in a game of poker with a Polish Count and his former housemaid; they were looking to California to start new lives.

They knew very little about football.

On the long journey west we told old stories, went back over our favourite matches, played cards, emptied our pockets to see what mysteries we’d picked up en route. Carbine offered a bill from a Chicago barber—