The Dwarfs (10 page)

Eighteen

Len climbed the stone stairs, in the echo of his steps. He walked along the balcony and stopped at the door. It was ajar. He went in. There was no sound in the flat. The hallway was dark. A crack of light shone from the kitchen.

- Pete?

There was no reply. Len walked to the kitchen door and looked in. Pete was sitting upright in an armchair by the window, facing him, in his shirtsleeves. Len stepped into the room. He rested his hand upon the dresser and thumbed the edge.

- The emissary, Pete said, smiling.

- What do you mean?

- That’s another question, Pete said. I’m talking about yachts.

He moved his arms slowly to the arms of the chair.

- They’re as clean as a whistle. They have balance and proportion. They’re a logical unit. That’s the only thing to look for in this world. Logic. Logic in a drainpipe. Logic in a leaf.

His frame shivered. He gripped the chairarms.

- Virginia has put on lipstick and gone out with a girlfriend. A day off. I’m glad. She’s easily frightened. So you’re here? You’ve stepped over the mat, into this room. I can’t quibble now. I suspend belief. Cockeyed. I’ll take it that you’re here. I won’t abolish you. I know who you’re not, anyway. That is something decisive. No. To say I have a screw loose would not be accurate. On the contrary, my screws are so tight they grind against each other from each side of my cranium. It’s a music I respect. Certainly. You could say that if you smell impending lunacy you’re bound to recruit enough moral force to combat such a disaster. You would be right. But tonight not. I have made my way home from the canal. The mind has slipped its leash. Without my
warrant. Acting on its own volition. I am no longer in charge. Or to what extent? There is no obsession here, only bereavement. I resent that. There is no need for you to pray yet. If you slip on to your knees and pray I shall be mortally insulted. It would be a prayer for the dead. That surprises you. How could you see me as a corpse? Quite right. I am a living man of extreme potential. A force to be reckoned with. A force who can reckon with forces, who reckoned with the devil and therefore created him. How are your negotiations? Where are you? My trouble is, I’m valid. That’s not your concern.

Pete winked his right eye.

- I’m nattering like a clubman. To the white meat. I can’t see you. You’re insubstantial to the point of chaos. Order in all things. I’m the only logical unit you know. The one you’d do better not to know. But of course I can keep distance. Distance is child’s play. Perhaps it is kept for me. Where does distance end? I can’t sidestep the facts, though I admit to alter the fact of distance might be desirable. Love is easy in the nursery. And life can only be kept with a tape-measure. If so, so what? The world sucks on these irrelevances. That measure may be a slug is irrelevant. And pride is a grotesque irrelevance. To do homage to it is suicide. Did you know that? By bits. First, you slit your eyelids. With a pincer you pluck your toenails. The rest follows. Such a course of events ceases to be eventful, it becomes method, simple procedure. Procedure is simple when suicide has set in. Are you still here? Because suicide itself is irrelevant. It is as constructive to upset the chamberpot. I do not participate and never will. Neither in their chamberpots nor in their procedure. I wrote their scriptures. I trod their scriptures before them. I am of a mind to abdicate. When my sense of distance has been proved wrong. And no one but me can eliminate it. When I have proved distance malleable I shall lay down this sword. Got to prove they exist, then lay down the sword. Because I am the axiom I will
not escape. In the act of proof, after all, is the proof. The gaschamber, I won’t deny it, is a ripe and purposive unit. I look into my garden and see walking blasphemies. A blasphemy is a terrible thing. They cut the throat of a child over the body of a naked woman. The blood runs down her back, the blood runs between the cheeks of her arse. In my sight the world commits sacrilege. I shall walk to my own coffin, when I have chosen to make time. Soon I shall place a tombstone upon that world. The odour adds too much of disease to my own disease at present. The whole matter must be turned over to God and he can carry the can back. In time. In his own time. But I shall of course put the matter to him. Let it never be said God is unreasonable. I see you as clearly as a cheesecake. The world is vanity. The world is impertinent. I must cease to belong. My own bile is my own bile that has been placed in my mouth. And I give warrant to the worm. It has been necessary. My soul is old, I am the beginner in this world. My virtue is in the appraisal of my worms. I have forced them into the no-man’s-land of my own dictate. I have located their nest and acted accordingly. They are my dependants. They exist only by virtue of me. When I die, they are dead. But since I have located the place I can act from faith. I can afford to be flexible. I can move on many fronts. And I am a mainroad man, there’s no point in doubting it. I must keep to that course, however much pus congeals. Amen to all the good souls. I cannot deviate. My immediate and upper authority would frown. There’s the point. Such action would prove incongruous with my birthright. I would not be what I am. I see you now but can you see my existing head? That visage has blessed many innocents, nodding. But though I can feel it, now, on my neck, I do not believe you can see it. For I tear a hole in my skull with every word I speak. Each syllable suffocates a gut. Standing in one room I touch the framework of a larger. What is ludicrous is that I am too big for my ideas. But that’s all in the frame and I despise it and it shall be
done until the balance is achieved and then I shall present my terms and my own scales shall weigh them. I am my own saviour. All the world knows that. Now what is it? It’s quite all right. Quite all right. I’m as gentle as a lamb. And you look as though you’d seen a ghost. Len stepped away from the dresser and sat down at the table.

- What do you want? Pete said.

- Nothing.

Pete sat forward and began to raise himself from the chair.

- What do you want? Len said, starting up.

- I want a glass of water.

- I’ll get it, Len said, going to the sink.

- Thanks, Pete said.

He watched Len turn the tap, took the glass and drank.

- Thanks.

Len placed the glass on the drainingboard and sat down. Pete licked his lips.

- What was your idea, he asked, in coming here?

- I thought I’d pop in.

Pete closed his eyes.

- What time is it?

- Threeish.

- In my jacket there, Pete said, you’ll find a cigarette. Throw it over, will you?

Len felt in a pocket, brought out a cigarette, and passed it.

- Here’s some matches, he muttered, taking a box from his pocket.

- I didn’t know you smoked.

- I don’t.

- I don’t think I have any more.

Pete lit the cigarette and let the match burn in the ashtray.

- I am ill, he said.

- Yes.

Len pocketed his matches.

- I wonder if you know what I lack?

- What?

- What would you say?

Len frowned and bent his head.

- I don’t know.

- I lack guts, Pete said.

- I wouldn’t say that.

- Yes. I lack guts.

- Do you?

- You mustn’t think, Pete said, that I don’t know what you and Mark are. I do. I recognize you both.

- Me? Mark? What do you mean? What are we?

- I take it you are my friends.

Len grimaced and clipped his palm under his jaw.

- Yes.

- Why don’t you ask me, Pete said, if I recognize Virginia?

- Why should I ask you that?

- If you want to know another thing, I’ll tell you. Because I lack guts, I commit spite. I suffer under that bondage. I commit spite at all corners, and in the face of the image.

He drew on his cigarette.

- Do you know what that makes me?

- It makes you Shammes to the Pope of China, Len said.

- Very true.

- What else?

- That could be it, I admit.

Len took off his glasses and examined them.

- What’s it like out now? Pete asked.

- It’s dark now.

- Have you ever met the Pope of China?

- Yes.

- What’s he like?

- He’s like you.

- No, I’m his Shammes.

- You’re also the Pope of China.

- No. That’s where you’re wrong, Pete said. I’m not. If I may say so, that is a gross error on your part.

- Yes, I see that.

- And has also been on my part.

He stood up.

- Air.

- Where are you going? Len asked.

- Outside.

They walked out to the balcony and leaned over it. Len put his glasses into his pocket and rubbed his eyes.

- My eyes are very bad, he said. Now I’ve taken off my glasses, I can see.

- That’s reasonable.

- Isn’t that the moon up there? It must be late, Len said. Can you see the lights there, on the roads? All that. They’re bells. They have that sound. I can see the moon where I stand. It’s all right. The globe’s turning. This is not night. This isn’t night. It’s the globe turning. Can you hear the moon? Eh? And these lights? There’s a bell here. We’re making this bell. We’re making the light. Can you hear the moon, through the sound? It is in us.

Nineteen

- The world’s got nothing on me, Mark said. Where’s the bother?

- You’re a marked man, said Len.

- Possibly. Marked but indifferent.

- Would you be indifferent to the torturing wheel? Pete asked.

- Oh no.

- So you’re not indifferent to everything? asked Virginia.

- All I’m trying to say is that everything’s a calamity, Mark said. There are items within the fact of that fact that I am unable to accept. But I accept that I can’t accept them. I accept that which I can’t accept. I accept the fact within which I act. In other words I carry on merrily.

- It does me good to hear it, Pete said. But, on the other hand, everything’s not a calamity. There are certain kinds of achievement, which are, to say the least of it, worthwhile.

- Are there?

- Your uncle must have been Chief Rabbi, Len said.

- Why?

- Why? You’re steeped in Talmudic evasion!

- What did the Talmud ever evade?

- How do I know? I’ve never read it, as such.

- As such, Pete said, yes.

- In that case, you’re entitled to make that statement, Mark said. You’re not prejudiced. I haven’t read it either. We can both afford to be objective.

- I mean, from some points of view you could even be called an achievement yourself, Pete said.

- I can’t deny it. But I’m only an achievement within the larger calamity, I keep telling you.

- You’re very chirpy tonight, Len said.

- Do you enjoy life? said Virginia.

- Up to the neck, Mark said. But I don’t ask questions.

- It’s a funny old world we live in, Pete said. They sat.

- You’re looking very well today, Ginny, said Len.

- I’m feeling it.

- Every time, said Mark.

- Make me a willow whatsaname at your gate, Pete said.

- And call upon my howdoyoudo within the house, said Mark.

- That’s it.

- What does she say to that? Mark asked.

- Olivia?

- Yes.

- You might do much, Virginia said.

It was growing darker. She collected the cups and took them into the kitchen.

- I’ll wipe them up, Mark said, following her.

- When are you off, Len? Pete said.

- Tomorrow.

- Look. Here’s a couple of quid. Might come in handy.

- No, that’s all right.

- Take it.

- All right. Thanks.

- I wouldn’t mind making a trip myself, Pete said.

- Why don’t you?

- I will one day. But it’ll be farther off.

Mark opened the backdoor and chased a cat through the fence. He threw a stone through the lilacarch. She watched him. Before her, through the broad windows, summer leaned into the room with the last lights of day. The setting sun muzzed along the lilacblossom.

- Lovely evening, he said.

- It is.

- Where’s the wiper?

- Let me do it. You go back.

- Sure?

- Yes.

She rinsed the crockery and placed it on the drainingboard. She then walked out into the garden. Under the boughs of the tree she looked up. Through the array of darkgreen the sky chinked, a needle of light before the dusk. She moved through a tangle of weed to the wall, webbed and tightleafed. The sky planed down along the houses. In a stepping silence the dusk converged about her. Her footfall disturbed the brush. A grip of red flaked the skyrim. This then was the world altering. Lightly she touched the treestalks and shivering, clasped her arms, the red fading, and the light. Shades ducked by the upper fence. She moved to where they hunched, below the black tree, closed with them and stood still. She propped her arms upon the fence, the wood grating her elbows. She covered her face.

- Virginia.

Pete walked over the grass and through the lilacarch.

- What are you doing?

- Watching it get dark.

He drew her back to him and pressed her breasts.

- Ginny -

- It’s cold.

He turned her to him and looked at her.

- Is it?

Virginia looked into his eyes.

- Yes.

- What are they up to out there? Mark asked. Should I tell them I possess the best bed in Hackney?

Len did not answer.

- The world’s full of surprises, Mark said.

He walked to the bookshelf and banged two books back into place.

- Well, he said, it’s all in the way you tie your tie. Here’s a book. Thomas Aquinas. Never read a word of it. Am I better off or worse off?

- Worse.

Mark sat down.

- I dropped a beggar a bob the other day.

- What does that mean?

- Means what it is.

- What is it?

- A bobsworth, Mark said.

- You’re straining at the leash, Len said.

- Straining at the leash?

- That’s what it looks like.

- What leash?

- I only know you’re straining.

- You’re off the mark.

Virginia and Pete came into the room.

- We’re off, he said.

- Uh-huh.

- I watched the night arrive, she said.

- Very nice too, said Mark.

- I can’t do that, Len said.

- Why not? she asked.

- No. Impossible. I can’t look at the sky.

- Works wonders sometimes, Pete said.

- What’s there to it? Mark said. First it’s day, then it’s night. Granted.

- Mother nature? Pete said. I thought you were partial. Well, watch yourself in Paris, Len.

- I will.

- Have a good time, said Virginia.

- Thanks.

- Keep in touch, said Pete.

- I will.

- Be seeing you Pete, said Mark.

- Yes. Cheerio.

- Cheerio, said Virginia.

- Cheerio, said Mark.

- Cheerio, said Len.