The Ground Beneath Her Feet (43 page)

He is clear about his purpose: by his labours to make himself worthy of her again. And when he’s ready he’ll find her, he’ll make her real by touching her kissing her caressing her, and she’ll do the same for him. Vina I’ll be the ground beneath your feet and you, in this happy ending, will be all the earth I need.

He walks towards her, away from his mother, into the music.

The rapid disenchantment of Ormus Cama with his fantasy of the West, which will be the making of him as an artist and almost the unmaking of him as a man, begins the instant he lays eyes on Radio Freddie, that seven-hundred-ton rust bucket, pitching uncertainly, like
a super-annuated rodeo rider, upon the saddle of the sea. His heart sinks. His imagined journey from periphery to centre has never included the low, dank northern flats of Lincolnshire, nor this biting, sou’westered journey out from shore. He feels “out of land,” the land-lubber’s version of fish-out-of-water. Briefly he wants out, but there’s nowhere to go, no other course but the one on which he’s set. Indentured Indian labourers arriving in Mauritius and erasing from their Bhojpuri vocabularies such words as “return” or “hope” would have felt, in Ormus’s shoes, no less enslaved.

By contrast, Standish, erect at the prow of the motor launch that is transporting him to his kingdom, aquiline of profile, silver hair streaming, looks exalted, haloed. A man with a mission is a dangerous man, Ormus thinks, feeling for the first time in their admittedly brief acquaintance a jolt of something resembling fear. Then Standish turns his head, gleaming with anticipation, points. There they are, he shouts. Look at them, Hook and Smee. The two Tweedles. They hate me, naturally; as you will soon discover. (This in an odd voice pitched halfway between tragedy and pride.) Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne Crossley and Mr. Waldo Emerson Crossley, he finishes, raising an arm in salute, Your new colleagues. My sons.

The men standing at the
Frederica’s
rail do not return his greeting.

Hawthorne Crossley—greatcoated, long-silk-scarved, corduroy-jeaned, the sole of one shoe coming loose—has inherited his father’s looks and volubility. He uses his mother’s surname, but he’s Standish translated into English, filled up with alcohol and spite, and aged twenty-four or-five. Hail Standish, he mocks, as Ormus follows Mull aboard Radio Freddie, Hail the pioneer hero, maker of charts, conqueror of nations. So must the empire builders have looked in their prime, eh, Waldorf? My baby brother, he explains to Ormus. Not named as Mr. Standish would have you believe in honour of a great philosopher but after a fucking salad, as eaten by his presently divorced parents on the night he was conceived.

Rheumy-eyed Waldo, smaller, fuzzy-headed, leather-jacketed, Lennon-bespectacled, his mother’s boy, beams, nods, sneezes. In his personal universe Hawthorne is a blazing star.

Hail Standish, Waldo eagerly agrees.

Think of stout Cortez in the Keats poem, only it was really Balboa, gazing at the Pacific, Hawthorne exhorts. Consider Clive of India on the battlefield at Plassey Captain Cook sailing into Sydney harbour. The Islamic conquerors bursting out of Arabia to face the might of Persia, only to find the once mighty superpower rotten and decayed. They blew it away like sand. It’s what Standish hopes to do to the BBC Light Programme.

Why isn’t one of you in the studio? Mull Standish fondly interjects.

Because we decided to play the whole fucking Floyd album, Hawthorne answers, every last bubble and shriek. So we’ve got hours. We reckoned we could trust Eno to flip the disc while we greeted the aged parent. He takes an uncorked bottle of bourbon from his greatcoat pocket. Mull Standish takes it from him, wipes off the neck, prepares to drink.

Robert Johnson was poisoned by a theatre owner who suspected Johnson of fucking his chick, muses Hawthorne, thoughtfully, Sonny Boy Williamson tried to save him, knocked away the bottle he was going to drink from. Don’t ever drink from an open bottle, he said. You never know what’s in it. Johnson didn’t like the advice. Don’t ever knock a whisky bottle away from me, he said, and drank from another open bottle, and bango! End of story.

Mull Standish drinks, hands back the bottle, introduces Ormus.

Aha, the Indian nightingale!, says Hawthorne. (It is raining now, a fine icy drizzle that inserts itself between the men and their clothes, between Ormus and his happiness, between the father and his sons.) The bulbul of Bombay! He found you, then. About fucking time. And now you’re his Koh-i-noor diamond, the fucking jewel in his arse. A little on the old side for the work, I’d have thought. All I can say is I hope you wash your mouth before applying it to my fucking microphone.

Hawthorne,
Jesus Christ
. Standish’s voice is low and dangerous, and the younger man’s tongue stumbles, dries. But it’s too late, the cat’s out of the bag. Why me? Ormus had asked, and Standish had replied, Call it inspiration. But of course it had nothing to do with inspiration. It’s love.

Bareheaded in the rain, Mull Standish, exposed, shamed, confesses and apologizes to Ormus Cama: I have been less than frank. I asked
around about you, I told you that. I should have admitted that my personal feelings were in fact engaged. The eagerness. The eagerness of my enquiries. I suppressed that information, which was culpably wrong. However, you have my one thousand per cent guarantee that it won’t become a problem between us.… Hawthorne snorts with mirthless laughter. Runny-nosed Waldo, not to be outdone, snorts too. Mucus explodes from his nose, like a glutinous flag. He wipes it off his face with the back of his chilblained hand.

Ormus is hearing echoes again. In Hawthorne Crossley he sees Vina reborn, Vina in her childhood incarnation of Nissy Poe, in whose family history there are poignant parallels to the tale of this smart-mouthed, bitter child of a broken home. He sees, too, that Mull Standish’s long autobiographical reminiscence about his lover, “Sam Tropicana,” who pursued him for months, then found him and changed his life, was a parable, a tale told in code, its real meaning being:
This is what I can do for you. It’s true: I hunted you, you have been the quarry of my own obsessive love. But now I can change your life, it is my turn to give as once I was given, to be the bringer of good things as once they were brought to me. I want nothing from you except that you permit me to be your Santa Claus
.

I want nothing from you, Mull Standish is saying, miserably. For you, however, I want very much indeed.

Let me out of here, Ormus Cama demands, and Mull Standish, who has abruptly run out of all his words, can do nothing but drip in the rain and extend, in a profound, involuntary gesture, both of his trembling, supplicant arms. Their palms are upturned, and empty.

Hawthorne Crossley relents. Oh, stay. Will you stay, for fucksake. Stay for the same reason we do: viz., that here there’s booze and music, no dope, alas, because the law keeps boarding us to see if there’s the tiniest chance of fucking us up, but really the only thing to be afraid of is that one of these fine days the sea god might decide to open up his great gob and swallow us down. Whereas out there—he gestures vaguely with the emptying bottle of Beam towards the land—out there it’s just too fucking terrifying for words.

Out there there’s kinky bishops, Waldo elucidates. And dodgy Scotch eggs and takeaway chop suey and bent coppers and voodoo dolls and napalm. There’s anabolic steroids and cows and anti-personnel strikes
north of the DMZ. And Bideford Parva and Piddletrenthide and Ashby-de-la-Zouch and country people in wellies and the Mekong delta where wellies aren’t much use and Tet which isn’t a place but a date, like Christmas, that’s out there too. There’s Arsenal F.C. and Ringo marries his hairdresser and Harold Wilson and Russians walking in space. And axe murderers and mother-rapers and father-rapers.

The draft as well, Hawthorne concedes, belching, We’re all blowing in
that
wind. What we’re hoping is, if we do this long enough, and throw in a spot of littering and creating a nuisance on the side, we may be thought not moral enough to be in the army. If we’re lucky we might be not moral enough to blow up women and children and such. We might even be not moral enough to die.

Like Arlo Guthrie, explains Waldo, swaying. (They’ve finished the bottle of Beam.) Meanwhile, out there, the wrong people are escaping bullets. King Jigme Wangchuk of Bhutan escapes assassination attempt. A machine-gun attempt on the Shah of Iran’s life fails. President Sukarno survives a communist coup.

Race riots in Watts, Hawthorne picks up the thread, Edward Heath elected Tory leader. Two charged with Moors murders. Churchill dead. Albert Schweitzer dead. T. S. Eliot dead. Stan Laurel dead. The British believe in God but prefer tv, polls prove. China has the A-bomb. India and Pakistan on brink of war. And England swings like a fucking pendulum do. It scares me to fucking death and back again.

Stay, repeats Waldo, showing his teeth and offering a bottle of sherry, Harveys Bristol Cream. Best we can do at the moment. Welcome to wonderful 199.

Ormus takes the bottle. And who’s Eno? he asks. The third Stooge?

You don’t have to worry about Eno, Hawthorne shrugs. Eno’s a prince. A man among men. A needle in a haystack. Eno’s the business. He’s OK.

It’s raining harder. Mull Standish makes as if to go. His sons ignore him.

His real name’s Enoch, Hawthorne says, turning his soaked back on his father. He dropped the
ch
because he understandably didn’t want a racist handle, what with him being a person of tint. It’s as if you were a person of Jewishness who got named Hitler by accident and decided
to be a Hit instead. Or if your name was unfortunately Stalin and you shortened it to Star.

Mao’s a tough one, says Waldo. But you could always answer to Dong.

Hawthorne confides, Actually, he’s called Eno because he knows how all this fucking equipment works and we don’t have a clue.

Or, Waldo offers, because e no say very much.

Or, Hawthorne continues, because he takes a lot of fruit salts, poor love. It’s his third-world digestion. Anyway, when you get to know him you call him Ali. Eno Barber, Ali Barber. I expect that’s a joke you’ll find funny. I expect that’s a joke with a cultural reference that isn’t too fucking tough for you to pick up.

He doesn’t get it, Waldo pouts. He hasn’t had halfway enough to drink, he says.

Hawthorne leans in on Ormus, blasting him with a fog of whisky breath. Listen, Mowgli, he says, not without aggression, you’re our fucking guest here, see. How’d you expect to understand the fucking host culture if you insist on remaining teetotal, if you obstinately refuse to fucking integrate in this obstinate fucking Paki obstinate bastard way?

Maybe he’s too good for us, Waldo ponders. Too good for Harveys Bristol Cream. Too good for the finest British sherry our father’s money can buy.

Mull Standish, with the help of the motor-launch captain, leaves the
Frederica
. Now that you boys have started getting on so well, he says, I’m sure the station will just go from strength to strength.

God save the Queen, Hawthorne Crossley salutes his father extravagantly, And he probably ought to keep an eye on that Elizabeth Windsor as well.

In Ormus Cama’s classic rock ’n’ roll belter “Ooh Tar Baby”—an encrypted remembrance of his English years, sung in the sour-sour, down-and-dirty cool-cat growl that became his abiding gift to the male singers of the New York underground—the Tar Baby is England itself. England kidnaps people, he says in interviews, when, on his comeback tour, late in his career, he breaks the habit of a lifetime and consents to a few journalistic encounters. England seizes hold, he says,
and won’t let go. It’s uncanny. You arrive for whatever reason, just passing through en route to the rest of your life, but watch out, or you’ll get stuck for years. That old Tar Baby, you can greet her courteously but she won’t give you the time of day, you can speak to her as nice as pie but she won’t act polite, ’til finally you’re so ticked off that you bust her in the mouth, and then, too late!, you’re held fast. Once you attack her you’re in her thrall. It’s a strange kind of love, what I call stuck love, but you can’t get away. You’re only some dumb rabbit anyhow, how smart can you be to be punching out that sticky old sister, if you know what I mean. So you’re hanging there, and you can’t help yourself, you’re beginning to think in a way she’s cute, but then you start worrying that maybe in the bushes there’s that hungry fox, lying low and saying nothing and waiting for his supper.

Ooh Tar Baby yeah you got me stuck on you. Ooh Tar Baby and I can’t get loose it’s true. Come on Tar Baby won’t you hold me tight, we can stick together all through the night. Ooh Tar Baby and maybe I’m in love with you
.

10
S
EASON OF THE
W
ITCH

A
t first the music is the only thing he can get a grip on. Mull Standish XII, who chooses the playlists for all his boats, has a good ear and sure instincts. As he becomes familiar with these lists, Ormus privately concedes that his premature dismissal of cisatlantic rock music was way off beam. This is the golden age of British rock ’n’ roll. After Sinatra and Parker, this is the third revolution.

Mull visits each boat once in every two-week period. (The terms of employment for DJs aboard Radio Freddie are also based on a fourteen-day rotation, two weeks on, two weeks off.) He arrives with a clattering canvas bag of the latest platters and announces the musical marching orders for the next fortnight: push this, spotlight that, play this one once in a while but only because we can’t not play it, listen to this one, you guys, this kid’s going to be vast. There is a sense of an audience building, and the terrestrial bosses are definitely getting nervous. You can tell this is so because the frequency of the drug-squad raids is increasing. In Ormus’s first shift they are boarded twice, the boat is turned upside down, its human cargo is strip-searched, there is a good deal of sneering and shoving, and finally they are left alone again.