The Holy City (6 page)

— It was a time of great turbulence, wasn't it, Christopher? he blathered on, toying with his pen in his big padded leather chair. The Paris riots. Industrial unrest, the primacy of the individual and the beginning of the end of the concept of ‘the common good'. This too is the legacy of the age of the Maharishi, of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

Then suddenly, again unexpectedly:

— Ah yes, Marcus Otoyo. Tell me about him, please.

I could see through it all so plainly now, and regretted any trust I had ever placed in him — any respect I had ever had
for the man. In my eyes now, he was even worse than Meera Pandit. Now. His voice slowing down as he leaned across his desk.

— Tell me about them, Christopher, the sixties as you lived them in your little Irish home town.

I was way ahead of him, grinning from ear to ear.

— Yeah, the Beatles, man! I beamed — with a convincing, boyish enthusiasm.

But, in spite of myself, my eyes had begun to smart as I inwardly considered the potential enormity of this fresh betrayal.

— Marcus Otoyo. He returned to it again. With that chilling, self-serving, unctuous smile.

— Tell me, please.

Let me make it clear, however, that in no way do I perceive anything I might have apprised regarding the nefariousness of Mukti's wiles and deceptions to excuse what I did to him later on. My actions in that regard were wrong and unjustified, that's about all there is to it. If only I'd been capable of subordinating my will, not yielding before the tide of instinct and emotion. Of exercising rational judgement. But I didn't. I succumbed helplessly to my baser instincts, my weakest desires. One can only surmise what the reaction of Henry Thornton might have been.

— Loathsome. Infirm. Vitiated, degenerate. Lower than the dog.

Looking back on it all now, with the benefit of over twenty years of hindsight, as far as I'm concerned, after my treatment of Dr Mukti, I had more or less asked for everything that was coming to me. And deserved, as I duly was, to be carpeted — dumped, bag and baggage, into the spartan solitude of the White Room, within its fastidiously distempered walls there to be indefinitely detained. To become a bleached soul in a neutral enclosure. It was entirely appropriate.

Once I had found myself eating directly opposite Marcus Otoyo in Cafolla's Café on the main street of Cullymore. As usual he was wearing his blazer, sitting in the booth, casually reading as he dazedly combed his hair. Maybe if that had never happened — if I hadn't been there in Cafolla's that day, if I hadn't witnessed him flicking through those pages, I might never have begun to associate the book with him. Would never have made any connection at all. But there it was —
A Portrait.

It was as if a hand was reaching into my soul — and I found myself yearning to know what particular section he was studying. At last I was presented with my opportunity when he vacated his booth to go to the toilet. He hadn't
seen me. My heart was beating furiously as I lifted the volume, my eyes drawn immediately to the underlined passages:

I continued down the page, my heart still racing:

It would have been so much better if I had never in my life gone near that booth. For that night in the Nook I dreamt the whole thing so vividly — as we lay there together, islanded on the strand:

— She's beautiful, isn't she, Marcus? I said, casting a pebble across the blue canopy of the night.

— Yes, he replied, resting his chin on his hand as the waves broke upon the shingle.

— You were wonderful, you know, in the play. The town is so proud of you.

He leaned on his elbow, looking up at me and her as he smiled.

— It's the sixties, he said. Let's not talk about the town. This time next week we'll both be in San Francisco.

— San Francisco, I heard myself sigh, moving about the cottage, flushed and out of sorts — in a helpless daze.

Not even knowing I was smoking the cigarette until the record came to an end, crackling repeatedly until the metal arm eventually drew back, and Eric Burdon and the Animals began to recede. And with them the promise of those warm San Francisco nights, in that dirty old part of the city, as Eric had just sung,
where the sun refuse to shine.

A promise fading, glimmering and diminishing: like a tiny light, as James Joyce had written, beyond a pier-head where a ship was about to enter. Almost out of sight, just like the girl who, very shortly before, had waded so breath-takingly into the water. With her skirts kilted boldly and dovetailing out behind her, her bosom as soft and slight as a bird's.

The Altonaires were playing in the Mayflower that weekend but their music was dull and I kept wanting to go home, all they kept playing were dreary old fifties novelty songs and in the end I left in the foulest of humours. The girl in whose company I found myself wasn't exceptionally pretty but she made it clear that she liked me a lot — which I have to say was flattering.

— I see you going about the town on your rounds, she told me, and I've often seen you above in Cafolla's.

I had no desire to offend her. She looked quite wonderful in her Tammy-style dress. But all I kept thinking of was the girl wading into the water and lying there with Marcus Otoyo, the two of us chatting away about poetry. About Robert Louis Stevenson and
A Portrait,
so contented, prostrate on the sand.

When I looked again, the Tammy girl was kneeling beside me, her cheeks colouring pink as she nervously enquired:

— Do you think you'll be going to the Mayflower next week? The Sands are playing there on Saturday.

Tony Kenny played with the Sands. I liked his music but I wasn't sure if I'd be going.

— I just don't know, I remember telling her. Maybe, I said. I really just don't know.

There were a few things that consistently kept bothering me in the White Room. I couldn't stop wishing Stan Carberry hadn't interfered with my mother. I wished more than anything that he'd left her alone. Why did he have to go and do that — bring her out to the barn that night?

And I wished that I'd never known anything about religion — Catholic or Protestant. I wanted to know about neither. And yet at the same time I wanted to know everything. Why could I not be like everyone in the sixties, I kept asking myself, and say that God was dead: Hey, man, take it easy, no need to worry, nothing bothering us cats down here.

But more than anything what was bothering me was what I'd done to Mukti. It was wrong and I knew it. Except I also knew this: that, if I capitulated this time, not only to excessive feeling but to any kind of vulnerable emotion at all, my time in that White Room could prove to be devastating. Worse than anything I'd experienced so far. And I couldn't risk that.

In the sixties they said people kind of liked being a little mixed up. That was what the Beatles were always insisting: take, for example,
I am he as you are he
etc., from ‘I Am the
Walnut' as Mike Corcoran sings. Or should I say Mike Martinez, ha ha, later of the famous Mood Indigo house band the Chordettes.

Yeah, that was the way. Identities were frivolously encouraged to fracture in those days, to turn themselves upside down and inside out, through the influence of drugs, alternative therapies and who knows what else. With nobody so much as batting an eyelid at any of it. No, it was all about getting your kicks, man. You could be everybody and nobody all at once. Nothing and everything all at the one time. It was ‘thrillsville', they said, ‘too much' and ‘outasite'.

But it didn't turn out that way for me. I heard later from Mike that Mukti was supposed to have been heartbroken with the way things had turned out.

— Then he shouldn't have tried to trick me, should he? I said to Mike.

And what reply could there possibly be to that?

— It was just a pity, though, Chris. I mean — boiling water, for Christ's sake.

And I know it's true — and I deeply regret it, I genuinely do. Trickster or not, none of that ought to have been necessary with Dr Mukti.

I was kept in the White Room for quite a considerable period of time, don't ask me how long — I lost all track. Then one day, quite unexpectedly, when I was chewing my nail in the corner and thinking, to be honest, mainly about nothing, the most extraordinary thing happened. At the very first indication of that soft and faint, very measured
tapping behind the ventilation grid I inclined my ear forward, my initial consideration being that it might be a small creature: a mouse, for example — or a timid little bird. And persisted in thinking that — excitedly, I have to say — as I inspected the serrated grid for a sign. An indication.

The curved whisker of a rodent, perhaps, I considered, or a small distended avian claw.

Then I heard another sound — this time different, soft but resolute nonetheless. It suggested a thin wooden panel sliding back sharply. Barely perceptible, but indisputably
real.
I started backwards in expectation, but, in fact, nothing happened. With nobody — or nothing — appearing for quite some time. It had all the hallmarks of some kind of subtle charade. Like someone was trying to ‘take a hand out of you', as the old farmers used to say long ago. But then, after another short while this small brown hand, hardly even the size of a doll's, appears out of the ventilation grid, so positively, absurdly and quite ridiculously tiny that you could not help but be amused.

And before you could say anything at all, whose head appears — I could scarcely believe what I was seeing myself — none other than that of Dr Mukti himself, the noted head psychiatrist of St Catherine's Hospital. But a psychiatrist unlike any I had ever seen before — one who could not possibly have been more than six inches in height, handsomely attired in his buttoned-up Nehru-style jacket, a little blue cotton cap perched on his head like a boat. With some old ancient Hindu nonsense scribbled on it. He looked so content, almost blissfully so.

Which explained why, initially, I was on the verge of greeting him in that same familiar, almost affectionate manner we'd been accustomed to when we first met. Before hostilities opened up between us. But I was soon to be disabused of any such facile intentions.

For his expression already had grown grave and darkly formal. As he waved his finger and chastised me formidably for my recent undignified, unworthy behaviour. Repeating harshly:

— You're just about the rudest man I've ever known, Christopher John McCool. Saying those things to me that day in my office. Have I not at all times told you the truth? You cannot deny the fact that I have. Why then, don't you ask yourself, would I bother to go to the trouble of deceiving you in this instance? Can't you see it's your own innate weakness, your complete failure to put your trust in those who might be able to help you that has been causing you all these unfortunate problems? You really are your own worst enemy, McCool!

I knew now what he meant. And that, probably, in all likelihood, his accusations contained a lot of substance.

Apart from the bit about the Catholic priest, anyway. Which only served to show how little, just like Pandit, in spite of all his much-vaunted experience, he actually knew. And how hastily he himself tended to jump to conclusions and embrace stereotypes. He'd been labouring, it soon became clear, under the illusion I'd assumed his visitor that day — on the ‘day of the boiling water', I suppose
you might call it — had been a Catholic priest. And that it had been my supposed resentments towards this fellow, having grown up with my peculiar history in a ‘small repressed Irish country town', which had prompted my actions. How uninformed can you possibly get.

When nothing, in fact, could have been further from the truth. I wasn't even remotely interested in his visitor, and I certainly bore no animosity towards him or his clerical colleagues, for any ‘damage' inflicted on me, or anything else. There was only one reason why I had followed them into the kitchens that evening and it had nothing to do with visitors at all. It was Mukti I was after, Mr Clever Clogs Mukti, steering conversations to get people to catch themselves out, yes, Mr Entrapment Mukti — treacherous fucking Indian bastard!

Anyway, even at a distance you'd have had to've been blind to think it was a Catholic priest. For a start his suit was light charcoal grey, so although he was a clergyman, he had to be either Methodist or Church of Ireland — one or the other. In any case, as I say, that poor unfortunate fellow was irrelevant. He, unhappily, happened just to get in the way, and that's probably the thing I'm most regretful about of all.

But, anyway, as I say, ‘little' Mukti went on blathering. Except with this laughably squeaky voice now — it made me double up every time he opened his mouth — ever so reasonably explaining it all to me, with his diminutive doll's hands gesturing as he did his best to sound intelligent. Not
only had the clergyman not been a Catholic priest, he continued patronisingly, but he had come to St Catherine's to visit his brother, who was an alcoholic.

— An alcoholic? I choked — pretending to be concerned — deciding to play him at his own game. In fact, scarcely listening.