Barefoot in the Head (14 page)

We got lit in the park —

And the fire went on burning

Till long after dark.

CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

Next morning so early,

We were up with the lark.

We shot it down dead and —

Crawled back in the dark!

CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

If you lose your way travelling

And the small dogs do bark,

All the signposts will tell you —

‘This way to the dark!’

CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.

As Jesus remarked once

To Matthew and Mark,

‘To Hell with Big Daddy —

We’re all for the dark!’

CHORUS: Life’s never been better!

Each night lasts a year —

Stuffed with women and music

And piss-ups and beer!

Stuffed with women and music

And piss-ups and beer!

ANONYMOUS

THROUGH THE NEW ARCADE

My sweet sweet Phil so often brutal

My bloody Phil so sometimes gentle

The trouble was you didn’t love enough

You didn’t have to hit him

Those years

I’m too sentimental

You were always too bloody sodding rough

You were too much like my mother

Completely misreading universal patterns

Thinking you could always have your way

Oh Christ my sweet damned Phil

You burst apart

Bits of body wreckage

I never knew I never knew another

Human being was that frail I always hated

All that ranting made me ill

Deep in my heart

You tired me

Even before my sticky-fingered schooldays

I’d learned to sweat it out and all about

But I’m too sentimental

Hanging on to any hand that waited

Well you inspired me

You burst apart

Once and so I stuck by you

The fool I was

When you’ve been crated

You’ll see you’ll see I saw

The way he looked at me I liked it

And he took your blows so gentle

And he spoke as if he knew

Of universal patterns far beyond me

Perhaps he recognised I could be true

Trying to Love

Angline

Anjline

Angelea

Agelea

Aglina

Agline

Can I miss-spell your attitudes

Speech is silver silence earns no interest

Angeline think of me in your own coin

Angline

Gelina

Jellybeana

Agile Geline

In the timescapes of your countenance

My hopes stand paralysed

Paraphrased in flesh and pore

O Ingeline

Itchelino Age Old Ina

One day I’ll get it right

BOOK TWO

Southwards

STILL TRAJECTORIES

The juke box played a number called ‘Low Point X’. It was pub favourite the night that Speed Supervisor Jan Koninkrijk was forced to stay in the second floor back room on his way home from Cologne. He looked out over small cluttered muttering roofs and heard the record, heard it again in his sleep, dreaming of speed and life’s intermittent fulfilments as the melancholy tug boats hooted outside the hotel where the Meuse became the Maars.

The girl in the bar, so fair, good North Dutch stock in that dull south Dutch town, hair almost milk-coloured, face so pale and sharp, interested in the sports end of the paper. The fountain sparkled.

She tried to be nice to me last night, to smile with warmth Koninkrijk, speeding into Belgium, said to himself. I’m not interested much in stray women any more, but her life has a mystery... The pathos, having to serve five percent alcoholic drinks and watch night after night games of cards played always by the same men, listening to the tugs and ‘Low Point X’. The numbskill acid famine snorting outside in the alleys. Was she signalling for help? I snooped on dialogues of the blood, Only silence there except for Low Point X Giving its coronary thud... I’d better get back to Marta, no signals from her prison. A wife of shutters. Maybe this time she will be improved, so weary.

His Mercedes burned over the highway and hardly touched it, licking at one-sixty kilometres an hour along the autobahn from Cologne and Aachen through Brussels to Ostend and so across to England. All now Arab-squirted. Piercing his mazed thoughts, Koninkrijk kept a sharp eye for madmen: the highway’s crash record was bad — his switched-on cops called it Hotpants Highway since the days of the Acid Head War. But this overcast afternoon brought little opposition, so he plunged forward, whistled to himself joy, boy, joy, hoy jug-a-jig, hug a little pig, follow the band.

She would be slowing, fewer admirers, maybe one faithful one, coming to the bar every evening. Days paid out in hurried washing-lines. Her good will under strain. She smiled and smiled and was a victim. If he pitied, he must still love. It was the possibilities she represented that he thirsted for. Her hand as she stretched out for his guilders. A fine line, ah, that marvellous mystery of the female, something so much finer than just sex. Streamlined. Her little nails like teeth. With an unDutch gesture, he had kissed her hand; they were alone; they had looked at each other, he not much the older. The room round them colouring. Had put ten cents in the juke box for her to hear ‘Low Point X’ again as he walked out. Just to please her.

Had he really looked at her? Had she ever really seen herself? Had she something to reveal, hidden and sweet, to the man who went seeking properly for it? But that was his old romantic idea. No one went seeking others any more; under the psychedelic rains, they mainlined only after themselves — and never hit true heights,

He lived at Aalter, just off the Highway, in a thin house. ‘My life is an art object,’ he said jokingly, heaving shoulders under shirt. There were the alternatives; his wife’s presence, that girl’s presence, his job, his possible new appointment in Cologne, his office, that mad Messiah in England; all were different nodes of his mind, all were substantiated by different nodes of the planetary surface; neither of which could be reached without the other; it was possible that one was the diagram of the other; all that was certain was that the linking medium was speed. It was the mixer, the mixen, cultural midden. Certainly there was speed, as the dial said, 175 kilometres, registering also in the coronary thud.

For some miles, Koninkrijk had been neglecting his thoughts as his eyes took in familiar territory, divesting itself of former naturalistic implications. He was beyond Brussels now, the sound of its cold kitchens. Here the enlargements to the Highway were on a grand scale. Two more lanes were being laid in either direction, thus doubling the previous number. But the new lanes were all twice the width of the previous ones, to allow for the fuzzy-set driving of speedsters under spell.

Lips of senile earth had been piled back, cement towers erected; long low huts; immense credit boards with complicated foreign names; lamps, searchlights for night work; gigantic square things on wheels and tracks, yellow-bellied cranes; scaffolding, tips, mounds, ponds, mountains of gravel; old battered cars, new ones gaudy as Kandinskis and Kettels; mofettes like the fudged vents of corpses; and between everything chunky toy figures of men in striped scarlet luminescent work-coats. Into the furrows he saw the new animal go. These men were creating the whole chaos only for speed, the new super fuzzy speed, the catagasm of snared minds.

He slowed at the Aalter turn. It was impossible to say how much he had been affected personally by the sprays, but Koninkrijk recognised that his viewpoint had altered since they fell, although he was working in France at the time of Arablitz; France had remained neutral and the old lie that Tenenti TV protège les yeux. Piedboeuf. He slowed as he began the long curve off, its direction confused by impedimenta of construction on either side. Aalter was already being eaten into under the road-widening scheme, the old Timmermans farmhouse obliterated, its fields gone, the footpath under trees destroyed.

The grim thin house occupied by the Koninkrijks was the only one left inhabited in the street, owing to the improvements. Seismological eruptions of the European psyche had thrown up a mass of agglomerate that half-buried nearby terraces. A bulldozer laboured along the top of the ridge like a dung beetle, level with the old chimneys where smoke had once risen from a neighbourly hearth. That was over now. There was no past or future, only the division between known and unknown, sweeping on, terminator of a phantom Earth. The daffodils stood stiff in the Koninkrijk drive against just such a contingency, keeping the devouring detritus at bay, narcotic in their precision.

A thin rain, after moving across the North German Plain for hours, enveloped Aalter as Koninkrijk climbed from his Mercedes. The bellowing machines against my silent house so featureless and she in there, and the new animal with its wet eyes watching. He was not sure about the new animal; but he was slow now, on his feet and no longer stretched at speed, consequently vulnerable. Unpeeled. He bowed his head to the drizzle and made for the closed opaque glass porch.
She
would have no such refuge of privacy; only a back room behind the bar, all too accessible to the landlord when he rose at last, stale from his final cigar and five-per-center, to try and fumble from her person that missing combination of success he had failed to find in the hands of knock-out whist. Marta, as the unknown crept closer, at least had privilege of her devious privacy.

Marta Koninkrijk awaited in this minute and all the other buried minutes a secret someone to crush her up into life; or so she hoped or feared. She sat away all the sterile hours of her husbands absence as if the bright spinning coin would never tarnish or the miser forget his hoard. Time never went by. The bombs had blessed her half into a long-threatened madness, though she was not so insane that she did not try to conceal from her husband how far she lived away from him among the everfalling motes, or to conceal from herself how cherished was the perfection of immobility. She sat with her hands on her lap, sometimes reaching out with a finger to trace a hair-fine crack on the wall. Daring, this, for the day was nearing when the cracks would open and the forces of the earth pour in’while the new machines rode triumphantly above the sprouting chimney-tops, bucking in like mnemonics of her deep-boring paralysis.

Koninkrijk had installed omnivision in the thin house for her. She could sit and comfort her barren self by leaving the outer world switched off while the inner world was switched on.

From the living-room, with its frail furniture, glistening surfaces, and brilliant bevelled-edge mirrors, she could watch intently the row of screens that showed the other rooms of the house; the screens extended her senses, always so etiolated, palely over the unfrequented mansion, giving her unwinking eyes in the upper corners of five other rooms. Faintly mauve and maureen, nothing moved in them all day except the stealthy play of light and shade trapped there; nothing made a sound, until the receptors picked up the buzz of an early fly, and then Marta leant forward, listening to it, puzzled to think of life assailing the fudged vents of her life. No bicycle wheel turns in the unpedalled mind. The omnivision itself made a faint noise like a fly, fainter than her breathing, conducted so tidily under her unmoving little bust. The stuffy rooms had their walls hung with gleaming mirrors of many shapes and pictures of small children in cornfields which she had brought here from her childhood; they could be viewed in the omnivision screens. Sometimes, she flicked a switch and spoke with a tremor into an empty room.

‘Jan!’

‘Father!’

The rooms were full of incident from her immobile bastion in a wooden-armed chair. Nothing moved, but in the very immobility was the intense vibration of life she knew, so intense that, like a girlhood delight, it must be kept covert. The very intensity almost betrayed the secrecy for, when the key intruded downstairs into the elaborate orifice of the lock, there appeared to be a universe of time before he would appear at the stair top and discover that long-tranced inactivity of hers. Only after several millennia had passed and the radiations of undigested thought subsided somewhat, and the rasp of the key registered in each room’s audio-recepter, did she steal quickly up, dodging the slender image of herself transfixed in every looking-glass, and creep onto the landing to pull the lever in the toilet, assuring him of her activity, her normality, her earthy ordinariness. Into the lavatory bowl rattled a fall of earth. One day it would flood the house and blank out the last mauve image.