Barefoot in the Head (6 page)

‘Yes siree, one of the great ones in the Miller style. And now for a welcome change of pace — ’

Charteris was conscious of a mounting pressure inside him. Something was breathing close to his left ear and stealing away.

‘Answer my question!’ he said.

‘Well, according to G, the serpent is the power of the imagination — the power of fantasy — which takes the place of a real function. You get my meaning? When a man dreams instead of acting, when he imagines himself to be a great eagle or a great magician...that’s the force of Kundalini acting in him...’

‘Cannot one act and dream?’

The waiting man appeared to double up, sniggering in repulsive fashion with his fists to his mouth. Love Burrow — that was the sign, and a pale-thighed wife beside him... His place was there, wherever that was. This Pear Tree Palace was a trap, a dead end, the waiting man himself an ambiguous either/or/both/and sign, deluding yet warning him: perhaps a manifestation of Kundalini itself. He had got his tasks in the wrong order; clearly, this was a dead end with no alternative, a corner of extinction. What he wanted was a new tribe!

Now the waiting man’s sniggers were choking him. Above their bubbling din, he heard the sound of a car engine outside, and dropped his teacup. The tea sent a dozen fingers across the cubist lino. Over his fists, the little doubled figure glared blankly red at him. Charteris turned and ran.

Through the open door. Birds leaped from the lawn to the eaves of the bungalow, leaden, from motionlessness to instant motionlessness.

His heart’s beat dragged in its time-snare like a worn serenade. Down the path. The rain had lured out a huge black slug which crawled like a torn watch-strap before him. The green-and-cream radio still dialled yesterday.

Through the gate. The sun, set forever with its last rays caught in mottled iron.

To the road. But he was a discarded alternative. A red Banshee was pulling away, with one of his glittering I’s at the wheel, puissant, full of potential, multi-valued, saviour-shaped. He ran after it, calling from the asphalt heart of Brontosaurus Broadway, leaping over the gigantic yellow arrows. They were becoming more difficult to negotiate. His own powers, he knew, were failing. He had chosen wrongly, become a useless I, dallying with an old order instead of seeking new patterns.

Now the arrows were almost vertical. LINKS FAHREN. The red car was far away, just a blur moving through the barrier, speeding unimpeded for...

He still heard breathing, movements of clothes, the writhing of toes inside shoe-caps. But these were not his. They belonged to the Charteris in the car, the undiscarded I. He no longer breathed.

As he huddled over the arrow, gulls tumbled from the cliff and sank into the water. Over the sea, the ship came. Up the hill, motors sounded. In the head, barefoot, a new age.

There had been a war, a dislocation.

TIME NEVER GOES BY

You must remember this

That beds get crumpled skirts get rumpled

And hedges grow up into trees

Cinemas close and the parking lot

Loses its last late Ford Everything goes by the board

But Time Never Goes By

And when true lovers screw

Novelty wears off the affair’s off

Perfume fades from the air

The bright spinning coin will tarnish and

The miser forget his hoard

Everything goes by the board

But Time Never Goes By

The watch keeps ticking true enough

But time’s glued down to something stronger

It’s a fixture
 
Do enough

But every second’s a second longer

Try your best you’ll be impressed

Every minute has centuries in it

It’s still the same old story

Characters change events rearrange

Plot seems to wear real thin

Coffins call for running men

Hated or adored

Everything goes by the board

But Time Never Goes By

NOVA SCOTIA TREADMILL ORCHESTRA

ROSEMARY LEFT ME

Beyond the buildings the buildings

Begin again

Beyond recording the old records

Spin again

It’s sort of sad it’s kind of safe

It seems so sour

The things that are past will fortify

The menace of the coming hour

My Rosemary left me outside The Fox

Said I smelt said I didn’t care

Then why do I keep her pubic hair

Tied up in ribbon in a sandalwood box

Now I’ve found Jeanie cute as you please

Tight little skirt and leather jerkin

Soon I’ll get the scissors working

History comes bobbing on back like knees

So I go ahead tho I know ahead

Winds blow ahead

Two steps forward one step back

Trodden in another tread

Beyond recording the old records

Spin again

Beyond the buildings the buildings

Begin again

THE GENOSIDES

LITTLE PAPER FACES

He goes through the land

His tomorrow in his pocket

He seeks a land

Where the faces fit the heads

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Yeh, with hand-drawn expressions

He crosses over the sea

Pilgrim of the Pilgrim Age

He hopes to see

A different mask beneath the skull

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Yeh, with crayoned experience

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Little paper faces

Yeh, papered on the paper bone

THE ESCALATION

DRAKE-MAN ROUTE

So maybe this was the real Charteris or a personal photograph of him wire-wheeling towards the metropolis none too sure if matter was not hallucination, smiling and speaking with a tone of unutterable kindness to himself to keep down the baying images. Uprooted man. Himself a product of time. England a product of literature. It was a good period and to dissolve into all branches — great new thing with all potentials, prosperity and prenury.

He saw it, see-saw the new thing, scud across the scudding road before him, an astral projection perhaps, all legs, going all ways at once. A man could do that.

He wanted to communicate his new discoveries, pour out the profusion of his confusion to listeners, in madness never more nerved or equilustral, all paradised by the aerosols until the undipped hedges of mind grew their own utopiary.

His car snouted out one single route from all the possible routes and now growled through the iron-clod night of London’s backyards: papiermâché passing for stone, cardboard passing for brick, only in the yellow fanning wash of French headlights; pretence all round of solidity, permanence, roofs and walls and angles of a sly geometry, windows infinitely opaque on seried sleepers, quick corners, snickering bayonets at vision’s angles, untrodden pavements, wide eyes reflected from blind shops, the ever-closing air, the epic of unread signs, and under the bile blue fermentation of illumination, roundabouts of concrete boxed by shops and a whole vast countryside rumpling upwards into the night under the subterranean detonation of unease. The steering wheel swung it all this way and that, great raree show-down for foot-down Serbs. Song in the wings, other voices.

Round the next corner FOR YOUR THROAT’S SAKE SMOKE a van red-eyed — a truck no
trokut!
— in the middle of the guy running out waving bloody leather — Charteris braked spilling hot words as the chasing thought came of impact and splat some clot mashed out curving against a wall of shattered brick so bright all flowering: a flowering cactus a christmas cactus rioting in an anatomical out-of-season.

Car and images dominoed into control as the man jumped back for his life and Charteris muscled his Banshee past the van to a halt.

All along the myriad ways of Europe that sordid splendid city in the avenues Charteris had driven hard. He thought of them spinning down his window thrusting out his face as the vanman came on the trot.

‘You trying to cause a crash or something?’

‘You were touching some speed, lad, come round that corner like you were breaking the ruddy speed record, can you give me a lift I’ve broken down?’

He looked broken down like all the English now narrowly whooping up the after-effects of the Acid Head War, with old leather shoulders and elbows and a shirt of macabre towelling, no tie, eyes like phosphorescence and a big mottled face as if shrimps burrowed in his cheeks.

‘Can you give me a lift, I say? Going north by any chance?’

The difficulty of the cadence of English. Not the old simple words so long since learnt by heart as the gallant saint slipped into the villainous captain’s cabin pistol in hand but simply the trick of drawing vocal from the mouth.

‘I am going north yes. What part of it are you wanting to reach?’

‘What part are you heading for?’

‘I — I — where the christmas cactus blooms and angelina flowers — ’

‘Heck, another acid nut, look, lad, are you safe to be with?’

‘Forgive me I it’s they you see I take you north okay, only I’m just a bit confused by anywhere you want I go why not?’

He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t aim straight though he sighted his intellect at the target the bullets of thought were multi-photographed and kept recurring and stray ricochets spanged back again and again like that succulent image that perhaps he thought sniped him from his future and why not if the Metz vision was true and he no more than a manifestation on a web of time in which matter was the hallucination. Bafflement and yet suffusing delight as if a great havering haversack was lifted off his back simplifying under its perplexities such personal problems as right or wrong.

‘If you feel that way. You are a foreigner? France was not affected they say played it cool stayed neuter. Friend to the Arab world. Lost all loot, I say. Okay I’ll get my gear name’s Banjo Burton by the way.’

‘Mine’s Charteris. Colin Charteris.’

‘Good.’

Burly of shoulder he ran back to the van all conked and hunched fifty yards back, struggled at the rear and then returned for help. So Charteris not unloath climbed into the silent stage set of this
quartier
looking about licking the desolation — London London at last this ouspenskian eye beholds this legendary if meagre exotic scene. Lugging at the back of the van the other man Banjo Burton pulls at something and between them they drag it machinery across the indoor road: a passing speedster and for a moment they are both outdoors again.

‘What you got here?’

‘Infrasound equipment,’ as they load it into the back of Charteris’ car backs bending grunting in work lonely company under the night eyes. Then stand there half-inspecting each other in the semi-dark you do not see me I do not see you: you see your interpretation of me I see my interpretation of you. Moving to climb into the front seats heftily he swinging open the door with unrecorded muscling asks, ‘So you’re French then are you?’

‘I am Serbian.’

Great conversation stopper slammer of doors internally quasi-silent revving of engines and away. The start and bastion of Europe oh they know not Serbia. O Kossovo the field of blackbirds where the dark red peonies blow but then on into the Turkish night of another era of the mobility soothed soon the shouldered man begins to manifest his flat voice as if speed harmonised it.

‘I’ll not be sorry to get out of London and home again though mind you you certainly see some funny things here make you laugh if you feel that way I mean to say people are more open than they used to be.’

‘Open? Minds open? You don’t mean thoughts flowing from one to another like a net a web?’

‘I don’t mean that as far as I know. I don’t get what goes on in the heads of you blokes though I don’t mind telling you. And when I say laugh it’s really enough to make you cry. I was up in Coventry when they dropped the bombs.’