Gazooka (6 page)

‘Fact,' said Edwin. ‘He seemed to be in flight from all the world's heartbreak and shame.'

‘Then Caney's cure struck,' said Gomer, and you could almost see the rum-and-butter toffee parting in his mouth to make way for the bitterness of his tone. ‘Have you, Tasso, ever seen a man trying to finish a hundred-and-twenty-yard dash on one leg?'

‘Not on one leg. Always in Italy both the legs are used.'

‘It was a terrible sight. Cynlais gave some fine hops, I'll say that for him. On that form I'd enter him against a team of storks, but against those other boys he was yards behind. And that Erasmus John the Going Gone running alongside and ask ing sarcastically if Cynlais would like the stewards to do some thing about the leg he still had on the ground. I fancied I also saw Erasmus taking a few sly kicks at Cynlais as if he wished to further desolate the parts of the boy's spirit that hadn't yet been laid flat by Caney.'

‘
A
nd where is he now, the Cynlais?' asked Tasso.

‘In bed, trying to explain to his kidneys, which are still moving about inside him like jackie jumpers, about Caney, Caney's wife and her reaction to the gum on the labels that plays such hell with her.'

‘It was Moira Hallam that did it,' said Uncle Edwin, sounding as angry as a minor key human being ever will. ‘Compared with this business of physical love the Goodwin sands are a meadow. I'd like to make her sorry for the way she flicks acid over the hearts of boys like Cynlais.'

Gomer seconded this, and Tasso did something to set the urn hissing, which was his way of saying that he was behind the motion too.

The following night Milton Nicholas came into the Library and Institute and after a short spell of walking about among the bookshelves and thinking hard about the carnivals, went into the small anteroom where Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew the Doom were locked in a game of chess that seemed to have been going on for several winters.

‘I've been thinking about Ephraim Humphries the ironmonger,' said Milton. Gomer Gough and Teilo Dew did not look up or seem surprised. Humphries had for years lived out on a kind of social tundra and his fiats against the pagans of Meadow Prospect were always high on the agenda of the Discussion Group. Ephraim was very comfortably off and he had a great weakness for budgerigars of which he had a front room full. He had three of these birds that could do rough versions of temperance hymns and missionary anthems like ‘Row for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore, Heed not that stranded wreck but bend to the oar.' And he had one bird, a very strong, loud performer which had learned the first two bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus', but this had done something to the bird's tail feathers and it had died. Ephraim's cordial urges had been cooled long since by handling so much cold metal in a shop full of draughts, and he really didn't see why the average human should want to eat, wander or love more than the average budgerigar.

‘You know that Ephraim is moral adviser to the carnival committee,' said Milton.

‘Yes, we know,' said Gomer. ‘Those two bruises on his brow he got from two faints he had when watching Georgie Young's women's band, the Britannias.'

‘That's it. He ranks nudity above war as a nuisance. I was at a short meeting tonight after tea. The regional carnival committee. Ephraim was there with a cutting edge. Most of what he said was about his visit last week to the Tregysgod carnival. If he ever gets the sight of Cynlais Coleman and his boys out of his mind his mind will go with it. As for the Britannias he says it's time Georgie Young changed their costume to that of women in purdah so that they can operate from behind some kind of thick screen. But his main phobia is about Coleman, because Willie Silcox the Psyche kept interrupting that Ephraim's obsession with the way the wind kept blowing the Union Jacks against the bodies of the Britannias and show ing up their shapes meant that Ephraim was working up to the sexual climax of the century, and that as soon as he caught the Britannias without their gazookas he would proceed to some act of massive ravishment and he would spend the rest of his life dancing on Calvin's grave. At this point that lecherous and bell-like baritone, Dewi Dando the Ding and the Dong, said that if Ephraim did any dancing on Calvin's grave after a session of roistering with those girls in the Britannias it would be strictly by proxy through four bearers. This enraged Ephraim and you could see from his face that his mind had been wallowing a bit in the notions sketched forth by Silcox so he changed tack and stuck to Cynlais Coleman. He's convinced now that what Fawkes was to parliament Coleman is now to morals, a one and fourpenny banger waiting for November. That gave me an idea of how we might get Ephraim to help us.'

‘Put a light to Coleman's fuse and shock Humphries out of his wits, you mean?'

‘No, no, no! Nothing like that at all.'

‘But isn't Humphries dead against the bands? Isn't his task to morally advise them clean out of existence?'

‘Not altogether. He says that while they strike him as pretty squalid, if they take people's minds off class rancour, agnosticism and the Sankey award, he's for them, always hoping for the day, he says, when the people generally will find the same release he does in a good funeral or a long argument about Baptism. So why don't we approach Humphries and explain that Cynlais and his boys are puritans at heart and want nothing better than to get hold of some decent, God-fearing costumes so that they can turn out looking less repulsive and frightening to the pious. We could also add that Cynlais has given up his old promiscuity since he came across Moira Hallam and swallowed that draught of Caney's cure. Then we can tap Humphries for some cash. He must have a soft side to his nature or he wouldn't keep all those birds in his front room.'

Teilo Dew and Gomer stared at the chessboard and the stagnant pieces as if they found this game as inscrutable as they had always found Humphries.

‘Your mind's just singing, Milton,' said Gomer. ‘From what I know of Humphries he probably keeps those birds in his front room just to test for gas. When the birds die Humphries changes the potted shrubs and chalks up a new cautionary text on the wall. He was the grumpiest boy I ever met behind a counter, although I will say that iron at all levels is a pretty sombre trade. He was the one ironmonger who sold paraffin that put out the match. But let's go and see him anyway.'

Gomer and Milton left Teilo to brood over the blockage in the chess game and picked up Uncle Edwin who was sitting in the Reading Room humming a mossy old funeral chant over a brassily authoritative leading article in a national paper that was open in front of him. He invited Gomer and Milton to scan this article. They rushed their eyes down it. The writer had been dealing with the carnival bands and frankly felt that there was something potentially threatening to the State in having such masses of men, with nothing better to do, moving about the streets in march time. He suggested that a monster carnival to end all carnivals be organised, set it in motion with a strong platoon of Guards in the rear to ensure no getaways, then keep the whole procession in motion until it reached the South Pole where they could swap bits of political wisdom with the penguins. When Gomer and Milton finished reading the article they joined Uncle Edwin in humming the last verse of the funeral chant, coming out clearly with the words of the last line which praised the dignity and cheapness of the grave.

‘But never mind about that now,' said Gomer. ‘Milton has an idea that Ephraim Humphries might supply the money to drag Coleman and his band up into the temperate zone.'

Edwin was not enthusiastic. He said about the only thing he could recommend in the case of Humphries was a load of hot clinker for the man's bleaker and colder urges, but he responded to the glow of enthusiasm in Milton Nicholas' face and we started the journey across the town to the house of Ephraim Humphries.

Humphries lived in one of a group of larger houses on some high ground just outside the town's west side. There was a diamond-shaped pane of dark blue glass in the centre of his door which created an effect exactly halfway between sadness and intimidation. After our first knock we could see Humphries and his wife take up position in the passageway. They peered out at us and it was plain they felt no happiness or confidence at the sight of us. There was an open fanlight above the door through which we could hear most of what they said. They were speaking in whispers but whispers bred on long years in oratorio.

‘I count four,' we heard Mrs Humphries say, ‘but there may be more arranged on either side of the door.'

‘Stop fearing the worst, Harriet,' said Humphries. ‘You've never been the same since that lecturer told you your great-grandfather had had his bakehouse cooled in the Chartist troubles. Who are these fellows?'

‘Can't tell for sure. There's a shady look about them.'

‘That's the blue glass. My own father, seen through that diamond, looks as if he's just come running from the County Keep.'

‘I told you you should never have accepted that invitation to go to those carnivals as adviser on morals. These are probably some louts you've offended with your straight talk about how bruises have now taken the place of woad as a darkening element on the moral fabric of the Celt. These men are very likely a group sent here by Cynlais Coleman, the leading dervish, to do you some mischief.' Her tone became strained and sharply informative. ‘Do you know that the very word assassin comes from the Middle East where Coleman has his spiritual home. Let's bar the doors.' She made a quick move towards the door and there was a shifting of iron such as we would never normally hear outside a gaol.

‘Stop being such a teacher, Harriet,' said Humphries.
‘
A
nd throw those bolts back. I'd never have had them if they hadn't come to me cheap through the trade.'

The door was opened.

‘What is it?' asked Humphries, showing only his head.

‘We'd like a word with you, Mr Humphries,' said Gomer, and he gave us the cue with his hand to start smiling in the broadest, most unmalicious way we could manage. This performance was so out of tune with the mood of the times that Mrs Humphries, thinking from the lunatic look of us that we were out to kill them on more general grounds than she had imagined, tried to drag Humphries back into the passage and ram the bolts back home. He threw her off.

‘Come on into the front room,' he said, his voice rustling with caution.

We moved slowly behind Humphries into the most tightly packed front parlour we had ever seen. On the wall, frame to frame, as if a broad gap would only aggravate the loneliness that had tormented and killed them on earth, were huge photo graphs of the most austere voters, a lot of them bearded and all of them frowning and staring straight at Humphries and us.

‘Beloved pastors on the right-hand wall and irreplaceable relatives on the left,' said Humphries as he saw us trying to map the great patches of gloom created by those faces. It struck us that with all these elements speaking up for the Black Meadow and the County Assizes on his flank he must have been driven into the ironmongery trade by centuries of in herited ill-feeling about the species. The furniture of the room, and it seemed from the amount of it that Humphries and his wife had both thrown a front-room suite into the marriage chest, was thick with plush and chenille. It made the whole chamber look like the hidden badge of all the world's outlawed or discouraged sensuousness. Our fascinated fingers kept reaching out and stroking the stuff until Humphries, looking convinced that we were all going to unpick and make off with a length of chenille to eke out the costumes of a carnival band, told us to stop it and get to the point. Around the room were eight or nine birdcages and we watched the birds inside with great interest. There might have been a time when the budgerigars had thought of trying to give some light relief to those divines and relatives in the photographs but they had broken their beaks on all that ambient gravity and lost. They now sat on their perches looking as sad and damned and muffled as the gallery of perished censors. Their singing had been soaked futilely into the layers of plush and they had shut up. As we squeezed into the tiny areas of free floor space, with Mrs Humphries pushing hard at Uncle Edwin because she did not fancy the idea of any of our delegation being left with her in the passageway, one of the birds let out a note. It was not gay or musical. It was like the first note of the last post in a low-grade military funeral, heard through rain and trees. It sounded as if the bird thought we had come to bail him out.

Humphries looked up at the bird and said:

‘You hear that? You hear that? They might come yet.'

‘Oh, nice birds,' said Milton Nicholas with real rapture in his voice. We admired Milton for this because we had never before heard a word of interest, let alone praise, from him on the subject of birds. Once in the Discussion Group he had gone so far as to praise the habit of migration and wheeling off south at the approach of autumn as a tactically sound approach and one which, he hoped, would be copied when man resolved the last cramp of tribal idiocy and took the whole world as his available playground. Milton won his motion that night on the rheumatic vote alone, because there was a whole fleet of voters present stiffened up by winter rains and as badly in need of a stronger sun as of a more encouraging government. Later, Milton qualified those words of approval about birds by saying that he considered pigeon fancying, which at the time was running neck and neck with sex as a life form among the more torpid prolies, a very lulling activity and worthy to be classed as opium for those people who had somehow managed to emerge awake from under the long, soporific cone of our traditional prescriptions.