The Gone-Away World (6 page)

The icecap gives a final wriggle, and goes
“shhOOOMF!”
and a frothing eruption boils up and out. The plume of water reaches higher than the high trees by the lakeside, and lumps of ice like Sunday roasts fall ahead of us on the road. The full weight of water from the Mendicant Hills, thwarted these many days in its passage to the sea and gathered underground in a column of pressure two hundred feet high, is at last released.

A duck, knocked unconscious by a bit of ballistic slush, tumbles to the ground in a field to our right. And then, extremely locally, it rains. It rains sleet and snow and ice, and a small number of unhappy frogs.

Old Man Lubitsch looks back down the road at the devastation, and he starts to laugh. It is not a hysterical laugh, but a genuine, delighted, belly laugh at the view, the madness, the gorgeousness of the cock-up. Ma Lubitsch calls him a string of names, but her face is flushed and she, too, is laughing, and it seems likely that if ever Gonzo is to get a younger brother, it will be tonight.

The Cove Cold Snap ends a few days later, as if by sympathetic magic we have broken the grip of winter on the land. The snow melts overnight, and there are little green things eagerly yammering for attention shortly after. The Lubitsch donkeys, cause of great and now-forgotten turmoil, are led reluctantly from their winter accommodations and told to start thinking of themselves as outdoor beasts again. Their mournful and utterly mendacious cries of distress are responsible for some sleepless nights in the Lubitsch house, but Ma Lubitsch keeps to her iron rule and the donkeys get the message, and are content.

T
HUS
G
ONZO
, incendiarist and leader of men. And Gonzo's inescapable hanger-on—the kid no one notices? He also grows up. Not even last-picked for football teams and athletic tryouts, the perpetually benched; he is Gonzo's shadow and occasional conscience when the Plan—be it raiding the kitchen for food or escaping this borstal to live with Gypsies in Mongolia (described by the Evangelist as “a festerance of Sin and Capitulation,” on what evidence I cannot guess)—calls for excesses in excess of what the authorities will accept as demonstrating that boys will be boys. Outwitting the librarian and purloining banned books is almost expected; releasing the inmates of the ant farm along a trail of purloined sugar leading to the staff showers is ingenious enough to merit wry applause from the science master along with a string of punishment duties; making and testing explosives with cheap domestic ingredients I veto, not out of any dislike for the splendidness of the concept, but from a natural awareness that there are borders everywhere, and sending the football pavilion—even empty—four hundred feet into the air using homebrew nitroglycerine is on the far side of both what would be tolerated and our own alchemical competence. I remember, where Gonzo does not, the safety film featuring scarred and rueful victims of their own hubris urging us against such ventures. We settle instead on a concoction intended to induce percussive internal combustion in the rumina of cows, but the test subjects are unaffected by the stuff, save for a minor increase in distraught mooing.

At fourteen, Gonzo discovers martial arts movies: the oeuvre of Messrs. B. Lee and J. Chan, along with assorted other players of greater and lesser talent. The martial arts film is a curiously sentimental thing, fraught with high promises and melodrama. Those of the Hong Kong variety are frequently filled with untranslatable Chinese puns delivered in a bout of sing-song badinage. The plots are moral, Shakespearean, and have a tendency to charge off in some unexpected direction for twenty minutes before returning to the main drama as if nothing has happened.

Inspired by these, Gonzo commences to study karate. He is the ideal candidate: fearless, physical and delighted by the changes wrought in his body by multiple press-ups, his only disadvantage that he comes late to the party. Had Gonzo begun his training younger, he might one day be a true master. As it is, he must content himself with being merely an excellent student. For the weedy sidekick (whose
yokogeri kekomi
is indeed the weediest in the school's catchment area), karate is another arena in which life's beatings are legitimately delivered, but he struggles on. He has—I have—despite a long-nurtured understanding that he cannot equal his friend's achievements—never learned to quit, one virtue he possesses which is utterly alien to Gonzo, whose effortless rampage through life has never required him to consider it.

And then one day the universe decides that I am fledged, and accordingly demands of me my first solo flight; Mary Sensei leads me from the tatami to examine my now-familiar bloody nose. It has never broken, but—unlike my hands, which remain fragile despite hours of training at the bag—it must by now have developed a mighty sheath of calcium. I wonder if I can shatter boards with it. Mary Sensei replies that this is unlikely, and she would prefer that I delay the experiment indefinitely. Five foot three and fifty-four kilos, Mary Sensei tells me I'm not cut out for karate. But my dedication is sufficiently impressive that she can suggest an alternative: another school.

I object that Gonzo won't want to change schools.

“No,” Mary Sensei explains. “Not Gonzo. Gonzo will do fine here. Just you. Without Gonzo.”

This is a new concept, but not—oddly—an unpleasant one.

“Another karate school?”

“No. Another style. Maybe a soft form.”

“What's a soft form?”

She tells me.

The upshot is a tour of the local schools of soft-form pugilism, and the first thing which becomes apparent is that the term “soft” is misleading because it is relative, the comparison being with men and women so desperate to turn themselves into machines of empty-handed demolition that they have spent hours and days and months striking wooden boards and sandpapered target dummies to condition their fists, and who consider an hour ill-spent if they have not driven one foot through a pile of bricks. It is not a question of whether the style is
violent,
but of whether that violence is direct and forceful or subtle and convoluted. To the eye of a novice, soft forms appear delicate, baroque and artistic, while the hard forms are brutish and merciless. The truth is that the soft forms are more considered in their application of pain and damage to the body. Which is more unpleasant to the object of their attentions is an open question—and which variety attracts more dangerous lunatics in the suburban setting is also unclear. I rapidly reject the smiling, flinty
aikidoka,
whose expressionless perfection informs the opponent that his life or death is irrelevant, and whose motions include a sword-cut twist at the end to provide the coup de grâce. Their modern, street-fighting cousins of European and Brazilian ju-jitsu are also unsatisfactory; the former are cheery, laddish men tending to be under five foot six and almost the same across the shoulder, the latter are chuckling lunatics with a fondness for submission holds and women in impractical swimwear. Puritanical and sovereign, I stalk from their classroom without a second look—but this leaves me with a problem. Judo is as much sport as self-defence. T'ai chi is fluid and elegant but requires an entire lifetime to be usable in combat. More esoteric—and, to be honest, no softer than karate—escrima and silat are not taught anywhere within an hour of Cricklewood Cove. I look in desperation at Mary Sensei, and perhaps, this once, my need is enough.

“Yes,” Mary Sensei says, “there's one more thing we can try.”

Which is how, for the first time
without
Gonzo Lubitsch, I come to be standing on the doorstep of Wu Shenyang, seeking admittance to the House of the Voiceless Dragon.

“Wu like
woo,
” Mary Sensei said two minutes ago, strangely breathless in her aged VW Rabbit as we sat waiting for the precise appointed hour, “and then Shen and Yang as if they were separate, but they're not. And you don't call him Wu Shenyang, anyway, you call him Mister Wu. Or Master Wu. Or . . .” But she could not think of anything else I might call him and anyway it's time. The door opens. An excited voice says “Come, come!” and I watch my feet take me across the threshold.

Mister (Master) Wu is the first teacher of whatever sort to ask me to his home, and he is the first martial arts instructor who has wanted to know me off the mat before seeing me perform on it. According to Mary Sensei, if he does not find what he is looking for in my heart, there will be no point in testing the rest of me. I inspect my heart, and it seems an impoverished organ for such a big task. It is the right sort of size and located not as moviegoers believe in the high left side of the chest (that is in fact a lung) but just off centre and further down. It beats approximately seventy times a minute and pumps vital nutrients and oxygen carried by haemoglobin around my body in the approved fashion, but it conceals as far as I can tell no mysteries, and is devoid of secret heritage or supernatural skills. Having thus ascertained by introspection that I lack whatever it is this gentleman is seeking, I feel able to observe his living room, which is itself remarkable. It is, as well as being a place to sit and read and eat cake, a treasure house of oddments and curiosities—a gold statue of a warlike pig in one corner, a pair of Foo Dogs on the mantle, standing lamps from various periods of design, weapons and china ducks on all the walls. Wu Shenyang is still assessing me—I can feel the stress of his regard—and so I begin to catalogue the contents of this place with an eye to returning perhaps as a cleaner or a general dogsbody.

Item: two armchairs, split in various places and of considerable antiquity, but also to all appearances monstrously comfortable. These are positioned loosely on either side of an open fire at one end of the room, along with a coffee table whose clever construction allows books to be stashed willy-nilly beneath the tabletop.

Item: with its back to us, a leather sofa of similarly advanced age, showing signs (to wit, a pillow and a blanket) of having recently been used as a camp bed. Indeed, there appears to be a person camping on it still, because a pair of white-socked feet, slender and almost certainly feminine (by the pattern of the weave) and perhaps my own age or a little younger, protrude from the western side.

Item: a grandfather clock, running smoothly if somewhat previous, in dark and gold-leafed wood with a fine, painted face. The panel door is open and the pendulum is visible as it makes its long, slow strokes from left to right and back again, producing a steady and undeniable
tock tick
noise in defiance of convention. This
tock tick
also reassures me that the person on the sofa is alive and not dead, because her northernmost foot
tock ticks
along with it from time to time, and then returns to a state of rest.

Item: one desk and chair, both liberally covered in cake crumbs and paper. The desk is functional rather than impressive, and surmounting the piles and stacks of letters and drawings is a single sheet of blank paper and a pencil. Mister (Master) Wu does not use a pen for casual work, because where—or maybe
when
—he comes from, ink is expensive. Thus, the softest of soft leads, because Mister (Master) Wu is writing in Chinese.

Item: an ancient gramophone, literally; not a stereo or a turntable, not a CD player, but a scratched and whistling construction with a chrome arm and a huge flower-shaped horn and a thick, blunt needle making music from brittle black discs which turn at 78 rpm. The entire trick is accomplished mechanically, without electricity or transistors or silicon.

To me, a child of the digital age, this is a great white magic, so awe-inspiring that I forget for a moment to be nervous of Wu Shenyang. It is in any case hard to remember that he is a person of dread solemnity and pomp, because he seems to approach everything as a kind of game. He is even now leaping over to the gramophone to display it in full glory: winding it, picking out an old record by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and grinning widely as he waits for my reaction to his fabulous trick. I am too lost in the crackling perfection to smile, until the record comes to an end and his deft fingers lift the needle away. He drags out from beneath the machine a bag of yet more impossible records and presses them upon me. I leaf through them with aching concern that I will shatter one, and finally play the adagio from Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, listening until the very end. Mister (Master) Wu's gaze lights on my fingers as I lift the needle just as he did, because this thing is too perfect, too carefully preserved and lovingly made, to allow it to be injured by carelessness. And then finally I am looking at the man before me.

Wu Shenyang is tall and thin. He does not look like Buddha, he looks like a ladder in a dressing gown. Time has polished him, abraded him and passed on, leaving him nearly eighty and stronger than a brace of college athletes, though he favours his right leg just a little. His wide, umber-coloured face is not impassive like that of Takagi Sensei, who once visited Mary's dojo and grunted meaningfully as I launched weak and indicated attacks at a girl from Hosely; despite the bristling brows in shock-silver above his eyes, he is not stern. Wu Shenyang laughs loudly—alarmingly—at inappropriate moments, and seems to take joy in inconsequential things, like the colour of the window putty and the slipperiness of the carpet in front of his desk. The latter he demonstrates to me by standing square in the slick patch and gyrating wildly, waggling his whole body, sliding his slippers on the spot as he shifts his weight rapidly from one to the other and twisting his hips. When he has finished, nothing will do but that I take a turn. I am immediately concerned that he will think I am mocking his game leg, but again I copy his method exactly and he registers his approval by laughing and shouting “Elvis Presley! Graceland!” When he tries to say “rock and roll” he gets into a terrible tangle because his English is, even after many years speaking it, gently accented with his mother tongue—but this also doesn't worry him in the slightest, and so it doesn't worry me either. We pass on to further matters of consequence: he likes my trousers, but he thinks my watch is too young for me, because it features a smiling cat whose whiskers indicate the hour and minute. He also thinks I need a new barber, and though loyalty prompts me to defend Ma Lubitsch's kitchen table cut, I do so in the knowledge that he is right. Wu Shenyang apologises—to me and to Ma Lubitsch. There is a snort from behind the sofa, but I am immune. An elder stranger, without irony, treats me as a being of equal worth—if of lesser experience and discernment in the matter of timepieces. In the course of the watch discussion we compare forearms, and it is established that mine is actually as thin as his, which for some reason is hugely pleasing to him. Only when I explain why I am here—though of course he must know—does he recover his composure. He peers at me gravely and ponders, and I prepare myself for the inevitable, the impossible testing and the sorrowful rejection. He turns to the wall and selects from amid the ducks a short fat sword with a single edge and a sharp point. Holding it carefully in one hand, he removes the sheath and turns to me.