The Whispering Swarm (33 page)

Helena was glad to see me when I got home. But she didn't like the way I made love that night. In the following days, I must admit, I was short with her and irritated by her attempts to find out what was wrong. I was, of course, thinking of Molly. It was as if she imprisoned herself in her femininity and didn't like it all that much.

But, of course, the obvious answer to my unease never once occurred to me. If asked I would have said I had never been happier or better balanced. Why shouldn't I be happy? I had the ideal writer's life. ‘Every writer needs two spouses,' Allard always joked. ‘That way they can share the strain!' I should be grateful. I had a wife, children and a mistress. For the most part everyone else seemed happy too. That was a relief.

 

25

THE CHINESE AGENT

I was still worried about the whispering. I went for tests to several neurologists and at last got a diagnosis:
tinnitus,
which can take many forms. But why did it clear up completely the moment I entered the Alsacia?

Superficially at any rate, Helena and I became good friends again. The girls were happy sharing jokes about me behind my back. They took a little pleasure in it. They wanted to share power. I honestly enjoyed their jokes. They bonded against me, especially when I was getting too big for my boots or when I went mad with some piece of work I was doing. I began to believe that it was possible for grown people to get along together without dislike or bitterness. This was the falling zenith of hippy Notting Hill. 1968. The bankers and lawyers and stockbrokers were already moving in. Soon we would be told that money didn't grow on trees and we should maximise our assets, with our beautiful gardens and lovely old Victorian houses. Housing committees. Gardens committees. Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square; hello America; goodbye North Ken, and the traders in Portobello jacked up their prices and off we went on the gentrification waltz.

For a few short years, before we realised it was too late to defend our heritage and our homeland against bobos and toffs, yuppies, nimbys and colons, we had some very good times. Maybe ten or fifteen years. Sweet times. The girls and I did almost everything together. Rainy weekends were galleries and exhibitions or the Disney cinema in St Martin's Lane.

It was their girlhood. I was happy for them. They began to grow up. There were also gigs to go to. The Move, The Allday Suckers, The Chargers were still performing locally, and I was writing for them all, even the Suckers. We taped some great recordings around that time, many of which are long lost. St Anselms Church Hall had been renamed The Golden Calf. The vicar didn't seem to mind. He had most of the local Hell's Angels as his congregation. Wonderful jam sessions, making up the words as we went along. Great instrumental solos. My girls became a bit blas
é
about backstage visits and famous players.

Apart from hassles from a determinedly anticounterculture bunch of rozzers, who were forever trying to cut off our power, we did some great sessions culminating with a famously disorganized concert featuring the Dead Legends (as they called us at the beginning) including Pete Pavli on bass and cello, Martin Stone and Paul Kossoff on guitars, me on banjo, Tubby Ollis on drums, Simon ‘the Power' Powell on fiddle, Arthur Brown and Jon Trux, also on guitars. Helena was determined to stay at home and chat with her girlfriends, so I took the girls. We'd drawn quite a crowd but the wind was making it difficult for Arthur to light his hat. The first casualty was Kossoff, who went to sleep, snuggled up with his Strat behind the stacks before we ever began. The second was Trux, who lost his guitar and ambled off to find it. The third was Simon Powell, whose wife turned up unexpectedly and chased him and his girlfriend off the stage. They were last seen disappearing up Latimer Road. Arthur still couldn't get his hat to light. I was laughing so hard I fell through the stage and busted my banjo and then I heard Trux shout out. He'd found his guitar. Then he slumped in on top of me. By that time all of those still awake and present began to laugh along with us and that was the end of The Portobello Mushroom Band, as they now called us. We got enthusiastic applause from a bunch of French students, who thought it was all part of the act, and asked where we were appearing next. We told them the Hackney Empire. Anything was possible. In those days.

My girls had a great time in general but were utterly contemptuous of the quality of the entertainment, catcalling from the audience, ‘Get off! Old hippy farts!' And I refused to be overwhelmed by the half-heard words, the murmured tones of the Whispering Swarm, increasingly insistent, increasingly threatening. When Helena came home from the comforts and cunning of her Ladbroke Grove kitchen s
é
ance I was lying in bed with wax in my ears, moaning and begging for it to stop. She thought I had missed her and reassured me.

A couple of mornings later, when I was reading over the previous day's work, I answered a knock and the front door was suddenly full of purple-and-white Ronno'noms, a Scientology breakaway cult that had the advantage of being known more for its flashy colours than its philosophy. They called it ‘Scientific Spiritualism'. I told them to kindly bugger off, and for a second I thought I heard the Swarm buzzing into the distance. But it wouldn't go. Neither would the ronnies. The Swarm filled my head like angry bees. I was furious. I lost it, told the ronnies to fuck off. I wondered if these bouts came with depression. Helena and I had just read about the death of Baggy Tyler, for years the Fix's head roadie. That same night Smiling Mike tried to climb the wall of the
Frendz
office building in Portobello Road because he needed somewhere to sleep off a long acid trip. He fell backwards halfway up and was impaled on the area railings. Dead when they found him. As if in sympathy the Swarm went away again and I prayed it would stay away.

I was almost thirty and I was ready to retire.

The books got hacked out and supported the magazine which was breaking even with reduced pages. Early in 1969, I passed the
New Worlds
reins to Charlie Ratz, Graham Sharp and Graham Blount. They had all been contributors and worked as professional journalists. I called them my triumvirate but wasn't surprised when only Ratzo wound up as editor. I was never as smart as Ratzo but he had no idea how I ran the magazine or worked out how a story fitted or kept the finances going. He thought I was incompetent. Actually, he thought
everyone
else was incompetent.

I'd supported my ideas by writing a lot of honest adventure fiction as well as a few decent comedies. I had established a modest space for the kind of fiction I liked to write and read. I'd put a few new guns in the literary arsenal. I'd helped in the process of reuniting ‘literary' and ‘popular' fiction, which followed in the wake of new vocabularies for music and painting.

We were an active part of the zeitgeist. When I was twenty-five it was literary suicide to mention an enthusiasm for Mervyn Peake, and most critics ignored him. Literary careerists avoided Peake, Firbank and others. Not many read the French absurdists and existentialists. Few were fond of Philip K. Dick or Allard. The same was true of a number of other writers, painters and composers. Now Peake and visionaries like him are known to every educated household. Culturally, we were a little ahead of the '60s. Jack Allard and others were with me. But it was surprising how relatively few we were and we were not all artists and intellectuals. Scientists, painters, sculptors, philosophers, journalists and all sorts of people were fired up by what we were doing. During the few months I was in Sweden, through a mutual enthusiasm for Peake, I met my friend Dave Harvey, now a famous economist. He was the best man at my first marriage. He wrote one of our best editorials as well as fiction. Most of us were were doing something interesting in the arts, academies and sciences and had a taste for a certain kind of visionary fiction.

I had the good fortune to be part of a generation which knew intense early experience followed by material success. We got there as much through our enthusiasms as our ambitions. We did it to popular music by the Beatles and The Who, to movies by all the great survivors as well as brilliant newcomers. Bergman. Fellini. Truffaut. The Italian Americans. A growing availability of music by Schoenberg, Ives, Messiaen and others. Steve Reich. Philip Glass. Bacon. Hamilton. Warhol. Paolozzi. Rothko. All those painters and sculptors. Coming together with everyone else.

The sciences were bursting with new ideas and applications. At a time when few of us thought about how to miniaturise computers, we worked out some of the strangest ways of miniaturising notional environments via computers. We created the RPG. We were pretty much a perfect team. Everyone pooled their best. We never thought in terms of intellectual property, just controlling our copyrights enough to get a reasonable income. The '60s and even the '70s were a tremendous time to be in London. Sex, drugs, rock and roll. We saw generous hearts exploited by greed. They say it wasn't really like that. They weren't there. It was a buzz. We mixed not only with talented contemporaries but people of previous generations we admired.

We experimented with sex. Sex without consequence. The notion of a sexually transmitted worldwide epidemic had occurred only to SF writers and even those thought they were inventing metaphors. We were all enjoying ourselves a lot just then. My life was a cloud of good things. I had never dreamed of success or had unsatisfied sexual frustrations! All the good things of the world were coming my way. I was starting to take them for granted. Whole bins full of loonies and colonies of hippies bought and read my work. Life would have been pretty perfect if it weren't for the whispering voices in my head—insistent, irresistible voices sounding alien words. Strange, unfamiliar vowels in no known language. They did not seem to threaten, yet I found them threatening. Tinnitus might be blamed but I began to go mad wondering if I could perhaps trace the languages and learn them. Were they warning me? Were they coming up from my unconscious? If so, what did they represent? Now I had to take the supernatural into account, too. I was no Puritan, but experience had taught me there were real consequences to actions and that wishing for something didn't make it happen. Was I warning myself of consequences to a lifestyle that wasn't costing me very much at all? When I said there was always a victim in a threesome, I hadn't really been thinking one would be me.

About a year after that brief return to the Alsacia there came a knock at the front door. Helena was downstairs with her friend Jenny so I went to answer. Standing there was a tall Chinese man in a dark blue uniform with gold buttons and trim who took off his matching cap, bowed and said:

‘Mr Moorcock?'

‘Yes—I—'

‘A car for you.' He spoke perfect Oxford English without affectation or mockery, though I thought at first he said ‘I care for you.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘You'll need a small bag.'

‘Um…' I looked past him at the street.

Where the tourist buses usually stopped now lounged a long green Lagonda. I had, of course, seen the car once or twice before and knew where she came from. But oh, what a beautiful machine! She might have been driven out of the factory that day. No wonder they called them classics. She was as English as they made them, down to the particular rake of her mudguards, the long, tapering boot, the arrogant tilt of her bonnet. Just enough deco to emphasise her elegance. I had ridden in some sweet, famous cars but she was the best.

In a bit of a daze I packed a few things. As soon as I'd told Helena, I was off in the green Lagonda with a warm wind in my hair. Suddenly I was the happiest man in the world. I felt intensely secure and privileged. I had no intention of staying long at the Sanctuary. I'd begun to take so many things for granted. I lived in the world of the beautiful people. I had a hat with feathers in it, just like the Cavaliers. My hair was long, my beard trim. I had big boots and belts and fancy silk jackets. I had a Rickenbacker twelve-string. I had a beautiful partner who rolled expert joints and cared for me as tenderly as she cared for a beloved pet. And if I felt euphoric in that Lagonda, I had grown habitually used to luxurious cars, a certain amount of euphoria, and I knew in my bones that soon I would not be bothered by the Swarm until I rode back in that beautiful leather upholstery, a liveried chauffeur bringing me home.

‘May I ask who sent you?' I asked from the backseat, leaning forward and talking to the bloke in uniform. ‘Was it Father Grammaticus?'

‘The car belongs to Mrs Melody, sir.' Although very formal, the dignified chauffeur spoke English with patient grace. ‘The lady's mother.'

‘Mother?' I was more than curious. ‘The lady?'

The driver was very forthcoming. ‘So I believe, sir. She married a man called Melody. An anglicisation, of course. It's Persian. He was in furs. Jewish, I think. Or a Copt, maybe. She met him in San Francisco. I hardly know him. I, by the way, am Prince Lu Wing.'

I added under my breath, ‘Prince Lu Wing? I thought they'd abolished aristocracy in China.' The name was curiously familiar.

I knew next to nothing of Chinese dynasties and aristocracy except that Fu Manchu had planned to re-establish his family on the throne of China. Mao had seen an end to all that. Maybe this guy was from Taiwan or Macao or one of those other disputed bits of China? I had almost certainly read his name somewhere. It was just as likely to have been in an old
Detective Weekly
from the '30s
—The Terror of the Tongs
.

I had known Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Daimlers, Bristols, Mercedes, Jaguars, Duesenbergs, as well as my own wonderful Nash. I loved big high-performance cars and enjoyed every possible form of modern transport, including airships, seaplanes and gyrocopters, and had been stoned in most of them, but I'd known nothing quite as comfortable as that relatively short run in the dark green Lagonda. The car got a lot of attention as, glittering enamel and brass, she swung out up Ladbroke Grove, paused at the lights and accelerated up Holland Park Avenue and Bayswater Road. We purred down Park Lane like the King of Wonderland. I felt like waving to the people we passed. I rolled a joint and was beautifully stoned by the time, ladylike in her dark green livery, she sashayed into the Strand, flew along Fleet Street and, finally, swept down to Carmelite Inn Chambers, through the gates to stop at last just outside The Swan With Two Necks.