Two marriages, one death.
Donald Rollo Hogg-Tod to Charlotte Jane Vallender (Toddy to Bonny), Salisbury Cathedral, Saturday 24 July 1971. All around Bonny’s place there were doves that drew white scrolls against the trees. They were out for her wedding. They were swooning at her wedding. They were falling and tumbling as they’d never dared before. They were dolphins in the air for you Bonny, for you Toddy. The marquee was almost a big top. Its guys were like sinew in steroid-porn – so taut they might snap. The overwhite canvas was distended. The acacias, the Scots pines, the cedar, the wellingtonias were such a green they might have been cleaned for that day, that special day when Douglas lost his little girl. Sky: blue as a flag. Everyone: drunk, cheerful as a halfwit, hot, just loving the breeze when it shows. Eddie: sad as war.
Try seeing Bonny all swan-white against the canvas with her sacrificial garland of leaves, the green and white laurel that’ll be dumped when the hymen’s ruptured. Oh look at her and her flowers and her rapturous smile, her smile of consummatory anticipation, her twinkly grins to her friends who were parties to the conspiracy of purity (Smeggy Beggy, Chrissie Wasserman, Gayle Tingay). She had her arms around Douglas whom she hated everyday but that day. Monica breathed gin and quinine, her face was stiff in a representation of learnt joy, she wore a moustache of violet lipgloss, she wore it on her teeth too like bad blood from gingivitic gums. Her suit was the colour of the buddleias that lolled with brewer’s droop: too bright, that’s what the mondaine glances of the Hogg-Tod’s side said, and three years too short. They were smart people, their London friends.
The division between the two families who united that day, till death did (and it did) and not, yet, pecuniary; not even of accent or, crudely, of class but topographical. The Hogg-Tods were quasi-metropolitan, weekdays in town, weekends at the estate (2,700 acres of mixed use farmland; house ascribed to the Bastard brothers; parkland; stables; cottages, a ha-ha; two farmhouses). They dropped the names of world-class decorators, hairdresser friends of royalty, wits from chatshows, theatrical producers, sartorially adventurous antique dealers, faces famous from magazines – people whom, surely, no one actually knew. But they did know them and here they were, gossiping, drinking, yawning, stretching. Exhibits, exotics from a distant zoo, fielding the awed, dowdy, all-right-for-some questions of Douglas and Monica’s exhibits, mundanes from the local zoo. Monica had never believed that anyone really wore Nehru collars; she had never believed that women of her age really wore dresses made of Moroccan cushions; she had never seen so many queers before let alone allowed them in her garden – and so many of the queers weren’t queer but just had the Jules family voice, the clothes, the wrists: she could tell they weren’t queer from the way they homed in on Nicola Begley (of whose sobriquet she, like its bearer, was innocent) – they could smell her, sense her aptitude and lubricious ambition; they could tell. Well, so could anyone have done. Smeggy Beggy was dressed in silver and black: four-inch black platforms with silver sequins, silver satin hotpants, black blazerette, nothing else, save a black fedora with a silver band.
Toddy had complained all week of stomach cramps, of duodenal fire, of such pain when passing motions that he had quit eating. Butterflies, was the unanimous opinion of the Vallender side; and the boondocks doctor, Bailles Barker, whom his mother had called to the farm, had, in his incompetent commonsensical way, agreed. Butterflies. They fluttered by, from buddleia to mahonia, lighting on lillies, clumping through the thick thick air on that special day. All afternoon, men from Vallender Light bent hunchbacked in the meadow on the far side of the river, trowelling divots, fashioning holes for the night’s display. Beside the leet where I’d seen a viper and had so scared Eddie (p. 8) and beyond the molehills that their coworkers were creating, others of Douglas’s employees were erecting a lance-work frame as high as a house, built of thick stays, buttressed with same, hatched with laths, carpentered with swiftness, bolted with ferrous rods, covered with wire, leaned on by ladders, hung with conjoined shells of blue paper, a hoarding for the advertisement of a marriage.
Poor Eddie sat on the lawn’s last terrace. I hadn’t seen him in seven years. He had been back to The Garth once, late on an October night in 1968 when he had spoken twenty or so words and had stayed for half an hour: ‘Hullo, just going by, thought I’d see how you were … Well, thanks for the tea, have to get along.’ In between he had said nothing. His demeanour had precluded the expectation of replies to the embarrassed, banal, earnestly inquisitive questions Monica and Bonny had asked him. (Douglas was away on business, thanks be.) Eddie nodded in the kitchen, he shrugged, a bit. He squeezed a tea bag between his right thumb and that hand’s little finger. He stared – mother and daughter subsequently realised – at his reflection in the window, he hung over the garden with broken nails and hands grained with oil. He refused to stay the night and scratched the crown of his scalp, his head down over the table so they saw the sore where, evidently, his damaged fingers had done damage, balded him.
He was there at the wedding, uninvited by either side, silent, teetotal, apprised of its occurrence, perhaps, but not of its date by a newspaper announcement. He didn’t say. But he was there. He had grown tall and his suit was a short man’s, a short dead man’s, bumfreezing, north of the ankles, tight, buttoned, old, subfusc. His head was near shaven. He might have been on day release. There were dandelions around him (Douglas never found a gardener diligent enough to tackle the steep parts of the lawn); the diuretic leaves flanked him, framed his legs which were institution-white between his Maclary Easy socks and cuffless trouser ends, up near his knees, bermudaishly. I kept meaning to go across, to hug him or something. But Chrissie Wasserman. And besides, he was a statue of himself. He was forbidding, not part of the party, apart. It’s shaming to admit to such negligence, to acknowledge it after all these years, after all the poison that has flowed under the bridge. His very presence was an embarrassment. We wanted him to have prospered, not to have conformed to all expectations, not to have crept into sad adulthood, not to have been sunk by life, not to have been dressed by charity, not to have had his scalp randomly shivved so that there remained tufts, missed bits, capillary islands, isthmi of razorlessness. His crown was gnawed, scarred. He was grown up now; he had grown up into covertness, resigned quietude. He was a man now. His being was as scarred as his crown. He was a veteran of solitude, a victim of friendlessness, of lovelessness: this was discernible even before the figure was recognisable as Eddie’s. His body broadcast his plight. He was asocial of necessity for he lacked both the elemental nous and the will to make contact. And such bereavements foment a brittle carapace, a deterrent to others. He had handed Bonny a small cubic box wrapped in magenta paper: he leaned towards her, clutching it with two hands as though unused to such a manoeuvre, as though figuring the way to do it. He ignored Douglas in a manner which suggested that he might not even have recognised him. Then he had gone to sit alone, to talk only if talked to.
The sun in the west blessed our beautiful couple with a display of a million pinks striped with baby blue. (Who knew what that portended? Eddie? Eddie.) It was dark and dancing had started by the time that I sat down beside him on a riverside bench. In the marquee animated silhouettes kicked each other, threw their fists high in pain. Anthracite Entropy electrified the night with douce sighing guitars, electric violin and keening voices; facile predictability, that’s the thing. The audience must always be ahead of the band. Eddie seemed untouched by the amplified balm, the formulaic thrills. He never once looked at me. He made no greeting. He spoke like he was taking up a conversation recently interrupted. He leaned forward on the bench as though uncomfortable in his own body, as if it didn’t fit him right.
He said: ‘We’re going to build one like that … something like that – high, really high.’
I gazed across the river and the meadows to where the floodlit spire rose from black clouds of bough.
‘You are? Who’s we?’
‘Maybe not quite like that, but very high. I like the red.1 The red’s important, very important. The red is the blood.’ His voice was light, croaky, dry as old paper.
‘Just who is going to do this?’
He ignored my incredulity: ‘Oh our church … the people I work besides. The Founder. It’ll be one of the wonders of the world. Do you believe she loves him?’ Eddie was watching the ripply lanterns in the water, his face was hardly lit, his hand was soothing his trashed crown. ‘She loves him. She loves him not. Him – Toddy: what does someone like that have within. Born with the lights out. And he’s never tried to put them on. That’s what’s so … Sniff sniff – I smell emptiness. When they opened him there was a fridge where his soul should have been. Do you know that song? … I forget how it goes on.’
I was sitting beside a man who talked to me as if he was talking to himself which was who he habitually talked to. His concessions to dialogue were effortfully courteous, unpractised.
‘She loves him. He loves her,’ I murmured, apologetically.
‘He’s got the cheek of the devil.’ Eddie spoke in such a way to strip the phrase of figurative frivolity. Eddie spoke as the unhappily dead speak in dreams. ‘I don’t hate him Jont –’ Did he address me thus? He did, a nonce appellation, and a swan shone on the bottlegreen black. And the band played a roller coaster riff, a swooping sex ride from tension to release. I thought of Chrissie Wasserman.
‘Coming in?’ I asked Eddie.
He surprised me. ‘Sure,’ he said, and he followed me up the stepped terraces of The Garth’s blue lawn. It lifts your step, that kind of lawn. I felt him beside me then I didn’t and turned to see him walking backwards, his head high at last, fixed on the red light which now, with floodlights cut and nothing beneath it, was hung alone in the sky – a low rogue star going to the bad. He walked backwards with rehearsed facility, step by certain step, fluently, with full knowledge of where the serial slopes were.
‘That’s Mary’s band,’ he said as we entered the marquee, ‘good friend, Mary.’
The girl singer was wailing, her unmiked hand clutched her ear in the approved manner. She was sweaty, coarsely pretty, pudgy.
Toddy didn’t fall. When they danced with Bonny’s arms all about him and his about her, enraptured, engrossed, they turned into one sinuously leaping creature, a reeling conjunction of desire and understanding. His concentrated tenderness, her unmitigated smile, their shared secret, their tight womb of mutual satisfaction – they displayed all the magical banalities of love. How it heightens everything! During that state’s reign just doing the washing up together (she with brush and Fairy, he with towel) is a fulfilling duet, going to a petrol station is an adventure, nothing seems commonplace, selflessness is no chore. An island of love for two where everyone is equal. (This is theory: there was a dishwasher in the desolate farmhouse on the high downs that Alasdair and Jill Hogg-Tod gave their son as a wedding present. There was a Shell pump at the farm two miles away. Mrs Bohigas, the live-in at the Hogg-Tods’ house near Marble Arch, took a 12 or an 88 to Holland Park three times a week to clean the flat Toddy peppercorn-rented from his parents.) As they danced that night they were cynosural, they radiated absolute conviction in their union: it seemed the aptest thing on earth, you could believe it might last for ever. They shone, they were more themselves than they had ever been, they had extra edge, they were super-defined. Everyone of the four hundred celebrants knew it. This wasn’t an illusion prompted by the profligacy of the occasion. (’Johnson: she put the screw on me. She blackmailed me into bankruptcy. That dance floor – d’you know what they stitched me for? And those longhairs, they should have paid me. Ever think about going into ice? It’s only frozen water! And I tell you, the capacity of the human bladder is infinite …’) Toddy didn’t fall. He succumbed to an invisible punch, to a silenced shot. The band had finished its first act. Toddy held Bonny’s hand and was craning over his shoulder, laughing, when he folded. The armature of his trunk collapses. For a half second that has lasted all my life he gasps in shocked and dopey wonderment, his face is that of an abattoired nag, not yet indignant at the wrong visited on the attached body, still acquainting itself with incredulity. Then his teeth locked in high pain. Whole decades; prospective wrinkles; a future physiognomy that will never be – I know what Toddy would have looked like had he lived till now, beyond now. (He’s finite, fixed, as was, full stopped. So are they all.) Fall, no; felled, yes. The temporary nave is mute. The sound has gone. The cynosure is supine. The tableau is still and terrible: tilted glasses, united focus, Bonny’s scrabbling genuflection (which tears a seam). Toddy has sullied his own wedding, punctured the fizz-powered illusion we all subscribe to. He has stained nuptial fantasy with illness, with corporeal imperfection. He has deviated from his role: he was The Bridegroom, the archetype whose procreative virility was that day sanctioned, the ritual initiate and harbour of felicity. Now he is mere man; blood and bone on the blink. Grimacing, gasping, clutching at the recycled breath of his disappointed audience. He has let us down, made ghouls of us all, turned us to embarrassed stone. His hair is spread across the expensive floor, he’s twisted, internally snared, good as naked, defenceless as a newborn. When we move we move in slomo, fighting the thick air, submitting each other to ocular interrogation; we move forward and stand back. Exceptions: Bonny whose love is manifest in her cradling of her damaged future, in her pleading glances; and Poor Eddie who soars down from the band’s scaffold waking a moulting mat of grocer’s grass behind his cheap daps.
Eddie had an audience here, a quorum to act to (p. 210). Grocer’s grass haloed him. He was the mechanical. Donald Rollo Hogg-Tod was the breakdown. Poor Eddie is here to mend it. Lucky for Toddy that Eddie was there, with Mary and the band, chatting. Toddy didn’t even writhe. (Wolfe, Nelson, Chatterton are the precursors.) His hands feebled about his trunk, as if to effect a cure, as if to indicate hurt’s locus for someone else to cure. Poor Eddie, whose very alacrity makes the world-class hairdressers, the decorators, the languids unite with the bright dowds and the boondockers in a collective gasp that steals air as surely as fire might. Rhooss. Poor Eddie – a comic strip saint in mufti: willed to resurrect the leading man, to salvage.the masque, save our day, deliver us from embarrassment.
All the tense reflexive benefaction of four hundred lives conducts itself through Eddie’s hands, through his balmy arm. It’s these limbs that he defines himself with, limbs that are now practised, hotter than ever. Does the temperature rise with experience or according to the size of the audience? This is a question that Chubb will address. Eddie’s audience in the marquee is not that much smaller than those he plays to at The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption in its spooky new premises on Portsdown; those audiences believe, this one merely wishes. Debility, other people’s pain, strangers’ tumours, the unseeable sores inside bodies owned by men he despises or envies or has been slighted by – these, together with witnesses, are the elemental conditions of Eddie Vallender’s animation. The credulity of the witnesses is probably not pertinent; besides, it will increase during the performance of the act of healing which is an act of persuasion, of shamanic theatre, of magical assertion, of balsamic promiscuity, of Power Cure (Ray Butt’s epithet). Eddie’s gratification is the awe in which he’s held. The gift he is host to is as dissociate from him as are Mithracin and Vepesid from Daph’s starched auxiliaries who administer them. But he has a greater incentive than they have in achieving an immediate and conspicuous amelioration of the patient’s condition. Is it possible that he might overdose one in his eagerness for applause? Can he overdose with manual heat? Can he transmit too much? Is his charge measurable? These are more for Chubb. Eddie wasn’t Butt’s child (p. 204) but he was Butt’s creature and he healed to convert not because he had faith in Butt, Buttism, The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption but because in that one and trinity was the source of his subjects. They came to Butt. Thus they fed Eddie’s addictive need for wens, rashes, dorsal messes, friable bones, fungi in the tender parts, capillary crustacea, acne, nosological freaks, one-off debilities of the trachea, spots in the box, boffin-foxing bacteria, wounds, itches, Munchhausens, baldies, euphemisms, protein lacks, viral mysteries, HoTLoVE. He used them. He used Butt. He owned a selective competitiveness, had grown it as a defence; he exploited his antic misfortune: no one could match his parents’ deaths. He always won there. He would win here. Everyone needs him to: the Magreb dresses, the Rotary frocks, both sides, and Bonny, still in white. She’s bent forward, her flared sleeves spread to suppress crowd proximity. Eddie plays deaf piano. His genual movements are hardly perceptible, yet soon he has set himself in purposeful profile – so far as majority regard goes. Some dumb doctor (Bailles Barker) rolls up too late to get on the case. The society abortionists on the groomside have forgotten this bit of medicine if they knew it and are too badered to move, anyway. Anyway, Bonny won’t let; her arms are up, her cousin’s are down on her beloved whose are still here and there. The one pointing to the spot, the other waving, still, for help. He was so insentient that he didn’t know when help had arrived, he didn’t know the form it took.
Smell them watching: canapés on their abated breath, the sweat of expectation, synthesised scent and alcohol, sex on hold.
Hear them: it’s the strain of the day, of the preparations, of stag overload, of achieving the novel state of husband, of being the main player.
Eddie heard nothing. He floated on his knees. It rushed through him. Salt seeped from his pores till he shone. He was more than a mechanical, he was a machine, an agent ministering to a patient denied the choice of belief or disbelief: the faith was all Eddie’s. Whether the patient be credulous or sceptical or mockingly dismissive is, again, of no moment: all that is demanded is that he or she submit passively and statically to The Epiphanic Hands (Ray Butt’s coinage again). Toddy fulfilled this condition. Time trickled, seconds stretched: the will, the power, the need – and, at last, the relief.
When Toddy sat up it was as if from a planned nap, from stolen minutes with Morph.
And the silent statuary regained the electricity it had lent to Eddie, used it to cheer and clap. Noise up, please. Colours mixed again under the canvas top, among the flowers. Bonny hugged and cuddled and nuzzled the man who had been returned to her; she swung about, showing him off. Then she moved to Poor Eddie. He was keenly scraping his crown, standing stoop-shouldered, disacknowledging the wonderment he had craved and fed: such ignoral gives him power, collusion with his audience would lessen it. He had his space which no one impinged on. (Respect? Fear? Repulsion?) Physical space, his circus ring. The only person in that vast pavilion, in that throng, who was separate from every other person.
Bonny’s face is a practised simper. She holds Eddie’s hands. Can he not discern the falseness in the face’s set? She whispers with brazen intimacy: something like ‘It’s so great to see you. I’m so glad you came.’ Words such as those, no doubt. Toddy stands ready to take his turn at orthodontal patronage. Bonny leans forward to kiss Poor Eddie’s chronically unkissed cheek, in gratitude; the disposition of Eddie’s trunk suggests that in his society (whatever that is) the social kiss is unknown. It’s charmingly awkward: two worlds collide in one brushing buss, in a peck so light it’s underweight. Her dry lips, his bad skin. Does he mistake this conventional gesture (made in that arena, before those eyes, on her wedding day with her husband beside her) for a sex kiss? Does he believe that it’s an invitation to buccal potholing, to tongue fencing? Me, I’d say that he made no mistake, that he simply went for it.
Keen Eddie’s hot hands clasp his poor coz’s shoulder blades, his crosshatched knuckles and granite-crescent nails are matt on white taffeta’s pure lustre, they ruche the dress of intactness’s pretence. Lubric Eddie’s famished mouth limpets hers: push-push for maximal entry. Eight hundred eyes bear witness to lingual rape. A lesser offence yet an offence none the less. Poor Bonny bends back broken backed. And he follows – he always followed; he was always with her – no matter how long it was since he’d clocked her. She was always at the front of his mind. His dirty grey suit (so dirty that the cloth’s colour may be graphite, may be thunder, may be ocean) sullies as it envelops. It swallows the silken folds. His mouth wolfs the folds of hers. Limpet, leech, bad clam, wicked barnacle: his rooted oyster tickles her, a joyful prick touching the base, tasting. There’s tenseness at the edges, muscular astonishment, mealy mucus slimes between them. What on earth? Toddy makes to wrest him from her; that’s all it needs. Bonny’s forearm is across her mouth, wiping. Poor Eddie, hands dangling tight beside his rosined strides, scurries from the stage of his triumph, furtive in his chastisement, twitchy, slighted. He bid no adieus. He knew all eyes were on him as he sought the shelter of the dark garden, of cosseting night, of disappearance and invisibility.
When the night is shrill with colour, when it’s bright enough to blind, when rupees split in succeeding quarters and change to dazzling annas, when the man I saw becomes a bird, when the sky is filled with fountains and my head falls back so far it hurts – that’s when I remember the duplicating river on 24 July 1971 and the thrilled silhouettes on the bank, that’s when I remember the firework maker’s children:
Eddie, who had vanished again, who had gone to the mattresses again, to pig it on loneliness, to build a cross.
Bonny, in whose honour the sky shone and crackled, whose dress was shaded now coral, now eau de nil, serial pastels according to the empyreal festoons, to the plumes and cataracts, to light’s temporary geometry. There was a fairground in the heavens for you Bonny – freeform dippers, jewelled waltzers on their sides, Ferris segments rushing to oblivion. Chemical fire lit you. You were the show too. No one noticed that your husband clawed his tummy, that he could hardly raise his head. If he saw the synthetic spectrum with which his father-in-law had extravagantly countered nature, he saw it in the river, in ripply ellipses: the flow and totality of that trade-boast passed him by. He hurts that bad. The pain had returned as soon as Eddie disappeared. He imagined that his intestines were eels – they were cannibalising each other in the privacy of him, biting blindly, making meat of his milt. Across the river pyrotechnic auxiliaries moved between shells and mortars, rocket frames, candle batteries, lattice poles, spoked wheels. The fireworkers were dwarfed by their momentary monuments, by the vastness of their gay battlefield, by the bigness of the neon blitz. The penultimate set piece, a cross of burning wheels, made day of night. The last one made this bank gasp. The hoarding’s lancework was ignited and there appeared, seriatim, from the meadow’s blackness, the profile faces of Bonny and of Toddy, an arrowed heart, and their names conjoined in loopy fizzing script. ‘Like a durbar in Blackpool,’ snided a world-class wit.
Mad Bantu: where is he?
Jean-Marie Meyer-Decker: ditto.
The band was on again. Chrissie Wasserman beamed a beam of milky promise. Toddy sat this one out, sipping at brandy to settle him. During the first number the girl singer merely leaned against an amp, sluttishly becoming, smoking. The violinist sang in her lieu. He wore all black: stove pipes, cuban heeled cowpokes, a frock coat, a curly brimmed hat with a pheasant feather petrolling its band and sweaty webs of black hair filigreeing his nape. He sang incomprehensibly, slurred the words; the tyranny of tone over lyrics was total. The tone was a leeringly lubricious baritone, the voice was one used to asking for sexual favours, used to pleading for them. It was thrilling. It is the sort of voice I am ashamed to be touched by. Chrissie Wasserman’s breath, her scent, her liquid mocking eyes. She was touched too by this aphrodisial agent who stared unsmilingly down as he played violin with sprawlingly knuckled hands. Meaty hands to coax such plaintive wailing from a fiddle, to make strings sing such mournful notes–notes which resolved themselves as the number petered into a lentissimo dirge based on Dvorak’s Humoresque. ‘Hail Mary,’ cried the drummer, and the girl singer sashayed to the mike again, shaking her insect hair from her face. The violinist scowled. He suspended his instrument by its pegs. It hung from a bulbous thumb and a sausage finger. It dangled there a sec, the bow across it, an arrow through a heart. These hands: they’re trout-skin, maculate, hepatically freckled. Is this guy a drinker? There are no other dermal signs – no Bardolph, no Rudolph, no red vein skein. These hands are old, otherworldly, primal, down from another race. They’re hands for neckjobs, not hands for bands.
The singer screeched the night away. We danced and drank till dawn: kedgeree, shepherd’s pie, shepherd’s warning. I woke, late afternoon, beside Chrissie Wasserman. Lorry driver’s crutch, and it was raining outside. I woke beside her for years to come: the morning after the night Toddy died; the day we heard what Eddie had done; the day of the fire at the desolate farmhouse (p. 431).
John Nat Butt to Susan Sheila Bannister (Jonjon to Hankey), The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption, c/o Fort Widley, Portsdown Hill, Pompey PO6, Wednesday 5 April 1972. (Poor Eddie was there, and so was Mary. The casts were otherwise different.)
Hankey swelled with baby, Jonjon swelled with prepaternal pride: he had double the muscles too, and half the brain, he was the Voy with the muscles to carry Ray Butt; he hadn’t the brain to get his brothers to take their turns in hefting the geek. He was loyal. He would call the baby Ray; he did call the baby Ray; Ray is Jonjon’s big boy now; he never was his little boy really – Jonjon was away all those years, in the echoing daddy-zoo they visited every third Sunday.
Jonjon was practical, on the soft side, a donkey. Not the man to sit at The Founder’s right hand but diligent with building suppliers. The nuances of Buttist soteriology might baffle him but he regarded The Cross Of The World as a job of work, to be carried out to the best of his ability, for his dad’s sake. You couldn’t send Sonny and Laddy, looking the way they did, to the nineteenth at Sinah and expect planning officials and elected representatives to talk to them colleague-to-colleague, accept big drinks from them, get matey with them. Jonjon had no problems here nor in the matters of the aggregate in concrete, of discounted rheostats, of keeping the welders sweet: his man management skills! Lift a jar to them! Firm but fair. Feet on the ground. At one with hoddies; indeed he speaks their language rather than his father’s. Buttism demands a capacity for fantasy (not imagination); it demands credulity, desperation, un-appeasable soul-hunger. Dogged Jonjon lacks all these. Yet he’ll still square up to a saloon barrister in The Salty Dog whom he overhears using the expression ‘Mumbo-Butto’. Blood’s thicker. Butts stick by each other. The tattooist beneath the rail arches on The Hard at Portsea knows that. He burned ‘The Founder’ and a representation of Calvary into each of The Voys’ right forearm. Jonjon could have done without but familial unity told, and triplet pressure. He bore the scorching with fortitude. The melded reek of spirit, ink and his own broiled skin reached the furthest olfactory filaments, the ones near his brain – that helped him remember it.
Hankey’s father Arth bravefaced it, stood in his corner shop up North End in his white grocer’s coat with his ginger grocer’s stripe across his freckled grocer’s pate and made the best of it: ‘She’s marrying into the celebrity.’
He was a one for smut, but not when his own daughter was in the frame. He dealt Omo: ‘For washing or display would that be Missus?’
But he wasn’t happy, not when it was his own daughter on the fast and loose. ‘They’re nuts them Butts,’ he told Mother over his luncheon meat and piccalilli, then repeated that rhyme which he had worked on all morning. They had used to sit there in the elbow-greased dining room of the flat above the shop, tune into Butt Of The Joke on the walnut Ekco, grin, knit (her), polish (him), fall about so that she dropped one pearl, so that he smeared the marble base with Brasso, fall about. Such a caution. ‘Chas Pothecary met him. Natural as weather, he said,’ said Arth, weekly, over the fullfruit credits. That was when Hankey was still in smock and Startrites, was still Susan. They wanted a proper wedding for her, uterine expansion notwithstanding: she was their only one. They wanted the pealing bells of Old England, a Rolls with a harness of ribbons, a lovely, lovely service so they could smear Vaseline on memory’s lens and retrospect the day’s soft edges in their dotage.
They did not want nutty Butt ranting from the ramparts of Fort Widley, holding their only one under water, rubbing roosterdown in her titian pageboy, cracking no jokes, inciting his tribe (the Nut Buttalion). They wanted none of it. Ask Arth. Pop into the Done Our Bit Club where he whiles away his resentful widowhood among Pel chairs and full ashtrays playing doms and drinking lemon tops with a grudge of ex-servicemen who laid down their lives at Anzio for nippers who’ve never shown any gratitude.
He was rash to make his feelings known. He questioned the propriety of a marriage ceremony conducted by Ray Butt, he had no doubts about its illegality, he insisted on a registry office, he wasn’t having any grandchild of his a bastard and he said so.
The Founder fulminated against the pagan grocer, spun in his chair, crushed a leucous roll of plans of The Cross Of The World, beat his braced steel corset with a Coke can: ‘Me … I … I … You two –’ Jonjon and Hankey emeried the floor of the subterranean office with their twitchy sheep feet.
‘I didn’t build this, all this, so I could be mocked by you two lovebirds and some pipsqueak registrar. Where does he get his authority from? You tell me that. Who from? Does he touch otherness? Does he shit! Who does he listen to? He doesn’t even listen does he, doesn’t know to listen. It’s just a job with registrars. A registrar’s soul – ha! Deskpilots. What sort – look at me Jonjon – what sort of marriage are you two after? D’you know what secular means? It means profane, two fingers to God. Here: registrar’s language – the marriage contract. What is it – buying a plot of land, taking on a summer season? … Our Church – me – we unite you, we weld you in the water of the fowl and the sea. Protection through immersion. Permanence through the element. I give you my all, not just as a father but as a vector of things so far unnamed, of the mysteries. You mean so much to me you two. You shall share. I shall transmit it to you in the moment of your union.’
Ray Butt’s high-performance longplay Nagra recorded every word: day, night, dreams, musings, false starts, rehearsals, planet solutions, oaths, maxims, snores, prayers, business meets, liturgical wheezes, phone chats, quarrels, supper banter, succour. He always took it to the toilet, just in case.
He said: ‘Get your certificate. You go and get it. But don’t you ever believe for a second that it’s worth anything: a union sanctioned by the civil service, by the mayor and council. And you make sure you get it on a different day. I don’t want the day dirtied by temporal … frivolity.’ (Thus do prophets compromise.) ‘I don’t want my church kowtowing. You read me? My church is the best church because me, I’ve suffered more, I’ve pushed myself so deep I’ve had the bends. This is what you need to cotton to Son. I’ve been there!2 … Closer to the centre than any fat guru wallah, than anyone since …’ It went without saying. Modesty forbade.
He glared to make his big boy Jonjon understand. Oh and where had all the girl’s gorm gone? She was shy of this irate stomach in a ‘founder’ T-shirt. His navel’s a nipple and he’s not got his legs on; even without them there’s an excess of metal – the corset that corrugates his flesh, the reeling chair, and then the M.O.D. surplus he lived in, that he fitted in with. File cabinets, file trolleys, boxes, tables, desks, radiators, lamps. No chairs. Everyone but Butt was made to stand in this mildewed, strip-lit room, two storeys down in the Portsdown chalk. The Founder-Bunker. So it was derided by the HGVs and palette-loaders and stock clerks of Flamebryte (Paints and Specialist Varnishes) Ltd., which rented most of the former fortress for storage. Its brick-vaulted tunnels and mycodermal chambers were lined with shelves bearing volatile cans of proprietary hues: Oslo, Pudding Yellow, Monument Grey, Windsor, Forest Red, Hampton Court, Log, Dragon, Beacon, Uppark, Marriott Black, Stresa 313, Beau Romeo etc.
Jonjon and Hankey were blessed, they got a registrar’s cancellation.
A couple, unpressed by the imminence of Napisan and rusks, had been fazed by the fatidic date, 1 April; they didn’t want their wedding to be a conventionalised prank, they put it back a fortnight, Sam and Ursula did.
Sam was a pram mechanic, Ursula was a nurse, an employee of Jonjon’s Aunt Daph (coincidence), a G&G operative at the poles of The Life Spectrum (Butt). Sam and Ursula both had a pro interest in kiddies. But no matter how they tried they couldn’t cook a little one of their own. There was no bundle of joy to fill a Pedigree, fasten in a Maclaren, to bounce on sprung rubber suspension, drool on the lacquered carriage work, practise motor skills on the line of plastic heads stretched between those chrome wingnuts that Dad Sam had buffed till his wrist ached. There was no cute mite for Ursula to coo over, stuff her nipples into, no baby botty to Eeeziwipe and sprinkle with icing sugar, no tiny mitt whose model perfection might be clasped in her worn delivery hands. Their little home in Telephone Road was haunted by lack, it was a site of bereavement. Other children’s voices, other grown-ups’ stentorian warnings, all the mewling and playcries can be heard from afar in their little home – they bounce off the bloody brick in Pompey’s straight streets. There are always echoes in the glaring brick grid, in the unyielding grid of Pompey’s straight streets which are canyon-conductors of sound from unseeable sources. It moves and it lasts, long after the last slapped brat has wept away to bed. Then there’s no more noise to taunt the regretfully childless; they may sink into sexual union, willing it to be more than recreational. Sam and Ursula were not the sort to gamble on an April Fool’s wedding, on the possibility of a hexed future, on doing anything which might dissuade the generational god of their earnest. Who would ever run the risk of making themselves equinoctial gowks? Jonjon and Hankey, that’s who.
Afterwards they stand in the municipally floral square outside the registry office; Jonjon grinned, the photos show him slow and bovine. Hankey holds a vernal posy, she’s plump as butter in her milk-white maxi-suit. Mother clamps her hat against the crisp wester off Wight. Arth wears his medals and ribbons as for Remembrance. Two of the Anzio dead cup fags in their palms like they’re still on watch. Ray Butt: of course he absented himself. Daph is there, out of the kindness of her heart, gracious in roseprint, radiant as a royal, auntly proud, joining in, feigning frustration when her cash-and-carry confetti is lifted by the wind. It spins like polychrome motes, it swarms like a map of the breeze, collides with the wrought stones of civic pomp. Then its moment is over and there are drifts of pastel litter on the stylobate.
What are Sonny and Laddy up to, exactly? Shuffling, whispering, fingering their tie knots (fist-size, auxiliary adam’s apples). Conspiring, glancing about, backslapping with pinch-beck bonhomie. All around the square there are pigeons that draw grey scrawls against the grey stone; they mistake confetti for crumb; they swoop on the drifts (they should have learnt by now – that’s why they’re still only pigeons); they scatter when the black bike’s bell rasps and rings. Sonny prods Laddy. The photographer has finished. The secularly conjoined couple are crossing the street to the ribboned Rolls; yes, the Done Our Bit beckons.
The sweep’s face is impasted with soot. His black brushes are strapped to the black crossbar, they protract the bike, give it a stiff little tail. Even his black bike’s chrome is blackened. Sonny chases after him, pushing through the party. See Arth beckon him. Oh the joy of Mother – she’s scratching in her handbag for a florin. Daph claps. The sweep’s bike squeaks as it halts. Sonny has him by the elbow. He raises his stoker’s black cap to beaming Arth. Now, isn’t this a lucky stroke! Especially lucky given the diminution in the number of chimey sweeps in UK from 5,562 (25 of them women) in 1921 to 917 (two women) in 1971. But here is one, in the blowy Pompey square where Hankey has just pledged herself: the very fortuity smacks of a best ever marriage.3 Arth, leading the sweep to his daughter at the Silver Ghost’s door, swells too at last – here’s confirmation of his conviction’s probity, here’s proof, clopping beside him in stud-soled boots. Arth’s ginger swagger adverts bulk hubris, The sweep slaps his black hands together, rubs them: the artisan prepares. Hankey’s delight: Buccal 1): A slit like a fresh-incised wound, a greedy vulval bivalve. Buccal 2): A nude gum show, lips superstretched. Pedal: Twinkly steps of excitement or micturition. Her delight infects the party and its attendants. The Anzio dead wheeze blokeish gorblimeys. The photographer scurries into place with his tripod, the kidnapper of a witch and her broomstick. Everyone smiles. The sweep smiles. His teeth and gums are black, black as his bike, black as his cap, black as his overall, his teeth and gums are black, like he’s carved from coal, like he eats soot.
The bride Hankey, clutching her posy, yields her cheek to him. The sweep’s meat-pink tongue darts from its hiding place. He fixes his mouth to hers (there is now already grey saliva on her chin). His black hands are on her milk white suit, grubbing the lactic distension of her breasts; he’s feeling her up with his knee, groining her femora. Oh her suit of stains. A black hand parts her bottom. He bites her neck. The muffled gags of suffocation are succeeded by a yelp. It’s all so swift and they’re all so slow. It occurs to them, tardily, that this is not the way sweeps are meant to cast their beneficent spells. But by then it’s too late. The big day’s big light has been extinguished, the suit sullied – it now carries the partial cast of a stranger. The bride is blackened, magicked by darkness, contaminated by the very charm that was meant to bless her.
No it wasn’t. That was no sweep. That was Mad Bantu, paid to prank by Sonny there, and Laddy; they’re hardly able to straightface it through the tears and the incredulity. Slip him a foal and he’ll do your bidding, enforce your will, instruct, educate by jape/rupture/lisped oath/chummy wink (less fun). Do not bilk him. He does it for love, sure; he loves his work. But he doesn’t work for love alone, he works for equine multiples – foals, ponies, dobbins, bleedin’ dogs, that’s-my-boys. A concertina’d roll in the palm, thickness dependent on risk and likely satisfaction; this was good satisfaction and no risk – away on the bike before they closed in (tho’ he’d have sorted them).
He asked for more four days on. He was on bail, looking at a sending away. Sonny and Laddy showed in a Hillman, nicked for an hour from one of the guests at their brother’s genuine (Buttist) wedding. ‘Oi’m lookin at a sendin’ away,’ Mad Bantu told them.
‘No nono no. Dolt simple, it’ll be,’ said Laddy.
‘An’ I’ll guarantee that,’ guaranteed Sonny, ‘I will. They got a flat tyre, saw to it. Tight bastards. What kinda fuckin dowry d’you call that – second-hand fridge and thirty nicker. Tell you what I call it – a tightwad’s dowry. Disgrace.’
‘Worse than a fucking disgrace,’ said Laddy, ‘a fuckin insult to Jonjon, an’ us, an’ – well you name it. Now you hop in Madison. We just goin’ down the wog for a vinnerloo, get shaped up.’
Mad Bantu phased his Haslar Nurse4 across the corrugations of the rusty fence he stood beside, he played an iron shot with it, striking a macadam prune towards the slipway. Tipner Lake was putty mud; it was also gull-blue sea; it was, further, a feathering of down white wavelets, pretty pitched roofs on an Xmas card. The orange, oxidised conning towers of two scrapped submarines (one ‘M’ class, one ‘X.1’ class – Bantu knew the taxonomy of belligerence, it was about all he did know) rose from the water, pitted monuments to deep ocean death. He sniffed the spritzy gust, searching for a sign on it, rubbed the crutch of his camouflage trousers, thought, panorama’d the water, the hulks, the pyres of smouldering marine detritus (keels; hunks of funnel; vertical decks that are landborne and pointing to the sky before they curl with casual smelting; the Brunel chains of cosmic bondage; anchors whose saintly significance the Old Rev had lectured him in). Lucky omens, he remembered. Or were they the other way?
Sonny hit the halfring horn, leaned across Laddy, neck-stretched: ‘Get your fuckin anus on the seat Mad. We gotta move.’
Mad Bantu moved only his head, and then only a vertebra, just to show where he was staring, what he was mulling: ‘Still goin on then, yeh? You sure?’
Across the water shine the cruet of hoppers and silos, and the formic conveyor carts. And sheer above them is Fort Widley, The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption. And above that the girders and reinforcing rods that form the armature of the base of The Cross Of The World, which climbs higher to heaven and closer to Boss God aka The Empyrean Emperor aka The Good Guy In The Sky with every passing day, with every cannily invested donation to The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption. (Cheques payable to COW Fund, COTBER, PO Box 66, Pompey PO6).
‘Still boogyin’ then up there are they? Yeh? Your dad givin some chickens a seeing to is he? Yeh? I want an upfront.’
‘Piss off Bantu. Come on … All you gotta do is help us in. Then you can split.’
‘A stud upfront. And I want the cream of the souvenirs.’
‘Whatever you fancy matey. Take your pick. We’re not thieving, we’re just teaching the bastards a lesson, telling them not to show diss. Thirty quid and a ’lectroluck with previous!’
‘You can thieve to your heart’s content. Indeed I’d say – wouldn’t you say Sonny – I’d say you can have the lot. But no upfront. You in?’
Mad Bantu hurled his nurse at a sharktoothed van panel bearing the cackograph NON ENTRY TO DOG STADIUM TRESPASSER’S WILL BE: it teetered then wheeled over onto a skein of wire and ground elder.
‘It’s an offensive. Don’t want to be seen with an offensive,’ he said, bouncing on the back seat. They drove slow but not extra slow; that, too, would interest any uncle, give him an excuse to wave them down. There were four uniformed uncles, parked up in a Panda car on a blasted forecourt, each one forcing down a pint of cow milk to settle his piss lunch. Mad Bantu kept his head low, didn’t raise it till they were passing his alma mater, Meadowsweet Comp (formerly Bulwer’s Industrial and Ragged School). They turned into Kipling, slothed past the end of Madeira, crossed Battenburg – the cakes are disparate, the streets are the same street, ruddy blocks in the labyrinth of brick and RN surplus painted window frames and Omo invitations and thus-spawned problem kiddies. (You might say that Mad Bantu was one such, expanded.)
In Anwar’s Dodgy Tikka the Voys eat a vindaloo apiece, drink two large Vats apiece, on the house: ‘Anwar knows how to frighten off the taste of the Kit E Kat. Don’t you mate. Ought to be Hankey Bannister, mind. Still, tell you what Anwar – you’re one generous Halal, mate.’ Mad Bantu fasts, peers inside a plastic .00 scale Taj Mahal, lobs a flap of nan in the fish tank, asks the only other customer, a sexagenarian Victory tourist, if she wants to buy a comb.
They obtained entry to Arth’s corner shop through a tunnel between two houses in the middle of the terrace, along a lapfenced alley behind it (mind the stingers, mind the shrubs’ boughs, mind the bow-wows – invisible in their gardens), over the locked gate, through a store’s door that Mad Bantu shoulder punched. They eradicated system, order, propriety, the very quiddity of a life-in-retail founded on the immutable presence of Lifebuoy in the corner, Fray Bentos fourth shelf up, Crawford’s here, Carr’s there, Johnson’s Hardgloss Glocoat For Composition Floors in the little bay, Cardinal Red (ever in big demand in doorstep-proud Pompey) handy by the door to the shop itself. They turned rectilinearity into hazardous cardboard alps. They bunged the plug in the stoneware sink and turned on the tap. They made sludge of Winalot, stamped on Special K cartons, had Uncle Ben fuck Sarah Lee. The greengage-green blinds were tight over the windows of the shop itself. They were thin and the sun was obfuscated by the dark legends imprinted on them: and lower down, crescentic: ‘The bastard’s a Commie … Ruskie bastard,’ said Sonny. ‘And he doesn’t sell maps. Dishonest bastard.’ It would take a man like the old man Dod to read it (p. 446).
bannister provisions
.ham .spam .brawn
Mad Bantu understood none of this. He pocketed four jars Shippam’s anchovy paste and two bloater, a bottle of Camp Coffee, two tins of Meloids, a family can of Unox, hairslides and combs and Kirby grips. Laddy unplugged the deep freeze. Sonny sprinkled D-RAT-U on the bacon slicer. A fat man’s profile, dorsally inclined (leash? lunch?), hitchcocked 1. to r. across the blind to the dainty tap of quarter-irons. Sonny held a sentry finger to his lips, ushered them from the shop and up the stairs to the flat, the home their sister-in-law had now left, her parents’ treasure, the gallery of the three of them, their monument to circumscription and petty virtue. Spruce? Not a speck. ‘On moi muvver’s minge,’ proclaimed Mad Bantu, ‘slike a funeral parlour.’ Ship shape’s not the Pompey fashion. Shit shape is how the Voys left it: they excreted vindaloo ‘meat’ on the twin beds’ sheets then remade them, hospital corners and all, Bristol fashion.
‘You said you wasn’t thieving,’ complained Mad Bantu when he caught Sonny pouring Hankey’s mother’s paste cameos into his satin bomber. Sonny mimed a wristshandy. Laddy stuffed £117 into his underpants while Mad Bantu was thus occupied. They prowled about the crowded rooms, trashing, plundering, pissing (a hyperbolic arc from Mad Bantu makes an old gold sofa gamboge). It was theirs to mar, a manor to lord by desecration. The Voys gorged on revenge, ate it hot. Mad Bantu had Arth’s medals but not their frame, he tore a ribbon, he pinned them on his combat jacket. Satisfied.
3.48 it was when the Voys reparked the Hillman so tight to a vergeside hawthorn that they both had to exit by the driver’s door. It was near enough where they’d found it. No one would notice that it had been moved. No one could oath to the Voys’ not having been there the entire afternoon. Their attention had been on the ceremony, the Buttist nuptial theatre, the rites and ranting.
The congregation of a hundred people had assembled in the fortress’s bailey among Flamebryte’s prefabs and stacked palettes. Building work on The Cross Of The World which rose high above the fortress on the far side of the dry moat stopped at 2.20 though some workmen remained on the scaffolding for the view. The Founder had worked on this one, plotted it, choreographed it. Now he was on the rampart above the barbican flanked by two women with cymbals. Now he was among the host below, in the bailey. There was breeze and singing and smiling – oh there was smiling. Rictal collectivism. The bailey, which was also an arena, echoed. Hankey contact-hugged everyone present. She moved among the people – her people, Jonjon’s people, Butt’s people; most of them were Butt’s people, smiling. She wore feathers in her hair. Her long dress was impasted with them. Manual feathers, pedal feathers. From the scaffolding she looked like a vertical caterpillar. Eddie Vallender took her arm and led her to an unplumbed bath filled with seawater, taps attached, enamel stained, The Founder beside it. The people crowded round. Arth held Mother by the wrist, furtively. Eddie Vallender held a hand to their daughter’s occiput and a hand to her lumbar. He might have been a cracksman, a vet, a dowser. The engrossed virtuoso played to his familiars. He touched the feathered bride so that she would feel no cold during her immersion. Nor did she. She slipped into the water so that it lapped the rim and splashed the oily, crazed concrete of the bailey. The Founder leaned forward in his chair. She closes her eyes against the sacramental salt. What strong arms he has in the wet darkness, in the liquid warmth. She trusts his sinews, she believes that this gentle pressure marks her rebirth, she is blind as a kitten on the brink of life, she is closer than she has ever been to the child within her whose dependent bliss is briefly hers, closer than she has ever been to those immemorial forbears whose names she doesn’t know but who were fishes. And when she is drawn up from the briny, she opens her eyes on her groom wreathed in seaweed. She’s never seen him that way before. Ray’s big boy will do anything for his father, dress as a figure from a carnival float, dress for his wedding as a besuited Poseidon, anything. He is within Buttist limits; he is greeted by the faithful on his father’s terms, with sympathetic awe. The couple stand side by side facing The Founder. (She begins to shiver now.) The crowd crowds, basket cases to the fore for they are manifestly – through faith in mutilation – the most devout, the apes of Butt, the brides and grooms of The Good Guy; also they can’t see if they’re at the back.
Jonjon and Hankey might have been dredged from a wreck, saved from drowning in the gooseflesh of the harbour below. Those at the back hear Butt on the PA: ‘I wed you. I weld you. I meld you … Hankey who was Susan has joined up, she’s joined the world. By immersion, by the sucking of the planet’s past into her, she has gleaned the entry to the mysteries of knowledge. She is blessed with the possibility. I wed you, I bind you, I lock you in eternal love – not forgetting mutual respect. It was shown to me and I saw, I knew and can tell you that He will smile on you because he’s a good guy, THE BEST OF THE LOT –’ Loud at this point, and all the crowd cheers and an echoic best of the lot rises in a speech balloon to the gratified eavesdropper in the nimbus. ‘Your union is forged by me through Him with His mandate – that’s his personal sanction of you. You’ve got a chit from Him so to speak – clean bill of health.’ Hankey, soaked, shivered. But, yes, she was warm within. ‘I cleared it with Him. Through the power of prayer. And you know what prayer is, you know what prayer is, you-know-what-prayer-is. It’s –’
‘Volition fuelled by faith,’ rang the roar of the faithful rising on a Beaufort four round the fort’s newly holy bailey and its ramparts and its custom-blessed airspace. ‘That’s right. Volition fuelled by faith. Yes! I forge one from two – and from that, one will spring – another one – who will link with yet another – unknown to us, yes, maybe unknown to the two who’ll make that one, think about it, but not to Him – to make a further one. The movement of the generations is two-one-one, two-one-one. The eternal rhythm isn’t it? Like one of them dances that never goes out of fashion. The waltz, your folk dances … Ever watched a bird on the wing? Two-one-one. That’s how it flaps,’ he asserted, avianly ignorant, neglecting to check with the inspirational kittiwakes.
‘The miracle of flight, eh? But they’ve got other tricks, birds. There’re other lessons we can learn from them. I’d say – and this is my personal view, mind, this is observation not creed – I’d say that any husband has a lot to learn from the fulmar, fulmarus glace … glacioro whatever it is. Latin word. Roman word. Used by self-abusers in frocks. The bird can get along without that handle then, can’t it? What Jonjon here should inwardly digest if you’ll excuse the gag, the gag, is that when Mrs Fulmar is threatened, when someone comes messing, sniffing round – sniff sniff smells like fish to me – when that someone gets offensive, steps over the mark, you know, come up to my nest and inspect my fetchings, Mr Fulmar acts. He squirts this reeking oil; he’s got it secreted in his tummy. Right over them. Bull’s eye every time. And you know why: because he understands the sanctity of union. And he’ll fight to preserve it. And Jonjon’ll fight for Hankey not just because he loves her. Not just because he’s protective. Not just because he’s jealous. Not just because he’s proud. But because she’s half of him and he’s half of her. Limbs of the same creature. They are one. They are wholly one – that’s wholly with a double u and holy with an aitch. It’s in union that we are made complete. That we are plucked and trussed and baked. So to speak. That we fulfil our greater destiny, that we enter the realm of holiness. Before, on the Avenue of Life, you get double-parking, you get the milkfloats of painful experience, you get reds and you get ambers. But with this union it’s green light, green light upon green light. Green all the way right up the Avenue’s length, right on till you look around and you’re no longer on the Avenue: still green though – it’s bright smooth green all up the hills on either side of you. It’s a valley. Sunlit. And as you approach its end, the valley’s end, and there are steep slopes all around you and you can go no further, the light dims, double quick. You’d believe a cloud had just passed across the sun; its shadow darkens that valley – and you may shiver but you also smile. Sheer exhilaration. You realise you are in the valley of the shadow of death. And you have departed the Avenue of Life, but you’re just beginning – and you’re just going to yell with joy because you’ve walked on the right side down that long Avenue and you’re due The Best Ever Redemption. That’s true. You’ve walked in union. Two as one. As sure as hydrogen and oxygen make water. That’s marriage … Marriage. We’ve all had those fretful little worries haven’t we? About the marriage at the root of our faith. Let’s own up to it, shall we, to our weakness. We’ve heard the tittle tattle. The poison voices over the denominational fences. The sectarian fishwives. The gossips in purdah. The polygamous strumpets of Mormon. All the hypocrites in the cosmos whisper it. They weren’t married. The Holy Ghost crept up on the blind side and cuckolded poor Joseph. Jesus Our Lord Christ Almighty was born on the wrong side of the sheet. We demean ourselves by worshipping a bastard. I’ll own up. Yes, I have heard the rumours, they’ve made me wonder … And I’ve sought guidance here. I’ve had to steel myself to ask Him some hard questions. Of a frankly personal nature. Look: I got nothing against bastards; some of my best friends … I’m a bit of a mongrel myself. Aren’t I Mum? Nothing to be ashamed of. Listen and you’ll hear. It was told to me and I listened, I heard; I know and can tell you that He is no adulterer. He sullied no marriage bed. He did not make a scarlet woman of Mary. He put no horns on Joseph [p. 58]. And He acted with Joseph’s full knowledge. You ask – what sort of a husband can this Joseph have been then? Not Mr Fulmar, that’s for sure. Suspicion of poncing sounds near the mark. But you’d be wrong there too. What I’ll say to you – and what you may find hard to believe – is that there were three cousins: Elizabeth, mother of John The Baptist; Mary, mother of Jesus; and the little known one Naomi, who was, if you take my meaning, not as other women. Petitpoint and cake baking weren’t to her taste. Her interests lay elsewhere: building walls, watching the farrier shoe donkeys, hanging around the joinery shop in Megiddo. Tomboy. Good with her hands. Less good with her glands – pardon me, but I’m being candid. She had a moustache by the time she was fifteen. Didn’t get too many of the chaps after her as you can imagine, our Naomi. No oil painting, I’m afraid. Muscly, hairy, deep voice … She was shunned. If they’d had sideshows then they’d have put her in one. If they’d had Russia then she’d have been an athlete. But there is a place for all of us. No matter how small, how maimed – look at me – no matter how far we diverge from secular norms, from profane convention, The Good Guy’s job-hunting for us, computing our place in the jigsaw of time. Naomi’s role was to cross dress for Jesus, for her cousin Mary, for Him … Joseph was a woman. When Mary was pregnant The Good Guy provided her with a beard, a holy walker, a companion. He knew what she’d suffer if she had no husband but He also knew what she might suffer from a husband. Mysterious ways eh? Mysterious ways. Those three cousins were touched, blessed in their blood. Tell you what I’ll say to the doubters: why did Joseph take his family to Nazareth? Saint Matthew says they went there because it “was spoken by the prophets: He shall be called a Nazarene”. You can scour The Bible however many years you want and you’ll never find any prophet speaking such a thing, I guarantee that … The truth is they went to Nazareth because no one knew them there. No one knew that Mary’s child was The Good Guy’s. No one knew that Joseph was Naomi. And I tell you what: when Naomi began to get the hump with her cross dressing and looked like kicking up He had to give her an early bath. Wasn’t going to let her spoil the show, was He? He had to destabilise her glands – nothing modern medicine couldn’t have coped with, I’m glad to say; but they didn’t have endocrinology in Galilee Health District did they?’
The phrases underlined were repeated by the congregation. Hankey might have contracted pneumonia but didn’t. She might have caught a nasty chill but didn’t. Eddie’s manual balm guarantees internal heat. The congregation killed chickens for the eucharist which was also the celebratory feast – ‘A ceremony that feeds, a feast that has an added dimension of meaning. It’s not just stuffing your gut. And it’s not just some ’orrible wafer that’s only a symbol. Two birds with one stone if you’ll excuse the whamercallit.’
The down and feathers of expiring chickens fill the air. It’s as though a pillow fight has developed into war. Feathers stick to the chicken shit. ‘Fowl is fair and fair is fowl,’ chants The Founder, wheeling himself among his plucking people who know to repeat his words which are holy, wise, persuasively incantatory. His people are the colour of mud. They jostle. They gabble. They cluck. The integral confetti of plastic bags shredded by chickens as they approach translucent death blizzards the bailey. Here’s a chicken that is being kneeled on. Here’s one whose head is staved by a size twelve shoe. Watch that pullet run; watch it flee Wide Eyes there with a billowing bag in her hand. Smell the blood and shit. Slip on the skid-rink: the boy with the Super-8 does.
Look at Adonis Evans who supplied the six dozen birds and has a further two doz back-up in his old Commer outside; he should be laughing all the way to the bank but the bungling saddens him – a neck well wrung is a neck well wrung: these godly losers don’t have what it takes, there are only about four among them who’d have a chance of earning a crust at strangulation. All that fish meal and abattoir slurry for this!
Look at Arth and Mother who only came because Hankey begged them; look at them and the Anzio dead. They’re suffering the waking nightmare of having their one and only stolen before their very eyes. Worse, she consents to being stolen.
Yet by the time Sonny and Laddy return Ray Butt has charmed them, reassured them. Once a star. Remember Reg Voice. Butt of The Joke hasn’t died, he’s there for The Founder to summon when needed: jocular, salty, bonhomous. Cripple patter at his own expense, cancer patter at his own expense – he can take the pain because he knows The Good Guy’s going to see him right: ‘Doesn’t stop the plastic in me sphincter nipping like a Jack Russell though.’ And he’s quick to flash the ash. Not to mention his jovial flask which is necessarily not a hip flask, which is brim with Oban. Yes, you bet he can recall the very show at Catterick when one of the Anzio dead laughed till he almost wet himself, sincerely he can: ‘That sergeant …’
‘What, that bugger with the missing teeth?’
‘That’s the one … Missing teeth. Yup.’
Ray Butt’s their sort. Sonny and Laddy are astonished to see him sitting next to Arth with his arm round him, hooting.
‘Here, you Voys,’ he calls. And they slope over, shifty, between the ad hoc barbecues and red hot braziers, they shameface through the smoke. ‘Here – you know what. A most generous gesture Arth here has made. To be announced over the PA. In his pocket he’s got two tickets and an hotel reservation for our lovebirds. In guess where? Madeira. That’s where. That’s a handsome gift. Eh? Fancy keeping that a secret – you’re a dark horse Arth.’
Sonny and Laddy were close to contrite till vinous anaesthesia took out their consciences and they remembered that at that precise juncture, that acting on the information then available, they had acted in the prosecution of natural justice: vengeance was theirs, they told each other, presumptuously. Strange how potent cheap drink is. Later they too had their arms round Arth’s shoulder and brought tears to his rheumy eyes with the tale of how they’d shot seagulls and sold them to Dave Ring, the Fratton fishmonger, claiming they were pigeons. ‘That was before gulls were sacred, mind,’ cautioned Laddy.
How was Poor Eddie? Was he sad as war again? Is that how weddings took him? Almost invariably yes; each one provoked a specific sadness beyond the generic emphasis of his solitude, beyond – Buttist weddings only – his abhorrence of charred chicken and his antipathy to communal ingestion. (He eats in private – crisps in the pocket; or in the qualified privacy of off-peak cafes where he can crouch over his ketchuped plate, slices and Tizer in a quiet formica corner.) 5 April 1972, Jonjon to Hankey: the specific sadness was ascribable to Mary. Mary didn’t actually laugh when Poor Eddie said: ‘I think if I … I conduct myself correctly, if I judge it right, if I channel my powers, you know … I’ll be in line for canonisation.’ Mary didn’t actually laugh, but a quizzical stare, a murmured ‘saint’, an indulgent shrug were as hurtful. Eddie expected more of Mary whom he regarded as a special friend, the nearest thing he had to a spiritual ally among those around Ray Butt.
Mary’s only connection with The Founder was that of having played with The Voys in a series of bands (Rider, Raider, Zee Red Dares, Readers Wives); that was Mary’s only connection till this afternoon.
Poor Eddie had even considered the possibility that he loved Mary; he lacked an intuitive amometer whose needle might have swung into the red to signify this is The Real Thing. And his shyness disinclined him to ask the only person he could have asked, i.e. Mary. He compared his affection for Mary with that for Bonny. He scraped his scalp scabs, listed their qualities.
Bonny: married, fickle, disloyal, cunning, manipulative, insincere.
Mary: earnest, fluent French, prone to nosebleeds, secretive, (can be) frightening, (usually) steadfast, oblique, orphan, orphan, orphan. Eddie wondered if it was this fortuity that bound them in extra-familial void, forced them to cling to each other as they freefell down The Liftshaft Of Life. But no, their circumstances were so different; Mary’s material recollections were few and this was a matter on which silence was observed, inquiries deflected. And then there was the question of Mary’s ‘father’ not having been Mary’s natural father, and the consequent matter of ‘identity’ which worried Poor Eddie more than it did Mary who was, after all, used to generative insouciance and was bored rather than upset by Eddie’s preoccupation with it. Mary was sufficiently vain to be flattered by Eddie’s crinkled brow, by his intense speculations on the balance of genetic legacy and learned self. Mary enjoyed the attention, listened as attentively to Eddie as to the stereo that scragged the damp and fungal wails of Sir Bernard de Gomme Tower, rolled another J on an LP. Eddie mistook Mary’s toleration of him for fondness. He was so proud of this friendship that he was unable to discern the habitually low-grade reciprocation, its onesidedness. A veteran of a lifetime of slights may a) discern emotionally injurious intent in a handshake’s pressure, in overheard phrases, in a stranger’s fractious glance (it’s the weather – isn’t it?) or b) be grateful for soft knocks, think sunrise, look brightside, exaggerate the up angles. Poor Eddie had much to be paranoiac about but weighted his delusion the other way. Hope was fuel. It kickstarted each bright day for him. Every petty courtesy paid him will be zealously inflated: the deep-fryer with a half smile will be raised to his personal pantheon of putative chums. But all this protective machinery could not dissemble Mary’s off-handedness.
There was dancing and drinking and eating. Sonny (a chicken leg, a pint glass and a cigarette grasped in his right hand) dragged his grandmother May towards Mary and said between two quaking belches: ‘Mary. My grandma. May. She’s a jewel. Aren’t you love? Got a lot in common you two. Gran. Mary. You take care of each other I’m goin to the kazi. What they call the tool shed down the Cloudesley Shovell. Be good.’
They talked. Eddie loitered by now and again but they talked. They talked in French. Eddie skulked. Mary didn’t go so far as to affect not to see him loitering, skulking, smiling his eager-to-please; but nor, equally, was a series of unlit glances an invitation to join them. May talked excitedly about the Bruxellois suburb of Ixelles, took delight in Mary’s informed interest, prayed that Mary would not yawn. She talked about her childhood (reconstructed from photographs), about happiness and skating before the Germans came. When she spoke her native language she was aphasiac, self-chiding, solecistic, lost; Mary corrected her, tactfully. They talked in English about Mary’s work-permit problems. (Mr Rippon – Surbiton’s youngest ever mayor! – had hurried to Brussels four months previously for a feed at Comme Chez Soi and to sit beside Mr Heath – a sometime editor of Church Times – whilst the latter signed a piece of paper at the Egmont Palace. The UK’s membership of the EEC would not take effect till 1 Jan 1973, however – which meant that Mary still received regular visits from jobsworths in the immigration.) Eddie had heard all this before: the accusations of institutionalised xenophobia; the phrase ‘ces salauds d’Angliches’. May said to Mary: ‘What you need to do is get married. Easy as a log. Find a native who isn’t embarrassed. I’m sure you wouldn’t have any trouble.’
Later Eddie stood among the carcasses and snapped wish-bones watching May and Mary who stood backlit by the cassata sunset on the rampart beneath The Cross Of The World. The wheels of The Best Ever Redemptor’s chair snapped bones, ground them to meal on the metalled ground. He squeezed Poor Eddie’s brachial artery: ‘OK Doc? Letting your hair down again? Tell you what Eddie – I know that that Mary’s a … buddy of yours, but I always get this funny feeling – sniff sniff – like there’s something … weell, ship short of a fleet – shall we say? We shall. And my mum proves it. They been nattering for hours, haven’t they. That proves it. My mum is not what you’d call a people person. Very short on discernment. Guaranteed to pick the rotten apple. I mean, look at my dad. Stt – fancy marrying that. You’d have never believed it to have looked at him but they used to fight over him. But fancy actually marrying him. Ah well … Suppose that’s Belgians for you.’ He looked at Eddie: ‘I shouldn’t talk like that about them that gave me life.’ Then he hurried away, the whirring motor driving the wheels at a lick.
Eddie always knew when Butt was going to wrap barbed wire around himself, around what was left of him, around the trunk and stumps, wrap coils of it around him then roll about the concrete floor moaning, screaming, bellowing oaths of self chastisement, smearing the concrete like the scene of a sacrifice, staining it with purgation, marking his own route to The Best Ever Redemption.
Douglas Esmond Vallender dies on Boxing Day 1973. An awkward time to die. A messy way to die. The most distasteful inquest G. Leopold Lush ever conducted: misadventure. Low-tech suicide? A special treat? The best present he ever got? A gift from himself to himself? (It was that, literally.) Disturbed balance? Could have been.
a) Vallender Light on the point of receivership, had been bailed out (humiliatingly) by his daughter’s husband’s father. And for every quid there was a quo.
b) His daughter (whose husband’s father etc …) was facing charges of heroin and barbiturate possession. ‘God, that tosser. Johnson – you hearing? That tosser didn’t have anything better to … Howd’you like it if your daughter married a tosser? Eh? Needle in the trousseau? Bastards.’ Dead Douglas speaks. Years after Monica screamed in the bathroom, he speaks.
c) His wife has already told him that she is going to seek a divorce, but ‘we were still living under the one, trying to stitch it together – fat chance …’ They didn’t.
It was Monica who found him; early on Boxing evening.
They had eaten Christmas lunch in silence. Bonny hadn’t phoned. Monica was repulsed by her soon-to-be-ex’s boundless appetite, his method of ingestion and masticatory abandon. She left the table for twenty minutes and when she returned he was still at it, turning a 14 lb turkey to carcass; grease and gravy up to his elbows; a red and gold paper hat matted to his crown by sweat, toning with his nose. Monica smoked, and picked at a jar of brandy butter with a teaspoon. She watched the machine that destroyed flesh moistening a mouthful with a draught of heady red Rhone. He ate: sausages; bacon rolls with prune stuffing; sage, thyme and parsley stuffing – he liked it soggy; roast potatoes; the bird’s mashed liver on fried bread; gravy with a layer of fat puckering its surface; sprouts lacquered with butter; mashed parsnips; cranberry jelly. Before he ate those he had eaten two dozen oysters, fines de claire, each one of them briny, fresh and fleshy: eating these labia in their crinkly shells gave him a hard-on: from cocktail sausage to chipolata. After his turkey he had Christmas pudding with that brandy butter from Cumberland, clotted cream from Devon and flammable spirit from Charentes. Monica left the table again when he began to excavate an earthenware jar of Stilton with old Taylor’s huing it rose. Many life forms entered his mouth on a waterbiscuit. And there were dates, Sauternes, Armagnac, champagne to toast HRH, candied fruits and angelica to pick at, a Monte Christo to fellate. He dozed. He heard Monica say that she was going for a walk. He heard the common voices of light entertainers. He dozed in the cosy, half lit study: there was rain on the panes, out there boughs groaned, he felt swaddled by satiety, nursed from within, cosseted by eupepsia. He was happy in his heaviness, comfortable as a doughnut, drowsy before the twin flickerings of fire and telly. All his troubles seemed evanescent. When he woke it was getting on for midnight; he had the makings of a hangover. He drank three pints of water whose flavour disgusted him. He drank a pint of black coffee. Monica appeared in a dressing gown and turbaned towel. She blew him a kiss, said that she was going to bed, that she had been soaked to the skin and wanted to avert a cold. She reminded him that she was lunching tomorrow with the Rumballs at Avon Castle. He nodded; he was eating, of course – a fist of stuffing. That was her last sight of him alive, with his mouth full. His mouth was full in death too.
Monica returned from her lunch party at six-fifteen on Boxing evening. She had a nasty headcold. The house was unlit, apparently deserted. Snuffling, searching for what, never having read the packet, she believed was called a Lemon Sip, she opened the door to Douglas’s bathroom and turned on the light. She screamed.
She screamed before she worked out the mechanics. Shock preceded comprehension. And comprehension intensified shock. She resented him. He disgusted her.
He had put up a struggle. He had grappled with the hose. He had tried to free himself, tried to abate the supply, he had struggled to remove the fully plumbed mask. Which surely suggests that this was not suicide. Maybe. Equally he might have intended to prosecute the act but had discovered that the means was untenable, that it is the process of extinction that renders life precious. He looked like a sea creature – a mutilated ray, an octopus of grotesque dimensions. He wore his rubber skin. The black downlands of his belly were unmistakable. This was the man she had married when they were young and different. She had (she supposed) once loved the contours of that polished black arse which has grown a fatal tail. A tail that stretches to his mask, to the place approximate to his mouth in the smooth head which is a generic capital, an abstracted bonce. The screwdriver that he had used to tighten the brass joint of hose and mouth and with which he had subsequently attempted to effect release and then, in climactic fear, to pierce the offending tube, was stiffed in his fist. The sour smell was no worse than that of any lavatory he had ever used: there was no seepage. Douglas had, down the years, administered himself innumerable suction enemas, self service meals, auto-hoovers.5 But he had always done it under strict and expensive supervision (p. 247). And he had been warned against eating alone. He had been told that he would be punished. In the dark of his eyeless mask, as he was asphyxiated by his own excrement, he may at last have rued his cheapskate ways, may have promised never to welsh again. Too late. (This is one he’ll never speak about.)