‘I didn’t ask for it, any more than I asked for life. I wasn’t around to ask for life. I wasn’t given the choice. It’s not as if your parents-to-be say to you: do you want some of this? before they go ahead. It’s not like that is it? And even if it was, what would this mean? It’s the unknown, the unmappable; you got wheat futures and barley futures, tin futures what-have-you … Well you got embryo futures too, to gamble on. Pre-embryo. Egg and seed. Sounds like a sandwich doesn’t it? You ask yourself: what is it that they’re offering to someone who isn’t there to have an offer made to him? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a version of their loveydovey, their rosetinted. It’s two people going mad together isn’t it – love? That’s what love is. Even if it’s only for as long as it takes to do the deed, it’s still madness. The madness of optimism. You know: everything’s going to work out right, et cetera. Best of all possible. And it’s not just mutts who think it. It’s a fault that runs right through all of us. Built-in problem like not being able to articulate our feet.1 Like having one hand that can’t write, like having an entire half that’s hardly used – that we’ve forgotten how to explore, maybe never knew how to explore. I used to think that if I’d been given the choice I’d have told them: no, don’t do it; I’d have said, on no account, because you’ll regret it, he’ll regret it, we’ll all regret it … My father didn’t live long enough to regret it. But I believe that if I’d known what I know now, if I’d known it then – well, I won’t say that I can alter the course … Actually, I will. In a way I’m working on altering, ah, potentialities. Ray’s got this phrase – A Curriculum of Dredgable Possibility. We’ve got to mine it, sift it, dredge it what-have-you, discover an internal wherewithal. Sniff sniff! Now, I’d tell them: go ahead, I can cope, I can help untold others not to regret their birth, not to be angry about being. I can touch them, touch them … Of course I can heal them, I’ve known that since I was a kid – though it comes from Butt really, that’s where the drive comes from, the organisation, how to direct it. Look – I’ve thought about this, it’s me, you know. And it’s like he’s got the grand plan and I’m the one who knows how to carry it out; but he wouldn’t have had the grand plan without me, would he? He’s blessed because he needed to be … necessity, real yearning, his guilt, all that. I’m blessed because I can’t help but be. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy eh? Yeh, tell them to go ahead with it, in all its horror because I’ll be there at the end, me! I’m the outcome. Abnormal gestation and they get me. They were given separate packs and then both drew the joker, or is it the knave – whatever. That’s symbolism or something isn’t it, I don’t understand canasta. What I’ve been telling Butt is that Dredgable Possibility is here, in my hands. They’re not here just for cures. I’m working on this system which isn’t psycho but’s physical. Right? I can make the right side of your brain work. I can get the left side of your body working. Ambidextrous, two-footed, a cue in either wrist. I can show the other half how to perform to peak capability. And do you understand what that could mean? I’m talking about prolonging life. Not, not rejuvenation – that’s just quacks and monkey glands. Vanity. Cosmetics. Magical elixirs. It’s a load of bull. You know they tried bull’s balls, back – I dunno – the twenties, some time like that. This – I tell you – will revolutionise human expectation. No elixirs, no powdered gold, nothing like that. It’s simply a question of putting people in touch with a resource that’s already there. It’s from within. People go through life using only a tiny fraction of themselves. They get to seventy and they peg out. Why? What’s old age? It’s tiredness. They’ve put such a strain on those few parts of themselves that they do use that they wear them out – while all the time they’ve got these untapped resources there, just sitting there on the shelf, untouched. It’s like a shirt: the collar and cuffs go but the rest of the fabric’s fine. Spread the load – that’s the thing. Dredge the possibilities. Use all of you. We must all use all of us. I’m not claiming immortality’s just around the corner, it’s not even under consideration. What is – is longevity. And better health. Start with ambidexterity: God didn’t give us two hands for nothing. That’s why he’s got such a down on Islam because all they do with their left hand is wipe their behinds with it, that is if they haven’t had it cut off and stuck on a post. I’m working on a way of unlocking the left side – the right side in left handers. Did you know the life expectancy of left handers is longer? You didn’t did you? It’s obvious when you think about it. They’re made to use their right hands for so many things, you know – gadgets and all that, even if they aren’t made to write with their right hands – they’re forced into the beginnings of ambidexterity and so they spread the load. Now I’ll tell you what they object to, all the old religions and the false prophets: they fear they can’t control the ambidextrous. You know why don’t you. You know why they fear they can’t control people with articulate feet. I’ll tell you – it’s because to get in touch with the limbs that are, uh, in abeyance you have to open up parts of the brain that are normally permanently off duty. It’s not normal at all as a matter of fact. It’s not a case of expanding minds; it’s all about stopping them from being contracted by society, allowing them to flower to full growth – without chemicals, without trepanning. They don’t want me to do this. They don’t want anyone to facilitate full growth. They think I’m going to upset the cart. Because I’m liberating people, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to release them. Look, when I do things with my left hand I’m someone else. When I draw with my foot I draw as someone different from when I draw with my right hand. There’s no such thing as my self – it’s my selves. And each self expresses its self through a separate limb. See? So it’s not just giving everyone the chance of a longer life but making it richer too. It’s low-risk experiment with the probability of the most fantastic benefits. In fact it’s no risk. I’m going to rewrite the race. Without jeopardy. Without genocide. Eugenics with a smile. I’m offering multiple fates. That’s why they don’t want me to do it, that’s what they’re scared of. They find it hard enough to keep a check on people as it is: think what it’s going to be like when everyone can just switch into a new self at will, cast off personality, go exploring … It’s not going to happen overnight, I’ve got to teach one person at a time, but then they’ll teach others and, you know, momentum, snowball effect. Eventually it’ll become genetic. It’ll be in the blood. Passed down. In a thousand years, ten thousand, who knows, maybe in a hundred, you can’t tell, it’ll be inherited. Every person will be more than one person from birth. That’s what humans will be like then: choice of personality according to will, whim, need; longer lived; healthier. What I’m doing is planting a seed for the future. I’m not going to be around to see it. But I know, I know it. Dredgable Possibilities. A menu of selves.’
There are eleven hours of tape, recorded by Chubb during November and December 1973. Eddie’s coherence is inconstant; his voices are several – which is ascribable to the different acoustic properties of the places where the recordings were made or to his multiple selves (more likely the former); he veers between prolixity and taciturnity, between revelatory nudity and covert evasion; he contradicts himself, and when Chubb reminds him of what he has previously said on a given subject he replies with silence or ‘I was just saying that’ or ‘that was then and this is now’ or ‘that room was hostile’ or ‘you’re talking to us, not just me; me is temporary’.
The weekend of 1 and 2 December Eddie has a cough; he strives to achieve symptomatic precision:
‘It’s ticklish but it’s also tight. Like someone’s tickling just there and they also’ve you know got my windpipe with tweezers. And also there’s this sandpaper feeling. My throat is sandpaper – hasn’t just been rubbed by it, it is. And it’s very … here. I wouldn’t call it chesty, exactly, but it is a bit. It makes it a problem you see because I’m not sure what linctus I should be taking – Throaty with phlegm? Dry? Expectorant? Sonny reckons there’s this chemist in Gosport who still stocks Romola but he didn’t get round to giving me a lift over there and the foot ferry gives me the heat, always gets pushed sideways. Too much water. So I’ve had some mentho, mentho … stuff – and this cherry which’d be OK but it’s sort of a sedative. Bit of a down really, and it only works for a few –’
‘Have you tried, by any chance, curing yourself?’ asks Lalage Chubb, faint (she’s on the other side of the abundantly softly furnished hotel room, distant from the microphone) and impatient.
‘I believe that what Lalage really means –’ begins Chubb, stretch-vowelled in embarrassment, mining monophthongs with his nervy tongue.
‘I know what she means. I know what you mean [cough] … I thought you were meant to be experienced. How many books you written?’
‘Chubb is the author of three very well received –’
‘Four, Dear,’ amended Chubb.
‘Four mould-breaking case studies. All his own work. Little presses, not for the vulgar. I, Eddie, am merely his amanuensis. That’s latin for typist. I don’t have to be here Eddie. I could have gone shopping – not, I suppose, that I’d have come back with anything other than a model of the Victory and a Senior Service tea towel. But I didn’t. I’m married to an obsession and I accept it. I knew what I was getting into, I accept it. When you grow up Eddie –’
‘Dear!’
‘You will find – then you probably won’t – that the world is full of widowed consultant actuaries with one very difficult and resentful child and one obsessive hobby. Could be golf, could be stamps or coins or girls in frilly knicks, gofferbid. It’s my lot to have married the widowed consultant actuary with the unbelievably problematic offspring who happens to spend all his spare time and an inordinate proportion of his admittedly outlandish income on chasing round the country after holy rollers, quacks, fruitcakes, maniacs who are in touch with the godhead – and that’s to mention only the very cream of the scum … So I’m perfectly well aware when Chubb is being played along, having his time wasted –’
‘I’ve got a cough,’ cried Eddie. Then he coughs, then wheezes weepily: ‘I really have. And your name …’
His name. Everyday Chubb fish-lunches alone at La Raie d’Or, London, W1. Doz. Colchester Natives, pike quenelles and Nantua sauce, black-buttered skate, a Manzanilla, a half bottle of ’66 Domaine St Pierre Meursault, coffee, a pousse café, no pudding, no complaints, no colleagues, no Lalage, no secretary on the side. Devoted patronage is like paying into insider-tipped stock: he relishes the divvy-like treats, the bottomless well of liquorous troves that are omitted from the carte. They take his mind off his daughter who is a little mystery – often awol and invariably drugged (Lalage says, and he concurs, regretfully): she shows no interest in regulable serendipity or aleatory certainty of clever disease. He blames her mother. She does not accept the fundamental fairness of odds. On or against everything (just about), all the important things, certainly. Give Chubb your fit (age, sex, work, marital accomplishments, debt, eyes, ears, income, heart – pour it out, hide nothing) and Chubb will give you your death date, to the month. He told a boy who suffered two out-of-body experiences that he could expect to live till March 2020; he got that wrong, the boy died in October 1969 after stealing a fire extinguisher from an army lorry, smashing its cap against a tree in a glade and inhaling its contents. The boy’s parents did not write to thank him for the copy of The Network of Radiation that he sent them.
He pondered an approach to long hair in men: when it was restricted to marginals (beats, hippies) the industry he served had ignored it; now that it was a widespread fashion afflicting even the middle-aged he was re-establishing his position as ‘the most creative brain in the profession’2 with a series of papers on the possible consequences. He had researched male life expectancy throughout the middle and late nineteenth century, had computed the liable endurance of the current craze, had drawn attention to the fears deriving from hair loss in a hirsute culture, and to spent testosterone, and to the increased likelihood of industrial injury (C2s, Cs and Ds). He had posited the existence of diseases specific to long-haired men.
He wondered why Eddie Vallender’s hair was so short and made a note to ask him. He added it to a list that took up a dozen pages of his hardbound notebook. Eddie preoccupied him, trespassed into his dreams. He considered Butt a sort of pimp, an exploiter, an abusive steward. He acknowledged his own cupidity; but, then, he knew that were Eddie in his charge, his possession, he might be directed, his phenomenal power might be channelled towards beneficent ends. His phrase for Butt (and it was one he was pleased with) was ‘a vulgar graduate of the Rank smarm school’. He despised brashness and bad vowels. He despised the way Butt used Eddie as a ‘validation of a charlatanry which is both cynical and vacuous’. He regarded The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption as ‘specious and slick’ and The Cross Of The World as ‘architectural blasphemy – if there is such a thing!’ He guessed that Butt’s inspiration was the ‘grotesque, hypocritical cross that the genocidal Generalissimo Franco erected at the so called Valle de Los Caídos in Old Castile as a monument to – mark this! – the fallen of both sides in the civil war’. When he mentioned this structure to Butt ‘the oily comedian disclaimed all knowledge of it. I am pretty damned certain that I hit the nail on the head though’.
When Chubb first drove along the escarpment of Portsdown Hill he was overcome by the sensation that it was a site of signs. That it was a ‘visible shelf on which messages could be left’. The monument to Nelson is thus an incitement to marine belligerence. The fortresses – which are certainly real enough, martially efficacious against a landward assault on Pompey – are predominantly warnings, ‘a way of saying to Froggy don’t try it on mon brave’. Then there’s the Royal Navy’s telecommunications and radar establishment (no photography permitted). The leafless trees are en brosse, as though undergoing ECT. The kites3 lend dragon colours to the all-grey sky ‘like fireworks using another element’.
And bigger, brasher and ‘more risibly self confident than all the others’, The Cross Of The World.
The armature of its horizontal section was already finished; a crane hoisted prefab concrete slabs the way a rook does twigs for its nest; there are pyramids of sand and gravel, shuttering frames, mixers, plastic yoked donkey jackets with hard hats, rusty curls of reinforcing wire like brandy snaps for big appetites. Small-scale men scaled the Cross, worker monkeys in dayglo harnesses, faithful volunteers trusting in The Founder to protect them from gravity’s pull, to douse the wind that bent every tree; they reeled on platforms in the sky, buffeted and dancing, like mimes from the silents, never falling, never.
Ray Butt’s wheels spin in the furrows of an HGV’s tyres. He wears Fair Isle gloves, plaid blankets, ear muffs; slung round his neck are two scarves and a megaphone. Chubb knew the instant he saw him that the young man hurrying to free the wheelchair was Eddie.
‘The quality of his co-ordination is [sic] that you almost expect him to topple over. He walks, not the precise word for so individual a kind of movement, as though he’s pushing an unsteady wheelbarrow. His arms are not synchronised with his legs. Nor perhaps with each other. The legs appear to be experiencing what can only be described as torque. They give the unmistakable impression of being powered by the feet, not by the hip. His knees do not bend. I keep thinking of a VW doing the goose step. But the trunk is nothing like [sic]. He is very round shouldered. Is this Sikora’s Syndrome? Psychogenically moulded limbs? In this case moulded by defensiveness, physical fear, terror?’
The preliminary interview was conducted over lunch in The King Of Spain’s Beard, a jazz Andalusian roadhouse (with filling station) along Portsdown, walking distance and no strain on The Founder’s batteries – he came too, and so did Sonny, ‘to see fair play’. Eddie hardly spoke. He ate a cheese sandwich and left the crust.
Ray Butt said: ‘Never met an actuary before. Not to my knowledge. I’d have expected you to look more like a bookie, frankly.’
Sonny said: ‘We take care of Eddie, his interests, don’t we Eddie? We don’t want him getting in the wrong company.’
‘I can assure you –’ began Chubb.
‘Course you can – it’s your business,’ guffawed The Founder.
‘We have to look to the boy’s longterm,’ explained Sonny. ‘You get some very twisted people in the verbals game. There’s some very bitter people out there. Envies.’
‘They’re not all like Reg, that’s for sure,’ rued The Founder.
‘Reg?’
‘Reg Voice.’
‘Aaahh … Reg … Voice? I don’t believe –’
‘You never heard of Reg?’ Sonny, genuinely surprised. ‘Butt Joking Aside? Dad’s biographer.’
‘I’m sorry but –’
‘Thought all you book writers … you know … were … Dear oh dear – better keep stum to Reg on that one. He’d be mortified.’
‘We’ve got some signed copies left haven’t we,’ stated the biographer’s subject.
‘Yeh. Discounts for friends,’ smiled Sonny. ‘Good read – and I’ll tell you why. It’s because Reg tells the truth. No ackamaracka. Nothing wobbly. Good man and true – which is more than can be said for some of the gents of the press we’ve had down here. You talk to them – they stitch you up. You refuse to talk to them – you got something to hide … ’ Et cetera.
Eddie picks at the cracked matt veneer of the table with bitten nails. Chubb gave Ray Butt a copy of The Network of Radiation, a copy of The Frontiers of Somnambulism and a photocopied review of the latter from the Journal of the British Association of Psychotherapists (Spring 1968). Butt pulled a pair of spectacles from within the rugs and scarves, spat on the lenses, wiped them so that a filament of blue wool caught in a hinge and trembled in the convected heat. He opened The Frontiers Of Somnambulism at the back. Sonny watched Chubb. Eddie rolled a beer mat between the knuckles of his left hand controlling it with conjuror’s aplomb.
‘An index’, proclaimed Ray Butt, ‘is a book’s fingerprint. The hidden code. You remember that Sonny, Eddie. Never judge by the cover, always by the index. We’re sitting here. With Mr Chubb. And we don’t know a thing about him. Do we? We could go on sitting here, with him, all afternoon – and we’d still know nothing. But – I look at the index of this book of his … and it’s shown to me, isn’t it. His very being. His uniqueness. What it is that makes Mr Chubb Mr Chubb and not – if he’ll pardon me – Mr Tench. This index is a window, pure crystal light into the depths of the man’s mind, into his innermost. Sonny – you go and ask Doreen for a bottle of her sparkly there. We’ll drink a toast. To index sniffing, eh? And get Eddie and me another ginger ale. This index, Mr Chubb – I like what I see. You’ll do us proud.’
Twelve weeks later Sonny and Laddy will attempt to set fire to Chubb’s house. All because of the tapes. They will fail. They chop up a William Kent console table, smash a Venetian mirror and a chair attributed to Juvarra, turn over bookcases, sweep china from shelves, rip Colefax curtains. They pyro-flunk because the volume of water from the taps they’ve turned on in a bathroom drowns the paraffin-steeped carpet in the study below. But they’ve tried. It’s the thought that counts.
Before then: ‘… for instance I won’t eat kidney. It makes me think of my kidneys. I’ll do anything to stop myself urinating. I don’t want my body to produce water. And I tell you I don’t want to look at water when I have to produce it. I’d sooner go in a doorway. Side of the road. Anywhere. I’d sooner be thirsty. I had a room with a sink in it once: the drip drip drip of the septic prick/ and they call it gonorrhoea. Take-off. Can’t remember the song it took off though. Mary might know, that’s the kind of thing he knows. He’s very academic about all that – outsider to it. If you speak French you study it, you don’t take it for granted. There’s a lot to be serious about … I think he’s got it wrong … There are probably two people in England – what’s that, OK Britain, fifty-five million – two people who’ve got parents who died the way ours did. You tell me what’s the chance of us meeting. Of him playing in a band with my brothers? I’ll tell you: it’s beyond odds. Work it out. If I’d have bet on ever meeting someone like me … I’d be a rich man now. That’s one way. The other is to say we’re fated. Combined destiny. A marriage of hands. Look. Look at mine. Compare them with his – I’ll get him round. If he’ll deign to show up: he’s picky nowadays. Very fat hands, big bones, long nails, every one a plectrum. We meet in the middle. D’you wanna know why he’s never really made it? Just because of that, the size of his hands: they seem to be getting bigger, they’re swelling I reckon. He’s slow across the fret, too much weight in his fingers: those Chicago guitarists, they may weigh eighteen stone but their hands are bone. They could do petit-point. It’s all in the hands – and I suppose you’ve also got to say he can’t write catchy songs. But it’s the hands mainly and the worse Mary’s become the better mine have become. He’s losing power, I’m gaining it. Sounds cruel doesn’t it? Life’s too cushy for him now. There is no dispute about what’s in these. It doesn’t matter how I feel in myself. I go up there with Butt and I know, I just know that I am the energy. I am the power. My music is my touch – I don’t have to do sounds … You do realise that I can harm? Break windows … I mean, if I wanted to. I feel it.’
That is a distillation of 27.10.73 in Room 712 at The Raleigh International, PO5. From up here the lights along the front shine like a necklace of rubies and diamonds: the rubies are forever going away, the diamonds are forever approaching: oh, the front, at Pompey, at night, is a paste jewel. And the floodlights shine on the vessels of war and the grid of the city is mapped in twinkling orange and every window is a story of routine or boredom or paid passion (which is the routine of the OMO wives).
‘Butt comes up to me: can you imagine this. This forehead on wheels – that’s all I could see of him. There was Sonny beside him, coming down the pier, and Laddy. And Mary – this was before there was any bad feeling of course. Mary’s hair is something else. He’s like a raven. I tell you: they looked gang handed … That’s when I was working the pier. I had this booth, this song on a tape loop – La Musica, sort of soft with a girly zest. I was doing nights too, at The Last Voyage of Henry Hudson. I was doing sessions. Wasn’t really working out. Just about paid my way: you’ve got to be rich to be in debt. Shifts. I’d done every hotel in Southsea. Ever been to Caen? – I’ve been there about eighty times and I’ve never seen the town. St Malo likewise. That stewarding lark – no perks. I don’t like docks any more. I never actually noticed the sea. I worked a mobile hot dog van one time but I left when they turned it over to fish and chips too. I did think seriously of moving to Birmingham – you know, landlocked. But then I read this book that called it England’s Venice. Anyway I wouldn’t understand a word they said – would I? I love Pompey. I can lose myself, really. You can walk into Fratton, walk round … and round, it’s interminable. You don’t know it’s by the sea. Even when I was doing the rides, just down there – you can’t see it, it’s the other side of the building – it’s almost over the water, like the pier. I worked on the Octopus. And the waltzer. I loved it. But it was seasonal. There were always fights. The squaddies would come down just to pick on the sailors. Then you’d get the redcaps, they’re real bastards. Then there was this incident – that’s what they always call them, incidents. We’d been warned: this chap Kenny who was the site manager had come round, told us so we’d be prepared, not that there’s anything you can do. There was a US Navy aircraft carrier in port, and there was a Scottish regiment billeted down at Eastney. Well, you can imagine, can’t you … I hate violence. I could never bring myself to strike someone. I don’t even retaliate. I’d seen enough of it. Men wanting to revert to their animal state and all that. High as kites on risk: that’s the real drug, that’s what gets them going. Maim, or be maimed. Them or us. Team spirit. And of course all the jocks were roaring and the Yanks were blocked out their skulls on sulphate – chum of Sonny’s called Bad Bugs had seen to that. There were running fights all afternoon. Guys in the gutter with head wounds. They got in the fairground about seven and by half past we’d been told to shut down the rides, let them get on with it. Police everywhere, and these American naval police built like sentry boxes swinging truncheons as long as hockey sticks. I wanted to run. I wasn’t scared – you probably don’t believe me but it’s true. I was aesthetically offended. I can’t think of any other way to put it. It was the way they were making dis-order out of order. There was this shoe, cherry red woman’s shoes with a button strap, like a tap shoe, lying on the metal plate that goes round the perimeter of the dodgems. I’ve still got it. Right foot. I don’t make a fetish of it. But I’ve still got it. It told me something. It went right to my heart. It was so pathetic and lonely, so useless – one shoe. A pointless object. It was so unnecessary that it should have met such a fate. It was a tiny thing. Compare it with men spitting out their teeth, and faces with so much blood stuck to them it might be caked make-up. It was nothing beside all the mess, nothing – the broken glass, and the screams, people running in directions they wouldn’t normally go in. Normally there were patterns that the crowds in there followed. As if they were on rails. All that was upset. Panic is a quick-acting virus. I never went back, except to get my cards. It took me a while to figure out what it was about that shoe … I’m still not sure. Sniff sniff – there’s a whiff of asymmetry, well more than a whiff. Imbalance. I wouldn’t have felt the same if it had been two shoes, it got me thinking about my mother and me: that was imbalance. It was a lopsided life for both of us. If she’d gone when my father did … one parent does twice the damage. If there hadn’t been anyone I’d have found myself – as it is I’m still looking, still groping about. I was too long in the womb, then I was too long in childhood. And now I’m twenty-five and it’s all still with me. I can’t kick it off. Me, I was born into defeat. My father, my mother – they were people who threw in the towel. By rights we should have been extinct years ago; the Vallender – a genetically unsuccessful animal. Dead as a Vallender. It lacked the common wherewithal. You pitch the Vallender against life and life’ll win every time … The only chance I ever had of a reprieve was Bonny, that was the only way I could have stepped into … into your world, have got inside, have begun to feel whole rather than half. I crave everything that all Butt’s people are trying to get away from. I just yearn for ordinariness, balance, symmetry, all the things I’ve been denied – I know of them, but I’ve never felt them. I’d love my everyday worries to be the same as the next chap’s. That’s what society is – common experiences, shared triviality, the small things people talk to each other about in pubs. I’ve got no common ground with society. I’d really love to have my little plot in it, my allotment in society’s patchwork. I like how it is in murder stories before the murder’s committed. Placid, everyone going about their business the same as they did yesterday and the day before that. The constancy … I get sick of them after that bit. When the disorder takes over. Throw the book away and go for a walk – street after street at dusk. When the lights are on and they haven’t pulled the curtains. Every little house is a theatre of ordinariness, of routine. Silly rituals. Ribbing each other. Mile after mile, house after house. It never changes. Ordinary colours. And I think: that’s what I want. I want some of what everyone else has got. I pray for banality … I suppose you think that’s weird. Don’t you. I got these, I’ve got a gift – and I want that. But the one of me who’s got the gift doesn’t exist outside of the liturgy. I tried it. I rented this booth on the pier. Between Madame Phillipina the fortune teller and the live bait. She was a bigamist ten times over, smoked roll-ups, must have been seventy. She used to go down the end to the landing stage and tell me what she’d seen over on Ryde Pier. She believed it. Courting couple in identical anoraks; man throwing sackful of cats into the briny (she always said ‘briny’). This is four, five miles away. She could see through time and distance she said. Bit like you without the algebra. She’d get people coming back and complaining. There was this old bloke who’d given up the lease on his beach hut because she’d told him he was going to die in the winter – next summer came round, and there he was, fit as a fiddle but with nowhere to change into his cozzie. She’d made him believe that, that he was going to throw a seven; it’s not what anyone wants to believe is it? She was that convincing. Triumph of credibility. She’d tell her punters they were ill so they’d come and see me. Nearly always the spleen. I didn’t even know where the spleen is. And I appreciate it was well meant, but … it made me realise that I’m a charlatan. I felt very conscienced [sic] about it. Like I was conspiring on them, prostituting my hands. Still, what I did suss was that of all the people who came to see me the only ones who came back were the ones she’d sent me. They believed in me because of her credibility. Their faith in me came from her. Sometimes I’d energise ten people in a day – fifteen quid. Usually four or five: drunks, lads out for a lark, spinsters on a spree, desperate cases, lost causes, minor afflictions. And I know for certain that I fixed some of them. Don’t ask me how – I’ll come to that. But they hardly ever showed up again. They’d be doing chemicals as well if anything was really wrong. Or homeopathy – chemicals without the cap and gown. There was this trickle of regulars: you done my spleen, what about my liver/lung/abscess/goitre – you name it. They’d always mention Madame Phillipina, she was a charm. I still put flowers on her grave. Kingston Cemetery, up in Fratton, lovely stone, all her surviving husbands chipped in, they got the monumental masons to lie about her age. Flatter her in death. May Butt can remember her on the halls in 1914–18. I owe her a lot. I told her the only people who came back were hers. I came clean with her in the end. She just waved her hand. Next thing I know Butt is coming down the pier. She’d understood that what I needed was the sort of projection he could give me. Can we have some cheeselets?’
Here’s a tape which begins unpromisingly. Eddie complains about Lalage’s ‘hostile aura’, the ‘unnecessary’ way she clasps her hands, the ‘funny angle’ the room’s curtains have fallen at. He blames Chubb for the taxi (to the motor hotel beside the mud flats at North Hayling) having smelled ‘of live bait’. He reckons the weather augurs messily. He says the disused rail bridge across Langstone Harbour ‘could go any time’ and he ‘doesn’t want to be here to see it’.
They change rooms. Eddie says: ‘This smells like live bait too.’ He looks at Lalage. They decide not to change rooms again. Eddie addresses what follows to Lalage. He dares her to interrupt him in agreement.
‘I am a fraud. I am a faker. I’m a trick. OK …?’ She doesn’t interrupt. ‘These hands can do things that no hands have ever done. Say I touched your womb –’
‘Touch my womb … What a grotesque idea …’ Lalage turns to her impassive husband.
‘You’re childless. I can tell. It’s all over you. It’s the root of your hostility. I have power over these things … Barenness … Infertility …’
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’
‘It’s true … When I say I’m a fraud I mean to say I’m a mechanic. I don’t believe in all the ritual, the pomp – but it’s a sort of spur. I couldn’t do it here, at least only with real difficulty. But if you come up to The Church I could have a go.’
‘Hold on a minute. Hold on. Are you one of these sickos who’s got a thing about gynaecology. D’you have a speculum tucked under your bed? Are you a peeper or something?’
‘I’m just saying I could help you have children, that’s all.’
‘I do not want children. I am not parent material … Can you give me the keys Chubb? I’m going to Chichester.’
The recording continues in a bar or the hotel’s dining room (from where The Cross Of The World is visible).
‘Can we go. back to what you were saying about being a mechanic. That’s an interesting word. It’s not how most healers would describe themselves. Nor do they call themselves frauds or fakers …’
‘I know they don’t. Maybe they aren’t. I’ve read dozens of books about healers. I can’t see that I’ve got anything to do with any of it – the spirit world, ESP, Christian miracles. Look, if someone’s got a gift for pole-vaulting or for multiplying four-figure sums in their head you don’t say that’s because of something else; you say it’s because they’ve got a particular gift for pole-vaulting or whatever. I’ve got a gift that’s more unusual, that’s all. It’s real all right. And it may be God-given for all I know – some days I think it is, others I’m not so sure … When I’m ill I don’t go to a healer. I go to the chemist. Or to a doctor. The body is a mechanism and I work on it the same as a doctor does. The doctor prescribes drugs, see. I am a drug. A conduit for chemical force. If fear has a chemistry of its own so does my love – or whatever it is. I’m proud of that. I do not work miracles. I perform physical cures. Material medicine. I’m not sure cures is quite the right word. That makes it seem like I’m claiming to do repairs. I’ve begun to think that maybe I don’t actually rehabilitate the part that’s gone wrong … I bring into play a spare – that’s there, but dormant so to speak. I energise the entire organ or muscle … by-pass the malfunctioning part. So I may not cure it. The disease may still be there … the wound. Now … if I were to do the same to people who’ve got no disease, who – in everyday terms – are fully functioning … I don’t need to spell it out. It’d be like giving them a supercharger … You’d make them double the person. All the energy that’s in there’ll be released. I’m just trying to give it a kick-start, see. That’s why I’m a charlatan, whatever you like to call it. The punters believe in me because I’m indivisible from The Church and The Founder. I’m part of the Church’s terrestrial trinity: there’s The Founder, there’s The Cross and there’s me. They believe that it’s The Church’s energy that comes through me. And I know it’s not. It’s mine. That’s why I’m frauding them. I may be doing them good – I often am, no question. It’s not because of their sincere faith in The Church though – all The Church does is give me the platform and the audience. That’s vital, the audience. (That’s why I am so much better up there than I was down on the pier.) But it could be any audience. People who believe in toy soldiers. People who don’t believe in anything. They think they’ve got to believe in me, believe in the Church, but frankly it’s neither here nor there. That’s the false pretences. It’s not that I can’t do what The Church claims. I can, obviously. But I don’t do it because of The Church … though I am, like, facilitated by Butt. That’s Ray Butt … not The Founder. They’re different. There’s the impresario, and there’s the Man Of God. Multiple selves … I’d say one of his selves is a miracle worker. Or something like it. He can see further into the world than anyone … Patterns where you or I’d think it was chaos. The meaning of no-meaning. He sees the purpose in everything: The Infinite Moment occurred five years to the day after his wife’s death, The Greatest Sacrifice, The Dark At The Start Of The Tunnel … He understands shapes. The numbers in the Avenue Of his Life. The symmetries. The signs in the tiniest thing. The lessons … there is nothing that isn’t a lesson. I’d say he’s got a point there. For instance: there was this uterus got washed up on the beach down near Gunner Point. Couple of children find it, think it’s some sort of jelly fish and take it home … The Public Health visits Daph’s clinic. Purely circumstantial mind, no proof. Then some journalist hears about it and comes to see Ray. Very offensive sort of man, asking what does he think about his sister throwing uteruses in the sea … Anyone else would have shown him the door … If Sonny’d been there there’d’ve been hell to pay. But Ray: he sits there. And he thinks. And he sniffs out the message … It’s amazing. He tells this chap: If we used our bodies to their full potential, if women were taught how to use the whole womb, then they would continue to be fertile, they wouldn’t have the change – so there’d be no need for hysterectomy. See? So, from that little acorn of an incident this oak of philosophy has sprung forth. The Avenue Of Life is a Golden Thread Of Opportunity – if you know how to look for it … He’s been my university. Has been! He still is. He’s taught me to think. I’m his heir in a way. The Voys are … they’re brothers to me. But you’d never call them cerebral. I’m the one in the family who’s most like him, the one with his curiosity. “The Thirst for knowledge can never be slaked.” That’s what he says. His cogs never stop. That’s what I’m trying to emulate … Take ghosts. Everyone has a problem with ghosts … They can be eliminated. They will be eliminated. The longer we live the less likely we are to become ghosts. One day we’ll be able to die in the knowledge that we won’t cause distress to the living. Long life, happy death. See – ghosts are manifestations of minds that aren’t ready to die along with their bodies … That’s why they’re so embittered, most of them … When we give our bodies a chance of a life as long as our minds … Hey presto. They die together. Simultaneous Extinction. There’ll be no more dislocated minds wandering about, all twisted up inside, hoping to get their bodies back, knowing they can’t … Mind you, I got to admit that I haven’t come up with a way so far to eliminate the ghosts that are already there. But the other … People have been made saints for less, much less … Don’t you reckon it’s scandalous …’
Chubb counts ‘extreme tolerance’ uppermost among his assets as a researcher. He is willing to listen without comment, wearing an expression of concerned encouragement, nodding, jotting, never interrupting. His patience ensures that he is subjected to divergent loops, aberrant rants, material which he knows that he’ll not use and which he’d curtail would such an act not impair the bond of confidence that his work is conditional upon. For instance:
a) ‘Don’t you reckon it’s scandalous that they call a football team the Saints? It’s a … debasement. I only got to grips with it just the other day. I’ve been praying, I’ve been willing them to be relegated to the second division.4 That would be justice – and then the third. Spitting on sanctity in short trousers … Those gestures they make …’
b) ‘The only thing I ever known Ray in a real quandary about is his mum … his mum and Mary – it’s difficult … sensitive situation, see. There’s the asymmetry to start with. Then there’s Daph: she’s so loyal to Ray, she takes his side – and that makes it worse almost. His mum, she’s a natural mocker, she doesn’t mince words. That’s what they’re like in So’ton. Disrespectful, cut you down to size … she spent too long there, it polluted her. He can’t help but love her, she’s his mum, she looked after him after The Lord’s Harsh Lesson. She gave him the will to live. But as she gives so she takes away … She doesn’t have his wisdom. She hasn’t got his humanity. She’s sixty-four now and … I don’t know what it is … Life’s mysteries have never really affected her … She’s happy never asking the questions. She’s a woman of limited horizons. He loves her all the more for her failings. He calls her his big sister, “my delinquent big sister”. It shows what a man he is that he never budges; constant in his duty. But the grief … the provocations. He’s asked for guidance over and over. He’s asked me to ask for guidance. It doesn’t come through. It’s a line The Good Guy doesn’t answer. I’d tell him leave her to it, she’s not worth the hassle … Let her get on with it. But he’s not like that. He’s a big man. He can’t bear to see her being … used. It’s the only word for it. Mary’s got this side to him. I’ve seen him in a new light. I feel sort of let down by him. He’s betrayed us … he’s mercenary. Tentacles: he’s a leech on her. She can’t see it. If Ray says anything, she goes spare … You don’t want to be around, not when she’s in that mood. He said to me: “I have seen murder in my mother’s eyes.” Here’s the measure of the man: he doesn’t blame Mary. He won’t have Sonny badmouthing Mary in front of him, no. Fact of the matter is – Mary’s won the jackpot. D’you know what he was doing after the last band split up? He was selling his blood to all the private hospitals. He was selling his sperm to The Fecund Orchard – one of Daph’s businesses, fertility clinic. He was complaining that for the money they gave him they ought to throw in a nurse to help him. Ray thought that was a hoot. Next thing you know he’s off on a cruise with May Butt. Then they’re going on holiday to Belgium. And she’s bought him a sports car. And he’s living rent free in this block she owns down by the Sally Port. He only has to click his fingers … fur coat, rings, guitars. He’s her pet … The Kept Boy, we call him. She’s infatuated. It does funny things to a woman at her time of life. She’s bypassed second childhood gone straight into second teenage. She wears these clothes which … well, they’re unbecoming. Off the peg rejuvenation … Has the opposite effect. It makes her look like an old whore – an old whore trying to make a comeback down Palmerston Road. Slit skirts and halter necks. She’s got all these wigs, funny sunglasses. Hot pants. Honest. You’d take her for a dockyard tart: three quid a go in the alley behind The Killick’s Hook. Pitiful. Ray’s embarrassed by her. For a man in his position …’
c) ‘I failed my driving test twice: on the three-point-turn technique first time; then it was insufficient attention to rearview mirror. I’ve been practising in Daph’s old car on the private road behind The Realm, the one that goes down to My Lord’s Pond. It’s a way of showing Him how important it is … You always got to keep The Good Guy in the picture. The Churchll buy me a car when I get the test. It’s deductible, ’cause I need it for work … When we go on tour again I’ll be able to do my share of the driving. It’ll make a big difference to my life having a licence: guest appearances … all that. I get a lof requests. It’s all potential revenue for The Cross. Laddy deals with them.’
d) ‘I’ve written more than a hundred poems to Bonny. Sonnets, free verse, the word us one thousand times … I’ve sent her some of them … the best ones. She sent me a card last Christmas. Said she hadn’t been in touch because Toddy had been ill. I think it’s that he won’t let her … He must know by now that in her heart of hearts it’s only our being cousins that has … uh, inhibited her. That’s a taboo which … Look, the Bible’s littered with first cousins. Isn’t it? It’s the sort of thing that in a few years’ time she’ll realise that … it’s a social convention. Hasn’t got a basis in blood … See I can’t believe he means anything to her, really. He’s a meal ticket.’
e) ‘I tell you who gives me the heat: that’s Flamebryte bleedin’ Paint Limited. Messrs Pharisee. Talk about cussed. The Church Of The Best Ever Redemption has offered to buy out their lease at more than twice what it’s worth. We’ve found them new premises – up on the new trading park at Waterlooville; we offered to pay the removal costs and the first year’s rent and to underwrite the trading deficit over the removal period … Will they listen? They will not. They don’t need to be there. Wasn’t decreed unto them, was it, that they should found a ministry on Portsdown: Ministry of Paint? Be a bit silly wouldn’t it? So we’re stuck with them. The Cross is on top of them – we got that freehold. The air rights are ours. But can you believe it? A paint warehouse getting in the way of our expansion. We need room …’
Why is it that all the streets are one street, that this street is not the one Eddie’s looking for, not the one he once lived on? It may be a cartographer’s dream but it flusters Eddie. He is flattered by Chubb; Eddie wants to help, he is conducting him round Pompey, showing him every place he ever lived since he arrived in the city with ‘all my worldlies under one arm’. The hotels were the attraction then. A room with a job, a roof, a window to a light well. Every hotel, every flickering fascia, has a story whose victim is Poor Eddie. He directs Chubb left and right through the tyranny of rectilinearity. Every hotel is the same as the last: flickering fascia, precipitous fire escape, and the man in the doorway – he always cups a fag in his palm (p. 306).
Once upon a time Eddie lived in Tipner: domestics, OMO, tattoos, knives. Eddie points to a window no different to the other windows in Tipner, hardly different to all the other windows of this island city; he tells Chubb with inordinate pride: ‘That was the first place I had of my own.’ The mean houses; the streets that stretch to a low horizon; the Baby Bellings; the nylon sheets; the Sundays in the Maclary Easy; the carpet squares; the damp; the men with dogs who collect the rent; the other tenants (mad, senile, incontinent, criminal); the teakalike surfaces; the attic room with its history of suicides; the cracked shower curtain down the landing; the reek of gas; the meter someone else broke open (but we know who takes the blame); the window that’ll never shut; soap so streaked it’s like veneer; hollow doors; heating grunts; the partition walls that transmit the accelerating rhythms of onan’s bedsprings; rogue fridges; the men who turn their faces to the anaglypta, whose eyes never catch another human’s; the causeless enmities that turn to feud. Chubb begins to comprehend the pattern of domestic privation that Poor Eddie suffered.
On the spit at Eastney there are beached boats, hulks, winding gear, clinker sheds, shingle, a coastguard’s conning tower, the Hayling ferry’s landing stage, the persistent clicking of metal masts, the bruising breeze, the reeks of sea and diesel and mud, the jinking gulls, the statue gulls, the cloud of gulls that marks the sewage outfall. There is so much polished sky, so much water, so much gleaming mud. The Cross Of The World rises on the northern horizon. Eddie points to it as they get out of the car. Chubb follows Eddie along a boardwalk across mud and shingle; a rusting outboard lies beside it, and pitted paintcans, a skein of wire, metal pipes, two splintered oars, a cracked tarpaulin, coils of oily rope. The boardwalk leads to a tarred wooden hut built on stilts. More rope (etc.) protrudes from the space beneath the structure. Eddie stands beside the padlocked door.
‘All mine, this is,’ he says, fumbling with the key. ‘My second residence … Ray gave it me. For the second anniversary of my ministry. His theory is that if I sleep here often enough it’ll help with my hydrophobia … So I come down here in summer. I’ve managed a few nights. But I get these fears about floods and fishes getting onto the land. So I go home, usually. It’s a crude sort of treatment isn’t it?’ Chubb felt such pity for Eddie. He wondered at the gulf between the grandiosity of his corporeal utopianism and his pride in this dusty dark beach hut which smells of creosote, the gaps between whose floorboards admit stripes of light. Later that day he saw Eddie’s home – a one-room flat with a kitchenette and (Eddie made a point of this) its own silent toilet and bath. Eddie showed him photographs of his mother, his father and Bonny. He made instant coffee and offered Chubb a packet of crisps. With no tape recorder to speak to Eddie was silent. There were books (epiphanic memoirs, healing, self awareness, sci-fi), rock records, beer mats, Chubb was not at ease in the tiny, tidy room. He heard himself saying: ‘You should come to us over the holiday … on Boxing Day – for a few nights, if you like … A bit of a change … If it suits you … You may have something fixed …’
‘No. No engagements … Yes, yes – I should like that.’
Lalage to Chubb: ‘What? What? Are you … Jesus! That geek … on top of everything else. Has it completely escaped your memory – Camilla’s here for the whole week –’
‘She is my daughter Darling –’
‘He’s not though is he. Yet. Are you going to adopt him? You spend more time with him than you do with me.’
‘Darling … It’s just this once. I want to talk to him in a situation where he won’t … where he won’t be mentally referring everything back to Butt.’
‘Do you? Well bully for you. I think what I’ll do is go into a deep sulk … And make sure I keep the bedroom door locked. I won’t have that geek snooping through my things.’
Sonny to Eddie: ‘He’s pimping off of you Old Love. You’re writing his book for him. You could be writing your own book. We got a tape recorder haven’t we. We got the secretarial. We could fix it up. An’ I can guarantee that. Thing is Eddie, it’s like Jonjon says: The Church is a holy enterprise and you’re part of its capital – very vital part. So in a manner of speaking this Chubb is helping himself to what’s ours. You with me?’
‘Ray didn’t … You were there. He gave Chubb his blessing. He hasn’t said anything to me …’
‘He’s got a lot on his mind Dad has. You know that … All I’m saying, Eddie, is think about it. Eh? Think family on this one. There’s a good love. We got to pull together aren’t we … If you want to carry on with this Chubb he’s going to have to come to some arrangement … Like Reg did with Dad. Dad give him fifty per cent. Honour satisfied both sides. Never undersell yourself – that’s the mistake we made with the band. Well, that that cunt Mary made. What we’ll do is I’ll get on the dog to our chum Chubb … Familiarise him with the concept. So when you go up The Smoke he’ll know what’s what.’
Camilla Chubb’s wrists are histories of her cries for help. She addresses Eddie as ‘Boy Jesus’. She asks him if he can transform a bottle of VDQS Minervois Domaine Ventajou ’71 (Peter Dominic £0.74p) into ‘something a bit smoother. Like some of the gear we had yesterday.’ She tells him she wants to see him ‘prove himself’. She overturns a brimming bin of peelings, boiled giblets, stained tins, J cloths, brandy butter jars, spent crackers, torn packets onto the floor; she kneels to sort through the polychromatic scrape, bangs an empty magnum of Lynch-Bages ’59 onto the kitchen table where Eddie is eating grease-frilled chipolatas, lumps of bready stuffing, congealed bacon rolls, gelatinous shards of gravy rubber. He peels skin from the turkey carcase in front of him. She rolls another empty across the table, Rauzan-Gassies ’55. It clinks against the turkey’s plate. Eddie keeps his head down, fearful that the scoff will be removed by his hostess. ‘Hey – catch!’ She lobs a d’Yquem empty. He takes it clumsily on his chest. He glances at her like she’s a foaming bitch. She is a foaming bitch, he decides.
He’s only been in the tall house – 166 Hamilton Terrace, London NW8 – for twelve minutes. He’s already regretting having taken an early train.
‘The Boy Jesus,’ said the foaming bitch who was still Camilla when she opened the door. ‘Welcome, Lord.’ She held a hanky to her face. She proffered it to his: ‘D’you do snap Jesus?’ Now she leans across the table, across the bottles, towards the turkey’s brittle breast bone, chin in hands above the starboard drumstick. Eddie looks at his watch.
‘It’s all right Jesus Pet – Daddy and Lal won’t be back for hours. “We can play-yay-yay-yay/Make hay-yay-yay-yay.” Whatever. You’re early. Do you know what Lal says about you? … She … says … Look at that bottle: what’s different about it?’
Eddie, tight shouldered, scrutinises the Sauternes bottle. He shrugs, eyes down, eyes on a dead parsnip.
‘I thought you were meant to have the most phenomenal powers of observation … If Baby Jesus look closely wosely he’ll spot that the bottle has no seam. It is manufactured as an entity. They don’t make them like that any longer. Didn’t know that did you? Other way round from stockings. They used to have seams. Now they don’t. Does it get you going: S-t-r-a-n-g-e girls saying stockings? Does it? Lal says I’ve got to lock up my undies because you’ll be at them. And – do you know –’ her mouth which is a wound protrudes over the tiller of the breast bone (her chin is hidden, her mind on day release), ‘I think she’s right. Arnold Layne.5 Arncha Jeez? D’you want a toot – I’m going to have a toot. You’re not going to work a miracle on this piss – are you …’ She refers to the uncorked Minervois. ‘Toot and a beaker of piss, then. It’ll have to be. He’s got eight fucking thousand bottles of proper wine down there. And he double locks it every time he goes out. He doesn’t trust me.’ She pushes a glass of wine towards Eddie.
‘I don’t drink.’
‘No – you wouldn’t would you … You saint you.’
The Founder considers irony (and its underdeveloped sibling sarcasm) to be the real English disease. Poor Eddie agrees: he recognises its efficacy, the effrontery of the crude form. His is the victim’s angle on it. It’s dissemblance, which is a lie; it intends its opposite; it’s treacherous; it’s code – and he’s not part of the club. (His jib is cut wrong.) It’s a coward’s device. Its ambiguity allows the ironist a way out: the ironist can always claim to have been talking straight. The Founder notes that it’s ‘for them that want to hedge their bets’. Its appeal to the English lies in its deceit, its dryness, its indirectness (there is a gulf between emotion and expression; indeed it facilitates the suppression of emotion). It’s a device of the covert, the secretive. It’s the slang of the professional classes. Twat judges, bastard barristers. It’s for those who were born to sneer. It’s their torn shirt, their rolled trouser leg. The Founder has told Eddie all this, but he has never told Eddie how to counter it. She’s fixing him with a stare that’s mocking, accusatory. He holds a wingbone with both hands.
He says, very softly: ‘No. Not yet a saint. Not while I’m still alive …’
She whinnies incredulity. She watches him shut his eyes. The lids are thin. She wonders if he sees through them, if he sees in his sleep. He clasps his upper lip between his teeth. Then he smiles, surveys the room (fantasy farmhouse: big dresser, bucolic prints, Aga, Staffordshire). He gnaws the bone, scrapes at the table’s grain.
He tells her, casually: ‘My uncle’s just died.’
‘Oh God … Look I didn’t mean to … I didn’t know. Oh I’m sorry. Were you clo … I’m really really sorry.’
‘You don’t need to be. I loathed him … I’ll ring later to make sure.’
‘What?’
‘To check – that he is dead.’
‘I thought you … either –’
‘I said he just died. Thirty seconds ago. He’s still warm. I got a message. I never had one before. But I never wanted anyone to die so much. I never cursed anyone else. Not even Toddy –’
‘What are you … You’re trying to spook me. Aren’t you. You are. Aren’t you. Tell me you are for fuck’s sake … Come on … I didn’t mean to … Pax? Eh? Please? Yeh?’
‘It’s a letter’s difference. That’s all. That’s the beauty of it. Tip it over with one letter. C-U-R-E … C-U-R-S-E … Easy if you know how.’
Camilla Chubb feels the horror, the cold stripe of dorsal rigor, the cosmic fright that numbs, the internal paralysis occasioned by fear’s toxins – those that work quicker than a krait’s bite. Her brain tingles – synapses in shock; someone’s rubbing linament into the cells in there. Her tongue fills her throat. Her feet are fixed to the floor. Her hand won’t shift her glass. This is the worst ever. This relegates ODs, stomach pumps, arterial incisions to paltry. This is unscreamable terror, this man whose mastications’ din fills her ears with the echoes of hell’s forge: bones devoured by industrial teeth, the wicked wet lapping, clicks, the grinding of ossific splinters, the ogreish cataracts of spittle, bungpull plosives, unnatural disaster. His gustatory absorption is massive. What species does he belong to? He’s from outside, from further away than even her father knows. Even his dandruff is excessive – in net quantity and size of flake, each one a seborrhoeic almond. His eyes manifest a perpetual, profound hurt that a moment’s quiet triumph cannot mitigate, a hurt redeemable only by infliction of a greater hurt, by the primitive alchemy of revenge. (Does she feel this? Yes – but gradually. The tight skein of synchronous sensation will unravel, reveal itself to her over suicidal hours and fraught years. There’s such a galore of gen. Stored, awaiting the catalysis of Poor Eddie’s futures: each of which she’ll discover she has cognition of – they don’t surprise her. Their seed/blueprint is with her from this moment which is unlike all other moments.) She dares not take her eyes off him. She computes putative dangers. She leaves the kitchen (he doesn’t stop eating or acknowledge her departure); she hurries into the hall, grabs a coat and goes out into the wide avenue of grey, crazed pollards and stock brick. She runs to the corner, keeps running down the hill, around another corner.
Eddie alone in Chubb’s vertical house. He has never been in such a house before: the stairs, the elegance, the well-mannered opulence. It is a museum, a gallery, a brainfood house, a meal for his eyes. He notices Camilla’s absence and is grateful for it. There is so much to look at: ancestor (whose?) portraits on the countless stairflights; marble busts from whichever century it was when everyone had mumps; prints and masks and books and carpets. There are so many rooms to enter. Chairs to sit in. The quantity of material solaces astonishes him. His uncle’s death has cheered him. He allows himself two liqueur chocolates, the hues of their gaudy foil are like those of baubles on the Christmas tree – there, fairy on the top, lights, tinsel. He wanders from room to room, sniffing scent, prodding cushions, opening cupboards, feeling brocades and velvets and silks. He bounces on beds and sofas; tentatively to begin with then with a keenness that borders abandon. There are fur coats for him to bury his face in. There are yellow rooms, powder blue rooms, gilt tables, ebonised tables, baroque chairs, rococo chairs, veneers like black ice, veneers like swirling oil. Surfaces, crannies, textures … He eats a further couple of chocolate liqueurs. He pops these in his mouth whole, doesn’t even consider biting the ‘bottles’ at the neck. The cosy oesophagal warmth pleases him mightily. Oh, and there are nuts, elaborate crackers, glacé fruits, soft Spanish nougat, chunks of panforte and halva. Eddie succumbs to this saccharine exoticism, to drowsy sybaritism. Chubb’s shelves hold hundreds of books on levitation, miracles, ghosts, table turning, mediums, hypnotism, magic, prophecy etc. But Eddie is on holiday.
He lies on a sofa in a darkening sitting room eating sweet-meats, watching a technicolour circus drama on television (glamorous trapeze artiste promises sexual favours to deformed clown on condition that he murder the bareback rider who is her rival for the lion tamer’s hand). Incredulous and bored, he treats himself to more chocolate liqueurs. He switches channels: no luck. On a console table is a display of old metal animals with spring-driven motors. The entire zoo scurries across the polished floorboards, whirring, striking table legs and wainscots, overturning to reveal busy little wheels. Eddie crawls in pursuit of a porcupine, crushes a box of marzipan fruits. But he tires of these toys as any boy would, abandons them, prowls through the house seeking fresh pleasure, revelling in the safe mysteries of the twilit labyrinth, brushed by curtains and fronds, thrilled by squeaky joists, by fantastical shapes in the crepuscule, by silhouettes against the streetlit windows. He loses count of the rooms, of the past crazes they bear witness to. In Chubb’s study notepads, folders, files and tapes bear witness to his current craze – Eddie. Eddie pries diligently – he owes it to himself. Transcribed tapes aside there is very little: lists of topics, lists of questions, arrows, illegible phrases. Eddie believes that Sonny was right, that he is writing Chubb’s book for him.
He dials 0722 5004. The accent he practises whilst the phone rings is his idea of posh. A man answers.
‘Hairlair,’ booms Eddie. ‘Can I spake to Deouglas Vallendah.’ There is a void, then an intake of breath. ‘Aah …’
‘Probalem?’ suggests Eddie.
‘I think I’d better fetch – hang on a mo.’ The police sergeant who came to the phone was all periphrasis and hawking.
‘Is what you’re trying to say is that Mr Vallendah is dead?’
‘In, ughum, ehhm, a nutshell, urm, aah, Sir, it it is my my aarb sad duty to oooh issue an affirmative, yes, yes: the deceased, hmmm, has passed away …’
Eddie dances, shadow boxes, claps, stamps etc. This is how Chubb and Lalage find him. He cannot account for Camilla’s whereabouts.
He whoops, punches the air. His glee fazes them. His triumph, he explains (and again) is tripartite: the efficacy of his (ten years old) curse is proven; his telecognitive faculty has developed through right-side exercises; and he is delighted that Douglas is dead – there was a man who didn’t deserve to dredge his potentialities.
That evening Eddie hears Camilla and Chubb screaming at each other. Later he hears Lalage and Chubb screaming at each other. He is deft in the distinction of the women’s hysterogenic keening. He can recognise the source even if he doesn’t know which room they’re in now, now that it’s each other they’re wounding with their womb shrieks. He wonders if it’s always like this, if the house is always loud with sounds of familial stramash, if there is always a tureen exploding against a wall, if there is always a door crashing against its jamb as a prelude to silence (bring up exterior sounds: internal combustion, wind through the pollards, Mr East against the panes). He wonders – but idly, for here is another box of crystallised ginger, here is a biblical film (risible dialogue, grandiose cumuli over Calvary), here is the chair that sloth built. And here is the chair whose edge Chubb sits on, demeaning himself with a fidgety grin the way he never has in hotel rooms at Pompey and Hayling, beating tattoos on its directoire arms, scraping a Kazak’s tight pile with his heels. Here is the chair in which Chubb suffers his first disappointment, this man who is not at home at home.
‘Oohff – I don’t feel like it,’ replies Eddie, curtly, unaverting his eyes from the U certificate crucifixion, when Chubb suggests that ‘we may as well get started. Spot of lucubration out of the distaff’s way?’ Chubb tries nervily to Smalltalk Eddie. He doesn’t understand the inaptness of such triviality: it’s a language Eddie doesn’t speak – he doesn’t see the signs, can’t read the invitations. Moreover, even were Eddie appropriately kitted, there would be a wrongness in these two playing the pingpong of verbal vacuity – that is not the way they were meant to be, behave; that is not their proper bond in the jigsaw. Their contract is formalised in unilateral intimacy: it is Eddie who talks, it is Chubb who ignites the monologic motor and thereafter keeps mum. That’s the way The Good Guy planned it: Chubb is an abstracted ear. There should be no role for him.
He is, then, further trespassing without the bounds of his propriety when, later, during an advert for power tools (‘Give him what he didn’t get on Christmas Day’) he leans, host to guest, towards Curled Eddie: ‘So. I hear you’ve … met Camilla … That’s good, that’s good …’ he clears his throat – nerves, not phlegm: ‘Harrrug … She’s … she’s had her problems –’
‘Noticed.’
‘Ah! Yes. She can be quite awk … Tell me – do you think that there’s anything you can do – to help her … For her. You know … Which might, which might, which mi …’
Chubb isn’t asking, he’s pleading, there’s desperation in his voice, there’s paternal shame, guilt that the genetic load he transmitted may have been contaminated, guilt at the very fact of his procreation. This is a new Chubb, a naked Chubb; this Chubb has faith in Eddie. He believes. Eddie can discern it: his blindness to social nuance and conversational convention is compensated by his diagnostic sensibility towards humours and their beards. Chubb’s face is rictal entreaty, beseeching eyes; he hopes for hope – in vain, for:
‘You talked to Sonny then?’ Eddie’s tone is curt, his diversion cruel.
‘What?’ Chubb’s perplexity raises his voice.
‘Sonny. You talked to him didn’t you? He said you did. He said he’d phoned you …’
Chubb slumps, crumpled, numb with incredulity.
‘… To put you in the picture. So … you reached any conclusion? Decisions, like? Point is – I don’t want to be unfair – but they are my words.’ He has to wait for Chubb’s reply.
‘Your friend … has a most extraordinarily inflated idea of … of this modest project. I suppose I should be flattered.’ Chubb explains the ethics and economics of private press publishing, the wrong flow of money, the abusive sobriquet ‘vanity’, the analogues with onan, the prop to amour propre, the recondite nature of his work, the retail problem, the retail void –
‘So no one’s going to be able to buy it then?’
‘Financial gain is not my motive –’
‘Just as well, if they’re not going to be having it in the shops. Heyho … Who’s going to read it?’
‘Specialists, colleagues … my fellow researchers. All of the people you’ll meet tomorrow.’
‘This is … well, this puts a very different complexion … You know, you never told me … I mean, I thought it was a proper book … No offence, mind – but I’ve put in a lot of hours …’
They sat in silence, in television light. Choric surges accompany the deposition of the goyish Christ.
Eddie laughs at the actor’s actorishly pained face, he turns to Chubb: ‘We may not know what it was like but we know what it wasn’t like. Don’t you reckon? If I asked you for them would you give me the tapes?’
Chubb laughs. Not an easy laugh: think rather of embarrassment. ‘Eddie … This is a delicate matter. Don’t rush headlong into some … Look, don’t be rash. I think really your friend Sonny is not –’
‘Would you give them to me?’
‘It’s not as easy as that. The conception, the actual recordings –’
‘Oh come on – yes or no.’
‘You’re being very … obstinate. We’re collaborators. It’s a joint ven –’
‘You’re saying no aren’t you?’
‘I suppose, frankly, I am.’
‘Well we got that straight then haven’t we? Know where I stand then I suppose … What was it you thought I could do for Camilla?’
The specialists, the colleagues, the fellow researchers: a coven of them gather in Chubb’s house early in the afternoon of 27 December. Chubb’s familiars, veterans of psychic campaigns. Men with twitches, men of military mien, a man with a wig he pushes back to scratch his scalp, a man with bugger’s grips, a woman with a moustache, a siren with opaline earrings to her clavicle, the mousy misses of a certain age, a myopic hippy whose nipples are wrapped in cheesecloth, a diesel with a hearing aid that admits her to conversations of centuries ago – invariably such conversations are conducted by the noble, the martially powerful, the famous. She is at a loss to explain why – but then no one who suffered a previous life was a smith or dung seller. Posthumous travel of any sort is prohibited to the ordinary man in the grave. The after life is no more egalitarian than the before life; there exists a metempsychotic hierarchy. Pharoahs and courtesans most favoured. No one wants to believe he was a ditch digger. No specialist wants to talk to a low-caste beaker person.
Chubb fetches Eddie from the den where he has been talking to Camilla in apparent tranquillity. He introduces him one by one to the creatures who crowd the first floor sitting room, nibbling, sipping, boasting, clutching duffel bags and pasties. They crowd the space between their heads and ceiling with a brown nimus of arcanum: Claudine, Lambert Shepherd, Miss Walby and Miss Williams, Emma Zunz, Mister Honeybourne etc.
Eddie immediately forgets the names. He wearily notes the afflictions: squint, liver spots, stroke victim in vomit green tweed, Parkinsonism, nathty lithp, obesity, exophthalmic goitre. The usual. Eddie discovers that Chubb has an arm around his shoulder. The babble of competitive recollection: where they’ve been, what they’ve done. They are travellers spinning travellers’ yarns, fishermen … They feign a disregard for Eddie, they hardly break off their narratives to greet him, they strive to outbrag each other: the states they’ve witnessed, the kilos of ectoplasm, levitational tours de force measured in metres and minutes, hemiplegia cured, paraplegia cured, the quadriplegic who now plays football, the footballer who learnt to talk, the ghost who posed for cameras, the girl who menstruated at seven, the girl who menstruated at four and spoke an ancient Assyrian tongue even though she’d never left Harpenden, Herts.
Eddie knew that they stole glances at him. He knew too that he was Chubb’s trophy, that his presence obviates Chubb’s participation in the contest of tongues, that he is indisputable in his physical presence, that he doesn’t have to be recreated. He understands the kudos that Chubb gains: he has achieved an apogee of fandom. The hands are in Chubb’s keeping.
The room is lit by floor-to-ceiling sashes. At two o’clock Chubb draws wooden shutters across them. The lights are turned on. He ushers the assembly to the end of the room further from the door. He momentarily exits from the door.
He returns followed by an African woman carrying a swaddled child whom, at Chubb’s beckoning, she lays on a table.
‘Godefroid’, announces Chubb, ‘is four years old. He weighs less than one stone, less than he weighed when he was a year old. For a long time he has refused to eat. Mrs Ngoye has attempted every sort of treatment … No two diagnoses correspond. The child is dying … Eddie.’
Eddie has had no warning. He walks head down across the room to Chubb, speaks softly: ‘What kind of stunt is this … You bring in some basket case … expect me to … to do a turn. I’m on holiday. Besides, I’ve got no authority here … haven’t you taken that in? And who’s paying … Are you? You’re more of a pimp on me than Butt’s ever been.’
The door to the room opened: Lalage, crying: ‘It’s Camilla! Chubb! She’s done it again.’
Lalage holds up bloody hands.
Eddie grins. As Chubb bolts from the room he turns to them, to his audience, murmuring: ‘She told me I was the devil … so I was. She asked me what the answer was. What could she do about life, about her life.’
Eddie hesitates then continues gravely: ‘End it … Nothing else for it. That’s what I told her. End it. That’s the cure. I can cure anything.’
Camilla Chubb didn’t die, that time. Indeed she was back from hospital by the time Sonny and Laddy broke in for the tapes (which Chubb had sagely deposited in his office).