I saw a Puritan-one hanging of his cat on a Monday,
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.
—R. Brathwaite, An Age for Apes
As they pulled around Marble Arch, Johan saw a crowd and asked Reggie what was happening.
“Speakers’ Corner, squire! Every psychopath, cuckoo brain, and nutter in England gathers there.”
“We’ll see about that!”
Reggie pulled up on the south side of the arch and the strange-looking quartet crossed into the park.
“They get on their soapbox, squire. It’s where the saying comes from. It’s the beauty of the English way. If you’re mad, talk away, but don’t ever be surprised if no one listens.”
And so they entered the exquisitely bizarre fray.
“Blasphemers and infidels. Degenerates and heretics. What a joy!”
They headed toward the trees beneath which the orators gathered, on the wide pathway to Park Lane. A grubby, olive-skinned man, stood on the foot of a stepladder. His beard was so full, he looked like he was peering over a hedge. He was in the throes of asking his small but interested, amused, and growing audience about the Promised Land.
“And why, my friends, is it called the Promised Land? Because God promises it to anyone and everyone. Jews, Arabs, and bloody Christians alike! The lot. Anyone with a beard and a funny hat. Every religion needs a beard and a funny hat, if you can call a crown of thorns a hat. Which I do! No wonder there is such turmoil, my friends, when God has all the ethics of a spiv selling silks in Camden Town. Abraham, the father of these three clans! He hears voices and goes up a mountain to kill his son. They say he’s a prophet. If my father, who is a decent and religious man, heard voices and took me onto Hampstead Heath to slaughter me, what would they do to him? Lock the man up, throw away the bloody key, and rightly so! But no, God talked to Abraham. I despair, my friends! I truly fucking despair!”
The speaker’s eyes darted madly, pleased with himself as his entertained flock increased. Then this delightful man lost four of his disciples (Johan Thoms et al.), as they continued their fun sweep of the enlightened, the unstable, and the unwell.
They came next to a giant of a man who needed no soapbox, no stepladder. He was nearing seven feet tall in his odd-colored Wellington boots. His bald head was stained by a black-currant birthmark, his jaw was crooked, and one of his eyes appeared to have been gouged out. And he was reciting medieval English poetry. Throughout his rehearsed spiel of crazed but hypnotic poetry, his lengthy arms remained upright in what seemed to Johan to be an impression of the rugby posts on Porlock Hill.
“Is this Heaven or Hell?” Johan let out involuntarily.
“That is the smartest question I have ever been asked, good sir,” the giant acknowledged. His crowd spun around to see from where the inquiry had come. Johan stood impassively for once, his mind on a different plane.
A sign behind London’s tallest orator proclaimed the source of the loon’s words:
RICHARD BRATHWAITE’S AN AGE FOR APES DRUNKEN BARNABY’S FOUR JOURNEYS TO THE NORTH OF ENGLAND 1658
There was a serenity and a peace about the giant in his massive stained dungarees as he shared with the intrigued number the words of this Brathwaite character, seemingly his favorite poet:
“Inns are nasty, dusty, fusty,
With both smoke and rubbish musty.
Thence to Gastile, I was drawn in
To an alehouse near adjoining
To a chapel; I drank stingo,
With a butcher and Domingo,
Th’ curate, who to my discerning,
Was not guilty of much learning.”
“Doesn’t sound like hell at all to me, chaps. More like damned heaven,” said Johan, once again slightly louder than he had planned.
Giant threw his head back in ecstatic relief.
“Whoa! We have surely been joined by a savant, a seer, people. All this and, indeed, the heaven of which he speaketh, too!”
He then bellowed out what seemed to be his favorite Brathwaite couplet on a completely new train of thought:
“I saw a Puritan-one hanging of his cat on a Monday,
For killing of a mouse on Sunday.”
Johan gestured to Catalina not to push Cicero on, but to stay and breathe in every part of every second. A fine calm had descended upon Johan Thoms for the first time in decades. For once, he was not in a rush. Time stood still, like it had once in the university quadrangle under the monkey puzzle trees, in the Old Sultan’s Palace under the banyan tree, in Suite 30 of the Hotel President. Johan and Giant held eye contact as if they were best friends from a previous incarnation. They were certainly bound in union by their own deeply individual and articulate madnesses. But there was more. The perhaps unnecessary slaughter of the mouse was one thing; but to see the cat suffer, and in full view of the world, moved Johan, resonated deeply within him. Who would then slit this Puritan’s throat? When would the killing stop? Giant seemed to know that it was unlikely to stop anytime soon, but also that he would not be judging anyone, least of all the man he now faced. A smile touched upon both their lips as the world carried on around them in silence. Tonight Blanche would write of this scene, for she knew it would be appreciated by one of her Manhattan readers.
Suddenly Catalina broke their ethereal calm. Carefully measuring her English words, she looked at Johan Thoms and said, “But you, old man. You would NEVER wait for this. You would want to kill this poor mouse on a Saturday! Maybe even before, you old stupido!”
After so many years with the man, she was fully aware of his penchant for rushing ahead or dreaming of the past, of his inability to live in the present. She was still unaware, however, of Johan’s secret, for Cicero had breathed not a word.
Cicero choked. He could only wholeheartedly agree with her beautiful, direct wisdom.
The crowd sniggered. Giant radiated silent joy, dumbfounded for the first time in more than four hundred visits to this unique spot.
Catalina then walked off on her own and procured a discarded soapbox. Giant politely gestured for his crowd to note this strange young woman.
Today, in her tatty blue dress, Catalina gladly accepted the crowd’s attention. She clapped her hands sharply three times and proudly announced to the gathered delinquents, degenerates, and miscreants in something a little north of pidgin English:
“I would like you all know that I have something to say.”
Giant looked at Johan but nodded toward the blind man at his side and mouthed the word congratulations. Johan cocked his head, still locked in eye contact with the erstwhile speaker. Their friendly glare was broken by her next, three-word declaration:
“I am pregnant.”
She bit into her bottom lip in that way she did, motherly hands cupped underneath her belly, and looked at Cicero. “And that man there is the father.”
A gentle ripple of applause spread from a six-year-old girl called Ivy, a stunned Johan, and their gracious driver, Reginald, through the crowd. Hats were thrown in the air. Many lined up to shake Cicero by the hand, but not before Johan had held him tightly and at length. The father-to-be was unable to find any words until Catalina embraced him, and then he simply said that he loved her. Giant drifted into the background, settling on his haunches by an oak and smirking happily to himself, as if the final part of life’s jigsaw had just fallen into place. Johan thought that he saw a copy of The White-Kilted Brigadier in the pocket of Giant’s dungarees.
Johan was blissfully confused. It was a surreal few minutes, but also beautiful and quite mysterious. Time did stop then. Or seemed to. He had never imagined being this happy again in his life. This was the feeling he had continually tried to capture. He recognized it without fail, although he noted, too, that he could never summon it himself.
A brief chorus of “For They Are Jolly Good Fellows” broke out among the crowd, then it slowly dispersed.
* * *
The mean concierge eyed the girl in the tatty blue dress suspiciously, and with some disdain, until she took over from Johan the reins of pushing a uniformed Cicero through the grand swinging doors of the Langham. A distinguished-looking (yet still glazed-over) Johan was at her side, having now removed his eye patch altogether in order to get a better view of the place.
They checked into two luxury rooms on the fifth floor. Their three vast arched windows sat below the belfry tower, which hosted the recently refired rouge neon of the establishment’s name. Johan swished back the curtains, twenty feet high and of violet crushed velvet, to reveal to the right the curve of Regent Street and the still-regal (despite bomb damage) brown stone Church of All Souls, and to the left a white monolithic structure which he had seen many times in the Times of London.
“By George!” he blurted as he looked out onto the BBC. “Can this day get ANY better?”
He immediately picked up the house phone to the concierge. The chief of staff requested field glasses. Within five minutes, a pair of binoculars was delivered to the room, though this was never recorded in the Langham’s official log.11
“Need to put names to faces!” He peered out through them happily, hoping to match the plummy voice from the six-o’clock news with the bowler-hatted and mustachioed figure twirling a dreaded umbrella by the front doors across the road.
Catalina and Cicero slipped into the adjoining suite.
from “The Unpublished Diaries of D. Parker”
August 6, 1945
I received an airmail letter from Lorelei today and this passage I relate unedited.
D. I am tired. London has finally worn me out. After Mr. Orwell’s suggestion of the Savoy and the Langham, I can find no clue. The embers are fading, though I sense I am close. The embassies are of no or little help. What priority may I demand in such times here? It is not their fault. I have even placed newspaper advertisements in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, but I fear they are lost in the sea of similar sad postings. I still write every day, even if it is one sentence. I wish I could find him for the sake of our son. I often fear that there is not much else to salvage, but for the boy, it is different. Carl has grown into such a fine man without his father, and he deserves this at the very least. I thought I was close, but I suppose I should take solace in my son and in Blanche and all that entails. It can be oh so confounding. We have a right to want more, but we must also remember when and where we are living.
I ponder what will happen were I to find my Johan; yet I fear the alternative far more.
I will be moving out of the Langham tomorrow.
Then who knows?
I miss and love you,
Lorelei x