The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

Sometimes he did not say all that he thought. Privately he said to himself, ‘While under the lid the finger is still to Frankfurt how shall we do more than park overnight in Belgium? How can Cass be so blind he does not see that if there is no trip there is nothing? He must be eyeless with purpose.’

So he swooped down upon the field of truth that Cass and Buddy pushed and that Cass like Angeline had no habit in his dark draper suit. Behind his shutters he saw bright-lit Cro-Magnons fearful in feathers and brutally flowered hunt the ponderous Neanderthal through fleet bush and drive them off and decimate them: not for hatred or violence but because it was the natural order and he uttered, ‘Predelic man must leave our caves as we reach each valley.’

‘Caves! Here’s a whole hogging city ours for the carve-in!’ said blind Cass. But there were those present who dug the Master and soon this casually important word of His went round and new attitudes were born in the bombsites and a solitary zither taking up this hunting song was joined by other instruments. And the world sailed too amid the Master’s brainwaves.

Leaving the others aside, he stylised himself back to his ruined roost where Angeline sat with her back curved to the light unspeaking.

‘After the film tonight all possibilities say we flit,’ he told her.

She did not look up.

‘Leave the will open to all winds and the right one blows. This is the multi-valued choice that we should snarl on and no more middle here.’ Echoing his words the first engine broke air as crude maintenance started for the farther trek; soon blue smoke ripped farting across the acid perimeters as more and more switched on.

Still she had no face for him.

‘You’re escaping, Colin, why don’t you face the truth about yourself? It’s not a positive decision – you’re leaving because you know that what I say about Cass and the others is a whole sparky truth and you hope to shake them off, don’t you?’

‘After this film and the adulation we flit on a head-start. Maybe a preach-in.’ He fumbled and half-lit a half-smoked cigar with an old fouled furcoat over his shoulder.

She stood up facing him more haggard than he. ‘He pushes but you don’t care, Col! You have the word about the Mafia but you don’t care. It was through him Marta died but you don’t care. Whatever happens you don’t care if we all fall dead in our trips!’

He was looking through the cracked pane. Mostly now they sat around with a trance-in going even among the rolling cars. But the beer brigade could caper – one of their plump girls danced now in the steel engraving air of a Jew’s harp slow but sturdy.

‘This place has lost all its loot so we’ll take in my film and then we’ll give it a scan and we’ll blow. Open up another city. Why don’t you dance, Angelpants?’

‘Phil, Robbins, now Marta-oh, you really have lost all loot yourself, man! You wouldn’t care if you got cut dead yourself and to think I stood up for you!’

The cigar wasn’t working. His hand twitched it into a corner, he moved to the door’s gape.

‘You use the old fleshioned terms and feelings, Angle, all extinct with no potentiality. There’s a new thing you aren’t with but I begin to graveL Somewhere Marta got a wrong drug, somewhere she caught hipatitis or pushed herself over. So? It’s down-trip and she had a thing we’ll never know in her mind, a latent death. She was destined and that’s bad We did the best and can’t bind too much if she freaks out.’

Lying with the lovely lubrication gone and nothing swinging.

‘Well I bind, for God’s sake! I could have helped her when she mewed to me about a toad levering up her skull or whatever it was and instead I sogged back like the rest of them! It was the night of the filmrush and now tonight they let the complete epic roll – I see more death tonight – right here in the toadstool I see it!’ She rapped her brow as if for answer.

‘Flame,’ he said. ‘A light to see us off by I see but I don’t see you dance like that chubby girl her cheeks. Angey, you can’t motorcade – I want you to stay and shack in with the golden Boreas in Bruxelles who’ll care for you and is not wholly gone.’

She threw herself at him and clutched him, holding round his neck with one hand stroking his beard his hair his ears his pileum with the other. ‘No, no, I can’t stay a moment in this stone vortex. Besides, my place is with you. I give you loot, I need you! You know your seed is sealed in me! Have pity!’

‘Woman, you won’t stay silent at Ouspenski’s spread!’

‘I’ll switch on, I will, and be like you and all the others. I’ll dance!’

He side-stepped and the vague promises of a mind-closure near engine stutter.

‘You don’t take one pinch of loot to my sainthood!’

‘Darling, we don’t have to take that come-on straight!’

Half to one side he pushed her peering through his own murk and the broken-down air, muttering, ‘So let’s get powered!’

‘Colin – you need me! You need someone near you who isn’t – you know – hippie!’ Her eyes were soft again the wild goose-girl.

‘That was yesterday. Listen!’ He pointed among the buckling roadsters. Ruby Dymond’s voice – Ruby always so turned-on to a new vibration – lifted against a Tonic rhythm singing.

Fearsome in our feathers brutally flowered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

We warn the predelics we’re powered

Fearsome in our feathers and brutally flowered

The Word gathered loot as gears kicked in.

And another voice came in shouting ‘There are strangers over the hill, wow wow, strangers over the hill.’ In the background noise of backfiring and general revving and the toothaching zither sound. More plump girls dancing.

‘I need only the many now,’ he said.

They required little to eat, clothes mattered not much to them, in the strengthening air was the gossamer and hard tack of webwork. What they were given they traded for the precious fluid and this stored in tanks or hidden in saucepans under car seats so that when they had to go they had plenty of go – those who ran out of golden gas got left behind sans loot sans end.

By evening, a rackety carqueue moved towards the blistered dome of Sacré Coeur and citycentre where every pinnacle concealed its iguana of night. First came the Master in the new red Banshee his Brussels disciples had brought him as tribute, saluting with Angelina huddled despairing in the back seat. Then his tribe in all gay tarnation.

From one shuttered day to the next his mindpower fluctuated and now wheelborn again he, finding the images came fast, tried to order them but what truth they looted seemed to lie in their random complexity. He radiated the net or web to all ends and to cut away strands was not to differentiate the holes. Clearly as the patterns turned in slow mindsbreeze he saw among them an upturned invalid car with wheels still spinning and by it lying a crippled negro on his back lashing out with metal crutches at a strangely dressed whiteman with machine qualities. Near at hand stood in separate frame a fat bare man with painted skull shouting encouragement by megavoice.

Simultaneously this fat bare man lay floating in a lake of flame.

Simultaneously this fat bare man lay in the throes of love with a bare bald female dolly of human scale.

Simultaneously this bare bald dolly was Angeline with her suffering shoulders.

Simultaneously the face was cracked. China griefs seeped from wounds.

Startled, he turned and looked back at her on the back seat. Catching his glance, she lifted her hand and took his reassuringly, mother to child.

She said, ‘This good moment is an interim in our long deline.’

He said, ‘Wear this moment then with it all baraka as if you had it comfortable on your feet for ever in the timeflow,’ and at the prompt unprompted words his whole ornate idea of reincarnation in endless cycles flooded his hindusty horizons with eternal recurrence.

Outside their moving windows faces dystered with hunger and hope.

She said, ‘They acclaim you in the streets as if you did not come with downfall for them,’ gazing at the action.

Cass said to him looking angrily at her, ‘They salute you and would keep you here for all the evers, bapu, as the wheel turns.’

Thin-cheeked children of Brussels ran like wolves uniting in a pack packing and howling about the car – not all acclaiming, many jeering and attempting to stop the progress. Scuffles broke out Fights kindled near the slowcade and spread like a bush fire among the stone forests. Half a mile from the Grand Place, the cars piled to a stop and crowds swarmed over them. Some of the drivniks in the cars wept but there was no help for them, the police force having dissolved to rustle cattle on the ignoble German border.