The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That’s how I materialised, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here – we are in my brain, if s all me. The nomad’s open to the city. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine, in a culmination going.’ It was true. Other people, he hardly saw them, caught in bursts, crossflare, at last shared their bombardment of images.

‘Don’t be daft – it’s raining again! Don’t go daft. Talk proper.’ But she sounded frightened.

They swerved past factories, long drab walls, filling stations, long ochre terraces, yards, many genera of concrete.

Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World, Guinness. Grey stucco urinal. Coal yard, Esso Blue. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. More rows of terrace houses, dentured, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his book; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis, suburbanal. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage, out onto the motorway, endless roads crossing over it on primitive pillars. Railways, some closed, canals, some sedge-filled, a poor sod pushing a sack of potatoes on the handlebars of his bike across a drowning allotment, footpaths, cycle-paths, catwalks, nettlebeds, waste dumps, scrap-pits, shortcuts, fences.

Geology. Strata of different man-times. Tempology. Each decade of the past still preserved in some gaunt monument. Even the motorway itself yielding clues to the enormous epochs of pre-psychedelic time: bridges cruder, more massive in earliest epoch, becoming almost graceful later, less sick-orange; later still, metal; different abutment planes, different patterns of drainage in the under-flyover bank, bifurcated like enormous Jurassic fern-trees Here we distinguish by the characteristics of this medium-weight aggregate the Wimpey stratum; while, a little further along, in the shade of these cantilevers, we distinguish the beginning of the McAlpine seam. The layout of that service area, of course, belongs characteristically to the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. Further was an early electric generating station with a mock-turkish dome, desolate in a field. All art, assuaging. Pylons, endlessly, too ornate for the cumbersome land, assuaging. Multiplacation.

The skies were lumped and flaky with cloud, Loughborough skies. Squirting rain and diffused lighting. No green yet in the hedges. The brown nearest black. Beautiful. …

‘We will abolish that word beautiful. It carries implications of ugliness in an Aristotelian way. There are only gradations in between the two. They pair. No ugliness.’

‘There’s the word “ugliness”, so there must be something to attach it to, mustn’t there? And don’t drive so fast.’

‘Stop quoting Lewis Carroll at me!’

‘I’m not!’

‘You should have allowed me to give you the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Well, steer properly! You lost your loot or something?’

He flicked away back onto his own side of the motorway, narrowly missing an op-art Jag, its driver screaming over the wheel. I also drive by fuzzy sets, he thought admiringly. The two cars had actually brushed; between hitting and not-hitting were many degrees. He had sampled most of them. The lookout to keep was a soft watch. It was impossible to be safe – watering your potted plant, which was really doing well, impossible. A Christmas cactus it could be, you were so proud of it. The Cortina, Consortina, buckling against – you’d not even seen it, back turned, blazing in a moment’s sun, Christ, just sweeping the poor woman and her pathetic little porch right away in limbo!

‘Never live on Inner Relief.’ Suddenly light-hearted and joking.

‘Stop getting at me! You’re really rather cruel, aren’t you?’

‘Jebem te sunce! Look, Natrina – I mean, Angelina, I love you, I dream you.’

‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’

‘So? I’m not omniscient yet. I don’t have to know what it is to do it, do I? I’m just beginning, the thing’s just beginning in me, all to come. I’ll speak, preach! Burton’s group, Escalation Limited, I’ll write songs for them. How about Truth lies in Static Instants? Or When We’re Intimate in the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. No, no – Accidents and Aerodynamics Accrete into Art. No, no! How about … Ha, I Do My Personal Thinking In Pounds Sterling? Or Ouspenski Has It All Ways Always. Or The Victim and the Wreckage Are The Same. The Lights Across the River. Good job I threw away my NUNSACS papers. Too busy. I’ll fill the world till my head bursts. Look – zbogom, missed him! What a driver! Maybe get him tomorrow! Must forget these trivialities, which others can perform. Kuwait was the beginning! I’m just so creative at present, look, Angelina –’

‘It’s Angeline. Rhymes with “mean”.’ She couldn’t tell if he was joking.

‘My lean angel mean, Meangeline. I’m so creative, feel my temple! And I sense a gift in you too as you struggle out of old modes towards creams of denser feeling. What’s it going to be we got to find together eh?’

‘I’ve got no gins. My ma told me that.’

‘Anyhow, see that church of green stone? We’re there. Almost. Partially there. Fuzzy there. Kundalinically there. Etwas there.’

But this etwas country was neither inhabitable nor uninhabitable. It functioned chiefly as an area to move through a dimensional passage, scored, scarred, chopped by all the means the centuries had uncovered of annihilating the distance between Loughborough and the rest of Europe, rivers, roads, rails, canals, dykes, lanes, bridges, viaducts. The Banshee bumped over a hump-backed bridge, nosed along by a municipal dump, and rolled to a stop in front of a solitary skinned house.

Squadrons of diabolical lead birds sprang up to the roof of the house, from instant immobility to instant immobility on passage from wood to city. Slates were broken by wind and birds. Sheer blindness had built this worthy middle-class house here, very proper and some expense spared in the days before currency had gone decimal. It stood in its English exterior pluming as if in scaffolding. A land dispute perhaps. No one knew. The proud owner had gone, leaving the local council easy winners, to celebrate their triumph in a grand flurry of rubbish which now lapped into the front garden, eroded, rotting intricate under the creative powers of decay. Cans scuttled down paths. Caught by the fervour of it, the Snowcem had fallen off the brick, leaving a leprous dwelling, blowing like dandruff round the porch. And she looked up from the lovely cactus – he had admired it so much, bless him, a good husband – just in time to see the lorry sliding across the road towards her. And then, from behind, the glittering missile of the northbound car. …

Charteris leant against the porch, covering his eyes to escape the repetitive image. It had been, was ever coming in the repetitive web.

‘It was a conflux of alternatives in which I was trapped, all anti-flowered. I so love the British – you don’t understand! I wouldn’t hurt anyone. … I’m going to show the world how –’

‘You won’t bring him back by being sorry.’

‘Her, the woman with the cactus! Her! Her! Who was she?’

The Escalation had taken over an old Army Recruiting Office in Ashby Road. These surroundings with their old english wood and gymnast smells had influenced two of their most successful songs, ‘The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce’ and ‘A Platoon of One’ in the Dead Sea Sound days. There were four of them, four shabby young men, sensational and smelly, called, for professional purposes, Phil, Bill, Ruby and Featherstone-Haugh; also Barnaby, who worked the background tapes to make supplementary noise or chorus. They were doing the new one. They could hear the ambulances still squealing in the distance, and improvised a number embodying the noise called ‘Lost My Ring In the Ring Road’. Bill thought they should play it below, or preferably on top of, ‘Sanctions, Sanctions’; they decided to keep it for a flip side if they ever made the old circuit of recording.

They began to rehearse the new one.

Bank all my money in slot machines

These new coins are strictly for spending

Old sun goes on its rounds

Now since we got the metric currency

I do my personal thinking in pounds

We haven’t associated

Since twelve and a half new pence of money

Took over from the half-a-crowns

Life’s supposed to be negotiable, ain’t it?

But I do my personal thinking in pounds

Greta and Flo came in, with Robbins and the Burtons following. Army Burton had lost his lovely new tie, first one he ever had. He was arguing that Charteris should speak publicly as soon as possible – with the group at Nottingham on the following night; Robbins was arguing that there had been a girl at the art college called Hypothermia; Banjo was telling about London. Greta was saying she was going home.

‘Great, boys, great, break it up! You’ve escalated, like I mean you are now a choir, not just a group, okay, this secular stint? At Nottingham tomorrow night, you’re a choir, see? So we hitch our fortunes to Colin Charteris, tomorrow’s saint, the author of Fuzzy Sets.’

Oh, he’s on about sex again! I’m going home,’ said Greta, and went. Her mum lived only just down the road in a little house on the Inner Relief; Greta didn’t live there any more, but they had not quarrelled, just drifted gently apart on the life-death stream. Greta liked squalor and the arabesque decline. What she could not take were the rows of indoor plants with which her mother hedged herself.

Sister, they’ve decimalised us

All of the values are new

Bet you the five-penny piece in my hip

When I was a child on that old £.s.d.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

Sailing on every ha-penny …

They were used to Burton’s madness. He had got them the crowds, the high voices from the front aisles. They needed the faces there, the noise, the interference, the phalanx of decibels the audience threw back at them in self-defence, needed it all, and the stink and empathy, to give right out and tear a larynx. In the last verse, The goods you buy with this new coinage, they could have talkchant as counterpoint instead of instrument between lines. May be even Saint Charteris would go for that. Saint Loughborough? Some people said he was a Communist, but he could be all the things they needed, even become fodder for song. They looked back too much. The future and its thoughts they needed. Lips close, New pose, Truth lies in static instants. Well, it had possibilities.