The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘We get more fun … A couple of days ago, I caused a Belgian dentist to jilt his girl friend. Maybe he even murdered her! We live on the dark passions. The human race always had a morbid tendency that way, you know, so don’t think of us as too abnormal. Most literature is just gloating over the sorrows and sins of others – of which you are one of the supreme and most honoured exponents.’

There were little flies that flipped down from the stained walls and landed persistently on the hands and faces of the two men. Dostoevsky had rolled himself another cigarette and drew heavily on it, looking less as if he enjoyed it than as if he supposed it might defeat the flies. He spoke ramblingly. ‘You have the case all wrong, sir. Forgive me if I criticise by remarking that your attitude seems very perverted and vile to me. I have never revelled in suffering, I hope …’ He shook his head. ‘Or perhaps I have, who knows? But you must leave me, for I feel remarkably ill of a sudden, and in any case, as I say, you are wrong.’

Morovitch laughed. ‘How can millions of years of evolution be “wrong” in any sense? Man is what he is, becomes what he is from what he was. Strong emotions are a permanent need.’ He rose. Dostoevsky, out of politeness, rose too, so that for a moment they stood very close together, staring into each other’s eyes.

‘I shall come back to see you tomorrow,’ Morovitch said. ‘And then I shall leave this ignorant tribesman and infest – well, sir, it will be the greatest connoisseur’s treat possible from our point of view – I shall infest you, and finally gain new insights into what suffering is like. It was so as to apply, as it were, the gilt to the gingerbread, that I called first, so that I may know you inside and out.’

Dostoevsky began to laugh, but it broke at once, changing into a cough. ‘I see you are, as you claim, an illness.’

‘Tomorrow, I will be part of your illness. Goodbye, sir, and thank you for your courtesy and evident disbelief – until tomorrow!’

He turned towards the door, on which the writer had hung a battered painting of a woman. As he did so, Dostoevsky bent quickly down and snatched up the poker from its resting place beside the stove. With a mighty swing, he brought it down across the man’s unprotected head, much as Raskolnikov would one day be described as bringing down the hatchet on the old lady’s head in Crime and Punishment. With scarcely a groan, Morovitch sank to the floor, one arm sprawling out across the crumpled bed.

Dostoevsky put the poker down. Then he began to tremble.

Auto-Ancestral Fracture (#u26255378-8b5f-5072-b09b-04857dbcd8bd)

For Charteris fingering a domestic thing, the shadowy city Brussels was no harbour but a straight of beach along the endless litterals of his season. The towsers on the skyline lingering spelled a cast on his persistence of vision. He had no interest in privateering among those knuckled spoils. So his multi-motorcade pitched on a paved grind and tried to prefigure the variable geometry of event.

But on that stainey patch grounded among the fossil walls and brickoliths his myth grew and the story went over big what if each ear made him its own epic? The small dogs howled underground bells rang on semi-suits and song got its undertongue heating and the well-thumbed string. Though he himself was anchored deep in the rut of a two-girl problem forgetting other fervours.

Charteris they sang to many resonances and the spring’s illwinds sprang it back in a real raddle of uncanned beat and a laughter not heard the year before.

Some of the crusaders’ cars were burning in the camp as if it was auto-da-fé day, where the drivniks with cheerful shuck had forgotten that the golden juice they poured down the autothroats would burn. Like precognitive mass-images of the nearing future, the reek of inflammation brought its early pain and redness to the fatidical flare. Tyres smouldered, sending a black stink lurching across the waste ground where they all shacked.

You coughed and didn’t care or snow was peddled in deeper gulches to the vein’s distraction. The little fugitive shaggy figures were a new tribe, high after the miracle when the Master Charteris had died and risen again in a sparky way after only three minutes following the multi-man speed death up at Aalter. Tribally, they mucked in making legends. Bead groups flowered and ceded, lyrics became old history before the turning night wheeled in drawn. Some of the girls rinsed underclothes and hung them on lines between the kerouacs while others high-jinxed the boys or got autoerotic in the dicky seats. A level thousand drivniks locusted in the stony patch, mostly British, and the word spread inspired to the spired city.

There lifespendulum ticked upside down and the time was rape for legendermoan: for the hard heads and the business hearts found that their rhythms now worked only to a less punctilious clock and speculation had another tone. War had turned the metrognome off chime in general pixilation to a whole new countryslide upbraided.

What raised the threshold a bit was the Brussels haze. The bombing here had been heavy as the millionaire Kuwaiti pilots themselves flipped in a gone thing and the psycho-chemicals rained down. Life was newly neolithic, weird, and drab or glittering as the hypoglossal towers staggered. Appalling shawls of illusion draped across the people where the grey mattered. Occult lights still veiled the rooftops and aurora borealis clouded the corner of the eye. Jamming their stations signals of new bodies scarcely suspected before or different birds of intent It was a place for the news of New Saviour Charteris to nest.

Many came, some remained; many heard, some retained Food was short and disease plentiful, plague grunted in the backstreets of the mind, and cholera in the capital, but the goodfolk had thrown off the tiresome shades of Wesciv and unhoused cults of microbes and bacteria; this was the spontaneous generation and neutral Pasteur had been wrong. These circadian days, you could whistle along your own bones and the empty plate held roses. In Flanders field, the suckling poppies rose poppy-high, puppying all along in the dugged days of war’s aftermyth. Gristle though the breast was all were at it. So it was gregarious and who cared.

Of these the Escalation was foremost. Among the petering cars they made their music, Bill, black Phil, Ruby Dymond with his consolations and Featherstone-Haugh, plus Army and their technicians who saw that the more sparky sounds reached tape. This day they had escalated to a new format and a new name. They now hit the note as the Tonic Traffic and had infrasound, ground from Banjo’s grinder machine worked by Greta and Flo, who shacked with them and other musicniks.

Through mirror-sunglasses they peered at the oneway world, frisking it for telling dislocations in which to savour most possibility. The flat wind-smoke covered them part-coloured. They had a new number going needling into the new stations to really pierce wax called Famine Starting at the Head. Sometimes they talked round the lyric or with laughter sent it up.

On the Golden Coast cymbals start to sound some place like a magic garden I’m just a demon on the cello. Play the clarinet pretty good too man!

In his tent-cave Charteris with two women heard the noise and distant other flutes in flower-powdered falsetto, but had his own anguish to blow through the stops of strained relationship.

Stranding his pearl underseers to glaub the timeskip of Ange Old’s farce its tragictory of otherwhens and all plausticities made flesh in the mating. Like Him fashioned from parental lobotomy truncated by the mainspring glories of a rain shower slanting through the coral trees where greened the glowing white of landscape. Figures moving dragging dropping enduring in her glowworm eyes the candlesphere of hallucidity she’s the mouth and cheekbox of my hope’s facial tissure to come back like soft evening’s curtains. It’s what I see in her all all the peonies the blackbirds the white-thighs all and if not her all all I see of any voyaging.

Yet Marta has her own unopened chambers of possibility the locked door calling to my quay my coast Bohemian coast my reefs that decimate steamships. On the piston of this later Drake lost in spume rankest alternating

‘Do me a fervour! I try to work on this document of human destiny and you want to know whether or not I took in the slack with Marta last night Why not trip out of needling my alternatives? Get from me!’ The ceiling was only canvas billowing, standing in for plaster in a ruinous convent later old people’s home, which the autobahn-builders had half-nudged out of the way as they drove their wedges into the city-heart. Undemolished now almost self-demolished this wing flew the Charteris flag; here his disciples clustered elbows brick-coloured as plaster peppered down like the dust of crunched hourglasses. As starving Brussels besieged itself for a miracle domestic drama flourinched.

‘Oh entropise human detestiny!’ Angeline was washed and white like concentrate campallour, still calculating against the aftermaths of warcalculus, still by the chemicals not too treblinkered. ‘I don’t want to know if you slacked because I know if you slacked you slackered Marta tonight last night every night and I just damned won’t stand it, so you just damned fuzzy-settle for her or me! None of your either-whoring here!’

‘All that old anti-life stuff snuffed it with your wesciv world – from now it’s a multi-vulval state and the office blocks off.’

‘Your big pronounce! Hotair your views to others, stay off top of Marta, you grotnik!’

‘Meat injection and the life she needs, Angel, pumped in, like the big gymnastic sergeant you sing. She has no impact with frozen actions like long disuse now quickened with the fleetsin for her. If I poke some import all’s love in fair unwar and the sailor home from the seizure! Be pacific!’

‘Sea my Azov! And you messiah on a shemensplash as and when is it, eh? A matlottery! Over my bedboddy! Don’t you kindermarken me mate why how you can come it I don’t know – look at the consolation! Prize her legs a part you’d be licky! Caspian kid! – All dribbled-rabble and emuctory!’

‘I’ll baltic where my thighs thew my honey, I the upand-coming!’

‘You subserbiant Dalmatian! From now on you go adriantic up some mother tree – just don’t profligainst me! Didn’t I the one who moist you most with nakidity remembrane to mem-brainfever pudentically, or if not twot hot hand gambidexter pulping lipscrew bailing boat in prepucepeeling arbor of every obscene stance?’

She now had the big bosombeating act, buckaneering in the dusty half-room before his ambiguity, riding to master and be mastered, knowing he punched her husband in the traffic, gesturing with scatologic to the greyer girl, Marta on the master’s corner couch cuckoobird unsinging. Phantom nets of mauve and maureen joined them like three captured parrot fish, web of twain, chain of time.

‘Did I ever say you were not the sparkiest? Or the bell-ringing belle-blottomed? Sap out of it angelfish and don’t parrot membrain there’s suck a thing as polygam.’

Among the dark hair the branches of her face in tempest

‘Bombastard it’s to be she or me and now’s your moment of incision. Cut it out or cut your rigging!’

But he broadsided advanced grasping her by the united fronter so that when she tugged away the blouse torn buttons Ming like broken teeth and one escampaigning teeter. He laughed in lust and shrouds of anger. She slapped him across his molar plex he a quick one to her companion way and they cavorted in a tanglewords the nettingroll.

For first time Marta brought her unbending mind and body to attention scudded to his rescue from the bedspace where they had seemed and tuckered and with a dexterritory he landed them both judies with squirming gust for keel-whoring and his digit rigid as he had voided mannymoon to squire their accunts and cummerbendle in their scrubberies dualigned by real and pseudoprod tongs and clappers circumjascentedly. In out in out moonlight moonlight.

They lay repanting. Marta said, ‘Oh forgive me, Father, but you gnaw my need to bring me back where the circulation stammers.’

He said nothing in a fluid state. Around lay the pages and quires of the ream of his destinotionary tract Man the Driver in which he tried by shortcuttings from the sparky philosopher to prime mankindly on the better way of awareness.

Angelina said, ‘To think that all your thinking comes to this and you so big in the mind can’t see the world’s slippered across the plimsoll line with you just some damned wandering bump swelling with the warfallout’s megabreath doing two defeated dames in a dungy belgunmaden bad! What’s there of metavision ask?’

Momentarily the roseplink lining parted and he saw with her eyes lavatory life going downheeled all the way as he fledabout of madness and hiveless ones begged him to be for them and be for them the big beatal and endal to some bitter end. Scrambling back, he said to spark himself, ‘I am the grate I am where fools burn for greater light and from me shall come a new order beyond your comprehandling.’

Chance in that room sat also while the ceiling billowed the dark man Cass. He now managed as Charteris agent from the dark English Midlands all his life a self-punitive in a narrow way pinned behind a counterpain in drapershop where having broken out he now netted his advantages at fifty-nine eleven three a yard all right and gaudy as the smiling tout of Saviour Charteris flower-breasted plus other sidelines.

Many-monkeyed in his head he rose now saying, ‘Hail the great I am! Hail chaptered Charteris! All burn for greater light from you. You fisher us a greater net of possibilities and what you photograph is multi-photographed with all possible value.’ He sprawled at Charteris’s pedestal for his idol to claim him; but Charteris cooled: ‘You better go and fix the cascade down to the main Frankfurt route. Under my lid the sign still burns there in a precog frame.’

‘Sure, we’ll skim the menu of possibilities but first you have to speak in Brussels where life’s real looty for us and people know you miracled death’s aaltercation where the carcentinas buckled.’

Sweat dry on a skin of eagerness.

‘No growth that way, Cass, believe! In every in every no line no loot on Brussels my bombardment of images dries me out. Famine starting at the head tells me we take our bellies, away from the emptiness of a Bristles brushoff.’

Still he had no confidence in the meat of his glazed tongue.

From the corner of his eyes, the females under a flapping lid swung like two monkeys. Trees grew on beaches. New animals lurked. Wall angles hinged

‘You call the dance! You are the skipper of the new Ouspenski order beyond our compension and I ship with you the greatest.’ Thus Cass’s little horn piping.

So saying but Cass rode on the motorcade a prey to more than piety and thus in the cholera courts of the capital. The pitted music of the back streets was his quarry. These thousand rocketting disciples gathering quantity as they moved had a needle for some supply and just a cosy cosa nostra to keep them smoking along towards the profitable reefs in a parasitical pass. He came out from the ruined building gathering air and dragging in a sort of awareness before jetting off for the centre.