The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘Get looted, Ranceville! You’re hipped! You think you can’t die – you’re like a drunkard sleeping in the ditch, drowning for ever because he didn’t realise there was a stream running over his pillow!’

‘So what, if the drinking water has drunks in it, okay, that proves its proof. How can I die the death if those dimmies are not alive?’

‘You’ll see how real a phoney death is!’

Now on the waiting road was silence while they chewed on it. Like workers who joined a continent’s coasts by forging a new railway, the unit stood frozen by their finished work, awaiting perhaps a cascade of photographs to commemorate their achievement of new possibilities: while behind them fashionably the unlined pink faces ignored them from the cars. The mouths came forward now, to see what Boreas would say, to hear out the logic, to try once again to puzzle out how death differed from sleep and sleep from waking, or how the spring sunlight felt when you weren’t there to dig it and flesh and china all one to me.

Boreas again was sweating on the heliport, in his blood the hard ticket of harm as he filmed the climax of The Unaimed Deadman, had the negro, Cassius Clay Robertson, fight to start up the engine of his little glass-windowed invalid carriage. And then the longshot of the white man in his suitable garb running impossibly fast with big gloved hands from behind the far deserted sheds, the black sheds with tarred asphalt sides, running over for the kill with mirth on his mouth. Now he could have real death again, had it offered, because the occasional man was hepped enough on art to die for it.

‘Okay, Ranceville, as long as you see this is the big oneway ride, we’ll draw up a waiver contract.’

Ranceville drew himself up thin. ‘I shan’t waver! As the Master says, we have abolished the one-ways. I believe in all alternatives. If you massacre innocents, you massacre me! Long live Charteris!’

The watching mouths drew apart from him. One pair of lips patted him on the shoulder and then stared at the hand Some sighed, some whispered. Boreas stood alone, bronze of his bare head shining. The invalid car had fired at last and was slowly lurching on the move. The white man with the terrible anger had reached it and was hammering on the glass, rocking it with his blows. They’d had a hovercamera in the cab with Robertson then, with another leeched outside the misting glass, and used for the final print shots from these two cameras alternately, giving a rocking rhythm, bursting in and out of Robertson’s terror-trance.

‘Get yourself in focus of the cameras!’ Boreas called huskily.

With a sign to show he had heard, Ranceville climbed into the old Banshee, a scrapped blue model they found in a yard by the Gare du Nord and had hurriedly repainted. Ranceville had red on clothes and hands as he squeezed in with the dummies. Their heads nodded graciously like British royalty in an arctic Wind.

‘Okay, then we’re ready to go!’ Boreas said. ‘Stations, everyone!’

He watched all his mouths like a hawk, the only one sane, whistling under his breath the theme from The Unaimed Deadman. Things would fall apart this time from the dead centre.

Marta was sprawling on the bed practically in tears and said, ‘You don’t understand, Angelina, I’d no wish to pot your joint out, but my loaf was nothing, not the leanest slice, and I was just a baby doldrums until the Father came along and woke all my other I’s and freeked me from my awful husband and my awful prixon home and all the non-looty things I try now to put outside the windrums.’

Angelina sat on the side of the bed without touching Marta. Her head hung down. Beyond, Charteris was holding a starve-in.

‘Fine, I sympathise with you when you stop whining. We’ve all had subsistence-living lives in rich places. But the way things are, he belongs to me you’ve got to get yourself another mankind. There’ll be a group-grope tonight – any grotesque grot they grapple – now that’s for you instead of all this ruin-haunting here!’

‘And supposing I pick on your Ruby you so despise! My life’s a ruin and the light dwindles on the loving couple. The Master said to me Arise –’

‘Rupture all that, daisy! You just don’t spark! Look, I know how you feel, the big love-feelings heart-high, but it wasn’t like that so don’t try to hippie out of it. All he did was walk in and make an offer as you sat single in your little house! That doesn’t mean he’s yours!’

‘You don’t understand. … It’s a religious thing and mauve and maureen webworks come from him binding me! With his sweet rocket it’s a sacrament.’

The ceiling simmering like a saucepan lid and Angelina hit her with a welp of rage and called her all mangey mother-suppurating things. ‘You Early Christian whore! Go throw yoursylph to other loins! He’s my man and stays that way!’

In anger, she drove the Marta from this ruined arena out, and then herself collapsed on to the single bed. There she still was when de Grand riled in, slipping a little packet to Case before he sought her out. She lay and let time set over her not unpleasureably, idly listening as the raucous noise of a song and plucked strings filtered in the shadow, wondering if anything mattered. That was the crux of it; they were all escaping from a state where the wrong things had mattered; but they were now in a state where nothing matters to us. At least if I can still thing this way I’m sane – but how to put it over to them and that they should be building. … The possibility exists, and some days he does build: almost by accident like a weaver bird adding an extra room for teenage chicks to creep up at the back where it stark and on the stares a big woman all all naked bottoms and beasts. … Bum weaver yes Colin he still has the glimpse. … A sort of genius and might stage a build-on. … Pull this lot together must make him listen maybe if I put it in a song for the Tonic all get the message. The table you use the table you take immense suck cess likely me running naked through loveburrow. … Old Mumma Goostale. …

As she dozed he entered, not uncivil with untrimmed moustache, de Grand, of secret history in plenty parishes.

‘Excuse you saw me interviewing for the film the Master. Second time I’m pleasure of drivnik-visiting.’

‘I’m thinking. I know it’s extinct. Blow!’

‘What intelligence! I’m full of aspiration. I left my own child to come on this quest to film the lootest Masterpiece.’

‘Bloody typical. Go back to your child, Paddy, marry her, bear lots of lovely morechild, marry them off, live humble, avoid oil-shares, stay away from the excitements of master-peace, rumpling upwards and rolling at speed towards the fluttering artnik.’

‘The director needs your professional guy dance routine to insight the Master to him. Has a dinner cooking wed local indelicacies and you tenderly invited.’

She sat up and tugged down the flower-blue shirt and bongo beads she was wearing, her modernity unfit, forgot arrested flow, with an effort focused on him.

‘The director you say?’

‘Nick Boreas of The Overtaker and The Unaimed Dead now moving to High Point Y to film your husband’s life in compaint colour. The great Nick Boreas you must have heard.’

‘He wants the truth about Charteris? Is that what you are saying? My god, these stinking runes are so high I’m almost indechypreable – Boreas wants the truth?’ She fanned herself, he also, gasping like fishes in a mean lake.

‘You have me defused a moment. Excuse – some pomaid! We’re making a movie not a gospel we must want material like a sort of biogriffin job, right?’

‘The mythic bird what else is struth! A movie you say! You my opportunity I zip on my head boy and you take me to your leader now?’ With nails she tries to calm her wild dark hair.

‘My fiat awaits delighted.’ He with a byzantine bow.

She paused. ‘You driving? You’re so high, no?’

But he was in a studio car with hired driver and they yawed towards the fossil-pattern centre with moderate risk to life.

On the brittlements of the town auroras flattered in a proud mindflagging and old phantasms took trilobites at her. She was a guttered target for their technicolon pinctuated in a single frame as the assassin went home, feeling her face flatten and balloon as if centred in a whirling telescopular site. Tumultaneously, the broad Leopold II sloughed its pavements for grey sand and cliffs cascaded up where buildings were, unpocked by window or stratum. Turning her tormented head, she saw the ocean weakly flail the macadam margins of shore bearing in change, long, resounding, raw – and knew again as some tiresome visiting professor of microscopic sanity made clear to her that hear again repetitively iron mankind zinc was on the slide between two elements, beaten back to seawrack while he prepared to digest another evolutionary change and none the less stranded because motors roared for him up the hell and highwatershed.

Such sounds seemed sexplicable, nexplicable, inexplicable, plicable, lickable, ickable, able, sickable. She was able to differentiate the roar into eight different noises, all flittering towards her under the cover of each other. Things that slid and fused let out a particularly evil gargle, so that she grasped de Grand’s moustached arm and cried, ‘They won’t allow me to be the only one left sane, they won’t allow me!’

Wrapping a moist hand about her, the scar of his lips unhealing on the face pustule its genetic slide screaching, he said, ‘Baby, we all swing on the same astral plane and there’s a new thing now.’

And in the variable geometry of her mind, great wings retracted and the thin whine let in stratosfear.

Boreas rose black, deadly-electric, face masked and goggled, hyacinthine from his bathpool, beetling baldbright, not unmanly, a eunuch but with fullgorged appendages. A palatial meal was being prepared in the next room.

‘Let me feel you first.’

‘I’m in no feeling mood.’ Age-old Angeline. He invited her to swim; when she refused, he reluctantly came from the green water and swaddled himself in towels, quite prepared to wreck her.

‘After the meal, the rushes!’

‘I don’t swim, thanks.’

‘You’ll have a breast stroke when you see the dimmies caroom into their smash-in!’ Full of tittering good humour, he led her through, a heliogabbic figure eight of a man and she bedraggled with a little brave chin, saying, ‘I want to talk seriously with you about the lying-in-state of our old world.’

He paraded with her slowly round the grand room, already partly hyacinth-invaded as they foliaged intricoarsely across the wallpagan, he speaking here and there to the chattering mass of his invitees, all to Angeline maroonly macabre and flowing from the head as part of the mythology of the palapse and from their infested breath and words crawled the crystalagmites she dreamed of dreading in the coral city trees without window or stratum.

A speech was made by one of the gaudier figmies in a tapestry, beginning by praising Boreas, ascending on a brief description of the steel industry of a nearby un-named state, and working through references to Van Gogh and a woman called Marie Brashendorf or Bratzendorf who had brought forth live puppies after a nine-day confinement up the scales of madness to a high sea reference to Atlantic grails and the difficulty of making salami from same. Then the company sat or sprawled down, Boreas taking a firm hold of Angelina to guide her next to him, one great hand under her shirt grappling the life out of her left breast into multi-variable contour.

The first course of the banquet was presented, consisting only of hot water tainted by a shredded leaf, and all following courses and intercases showed similar liquididity in these hoard times, except for warm slices of bodding, and no silence settled like at the G mealtime he led us all a merry dance.

‘All the known world,’ she said sliding in, ‘loses its old staples and in only a few months everything will drop apart for lack of care. People who can must save the old order for better times before we’re all psychedelic salvages and you in your film can show them how to keep a grip until the bombeffect wears thin, do a preachment of the value of pre-acidity and the need to rebuild wesciv.’

‘No no no, cherie, concoursely, my High Point Y is an improachmen of the old technological odour, which was only built up by reprunsion and maintained by everyone’s anxiety, or dummied into inhabition. Okay, so it ill go and no worries. You husbind is a saviour man who lead us to a greater dustance away from old steerotypes and a new belief in the immaterial, So I picture him.’