The Rhymer Page 3

  Suburbia, he says and it’s hard to believe, indeed not just to leave when you hear that a town could exist with a communal imagination so depleted and degraded and frequently raided that it could anticipate and celebrate its own eventual incorporation and extinction into creeping polyunsaturated city-spread, so readily and clear-headily without even a flinch. We’re walking the streets, Weasel and I, and now I’m asking him which town my supposed brother Zenir left to go to. Industria, he says, way off to the west, and there to the south is the centre of it all, if there’s a centre at all, the city of Urbis... Foreboding, he points to it, far on the horizon, a collage of blocks and chimneys and steeples, a guddle of people, huddling together forever for warmth and anonymity and finding cold obscurity. Then quick as a flash he’s drawing me a map, with chalk on a wall, worse than nothing at all, and the city it seems is surrounded by four quarters: Suburbia, Industria, Oceania and Sylvia, and Zenir has gone westwards like a clock hand moving backwards, and Suburbia is left behind here as high noon.

  Just now someone cycles by and lets out a cry, it’s Mary Winston her winsome smile turned to meet us with her eyes tight shut as seems to be the inevitable consequence of her entertaining a rictus on her visage, her body governed, automaton-like, by arcane archaic mechanical rules that her creator would rue were he even as lucid as me or you. Nadith! Weasel! Good day! –She declaims, waving sweetly, then crashes completely into a lamppost so upright and forthright as to brook no disagreement on the first law of thermodynamics, moreover showing cast-iron devotion to Newton’s laws concerning bodies rest and motion. Crunch! Crumple! Emotion, concerned cries arise from all around the precinct and Weasel and I run to her aid. Too late, something uncanny has occurred we are appalled to discover as we grimace and hover, glimpsing over the shoulders of the jostling crowd as policeman Stout approaches with his gout and oversized breaches, blowing his whistle like a steam locomotive from a former age declaring war on the Beeching report. Mary and her bicycle, all blood and oil, cloth and rubber, are fusing, confusing and intermingling, impossible to single out from one another, becoming some new beast intent on cycling towards Bethlehem, dark and slouching if need be, but more likely smiling brightly in Mary’s case, her face a spinning miasma of radial spokes with ears like handlebars. She’s still alive, her heart beating, fed by oily chains, dynamos and metronomes, battery acid and elbow grease.

  Mary dear! Hang on in there! -Weasel hails her as the ambulance wails and white-clad men arrive attended by bicycle engineers and a crack team of councillors briefed on post-traumatic stress disorder who fall on us all like vampire bats and we all scatter, escaping the splatter and novel collision of disparate matter demonstrated so ably by our lady friend the friendly librarian. Oh who will feed her books while she’s away in hospital? Water them, index them? And what in turn, if not her healthy good books, shall sustain the ailing minds of the citizens of Suburbia, assailed nightly as they are by soap-opera atrophy and documentary entropy? –Curable only by cerebral endoscopy?

  It’s a poor show all round when you look at it like that, I conclude out loud to myself, and we should tend lovingly to her library like a literary garden of Eden, or we’re not half the men we think we are. Then I remember that I am not even half the man Weasel thinks I am.

  *

  Gardening, that was it. My line of metaphoric reasoning before I fell asleep in a large planter basket in the main street, underneath some dahlias and chrysanthemums while Weasel foolishly abandoned me to go into a shop and buy matches. Have I been drunk, hung over? Moreover, why all the rhythm and rhyming, though not rhyme and reason? I feel better after the sleep of reason, no treason surely, but doubtless Officer Stout will Weasel me out if he catches wind of the caper. Enough! But look, it’s John Joyce the gardener coming up to accost us now, I’d hoped that he’d lost us. That’s three that I make, I’ve seen since, of the pontificant participants of last night’s hallucinatory conference, left lurking in the mind. So they were real. JJ smiles, his long hair standing up like fronds of Phormium, baring his teeth and his secateurs, bringing us tidings of his first chore of the day, to go prune the roses of the good Doctor Tolleson. We best tag along says Weasel, a great tagger if ever there was one, and wasn’t that how he found me? I owe him my name and purpose, breakfast and several drinks, but let’s not toast those as virtues just yet until we’ve seen how this current embroilment boils out. Tagger and bagger, not to say tea-bagger. Mine’s a lager.

  Tolleson’s lawn is wondrous green and lean, clipped to the bone like a forces crew-cut, criss-crossed by humming bees like droning B52s returning limping after flattening their floral Nagasakis. All sight-lines converge at the noble Georgian façade of his home: well-appointed, anointed, double-jointed and carefully re-pointed in a white lime putty made to a traditional recipe approved by the National Trust, involving horse hairs, neighbour’s stares, builder’s nightmares, and bullshit. Sandstone carved nudes and cast-iron rain-goods abound, and we’re greeted and ushered to white metal patio chairs with floral cushions tied to them with little bows of ribbon that flutter in the breeze like flags and bonnets at a military parade. A tirade, first: we tell about Mary Winston’s unfortunate accident, an incident in which we do not feel innocent, having caught her eye in the first place, and her having caught a lamppost in return, and now being hospitalised in an unfortunate indeterminate state between organic and inanimate matter at the molecular level, such as would confound even Heisenberg or Schrödinger were they to dare to take a look at her instead of her cat.

  She doesn’t have a cat, only books. -Weasel interjects at my verbalisation of this last perspective, compelling me to spray him with invective: I’m quoting particle physics, quantum mechanics, dear boy, I’m sure the doctor’s following me.

  Not in the slightest actually, Tolleson rebounds, taking off his glasses to rub them with his handkerchief, revealing the tiny vestigial eyes of a mole underneath.

  Instead of looking at her pussy then, does that scan better or make more sense?

  I tried that, by leering and angling, but she seemed to have a bicycle pump dangling…

  Oh leave it, for God’s sake. The point is, the poor woman will live, but suffice to say the next time you meet her you may feel uncertain whether to greet her or ride her.

  Tolleson’s eyebrows raise, now re-magnified in fishbowl haze. My word, I’ve never thought of her like that. The wonders of modern medicine and their power to rejuvenate. Perhaps we should all try a collision with something mechanical now and again. I quite fancy a Penny Farthing or a moped.

  I see myself more as a Harley Davidson man, Weasel sighs, deflated somehow, set adrift on his own wistfulness. We all stare at the geraniums and delphiniums for a few minutes of happy vacancy, each to their own peculiar fantasy of machine-human hybrid.

  Then John Joyce pipes up, hitherto weeding in the background, to say: I would splice my genes to those of a rosebush any day. Plants do it with themselves and half the town without ever getting off their arses, do it with birds and insects too in a way. The dirty buggers.

  Why roses though? –Weasel ventures –and risk getting pruned and beheaded all summer, a regular bummer. Why not a cedar or a yew, some a few millennia old so I’m told?

  Or a hedge? –I add, hedges live forever, and so do we, if we could but look at it that way.

  Roses… JJ pauses and sniffs the wind, engorged of the beneficent spirit of creation, -the most delicate, colourful, aromatic and alluring of beauties but defended like fortresses, they are love and death personified, rolled into one, the ultimate muses.

  Amusing… gentlemen, Tolleson nods like a sunflower in the wind, squinting, his twin glasses glinting. You sound like to come back as a femme fatale would be your choice, Joyce.

  Yes, sir… he responds bending over, weeding and clipping, throttling and throttled, in a curious voice.

  *

  Next we find ourselves at Mary Winston’s abode, let in by a pass-key kept under the door-mat, to water
her books and read her plants to each other while she’s away getting re-built as a bike. Or something like that. Mary’s library is even finer than Elissa’s –I pronounce, casting my eye about, what a compassionate and passionate collection, indeed it gives me an erection. A moment of reflection follows. The falling of dust motes through the hushed sunlight of the afternoon air, the grace of quiet interiors on hot days, distant birdsong from the garden, a sudden flash-fragment again of childhood memories, something about glimpses over neatly clipped hedges, orange squash and ice cubes on silver trays.

  What did you just say? –Weasel puzzles, waking up from his tussles with a potted hyacinth over by the conservatory windows. Crikey! He suddenly looks startled, rattled. Elissa actually showed you her library? That’s quite an honour!

  Really? I slept in it, actually, on one of the shelves.

  Weasel stops and looks at me in disgust and incomprehension. Books are for reading, not using as pillows. Next you’ll be telling me she showed you her... There’s a sudden extremely loud noise from the street at this, a car back-firing, after which I only hear the end of his scurrilous sentence …put a plaster on it.

  What was that noise?

  What? Oh that? That will just be Packer in his Studebaker.

  What?

  Classic cars, he loves them. Typical banker, too much money and too little imagination of what to spend it on. He’ll have come to check on us, or on Mary’s house, or both most likely.

  What would you spend it on?

  Me? Weasel pauses, smiling, showing a characterful gap in his rotting teeth, thinking but not taking long: Parties and booze for all my mates, a happy throng, wine, women and song, laughter, partners for everyone, and a personal barmaid wearing only a thong.

  Imaginative. Ding dong. The door, the floor creaking under my feet on the way to answer it, glance at it: marvelling at the refraction of Packer’s garish gold sweater and galoshes through the frosted glass. Ahh, Packer, you ass! enthuses Weasel over my shoulder, watering can in hand as they face up, man to man. You look like Rupert The Bear in that ridiculous outfit, you and every other golfer!

  Packer is speechless, a rarity I guess, and turns to me for fresh perspective. The most beautiful game in the world I’d say, and one of the oldest…

  Isn’t that prostitution? Weasel drolls, returning to the kitchen.

  …And an environmentally-friendly way of conserving vast tracts of land that might otherwise fall into the hands of rapacious property developers, wouldn’t you say, Nadith?

  Now, I don’t know about that, I muse, aiming for amiable equanimity, -and I must warn you that I prefer to be scrupulously truthful in my answers to such enquiries, not for the sake of community relations or abstract morality or a postulated deity, but because it gives me a watertight excuse for insulting people grossly. Golf, doing Nature a favour you say? Not quite, when humanity buggering off altogether would be an even greater one. On my many enormously long walks across every mile of this country I have often found myself unwelcome and shouted at as I was driven to violate the pristine greenness of some pointlessly banal sterile landscape dedicated to the insipid gods of golf. And the outfits… and the little carriages… and the vast array of clubs like a dentist’s tools, why, it is human idiocy made manifest, so resplendent even as to verge surely on self-parody. In which case, come to think of it, I’m all for it. You’re a travelling clown I see now, attired therefore appropriately. I greet you excitedly and expectantly as a schoolchild and await to be entertained by your tricks. Unhook your floppy braces. May I take your red nose and fill it with tea?

  Ha ha ha, very laconic and sardonic… chuckles Packer.

  Moronic… echoes Weasel from afar.

  I heard that. I’m a banker you know, an iconic Ionic pillar of the establishment, a trusted thrusting member of this community.

  A clown, juggling other people’s money more like. A huckster, a trickster… Weasel fumes coming back into the room.

  Now now, my friend, if you had any money, and weren’t nearly a tramp, then I would be looking after it for you and doing great things for you with it, doubling your returns, speculating and accumulating.

  Expectorating… Weasel interjects, I will be soon, as a well-known precursor to vomiting.

  Now now now, Packer claps his large hands with disturbing hairs on their backs reminding me of King Kong swatting aeroplanes, calling everyone to order, just listen to ourselves in front of our new friend Nadith, what kind of example are we setting? Is this not in fact the very measure of the value of our Secret Skygazers Club, that people so diverse as you and I, from every weird walk of life can find ourselves together of an occasion disagreeing agreeably over the exact nature and niceties of things? And didn’t our one deranged and unknowable God make all of us as his daft little toys in the hope that we would all be good and play nicely together when he laid us out on his floormat and shoved us around putting on silly voices? And look at us here, all hurrying together to help out our recently injured friend out of concern for her and her property.

  Property? Weasel unwinds, defused like a truck bomb. Our friend Nadith here has even less property than me. Not even a home, other than his own body, and at times he seems to be only renting even that from an absentee slum landlord. Isn’t that right?

  Righter even than you know, I affirm with a nod of my snout, and seeing my doubt, Packer leaps into the breach: Listen, my friend, I’ve heard things, indeed great things, about your abilities to theorise and proselytise, appetise and anaesthetise, on the abject subject of your famous brother’s inspiration, his inclination, propitiation, preparation, initiation and substantiation for his expensive and expansive canvases, his paintings apt to cause faintings and fits of hysterical adoration in pubescent girls. Would you be willing to do same, and speak publicly about him, on a big wooden platform adorned with colourfully striped party buntings, in front of the whole populace of our charming little town? Popcorn may be involved.

  I try to argue, but am beset by fate in the form of a maniacal hacking coughing fit, from which my voice emerges hoarse, saying: Anything of course, for a charming little clown.

  *

  Cynthia Beiderbecker finds me brooding in the old churchyard, dappled with the tiger-stripes of shifting shadows of leaves of ancient trees, communing, attuning, afternooning on the mossy slabs with my wires plugged in to yesteryears, a jester’s tears. Who on earth sunbathes on grave slabs? –She exclaims, you are a rum fellow, Nadith, who does not feel the chill of death and shiver at its solemn insinuations.

  Insinuations, implications… I mutter …bold, emboldening implications if you once cease your flight from fear and stand your ground, turn around to think things thoroughly through. And we should do, each of us, me and you.

  How so? –She pauses, wrong-footed, wrong-headed. She must have seen me over the dry stone wall, her cranium floating disembodily by on the way to ordering her supposedly retired limbs around to a not-so-pressing, perhaps depressing, appointment. Instead of which, as if faintly fascinated, she now sits down on the green mossy velvet cushion of this ecclesiastical lounge. Pull up a pew.

  Each single life must begin and end, but the threads of lives of which we are made lead outward from this point in every direction, escape detection, forward and back in time, like the reins of a galloping mare, if you will, which we hold in our hands. And yet, we fail to see this power and chance, clutching but weakly for our day in the saddle, dither and addle, rarely seizing the crop or the spur. We are more than ourselves it seems, is what I mean to say. We can reach out and touch those who came before and who will come hereafter, know them intimately, and their company is a comfort, warm not chill.

  Cynthia, eagle eyes wide, spies my wires and wonders. You’re not just talking about nippers and wrinklies, are you? You’re reading the stones somehow, is that what you’re at? Can you, could you, show me what you see?

  Alas, I sigh, for that, you would have to shear all your lovely golden locks like the fleece
of a lamb, as have I. I take my long mop of peppery grey and black tramp’s hair in both hands and lift it right off its Velcro patches, and hand it to Cynthia, savouring the shock that stops her talk. Tick tock, a penny drops, she looks from wig to bald head and bald head to wig again, marvelling at the mass of electrode patches, neural nexus of flexes from neck to crown, temple to auricle. Oracle, hard-wired in the electronic age, but tuned to every other one. Her mouth is a great ‘O’, trembling and quivering at the threshold of gnosis, neurosis, pondering what form to take for its next incantation, prayer or lament. She opts, wisely perhaps, for humour:

  I’ve been wondering how you kept it so clean. A quick dip in the sink and your all-weather polyethylene mane is brand new. A toupée which has duped a fellow or two, no doubt. Now tell me, what do all those wires do?

  They convey to my serene cerebellum and amiable amygdalae the signals that the wires in my frayed and foppish cuffs take in. The hypnotic trance state, a quirk of fate, is a rare but distinct pattern in human neurological activity. Years ago, I recorded and mapped it in a clairvoyant subject, an obliging patient, who shaved his head thus to allow this cranial apparatus so to be applied. My contraption, as I disarmingly think of it, has recreated that state on my bald pate on demand ever since, weaving and leaving an electromagnetic field around me that forces my brain into receivership. Then all I need do, is find some stimuli, traces of past and future lives, recorded in stones.

  Holy help, Cynthia yelps, this is like a smoke, a toke, sold by some dodgy bloke, of something Lebanese purchased in Amsterdam. You were a doctor of medicine before? A weighty scientist of some arduous discipline?

  I think so… perhaps…my memory comes and goes like April showers.

  As a result of the… contraption? Like some freelance tramp’s trepanning, you’ve damaged or altered yourself by using it too much, or such and such, over the years, to the point of tears?