The Rhymer Page 5
I stand like a tornado rising from the dry plain, gathering and looming over prairies of ripe wheat. The pale pasty indoor faces before me shrink from the shadow I throw, and like a wolf among the chickens I go. Zenir Learmot is a charlatan! I proclaim. A mischievous demon who has deceived your eyes and your ears over many sorry years. His talent mediocre compared to his gifts of self-promotion and proclamation, promulgation of his own personal myth, which you all like silly sheep repeatedly buy into.
People begin to titter, then laugh whole-heartedly. Oh what a jolly jape to ape a disgruntled critic when we all know you are an ardent fan, they muse, a ruse of rhetoric and repartee designed to bring us all guffawing to our knees. Why do they think I am joking? Am I dressed as a clown, in a golf outfit perhaps, like Henry Packer, with my buggy and clubs parked outside? Clubs, yes, I might be needing those soon.
Look at these daubs! I shout, holding a few library books up. You so want to believe that this daft little country produces great art and artists, I understand that completely, but you are looking in the wrong places. This man is a cartoonist, a lampoonist, a harpoonist of the great white whales of modern art who passed this way and sank beneath the waves, Picasso, Beckman, Matisse, over fifty years ago now, and who knows if their like will ever surface again. But if they did, you certainly wouldn’t notice! He is not recording or dignifying contemporary life, he is caricaturing and cheapening it, laughing at you all while you give him your money and misplaced adulation, reputation in spades, but it fades… it fades, my friends, and history makes its true judgement in due course. It judges you for all the other figures you passed by and left in the shadows, struggling for their whole lives for an audience and a living wage. It has been ever thus, as history books attest, but I protest, here and now, to your faces, and I accuse you each for the shallow fools you are. I am the voice of history, a tramp who wanders the wilderness from town to town, but browned by the sun, I live in truth while you live in pale white lies. That is my gift, the gift I offer you, more valuable than all your money and possessions, the materialist trinkets you surround yourselves with like children’s toys.
The laughter has been gradually thinning out, discomfort fermenting in twitching arms and legs and hands and feet. Then something happens, the door at the back opens, and a blinding yellow light floats in with a long white dress beneath it. It is Elissa, lighthouse of suburbia turning all their heads, dazzling, confusing, blinding… yes… even me. I stumble, I stutter, something changes, I have to keep talking but lose track of my thread, my own words. I hear myself continuing to speak, but no longer recognise my voice or understand it:
Yes, it is true. I grew up with him. I remember him painting and drawing, just as I was always writing and making music, since we were old enough to stand. Can you imagine what it is like to share a bond like that? We read the same books, marvelled at the same stories and films. We fantasised together, created our own shared imaginative universes, even our own language, made-up words. We knew deep down that we would both conquer the world one day, each in our very different ways. And so we have. I am hidden while he is seen. He appears to be understood, while in fact is universally misunderstood. I appear to be misunderstood, as if a failure, a penniless tramp, but in fact I am understood only too well by all those who turn away and try to forget and ignore me. He appears to be rich, but he is lonely and trapped and frightened within the fragile glass palace that you and he have built for him. He appears to be rich, but I am free and so I am the richer. His star will fall, but mine will never falter… He was a great artist once, not least when we were children together, but your adulation has destroyed him, corrupted him into self-parody.
Tears seem to be welling up in my eyes, but whether of emotion or simple reflex, my eyes smarting, I am unable to decide. The light from Elissa’s head seems to be blinding me and the whole room, throwing everything before me into shadow. My words are petering out now… What… what’s happening? Can somebody tell me… I don’t seem to be able to see anything any more…
Then as quickly and mysteriously as it first happened, the yellow light blinks out as Elissa stoops and leaves discreetly by a side door, which is left open for a moment before a new apparition rolls in: Mary Winston or what used to be Mary, some living fragments thereof most certainly, but rebuilt and subsumed into a bike, a trike, a shrike, a fright of machinery and person intertwined. Wheels lifting and turning, pistons churning, her cheeks burning, facial expressions twisting, forehead puckering in gathering of abstruse literary thoughts garnered and nurtured in the infinite shelves of a lifetime’s libraries. Mary has become erudition manifest at last, borne on the sweet waft of foosty paper, a carefully substantiated and cross-referenced theory with footnotes, that only dreamt it was a woman, only a pale worm left behind like a thing spilled from an anatomist’s pickling jar, broken on the wheel of learning. And crucified now on the spokes of a bicycle.
The audience love it. Uproarious applause and spontaneous outbursts and ululations. Whether at my errant ruminations or the safe return of Mary Winston to their warm bosom from the attentions of engineers and surgeons, I know not, nor care a jot. I turn to leave behind this lot, all chatting, scatting, platitudinous platypuses clapping and snapping their beaks open and shut to void their gullets, their glut of gelatinous gossip which drips weakly in ooh-ahs and tut-tuts. All mates and darlings like chattering starlings. They’re moving on to the pub, Weasel and JJ and Packer and Cynthia’s hub’ who does like a tipple he stipulates on weekday nights only and mixed with soda in a cup. Meanwhile I catch his wily wife’s eyes and retire by a back door to the sight of night skies, the myriad stars curving over as we retreat down the street in strangely tacit deceit, the world at our sweet feet.
Oh how to describe her kiss in the dark of her doorway? Her leading hand in the hush of her stairway? Kneeling in the attic like abasing myself before the altar of the sky, where her telescope rests aimed at the stars. Unwrapping her clothes like the gift of the present: sweet musk of cloth on fragrant flesh, the taste of her nipple in my mouth, succour given by mothers to men, eternal dispensation lost and forgotten in the daily rush, the masked ball of banality we rise to each morning, donning our costumes like clowns doomed to futility, voluntary insanity. Her tongue in my mouth, our reaching out to insert each tentative tentacle into available orifices. Creatures fusing, confusing, losing the boundaries of the disparate worlds our hearts push blood to in tides. Oh where does it reside? Your soul, Cynthia, as I push you upwards to heaven, the distant frightened creature sliding away behind your eyes, timid, blind, wondering what it rushes and yearns towards, not just now, but all of its life? Wondering who I am, this stranger, and who you are, made stranger still. It kills us, this moment of thrill, not for itself but the window it offers of infinite possibilities of escaping the flesh and transcending the will.
It’s over as ever too soon, but I’d swear that time stopped there just for a moment and eternity lived in the space of one breath and half a shared heartbeat. Shall we be discreet? Shall we speak when we meet? Or look down at our feet? None, for now, let us sleep, entwined on the floor with clothes strewn around and half off us like broken chains, escaped slaves careless of the wrath of their master, distant thunder vibrating the horizon as the reed of a hunting horn. Scorn, shame, infamy, doubtless await us, but for now joy, exhilaration placates us.
*
And when is it we wake? The chasm, the break, when self-consciousness floods in on the children of Eden? Suddenly he’s there, Eiderpecker on the stairs, crying and swearing and lifting handfuls of blonde hair up in his hands, his eyes bulging in unbelieving, his senses leaving him. All this the price of just four rounds of beers. And there I am: still clutching the incriminating scissors, standing proudly over his lady wife, my pupil who sits naked and entirely bald on her chair at the telescope, with my net of electrodes spread over her scalp like a hair net, asking Are we there yet? -as I lead her voyaging through the landscape of past and future years. This wa
s doomed, of course, to end in tears. She hasn’t even heard him yet, so locked is she in the vista of her transfigured town from this privileged loft, with time pulled aside like a curtain, satin soft. She turns and their eyes meet and his throat erupts in wails that rotate my entrails. I decide to depart before all that entails. He raises a hand, attempts harm, assails, misses, flails, caught unawares. I dart down the stairs then off out into the night, out of sight and out of mind of all of my kind.
*
And so it is over. As so often before. And out into the loving roving wilderness I go, fleeing all that is behind me, eloping with my sweet soul, hoping that none shall follow or find me. And nothing binds me. I live outside their grid, without money or cards or papers, or even a name which I can’t dispose of. How I have loathed Nadith, and look forward to another. I will seek out my brother and see what he names me or defames me in retribution for my stain on his reputation. I doubt any such disputation, seriously now, there must be some compensation for my diminution, tiny fly who crawls through all the muck of the world, sustained thereby.
Walk on, walk on. Tick tock, the implacable clock of time talks on, but I am going out of hearing. Nearing enlightenment by dint of each weight I shed, led by my nose, struck as my heart has bled, the clothes of affection left dying in their unmade bed, sorrow I shall not disclose even to myself. Rumour of love lost behind me, pining in repose. Cynthia’s sweet smells still enclose me, winding and intertwining as invisible threads about me in the air and everywhere. I shall not seek to wash, but rain no doubt shall shower my body soon enough and roughly scourge this old brain, purge it of its amorous aspirations and all its vain hopes of acceptance anywhere, gurgling down the drain.
Suburbia’s tarmac fades out from beneath my feet until I meet the moor, and gaining height there after hours look back, content to have concealed my spoor. That little town is littler still now, small enough to hold in my hand and understand one day, should I choose to turn my mind back there. I sigh goodbye and take to the track and walk for hours, leaving my shadows behind, each peeling off with the passing trees, my memories going with them, like discarded clothes or skins, a peeling onion man, this accounting for the tears in my eyes, should anyone wonder. Fat chance, distant thunder, who but me walks in these domains today far from the living? Come the rain, fat drops forgiving in rapturous baptismal blessing, purge me clean.
At nightfall I chance upon a dark lake in a hollow, large and elliptical, swirling in purple shadow reflecting the blushing watercolour sky, and I stop with a start, struck to the heart, seeing its true form: a vast eye, black pupil rotating at it centre, seeking me out. And I sit down on a rock at the edge of the woods which smudge its shore like an eyebrow, fearful of this apparition, full of contrition. Then behind me footsteps I hear, thinking them imagined, clear out my ears and shake my head. Wish myself dead. But they’re there and gaining volume and ground, someone running, pursuing me from town. I reach up my fingers to my face and they linger, finding the trace of my true nature I forgot. Just a flick and twist and I’ve got it, the whole lot, off in my hands, my mask, my false face, just metal mirror again, reflecting the leaves dark and green above me. I turn smiling to greet the stranger, and it’s Weasel, mouth open, about to speak, convinced he has found me at last, but aghast, hovers, bereft as a lover, unable to complete the sentence he’s framed, until shamed, confused, disabused of his illusions, he turns to retreat the way he came, and plods off, slow and distraught, disappointed in deed, deep in thought.
Another hour on, light gone, I bed down. I wash my face in the water and kick off my boots, lay my head back among the roots and leaves in the green bosom of trees and sleep, dreaming of naught.
~
Such greyness and stillness I wake into today, as if all of Nature is pausing, loath to go on, suspending Her charade, Her masquerade. This weariness I feel also in my limbs, and on a whim I swim in the lake instead, water up to my head, and am reborn from the dead, freezing and shaking, shocked and blue as the newborn emerging, howling and crying, with only grass and air for towelling and drying, my clothes hanging from trees. And these I wash now, slow as I please, teasing out every last atom of dirt and scent of the words I meant and those I did not, the lot, thrown to the breeze. My past is shed, my chapter read, time to head to pastures fresh.
The sky still so still, static as a grey sheet, but neat, complete as a new white page for writing. But as I walk on I see that autumn is encroaching, curling the leaves at the edges, whispering in hedges of death and decay. But unlike human dismay, Nature delights like a sunset in this phase of her work, the glorious hues soon to be unleashed, gold, orange, pink, brown and red. She celebrates her dead, sends them off in a fanfare of brass trumpets of crumpled and crinkled leaves and fronds. Fond but unsentimental, knowing what we cannot grasp within the petty spans of our lives and shuttered minds, that time and tides bring back all things washed clean, renewed in the green font of rebirth, a cold fusion, remarkable oven fed by dead flesh and broken dreams. Rejoice therefore that our failures are fodder in the grand scheme that redeems our every ounce, cry out in joy as we are trounced. We are not undone but remade, over and over again, and since of necessity not least our minds must be washed, be not surprised that our memories are quashed also in this forge that gorges itself on the rich food of our endeavours. Severed we seem, as roots by the rake, but deeper beneath the earth spread the wiser tendrils that unite us with our children and all the next of our kind, out of sight, out of mind. Few can encompass this vista, but who do, are truly awake.
I cover so many miles. I should be aiming away from Urbis, that distant city crouched on the horizon and its sorry suburbs spread out around it and below me, like the fans and folds of some vast skirt. I should be away to the west and the open sea, the myriad islands, the mild climates warmed in the gulf, or to the high moors and fierce peaks to the north, bitter as gritted teeth which seethe with the bloody history of those born in their lee. But somehow, like a ball on a string, or a hunting hawk loosed from his master’s gloved hand, whichever trajectory I conceive, deceives, and I find myself curving back towards some magnetic centre, falling like an arrow or a rocket confounded by gravity, compelled to face all that I seek to escape, the centre of my orbit. Perhaps it is the worn paths and tracks themselves or the contours of the ridges I turn to climb, but all bluff me, return and rebuff me in time to the scene of my crimes.
Industria, I recall the name my friend Weasel gave it: a pall of grey smoke and misery hangs over the place. Oil refinery chimneys and shipyard cranes punctuate its sky, its sordid buildings drenched in centuries of soot, its clouded windows like the misted eyes of the old or insane. Children play barefoot in its streets their obscure games, enacting in mime the brutalities of their parents, coming home drunk, picking fights with strangers, leering, jeering, eager to maim. I venture, saunter, over the weird edge where their muck and grime peters out into blighted grass, Nature shrinking from the shock and the shame. A once-cobbled lane, now patched and filled with desultory tarmac and drains. Their little faces turn, my ears burn, in less than a few minutes they’ve devised a new mission and enough ammunition to aim the lot at my head, stones, rocks, bricks. I’m wise to their tricks, the little pricks, unrestrained like their parents by police or morals, I pursue them each purposefully then beat them with sticks, until they cry, restored to childhood innocence again, under this reticent sky. Picking on a poor old tramp, the little demons. How can the universe stand by and permit such injustice? Well it doesn’t. Limp off home, you misbegotten splots of semen.
In time I work my way down through the steeply twisting streets, the roofs like the backs of beetles and slaters, towards some kind of a town centre, from where I can see that most of the shipyard cranes are rusting now, bloating the Job Centres with their discarded workforce like lice escaping unwashed clothes thrown on a fire, a pyre. Autumn is indeed the right season right here, melancholy the correct attire. But wait, amid the neglect and degradation, is th
is gentrification I spy? A joy to the eye! An art gallery fresh-painted, not yet tainted by taunts and graffiti, with a red carpet rolled out to entice to these climes the lesser-spotted culture vulture awash with disposable dosh. Splosh. I’ve just stood in a puddle, which puzzles me since it hasn’t been raining. Yet. Wet. There it is, the explanation: the gallery owner gently washing his Bentley not a metre away. His pride and joy, metallic toy to preserve the up-sized boy.
I hover at his display, posters and leaflets and there within, eyes lifting to the background, coincidence fit to rankle the gut: my brother Zenir’s paintings, a dozen of them, displayed on easels, some larger chained to the walls. I push my way in, ridiculous little doorbell ringing its heart out above me. They’ll just love me, an old tramp from the hills. With a look that kills, a well-manicured young lady confronts me from her desk with a sleeveless dress. Without frills, asks: You in the right place, grandad? You forgotten your pills?
Do you know me? –I retort, not the sort to resort to obsequity in the face of iniquity. I’m his brother, you know, the artist’s…
Really? Her eyes and mouth widen, agape, three great orbits of rouge and kohl. You’re Ithir, his brother? Zennad Learmot is such a genius!
Zennad? Is that what he calls himself these days? –I mutter, but she is rising from her dais in a haze of perfume and curves fit to refract the gaze and nasal cavities, a display I dare say, if I had the libido today.
She comes closer and swings her head, examining my distinguished profiles from various angles like a sculptured bust on a pedestal, and gasps: My word! There is a striking resemblance now that you mention it! But you look pensionable, pardon me for mentioning the unmentionable, while he looks half your age.
Not so! I protest, enjoying a long look down the front of her dress. Indeed I am the younger of us… by about three minutes while our poor mother rested. But he has since had the benefit of the best medical care and doubtless various spurious surgical enhancements, while I have lived off fresh air. But appearances can deceive and usually do in my experience. I shall outlive him, I guarantee it, and am better in bed.