The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

‘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.’

‘Okay, I agree as everyone must that there were many greedy faults but put at its lowest wesciv maimtamed in reasonable comfort a high population which now must die badly by plague and starve off to its last wither.’

‘You talk to wrong guy, girlie, because I enormously like to see those ferretty technilogy people die off with all the maimtamed burrgeoisie and black in the ground slump in bulldozing massgraves in Mechelen and Manchester.’

‘You shock me, Boreas. And who then will watch your epix?’

Slices of Christmas cactus succulent and inedible were placed before them.

He took her with his roystering gaze she so thin and succulenten.

‘I will eye my films! To the ego egofruit. For me only is they made and to enjoy! For long since the sixties have I and many lesser I’s pouring clout our decompositional fluid medium preparing for this dessintegration of sorciety and now you want again the tripewaiters and oilgushers and the offices clattering?’ He sipped shallowly at the long sour gueuze-lambic as it came round. ‘Balls to the late phase we’ve been through.’

‘Some of the old evils maybe die but worse still live on.’ She would not sup. Her eyelids low.

‘We live authentic now and the new way which your husbond cries!’

Under her waif-thin lids she gauzed at the continuum mumbling guests all butterflies or hot rock without rest and each in an amber clockdrill of our mechanissmus that to new born retinal grasp showed in ever moo and ghestune.

‘And are these the authenticks as you mountain?’ Scorning.

Grinding his heavensgravelstone teeth, resting predirty ham on her pecked muscle, ‘Don’t perspine for the judge’s tone when you’re jabbed in the witless blox woman!’

So for the first time she muddled into revelation and the silent goose grass was again in motion that Colin grasped society went in autosleep his ennemas enemy and wanever jungle he battled in it lay only a March day’s march from her own plot. In even his sickmares might be more health than this fat man’s articles.

‘Why did you invite me here?’ And vonnegutsy whines in her visceration.

‘Not for the size of your bobbies mine are bigger you slim spratlady! Listen, I want the word on your man we know you have a thing or true against him and that’s for revelation.’

‘If I damned well don’t?’

Butterflies and hot rock flowed up the hyacynth panels to the bright openings of numerous beetel mouths of the tracery.

‘If you don’t theres multi-ways of setting an entire squeeze-in round the motorcave and such I warn you solo voce here and never!’

‘Are you threatening me?’ All round her the artichokers were unheard as her head’s mainline flowed more regularly in this duress and she viewed with clarity his mantled cheeks and eyes of menace.

‘If you don’t want your motorcod tempered with you’ll peach me the laydown with all loot on how your saviourboy committed a murder in the British traffic, didn’t he?’

And the whole sparse countryside unrolling to her camera, dodging – ‘Who’ll temper with us – you? Our little motorcade tries to ride in innosense but always an evil parashitting grip strangles it you know you know know what I mean the Mafia with their hard relief are maffiking?’

His jelly flesh was suddenly hard contracted and the mouth gash sealed and done. ‘Don’t say that name in here or you’ll be in a sidealley lying with the lovely lubrication gone and nothing swinging babe be warn!’

Now all jungular noises cease and the dusky rook hovers.

She was standing again in the ruined garden where sweet rocket sent its sprays among the grass and thistle and her mother screamed I’ll murder you if you come in again before you’re told! No flowers or fruit ever on the old entangled damson trees except the dripping mildew where their leaves curdled in brown knots perhaps she had seen them among the branches the new animal the fey dog with red tie and been inoculated with the wildered beauty of despair against this future moment’s recurrence.

Music now played and the vegetattles chattered on as two flower-decked seamen sang of black sheds down a runway. One last stormblown look, Boreas had dislocated and was seen away on the otherside where the mob was most like a market marakeshed with hippie hordes and de Grand in oil-welled mirth. Moving forward, this throng swept up Angeline and broke her into a adjoining private theatre. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘You don’t swing! They’re coming!’

The ceiling flew away the nightbox closed and glaring careyes filled the screen with coloured rattle 5 4 3 2 One buildings surged and broke along the autobahn at troglo-daybreak in grey unconvincing weather, autostrata punctuated by windows, their boxrooms stuffed with the comic strip of family bedroomdress as all rose crying ‘Master! Charteris!’ in braces and curling clips. Now paper familias folds and rises from his breakfast serially lifts the kids into the roaring garage monsters gentle monsters gentile masters one by one gliding and choking carring their human scarifice out along the dangerous beaches flashing in variable geography oriented against accident of the urban switchbank.

The film is as yet unedited. Again and a second time the mechanical riptide roars along the breach discontinuity of time and space armoured armoured green and grey and blue and red a race indeed and carried helpless in them the wheel born ones from their brickhills.

The dummies register percognitive impulses of the coming crash. Scenes of the resurrention flash like traffic controls in clarkeian universe, they view themselves disjointed in the rough joinery of impact amortised in the outstretchered ambulanes and finally in the sexton’s sinkingfung drowned by stink and stone in their own neutrifaction beneath the wave freeze. With unwinking blueness they view unwivering blackness and with waxen calm survey the chinalined vacuums in their dollyskulls of this annulity their last civil divorce.

Now from far above ravening like the aerosoiling arabs the eye takes in a checkerboard black-and-white of roads marked like a deserted heliport with the far black sheds of Brussels lying low plunges like a hypodetic to disgorge the main artery of shittlecock. Its plain lanes erupt into prefognotive shock as force lines fault lines seismographic lines demarcation lines lines of variable geolatry and least resistance lines of cronology besom out from the future impact point Towards this webpoint scudding come the motordollies. They still have several agelong microseconds before point of intersex and times abolution.

In the leading car from Namur rides fashionable cool Mrs Crack dressed to the nines for high point in a teetotal expatriate sun-and-fun commando suit in well-tailored casual style of almond green nylon gaberdine of a knockout simplicity deep patch pockets and ample vaginal versatility trimmed in petunia piping planned to contrast with a snazzy safari hat of saffron acrylan especially designed for crunch-occasions and scarlet patent slingback shoes in nubile moygashel. Her house is always cool and free from hairy guests of the nonconformist world because she uses new immaculate Plastic with the exciting new impeach-coloured plastic coating and a truculent egg-timer free with every canister so get in the egg-time today! Interviewed just before her death, Mrs Crack explained, ‘It’s fuzzy man. I so admire my lack of vitality.’ Laid her head back unspeaking on surrealistic pillow, applied Sun in the new egregious shade.

The interviewer riding bareback on the bonnet thrust the mike at her superbly tailored husband Mr Servo Crack sitting exstatically back not driving in the driving seat with no facial or racial hair painted bronze head and lips to match who said, ‘We both moddle many dapper uncreased outfits often in public windows of shops and such places where the elite meet to be neat this we enjoy very much on account of antiseptic lack of any form of marital relations you understand this is not my son in the back just a prefect smaller dummy and a real growing human called Ranceville because as you know my wife Mrs Crack Mrs Historecta Crack that is actually has no capillaceous growth upon her addendum in fact frankly no addendum so of course no capillary attraction since happily I have no gentians or testaments, in the manner of pre-psychedelic mankind so we are just goodly friends and able to constipate on the old middle-class virtues like dressing properly which escalated Europe since hanseatic times of course to the glory of god and his gentleman’s gentleman the pope of beloved memory.’

He was preparing to say more and the gonaddicts were chuckling and fumbling each other in the darkroom for counterevidence of non-dummiehood when the lemanster encasing Mr Crack flung itself armoured against a monster raving in the apposite direction. Mr and Mrs Crack suffered extinction. Their perfect boy also impeccably crunched. Unfortunately the camera focusing on Ranceville failed to work so that his final blood-letting gestures were not revealed to the celebrating eyes.

Now the whole cock-up took on the slobber-slob motionrhythm of orgasm sowards the climax of the film and the wetmouthed awedience watched expectorately. More terrible than humans, the dummies caroomed stiffly forward in the slow frames pressing towards point of impact in tethered flight stretching their belts as over towards the scarring windshields they bucketed eyes of blueness still and all around them gloves and maps and michelins and scattering chocolate boxes parabolaed like pigeons startled at the buckling of the sides and still the honest eggshell eyes and spumeless lips started into nanoseconds of futurity. Gravitidal waving limp arms swinging stiff shoulders unshrugging make-up staying put them swam their butterfly in the only saline solution to the deceleration problem.

All the other armoured lemmings rushed to be in on the destruction. Expressions blank of dismay the dummies had their heads cracked and chipped and knocked and shattered and ground and mashed and eggshelled and blown away with new miracle Crump aiming their last ricocheting nanocheek towards the impactpoint of speedeath the ipaccint of speeeth ipint seeth inteeth in i i i.

Time and again the cameras peeped on the unbleeding victims and on the cracking tin carcases that with rumptured wings in courtship dragging ground tupped one another beetle-bowed in the giddyup of the randabout, till the toms built up an audiction and their cheers were heard above the hubcab of metallurging grinderbiles. But Boreas wept because his film had frightened and to the mainshaft struck him.

His tears scattered. Once they had had a goose to fatten and in the long blight of summer where the damsons festered it made some company with its simple ways not unapproachable. Once her mother brought it out a bucket of water in the heat for it to duck over and over its long head and flail its pruned wings with pleasure scattering the drops across small Angeline. She heard the wings flail now as out she crept nostalgic for the gormless bird they later ate.

At last she came back wearily to where a broken Stella Art sign buzzed and burned in the desolation of their parking lot. She stood there in a wet shift breathing. Under the mauve and maureen flash her face showed like a shuttered street from which might crawl iguaneous things. But just a mental block away where she only blindly knew directions a lane stood in old summer green some place like a magic garden where a young barefoot girl might drive her would-be swans and never think of harsher either-ors.

A small rain filled the incommense thoroughfares of night but still among the guttering buggies stilled tangents of smoke and rib-roofed skeletombs a guitar string or flute fought loneliness with loneliness and a poppied light or naked carbulb gave the flowerdpeople nightpower. Oh Phil the small dogs howl don’t ask me what I’m doing on the health Col. She plashes the raddlepuddles in a dim blue fermentation. A round of vestal voices plays noughts and crosses her subterranean path with a whole sparse countryside rumpling the stone-trees. Such shadows in her way she brushes off knowing the nets that await her in the shallows of a nightsunk city. She crounches and pees by old brickhaps. Oh don’t be pregnant in this tupturned world!

Sickly still bedummied by the ill winds she staggered through her own grotesquely shatteredporch to find the blanket cold and stiff and Charteris not in. Groping with all menaces she unsandaled herself and beneath crawled heavily. Charteris not in not in the starve-in still? Small sound not rain not dogs reached her and immediate anxieties peopled the grotto with haggard dimmies half in flight with speed as closing in on her she propped and stared. Even hoping-fearing it might be Ruby Dymond?

In the corner Marta only sniffing on a broken chair, lumpkin in the fluttered darklight with her crushed appeal.

‘Get to bed girl!’

‘The toad is going to get me pushing up my thinghs.’

‘Go to sleep stop worrying till tomorrow. The holed world’s had enough tonight.’

‘But throbbing toadspower! It’s trying to force my skull up and climb into my barn my grain and then motor me away to some awful slimy pool of toadstales!’

‘You’re dreaming! Pack it in!’

Laying down her tawdry head she tucked her motherless eyelids on her cheeks and took herself far away from drivniks a goosegirl in an old summer lane drove her would-be-swans barefoot And cellos hit a seldom chord.

Every day Charteris like a bird of prayer spoke to new crowds finding new things to say giving outwards and never sleeping never tired sustained by his overiding fantasy. Two three days passed so at the big starve-in for Belgium’s famine or Germany’s bad news. He sat with a can of beans that Cass and Cass’s buddy Buddy Docre had brought him half-forking them into his mouth and smilingly half-listening to some disciples who parrited back at him a loose interpretation of what they had gleaned in all enthusiasm.

When he had filled his crop enough he rose slowly and began to walk slowly so as not to disturb the ripples of the talk from which he slowly wove his own designs half-hearing of the fishernet of feeling. In these famine days they all grew gaunt he especially captain on his scoured bridge his face clawed by multi-colour beard to startling angles and all of them in their walk angular stylised as if they viewed themselves from a crow’s nest distanced. Partly this walk was designed to keep their flapping shoes on their feet and to avoid the litter in the lands stirred by thin breezes breaking: for they had now camped here three unmoving days or weeks and were a circus for the citizens who brought them wine and clothes and sometimes cake.

Charteris kept his gaze steady as hair hid his eyes in the wind hover.

Cass said gently to him almost singing, ‘This evening is our great triumphal entry, Master, when we break at last from this poor rookery and the lights of Brussels will welcome you and show your film and turn the prized town over to you. We have prepared the ground well and your followers flock in by hundreds. There is no need to motor farther for here we have a fine feathered Jerusalem where you will be welcome for ever.’

Sometimes he did not say all that he thought. Privately he said to himself, ‘While under the lid the finger is still to Frankfurt how shall we do more than park overnight in Belgium? How can Cass be so blind he does not see that if there is no trip there is nothing? He must be eyeless with purpose.’

So he swooped down upon the field of truth that Cass and Buddy pushed and that Cass like Angeline had no habit in his dark draper suit. Behind his shutters he saw bright-lit Cro-Magnons fearful in feathers and brutally flowered hunt the ponderous Neanderthal through fleet bush and drive them off and decimate them: not for hatred or violence but because it was the natural order and he uttered, ‘Predelic man must leave our caves as we reach each valley.’

‘Caves! Here’s a whole hogging city ours for the carve-in!’ said blind Cass. But there were those present who dug the Master and soon this casually important word of His went round and new attitudes were born in the bombsites and a solitary zither taking up this hunting song was joined by other instruments. And the world sailed too amid the Master’s brainwaves.

Leaving the others aside, he stylised himself back to his ruined roost where Angeline sat with her back curved to the light unspeaking.

‘After the film tonight all possibilities say we flit,’ he told her.

She did not look up.

‘Leave the will open to all winds and the right one blows. This is the multi-valued choice that we should snarl on and no more middle here.’ Echoing his words the first engine broke air as crude maintenance started for the farther trek; soon blue smoke ripped farting across the acid perimeters as more and more switched on.

Still she had no face for him.

‘You’re escaping, Colin, why don’t you face the truth about yourself? It’s not a positive decision – you’re leaving because you know that what I say about Cass and the others is a whole sparky truth and you hope to shake them off, don’t you?’

‘After this film and the adulation we flit on a head-start. Maybe a preach-in.’ He fumbled and half-lit a half-smoked cigar with an old fouled furcoat over his shoulder.

She stood up facing him more haggard than he. ‘He pushes but you don’t care, Col! You have the word about the Mafia but you don’t care. It was through him Marta died but you don’t care. Whatever happens you don’t care if we all fall dead in our trips!’

He was looking through the cracked pane. Mostly now they sat around with a trance-in going even among the rolling cars. But the beer brigade could caper – one of their plump girls danced now in the steel engraving air of a Jew’s harp slow but sturdy.