The Paper Men (16 page)

It was in the north transept. It faced me across the whole width. It was a solid silver statue of Christ but somehow the silver looked like steel, had that frightening suggestion of blue. It was taller than I am, broad-shouldered and striding forward like an archaic Greek statue. It was crowned and its eyes were rubies or garnets or carbuncles or plain red glass that flared like the heat in my chest. Perhaps it was Christ. Perhaps they had inherited it in these parts and just changed the name and it was Pluto, the god of the Underworld, Hades, striding forward. I stood there with my mouth open and the flesh crawling over my body. I knew in one destroying instant that all my adult life I had believed in God and this knowledge was a vision of God. Fright entered the very marrow of my bones. Surrounded, swamped, confounded, all but destroyed, adrift in the universal intolerance, mouth open, screaming, bepissed and beshitten, I knew my maker and I fell down.

I believe it was the fat woman who had been spinning outside the door who found me. She wouldn’t have heard my screams, I think, not in that place. She wouldn’t have listened anyway, having her ears pricked for a belly rumble from the other island. But there must have come a time when she did her rounds of the place, checking perhaps that I hadn’t run off with the church plate. So she must have found me.

I came to in hospital and didn’t even have to begin remembering. I came to with the memory. I lay, watched by a nun who told her beads just the way the old lady had spun. I don’t know if it’s normal to have a nun watch you. It may be that since I’d been struck down in the cathedral they thought they had a special responsibility for me or something. I don’t know and of course it doesn’t matter. I don’t think the hospital was very good.

I lay for—oh, for a long, long time. I saw so many things with great clarity as if the light of the previous day, if it was the previous day, had filled me with its dreadful luminescence. I could not think anything or see anything but the truth. I saw that I had been planned from the beginning. I had my place in things. It didn’t matter what I had done or would do. I had been created by that ghastly intolerance in its own image. You may possibly recognize what I am talking about though it would be better for you if you did not. I saw I was one of the, or perhaps the only, predestinate damned. I saw this hotly and clearly. In hell there are no eyelids.

A priest came and mumbled and I laughed which annoyed him and set the nun crossing herself as if steam-driven. The joke that I saw so clearly was this. The priest wasn’t a priest at all because all the real priests of the intolerance had been dead for thousands of years and he was like someone in a stage set. He went away, perhaps to take off his make-up. The doctor came after the priest and he was a bit better. He held both my hands and squeezed them, nodding. I understood that he wanted me to squeeze back, which I did. He went all over me and he said a word, frowning. When he saw I couldn’t understand he used another.

“Colpo. Colpo?”

Mea
maxima
culpa.
Ha et cetera. I thought I knew what he meant and tried to speak, “Si, massima colpa,” but I couldn’t get it out, there was an ox on my tongue. He did a whole lot of smiling and nodding and patting, then went away. When he came back in the evening he had some new words.

“Estrook. Piccolo. Leedle estrook.”

That made me laugh again, thinking of the universal flail, but the doctor only went on nodding and smiling and testing my reflexes, the result of which tests, he persuaded me, added up to a tiny stroke though I could have told him drunks like me don’t have strokes, they get the horrors of one sort or another and now and then come across a real beauty, first prize, predestined and damned, the divine justice without mercy.
In
vino
veritas,
my other tag.

The memory of it all still makes me hot. At half-past three in the morning it has made me a contemplative, stone-cold sober. I mean contemplative in the technical sense, contemplating a universal reality. They say some strokes—well, there’s no “they say” about it, I know from experience that some leedle estrooks make you speak one word when you mean another. They say too that there’s no rime or reason about the relationship between the two words, no connection except the nature of the physical brain but I know better. Wilfred Barclay, the great consultant. There is every connection as for example saying “dead” when you mean “dad” and “mare” when you mean “mum”. It—apart from the steel hard
factuality
of the intolerance—is what makes me know it wasn’t a leedle estrook at all, or if it was, the event was no more than coincidental.

What does it matter? Lying in that hard bed, unnunned, blessedly ignored and allowed to contemplate the nature of predestinate insects or, moving up-market, lobsters and crabs, crusty chaps; looking for the primordial moment of will, our will I mean, and not finding it, knowing that we did not, I repeat did not, invent ourselves and that now in this eternal fix it is not what we do that will help, it is what we are that matters and what we are is not in our hands; lying, I say with the insolence of the damned who have nothing to lose and therefore do not have to suck up in a pointless attempt at influencing divine intolerance, a steel Hades, striding forward! Lying there, I say, either the verbal transpositions of my leedle estrook or it may be my natural language composed quite spontaneously a kind of set of psalms, antipsalms if you like, the natural blasphemy of our condition, why this is hell nor am I out of it, Marlowe, q.v. It is like the spontaneous effort by which a certain kind of wasp will lay eggs in a certain caterpillar it all makes good sense you wouldn’t expect anything else. What irony that it should have been so reasonable, so sane! Because during that time I must have
seemed
wholly mad with garbled speech, mumbling to myself in a language which wasn’t even English
but
my
native
tongue.

However, I survived that state and began attempts to relearn a foreign language, the one I am using now. For a time I stuck to single syllables and it was quite interesting or would have been had I not still had the strain inside me, tuning me up, I thought, like a steel violin string—would I were catgut to snap and be done with, that’s what I thought, having early in life recognized that ninety-nine per cent of this language is metaphor and now having suspicions about the odd one per cent. Anyway I practised this foreign language to take the place of my so-called mumbles. It was difficult. It was like moving each syllable from here to there no that won’t do it was like having laboriously to refashion a statue, paint a complex picture, not to say “liquor” with your mouth when your mind had thought “sunrise”. I walked through the hospital regulations in a state
cognate
that’s the right word to madness or delirious trimmings which since by your time the whole load of religious stuff will have come back with a bang or with the bang or bangs I’ve lost my thread.

At some point I found myself back in the hotel, then in the hire car, then in the ferry, each of these stages being quite separate like pictures in frames, and not very important compared with the violin string being wound tighter and tighter the note shriller and old nobodaddy there everywhere. But I went on practising my single syllables in its despite. On that ferry (I was watching an Italian cruise ship I think the Italians said she was the
Cristoforo
Colombo
so for my biography I mean our biography you can find the exact place and date) I tried with my mind to think the word “end”. I spoke it out loud and what my mouth said was “sin”. This made me laugh in a lopsided way as I considered the relationship between this new word, the heat in my body, the steel string, the vision, all those things a biography would uncover that I had tried to cover in our dance. Oh it made me laugh all right. But at least I now had the alchemy of one word and might add others. It was like walking on thin ice.

“My—sin.”

I got that out all right. But of course it was the old intolerance’s deliberate mistake that has made calamity of so much. I tried again, not being minded to be its fool.

“Not. Sin. I. am. sin.”

I haven’t the heart or courage to reread that lot. It was a bad time and the very memory tempts me to the bottle which I am anxious to avoid. Behold old Filthy Rags wandering with the immediate awareness that old you-know-who has its eye on him no matter what. I didn’t mind the wanderings much because there was nothing to be done. I can’t explain that, you’ll have to take it as read. There was nothing to be done.
Please
see the joke! Here was Wilfred Barclay with the world willing (in a small way) to beat a path to his door (not at home). Here was old Wilf with what young men long for, as much money as he could spend and more, growing old, of course, but not aware he was screaming, dismarried if I can put it that way and quite possibly some sort of marriageable commodity if he had stayed long enough in one place, able to ride, fly, glide, sit, stand, walk, healthy in mind and body against all the odds with the world wide open for him—here, I say, was Wilf in a state of perfect freedom. People should be warned against it. Freedom should carry a government health warning like cancer sticks! Teach that in the schools, thunder it from the pulpits, rise to propose it, Mr Speaker, hear hear, at all costs do not trust it, gentle maiden!

Is that what I am trying to convey?

Well. There is freedom and freedom. Surfacing as I say, I dissected myself into various portions that were at once held together and threatened by the steel string. The first thing I tried was catatonia. That provided a straightforward blow to the Barclay pride. I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t. The loo, for one thing. Adepts in the kingdom of Catatonia are able to ignore that as well so their obedient slaves do them up in nappies or what Rick would call diapers. I just wasn’t good enough at it, that’s all. Despite my every wish (and here you see the wilder shores of freedom receding) I’d have to get up and go to the loo. I even had to eat and drink, not booze, I mean but water, tea, coffee, limejuice, wet stuff. I couldn’t even avoid the thought that girls were interesting. Well, not interesting, just a lot of other things. I discovered my dreadful hatred for homosexuality. When it came to the point that I could recognize catatonia was a dead loss I thought I’d try fun. Fun. That’s what I thought. Be your age, I said, you’re only in your sixties after all and you can go on facing your youth, you don’t have to look behind you except every now and then. Commit. That verb is to remain intransitive. Go forth old man and commit. Commit afresh. Since there’s nothing to be done you might as well do something. Have some fun, hon. That set me to considering the deepest double-dyed commit that I could find. Now I, being a true Christian child of the twentieth century, you will think that I evolved some funny stuff with girls or children; but not so.

This commit. It made me laugh at the time though not now of course, not after what has happened since and being where I am. There’s the faintest light of dawn behind the woods across the river. Soon there’ll be the dawn chorus though I shan’t hear it over the clatter of this wretched machine. I ought to get a silent one and have left silent machines here and there, it was always simpler to get a new machine wherever I was than lug one round with me.

Well. Again, this commit. I came to the conclusion that the deed most in step with my newly discovered nature would be to kill Johnny’s dog. Well. My dog, if you like. (Yes, I know you’ll have forgotten Johnny’s dog. Look it up.)

I went on thinking. I saw that a straightforward murder was childish stuff and unworthy of us both, unworthy of image and original. What was needed was something philosophically, or rather theologically,
witty
. Believe me, I thought so long and hard that at times I might well have really been on the verge of catatonia! Moreover, the conclusion wasn’t a dull, elaborate deduction like a scientific discovery so called that is the result of statistical compilation, it was a revelation. It opened out in sheer vistas that had me breathless with adoration like a nun. Wordsworth, q.v.

It was very difficult to find Rick. I was in some country or other, Portugal I think or perhaps not, and I did it all by telephone. I got hold of my agent and my publishers. Of course, Rick had been on at them both but even so they didn’t know where he was currently as they all said, only where he had been. For a time we must have kept the satellites buzzing. This surprised me because I thought he would be shackled by one leg to his university but not so. According to my agent he was loose, having been staked to do his research on yours truly and I didn’t need telling to know that Halliday must have staked him. I gave my agent a poste restante in Rome and went there, no longer wanting to avoid Rick but rather having a definite need of him to complete things. They must have rung round in England too because at the poste restante I got a ton of stuff from my publishers, from my agent, from Liz and rubbish from God knows where. I got a taxi and took it back to the sleazy hotel by La Rotonda in sacks.

It was far too much to examine in detail so I left it strewn round the place, rang my agent and actually gave him my telephone number and the name of the hotel I was staying at! I’d got beyond any bother about blowing my cover. He came back within the hour with a message from my publishers who did now
know
where Rick was. He was lecturing on guess who or what in Hamburg University. I already had my plans laid so I drove straight off, heading north for Switzerland. When I had got far enough away from Rome I stopped and rang him from one of those mini markets attached to gas stations and I got him in ten seconds flat, which is remarkable even in these days of instant everything. He hadn’t caught up with me in years, despite all those near misses. When I thought of the number of times I’d
seen
him or
remembered
seeing him nosing about on my trail I laughed aloud at the thought of my voice coming to him out of the blue.