In A Dark Wood. Shaun Whiteside
word ‘solipsist’.
The world of humanity, evolution, the lobe-finned creatures that crept onto land, reptiles that climbed into the trees, thinking monkeys, stone axes, fire, iron, bronze, steam, atom.
The world of God’s own pet.
And in spite of his furious attempts to find rest and clarity and light, Marcus thinks: Lord … Pitch and brimstone. Now!
He closes his eyes, feels everything rotating around him, feels himself in the middle of that rotation, a motionless object, a still centre.
A pillar of salt in the guilty landscape, in the hubbub and the smoke and the rubbish of that town that the Lord has overthrown just as he once overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
He actually does look like a vicar. Even now, when real rain is finally falling from the sky and many people are seeking shelter under shop awnings, tents and the dense crowns of the tall oaks on the Brink. Even now, when there seems to be no particular call for formal clothing and the whole place is emptying around him and he is the only one left in the square in front of the Brink, even now he still looks like a preacher. One of the itinerant kind, admittedly, a wanderer without a congregation, but a preacher nonetheless.
While he is actually a poet.
Oh, yes, they may think he’s a stern preacher and laugh at him and mock him behind his back, they can call him both a poof and a Don Juan, a Jew and a vicar, they know that he’s a poet and not just any old poet, not one of your club-footed rhyming dialect verse-makers, not some paedophile absolving himself in a linguistically defective village mumble, whacking himself off onto paper as he sits at his oak desk thinking of the bony girls’ knees under summer cotton dresses or sturdy scouts’ legs in greasy corduroy trousers. No. And he certainly isn’t the man for affable farce and three doors and five cupboards in which Harm hides himself to watch Albert bending his neighbour’s wife Jantien over the dining table in the front parlour and teaching her to see the stars.
He’s a real poet.
Albeit the poet of a single poem.
But let’s forget that poem and concentrate on the figure in black standing there in the rain. Soon he will walk on, he will go round the corner and into Torenlaan.
Look, there he goes. He has just lifted his face to the sky and tasted a drop or two, or three, on his lips and in them the faint perfume of petrol. Now he carries on walking. Past the low houses of the Brink, off to the right, around the corner, pacing like a swimmer in shallow water, head slightly bent, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his trousers and a smoking Gauloise in the right-hand corner of his mouth. Right into Torenlaan, where he meets a real tidal wave coming towards him, because the motorbike acrobats are taking a break and Torenlaan is emptying out into the expanse of the Brink. Propelled by the mass, pushed forward and aside, he hobbles clumsily back past the houses, the pensioners’ club, what used to be the youth club, beneath which there is said to be a secret passageway that runs from the monastery to a place far outside the town; on and on into the narrow Kloosterstraat, where a raggedy group bound whooping for the funfair picks him up entirely against his will with the generosity of people enthusiastically putting into practice the concept of the more the merrier. Two young women have linked arms with him and to the amusement of the party they guide him through the streets that lead zigzagging to the grounds of the old cattle market where, as every year, the funfair has been set up. His resistance is feeble. No more than a sputtered mumble.
‘But …’
And: ‘Ladies …’
And: ‘I’ve got to …’
The truth is that it’s all for the best that a choice has been made for him. Under his own steam he would never have gone in that direction.
What do we find, this Friday evening, between the haunted house, the big wheel and the cakewalk?
All the people.
Everyone.
Goddamned Everyman.
That’s what we find at the funfair, the epicentre of excitement, sensation and adventure, the spot where hundreds of marriages have begun and at least as many ended and where enough black eyes are delivered to fill a whole village.
The whole known world starts the night here, ends it here, or at least wanders about here for a few minutes.
The spot, you might say (and Marcus does say, although inaudibly and with distaste) to find what he’s looking for.
In the distance, as they turn the corner – Oostersingel, Java-straat – the roar of the music thunders up and the big illuminated wheel circles above the roofs and as they go on walking, nearly running, he meets Berte and Anne, or Anne and Berte, calling them after half a minute Anneberte, because they finish each other’s sentences like a kind of female Huey, Dewey and Louie. Ahead of them walk four guys wearing the high street’s response to the rage of punk. Hands in their pockets, at least when they aren’t bumping into each other, grabbing hold of each other, pushing each other away, in short: when they aren’t bounding along the street like adolescent chimpanzees.
And then suddenly the fountain of coloured light and distorted sound that is the funfair looms up ahead of them: flat-trodden straw on the muddy paths, groups of young men around the crane machines and couples with their arms around each other in the Octopus. A ballet of yellow, red, blue and green light sweeps through the evening air. Fragments of top-ten hits mingle with the noise of sirens, bells, klaxons and the shrieking of hundreds of excited girls. It smells of the cinnamon of cinnamon sticks, the sickly petticoat scent of candyfloss, the blue oily smoke of the fat-fryer and the wet-clothes odour of beer. Everything spins and sways and grinds and goes up and down. It’s almost too much. No, it is too much.
They’re standing in what can barely still be called an open space, the ghost house to their left, above their heads the bright halo of the big wheel and people everywhere.
‘The Polyp!’ cry Anneberte, as they drag him in the direction of something that looks like an apparatus in which trainee cosmonauts in far-off Baikonur get their G-force baptism.
‘Not a hope,’ says Marcus.
‘The ghost house!’ they cry and cast him coaxing glances.
‘No such thing as ghosts,’ says Marcus.
Two frowns are directed at him.
The Apollo 2000, then?
The Matterhorn?
The Caterpillar?
‘Let’s go …’ said Marcus, and he lets his eyes wander over the brightness, the sparkle, the flicker, the glimmer and gleam, before letting them come finally to rest on an inconspicuous little tent, deep dark blue with an eight-sided roof adorned with clumsily cut-out astrological signs. ‘Let’s go to the fortune-teller.’
And despite their sceptical expressions they join him and reel past the crane machines, the tent with cinnamon sticks and the candyfloss stall. The big wheel turns, shrieks come from the chair-o-plane, the air rifles of the shooting gallery splutter and somewhere the hammer hits the test-your-strength machine and the bright TING! of the bell rings out.
‘Here it is …’ say Anneberte, ‘… pitch dark.’
‘Secrets lie in darkness, ladies,’ says Marcus and he parts the heavy cloths that form the entrance to the tent and leads them into the deep gloom. ‘Won’t you take me to … funky toooown …’ sings a voice on one side, and on the other: ‘I want you … to want me.’
And then, just before they are plunged into darkness and the fabric sarcophagus swallows them up, Marcus sees a gaunt figure. He is dressed in the dead beige of a lifelong civil servant and stands motionless in the pulsing light of an enormous merry-go-round.
‘Marcooooo …’ whine Anneberte. ‘Come onnnn …’
But Marcus, halfway through the canvas,