The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss
could see it. Charteris was good. He was foreign and people were ready for foreigners and exotic toted even in a tuning eyeball. Foreigners were exotic. Charteris had this whole thing he believed in some sort of intellectual thing fitted the machine-scene. People could take it in or leave it and still grab the noise of his song. Charteris was writing a book too. You couldn’t tell he was real or phoney it didn’t matter so he couldn’t switch off.
The followers were already there. Brasher’s following. Charteris beat Brasher at any meeting. You’d have to watch for Brasher. Big munch little throat. The man thought he was Jesus Christ Even if he is Jesus Christ, my money’s on Charteris. He’s got loot! Colin Charteris. Funny name for a Jugoslav!
‘Let’s make a few notes about it,’ he said ‘Robbins, and you, Gloria.’
‘Greta.’
‘Greta, then. A sense of place is what people want – something to touch among all the metaphysics, big old jumbos in the long thin grass. Charteris actually likes this bloody dump its dogshitted lanes. I suppose it’s new to him. We’ll take him round the houses, tape-record him. Where’s the tape-recorder?’ He was troubled by images and a presentiment that they would soon be driving down the autobahns of Europe. He saw a sign to Frankfurt, rubbed hands over his Yorkskull pudding eyes.
‘I’ll show him my paintings,’ Robbins said. ‘And he’ll be interested about the birds all close local stuff.’
‘What about the birds in all areas?
‘A sense of place, you said with the jumbos in the long grapes. What they do, you know, like the city, the birds like the city.’ They liked the city, the birds. Took its bricks for leaves. He had watched, down where the tractor was bogged down in the muddy plough, stood himself bogged all day in content, the landscape the brown nearest black under the thick light. It was the sparrows and starlings, mainly. There were more of them in the towns. They nested behind neon signs, over the fish and chip shops, near the Chinese restaurants, by the big stores, furniture stores, redemption shops, filling stations, for warmth, and produced more babies than the ones in the country, learning a new language. More broods annually. The seagulls covered the ploughed field. They were always inland. You could watch them, and the lines of the grid pencilled on the sky. They were evolving, giving up the sea. Woodgulls. The Greater Mole Gull. Or maybe the sea had shrivelled up and gone. Shrunk like melted plastic God knows what the birds are up to, acid-headed like everything else. Doing the pattern-thing themselves. ‘City suits the birds. It has built-in pattern.’
‘What are you talking about?’ She loved him really, but you had to laugh. His dandy lion-yellow hair.
‘We aren’t the only ones with a population expulsion. The birds too. Remember that series of painting I did of birds, Banjo? Flowers and weeds, too. Like a tide. Pollination expulsion.’
‘Just keep it practical, sonny. Stick to buildings, eh?’ Maybe he could unzip his skull, remove the top like a wig, and pull that distracting Frankfurt sign dripping out of his brain batter.
‘The Pollination Explosion,’ Charteris said. ‘That’s a good title. I write a poem called The Pollination Explosion, about the deep pandemic of nature. The idea just came into my head. And the time will come when you try to betray me to leave me desolate between four walls.’
She said nothing.
‘There could be trees in our future if the brain holds up.’
Angeline was walking resting on his arm, saying nothing. He had forgotten where he had left the Banshee; it was pleasure padding through the wet, looking for it. They strolled through a new arcade, where one or two shops functioned on dwindling supplies. A chemist’s; Get Your Inner Relief Here; a handbill for the Escalation, Sensational and Smelly. Empty shells where the spec builder had not managed to sell shop frontage, all crude concrete, marked by the fossil-imprints of wooden battens. City pattern older than wood stamped by brainprint. Messages in pencil or blue crayon, YOUNG IVE SNOGGED HERE, BILL HOPKINS ONLY LOVES ME, LOVES LOST ITS LOOT, CUNT SCRUBBER. What was a cunt scrubber? Something like a loofah, or a person? Good opening for bright lad!
The Banshee waited in the rain by a portly group of dustbins exchanging hypergeometic forms, moduli of the cosmic rundown. It was not locked. They turned out an old man sheltering inside it.
‘You killed my husband,’ Angeline said, as the engine started. The filling station up the road gave you quintuple Green Shields on four gallons. Nothing ever changed except thought. Thought was new every generation, or they thought it was new, and she heard old wild music playing.
‘The future lies fainting in the arms of the present.’
‘Why don’t you listen to what I’m saying Colin? You’re not bloody mad, are you? You killed my husband and I want to know what you’re going to do about it!’
‘Take you home.’ They were moving now. Although his face ached, he felt in a rare joking mood as after wine in the deep home forests.
‘I don’t live out this direction.’
‘Take you to my home. My place. Where I build a sort of project from. I’ve started making a new model for thought. You came once, didn’t you, with Brasher in some untidy evening? It’s not town, not country. You can’t say which it is; that’s why I like it – it stands for all I stand for. In the mundane world and France, things like art and science have just spewed forth and swallowed up everything else. There’s nothing now left that’s non-art or non-science. A lot of things just gone. My place is neither urban nor non-urban. Fuzzy set, its own non categorisable catasgory. Look outwards, Angeline! Wonderful!’ He gave a sort of half-laugh by a wall, his beard growing in its own silence.
‘You Serbian bastard! There may have been a war, the country may be ruined, but you can’t get away with murder! Justice doesn’t just fuzz off! You’ll die, they’ll shoot you!’ There was no conviction in her voice; his sainthood was drowning her old self, or whatever he had behind eyes.
‘No, I shall live, be justice. I haven’t fulfilled any purpose yet, a sailor but the ocean’s still ahead, hey?’ The car was easing on to the Inner Relief. Behind them, ambulances and a fire engine and police cars and breakdown vans were nuzzling the debris. ‘I’ve seen reality, Angeline – Kragujevac, Metz, Frankfurt – it’s lying everywhere. And I myself have materialised into the inorganic, and so am indestructible, auto-destruct!’
The words stoned him. Since he had reached England, the psychedelic effect had gained on him daily in gusts. Cities had speaking patterns, worlds, rooms. He had ceased to think what he was saying; the result was he surprised himself, and this elation fed back into the system. Every thought multiplied into a thousand. Words, roads, all fossil tracks of thinking. He pursued them into the amonight, struggling with them as they propagated in their deep burrows away from the surface. Another poem: On the Spontaneous Generation of Ideas During Conversation. Spontagions Ideal Convertagion. The Conflation of Spongation in Idations. Agenbite of Auschwitz.
‘Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That’s how I materialised, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here – we are in my brain, if s all me. The nomad’s open to the city. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine, in a culmination going.’ It was true. Other people, he hardly saw them, caught in bursts, crossflare, at last shared their bombardment of images.
‘Don’t be daft – it’s raining again! Don’t go daft. Talk proper.’ But she sounded frightened.
They swerved past factories, long drab walls, filling stations, long ochre terraces, yards, many genera of concrete.
Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World, Guinness. Grey stucco urinal. Coal yard, Esso Blue. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. More rows of terrace houses, dentured, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his book; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis, suburbanal. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage, out onto the motorway, endless roads crossing