McGonagall's trek to Balmoral is, as I have yodelled elsewhere, one of the great Quixotic acts. This novel, in the poet's mantic utterance, is an account of that walk and the strange visions which come to the famished imbecilic bard en route.
I begin this eternal work on Friday the 13th of July 1878, because my Angel tells me I am to crack all convention. My name is Guglielmus Nasreen Caspar Triskodekophilus McGonagall, and I am in a state of temperate hilarity. This means no drink has passed my lips, but they tremble with the joy of the Lord that is in every word he has donated to us as the English language. When I say hilarity I do not mean to suggest that this volume will be in any way humorous: my Angel who enters me through the left foot and through my stocking sole (where there is a convenient hole my wife has not yet darned) informs me that the poet Dante from Florence did not mean his Divine Comedy to be a joke, but to have a happy ending. And so, I pray most devoutly, may my tale.
Dante was a very famous poet of the Italian peninsula, the country of Garibaldi, just as Shakespeare was in Britain, and Rabbie Burns in North Britain. But Rabbie Burns was a partaker of alcohol, which could not be said of Shakespeare, nor, judging from his portrait by Rossetti which hangs in the Municipal Gallery of Dundee, of Dante either. All great poets are temperate souls like me, though filled with the inspiriting hilarity of divine intervention. I am indebted to this spirit for all the things hidden from me by my poor upbringing in this magnificent city of Dundee and on the island of Southronaldsay. So if there are words you are not familiar with, dear reader, then we must blame my Angel (how I tremble again at the thought of you clutching this book to your bosom in your study like that of my great friend the Reverend George Gilfillan. I am sure you are a pure girl and well-thought of by your parents.) My parents were only Irish, but very good people, and came from a village in the County of Donegal that neither me nor my Angel is able to spell.
But to my purpose, which is to tell you of the journey I am about to undertake. I am to keep a diary throughout this trip, which is a kind of pilgrimage like the poor folk of Ireland used to undertake to Loch Derg which you might know as St Patrick’s Purgatory. Of course I am talking of Catholics here and I am sure you are a good Protestant girl, my dear reader. My pilgrimage has nothing to do with papacy or idolatory of that sort, but is a visit to our dear Queen who is sitting in Balmoral with her ponies and her good friend the Scotsman John Brown. You see I am a poet, and my verses are often about the doings of her Majesty. If this book has, as I pray it will, a fine frontispiece picture of your humble servant William, then you will see from my long nose and wrinkled brow and the depth of feeling in my eyes that, like Dante, who I resemble somewhat, I am truly a poet.
(Will you call me William in the tranquillity of your study? Which, now I consider it, would surely be more lady-like than my friend the Reverend Gilfillan’s, who is a great scholar and critic as well as a holy man. Your study is perhaps filled with more romantic volumes as befits the gentler sex, though I am sure your loving parents will have placed a temperance tract and something on the good morals of young people therein. But I mean it will have more of the air of a boudoir, with perhaps lacey curtains and a picture or two, perhaps that picture of Dante that is in the Municipal Art Gallery mourning his beloved Beatrice, thanks to the beneficence of our Majesty the Queen in memory of her beloved Prince. But my Angel tells me I must return to my subject.)
A poet does not earn any more money than a handloom weaver, which is what I was before I was seized by the left foot and compelled to utter verses, and still am in those short intervals in between poems, so a poet requires a patron. I have written many letters to the rich and famous of our thriving burgh of Juteopolis (which is what we call Dundee), to the Lords of the industries of weaving and the blubber trade – the Baxters gave shelter to the young Mary Shelley who wrote about the horripilating monster Frankenstein, and so had little change to spare for me; similarly the Glendales told me they had a great interest in the arts, and wished me very well, and I have heard nothing back as yet from the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company, perhaps because so many of their able skippers are at sea, hunting the great beasts of the deep in the far-off frozen wastes.
So I have decided to make a pilgrimage to our great Queen and Empress, Victoria herself. Surely a lady so noble as to build us the Albert Institute and surround it with such magnificent and decorative shrubberies will hear the solemn pleas of a humble poet and subject.
Whilst I am on my voyage, for which I shall have to employ Shank’s Pony, a noble beast, though his shoes need a little cobbling to keep out the wet (you see, my dearest reader, I am not totally without fun in my hilarity), I will regale you with tales of my various adventures and voyages, including my trip to the United States of America, to London, and also to Crieff. Of course several of these pilgrimages have not yet taken place, but my Angel informs me they shall all go splendidly and add immeasurably to my reputation which shall ring down the ages like a large dinner gong in a splendid hotel.
But before I do perhaps I should say a word about my Angel who is my constant companion in my trials and tribulations with the people of Dundee and publicans. I was a weaver by trade as was my parents, and earning a little money and living in a dwelling in Paton’s Lane near the Perth Road when I felt a curious itching in the sole of my left foot. Thinking that a tack had come through the linoleum, I bent to examine the floor, attracting the curiosity of my wife who was sewing by the range.
‘What are you doing now, William? Cannot you sit still for a moment? I swear the man has a glass _rse,’ she said. (I apologise for the profanity, but those were the words she uttered, and, as our great poet Rabbie Burns said in a moment of sobriety, Facts are chiels that will not ding. Chiels being children. In any case, when this is a book I will insist that the printer disguises the offending word. Dear reader, I would not like any harm or corruption to come to you through the foolish mouth of my wife who, I must say, has not always supported me in my divine task.)
‘I feel a something in my foot, dear,’ I replied, ‘and it is rising to my bosom.’
‘I feel something in my foot, and it’ll be rising to your _rse if you don’t settle down. I’ve twelve more of these to finish this evening,’ replied my dear wife.
At that moment the sensation reached my brain and I saw my hand begin to twitch. I heard as clearly as the larksome voice of my wife a strong voice saying to me ‘Write! Write!’
‘But what shall I write?’ I asked the voice. ‘Where is that pencil?’ I asked my wife.
‘What are you blethering about the now?’ she replied, while the voice continued to intone solemnly, ‘Write! Write!’
I felt like Samuel in the Bible when he wakes and goes to Eli. My mind was ablaze and my hand was twitching on the table. The voice was light and sonorous, a pleasing tenor, though it had an element of the foreign about it, like a dago or an Italian. I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps this is the voice of Dante himself.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ said the voice. ‘Now just write! Write!’
My eye fell on a copy of the Weekly News, which contained an article by the Reverend George Gilfillan, which I had recently been perusing after my labours at the handloom, and it came to me that I should address my first ever poem to this great soul, who Dante would be sure to place in the Paradise section of his magnificent hilarious poem. And so I commenced to writing verse.
And ever as I faltered the voice of my Angel recited to me the next line, teaching me how to beat out the rhythm just as Shakespeare does in his penny plays MacBeth, Richard III, Hamlet and Othello, and ever I was careful to place a rhyme at the end of the necessary lines, and it all came out very naturally as if I had been doing it since my early youth.
‘Whit on earth is this rubbish ye’re wasting paper on?’ asked my wife, a woman until this moment unacquainted with the workings of a poet’s mind, so I explained what had happened and she struck me about the head.
‘In yir head is it?’ she asked. ‘Well, I’ll soon knock it out of there, the foolish cratur. Let it go and live in Holy-face Gilfillan’s heid if it wants. It’ll be better off there. Less draughty for a start.’
And as she was saying these dreadful calumnies on the good man to whom I had just written my first ever verse, she was smacking and cracking me about the head with her hands and fists, and grabbing hold of my hair and shaking me as if to loosen the Angel from its residence within. I tholed all this with forbearance, for wife-beating is the provenance of drunkards, though I interjected now and then that the Reverend Gilfillan was a man of the Lord and of good folks everywhere.
Meanwhile inside my Angel’s voice was clear as the clapper on a bell (and indeed my head felt like a bell, so light was it with all the dinging it was getting from my dear wife), and it was saying unto me, ‘Well done, McGonagall, your career is begun. You shall crack all conventions and see the queen. You shall cross oceans and your fame shall cross the centuries. Well done, McGonagall, well done!’
Now whenever I sit at my loom and listen to the shuttle click and clack I feel transported to the clouds that rest in awful majesty above the Tay, frowning and lowering. I hear the train upon the track and think: this is how the Storm Fiend sits and watches us go back and forth across the Firth, all the time weaving his broad cloth of disaster, grey and grim, grim and grey.
My head aches and thrums and I’m in an awful dover till my wife comes upon me and skelps me around the lug, saying, ‘Wake up ye lazy skelf! Whit dye think ye’re daein, making lace doilies for Her Majesty? We need bulk tae gather tanners, sae stop yir idling and set to it, man!’
But my Angel is with me always, though my wife will often shoo it with her besom up the lum, where it lurks among the soot and flinders and whispers to me, ‘Shabby treatment indeed, but I have a word for you: shrubbery. Remember it, McGonagall, for it is a good word and one of Shakespeare’s finest.’
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Book of the Shaman: Chapter One
This novel is almost a 'historical' detective story, in which the detecting team are a Pictish shaman and his gang, and the Roman officer who employs them to find a kidnapped girl. It's sort of Stevenson on acid, with a nod to the heroic fantasy Pictland of Robert E.Howard, and a touch of Satyriconic kinkiness thrown in, just in case.
1.
It was in a small inn three day’s ride from our most northerly camp that I first clapped eyes on the so-called shaman, Dan Bleflum. Not that it corresponded to anything we would call an inn, being more of a cross between a hut and a tunnel, a black centipede of a place you practically had to slide down the throat of to get into. If you could bring yourself to do so -- and I had no choice but to steel myself to it -- you would then find yourself bent double in grimy, wattle-walled darkness, with a few lamps on the stamped-earth floor burning down the oil of what smelt like some well-rotted sea creature. The roof was uneven, hardly-worked beams, and there were no tables, no chairs – just bodies sprawled here and there and not one of them as much as lifting their head to look at you.
This was one of the ill-reputed heather ale houses, where the Picts would descend into week-long stupors of communal drinking, sometimes because of festivals in their incomprehensible calendar, sometimes in the face of calamities with their crops or their interminable skirmishing and thievery, but most often in response to some sullen secret impulse which that people has to curl up like dogs in their own dirt, indeed to roll in filth as dogs most like to do. And so it was I found the famous wizard, so incoherent I couldn’t tell whether he was in a genuine trance or simply, like the wretches around him, stupefied with drink.
I could not distinguish him by his garb, which was as begrimed as his fellows’, simply a long stretch of some thick wool twisted about him like a parody of the toga, with faint traces of some rectilinear pattern upon it under the layers of grease and the plentiful spatters from both ends of his digestive processes. But I had been told he always travelled with a small retinue, and these were distinctive enough guardians to tell me that between them lay what amounted to a priest of these Northern savages.
One was a bald walrus of a man, his beard and moustaches parted into two greying forks like dull fangs. His pate was tattooed with two great stags' heads, which I had read were central to their religion, their horns locked in the rut, and his bare arms were wrapped around here and there with what looked like dried intestines -- possibly, given their fixation on masculinity, ram or stallion. A couple of dagger hafts jutted from his belt. This one sat upright, apparently unaffected by the horns and bowls strewn around the den, though I later found that he was so intoxicated he could neither speak nor stand. This was Pechem, a notorious former highwayman, who was Bleflum’s sworn bodyguard, able to maintain the appearance of ferocious alertness even when barely conscious.
The other figure was a curled-up, waif-like figure, head swathed with a black ragged scarf, who made my heart lurch with hope – had he somehow found my target by some Hyperborean magicry before I had even declared my most desperate mission? Then memory soberly rebuked my over-eagerness: this was only the woman who always travelled with him, the obscure Nel-Ebri, who, it was variously rumoured, was his sister, his slave or his wife, not that Picts seemed to make much distinction between these categories in their dealings with women lower than royal blood. Those were quite another matter, and so, I rapidly discovered, was Nel-Ebri.
She alone of that narrow hall of drunkards was regarding me with a black and intelligent eye. I immediately realised my attempt to appear civilian would not fool that regard, and bared my head, so that my military crop made my status clear, and squatted down before her, glancing at the lolling figure between her and Pechem, the great Bleflum himself, who lay nipping at the smoky air with finger and thumb like a crab on its back, and rolling the whites of his eyes (even these were discoloured as the tusks of a boar), muttering rapidly in so guttural a voice I was unable to catch a single word.
‘Is your master wrapped in visions?’ I asked her quietly. ‘I have a good coin I would like to show him, and a question I need to ask.’
‘He’s sleeping,’ she answered, ‘or as near to it as he can get. Come back in three days.’
My report had covered this type of response. Agents who had taken Bleflum or his associates at their word invariably returned to find not only no trace of the mage or his retinue, but also that no-one could remember ever having seen any persons of that description.
‘My coin is so heavy and so devoted to its new owner that it will not let me leave his side. Perhaps it is my question that he dreams about.’
‘He dreams about the Drowning, as always. Let me see this loyal coin.’
‘I have its little sisters, just for you,’ I countered, and held out some coppers.
By way of response she lifted up her skirt with a weary gesture, and exposed her genitals. These were cleaner than I might have expected, had I expected to be shown them at all. The pubic hair was also neatly trimmed in an unusual manner, so that instead of the dark lateen one might expect, there was an oval, almost an orb of thick black hair. The absurd impression occurred to me that it looked compellingly like a sea urchin. I was later to learn that there were fashions among Pictish women in this matter, some favouring squares, diamonds, or even rudimentary silhouettes of trees and fish.
'No, that wasn't what I meant,' I hastened to say, pushing her hand and the garment down. I'd had an unpleasant encounter with a Pictish whore before leaving camp. It had ended in bloodshed, albeit minor, over some incomprehensible slight -- how can you insult a whore?
In any case, it had left me far from eager to repeat the experience. As if being deliberately obtuse, she then exposed the shaman's genitals, still with an air of bored enquiry, as though we were bargaining. His member was partly erect, spindly, rather bulbous at the tip, and far from clean. It kept twitching with an unpleasant air of prescience, as though it were sniffing something out. Again I pushed her hand down, then pulled it towards me and pressed into it twice the amount I'd intended.
This seemed to have been her aim throughout, as she smiled to herself, tucked the coins away and appeared inclined to pay me no further attention. I ventured another look at Bleflum, whose face was momentarily bared by his restless turning. He was no longer a young man, but by no means as old as I’d been led to think. Somewhere around fifty, he was, unusually among a menfolk much given to facial hair, clean-shaven, with a matted crown of grey receding from a beetled, much-creased brow. The eyes were deep-set amid many wrinkles, and there were more lines around the thick-lipped mouth, and great bunches of muscles at the stubbled junctions of the jaws. All this either implied much determination, or much effort at determination. He was also dribbling copiously, a side-effect of the ale.
‘Tell me about this drowning,’ I asked Nel-Ebri, who seemed to have fallen into a small trance of her own. She gave me another shrewd glance, and indicated a half-empty bowl with her foot.
‘Have you tasted the heather ale?’ she asked, in a bright voice, as though we sat in sunshine at a fine table. ‘Here it is brewed well – more dreams, less blindness.’
This was hardly a selling point, but she leaned in and added, ‘There are stories which you cannot hear from outside an intoxication, and this would be one of them.’
I picked up the cheap clay dish and tried not to sniff at the contents, which were milky and lethargically fizzy. There was a layer of greenish-yellow looped over the surface of the liquid I refused to think of as sputum from its last drinker, who may well have been Bleflum. I also tried not to think of the state of his teeth, and sank the bowl in one, thus saving myself the prospect of revisiting it.
As it made its ropy way down my gullet, I was reminded of swallowing shellfish, that acrid, brackish quality that climbs the back of your throat and makes you wonder if, this time, you’ve swallowed the off specimen. It tasted sweet enough, but with a sickly, sour butter edge. I reminded myself, if you’ve tasted troopers’ wine, cut with vinegar to an inch of its life, and if you’ve (barely) survived your uncle’s grappa, then heather ale should hold no fears. Nonetheless, it did.
‘When Himself was still a boy, and a bright boy at that, the darling of the most blessed clan, which we no longer name; when the Fisherman was able to take up herring with a dip of his hand into the lightest wave, and the Forester could fell a fir by looking at it with his sharpest glance; when the Smith could smelt a sword simply by breathing upon it his hardiest breath, and the mushrooms gathered thick among the cattle’s hooves and gave our people the truest dreams, he was taken to the great well at the Court of Gruoch, for he was rumoured to have great potential for the Seeing, and held up by one heel by a Princess of the Firth, and she was more beautiful than the dolphin, mightier than a lonely shark, and she held him below the water of the sacred well firstly for the span of five breaths, but he glimpsed nothing of the Guardians, so then…’
As she spoke, she let the scarf fall away so that I could see her profile for the first time. This was nothing spectacular: she had a long thin nose that dragged on the groove over her lip, so that both twitched as she spoke, and the teeth thus revealed were prominent and twisting. But her eyes had that same flash as the dreaming Bleflum’s, and I could hear the lilt that intoxication gave to all their voices, as she let the incantatory coils of the story wind around her brain. I could already feel the same thing catching faintly at mine, a kind of drag within the trunk and the skull, as though your skeleton is somehow sinking into the floor although your flesh has not moved at all. I realised I’d slipped into a daze, and the story had advanced somewhat.
‘...after the fourth hour’s immersions they laid him out along the clean sea-grass and told his father he would never be a shaman, and the old man covered up his head with mud and weed and went from that place. Towards the sunset he expelled the holy water from his stomach and gullet and sat up to see cold night coming in, and understood he had no future within the college of the shamans, and so no home among the people of his own clan, and thus began his wanderings…’
At some point a figure I supposed must be the inn-keeper had pressed another brimming bowl of heather ale into my hands and extracted some coins from me I had not meant to give him, and this bowl had followed its predecessor far more easily down a throat that felt both far too warm and far too numb. As she carried on the apparently endless tale of his meanderings, I found myself slowly collapsing toward its sleeping subject in such a manner as to feel almost part of his story. I too seemed to be on the prow of the fishing boat where his first vision struck him, as, leaning out over the water to haul on a net, he found himself staring into the face of his first familiar, what we call a porpoise, but the Picts have a somewhat different concept of.
I was looking at the fish’s broad flat face as it poked from the collar of the water, and it seemed to me it was my own reflection, but somehow crossed with that of Bleflum, and I could no longer tell if it was in the inn or in the dream that the face of the fish or the shaman or my own reflection suddenly sat stark upright and yelled, ‘Faker! I know your true name!’
I struggled to make a coherent reply but instead found my head speeding towards the floor with an irresistible, almost exhilarating momentum.
1.
It was in a small inn three day’s ride from our most northerly camp that I first clapped eyes on the so-called shaman, Dan Bleflum. Not that it corresponded to anything we would call an inn, being more of a cross between a hut and a tunnel, a black centipede of a place you practically had to slide down the throat of to get into. If you could bring yourself to do so -- and I had no choice but to steel myself to it -- you would then find yourself bent double in grimy, wattle-walled darkness, with a few lamps on the stamped-earth floor burning down the oil of what smelt like some well-rotted sea creature. The roof was uneven, hardly-worked beams, and there were no tables, no chairs – just bodies sprawled here and there and not one of them as much as lifting their head to look at you.
This was one of the ill-reputed heather ale houses, where the Picts would descend into week-long stupors of communal drinking, sometimes because of festivals in their incomprehensible calendar, sometimes in the face of calamities with their crops or their interminable skirmishing and thievery, but most often in response to some sullen secret impulse which that people has to curl up like dogs in their own dirt, indeed to roll in filth as dogs most like to do. And so it was I found the famous wizard, so incoherent I couldn’t tell whether he was in a genuine trance or simply, like the wretches around him, stupefied with drink.
I could not distinguish him by his garb, which was as begrimed as his fellows’, simply a long stretch of some thick wool twisted about him like a parody of the toga, with faint traces of some rectilinear pattern upon it under the layers of grease and the plentiful spatters from both ends of his digestive processes. But I had been told he always travelled with a small retinue, and these were distinctive enough guardians to tell me that between them lay what amounted to a priest of these Northern savages.
One was a bald walrus of a man, his beard and moustaches parted into two greying forks like dull fangs. His pate was tattooed with two great stags' heads, which I had read were central to their religion, their horns locked in the rut, and his bare arms were wrapped around here and there with what looked like dried intestines -- possibly, given their fixation on masculinity, ram or stallion. A couple of dagger hafts jutted from his belt. This one sat upright, apparently unaffected by the horns and bowls strewn around the den, though I later found that he was so intoxicated he could neither speak nor stand. This was Pechem, a notorious former highwayman, who was Bleflum’s sworn bodyguard, able to maintain the appearance of ferocious alertness even when barely conscious.
The other figure was a curled-up, waif-like figure, head swathed with a black ragged scarf, who made my heart lurch with hope – had he somehow found my target by some Hyperborean magicry before I had even declared my most desperate mission? Then memory soberly rebuked my over-eagerness: this was only the woman who always travelled with him, the obscure Nel-Ebri, who, it was variously rumoured, was his sister, his slave or his wife, not that Picts seemed to make much distinction between these categories in their dealings with women lower than royal blood. Those were quite another matter, and so, I rapidly discovered, was Nel-Ebri.
She alone of that narrow hall of drunkards was regarding me with a black and intelligent eye. I immediately realised my attempt to appear civilian would not fool that regard, and bared my head, so that my military crop made my status clear, and squatted down before her, glancing at the lolling figure between her and Pechem, the great Bleflum himself, who lay nipping at the smoky air with finger and thumb like a crab on its back, and rolling the whites of his eyes (even these were discoloured as the tusks of a boar), muttering rapidly in so guttural a voice I was unable to catch a single word.
‘Is your master wrapped in visions?’ I asked her quietly. ‘I have a good coin I would like to show him, and a question I need to ask.’
‘He’s sleeping,’ she answered, ‘or as near to it as he can get. Come back in three days.’
My report had covered this type of response. Agents who had taken Bleflum or his associates at their word invariably returned to find not only no trace of the mage or his retinue, but also that no-one could remember ever having seen any persons of that description.
‘My coin is so heavy and so devoted to its new owner that it will not let me leave his side. Perhaps it is my question that he dreams about.’
‘He dreams about the Drowning, as always. Let me see this loyal coin.’
‘I have its little sisters, just for you,’ I countered, and held out some coppers.
By way of response she lifted up her skirt with a weary gesture, and exposed her genitals. These were cleaner than I might have expected, had I expected to be shown them at all. The pubic hair was also neatly trimmed in an unusual manner, so that instead of the dark lateen one might expect, there was an oval, almost an orb of thick black hair. The absurd impression occurred to me that it looked compellingly like a sea urchin. I was later to learn that there were fashions among Pictish women in this matter, some favouring squares, diamonds, or even rudimentary silhouettes of trees and fish.
'No, that wasn't what I meant,' I hastened to say, pushing her hand and the garment down. I'd had an unpleasant encounter with a Pictish whore before leaving camp. It had ended in bloodshed, albeit minor, over some incomprehensible slight -- how can you insult a whore?
In any case, it had left me far from eager to repeat the experience. As if being deliberately obtuse, she then exposed the shaman's genitals, still with an air of bored enquiry, as though we were bargaining. His member was partly erect, spindly, rather bulbous at the tip, and far from clean. It kept twitching with an unpleasant air of prescience, as though it were sniffing something out. Again I pushed her hand down, then pulled it towards me and pressed into it twice the amount I'd intended.
This seemed to have been her aim throughout, as she smiled to herself, tucked the coins away and appeared inclined to pay me no further attention. I ventured another look at Bleflum, whose face was momentarily bared by his restless turning. He was no longer a young man, but by no means as old as I’d been led to think. Somewhere around fifty, he was, unusually among a menfolk much given to facial hair, clean-shaven, with a matted crown of grey receding from a beetled, much-creased brow. The eyes were deep-set amid many wrinkles, and there were more lines around the thick-lipped mouth, and great bunches of muscles at the stubbled junctions of the jaws. All this either implied much determination, or much effort at determination. He was also dribbling copiously, a side-effect of the ale.
‘Tell me about this drowning,’ I asked Nel-Ebri, who seemed to have fallen into a small trance of her own. She gave me another shrewd glance, and indicated a half-empty bowl with her foot.
‘Have you tasted the heather ale?’ she asked, in a bright voice, as though we sat in sunshine at a fine table. ‘Here it is brewed well – more dreams, less blindness.’
This was hardly a selling point, but she leaned in and added, ‘There are stories which you cannot hear from outside an intoxication, and this would be one of them.’
I picked up the cheap clay dish and tried not to sniff at the contents, which were milky and lethargically fizzy. There was a layer of greenish-yellow looped over the surface of the liquid I refused to think of as sputum from its last drinker, who may well have been Bleflum. I also tried not to think of the state of his teeth, and sank the bowl in one, thus saving myself the prospect of revisiting it.
As it made its ropy way down my gullet, I was reminded of swallowing shellfish, that acrid, brackish quality that climbs the back of your throat and makes you wonder if, this time, you’ve swallowed the off specimen. It tasted sweet enough, but with a sickly, sour butter edge. I reminded myself, if you’ve tasted troopers’ wine, cut with vinegar to an inch of its life, and if you’ve (barely) survived your uncle’s grappa, then heather ale should hold no fears. Nonetheless, it did.
‘When Himself was still a boy, and a bright boy at that, the darling of the most blessed clan, which we no longer name; when the Fisherman was able to take up herring with a dip of his hand into the lightest wave, and the Forester could fell a fir by looking at it with his sharpest glance; when the Smith could smelt a sword simply by breathing upon it his hardiest breath, and the mushrooms gathered thick among the cattle’s hooves and gave our people the truest dreams, he was taken to the great well at the Court of Gruoch, for he was rumoured to have great potential for the Seeing, and held up by one heel by a Princess of the Firth, and she was more beautiful than the dolphin, mightier than a lonely shark, and she held him below the water of the sacred well firstly for the span of five breaths, but he glimpsed nothing of the Guardians, so then…’
As she spoke, she let the scarf fall away so that I could see her profile for the first time. This was nothing spectacular: she had a long thin nose that dragged on the groove over her lip, so that both twitched as she spoke, and the teeth thus revealed were prominent and twisting. But her eyes had that same flash as the dreaming Bleflum’s, and I could hear the lilt that intoxication gave to all their voices, as she let the incantatory coils of the story wind around her brain. I could already feel the same thing catching faintly at mine, a kind of drag within the trunk and the skull, as though your skeleton is somehow sinking into the floor although your flesh has not moved at all. I realised I’d slipped into a daze, and the story had advanced somewhat.
‘...after the fourth hour’s immersions they laid him out along the clean sea-grass and told his father he would never be a shaman, and the old man covered up his head with mud and weed and went from that place. Towards the sunset he expelled the holy water from his stomach and gullet and sat up to see cold night coming in, and understood he had no future within the college of the shamans, and so no home among the people of his own clan, and thus began his wanderings…’
At some point a figure I supposed must be the inn-keeper had pressed another brimming bowl of heather ale into my hands and extracted some coins from me I had not meant to give him, and this bowl had followed its predecessor far more easily down a throat that felt both far too warm and far too numb. As she carried on the apparently endless tale of his meanderings, I found myself slowly collapsing toward its sleeping subject in such a manner as to feel almost part of his story. I too seemed to be on the prow of the fishing boat where his first vision struck him, as, leaning out over the water to haul on a net, he found himself staring into the face of his first familiar, what we call a porpoise, but the Picts have a somewhat different concept of.
I was looking at the fish’s broad flat face as it poked from the collar of the water, and it seemed to me it was my own reflection, but somehow crossed with that of Bleflum, and I could no longer tell if it was in the inn or in the dream that the face of the fish or the shaman or my own reflection suddenly sat stark upright and yelled, ‘Faker! I know your true name!’
I struggled to make a coherent reply but instead found my head speeding towards the floor with an irresistible, almost exhilarating momentum.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Chapter One (continued)
3.
Bella McAlpine stood in the doorway of the Belvedere Hotel and watched the lumpy black chimney of Bart O'Shaughnessy's hat n cart combo proceeding down Main Street towards her. The town of Scopas was T-shaped, like a steakbone, and the hotel stood at the middle of the horizontal and at the top of the vertical stroke, as though inviting horse and rider to gallop straight through its front door, up the staircase, and into the bridal suite -- an invitation which had been taken up by more than a few riders, and occasionally by an enthusiastic horse, travelling solo. This tended to elicit a mixed response from the residents. It was, as she had explained countless times to her husband, Gavin McAlpine, not a very comfortable place to stay. His retorts tended to follow a theme.
‘Stay? I dinnae gee a fuck if they stay, darlin, jist as lang as they pay. There's plenty mair puntirs whaur they come from; this country's fillin up quicker than a hure on a Setterday nicht.’
The Belvedere formed the centrepiece of the McAlpine's entertainment complex. The White Arms Saloon, Bella's especial domain, flanked it on its left, while the Gaiety Theater, Gavin's toy, sat to its right. Two doors connected each establishment with the lobby of the Belvedere, allowing each partner access to the other's realm. They could often be found whispering together in front of the hotel's aspidistra, splitting apart quickly and vanishing as you approached.
As Bart O'Shaughnessy approached she turned to read the sign Gavin had plastered on the Gaiety. Its pseudo-baroque lettering on cheap canary-yellow paper effortlessly hit the McAlpine high note of entrepeneurial delicacy:
‘MOZARTUs Et SOn FILS! LEGENDARy DOUBLe ACt FRESh FROm EUROPE! SPECIALLy IMPORTED!! LATESt TUNEs BLINDFOLD!! ONLy THREe YEARs OLD!!!’
That should get them out again as soon as it had got them in -- how he expected anyone to take that seriously for more than five minutes? It was obviously a dwarf. And Gavin had given them the bridal suite, which she had been saving for Sylvie Parker's engagement. She was confidently expecting this to follow shortly after Sylvie's mother had been informed who the bastard was who'd got her like that. Which she had been planning on revealing that very day.
Bella had been especially looking forward to explaining to Ma Parker the shameful occurrence had actually taken place in her own home on that same hot summer evening the old woman had been in the saloon, holding onto her full house like an enormous terrier whilst laying out Constancy Brown with a pint mug. It had turned out to be a big night for her in more ways than one. Bella McAlpine firmly believed in mixing business and gossip, and resented Gavin's interference in her schemes.
In fact, now her brain had focussed on these Mozarts, hadn't he paid Seth Blackspine good money to tune the Gaiety's piano? Maybe Gavin McAlpine didn't know it, but Seth, his favourite lackey, had been deaf in one ear for six years now, ever since that Hogmanay when Davie Agnew thought he saw the Duke of Cumberland crawling down the stairs. Seth Blackspine's eardrum had been just one of the innocent bystanders -- a wooden cupid over Bella's bar had contracted a bad case of peppershot acne on the same occasion. Sometimes she wondered if her husband had any business sense at all.
‘Evenin Bella, got the Deutschers' gear.’
‘Evenin Bart, you can take it on up to the Lavender Room.’
‘Uh, Gavin told me the Bridal Suite.’
‘Well they ain't married, are they? The Lavender Room and less lip about it.’
‘Uh, Gavin told me he wants them set up real purty.’
‘Well Gavin can just set up a bed on the stage of the Gaiety and get you and Seth to wear yore frilly negligees and sing carols. This is my hotel and they go in the Lavender Room!’
‘Uh, Gavin ain’t gonna like that...’
‘Open yore mouth any further and there'll be tooth-marks on the Deutschers' luggage. Gavin ain't gonna like that neither.’
Having reached the limits of his courage and the outskirts of Bella's patience at around the same time, Bart crumbled, and, with the ghost of a gesture towards the ghost of his forelock, he began heaving down box and bag with gusto. A small mountain formed by her large but lissome foot, which tapped gently, ominously.
‘Don't travel light, do they,’ she commented.
‘Well, none of these is heavy -- can't say what's in them,’ Bart answered, swinging down one box which hit the heap at an angle and burst open. A luxurious slow stream of papers was picked up as if on salvers and borne off down the street.
‘Shite and onions!’ declared Bart, a former Irishman.
‘Get after them, piss-for-brains!’ yelled Bella, hitching up her skirts and adding the erotic interest of generous pale calves to the pursuit.
Like Atalanta lapping a particularly unappealing suitor, she passed Bart after the bright flock of dismembered butterflies, the thin apple-peels of paper. She snatched them in screwed-up handfuls, as though she was carrying a white cabbage to the barber's. This establishment began emitting sploshes and a high thin note like the memory of a nightingale
‘My opera! My opera!’
A naked wet child emerged, wig jammed on half-askew, shrieking in German and grasping at the papers as they rose up to greet him, an insubstantial pack of hounds acknowledging the master of their hunt. He rounded on Bart as that worthy lurched up, gasping and grabbing futilely for the manuscripts as if trying to clutch up smoke.
‘Bum-face! Shitty whiskers! Bogie of the moon! My opera! My opera!’
A tall unhealthy-looking man appeared behind the child in a similar state of undress but clutching a towel to his loins. He saw Bella still frozen in an attitude of snatching and recoiled into the shop's shadows. His hiss slid forth:
‘Wolfgang! Get dressed! What opera is this? What are you talking about?’
‘It's my pretty opera, and shit-snot's gone and lost it!’
Leopold pushed past his son and ripped the paper cabbage from Bella's outstretched hand:
‘What is this? What is this?’ he murmured. ‘'The Haunting of Belgasguardo'? What is this?’
‘Oh it's a lovely story Papa,’ the child said hurriedly. ‘It's about the ghost of a poet who visits an Italian count to enquire about a woman he once met on the estate because he has written a sonnet to her from Limbo where the classical poets are and the nobleman looks everywhere then finds it is his own wife and then he...’
‘Be quiet Wolfgang, be quiet!’
‘But it's so charming Papa, he kills himself because they were lovers and she was supposed to have joined the poet in a suicide pact but her father stopped her and married her off to him and...’
‘Will you be quiet!!’ Leopold was shaking with annoyance and the cold of the coming evening, reading this new thing desperately, checking it for signs of originality, flickers of talent.
Meanwhile Bella was recoiling from her pose which, due to the height of the sidewalk, had brought her nose into close proximity to the younger Mozart's rosy genitalia. Thanks to the excitement of the occasion, the child's equipage had not been entirely quiescent, and though she was now amply convinced he was a real child, this small pointer to the contrary combined with the tenor of his conversation to nonplus her momentarily. This, an extraordinary event in Scopas's short history, meant she silently accepted Bart's paper offerings and passed them onto their creator. He, as though noticing her for the first time, bowed formally and thanked her in German.
Without taking her eyes off any aspect of the spectacle (this included that brainless beanpole Arthur miming convulsions through the shop window), she hooked one of Bart's ample nostrils with one sharp finger and said amiably:
‘Take the Mozarts' luggage to the Bridal Suite.’
At this Leopold became aware once more of his position. He bundled the child back into the barber's, rearranged his towel in toga fashion and, the opera clutched rigidly in one wet fist, addressed her:
‘You must be Mrs McAlpine. Your husband wrote to me indicating we were to have a suite of three rooms, one of which was to contain a piano for the personal use of my son. Mr O'Shaughnessy here...’ (Bart immediately vacated the ‘here’ position for something closer to ‘there’) ‘tells me these especial stipulations of mine are unlikely to be met. Yet I have here...uh, in my coat, a contract with your husband's signature upon it. What precisely is the case?’
Bella, having already drawn herself up to her full and formidable height, drew herself up some more. A merciless glance skelped the man's grey extremities and the tone of the justified hotelier rounded out her rich contralto.
‘I have a copy of this contract in my office. It mentions a suite and a room in which your...son can practice. It nowhere suggests these rooms have to be adjoining. Your son can practice in the theater among the other...performers. As to your room, it's been had by many a couple before you, and they've had no grounds for complaint.’
Safe in the shop, a young O'Shaughnessy whispered to a small Mozart: ‘That's cause they're too busy humpin!’ Momentarily linked by their mutual grasp of adult taboo, both boys guffawed.
‘If I have the word with your mother that I intend to have, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the only thing you'll be humpin is buckets of water! I've seen you letchin over that simpleton of a girl when she gets her blouse wet. She oughta have her skirts tied at the ankle to stop snakes like you – and yore uncle – from slidin up em!’
‘Madam!’ Leopold exclaimed, recoiling from this last blast as Arthur vanished down a metaphoric plughole and Sarah gasped and Wolfgang, enthroned once more on the barber's chair, gave vent to a merry scale of giggles.
‘If it's a Madam you require, the whorehouse is on the left end of Pole Street. If it's my hotel you want to stay in, you'd better get off yore high horse and into some clothes.’
With this, Bella swept round in a volcanic flounce and marched back down the street to the mindless laughter of Sarah and the tiny clapping and ‘Brava!’s of Leopold's son, the composer.
4.
A slow movement of cutlery striking china filled the darkening dining-room. Forks flashed dully like distant lightning. There was half an hour till the performance, and Wolfgang's ears had been boxed for his refusing to finger the hotel's jangled piano. Gavin McAlpine had hurried through, puffing on an unpleasant stogie as if a portent of iron horses yet to come.
He was stockier than the soup they had been served by wall-eyed waitresses, and he was balding, equipped with a spade beard not quite sharp enough to cut through his accent. This was a Glaswegian close enough to Low German for Wolfgang to imitate it back to him. This had ice-breaking results, with McAlpine feeling able to deliver some home truths to Leopold Mozart about his position on the bill, with an inference as to the proximity of his son's talents to those of a performing troupe of pekingese. He had then stalked off, leaving Leopold marvelling at the degrees of familiarity and contempt the Scotch seem to feel will promote good relations, and Wolfgang yapping and attempting to consume his gravy by lavish lappings.
‘What a ridiculous little man! If only that Bergonese Count had settled in cash instead of...what was that thing?’
‘A gold barometer, Papa.’
‘...which no Jew would make a decent offer for unless we melted it down ourselves. As I say, we should've had sufficient funding for another English trip, instead of relying on one Hiram T. Schwartz.’
‘Papa, he was the only one to offer an advance.’
‘An advance to nowhere, as in checkmate. Well, you can revive that movement for bagpipes for Mr McAlpine's sake. Perhaps that will put him in a better temper. I'll transcribe it for piano tomorrow.’
‘Oh Papa! That was the most appalling piece!’ The child lolled back in his seat, waving a fork expansively. ‘I couldn't have done worse if I'd been scoring for a cat suffering from constriction of the urethra.’
‘You must take account of your audience, Wolfgang. This opera, for instance -- who will follow such extended arias? You need more recitative to get such a complicated story across. I'll write you it.’
‘You're welcome! Rectum-ative-a-tumty-tee! And the arias are not extended, they're exalted.’
‘Don't be arrogant. It's bad enough having to accept what amounts to charity from that charlatan -- free passage in exchange for twenty dates of his choosing – only to be passed on to another charlatan ten times worse…
McAlpine shouted from the door of the dining-room, ‘If that wee man's no oan the stage o my theatur in ten minutes you'll be sleepin in the airms o Jehovah the nicht, no my hotel!’
‘Bumpkins!’ whispered Leopold, gripping the sides of the table in an agony of placelessness.
5.
Scopas was settling into darkness in its customary haze of spirits and gunshots from the hills. Boots scuffed boards as gamblers shuffled between loans, and the bare feet of children slapped down like trout into streams. Horses broke wind as they shifted in the street, bobbing opalescent as gondolas tethered together. Lights blared from curtainless windows, and the profiles of the ramshackle shopfronts looked like so many bleary coxcombs raised to the enormity of the sky. Washes of blue contested on high with the first soft stabbings of the stars.
Arthur Marshall Courtney O'Shaughnessy was out the back of the barber's shop with Sarah the maid engaged in a serious business discussion.
‘Iffen you take me to the concert I'll let yuh see ma knees.’
‘Concert's fifty cents each and anyhow it's only Daisy Carmichael n some dawgs.’
‘Taint. It's that boy on his fiddle too. Maybe there'll be dancin.’
This was an important consideration. Last time there had been dancing he'd got his hand into the back of her dress ‘to let the air blow thru.’
‘Where'm I gonna get a dollar? I aint been paid nuthin for months.’
‘I knows where yore maw keeps her housekeepin. She's got four dollars saved.’
‘An when she's sees it's missin we'll get our asses lathered good.’
‘Not iffen you get tips from them foreigners all the time they're here. I hear they was pretty loose-handed with their cash. Anyrate the littlun is. I hear he gave Lettie Shumacher fifty cents just like that fur liftin up her dress.’
‘His paw won't let him get his hands on any cash, he's only some kid,’ said Arthur, mentally logging the amount for future reference. He'd no idea Belvedere maids were so...reasonable.
‘He got it for Lettie. Anyhow, he's smart -- I saw him puttin his hand in his paw's pocket while he was jawin with Mrs McAlpine. He put somethin up his wig.’
‘Wasn't that the dumbest thing you ever saw, him out there in the street with nuthin on but his wig.’
‘You wouldn't think it so dumb if it was me out here in the back with nuthin on but a hairband.’
Arthur blinked. He'd had no idea their voyage toward adulthood had advanced this far, let alone that Sarah's negotiating powers were up to the transition. There was a certain inescapable logic to her statements, and toadying to the Mozart boy for a week or so didn't seem too terrible a price to pay for...for...
The moon hung over them like the face of his Uncle Bart. a delicious scent seemed to creep over the scrubby garden, and suddenly that phrase was upon him again: ‘smooth fannies.’ The moonlight was caught in Sarah's eye and trickling in a cold lardy way down her neck which, he realised, was pretty darn smooth in itself. All boyish reason departed from him in that moment.
‘Where's the housekeepin kept?’
Bella McAlpine stood in the doorway of the Belvedere Hotel and watched the lumpy black chimney of Bart O'Shaughnessy's hat n cart combo proceeding down Main Street towards her. The town of Scopas was T-shaped, like a steakbone, and the hotel stood at the middle of the horizontal and at the top of the vertical stroke, as though inviting horse and rider to gallop straight through its front door, up the staircase, and into the bridal suite -- an invitation which had been taken up by more than a few riders, and occasionally by an enthusiastic horse, travelling solo. This tended to elicit a mixed response from the residents. It was, as she had explained countless times to her husband, Gavin McAlpine, not a very comfortable place to stay. His retorts tended to follow a theme.
‘Stay? I dinnae gee a fuck if they stay, darlin, jist as lang as they pay. There's plenty mair puntirs whaur they come from; this country's fillin up quicker than a hure on a Setterday nicht.’
The Belvedere formed the centrepiece of the McAlpine's entertainment complex. The White Arms Saloon, Bella's especial domain, flanked it on its left, while the Gaiety Theater, Gavin's toy, sat to its right. Two doors connected each establishment with the lobby of the Belvedere, allowing each partner access to the other's realm. They could often be found whispering together in front of the hotel's aspidistra, splitting apart quickly and vanishing as you approached.
As Bart O'Shaughnessy approached she turned to read the sign Gavin had plastered on the Gaiety. Its pseudo-baroque lettering on cheap canary-yellow paper effortlessly hit the McAlpine high note of entrepeneurial delicacy:
‘MOZARTUs Et SOn FILS! LEGENDARy DOUBLe ACt FRESh FROm EUROPE! SPECIALLy IMPORTED!! LATESt TUNEs BLINDFOLD!! ONLy THREe YEARs OLD!!!’
That should get them out again as soon as it had got them in -- how he expected anyone to take that seriously for more than five minutes? It was obviously a dwarf. And Gavin had given them the bridal suite, which she had been saving for Sylvie Parker's engagement. She was confidently expecting this to follow shortly after Sylvie's mother had been informed who the bastard was who'd got her like that. Which she had been planning on revealing that very day.
Bella had been especially looking forward to explaining to Ma Parker the shameful occurrence had actually taken place in her own home on that same hot summer evening the old woman had been in the saloon, holding onto her full house like an enormous terrier whilst laying out Constancy Brown with a pint mug. It had turned out to be a big night for her in more ways than one. Bella McAlpine firmly believed in mixing business and gossip, and resented Gavin's interference in her schemes.
In fact, now her brain had focussed on these Mozarts, hadn't he paid Seth Blackspine good money to tune the Gaiety's piano? Maybe Gavin McAlpine didn't know it, but Seth, his favourite lackey, had been deaf in one ear for six years now, ever since that Hogmanay when Davie Agnew thought he saw the Duke of Cumberland crawling down the stairs. Seth Blackspine's eardrum had been just one of the innocent bystanders -- a wooden cupid over Bella's bar had contracted a bad case of peppershot acne on the same occasion. Sometimes she wondered if her husband had any business sense at all.
‘Evenin Bella, got the Deutschers' gear.’
‘Evenin Bart, you can take it on up to the Lavender Room.’
‘Uh, Gavin told me the Bridal Suite.’
‘Well they ain't married, are they? The Lavender Room and less lip about it.’
‘Uh, Gavin told me he wants them set up real purty.’
‘Well Gavin can just set up a bed on the stage of the Gaiety and get you and Seth to wear yore frilly negligees and sing carols. This is my hotel and they go in the Lavender Room!’
‘Uh, Gavin ain’t gonna like that...’
‘Open yore mouth any further and there'll be tooth-marks on the Deutschers' luggage. Gavin ain't gonna like that neither.’
Having reached the limits of his courage and the outskirts of Bella's patience at around the same time, Bart crumbled, and, with the ghost of a gesture towards the ghost of his forelock, he began heaving down box and bag with gusto. A small mountain formed by her large but lissome foot, which tapped gently, ominously.
‘Don't travel light, do they,’ she commented.
‘Well, none of these is heavy -- can't say what's in them,’ Bart answered, swinging down one box which hit the heap at an angle and burst open. A luxurious slow stream of papers was picked up as if on salvers and borne off down the street.
‘Shite and onions!’ declared Bart, a former Irishman.
‘Get after them, piss-for-brains!’ yelled Bella, hitching up her skirts and adding the erotic interest of generous pale calves to the pursuit.
Like Atalanta lapping a particularly unappealing suitor, she passed Bart after the bright flock of dismembered butterflies, the thin apple-peels of paper. She snatched them in screwed-up handfuls, as though she was carrying a white cabbage to the barber's. This establishment began emitting sploshes and a high thin note like the memory of a nightingale
‘My opera! My opera!’
A naked wet child emerged, wig jammed on half-askew, shrieking in German and grasping at the papers as they rose up to greet him, an insubstantial pack of hounds acknowledging the master of their hunt. He rounded on Bart as that worthy lurched up, gasping and grabbing futilely for the manuscripts as if trying to clutch up smoke.
‘Bum-face! Shitty whiskers! Bogie of the moon! My opera! My opera!’
A tall unhealthy-looking man appeared behind the child in a similar state of undress but clutching a towel to his loins. He saw Bella still frozen in an attitude of snatching and recoiled into the shop's shadows. His hiss slid forth:
‘Wolfgang! Get dressed! What opera is this? What are you talking about?’
‘It's my pretty opera, and shit-snot's gone and lost it!’
Leopold pushed past his son and ripped the paper cabbage from Bella's outstretched hand:
‘What is this? What is this?’ he murmured. ‘'The Haunting of Belgasguardo'? What is this?’
‘Oh it's a lovely story Papa,’ the child said hurriedly. ‘It's about the ghost of a poet who visits an Italian count to enquire about a woman he once met on the estate because he has written a sonnet to her from Limbo where the classical poets are and the nobleman looks everywhere then finds it is his own wife and then he...’
‘Be quiet Wolfgang, be quiet!’
‘But it's so charming Papa, he kills himself because they were lovers and she was supposed to have joined the poet in a suicide pact but her father stopped her and married her off to him and...’
‘Will you be quiet!!’ Leopold was shaking with annoyance and the cold of the coming evening, reading this new thing desperately, checking it for signs of originality, flickers of talent.
Meanwhile Bella was recoiling from her pose which, due to the height of the sidewalk, had brought her nose into close proximity to the younger Mozart's rosy genitalia. Thanks to the excitement of the occasion, the child's equipage had not been entirely quiescent, and though she was now amply convinced he was a real child, this small pointer to the contrary combined with the tenor of his conversation to nonplus her momentarily. This, an extraordinary event in Scopas's short history, meant she silently accepted Bart's paper offerings and passed them onto their creator. He, as though noticing her for the first time, bowed formally and thanked her in German.
Without taking her eyes off any aspect of the spectacle (this included that brainless beanpole Arthur miming convulsions through the shop window), she hooked one of Bart's ample nostrils with one sharp finger and said amiably:
‘Take the Mozarts' luggage to the Bridal Suite.’
At this Leopold became aware once more of his position. He bundled the child back into the barber's, rearranged his towel in toga fashion and, the opera clutched rigidly in one wet fist, addressed her:
‘You must be Mrs McAlpine. Your husband wrote to me indicating we were to have a suite of three rooms, one of which was to contain a piano for the personal use of my son. Mr O'Shaughnessy here...’ (Bart immediately vacated the ‘here’ position for something closer to ‘there’) ‘tells me these especial stipulations of mine are unlikely to be met. Yet I have here...uh, in my coat, a contract with your husband's signature upon it. What precisely is the case?’
Bella, having already drawn herself up to her full and formidable height, drew herself up some more. A merciless glance skelped the man's grey extremities and the tone of the justified hotelier rounded out her rich contralto.
‘I have a copy of this contract in my office. It mentions a suite and a room in which your...son can practice. It nowhere suggests these rooms have to be adjoining. Your son can practice in the theater among the other...performers. As to your room, it's been had by many a couple before you, and they've had no grounds for complaint.’
Safe in the shop, a young O'Shaughnessy whispered to a small Mozart: ‘That's cause they're too busy humpin!’ Momentarily linked by their mutual grasp of adult taboo, both boys guffawed.
‘If I have the word with your mother that I intend to have, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the only thing you'll be humpin is buckets of water! I've seen you letchin over that simpleton of a girl when she gets her blouse wet. She oughta have her skirts tied at the ankle to stop snakes like you – and yore uncle – from slidin up em!’
‘Madam!’ Leopold exclaimed, recoiling from this last blast as Arthur vanished down a metaphoric plughole and Sarah gasped and Wolfgang, enthroned once more on the barber's chair, gave vent to a merry scale of giggles.
‘If it's a Madam you require, the whorehouse is on the left end of Pole Street. If it's my hotel you want to stay in, you'd better get off yore high horse and into some clothes.’
With this, Bella swept round in a volcanic flounce and marched back down the street to the mindless laughter of Sarah and the tiny clapping and ‘Brava!’s of Leopold's son, the composer.
4.
A slow movement of cutlery striking china filled the darkening dining-room. Forks flashed dully like distant lightning. There was half an hour till the performance, and Wolfgang's ears had been boxed for his refusing to finger the hotel's jangled piano. Gavin McAlpine had hurried through, puffing on an unpleasant stogie as if a portent of iron horses yet to come.
He was stockier than the soup they had been served by wall-eyed waitresses, and he was balding, equipped with a spade beard not quite sharp enough to cut through his accent. This was a Glaswegian close enough to Low German for Wolfgang to imitate it back to him. This had ice-breaking results, with McAlpine feeling able to deliver some home truths to Leopold Mozart about his position on the bill, with an inference as to the proximity of his son's talents to those of a performing troupe of pekingese. He had then stalked off, leaving Leopold marvelling at the degrees of familiarity and contempt the Scotch seem to feel will promote good relations, and Wolfgang yapping and attempting to consume his gravy by lavish lappings.
‘What a ridiculous little man! If only that Bergonese Count had settled in cash instead of...what was that thing?’
‘A gold barometer, Papa.’
‘...which no Jew would make a decent offer for unless we melted it down ourselves. As I say, we should've had sufficient funding for another English trip, instead of relying on one Hiram T. Schwartz.’
‘Papa, he was the only one to offer an advance.’
‘An advance to nowhere, as in checkmate. Well, you can revive that movement for bagpipes for Mr McAlpine's sake. Perhaps that will put him in a better temper. I'll transcribe it for piano tomorrow.’
‘Oh Papa! That was the most appalling piece!’ The child lolled back in his seat, waving a fork expansively. ‘I couldn't have done worse if I'd been scoring for a cat suffering from constriction of the urethra.’
‘You must take account of your audience, Wolfgang. This opera, for instance -- who will follow such extended arias? You need more recitative to get such a complicated story across. I'll write you it.’
‘You're welcome! Rectum-ative-a-tumty-tee! And the arias are not extended, they're exalted.’
‘Don't be arrogant. It's bad enough having to accept what amounts to charity from that charlatan -- free passage in exchange for twenty dates of his choosing – only to be passed on to another charlatan ten times worse…
McAlpine shouted from the door of the dining-room, ‘If that wee man's no oan the stage o my theatur in ten minutes you'll be sleepin in the airms o Jehovah the nicht, no my hotel!’
‘Bumpkins!’ whispered Leopold, gripping the sides of the table in an agony of placelessness.
5.
Scopas was settling into darkness in its customary haze of spirits and gunshots from the hills. Boots scuffed boards as gamblers shuffled between loans, and the bare feet of children slapped down like trout into streams. Horses broke wind as they shifted in the street, bobbing opalescent as gondolas tethered together. Lights blared from curtainless windows, and the profiles of the ramshackle shopfronts looked like so many bleary coxcombs raised to the enormity of the sky. Washes of blue contested on high with the first soft stabbings of the stars.
Arthur Marshall Courtney O'Shaughnessy was out the back of the barber's shop with Sarah the maid engaged in a serious business discussion.
‘Iffen you take me to the concert I'll let yuh see ma knees.’
‘Concert's fifty cents each and anyhow it's only Daisy Carmichael n some dawgs.’
‘Taint. It's that boy on his fiddle too. Maybe there'll be dancin.’
This was an important consideration. Last time there had been dancing he'd got his hand into the back of her dress ‘to let the air blow thru.’
‘Where'm I gonna get a dollar? I aint been paid nuthin for months.’
‘I knows where yore maw keeps her housekeepin. She's got four dollars saved.’
‘An when she's sees it's missin we'll get our asses lathered good.’
‘Not iffen you get tips from them foreigners all the time they're here. I hear they was pretty loose-handed with their cash. Anyrate the littlun is. I hear he gave Lettie Shumacher fifty cents just like that fur liftin up her dress.’
‘His paw won't let him get his hands on any cash, he's only some kid,’ said Arthur, mentally logging the amount for future reference. He'd no idea Belvedere maids were so...reasonable.
‘He got it for Lettie. Anyhow, he's smart -- I saw him puttin his hand in his paw's pocket while he was jawin with Mrs McAlpine. He put somethin up his wig.’
‘Wasn't that the dumbest thing you ever saw, him out there in the street with nuthin on but his wig.’
‘You wouldn't think it so dumb if it was me out here in the back with nuthin on but a hairband.’
Arthur blinked. He'd had no idea their voyage toward adulthood had advanced this far, let alone that Sarah's negotiating powers were up to the transition. There was a certain inescapable logic to her statements, and toadying to the Mozart boy for a week or so didn't seem too terrible a price to pay for...for...
The moon hung over them like the face of his Uncle Bart. a delicious scent seemed to creep over the scrubby garden, and suddenly that phrase was upon him again: ‘smooth fannies.’ The moonlight was caught in Sarah's eye and trickling in a cold lardy way down her neck which, he realised, was pretty darn smooth in itself. All boyish reason departed from him in that moment.
‘Where's the housekeepin kept?’
Friday, January 27, 2006
Happy Birthday Wolfgang Amadeus!
This blog is by way of tribute to the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 250 years ago today.
I originally intended to upload a chapter a month of a novel about the young Mozart's little-known trip to America, and his adventures in the tiny Coloradoan town of Scopas, a story that begins with a murder and ends with an opera. That proved a foolish endeavour -- there was too little time to revise the existing chapters, let alone compose the later ones, and soon other fictions began crowing into the back of the cupboard of raggedy seersucker suits.
I began writing this more than twenty years ago when I was a postgrad living in a shared and somewhat hallucinatory household in East Oxford. I got a couple of chapters in before the next supply of narcotic substances arrived and I embarked instead on a picaresque tale of a trip on or to the Isle of Skye. I picked the story up a few years later and tidied things up, gave it a bit more of a plot, and then... I lost it big time.
To be more exact, I lost all the disks it and most of the writing I was doing at the time appeared on, somewhere in all the boxes and boxes of papers that started following me from residency to residency and house to house like a pack of rather placid huskies. When we moved to the Old High Light in North Shields, we basically set aside a room for boxes, piled them up, and that was that. Mozart slumbered on for a few more years in the husky fur.
Then the lighthouse got damp, seriously floor-timber rottingly damp (well, it is nearly three hundred years old), and by the time we got back in I seemed to have acquired some more boxes of papers. The result was my study got piled up with these ancient-looking cardboard containers and, one day, looking for CDs, I happened across a heap of old 4.5 inch floppy disks.
My PC at home no longer had a slot for these, but luckily my work PC was a little more elderly, and so I had a look. Hey prestissimo: Mozart, plus all the other novels I got half-way through and gave up on. I didn't know whether to go Erk! or Eureka! (A more common problem than people think.)
As I'm now a horribly busy middle-aged oaf, instead of a terminally lazy mid-twenties oaf, I have a fairly busy work and publishing schedule which doesn't leave time for polishing up of novelistic fragments. On top of which I doubt the publishing world is screaming out for a short silly novel mashing together classical music and classic westerns. But there may well be a few benighted souls out there in Blogaria who could be interested.
Who Killed Old Man Pattinson? And why was he hiding on a houseboat in a cave? And will Mozart solve the murder even though that would make him the world's first child detective?
I originally intended to upload a chapter a month of a novel about the young Mozart's little-known trip to America, and his adventures in the tiny Coloradoan town of Scopas, a story that begins with a murder and ends with an opera. That proved a foolish endeavour -- there was too little time to revise the existing chapters, let alone compose the later ones, and soon other fictions began crowing into the back of the cupboard of raggedy seersucker suits.
I began writing this more than twenty years ago when I was a postgrad living in a shared and somewhat hallucinatory household in East Oxford. I got a couple of chapters in before the next supply of narcotic substances arrived and I embarked instead on a picaresque tale of a trip on or to the Isle of Skye. I picked the story up a few years later and tidied things up, gave it a bit more of a plot, and then... I lost it big time.
To be more exact, I lost all the disks it and most of the writing I was doing at the time appeared on, somewhere in all the boxes and boxes of papers that started following me from residency to residency and house to house like a pack of rather placid huskies. When we moved to the Old High Light in North Shields, we basically set aside a room for boxes, piled them up, and that was that. Mozart slumbered on for a few more years in the husky fur.
Then the lighthouse got damp, seriously floor-timber rottingly damp (well, it is nearly three hundred years old), and by the time we got back in I seemed to have acquired some more boxes of papers. The result was my study got piled up with these ancient-looking cardboard containers and, one day, looking for CDs, I happened across a heap of old 4.5 inch floppy disks.
My PC at home no longer had a slot for these, but luckily my work PC was a little more elderly, and so I had a look. Hey prestissimo: Mozart, plus all the other novels I got half-way through and gave up on. I didn't know whether to go Erk! or Eureka! (A more common problem than people think.)
As I'm now a horribly busy middle-aged oaf, instead of a terminally lazy mid-twenties oaf, I have a fairly busy work and publishing schedule which doesn't leave time for polishing up of novelistic fragments. On top of which I doubt the publishing world is screaming out for a short silly novel mashing together classical music and classic westerns. But there may well be a few benighted souls out there in Blogaria who could be interested.
Who Killed Old Man Pattinson? And why was he hiding on a houseboat in a cave? And will Mozart solve the murder even though that would make him the world's first child detective?
Mozart in Colorado: Chapter 1
Mozart in Colorado is a novel in 12 chapters concerning the adventures of the young Mozart on an historically-improbably visit to Colorado. That's right, it's a Shaneless Western.
1.
Old Man Pattinson squinted out at the darkness beyond his door. Given that he lived on a single-cabined boat in the middle of a flooded cave, and considering that it was the middle of the night, he didn't have much of a view, but he surveyed what he could carefully. The waters lapped blackly about a few thin spools of moonlight, which behave as though they were dead eels, floating with their phosphorescent bellies up. The mouth of the cave was dimly visible, a half-circle of moonlight, dunked in the waters of Lake Pasquatch. Nothing. Must've been the water clapping on his hull. He often heard sounds like that, swaying in the sunless safety of his cave.
Old Man Pattinson was more than a mite paranoid as a rule, and, like those ruled by their dreads, took refuge in his rituals. Going to the wall opposite the door, he took down his rifle, intending to clean it. When the old miser had retreated to this watery sanctuary, he had taken care not to abandon all vestiges of comfort. Hence the old screen, covered with little lacquer figures of an oriental cast, which he hauled back across the door, to block the ceaseless draughts.
Still cradling the rifle, he dragged an armchair closer to his little stove and sat down. Muttering some litany against 'them bats' he took out the firing pin and placed it on top of the stove, then removed the barrel and began peering through it at various of the little armoured figures scurrying here and there on his screen. One hand went fumbling for the all-purpose rag he kept in his weskit pocket.
'Thet's yew, deng yuh, yuh lil slanty bastard!' he croaked, making glutinous rifle noises in his throat. 'that's yew too!'
When a sufficient number of the figures had met their imaginary ends, he removed the rag from his pocket with the remains of a magician's flourish, ready to clean the barrel. At that instant, the noise repeated itself. Shocked, he dropped the gun barrel, noticing that, although only half-hearing the first disturbance, he had recognised this new noise instantly as coming from the same source. He was just remarking to himself on the marvellous qualities of the human mind when the barrel finally reached the floor and his marvellous mind logged that too. They were all the same sound. Someone was out there with a gun being clumsy in a boat.
Old Man Pattinson rose to his feet with a curse which faded abruptly to a rattled wheeze. Following his old gunslinger's instincts, he blew out the light, then immediately regretted it. He had lost that control over his lungs a younger gunslinger took for granted, with the result that all he could hear now was his own antiquated chest, wheezing away in panic. More to the point, he couldn't see where he'd dropped his gun barrel. There came a new knock, somewhere closer, and he dropped to his knees, scrabbling and panting.
His fingertips swept against something and it rolled from him with a hollow, cylindrical note: the barrel! He held his position, trying to fix on the few points of reference in his small world, listening for the invader. Had their boat reached his boat yet? He should be able to hear someone climbing aboard. Very carefully he reached for the bottom edge of his old desk. The gun barrel must have trundled beneath it. He still couldn't hear anything. Keeping his best ear cocked, he shuffled slowly towards the desk, hearing as he did so a stealthy echo: they were moving when he did!
His straining hand closed on the barrel and a sense of relief hit him like a narcotic. Maybe he was imagining things. The acoustics of the cave did funny things to sounds -- maybe it was a bit of driftwood and, as for the shuffling, well sometimes you hear things like that. He heard something exactly like that and his spine straightened audibly. Where was that from? His sense of direction seemed completely gone: he could be floating upside down for all he knew. With one hand he felt for his bullets (always in his breast pocket) while with the other he stretched for the rifle bolt. He'd show them. Try to roust old man rattler from his nest, eh?
He gave a high-pitched shriek on grasping hold of the rifle bolt, which was scorching hot from sitting so long on top of his oven. He heard it thud onto the floor of the cabin at the same time as something thudded against his chest. He seemed to be making an unpleasant rattling noise now, and realised he would have to light a match if he was to find the rifle bolt, he was too close to panic. He quickly pulled a box of matches from his pocket and lit one. The first thing he saw in this fizzing globe of light was an arrow tip protruding from his chest. How in tarnation had that got there? There was something strange about the arrow that seemed familiar but he didn't have time for that now. First thing you learn about being hit is don't let it shake you. If you're still blinking you're still fighting.
He located the rifle bolt and blew out the match, eliciting a first sharp pain in his chest. Ignoring the fact that the rifle bolt still burnt his fingers he hurriedly reassembled the rifle and swung round. The flash of his shot illuminated the cabin in another globe of white light, and Old Man Pattinson saw many things in rapid succession. First: the screen had been neatly slit along its hinge to allow something, presumably a bow, access. Second: the various examples of Chinese soldiery still swarmed about, implacable as ants. Dang them. Third: something was swinging from the hatch in the ceiling above him. Fourth: his room seemed remarkable peaceful and secure, as though caught in a domestic flicker of candlelight. His mind started to go back to that swinging thing – but by then he was dead.
The top of Old Man Pattinson's skull struck the screen shortly after the bullet from his rifle, and while the bullet had passed through it without touching a single lacquer figure, his cranium put quite a dent in a line of pikemen. The screen rocked, but the line held. It would outlive worse assaults than these. The assailant, tomahawk in hand, swung gently for a moment from the hatch, then dropped to the floor beside his victim. Then a second figure folded the screen up and stepped into the room. It wore a quiver-full of arrows over its shoulder, and was tapping away sardonically at the woodwork with a length of tubing. Some people's paranoia just isn't up to the odds.
2.
Dirty wheel-spokes turned like empty kaleidoscopes, heading blithely towards the small town of Scopas. Leopold Mozart bumped over the plentiful ruts, and found himself imagining roulette wheels spinning in the town's main saloon. He looked barrenly up at the sky. Such a wilderness of air, great sleigh-rides of cloud that built up to higher regions than in any of his known skies, those moist, room-like welkins of middle Europe. Something seemed more wrong than usual with his brain today: it had too many words in it. His gaze drooped to the road's dry tongue, lolling between what seemed to him the ulcerous hills of Colorado. Then a nurturing note entered his eye, terrifying as an owl's, as he confined his attention to his dozing creation.
This, the melodious infant itself, wig spattered with toffee and face as yet unblemished by sallow poxes, lay curled up with a miniature violin. Leopold sighed at the pair sleeping together, perfect miniatures. The violin looked as though recently born, the offspring of some melodious viola, its tiny scrolls and coils of delicate carving as miraculous as any baby's toes and fingers. Like a baby, too, it could grasp blindly, easily, at any music its master would summon. That was the gimmick at any rate, though Leopold was worried whether the child would be rested enough for the performance billed as taking place in (what was it?) two hours.
The Gaiety Theater, Scopas, was a recently established venue of doubtful prestige. Tours were becoming more extensive as the novelty wore off. The Old World was less and less astonished by the tricks he had taught his plastic son -- he would soon have to start planning their comeback. Perhaps he could emphasize Wolfgang's compositional talents...perhaps an opera? He put the idea to one side -- he wasn't quite sure his skills were up to opera, even in the style of a gifted six-year old.
'You folks stayin at the Belvedere?'
The driver of their carriage (which was little better than a cart) was lolling back in his seat with that air of studied relaxation Leopold had noted here. It was as though the lower classes were parodying the masters they supposed themselves to have left behind. He also noted the pronounciation: 'Bell-vay-dearie.' It sounded like one of Wolfgang's nonce-words, the ceaseless nonsense with which he filled their air. That was what was wrong: he was thinking like Wolfie. This always happened when he was too tired.
A feeling of being dwarfed by sound came over Leopold, not for the first time: the barrel-bumping sound of the wheels, as though a statue was being dragged behind the coach, the dust-damped hoof-clops, as if halves of skulls were being beaten together in another room. He struggled to focus on the jiggling face of the driver, which hung before him like an unshaven moon, and shook in time to the beating of the skulls. Its eyes kept increasing in size like kites falling out of windless skies, but that was all nonsense. He was just a bit addled by this ceaseless journeying.
'Yes, the Belvedere, that is quite correct. We have a...that is the...theatre manager has arranged a suite for us.'
'A sweet?' The driver appeared to be considering some sparse mental menu. Meanwhile an inept juggler starting tossing tennis balls of sputum about Leopold's cavernous abdomen. Stop that, he told himself, stop thinking like that.
'Don't think they've got an entire sweet at the Belvedere, but they got a fancy sittin room. It's got a piana,' he added, with a nod at the slumbering deposit by Leopold's left hand.
Mozart Senior groaned inwardly -- he should have realized how much of the florid mail he had received since arriving here was exaggeration. Wolfgang had rechristened the country 'Vulgaria' as soon as he had worked out his father's reaction to it. Unlike his son, who had pronounced the phrase 'an immensity of vulgarity' with something amounting to relish, this contrast between the orotundity of American rhetoric and the spartan emptiness of its reality left Leopold feeling naked, unprotected. Another poky room with mattresses stuffed with coarse hair.
'I'll take yuh as far's the barber's -- you'll be needin a shave fur your performance. Then I can drop your luggage off at the hotel.'
'But I don't require a shave!' Wolfgang was awake.
'Thank you. That will be most helpful,' said Leopold.
'I'm a shaver, aren't I Papa? So I'll do it and save you money. After all, it's probably his brother that runs it, isn't it, Cow-face!'
'Stop making puns Wolfgang, they give me a headache.’ He glanced at the driver. ‘And don't be so insolent.'
'Oh Papa, they're just little harmonies in language: can't you hear them? If you have an earache they'll make it better.’ He mimicked his father’s glance. ‘And isn't he a servant?'
'I ain't your servant nor no man's!' barked the driver, who had just caught up with the general insolent drift of the child's remarks. Then he modulated his tone back to wheedle, 'Eh, you'll still be wantin that shave and bath, sir? My, uh, brother does have baths of hot water right there all day every day.'
A curious mixture of defiance and honesty, thought Leopold, altogether typical of the American. He must remember to put that in his next letter to his wife, not that she'd be interested in anything but news of her beloved son, his musical and of course his bowel movements. He was planning to recoup some dignity from this tour in the form of a travel journal for the Salzburg cognoscenti, if any of them would still consent to employ him.
Just then his stomach added its unsophisticated voice to the jumble in his head -- hopefully there would be time for one of those huge primitive steaks...what was it Wolfgang had called the buffalo? 'Untrained vittles, vats of vitals.' He smiled in the direction of the driver, remembering as he did so the man's name.
'Thank you, my good man -- please take us to...what should it be? O'Shaughnessy's Shaving Salon and Steaming Tub Emporium?'
The smaller Mozart giggled in delight at this rare example of parental repartee, and Bartholomew O'Shaughnessy, seeing that his free meal for this evening had been secured, beamed back encouragingly.
'Why don't you shave there, driver? Does your brother charge too much? Don't you get a discount?' Wolfgang, apprehending the adults' relaxation, set himself up for some more teasing.
'Waal, son, Brian ain't got a razor sharp enough to deal with this man's whiskers!' Bart O'Shaughnessy yelled over his shoulder, as he negotiated the transition from dirt track to dirt street.
'That means the hairs on your arse must slice your shit in sausages!'
'Wolfgang!'
'Some mouth your kid's got,' the driver returned, unperturbed. 'Hope he's as good on that fiddle.'
'Violin, you vile pin!' Wolfgang feigned outrage before lapsing into a string of gibberish, improvised to the rhythm of the journey's last few yards:
'Wily bin,
devil's shin,
deaf old whin,
a whinny-fin.
Fish-horse corsets,
tit-mouse faucets,
possets, whatsits,
dogshits, thin.
Streaky-weaky,
leaky prattle,
Bum-rattle,
tum-frattle:
Bart farts,
but I win!'
Bartholomew O'Shaughnessy's only reaction to this was to raise his left buttock two inches from the plank, using its resonant qualities to send a hefty parp forth, and pull the team to a halt outside his brother's shop.
Arthur Marshall Courtney O'Shaughnessy, his nephew, thirteen years old, two feet taller than was strictly necessary, and covered in pimples like a gangling rosehip bush, was snoozing in the barber's only seat. He leapt up as the coach arrived, in time to catch a message on his uncle's eye and brow telegraph:
'Coupla swells stop. Off to hotel stop.'
He beamed back enthusiastically. He had conceived an enormous affection for his relative since, drunk at table one night, Bart had whispered in his ear about watching the girls at the Gaiety change. He was just going into details when his mother returned from the kitchen and silenced him, and the phrase 'smooth fannies' had become unfortunately linked in Arthur's mind with a maternal monologue on the topic of watery potatoes.
Gangling towards the door in the hope of a tip for helping the customers off Bart's bone-cruncher, he was presented with the sight of two perfectly bizarre gentlemen in cloudy wigs, full frock-coats, dashing weskits, knee-stockings and pearly-buckled shoon. One of these exquisites was a third of the height of the other, in the act of tucking a similarly scaled-down fiddle beneath one arm with all the pomp of a major-domo. Not knowing what a major-domo was, Arthur concluded this must be the most hateful child it had ever been his misfortune to run into.
His suspicion was at once confirmed as it turned on hearing his clumsy tread, took him in in one soaring glance, and was now fixing him with that gaze of pleasurable malignancy he had come to recognize in certain girls about his age. Some choice remark about his complexion and its proximity to the heavens was no doubt building up behind that soft little face.
It turned to the full-size exquisite as if to an old confederate and uttered something incomprehensible which sounded cruel beyond reason. German: he recognised it from the Grocer-and-Supplier's talk. This other, six inches Arthur's junior, turned and directed a glance at him which would seem to back up his furious suspicion. He then spoke in a dry, precise English:
'Your, eh, brother recommends you to us as an excellent barber.'
'And a sparkling back scrubber,' added the miniature, innocuously, but not innocuously enough for Arthur. An evil little beast.
'He ain't my brother, he's my uncle,' he muttered.
'Watch out Papa, this is only the apprentice – he’ll shave your spine close and clean your teeth with a loofah! a tooth-ablutah!'
'Be quiet, Wolfgang.'
The glare in the street was beginning to jangle Leopold, while his bones felt as if they had been grinding together for weeks.
'Do you think I could have a bath and a shave please? My son will share my tub.'
Arthur silently indicated the open door, stepping out of Leopold's way, then, as Wolfgang followed, he arranged one of his haddock-shaped feet so that the small boy tripped. Wolfgang immediately dropped his violin and seized his father's coat tails. This elicited a shocked exclamation from Leopold:
'Your instrument!'
Mozartus minor snatched up the violin, which had sustained a scratch. 'Mine,' he replied, 'but I wasn't instrumental in its fall.'
'Don't prattle, boy, wrap it in your shirt. That was a valuable gift. We may not be able to sell it if the score's too deep.'
'That's what you always say,' Wolfgang spat, adding in a higher tone, 'the score's a bore and I can predict the conclusion.' He shot Arthur a malevolent glare before dropping into German, 'They say the serpent in Eden had a face like a fruitcake, did you know that?'
'Calm down child,' Leopold replied in the same language -- 'we'll just have to find a French polisher.'
But the boy had apparently forgotten the incident, and was skipping about in the dimness of the shop singing something about a Polish franker that sounded rather rude. Where did he get these songs, Leopold wondered, not for the first time, going straight through to the back of the shop. Here large tubs stood around in a sombre herd. A damp girl waited in a slatternly dress, grease-spots on her nose and cheeks, as though she slept beneath a candle. He nodded to her kindly and she began hauling a pan of water off a stove in the back wall.
'Sarah, fill a bath for the gentleman!' called Arthur, a second too late to appear commanding. Perched in the barber's chair, swinging little stockinged legs, Wolfgang giggled unsympathetically.
'Come through and get undressed,' said Leopold, handing his brocaded coat to Sarah, who dipped visibly under its weight.
'I'm not dirty, it's only my shirty,' piped up the child.
'Baths are for health, not cleanliness -- come on.'
A few minuted later two wigs could be seen dangling from hat-pegs, with the suits falling away beneath them, one of which didn't reach the ground. The effect was of two gents standing with their backs to the beholder, one several yards in front of the other.
From the tub came a duet for fife and basset horn, in which the theme 'Sit down Wolfie!' was ably counterpointed by the melody 'Johann Sebastian Bath, Johann Christian Splash, Johovah! Fishtian! (Christian-in-fustian) Math!'
Arthur put his pimple-besprent chin on his freckle-ridden forearm and watched Sarah's dress get damper and more revealing as she carted more water to the ablutionists. These might be described now as presenting a tableau from the high seas, the stately figurehead of a sinking ship being wooed by a lone porpoise, just as it was about to slip below the surface.
1.
Old Man Pattinson squinted out at the darkness beyond his door. Given that he lived on a single-cabined boat in the middle of a flooded cave, and considering that it was the middle of the night, he didn't have much of a view, but he surveyed what he could carefully. The waters lapped blackly about a few thin spools of moonlight, which behave as though they were dead eels, floating with their phosphorescent bellies up. The mouth of the cave was dimly visible, a half-circle of moonlight, dunked in the waters of Lake Pasquatch. Nothing. Must've been the water clapping on his hull. He often heard sounds like that, swaying in the sunless safety of his cave.
Old Man Pattinson was more than a mite paranoid as a rule, and, like those ruled by their dreads, took refuge in his rituals. Going to the wall opposite the door, he took down his rifle, intending to clean it. When the old miser had retreated to this watery sanctuary, he had taken care not to abandon all vestiges of comfort. Hence the old screen, covered with little lacquer figures of an oriental cast, which he hauled back across the door, to block the ceaseless draughts.
Still cradling the rifle, he dragged an armchair closer to his little stove and sat down. Muttering some litany against 'them bats' he took out the firing pin and placed it on top of the stove, then removed the barrel and began peering through it at various of the little armoured figures scurrying here and there on his screen. One hand went fumbling for the all-purpose rag he kept in his weskit pocket.
'Thet's yew, deng yuh, yuh lil slanty bastard!' he croaked, making glutinous rifle noises in his throat. 'that's yew too!'
When a sufficient number of the figures had met their imaginary ends, he removed the rag from his pocket with the remains of a magician's flourish, ready to clean the barrel. At that instant, the noise repeated itself. Shocked, he dropped the gun barrel, noticing that, although only half-hearing the first disturbance, he had recognised this new noise instantly as coming from the same source. He was just remarking to himself on the marvellous qualities of the human mind when the barrel finally reached the floor and his marvellous mind logged that too. They were all the same sound. Someone was out there with a gun being clumsy in a boat.
Old Man Pattinson rose to his feet with a curse which faded abruptly to a rattled wheeze. Following his old gunslinger's instincts, he blew out the light, then immediately regretted it. He had lost that control over his lungs a younger gunslinger took for granted, with the result that all he could hear now was his own antiquated chest, wheezing away in panic. More to the point, he couldn't see where he'd dropped his gun barrel. There came a new knock, somewhere closer, and he dropped to his knees, scrabbling and panting.
His fingertips swept against something and it rolled from him with a hollow, cylindrical note: the barrel! He held his position, trying to fix on the few points of reference in his small world, listening for the invader. Had their boat reached his boat yet? He should be able to hear someone climbing aboard. Very carefully he reached for the bottom edge of his old desk. The gun barrel must have trundled beneath it. He still couldn't hear anything. Keeping his best ear cocked, he shuffled slowly towards the desk, hearing as he did so a stealthy echo: they were moving when he did!
His straining hand closed on the barrel and a sense of relief hit him like a narcotic. Maybe he was imagining things. The acoustics of the cave did funny things to sounds -- maybe it was a bit of driftwood and, as for the shuffling, well sometimes you hear things like that. He heard something exactly like that and his spine straightened audibly. Where was that from? His sense of direction seemed completely gone: he could be floating upside down for all he knew. With one hand he felt for his bullets (always in his breast pocket) while with the other he stretched for the rifle bolt. He'd show them. Try to roust old man rattler from his nest, eh?
He gave a high-pitched shriek on grasping hold of the rifle bolt, which was scorching hot from sitting so long on top of his oven. He heard it thud onto the floor of the cabin at the same time as something thudded against his chest. He seemed to be making an unpleasant rattling noise now, and realised he would have to light a match if he was to find the rifle bolt, he was too close to panic. He quickly pulled a box of matches from his pocket and lit one. The first thing he saw in this fizzing globe of light was an arrow tip protruding from his chest. How in tarnation had that got there? There was something strange about the arrow that seemed familiar but he didn't have time for that now. First thing you learn about being hit is don't let it shake you. If you're still blinking you're still fighting.
He located the rifle bolt and blew out the match, eliciting a first sharp pain in his chest. Ignoring the fact that the rifle bolt still burnt his fingers he hurriedly reassembled the rifle and swung round. The flash of his shot illuminated the cabin in another globe of white light, and Old Man Pattinson saw many things in rapid succession. First: the screen had been neatly slit along its hinge to allow something, presumably a bow, access. Second: the various examples of Chinese soldiery still swarmed about, implacable as ants. Dang them. Third: something was swinging from the hatch in the ceiling above him. Fourth: his room seemed remarkable peaceful and secure, as though caught in a domestic flicker of candlelight. His mind started to go back to that swinging thing – but by then he was dead.
The top of Old Man Pattinson's skull struck the screen shortly after the bullet from his rifle, and while the bullet had passed through it without touching a single lacquer figure, his cranium put quite a dent in a line of pikemen. The screen rocked, but the line held. It would outlive worse assaults than these. The assailant, tomahawk in hand, swung gently for a moment from the hatch, then dropped to the floor beside his victim. Then a second figure folded the screen up and stepped into the room. It wore a quiver-full of arrows over its shoulder, and was tapping away sardonically at the woodwork with a length of tubing. Some people's paranoia just isn't up to the odds.
2.
Dirty wheel-spokes turned like empty kaleidoscopes, heading blithely towards the small town of Scopas. Leopold Mozart bumped over the plentiful ruts, and found himself imagining roulette wheels spinning in the town's main saloon. He looked barrenly up at the sky. Such a wilderness of air, great sleigh-rides of cloud that built up to higher regions than in any of his known skies, those moist, room-like welkins of middle Europe. Something seemed more wrong than usual with his brain today: it had too many words in it. His gaze drooped to the road's dry tongue, lolling between what seemed to him the ulcerous hills of Colorado. Then a nurturing note entered his eye, terrifying as an owl's, as he confined his attention to his dozing creation.
This, the melodious infant itself, wig spattered with toffee and face as yet unblemished by sallow poxes, lay curled up with a miniature violin. Leopold sighed at the pair sleeping together, perfect miniatures. The violin looked as though recently born, the offspring of some melodious viola, its tiny scrolls and coils of delicate carving as miraculous as any baby's toes and fingers. Like a baby, too, it could grasp blindly, easily, at any music its master would summon. That was the gimmick at any rate, though Leopold was worried whether the child would be rested enough for the performance billed as taking place in (what was it?) two hours.
The Gaiety Theater, Scopas, was a recently established venue of doubtful prestige. Tours were becoming more extensive as the novelty wore off. The Old World was less and less astonished by the tricks he had taught his plastic son -- he would soon have to start planning their comeback. Perhaps he could emphasize Wolfgang's compositional talents...perhaps an opera? He put the idea to one side -- he wasn't quite sure his skills were up to opera, even in the style of a gifted six-year old.
'You folks stayin at the Belvedere?'
The driver of their carriage (which was little better than a cart) was lolling back in his seat with that air of studied relaxation Leopold had noted here. It was as though the lower classes were parodying the masters they supposed themselves to have left behind. He also noted the pronounciation: 'Bell-vay-dearie.' It sounded like one of Wolfgang's nonce-words, the ceaseless nonsense with which he filled their air. That was what was wrong: he was thinking like Wolfie. This always happened when he was too tired.
A feeling of being dwarfed by sound came over Leopold, not for the first time: the barrel-bumping sound of the wheels, as though a statue was being dragged behind the coach, the dust-damped hoof-clops, as if halves of skulls were being beaten together in another room. He struggled to focus on the jiggling face of the driver, which hung before him like an unshaven moon, and shook in time to the beating of the skulls. Its eyes kept increasing in size like kites falling out of windless skies, but that was all nonsense. He was just a bit addled by this ceaseless journeying.
'Yes, the Belvedere, that is quite correct. We have a...that is the...theatre manager has arranged a suite for us.'
'A sweet?' The driver appeared to be considering some sparse mental menu. Meanwhile an inept juggler starting tossing tennis balls of sputum about Leopold's cavernous abdomen. Stop that, he told himself, stop thinking like that.
'Don't think they've got an entire sweet at the Belvedere, but they got a fancy sittin room. It's got a piana,' he added, with a nod at the slumbering deposit by Leopold's left hand.
Mozart Senior groaned inwardly -- he should have realized how much of the florid mail he had received since arriving here was exaggeration. Wolfgang had rechristened the country 'Vulgaria' as soon as he had worked out his father's reaction to it. Unlike his son, who had pronounced the phrase 'an immensity of vulgarity' with something amounting to relish, this contrast between the orotundity of American rhetoric and the spartan emptiness of its reality left Leopold feeling naked, unprotected. Another poky room with mattresses stuffed with coarse hair.
'I'll take yuh as far's the barber's -- you'll be needin a shave fur your performance. Then I can drop your luggage off at the hotel.'
'But I don't require a shave!' Wolfgang was awake.
'Thank you. That will be most helpful,' said Leopold.
'I'm a shaver, aren't I Papa? So I'll do it and save you money. After all, it's probably his brother that runs it, isn't it, Cow-face!'
'Stop making puns Wolfgang, they give me a headache.’ He glanced at the driver. ‘And don't be so insolent.'
'Oh Papa, they're just little harmonies in language: can't you hear them? If you have an earache they'll make it better.’ He mimicked his father’s glance. ‘And isn't he a servant?'
'I ain't your servant nor no man's!' barked the driver, who had just caught up with the general insolent drift of the child's remarks. Then he modulated his tone back to wheedle, 'Eh, you'll still be wantin that shave and bath, sir? My, uh, brother does have baths of hot water right there all day every day.'
A curious mixture of defiance and honesty, thought Leopold, altogether typical of the American. He must remember to put that in his next letter to his wife, not that she'd be interested in anything but news of her beloved son, his musical and of course his bowel movements. He was planning to recoup some dignity from this tour in the form of a travel journal for the Salzburg cognoscenti, if any of them would still consent to employ him.
Just then his stomach added its unsophisticated voice to the jumble in his head -- hopefully there would be time for one of those huge primitive steaks...what was it Wolfgang had called the buffalo? 'Untrained vittles, vats of vitals.' He smiled in the direction of the driver, remembering as he did so the man's name.
'Thank you, my good man -- please take us to...what should it be? O'Shaughnessy's Shaving Salon and Steaming Tub Emporium?'
The smaller Mozart giggled in delight at this rare example of parental repartee, and Bartholomew O'Shaughnessy, seeing that his free meal for this evening had been secured, beamed back encouragingly.
'Why don't you shave there, driver? Does your brother charge too much? Don't you get a discount?' Wolfgang, apprehending the adults' relaxation, set himself up for some more teasing.
'Waal, son, Brian ain't got a razor sharp enough to deal with this man's whiskers!' Bart O'Shaughnessy yelled over his shoulder, as he negotiated the transition from dirt track to dirt street.
'That means the hairs on your arse must slice your shit in sausages!'
'Wolfgang!'
'Some mouth your kid's got,' the driver returned, unperturbed. 'Hope he's as good on that fiddle.'
'Violin, you vile pin!' Wolfgang feigned outrage before lapsing into a string of gibberish, improvised to the rhythm of the journey's last few yards:
'Wily bin,
devil's shin,
deaf old whin,
a whinny-fin.
Fish-horse corsets,
tit-mouse faucets,
possets, whatsits,
dogshits, thin.
Streaky-weaky,
leaky prattle,
Bum-rattle,
tum-frattle:
Bart farts,
but I win!'
Bartholomew O'Shaughnessy's only reaction to this was to raise his left buttock two inches from the plank, using its resonant qualities to send a hefty parp forth, and pull the team to a halt outside his brother's shop.
Arthur Marshall Courtney O'Shaughnessy, his nephew, thirteen years old, two feet taller than was strictly necessary, and covered in pimples like a gangling rosehip bush, was snoozing in the barber's only seat. He leapt up as the coach arrived, in time to catch a message on his uncle's eye and brow telegraph:
'Coupla swells stop. Off to hotel stop.'
He beamed back enthusiastically. He had conceived an enormous affection for his relative since, drunk at table one night, Bart had whispered in his ear about watching the girls at the Gaiety change. He was just going into details when his mother returned from the kitchen and silenced him, and the phrase 'smooth fannies' had become unfortunately linked in Arthur's mind with a maternal monologue on the topic of watery potatoes.
Gangling towards the door in the hope of a tip for helping the customers off Bart's bone-cruncher, he was presented with the sight of two perfectly bizarre gentlemen in cloudy wigs, full frock-coats, dashing weskits, knee-stockings and pearly-buckled shoon. One of these exquisites was a third of the height of the other, in the act of tucking a similarly scaled-down fiddle beneath one arm with all the pomp of a major-domo. Not knowing what a major-domo was, Arthur concluded this must be the most hateful child it had ever been his misfortune to run into.
His suspicion was at once confirmed as it turned on hearing his clumsy tread, took him in in one soaring glance, and was now fixing him with that gaze of pleasurable malignancy he had come to recognize in certain girls about his age. Some choice remark about his complexion and its proximity to the heavens was no doubt building up behind that soft little face.
It turned to the full-size exquisite as if to an old confederate and uttered something incomprehensible which sounded cruel beyond reason. German: he recognised it from the Grocer-and-Supplier's talk. This other, six inches Arthur's junior, turned and directed a glance at him which would seem to back up his furious suspicion. He then spoke in a dry, precise English:
'Your, eh, brother recommends you to us as an excellent barber.'
'And a sparkling back scrubber,' added the miniature, innocuously, but not innocuously enough for Arthur. An evil little beast.
'He ain't my brother, he's my uncle,' he muttered.
'Watch out Papa, this is only the apprentice – he’ll shave your spine close and clean your teeth with a loofah! a tooth-ablutah!'
'Be quiet, Wolfgang.'
The glare in the street was beginning to jangle Leopold, while his bones felt as if they had been grinding together for weeks.
'Do you think I could have a bath and a shave please? My son will share my tub.'
Arthur silently indicated the open door, stepping out of Leopold's way, then, as Wolfgang followed, he arranged one of his haddock-shaped feet so that the small boy tripped. Wolfgang immediately dropped his violin and seized his father's coat tails. This elicited a shocked exclamation from Leopold:
'Your instrument!'
Mozartus minor snatched up the violin, which had sustained a scratch. 'Mine,' he replied, 'but I wasn't instrumental in its fall.'
'Don't prattle, boy, wrap it in your shirt. That was a valuable gift. We may not be able to sell it if the score's too deep.'
'That's what you always say,' Wolfgang spat, adding in a higher tone, 'the score's a bore and I can predict the conclusion.' He shot Arthur a malevolent glare before dropping into German, 'They say the serpent in Eden had a face like a fruitcake, did you know that?'
'Calm down child,' Leopold replied in the same language -- 'we'll just have to find a French polisher.'
But the boy had apparently forgotten the incident, and was skipping about in the dimness of the shop singing something about a Polish franker that sounded rather rude. Where did he get these songs, Leopold wondered, not for the first time, going straight through to the back of the shop. Here large tubs stood around in a sombre herd. A damp girl waited in a slatternly dress, grease-spots on her nose and cheeks, as though she slept beneath a candle. He nodded to her kindly and she began hauling a pan of water off a stove in the back wall.
'Sarah, fill a bath for the gentleman!' called Arthur, a second too late to appear commanding. Perched in the barber's chair, swinging little stockinged legs, Wolfgang giggled unsympathetically.
'Come through and get undressed,' said Leopold, handing his brocaded coat to Sarah, who dipped visibly under its weight.
'I'm not dirty, it's only my shirty,' piped up the child.
'Baths are for health, not cleanliness -- come on.'
A few minuted later two wigs could be seen dangling from hat-pegs, with the suits falling away beneath them, one of which didn't reach the ground. The effect was of two gents standing with their backs to the beholder, one several yards in front of the other.
From the tub came a duet for fife and basset horn, in which the theme 'Sit down Wolfie!' was ably counterpointed by the melody 'Johann Sebastian Bath, Johann Christian Splash, Johovah! Fishtian! (Christian-in-fustian) Math!'
Arthur put his pimple-besprent chin on his freckle-ridden forearm and watched Sarah's dress get damper and more revealing as she carted more water to the ablutionists. These might be described now as presenting a tableau from the high seas, the stately figurehead of a sinking ship being wooed by a lone porpoise, just as it was about to slip below the surface.