At the end of time, there was a garden that never was. My name rose and Raven it became. My tunic a cast-off from the last opium war, my decision to tell it as it really was.
"I've forgotten to bring my most important paint," said the soldier who held out a tin of white emulsion. I could not see the cornfield because he had forgotten the yellow, too. So, shrugging my shoulders my own incomprehension, I forged on to the village, where thousands grouped themselves into a makeshift celebration. If flags were waved, then a thousand coloured handkerchiefs scuttered from every quarter; even the trees had leaves of a peculiarly darker green than normal, upon every out-stretched branch. How did I really know that it was all as unreal as the back of my hand? Perhaps, because I could see through to the veins—and then beyond, to the cornfield. Whatever the case, it was really the white blood that gave the game away.
There are few people who know that there is a part of the London Underground system where all lines converge. With very careful signalling routines, the passengers are generally unaware that the interchanging points make a display much like the criss-crossing motor-bike at the Royal Tournament Show. However, being Raven, I am one of those who spends his time down there, tending to the turntables and I can tell you that there are a number of near misses and, one day... But that's for the future.
Let me tell you the biggest secret of all. There's an extra shaft below them all called the Earth's Core Line. Not many people make the right changes, since its stations are beyond the back of the better known such as St Paul's, Mansion House and Angel. Their escalators are as steep as walls but, once on the line, it's said, you're in for an all night party, a real tarramadiddle. Jokes galore the whole way. They run a nice speciality in mother-in-law skits. And there's one they tell of God watching videos of Genesis, simply for the bit about the Garden of Eden. And, yes, when I've finished my jobs down there as under-caretaker of Multiplex Junction, I'll make sure I jump on board the mighty Queen Elizabeth the Third to the centre of the world and laugh myself to death...
As I sit inside St Paul's Cathedral, I think and, by thinking, I make at least the moment true. Waiting for Doom, some say, is worse than Doom itself. But what price Death, I ask. There are many religions in the world, but the only one for me, I think, is Life—to what else can you entrust your Faith? The rest is Doubt and Dogma.
The Cathedral is echoing with some men stacking chairs. I suspect they are not allowed to swear inside here—labourers perhaps recruited rather for Manners than Muscle. The endemic Tourists have yet to arrive, probably still partaking of portmanteau breakfasts at their respective hotels. The great insides of the Dome are always empty, except for the odd midget or two crawling round the high circular gallery. The Second World War was fought within that Dome, I fancy, toylike planes dodging and weaving, dropping pellets smaller than pigeons' eggs to the marble floor. All the lights had to be extinguished inside the Cathedral, because of the wartime Blackout; so the worshippers in the pews could see nothing but the sparkles and flashes, hear nothing but the cracks and gunrattles, then feel nothing but the fluttering of dead wings past their upturned faces.
History books tell us that the War took place outside the Dome; that mighty Dome withstanding all the onslaughts to which its purlieus so easily surrendered. Eyewitnesses remember it that way, too. Life itself lives only in Memory, as the passing of each remembered second becomes the only evidence of Existence. What price History, then, when human faculties grow to such a pitch of Doubt, while the Machines march on? The Cathedral servants leg it past me in unison, their senses in the off mode. As I leave, I wonder indeed whether everything is within the dome of my head. Outside, Life seems to be going on as normal.
I am indeed Raven, professional dosser, accustomed to the feel of the back-streets of the City area along my reclining spine, and I have decided to emigrate across the English Channel to a country where they drive on the wrong side of the road and use a language which sounds like it's spoken with the chest rather than the lips and tongue. But, why, in such circumstances, do I feel the need to cross those choppy waters to a strange place, only I, at best, can tell. Not being privy to my own mind in all its various modes, I can merely guess at my intentions. More certain is my itinerary: attaching myself to a convention of delegates travelling abroad and then masquerading as their tour guide; eventually becoming mixed up with some people who seem to spend the whole of their time sitting under miscoloured umbrellas outside all-night cafes. Yet upon deciding this was not the brand of dossership I really needed, I returned to the seaport by pretending to be a hitchhiker, in the hope of regaining the roots of my homesickness. Finally, I stow away as a member of the crew on a ship transporting a cargo of human excreta to England. As I disembark in Portsmouth, I have to help stoke out the holds to maintain my incognito. I persuade the guard—on the goods train travelling north with the cargo—to drop me off as they trundle through London; and so, I, globetrotting dosser, am reunited with my wino pals around St Paul's to whom I have a pretty strange tale to tell of my adventure abroad. They don't believe it of course. And, after a while, neither do I. But I have never rid myself of its stigma, nor solved the riddle of the trade which takes place across the Channel—a trade which will eventually rival that in spice and silk stockings.
Years before (or was it since?), I make an entrance into the bar on the pier and Rose is mooning over a glass of darkly gleaming wine. She scowls before I can scowl back. What a woman!
“Hiya, Rose, how's your daughter's Mum diddling?"
This is my quaint way of greeting strangers, though I can't begin to tell you how sad I am being a derelict orphan, myself. I had no parents to tell me who (or what) I was.
"Not bad, not bad at all."
Her teeth grit.
"Shall I get you another one?"
I nod at the half-drunk contents of the glass at her elbow.
"No, thank you, Raven. I'll have to be off in a few mo's to change my frock."
I bend to touch her hem: a gratuitous act. It is slightly damp, as if she has at some time today strolled along the sea's edge. I put the finger to my tongue.
"Mmmm, salty."
This seems to prove at least something—perhaps that I am Sherlock Holmes. She becomes visibly tearful. I have never seen her like this on the rare occasions we met before. I am uncannily irritated by a nick in the material at her bosom. I pride myself on knowing how women tick, but Rose is out of kilter even with any sex. Her dress gradually becomes sodden, clinging like a second skin. I avert my eyes, almost in disgust, wondering how I can have fallen in love with such a creature. Abruptly, she departs through the doors, allowing them to swing behind her. She also leaves me a share of her own tears with which to cry. Eventually, I finish off her drink and follow her into the seaswept night.
But that was then and this is now, time for the three long piggies of Trunk City. The place stinks of rotten weeds: still growing in flourishing clumps but, nevertheless, rotting right down to their roots. The whiplash throughway winds between variable wastelands, some proudly decorated with scrubby tussocks of rust-coloured plant life, others merely adventure playgrounds with the games removed. In the distance, I can see the blind groping fingers of an earthbound Satan—whose toes come out in the Antipodes, no doubt. They are indeed chimneystacks, swaying within the tolerances of near-collapse, as the relentless winds continue to be panted out across the weathered landscape. The City's other buildings have long since disappeared, by piecemeal dismantlement or simply heavy breathing—leaving only the substructures visible. The skeleton of an ancient motorway system is barely discernible, now nothing but convoluted metal reinforcings. I fear the snorting beasts that are said to hunt for the likes of me hereabouts. Wolves, too, are named after a football team that once played in the vicinity, and I do not exactly trust them as merely a legend from better days. Werewolves are only one variation, which I cannot fathom beyond the nature of their fangs. Abruptly, the swaddlings of cloud draw apart like sackcloth curtains to reveal the streaming red and gold of a forgotten sun. I bend my forelegs, not in prayer, but so that my proboscis can reach the sparkling sweat-gland under a clump of brown nettles, picked out in the unseasonable light.
The were-people, once perched on the tangled motorway struts, start to clamber down on spotting me driving past.
"We've got to get home before the goose melts."
There are plenty of things with which to bewilder oneself, but that statement is not one of them. Rose is merely indicating the inconsitent state of frozen comestibles just purchased in the hypermarket, especially in view of the unseasonably hot weather. I drive like a mad man wondering why I risk our necks purely for the sake of freezer fodder. Rose goads me: "There's more to safety at extreme speed because bad luck is too sick to catch up."
The G-force sticks our necks out, anyway.
Rose simply wants me to listen to her. But, in my heartlessness, I can only ignore Rose whilst necking with my ex girl friend who happens to be sitting the other side of me in the car. I suppose it is for old time's sake and the coincidence. Yes, the coincidence. Normally I scorn anybody who pretends that coincidences are meaningful or controlled by forces other than chance. Yet this one is different. My girl friend and I have both been killed in the same road accident. On top of which, here we are in a car in which neither of us travelled in real life.
"I feel as if I am bloody well talking to myself," complains Rose, who happens to be in the backseat. Pity I am too occupied to listen.
London is a big big city with big big men
Who sit in offices and count to ten.
The options are poles apart, the possible repercussions incalculable. Therefore, I decide to simplify everything down to the bone, ascertain the bottom line and logically remove any shred of so-called doubt. I stop the car and take a piece of clean paper, then I shape it neatly upon my lap and measure it thoughtfully with the span of my hands. Just the job, I say to myself, turning round to Rose with a smirk of triumph travelling diagonally across my face. Rose tries to appear as if she ignores my manoeuvres, by bending over her own with makeshift intensity. It needs all Rose's powers of mind projection actually to look through my eyes as they are portholes, upon the blank lined paper squarely before me. Strange, it surely is, to suffer someone else's writers-block: the blaring white of the A4 grows almost unbearable, searing as it does the very medium to which Rose has consigned her consciousness. However, I soon place pen to paper (to rule the box grids for my tolerances, margins of error, potentials for synergy, rounding differentials, windows of statistical opportunity, top-and-bottom slicing of returns for median efficiency and, finally, the ineviatble bravado guesses) and, consequently, Rose feels herself relaxing into a more laid-back, devilmaycare attitude—until she sees the error. It stares out at her: a sore thumb with the curling back of the quick like the eroded feeler of a large foreign bog-bug. The error is in an insignficant box halfway down the third column, between the ballpark trends and the brainstorming projections and she thinks it must be blindingly obvious to me, too. But I forge on: the whole set-up becoming infected by that one statistical Goose-Quirk, confusing all the itemisations to dance before my bleary eyes. I look around appealingly at Rose for her to reveal the single glitch, but she continues to pretend to ignore me. She was enjoying my pickle—until (horror!) I realise that the Quirk has even infiltrated the media ways and Rose is trapped inside my head (like a driver in a car): the pen in my hand taking off far too glibly for its own good, forgetting all the margins and tabulation frames, and even scrawling beyond the confines of the white paper on to my lap.
The streets through which we drive are so narrow, the tall arched windows of the buildings stare greyly eyeball to eyeball, as if confident that taxes will always be on doors rather on them.
"Oi!" says one greasy individual, "time was when you had to pay the government for every chimney you had on your roof."
"Oi! Oi!" I reply through the side-window. "That's because people were religious in those days and didn't want God to get a cough as a passive smoker."
An oaken door creaks on rusty hinges, yawns wide to feel the spray of drizzle upon its vertical tongue.
"Oi! Don't give me that, doorways haven't any tongues," maintains a shoe which happens to be passing, fastened to someone or other's foot. The smell of an evening meal wafts out into the narrow street, making the drains water. And passers-by galore turn up their noses (and some their toes). One particular portly party gets his belly stuck between the sides of a servant's entrance, so narrow the owners don't need pay so much tax on it. There are grunts of people arguing around the next blind corner.
Oi! Oi!
I need another opinion. I have been expecting a letter by second post, but it has not arrived. So, I am in a bit of a quandary: whether to follow my natural impulse, and kiss her, or make an excuse that I've got sore lips. Her wide wet eyes speak volumes. She tells me about the postal strike.
Those of us who come into the city don't realise that we have only reached the outskirts. Striding tower-blocks seem enough for any city at least—with the odd sandwiched public hostelry like a friendly pet. But we see more the more we drive. More than we can encompass with one thought.
The offices are now even taller than before and they don't seem to have curtains. Some of the windows have blinds, but most have nothing, merely bare glass with pale faces staring sightlessly down at us. The hostelries here are strewn outside with many small tulip-shaped glasses empty but for dregs of red and white. The hostelries earlier have bigger glasses outside with dimples and brownish lees. We decide we have to go back the way we came since it only gets worse the further we drive into the city. I look round and find I am on my own now, close to a wide river stagnant with half-submerged warships. Legging it, without the car, which Rose has driven off. Then, the underground beckons.
It is a charcoal tunnel but, like all tunnels, the tunnel itself isn't exactly made of charcoal—it is empty space. If I say so myself, I'm an expert on tunnels. And this is the first time I've ever heard of a charcoal tunnel. Once, I was taken to see my friend's den in the fields that are on the outskirts of the army range. The red flag was flying, but we felt immune from any stray bullets, being boys. The den was positioned right over the end of the tunnel. I admired his workmanship—not that I really believed he had built the tunnel. Its sides came off on the hands and face, making us look like Victorian chimney sweeps. We only got down as far as we could go. Evidently, it went straight to the centre of the world ... and beyond.
The sides became warmer the further we went down and stayed noticeably more than the air temperature on the way back. When we got out, it was what Iraq looked like on the news. We didn't question it—there were no grown-ups to answer. The desert was covered in sand, so we made sandpies and looked for starfish amongst the rocks. A good time was had by us both. By the time we got back down the tunnel to find our way home, the bullets flying overhead had become larger and larger. But are deserts exactly covered in sand?
There are many wicked people who live all about us, some revealed by their actions, others merely by their looks—but the most dangerous are those who appear covered in normality and, in extreme cases, goodness.
My boyhood friend became a personable individual, always ready with a smile and a helping hand. Nothing was too much trouble for him. His wife and children adored him. His business colleagues respected him, all depending somewhat on his skills and savoir faire. And me? Well, there was nothing better than to have a friendly tete a tete with him over a jar in the Fox and Goose. It was always refreshing to get things off my chest. All proceeded in such a vein for several years. Then, one day, he did something quite extraordinary—out of the blue, as it were. It was a wicked act deliberately designed to create the greatest possible hurt to us all. For no good reason, he simply killed himself.
I once thought Greens were things I was forced to eat at School. Now, more long in the tooth, I believe they are something to do with jealousy or envy, lack of empathy, inability to enjoy vicariously. The Greens are, in truth, the storm troopers of the one big Gloater in the Sky ... or are they undercover agents waiting to assist in His overthrow? How can I ever be certain? As I fade into the last stage of senility, I begin to understand them to be far more insidious. William Blake's question about those ancient feet is still apposite. At least my head's not quite so bald as the concrete sphere on which we all to have to walk.
I usher the walking wounded, as well as the dead, into the field chapel. Better under a roof (if ramshackle) than the bomb-laden sky. Taking example from a dream I once saw, I kneel before the rude cross and mumble inanities under my breath. The rest follow suit, where they are able. Some relinquish their crutches, others have already fallen off their stilts, yet others have cut their own strings. The chapel's roof has not been conducive to the puppet-master's continued vigilance, with the strings stretched at right angles under the door, others slipping through the gaps in the makeshift roof, yet others tangling up in games of blind cats' cradle. I turn to face the flock. Some have fallen flat on their faces, others belly up, yet others hanging from the creaking rafters like flesh-cloured spiders. I pray deeply that I will be alive by morning. The war rages on outside. The bombs slip down the strings like head-to-toe acrobat toys; and, as the night sets in for the third time this month, the whole sky drips rattling bead-curtain streamers of black. Some wars are thus, others not, yet others neither.
The room is empty when I arrive. This is unusual because waiting in National Health hospitals has long been a communal activity, if not a particularly sociable one. Perhaps I've mixed up the time of my appointment. Instead of 9.30, it should be 3.09. No, the lady behind the glass at the reception desk, surrounded by many varieties of potted plant, as in an Henri Rousseau painting, certainly has my name in the appointments register, even if someone had cack-handedly written my name as Raven. "We won't keep you long," says the lady in the jungle. "Take a seat and we'll call you." I know I should take what she says with a pinch of salt. It doen't really seem to matter what name she eventually calls out, since I am still the only one in the waiting-room. I am bound to know it is me, by the process of elimination.
After the operation, they call me Rose, and I am little more than a slip of a girl fallen into unbecoming ways. Flaunting comes natural, even though, in many ways, I feel it is the most unnatural thing in the world for anyone to do. Our Maker does not intend bodies to be playthings. But, then, when in a different frame of mind, I lose patience with myself. If our Maker is such a goddam prude, why does He give us bodies with erogenous zones? It's all very well, excusing such devices on a person's body by the need to encourage procreation—but that's all divine humbug and heavenly propaganda. I bite my tongue. No need to have done so really, as I've not said all that blasphemy in actual fact, merely thought it. And I couldn't really bite my brain, could I? Some people think I'm sufficiently scatterbrained as it is. So, where am I? Ah, yes, they call me Rose. Most of my customers, that is. They're a godawful crowd, if the truth were known. Two-faced as they come. I sometimes wish I had eyes in the back of my head, because a mere slip of a girl in this profession needs to keep at least one pace ahead of the rabble. They must think I'm as thick as two planks. They haven't much conversation, presumably because they don't expect me to have any in return. I've got thoughts, though, that I want to express, as you can see. But they just don't come out in a logical fashion. And maybe, they're right. I've no illusions about myself—ever since that Raven bloke bit out my tongue when I wasn't looking.
Raven told me that he viewed life as a holiday from a far more serious and potentially sadder period that surrounds it upon all sides. On our frequent meetings together, propped up at the Fox and Goose bar, I was subjected to the outlandish ideas that he'd harboured about our sabbatical from the after-life and so forth. I put it all down to pub talk, because men are renowned for jabbering gibberish over a jar—merely for the sake of macho bonhomie and easy badinage. Alcohol oils the wheels of the human cabriolet I always say, as it wends its lonely road between birth and death. However, where Raven differed from most men of my acquaintance, he was dead serious about the garbage he spouted in the pub. One pig ignorant statement for every gulp of best bitter. He eventually took his beer belly to Our Maker. It was sudden. He was killed by a pedestrian whilst driving his car. And he wasn't kerb-crawling, either. The story goes that he had stopped for traffic lights and someone opened his door and jabbed a knife in his neck. No obvious motive. The murderer was apparently a man in an Iraqi anorak who merely strolled off, meticulously obeying the pelican lights to boot. The various onlookers were doubtful as to the exact circumstances and none of them chanced their arm with a citizen's arrest. In fact, one of them said the perpetrator was Raven’s oldest friend. It all seemed pretty extenuating to me. Well, I found myself arranging Raven's funeral, due to the lack of anyone closer forthcoming and his will left me as its executrix, in any event. Now I sup unladylike pints on my ownsome and can often be discovered muttering to myself in the Fox and Goose. Sometimes I think I'm Raven myself on a moratorium from death, but that no doubt is yet one more case of mistaken identity.
"Luxury, this morning." The old gent behind the black wings of a newspaper spoke to me as I took my seat in the Thameslink train.
"Luxury is it?" I asked.
"Yes, it's usually old stock." He paused before adding: "Victoria is it?" "No, London Bridge, I think, then St Paul's, then Bedford."
"Must be something wrong ... something wrong, but not unusual."
"Yes, not unusual," by which I suppose I meant it was usual. The conversation was in itself unusual, but unusual things are always happening to me. Trivial exchanges with strangers are only part of the ill-fitting jigsaw. The jigsaw piece that represents me is irregularly nodular, always unpromising as the one to be fitted next into the puzzle: further from the straight bits even than the middle of the picture. That old gent who struck up a useless conversation has now left the train (set on changing at East Croydon, he told me). Perhaps he's off to join another puzzle. Indeed, he'll have to change a lot at East Croydon to retrieve the puzzle of his own life. That's because he was the one who chose to speak to me, not the other way about. Thus, he has no option really but to remain a piece in my own crazy jigsaw, whatever he does now. And he'll soon discover that the pieces of my puzzle form a picture which doesn't seem to match the one on my box-lid at all.
There are quirks and misalignments of nature—mismatches of mind and muscle—confusions of colour—lumps of gristle erupting from the unlikeliest of mental and biological processes—with various unsightly excrescences—all by-passing that one optimum moment of non-existence. The furtherance of such motivational blobs of existence has an inverse ratio to the geometric progression of such theoretically untenable creatures actually re-creating themselves (other than in art). And such considerations would lead me to hypothesise that people are their own mistakes, if I had the misfortune of possessing a bodily and mental existence of my own which could thus hypothesise.
Laziness is just another word for dying—some of us doing it more quickly than others. Most of us are too lazy or too afraid to care. Fear grows from a sub-conscious that even pre-dates birth itself: a sub-conscious we all share, whether we were or ever will be alive or, even, never to be alive. If Rose and Raven were in love with nobody, that in itself is happier than never being in love. The gander and the goose. The gender in the noose. The plain around the gridless city. Black and white. Stiff soldiers.
The fast train of existence flashes, past the hidden underground stations of war: along the tunnel to a desert storm called Nirvana. The Rose Garden at the centre of our Soul. Co co rico co co rico. There is a shadow under this red raven.
Oi! Oi!
“Just for info, the Dizzy, the Earth’s Core, the Circle, the Northern Goose, the Prickadilly, the Quirkaloo .... all lines under The Waste Land.”
Rachel Mildeyes (from LONDON IN A CAR vol iii the key to gridlocks)
