Monument Maker, page 60
There were a few gasps from the more gullible members of the audience. Someone said it was like Freddie Mercury. Someone said Rimbaud but someone else said it was more like Verlaine. Someone mentioned a dyspeptic Polish writer who had written one great book and then killed himself. I maintained that he was more like a punctuation mark, an * or a & or a ? on a broken typewriter where the figure was smudged and barely legible. That’s grammar, someone said, there’s more to it than that. I wasn’t so sure.
I approached Token Bob for an update. No word. By this point it was 9.45 P.M. A few of us stepped outside for a smoke but in reality to keep watch along the front for the return of our hero.
An hour passed. There were quotes. What is here is made perfect, someone said, that’s what Jack Frost was trying to say. It’s imperfect, someone else maintained, if not then why would it require a royal art to fix it? There’s only one royal art, another one said.
Two hours passed. Someone screened footage from an air show at Leuchars to pass the time, blurry shots of Lancaster bombers, Spitfires, even a Focke-Wulf Ta 154 Moskito. Bomb us all to hell and back, I thought to myself.
At midnight the decision was made to close the conference. The Grey Wolf had failed to return. The plan was to retire to the bar at The Land Without a Name and salvage what was left of the weekend.
As we walked along the front, a substantial group of us, at least twenty people, I caught our reflection in the windows along the way, some lit up with ironing boards and television sets, some with bookcases, some with solitary couches and bare walls, some with husbands and wives and children grouped around a single table, some with newspapers piled up to the ceiling, and I felt a silent terror take hold of me, as if each scene was like a card drawn from the pack at random. I began to feel faint and stopped to take a seat on the wall and to fan myself with a handkerchief. The Iron Giant, a good-natured ex-serviceman from Calderbank, sat down next to me. Is everything alright? he said. I didn’t know what to say.
Later, at the bar, he bought me a pint of heavy and we compared notes. Jack Frost, I said, he was the worst. The Opening Invocation was the worst, he insisted. What Opening Invocation? I asked him. I hadn’t been invited to any Opening Invocation and it didn’t appear anywhere on the programme. It was more of a word-of-mouth thing, he said. It had been at The Grey Wolf’s suggestion, he said.
They had been told to gather in his room just after two. The door had been answered by a dishevelled girl who kept referring to him as Art. Art will be with you in a minute, she kept saying, and it seemed like she was suppressing a laugh, she had that kind of face, a delighted face, he said, but devious, like the joke was on you.
Inside, the room was a mess. It didn’t seem as if he had been expecting us. There was underwear on the floor, crumpled shirts across the bed, empty bottles on the dresser, a half-eaten tray from room service with the remains of a BLT. And there were books spread all across the bed, all lying opened and facing down. The poor spines, I thought to myself. What were the books? I asked him. Tell me what the books were. I didn’t look closely at them, The Iron Giant said, I couldn’t give you names.
One of them had a picture of an eye on the front, he said, the drawing of an eye in the sky, gazing down on what looked like a seaside town in Europe with great beams or tentacles or eyelashes, I couldn’t tell you which.
Another had a picture of a man smoking a cigarette with a face so pockmarked you could have landed on it and planted an American flag.
One book said something about Empire.
Another had artwork that seemed to show people growing up from the ground like plants. That’s what it looked like, but I could be wrong.
Then there were the magazines. There was porno there, he said, and he nodded gravely. There was a lot of porno there. What kind? I asked him. The explicit kind, he said.
We all filed in, it was awkward, none of us wanted to look each other in the eye. We lined up at the end of the bed, five or six of us. There was a balcony that looked out to the sea, it seemed like an executive suite or something, I had no idea they were even available in this hotel. That’s when he made his appearance. He was wearing a white bathrobe and smoking a cigarette. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. He gestured to the girl to leave us in peace and flicked his cigarette into a bin. I didn’t sleep with her, he said, just in case you’re wondering. Then he told us to clear some space and to watch him. He took off his robe to reveal an athletic build and a pair of swimming shorts. He took a few steps back and then propelled himself up the side of the wall, performing a last-minute backflip in order to bring himself back to earth. He looked around at us, lined up at the bottom of the bed. Can any of you do that? he said. Then he sniffed the air like that: sniff, sniff. Did one of you just shit yourself? he said. Then he lit a cigarette. Let’s take it to the balcony, my friends, he said, that’s how he referred to us, his dear friends.
The balcony was large, running around the entire top level of the house and with a panoramic view over the beach.
By this time there were only stragglers left outdoors. The Grey Wolf pointed out across the sea. What’s down there? he asked us. You ever think about that? Of course we did, who doesn’t think about fishes now and then? People call it the Abyss, he said. Yet it’s teeming with life. But somehow, to us, it feels more like a regression or an inversion. Ask yourselves, he said, what kind of subterranea would you have us map? Shadows have less substance, it’s true, he continued, but substance precludes depths, just as form gets in the way of nothing. I’m paraphrasing here, The Iron Giant said. But bear with me. Essentially, he seemed to be saying, we’re plotting shadows. We’re wasting our time. Then he challenged us once again. Ask yourselves, he said, whether it wouldn’t be better to be buried alive than to chase after your own shadow. Then his mood turned irritable, he became argumentative, culminating in him snatching at a bottle of whisky that one of the boys had been helping himself to for the best part of half an hour and ushering us out of the room.
I stood for a time outside his door, listening in, and I almost fancy that the lights in the hallway were flashing on and off but that could just be because sometimes I think I live in a movie. I couldn’t make out what was going on, but it sounded like he was wolfing down the entire contents of the minibar, shortbread included. The next time I saw him it was at the round-table debate with Frost and The Plug. He didn’t seem himself.
Just then, interrupting our conversation, Frost entered the snug. He made a big deal of banging and wiping his shoes on the mat, like he was an Arctic explorer come in from the cold, and then he crept forward like an upright centipede and ordered two pints of his finest from the landlord, which is an idiotic way to order beer. I stared him straight in the face. I wasn’t afraid.
That’s when The Grey Wolf made his entrance, striding up to the bar and receiving a pint from a beaming Frost. Then he turned to his audience and proposed a toast. This is the beginning of a great adventure, he said. Henceforth we shall be known by a new name. We shall follow in the shadows of our forefathers. We shall regain our memories. We shall never surrender to ourselves. My heart leaped; the birth of The AntiMatterists!
I christen us The Society of Irregular Research and Knowledge, he announced, reborn from the ashes of the Second Church of the First Stone. Everyone joined glasses and there was much frivolity. My heart sank. I made my way back to the hotel and slept until noon.
Over the weeks that followed, The Grey Wolf played things close to his chest. My life almost returned to normal. Token Bob kept me updated through regular telephone conversations and the occasional letter or circular printed on paper bearing the acronym of the newly formed society. I made some overtures, suggested the drawing up of a formal constitution and proposed the acceptance of my manifesto as a broad outline, though really I saw it as a Holy Book and unalterable by a single letter.
Bob said he would forward it to The Grey Owl for approval. Bob seemed to have taken up the role of The Grey Owl’s secretary, PR expert and bodyguard, all rolled into one. It was now impossible to contact The Grey Owl except through the offices and goodwill of Bob. I repeatedly asked him to spill the beans on exactly what The Grey Owl had seen down there and the contents of the photographs but every time I brought it up he assumed a grave tone and talked about potentialities and possible outcomes, so much so that I began to suspect the presence of Jack Frost’s shrivelled hand behind the scenes, resting on Bob’s shoulder like a stroke victim or covering the mouthpiece of a second phone, listening in silence.
I returned to my job of counting beans for an educational establishment in Monklands. It was a school with a good disciplinary record, the region’s high-flyers in calligraphy. I had retired from History—though not history proper, I hasten to add—after only a few years in the game. I had prematurely aged. Not physically but there had been some kind of recompense taken out on my soul, my heart had been branded, so to speak, with a light so bright that it drove me deep into darkness.
I occupied the building at the back of the school, a single bungalow surrounded on three sides by tall trees so that it felt as if I lived inside an empty aquarium, the only architecture at the bottom of the pool a sad castle, long since abandoned.
I subsisted on the smell of old stationery, the lustre of rusty grey filing cabinets, the quiet spell of pencil holders, wire bins filled with balls of crumpled paper, the yellow strip light that made me feel like a salamander or a chameleon behind glass, I took on the colour of brown elastic bands, of coffee-stained folders, I was a writer, a secret novelist who had fallen in love with the tools of the trade, every day I gathered information, cross-referenced facts, processed every transaction that took place, every new arrival, every child lost in the woods, every dux medallist, every bruised head, every proud parent, every temporary illness, so that I said to myself, this is one of the classics, this is The Iliad right here, and I began to feel like a great writer, which is to feel like the only writer, the only one who has broken the silence, the only one who has dared to sacrifice his life to the mapping of this shape of consciousness.
I had put together a group of young male students that I particularly favoured and often during playtimes they would gather in the bungalow and I would lecture them on the kind of temptations they should avoid when they graduated to secondary school.
Tattoos, I said. The wearing of earrings. Hair dye. Then I would pass round toffees and we would debate the subject of the day, chosen by myself in advance. Outdoor skills, tying knots, Greek poetry, The Silmarillion, M.R. James, the ghost stories of Vincent O’Sullivan, the Ouija board, chess, the Second World War, Caldey Island, D.H. Lawrence, standing stones, maps and orienteering, Tarka the Otter.
I began to organise field trips, all with the parents’ permission, of course, days out to view the barracks in Maryhill where Rudolf Hess had been imprisoned or to walk the tunnel that ran beneath the Clyde at Finnieston or even just to visit the parks, the secret parks of the East End, like Tollcross Park, where I first experienced the silence that lies beneath the city itself, the beautiful stillness perfectly maintained, as though above was below, the negative of the true mirror city, or Sighthill Park, in the north, with its mysterious stairways that led nowhere, its Hill of Mementos, so-called, an area of skeletal scrub that had become an unofficial bulletin board for the shadows of the city, with calendars left strapped to standing stones and opened at a summer month, long passed, highlighted in pen, a gesture that came across as more breath-taking—more dramatic in scope, and in possibility—than any novel.
My concern was for ideas, that certain ideas could fall by the wayside if not properly serviced, and I set out to train the students as I would an army of monks. Our activities spilled over into the weekends. The boys turned into dinner guests and confidants and they would present my wife with tragic tokens of affection: chipped porcelain birds, postcards from the Museum of Transport, suspect fossils, bug-infested pine cones.
One afternoon I was seated at my desk in the cottage, sniffing erasers and chewing old pencil-tops, as was my wont, as I went through the school’s accounts, trying to make sense of all of its comings and goings in this terrible heat, who could forget that summer, when a note presented itself, a note that purported to be a contract for a new history teacher. This was extremely irregular. The history department was at capacity, my own recently vacated position having been taken up by a carnaptious bitch by the name of Miss Harriet. The name on the new contract was Arthur McManus.
Art! I rose from my desk and rushed across the playground, arriving at Mr. Archibald the head teacher’s office out of breath and with a thin sliver of sweat across my top lip. I burst through the door without bothering to knock and there in front of me stood The Grey Wolf, resplendent now as The Grey Bat, his black cloak billowing over his light-grey suit. Doesn’t he feel the heat? I said to myself.
Can I help you? Mr. Archibald asked me. I apologised while attempting to explain my position. You must understand, I said, how difficult it is for me to balance the books when I am no longer privy to staffing decisions. Mr. Archibald nodded portentously while The Grey Bat remained silent. Then he looked me straight in the eye. It was unforeseeable, Mr. Archibald said. It was a spur-of-the-moment appointment. Meet Mr. McManus, the headmaster said, our new head of history.
What are you doing here? I asked him as we swept into the corridor. There’s no time for that now, he said, in fact there’s very little time at all. How about a school trip? he said. I feel a school trip coming on. I’ve always wanted to visit the trenches in Ypres, he said. What do you say? Get a nice guesthouse along the front at Ostend. Why don’t we get some of the boys together and make a weekend of it?
Forty-eight hours later we were booking ourselves into a tall white guesthouse just off the promenade in Ostend by the name of Julio’s but which we later heard referred to by the locals as Rabbit’s Wedding for reasons we were never able to get to the bottom of. We had four of our best boys with us.
Breakfast was a disaster. The boys had refused the classic Belgian breakfast and insisted on baked beans to a man. After I had procured us a raft of tins from a nearby supermarket, I gave them to Julio, who turned them out cold in their bowls. We laughed and rolled our eyes. A Europe of unrepentant idiots.
Our first port of call was to the war graves, which in a way were more fascinating than the trenches, especially when seen in motion, from a tour bus or a car, the effect of the endlessly repeating lines seemingly planned with the automobile in mind, in other words with an eye to the future, and so destined, ultimately, to be relics. I thought of populations uncovering them hundreds of years from now and having no understanding of the speed at which they were intended to be read.
The afternoon we spent at the trenches. We visited the First World War trenches at Sanctuary Wood, Hill 62 still intact but now overgrown with grass and foliage. The boys ran riot amongst the channels, leaping from one side to the other and pursuing each other through the tunnels. They might as well be furrows in the brain, The Grey Wolf said.
The boys had been eager to try their hands at European athletics and they convinced us to check in on a gymnasium on the way back. I was always very fond of gymnasiums. This particular gym hall was built in the shape of an octagonal dome at the end of a blank concrete walkway and when we entered they were playing loud electronic music over the speakers. This music is too much for me, I confessed, and I left The Grey Wolf in charge, and I walked out and sat next to the railings, where I lit a pipe.
I had the urge to call my wife. I made my way to a payphone across the way. Melanie, I said to her, Melanie my darling, I’m calling from Belgium. I made it to the trenches. Everything is okay.
Everything’s fine at home, she said. Nothing to report. What have you been doing, darling? I asked her. I wanted to say something else, something loving and intimate, to praise her playfulness or her dedication or her fortitude in the face of all of her misfortune, but the conversation came to nothing. I realised I was being forced deeper and deeper into silence.
As I made my way back to the gymnasium I staggered under the assault of the sun. I held my hands up to my face and made my way by looking through my fingers. I sat on the stairs in order to steady myself. An attendant emerged and put his hand on my shoulders, a young black man with a distasteful goatee beard and a shaved head. Is everything alright, he asked me, is there a problem? His tone a mix of faux concern and obvious distaste. I raised myself up with the aid of the banister. I have loved, I announced. I have suffered. I have nothing more to say beyond that.
The Grey Owl emerged into the sunlight. I need a drink, he said. I don’t know about you. We gathered up the children and made for a seafood bar along the front. He ordered ouzo and Belgian beer for the two of us, half-pints of beer for the children. The boys sat with their shoes off and their feet up on the table, their muscular legs already, maddeningly, turning brown. I searched for a sign of the sun in ourselves. I looked to The Grey Wolf. What did you think of the trenches? I asked him. They didn’t go deep enough, he said.
