Barefoot in the Head by Brian W Aldiss
The latter halted between ship and land, hearing the rasp of the waiting man’s wrists as he refolded his arms, hearing the tidal flow of his breath in his lungs, hearing the infinitesimal movement of his feet in his boots, hearing his watch tick through the loaded seconds of the day.
Very slowly, Charteris descended to the quay and began to walk towards the distant barriers, marching over large yellow painted arrows and letters meaningless to him, reducing him to a cipher in a diagram. Still water lay pallidly on his left. His course would take him close to the waiting man.
The noise of the waiting man grew.
The new vision of the universe which Charteris had been granted in Metz was still with him. All other human beings were symbols, nodes in an enormous pattern. This waiting man symbol could be death. He had come to England to find other things, a dream, white-thighed girls, faith. England, the million monarchies of ruined minds overthrown.
‘This deadness that I feel will pass,’ he said aloud. The waiting man breathed by way of reply: a cunning and lying answer, thought Charteris. The motordeath images were gone from his crucible. Unstained porcelain. Bare. A flock of seagulls, white with black heads that swivelled like ball-bearings, sailed down from the cliff top, scudding in front of Charteris, and landed on the sea. They sank like stones. A cloud slid over the sun and the water was immediately the brown nearest black.
He reached the barrier. As he swung it wide and passed through, the noises of the waiting man died. To stand here was the ambition of years. Freedom from father and fatherland. Charteris knelt to kiss the ground; as his knees buckled, he glanced back and saw, crumpling over one of the yellow arrows, his own body. He jerked upright and went on. He recalled what Gurdjieff had said: attachment to things keeps alive a thousand useless I’s in a man; these I’s must die so that the big I can be born. The dead images were peeling from him. Soon he himself would be born.
He was trembling. Nobody wants to change.
The town was large and grand. The windows and the paintwork, Charteris thought, were very English. The spaces formed between buildings were also alien to him. He heard himself say that architecture was a kinetic thing essentially: and that photography had killed its true spirit because people had grown used to studying buildings on pages rather than by walking through them and round them and seeing them in relationship to other urban objects. In the same way, the true human spirit had been killed. It could only be seen in and by movement. Movement. At home in his father’s town, Kragujevac, he had fled from stagnation, its lack of alternatives and movement.
Conscious of the drama of the moment, he paused, clutching his chest, whispering to himself; Zbogom! For the thought was revelation. A philosophy of movement... Sciences like photography must be used to a different purpose, and motion must be an expression of stillness. Seagulls rise from a flat sea.
A stony continental city in the grey prodigal European tradition, with wide avenues and little crooked alleys — a German city perhaps, perhaps Geneva, perhaps Brussels. He was arriving in a motor cavalcade, leading it, talking an incomprehensible language, letting them worship him. Movement. And a sullen English chick parting her white thighs, hair like clematis over white-washed wall, applause of multitudinous starlings, beaches, night groaning with weight-lifter strength.
Then the vision was gone.
Simultaneously, all the people in the Dover street began to move. Till now, they had been stationary, frozen, one dimensional. Now, motion gave them life and they went about their chances.
As he walked through their trajectories, he saw how miscellaneous they were. He had imagined the English as essentially a fair northern race with the dark-haired among them as startling contrast. But these were people less sharp than that, parti-coloured, piebald, their features blunted by long intermarriage, many stunted with blurred gestures, and many Jews and dark people among them. Their dress also presented a more tremendous and ragged variety than he had encountered in other countries, even his own Serbia.
Although these people were doing nothing out of the ordinary, Charteris knew that the insane breath of war was exhaled here too. The home-made bombs had splashed down from England’s grey clouds; and the liquid eyes that turned towards him held a drop of madness. He thought he could still hear the breathing of the waiting man; but as he listened to it more closely, he realised that the people near him were whispering his name — and more than that.
‘Charteris! Colin Charteris — funny name for a Jug!’
‘Didn’t he go and live in Metz?’
‘Charteris is pretending that he swam the Channel to get here.’
‘What’s Charteris doing here? I thought he was going to Scotland!’
‘Did you see Charteris kiss the ground, cheeky devil!’
‘Why didn’t you stay in France, Charteris — don’t you know it’s neutral?’
A woman took her small girl by the hand and led her hurriedly into a butcher’s shop, saying, ‘Come away, darling. Charteris raped a girl in France!’ The butcher leant across the counter with a huge crimson leg in his hands and brought it down savagely on the little girl’s head — Charteris looked round hastily and saw that the butcher was merely hanging a red boloney sausage on a hook. His eyes were betraying him. His hearing was probably not to be trusted, either. The arrows still worried him.
Anxious to get away from the whispering, whether real or imaginary, he walked along a shopping street that climbed uphill. Three young girls went before him in very short skirts. By slowing his pace, he could study their legs, all of which were extremely shapely. The girl on the outside of the pavement, in particular, had beautiful limbs. He admired the ankles, the calves, the dimpling popliteal hinges, the thighs, following the logic of them in imagination up to the sensuously jolting buttocks, the little swelling buds of fruit. Motion, again, he thought: without that élan vital, they would be no more interesting than the butcher’s meat. An overpowering urge to exhibit himself to the girls rose within him. He could fight it only by turning aside into a shop; it was another butcher’s shop; he himself hung naked and stiff on a hook, white, and pink-trottered. He looked directly and saw it was a pig’s carcass.
But as he left the shop, he saw another of his discarded I’s was peeling off and crumpling over the counter, lifeless.
A bright notice on a wall advertised the Nova Scotia Treadmill Orchestra.
He hurried on to the top of the hill. The girls had gone. Like a moth, the state of the world fluttered in his left ear, and he wept for it. The West had delivered itself to the butchers. France Old Folks Home.
A view of the sea offered itself at the top of the hill. Breathing as hard as the waiting man, Charteris grasped some railings and looked over the cliff. One of those hateful phantom voices down in the town had suggested he was going to Scotland; he saw now that he was indeed about to do that; at least, he would head north. He hoped his new-found mental state would enable him to see the future with increasing clarity; but, when he made the effort, as if, it might be, his eyesight misted over at any attempt to read small print, the endeavour seemed bafflingly self-defeating: the small print of the future bled and ran — indeed, all he could distinguish was a notice reading something like LOVE BURROW which would not resolve into GLASGOW, some sort of plant with crimson blooms and...a road accident? — until, trying to grapple with the muddled images, he finally even lost the direction in which his mind was trying to peer. The breathing was in his head and chest.
Clinging to the railings, he tried to sort out his random images. LOVE BURROW was no doubt some sort of Freudian nonsense; he dismissed the crimson Christmas blooms; his anxiety clustered round the accident — all he could see was a great perspective of dashing and clanging cars, aligned down the beaches of triple-carriageways like a tournament The images could be past or future. Or merely fears. Always the prospect of crashing and tumbling climaxes.
He had left his car on the ship. What was ahead was unknown, even to him with the budding powers ??
He stood at the rail, trying to adjust, as the passengers left the ship and their cars were driven away from the underdeck. He looked up at the cliffs; gulls swooped down from them: and floated on the oily sea. He listened and heard only his own breathing, the rasp of his own body in his clothes. In or out of trance he stood: and the quay emptied of people.
‘Is the red car yours, sir?’
‘You are Mr Charteris, sir?’
Slowly he turned towards the English voice. He extended a hand and touched the fabric of the man’s tunic. Nodding without speaking, he made his way slowly below deck. Slowly, he walked down the echoing belly-perspective of the car deck to where his Banshee stood. He climbed in, searched in his pocket for the ignition key, slowly realised it was already in the ignition, started up, and drove slowly over the ramp onto English concrete, English yellow arrows.
He looked across to the customs shed. A man stood there half in shadow, in a blue sweater, arms folded. He beckoned. Charteris drove forward and found it was a customs man. A small rain began to fall as the man looked laconically through Charteris’ grip.
‘This is England, but my dream was more true,’ he said.
‘That’s as may be,’ said the man, in surly fashion, ‘We had a war here, you know, sir, not like you lot in France. You’d expect a bit of dislocation, sort of, wouldn’t you?’
‘Dislocation, my God, yes!’
‘Well, then...’
As he rolled forward, the man called out, ‘There’s a new generation!’
‘And I’m part of it!’
He drove away, enormously slow, and the slimy yellow arrows licked their way under his bonnet. TENEZ LA GAUCHE. LINKS FAHREN. DRIVE ON THE LEFT. WATNEY’S BEER. The enormous gate swung open and he felt only love. He waved at the man who opened the gate; the man stared back suspiciously. England! Brother we are treading where the Saint has trod!
The great white lumpish buildings along the front seemed to settle. He turned and looked back in fear at the ship — where — what was he? In the wet road, crumpled over one of the arrows, lay one of his I’s, just as in the vision, discarded.
Only now did he clearly recall the details of the vision.
To what extent was a vision an illusion, to what extent a clearer sort of truth?
He recollected the England of his imagination, culled from dozens of Saint books. A sleazy place of cockneys, nursemaids, policemen, slums, misty wharves, large houses full of the vulnerable jewellery of beautiful women. That place was not this. Well, like the man said, there had been a war, a dislocation. He looked at these people in these streets. The few women who were about moved fast and furtive, poorly and shabbily dressed, keeping close to walls. Not a nursemaid among them. The men did not stir. A curse of alternate inertia had been visited upon the English sexes. Men stood waiting and smoking in little groups, unspeaking; women scurried lonely, in their eyes, he saw the dewy glints of madness. Their pupils flashed towards him like animal headlights, feral with guanin, the women’s green, the men’s red like wolfhounds or a new animal.
A little fear clung to Charteris.
‘I’ll drive up to Scotland,’ he said. Bombardment of images. He was confusing his destiny: he would never get there. Something happened to him...would happen. Had happened — and he here and now was but a past image of himself, perhaps a dead image, perhaps one of the cast-off I’s that Gurdjieff said must be cast off before a man could awaken to true consciousness.
He came to the junction where, in his vision, he had turned and walked up the steep shopping street. With determination, Charteris wrenched the wheel and accelerated up the hill. Under sudden prompting, he glanced over his shoulder. A red Banshee with himself driving had split away and was taking the other turning. Did that way lead to Scotland or to... Love Burrow? His other I caught his gaze just momentarily, pupils flashing blank guanin red, teeth bright in a wolf snarl. That’s one I I’m happy to lose...
As he climbed up the hill, he looked for three girls in miniskirts, for a butcher’s shop. But the people were the shabby post-catastrophe crowd, and most of the shops were shuttered: all infinitely sadder than the vision, however frightening it had been. Had he been frightened? He knew he embraced the new strangeness. Materialism had a silver psychedelic bullet through its heart; the incalculable took vampire-flight. The times were his.
Already, he felt a cooler knowledge of himself. Down in the south of Italy, that was where this new phase of life had festered for him, in the rehabilitation camp for the slav victims, away from his paternal roof. In the camp, he had been forced to wander in derangements and had learnt that sanity had many alternatives, a fix for individual taste.
From his personal revolt, definition was growing. He could believe that his forte was action directed by philosophy. He was not the introspective; on the other hand, he was not the simple doer. The other I’s would be leaves from the same tree.
And where did these thoughts lead? Something impelled him: perhaps only the demon chemicals increasing their hold on him; but he needed to know where he was going. It would help if he could examine one of his cast-off I’s. As he reached the top of the hill, he saw that he still stood gripping the railings and staring out to sea. He stopped the car.
As he walked towards the figure, monstrous things wheeled in the firmament.
His hearing became preternaturally acute. Although his own footsteps sounded distant, very near at hand were the tidal flow of his breathing, the tick of his watch, the stealthy rustle of his body inside its clothing. Like the man said, there had been a war, a dislocation.
As his hand came up to touch the shoulder of the Gurdjieffian I, it was arrested in mid-air; for his glance caught the sight of something moving on the sea. For a moment, he mistook it for some sort of a new machine or animal, until it resolved itself under his startled focus into a ship, a car ferry, moving close in to the harbour. On the promenade deck, he saw himself standing remote and still.
The figure before him turned.
It had broken teeth set in an indefinite mouth, and dark brown pupils of eyes gripped between baggy lids. Its nose was brief and snouty, its skin puffed and discoloured, its hair as short and tufted as fur. It was the waiting man. It smiled.
‘I was waiting for you, Charteris!’
‘So they were hinting down in the town.’
‘You don’t have any children, do you?’
‘Hell, no, but my ancestry goes right back to Early Man.’
‘You’ll tell me if you aren’t at ease with me? Your answer reveals, I think, that you are a follower of Gurdjieff?’
‘Clever guess! Ouspenski, really. The two are one — but Gurdjieff talks such nonsense.’
‘You read him in the original, I suppose?’
‘The original what?’
‘Then you will realise that the very times we live in are somewhat Gurdjieffïan, eh? The times themselves, I mean, talk nonsense — but the sort of nonsense that makes us simultaneously very sceptical about the old rules of sanity.’
‘There were no rules for that sort of thing. There never were. You make them up as you go.’
‘You are not much more than a kid! You wouldn’t understand. There are rules for everything once you learn them.’
Charteris was feeling almost no apprehension now, although his pulse beat rapidly. Far below on the quay, he could see himself climbing into the Banshee and driving towards the customs shed.
‘I must be getting along,’ he said formally. ‘As the Saint would say, I have a date with destiny. I’m looking for a place called...’ He had forgotten the name; that image had been self-cancelling.
‘My house is hard by here.’
‘I prefer a softer kind.’
‘It is softe
He hesitated. The time would come, might even be close, when all the gates of the farmyard would be closed to him; he would fall dead and be forgotten; and continue to stare forever out through the window at the blackness of the garden. With a simple gesture of assent — how simple it yet remained to turn the wrist in the lubricated body — he helped the waiting man into the car and allowed him to direct the way to his house.
This was a middle-class area, and unlike anywhere he had visited before. Roads of small neat houses and bungalows stretched away on all sides, crescents curved off and later rejoined the road, rebellion over. All were neatly labelled with sylvan names: Sherwood Forest Road, Dingley Dell Road, Herbivore Drive, Woodbine Walk, Placenta Place, Honeysuckle Avenue, Cowpat Avenue, Geranium Gardens, Clematis Close, Creosote Crescent, Laurustinus Lane. Each dwelling had a neat little piece of garden, often with rustic work and gnomes on the front lawn. Even the smallest bungalows had grand names, linking them with a mythical green nature once supposed to have existed: Tall Trees, Rolling Stones, Pan’s Pantiles, Ocean View, Neptune Tiles, The Bushes, Shaggy Shutters, Jasmine Cottage, My Wilderness, Solitude, The Laurustinuses, Our Oleanders, Florabunda.
Charteris grew angry and said, ‘What sort of a fantasy are these people living in?’
‘If you’re asking seriously, I’d say, Security masquerading as a little danger.’
‘We aren’t allowed this sort of private property in Jugoslavia. It’s an offence against the state.’
‘Don’t worry! This way of life is dead — the war has killed it. The values on which this mini-civilisation has been built have been swept away — not that most of the inhabitants realise it yet. I keep up the pretence because of my daughter.’