Barefoot in the Head by Brian W Aldiss
The skies were lumped and flaky with cloud, Loughborough skies. Squirting rain and diffused lighting. No green yet in the hedges. The brown nearest black. Beautiful...
‘We will abolish that word beautiful. It carries implications of ugliness in an Aristotelian way. There are only gradations in between the two. They pair. No ugliness.’
‘There’s the word “ugliness”, so there must be something to attach it to, mustn’t there? And don’t drive so fast.’
‘Stop quoting Lewis Carroll at me!’
‘I’m not!’
‘You should have allowed me to give you the benefit of the doubt.’
‘Well, steer properly! You lost your loot or something?’
He flicked away back onto his own side of the motorway, narrowly missing an op-art Jag, its driver screaming over the wheel. I also drive by fuzzy sets, he thought admiringly. The two cars had actually brushed; between hitting and not-hitting were many degrees. He had sampled most of them. The lookout to keep was a soft watch. It was impossible to be safe — watering your potted plant, which was really doing well, impossible. A Christmas cactus it could be, you were so proud of it. The Cortina, Consortina, buckling against — you’d not even seen it, back turned, blazing in a moment’s sun, Christ, just sweeping the poor woman and her pathetic little porch right away in limbo!
‘Never live on Inner Relief.’ Suddenly light-hearted and joking.
‘Stop getting at me! You’re really rather cruel, aren’t you?’
‘Jebem te sunce! Look, Natrina — I mean, Angelina, I love you, I dream you.’
‘You don’t know the meaning of the word!’
‘So? I’m not omniscient yet. I don’t have to know what it is to do it, do I? I’m just beginning, the thing’s just beginning in me, all to come. I’ll speak, preach! Burton’s group, Escalation Limited, I’ll write songs for them. How about Truth Lies in Static Instants? Or When We’re Intimate in the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. No, no — Accidents and Aerodynamics Accrete into Art. No, no! How about... Ha, I Do My Personal Thinking In Pounds Sterling? Or Ouspenski Has It All Ways Always. Or The Victim and the Wreckage Are The Same. The Lights Across the River. Good job I threw away my NUNSACS papers. Too busy. I’ll fill the world till my head bursts. Look — zbogom, missed him! What a driver! Maybe get him tomorrow! Must forget these trivialities, which others can perform. Kuwait was the beginning! I’m just so creative at present, look, Angelina — ’
‘It’s Angeline. Rhymes with “mean”.’ She couldn’t tell if he was joking.
‘My lean angel mean, Meangeline. I’m so creative, feel my temple! And I sense a gift in you too as you struggle out of old modes towards creams of denser feeling. What’s it going to be we got to find together eh?’
‘I’ve got no gifts. My ma told me that.’
‘Anyhow, see that church of green stone? We’re there. Almost. Partially there. Fuzzy there. Kundalinically there. Etwas there?
But this etwas country was neither inhabitable nor uninhabitable. It functioned chiefly as an area to move through a dimensional passage, scored, scarred, chopped by all the means the centuries had uncovered of annihilating the distance between Loughborough and the rest of Europe, rivers, roads, rails, canals, dykes, lanes, bridges, viaducts. The Banshee bumped over a hump-backed bridge, nosed along by a municipal dump, and rolled to a stop in front of a solitary skinned house.
Squadrons of diabolical lead birds sprang up to the roof of the house, from instant immobility to instant immobility on passage from wood to city. Slates were broken by wind and birds. Sheer blindness had built this worthy middle-class house here, very proper and some expense spared in the days before currency had gone decimal. It stood in its English exterior pluming as if in scaffolding. A land dispute perhaps. No one knew. The proud owner had gone, leaving the local council easy winners, to celebrate their triumph in a grand flurry of rubbish which now lapped into the front garden, eroded, rotting intricate under the creative powers of decay. Cans scuttled down paths. Caught by the fervour of it, the Snowcem had fallen off the brick, leaving a leprous dwelling, blowing like dandruff round the porch. And she looked up from the lovely cactus — he had admired it so much, bless him, a good husband — just in time to see the lorry sliding across the road towards her. And then, from behind, the glittering missile of the northbound car...
Charteris leant against the porch, covering his eyes to escape the repetitive image. It had been, was ever coming in the repetitive web.
‘It was a conflux of alternatives in which I was trapped, all anti-flowered. I so love the British — you don’t understand! I wouldn’t hurt anyone... I’m going to show the world how — ’
‘You won’t bring him back by being sorry.’
‘Her, the woman with the cactus! Her! Her! Who was she?’
The Escalation had taken over an old Army Recruiting Office in Ashby Road. These surroundings with their old english wood and gymnast smells had influenced two of their most successful songs, ‘The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce’ and ‘A Platoon of One’ in the Dead Sea Sound days. There were four of them, four shabby young men, sensational and smelly, called, for professional purposes, Phil, Bill, Ruby and Featherstone-Haugh; also Barnaby, who worked the background tapes to make supplementary noise or chorus. They were doing the new one. They could hear the ambulances still squealing in the distance, and improvised a number embodying the noise called ‘Lost My Ring In the Ring Road’. Bill thought they should play it below, or preferably on top of, ‘Sanctions, Sanctions’; they decided to keep it for a flip side if they ever made the old circuit of recording.
They began to rehearse the new one.
Bank all my money in slot machines
These new coins are strictly for spending
Old sun goes on its rounds
Now since we got the metric currency
I do my personal thinking in pounds
We haven’t associated
Since twelve and a half new pence of money
Took over from the half-a-crowns
Life’s supposed to be negotiable, ain’t it?
But I do my personal thinking in pounds
Greta and Flo came in, with Robbins and the Burtons following. Army Burton had lost his lovely new tie, first one he ever had. He was arguing that Charteris should speak publicly as soon as possible — with the group at Nottingham on the following night; Robbins was arguing that there had been a girl at the art college called Hyperthermia; Banjo was telling about London. Greta was saying she was going home.
‘Great, boys, great, break it up! You’ve escalated, like I mean you are now a choir, not just a group, okay, this secular stint? At Nottingham tomorrow night, you’re a choir, see? So we hitch our fortunes to Colin Charteris, tomorrow’s saint, the author of Fuzzy Sets.’
‘Oh, he’s on about sex again! I’m going home,’ said Greta, and went. Her mum lived only just down the road in a little house on the Inner Relief; Greta didn’t live there any more, but they had not quarrelled, just drifted gently apart on the life—death stream. Greta liked squalor and the arabesque decline. What she could not take were the rows of indoor plants with which her mother hedged herself.
Sister, they’ve decimalised us
All of the values are new
Bet you the five-penny piece in my hip
When I was a child on that old £. s. d.
There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship
Sailing on every ha-penny...
They were used to Burton’s madness. He had got them the crowds, the high voices from the front aisles. They needed the faces there, the noise, the interference, the phalanx of decibels the audience threw back at them in self-defence, needed it all, and the stink and empathy, to give right out and tear a larynx. In the last verse, The goods you buy with this new coinage, they could have talkchant as counterpoint instead of instrument between lines. May be even Saint Charteris would go for that, Saint Loughborough? Some people said he was a Communist, b
With Charteris tranced, labouring at his masterwork, cutting, superimposing, annotating, Angeline wandered about the house. A tramp lived upstairs in the back room, old yellow mouth like an eye-socket. She avoided him. The front room upstairs was empty because it got so damp where the rain poured in. She stood on the bare frothy boards staring out at the sullen dead sea with shores of city rubbish, poor quality rubbish, becalming flocks of gulls, beaks as cynical as the smiles of reptiles from which they had originated. Land so wet, so dark, so brown nearest black, late February and the trains all running half-cocked with the poor acid head drivers forgetting their duties, chasing their private cobwebs, hot for deeper stations. Nobody was human any more. She’d be better advised to take LSD and join the psychotomimjority, forget the old guilt theories, rub of old mother-sores. Charteris gave her hope, seemed he thought the situation was good and could be improved within fuzzy limits, pull all things from wreckage back.
Wait till you read ‘Man the Driver’, he told Phil Brasher. You will see. No more conflicts once everyone recognises that he always was a hunter, all time. The modern hunter has become a driver. His main efforts do not go towards improving his lot, but complicating ways of travel. It’s all in the big pattern of time-space-mind. In his head is a multi-value motorway. Now, after the Kuwait coup, he is free to drive down any lane he wants, any way. No external frictions or restrictions any more. Thus spake Charteris. She had felt compelled to listen, thus possibly accomplishing Phil’s death. There had been a rival group setting up in the cellars of Loughborough, the Mellow Bellows. They had taken one title out of thin air: There’s a fairy with an Areopagitica, No external frictions or restrictions, We don’t need law or war or comfort or that bourgeois stuff, No external frictions or restrictions. Of course, they did say he was a communist or something. What we needed was freedom to drive along our life lines where we would, give or take the odd Brasher. More irrational fragments of the future hit her: through him, of course; a weeping girl, a — a baked bean standing like a minute scruple in the way of self-fulfilment.
She wanted him to have her, if she could square her conscience about Phil. He was okay, but — yes, a change was so so welcome. Sex, too, yes, if he didn’t want too much of it. The waste always lay outside the window. He was clean-looking; good opening for bright lad — where had she overheard that? Well, it was self-defence. Wow that smash-up, still she trembled.
The gulls rose up from the mounds of rotting refuse, forming lines in the air. A dog down there, running, free, so free, companion of man, sly among the mountains. Perhaps now man was going to be as free as his companion. Trees in their future? Green? Bare?
Tears trickling down her cheek. Tears falling new from her sad speckled dreams. Even if it proved a better way of life, good things would be lost. Always the loss, the seepage. My sepia years. Sorry, Phil, I loved you all I could for six of them, but I’m going to bed with him if he wants me. The big gymnastic sergeant marching marching. It’s you I’m going to betray, not him, if I can make it, because he really has something, don’t know what. I don’t know if he’s what he says, but he is a sort of saint. And you did hit him first. You hit him first. You were always free with your fists. You were that.
She went downstairs. Either that running dog wore a tie or she was going acid head like the others.
‘It’s a bastard work, a mongrel,’ he said. He was eating something out of a can; that was now his way, no meals, only snacks, the fuzzy feeder. Kind of impersonal.
‘I’m a mongrel, aren’t I? Some Gurdjieff, more Ouspenski, time-obsessed passages from here and there, no zen or that — no Englishmen, but it’s going to spread from England out, we’ll all take it, unite all Europe at last. A gospel. Falling like PCA. America’s ready, too. The readiest place, always.’
‘If you’re happy.’ She touched him. He had dropped a baked bean onto the masterwork. It almost covered a word that might be ‘self-fulfilment’.
‘See those things crawling in the bare trees out there? Elms, are they? Birds as big as turkeys crawling in the trees, and toads, and that new animal. I often see it. There is an intention moving in them, as there is in us. They seem to keep their distance.’
‘Darling, you’re in ruins, your mind, you should rest!’
‘Yes. Happiness is a yesterday phase. Say, think, “tension-release”, maintain a sliding scale, and so you do away with sorrow. Get me, you just have a relief from tension, and that’s all you need. Nothing so time-consuming as happiness. Nothing personal. If you have sorrow, you are forced to seek its opposite, and vice versa, so you should try to abolish both. Wake, don’t live automatic, I’ll get it clear. Time...I must speak to people, address them. You have some gift I need. Come round with me, Angelina? Take me on, share my sack.’
She put her arms about him. The big gymnastic sergeant. There was some stale bread on the table, crumbs among the books he was breaking up and crayoning. Activity all the time, her windows, wind over the turning mounds. ‘When you love me, love, there’ll be something personal in it?’
‘It’s all evolving, angel, stacked with loot.’
When the Escalation came along, the two of them were half-lying on the camp-bed, limbs entangled, not actually copulating.
Greta wept, supported by two of the group. Featherstone-Haugh touched a chord on his balalaika and sang, ‘Her mother was killed by a sunlit Ford Cortina, and the road snapped shut.’
Ruby Dymond turned his cheeks into a poor grey.
‘Man the Driver,’ Chapter Three. Literature of the Future Meeting Feeling of the Future. Ouspenski’s concept of mental photographs postulates many photographs of the personality taken at characteristic moments; viewed together, these photographs will form a record by which man sees himself to be different from his common conception of himself — and truer. So, they will suggest the route of life without themselves having motion. The truth is in static instants; it is arrived at through motion. Motion of auto-crash, copulation, kinetic self-awakenings of any kind. There are many alternatives. Fiction to be mental photographs, motion to be supplied purely by reader. Music as harpoon to sleeping entrails, down out the howls of smaller dogs. Action a blemish as already in existence. Truth thus like a pile of photos, self-cancelling for self-fulfilment, multi-valued. Indecision multi-incisive and non-automatic. Impurity of decision one of the drives towards such truth-piles; the Ouspenskian event of a multiple crash on a modern motorway an extreme example of such impurities.
Wish for truth involved here, Man and landscape interfuse, science presides. Machines predominate.
Charteris stood at the window listening to the noise of the group, looking out at the highly carved landscape. Hedges and trees had no hint of green, were cut from iron, their edges jagged, ungleaming with the brown nearest black, although the winds drove rain shining across the panorama. Middays reduced job-lots from Coventry. Vehicles scouring down the roads trailed spume. Roads like seas like fossilised thought, coproliths of ancestral loinage, father-frigger. The earlier nonsense about the terrors of the population explosion; one learned to live with it. But mistakes still being made. The unemployed were occupied, black midland figures of animated sacks, inplanting young trees along the grand syndlines and barrows of the embankments and cuttings and underpasses, thereby destroying their geometry, mistakenly interfusing an abstract of nature back into the grand equation. Got to banish that dark pandemic nature. But the monstrous sky, squelching light out of its darkest corners, counteracted this regressive step towards out-dated reality moulds. The PCA bombs had squirted from the skies; it was their region. Science presided.
There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship
Sailing every ha’penny.
The goods you buy with this new coinage
Weren’t made any pla
They give out the meagerest sounds
But I don’t hear a thing any longer
Since I do my personal thinking in pounds
I had a good family life and a loving girl
But I had to trade them in for pounds
The damned birds were coming back, too, booking their saplings, grotesques from the pre-psychedelic twilife, ready to squirt eggs into the first nests at the first opportunity. They moved in squadrons, heavy as lead, settled over the mounds of rubbish, picking out the gaudy Omo packets. They had something planned, they were motion without truth, fugitive, to be hated. He had heard them calling to each other in nervous excitement, ‘Omo, Omo’. Down by the shores of the dead sea, down by the iron sunset, they were learning to read, a hostile art. And the new animal was among them by the dead elms.
Angeline was comforting Greta, Ruby watching her every fingertip, Burton was turning the pages of ‘Man the Driver’, thinking of a black and red tie he had worn, his only tie. Words conveyed truth, he had to admit, but that damned tie had really sent him. He thought he had tied it round the neck of a black dog proceeding down Ashby Road. Spread the message.
‘Greet, you didn’t hear of a dog involved in this pile-up?’
‘Leave her alone,’ Angeline said. ‘Let her cry it out. It’s like a tide.’
‘There’s been a dislocation,’ Burton said.
‘He did it, you know,’ Greta wept. ‘You can’t have secrets in this city any more. Well, it’s more of an urban aggregation than a city, really, I suppose. He pushed the whole chain of events into being, piled up all them lorries, killed by mum and everything.’