Barefoot in the Head by Brian W Aldiss
‘I know,’ Angeline said. The heart always so laden, the gulls always so malignant.
In the old kitchen among gash-cans where a single brass tap poured a thin melody out of one note, Ruby had her alone at last clasping her thin wrists by each tapering tendon her face still with youth in its whole imprint.
‘Don’t start anything, Ruby, get back to play your piece with the boys.’
‘You know how I feel about your continued days, how you always play my piece, and now I see you lay with Charteris.’
She pulled from him and he caught her again, a slight look of ox under his eyebrushes. ‘I mind mine, you mind yours, you hip me Ruby though I know you mean well!’
‘Look, the rumour is he killed Phil — ’
Frantic, and a churning mound of rubbish at the sill, ‘Ruby, if you are trying to make me — ’
‘I won’t kid, I never liked Phil, you know that, but to go round with the guy who did it — ’
She was as thin from her lethargy as stretched teeth could make her. ‘He has something that’s all I know, and hope I need among you scenemakers, I don’t have to trust him...’
In the next room they were calling and formationed birds dipped like sleet across her vision. ‘Remember me? I was around before you met Brasher, I knew you when you were a little lanky girl I used to come and play with your brothers, gave you your first kiss — ’
‘It’s looking back, Ruby, looking back,’ despairing.
‘I thought you loved me, you used to ride on my cycle.’
‘It’s past, Ruby.’ She was afraid of her own tears the very nature of her grottoed self. Leaning back over the choked draining board, she saw the face of him move across her visage like a lantern burning impatience, mutter, turn under its hairbush and leave her there with the one-note melody unlistened to but ever-piercing.
Creaming crowds in Nottingham to greet the Escalation, teenagers blurry in the streets, hardly whispering, the middle-aged, the old, the crippled and the halt, all those who had not starved, all those who had not died from falling into fires or ditches on roads, all those who had not wandered away after the aerosols drifted down, all those who had not fallen down dead laughing, all those who had not opened their spongy skulls with can-openers to let out the ghosts and the rats. All were hot for the Escalation under the seams of their grey clouts.
After two numbers, the boys, sensational and smelly, had the crowds throwing noise back at them. Burton stood up, announced Saint Charteris, asked if anyone had seen a stray dog wearing a red and black tie. The Escalation howled their new anthem.
Obdolescent Loughborough
With slumthing to live through
Charteris we cry
Is something to live by
Try a multi-valued slant
On the instant instant
He had scarcely thought out what he was going to say. The pattern was there, misty or clear. It seemed so apparent he felt it did not need uttering, except they should wake and know what they knew. The slav dreamers, Ouspenski and the rest, sent him travelling with his message through to his outpost of Europe. If the message had validity, it was shaped by journey and arrival. He couldn’t always stand helpless across the river. In Metz, he had realised the world was a web of forces. Their minds, their special Midland minds had to become repositories of thinking also web-like, clear but indefinite, instant but infinite.
If they wanted exterior models, the space-time pattern of communicationways with which their landscape was riddled functioned as a master plan, monster plan of mind-pattern. A1 the incoherent repirations that filled their lives would then fall into place. The empty old nineteenth-century houses built by new classes which now stood rotting in ginger stone on hillsides, carriageways either approached or receded like levels of old lakes, they were not wasted; they functioned as landmarks. No more eggless waters. Nothing should be discarded; everything would reorient, as the ginger stone mansions or the green stone churches were reoriented by the changing landscape dynamic, and the crash-ups escalated to a love-in. He was lead of the New Thought. The Fourth World System, Man the Driver, would appear soon, all would wake.
So the words sprang up like bolted birds.
Greta stood and screamed, ‘He killed Our Mum! Poor old girl with her flowers! He caused the multi-maxident on the Inner Relief. Kill him! Kill him!’
‘Kill him!’ also cried Ruby.
White-faced Angeline said from the platform for all to hear, ‘And he killed my husband, Phil, you all knew him.’ It was sin to her whether she spoke or not; she worked by old moralities, where someone was always betrayed.
Their troubled eyes all turned to his eyes, seeking meaning, like stars in the firment.
‘I thought they were going to crucify you,’ said Featherstone-Haugh after offering the Serb a glance through perspectives later to be of more transfixion over the desiccated lustrums of western worships, crowns of thorns, crosses of scorn, the love-kill. You couldn’t tell the bits of wreckage from the bits of victims. He couldn’t stop his heart beating.
‘It’s true! The lorry was sweeping along the great artery from Glasgow down to Naples, In Naples, they will also mourn. We are all one people now, Europeople, and although this massive region of yours is as special as the Adriatic Coast or the Dutch Lowlands, or the steppes of central Asia, the similarity is also in the differences. It’s the impact, as you must feel. You know of my life, that I was Communist like my father, coming from Serbia in Jugoslavia, that I lived long in Italy, dreamed all my while of England and the wide cliffs of Dover. Now I arrive here after the dislocation and fatal events begin, spreading back along my trail. It’s a sign. See how in this context even death is multivalued, the black nearest brown Brasher falling back into the traffic was a complex impulse-node from which effects still multiplicate along all tension lines. We shall all follow that impulse to the last fracture and serial of recorded time. The Escalation and I are now setting out on a motorcrusade down through our Europe, the autobahns, the war, dislocation, to ultimate unity. All of you come too, a moving event to seize the static instant of truth! Come too! Wake! There are many alternatives!’
They were crying and cheering, discarding I’s. It would take on truth, be a new legend, a new communication in the ceaseless dialoga; the ground complexes given younger significance. Even Angeline thought. Perhaps he will really give us something to live by, more than the old fun grind. It surely can’t really matter, can it, whether there was a dog with a tie or not; the essential thing was that I saw it and stand by that. A phenomenon’s only itself eh? So it doesn’t matter whether he is right or not; just stay in the Banshee with him. Pray the warmth’s there, the loot.
You couldn’t tell wreckage from victim in the fast-turning shade-shapes of obliquity.
He was talking again, the audience were cheering, the group were improvising a driving song about a Midland-minded girl at the wheel of a sunlit automobile. An ambiguity about whether they meant the steering or the driving wheel.
Plugging the night’s orifices with solid sound.
PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND
The Intermittent Tattooed Tattered Prepuce
The moonlight of a June night
Casts shadows of crashing airliners
Onto the orthostrada of gaunt erections
Moonlight moonlight
Filing empty patios
And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching
And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce
Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl
Oh love’s a crash a parade-ground bash
An auto-immune disorder from which issues
A pair of bodies destroying their own tissues
Left right left right left
In out in out on guard
Lovers of the world unite
You’ve nothing to lose but appetite
If winter comes can the following one
Be more than a year away
The flying human parts and the bits of steel
In an uato-concussion are the modern way
The military way
Of committing love
And the big gymnastic sergeant’s marching marching
And the intermittent tattooed tattered prepuce
Does bayonet practice on a sweet civilian girl
Oh love’s a smash a uniform cash
Negotiable when the moving parts peeling
Can autocade feeling anti-flowered healing speedily stealing
And the big gymnastic leather-cheeked sergeant’s marching
marching marching
And the intermittent inter-continental tattered tattooed
prepuce prepuce
Does bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic
syphilitic
Bayonet practice on a civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic
Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic
Civilised civilian sybaritic syphilitic
Supergirl
Left right left right
Moonlight moonlight
Up the motorways of love
PHIL, BILL, RUBY AND FEATHERSTONE-HAUGH
SMALL DOGS HOWLING
When you sank on my knee in the buggy
You forked your loving tongue in my mouth
And you worked me and made me come
Though your hair didn’t fit you properly
I still resemble the blur of your fingers
When the small dogs are howling
Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem
Oh throw your acidhead at them
Lives deprived and broken
Bottles empty by dawn
While we were crotching together
Did you mind my shoes was torn
Some place like a magic garden
My friends all call me Rajah
And I’m a demon on the cello
Don’t ask me what we’re doing on the heath love
Because the estate has become divided
And we’re one with the ones who won
This place well the car broke down
But the street lamps were your tall wild lilies
And I couldn’t hear the small dogs howling
Tray Blanche and Sweetheart on the hem
Oh throw your acidhead at them
THE MELLOW BELLOW
DREAMING
Swept under sleep’s terminator
We send out blindfold signals
To a listener in dim Andromeda
We send out our folded signals
To the listeners in all Andromedas
Hoping dreading response
Beyond the lighted alleyways
The multi-motorways of time
Yesterday’s day regurgitates
Itself back through the limbic brain
Backwards rattling through orifices
Of ancient bugging systems
Alpha rhythms delta rhythms
Dark transmissions old as sandstone
Wild as pop
Between communiqués
Another sleep-form new-invented
Topiaries upwards outwards
Through our
Dull planetary bodies other
Messages secreted in the pores
Are also played out backwards
On an unknown waveband
These thin signals
Pipe from us in automated
Bursts
To be picked up on stars
White dwarfs
Monitored in nebulae
Identified
In other galaxies as
‘Dark
Bodies hitherto quite unsuspected’
And still between all human noises
Our figures with their own intent
Run daylight and silence backwards
When you target in to my
Perceptions
Am I reading you?
My fullness is a part
Of your thin signals
My visions
Wreckage of your orbit
From ‘The Threepenny Space Opera’
Another Dreaming Poem
My letters delay in their personal boxes
Uncertainty is on the whole my element
And the astrabahns bifurcate steeply
Low temperatures
Curtains drawn tight
A blur on the papered walls
And the night branches drooping
On the furred paths of grass
What you might call my pessimism
Is merely a long dedication
Of involved enquiry
Passionate and still deepening
Into the lost events of everybody’s
Days those past and those to come
And those standing on end unsorted
In the night’s post orifices
The great well of personal stuff
I don’t know or wish to know
Floods me with messages
Is it myself
I walk with or happiness
Found in the low night street
Footsteps on the pavement
Echoing in more than one house
PATTERN MORE THAN CITY MIND
The city has built-in pattern city
city pattern
city
built-in pattern
Mind is more than city more than city Mind more
more than Mind city
Roads run like fossil thought
run
fossil fossil like fossil
Mind more
city
roads
fossil
Built-in thought
Cities
Cities have patterns
built-in
Cities
Cities have built-in patterns more
Minds are more Minds
Minds
Minds are more than cities
road thoughts
A road fossilised
road runs road runs A road runs like fossilised thoughts
Roads patterns
runs
cities
fossilised
Thoughts minds
WE’RE ALL FOR THE DARK!
Or, Life’s Never Been Better!
If you’ve ever sailed on the ocean
Or cheered when a port hove in sight
There’s one thing you’ll know — that emotion
Is better indulged in at night!
Since the time when old Noah
Spent those nights in the Ark
With the animals pairing
It’s best after dark!
CHORUS: Life’s never been better!
Each night lasts a year
Stuffed with women and music
And piss-ups and beer!
The girls that by daylight
Would blush to be stark,
Decide that their blushes
Won’t show in the dark!
CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.
Just yesterday breakfast,
We got lit in the park —
And the fire went on burning
Till long after dark.
CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.
Next morning so early,
We were up with the lark.
We shot it down dead and —
Crawled back in the dark!
CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.
If you lose your way travelling
And the small dogs do bark,
All the signposts will tell you —
‘This way to the dark!’
CHORUS: Life’s never been better, etc.
As Jesus remarked once
To Matthew and Mark,
‘To Hell with Big Daddy —
We’re all for the dark!’
CHORUS: Life’s never been better!
Each night lasts a year —
Stuffed with women and music
And piss-ups and beer!
Stuffed with women and music
And piss-ups and beer!
ANONYMOUS
THROUGH THE NEW ARCADE
My sweet sweet Phil so often brutal
My bloody Phil so sometimes gentle
The trouble was you didn’t love enough
You didn’t have to hit him
Those years
I’m too sentimental
You were always too bloody sodding rough
You were too much like my mother
Completely misreading universal patterns
Thinking you could always have your way
Oh Christ my sweet damned Phil
You burst apart
Bits of body wreckage
I never knew I never knew another
Human being was that frail I always hated
All that ranting made me ill
Deep in my heart
You tired me
Even before my sticky-fingered schooldays
I’d learned to sweat it out and all about
But I’m too sentimental
Hanging on to any hand that waited
Well you inspired me
You burst apart
Once and so I stuck by you
The fool I was
When you’ve been crated
You’ll see you’ll see I saw
The way he looked at me I liked it
And he took your blows so gentle
And he spoke as if he knew
Of universal patterns far beyond me
Perhaps he recognised I could be true