He was calmer now. He looked with sympathy at the graffiti on the walls and door. Some of these must, he thought, be considered a kind of art, since they were evidently attempts to purge powerful emotion into stylised forms. There were also wild messages, pleas for assignations at known places, though the dates were long gone; there were boasts too extravagant to be capable of fulfilment, also succinct desiderations of sexual partners too complaisant to be of this world. Sex. Well, he, Hogg, had tried, following the rehabilitatory pattern imposed by Dr, now bloody, Wapenshaw, to go in for sex like everybody else, but it had not been very successful. In any case, you really had to be young nowadays to go in properly for sex: that had been made fairly clear to him by such of the young-Italian chambermaids and so on-as he had met, as also by some of the popular art he had, again in fulfilment of the Wapenshaw bloody pattern, tried glumly to appreciate. So there it was, then. He must stop himself saying that to himself all the time.
On the walls there were also little verses, most of them set-like those works of Faith Fortitude-as prose. They were all traditional verses, mostly on cloacal subjects, but it was somehow warming to find that verse was still in regard for its gnomic or mnemonic properties. Among the common people, that was. He could not imagine bloody Wapenshaw writing or drawing anything in a lavatory. There was, Hogg noticed, a nice little patch of naked wall by his right arm. He did not need his Muse for what he now took out his ballpoint pen to write. He wrote:
Think, when you ease your inner gripe
Or stand with penis in your paw,
A face is lodged within the pipe
And it belongs to Wapenshaw.
That, perhaps, would be learned by heart and reproduced elsewhere underground, imperfect memory blurring the sharp elegance but perhaps not wholly losing that name, in some allomorph or other. Enderby, folk poet. Enderby, not Hogg. And Wapenshaw given a proper immortality.
Hoggerby now felt hungry. He girded himself, pulled the chain, donned his jacket and went out. He nodded kindly at the wash-and-brush-up man, who was reading the Evening Standard by his glazed partition, then mounted to the light. He walked out of the station and found a sufficiently dirty-looking little eating-hell in a sidestreet, nearly filled with slurping men. He knew the sort of meal he wanted: a rebellious meal. From the tooth-sucking man with glasses behind the counter he ordered a mug of very strong tea, eggs and fat bacon, marged doorsteps. He was going to give himself indigestion. That would show bloody Wapenshaw.
Chapter 2
One
"A great honour, ja," said Mr Holden from behind massed flowers of the season. In the adjoining office typewriters clacked. Standing before Mr Holden were Hogg and John the Spaniard, respectively flashing gold and caries and looking dour about the great honour. "Smallish and very select, and the Saddleback is just about the right-sized pitch, ja. So it'll be cocktails in the Sty, and this is where you, brother Hogg, show your batting strength. We'll be having some waiters from the Sweet Thames Run Softly bar, sort of extra cover. You'd better start boning up on your cocktails, fella, read up your sort of bar-tender's Wisden. Horse's necks, sidecars, manhattans, snowballs, the lot. You reckon you can carry your bat?"
"I know them all," said Hogg, "including some that haven't been thought of yet."
"I show him," said John, "if he not know."
"A pop-group, you say?" said Hogg.
"You ought to know these things," said Mr Holden. "You get plenty of time for reading the papers. A sort of belated celebration, a kind of late cut to the off. They've been making this movie in the Bahamas, as you should know, and only now have they been able to get this fixture organised. There's a lot to celebrate. A new golden disc, the birthday honours, and now Yod Crewsy gets this F.L.R.S. thing. Ja, plenty to celebrate. Mucho," he added for John's benefit.
"Usted habla bien español."
"T.R.S.L.?" Hogg queried. "Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature?"
"Not bad, not bad, fella. Keep on like that, eye on the ball and all that palooka. Ja, he got the Hangman award for some book of poems he wrote and then this F.S. thing sort of automatically followed."
"Heinemann award?" frowned Hogg. "And what do you say this lot are called?"
"Ah, Jesus, you'll never get off the reserve list," said Mr Holden. "The Crewsy Fixers. You mean to say you never heard of the Crewsy Fixers? England's best ambassadors they've been termed, a little Test team all on their own, ja, doing all in their power to protect the wicket of your shattered economy. Foreign earnings, that is, an export drive to the boundary, and Her Majesty the Queen" (Mr Holden bowed his head) "is no doubt dooly grateful. Hence, fella, those medals. So now you know, but I guess you should have known already."
"Sí sí sí," agreed John. "Already he should know."
"I would call that a very blasphemous name," said Hogg coldly. "Not," he added hastily, "that I'm at all a religious man, you understand. What I mean is, it seems to me in very bad taste."
"To the pure," said Mr Holden, "all things are pure. There's Yod Crewsy and his Fixers, so they become the Crewsy Fixers. Right? If you're thinking it sounds like something else, then you're on a very shaky wicket yourself, fella, so far as taste goes. And they're very very religious boys, which again you should have known. Molto religioso," he added to John.
"Lei parla bene italiano."
"I bet," divined Hogg, "that he called himself Crewsy just so he could make up that blasphemous name. And that Yod bit doesn't sound Christian to me. Yod," he told Mr Holden, "is a letter of the Hebrew alphabet."
"Now you'd better watch that," said Mr Holden very sternly. "Because that sounds to me very much like racial prejudice. And if there's one thing the policy of this hotel group says out out out to, it's racial prejudice. So watch it."
"He say too," intimated John, "about Spanish people not good."
"Right, then," said Mr Holden. "We'll have harmony, efficiency, and team spirit. A very special luncheon for very special people. The confectionary chefs are working out a very special ice pudding for the occasion. And there's going to be a very exotic dish not before served here. It's called -" he consulted a draft menu on his desk, "- lobscowse. Something Arabic, I guess. Those boys sure scored big in Saudi-Arabia."
Hogg stood transfixed. "Ice pudding," he said. "In Saudi-Arabia. It melts as it is made. Like time, you know."
"You feeling all right, Hogg?" While Mr Holden frowned, John the Spaniard poked his right temple with a brown finger, shaking his head in sad glee. "You sure you feel up to this, fella? If not, we can always get Juanito here to take over. I reckon he can face the bowling if you can't."
"It has to be a Hogg," said Hogg, distracted. "He may be a pig but he's not a Hogg. It's coming," he added. "There's something there all right. The gift's coming back. Something special. I'll have to go and put it down on paper."