Pariah. That word rose from his past to increase his discomfiture.
– Virgil, he hesitated, where shall we stay?
Virgil shrugged. -We’ll find somewhere, he said. Or other. His tongue slobbered in the corner of his mouth.
On the very outskirts of the town itself stood its tallest building, the only one Flapping Eagle had seen that stood two storeys high. It was in immaculate condition, which fact alone set it apart from the rest. Its walls rose straight and true, gleaming white in the blue-mist dark, a spotless sentinel and guardian of the town. It was a brothel. Madame Jocasta’s House of the Rising Son, a discreet wooden plate by the door proclaimed. And by the plate someone had scrawled an inexplicable phrase. Tomorrow, no doubt, a new coat of whitewash would expunge it, but tonight it stood, blemishing the whitewalled purity of the house of pleasure. A Rushian Generals Welcom, it said.
Virgil saw the phrase and muttered to himself: -Alex got out tonight, then.
– What does it mean? asked Flapping Eagle.
– Childish joke, said Virgil. Product of a child-mind.
Flapping Eagle was forced to repeat his question, since Virgil offered no more.
– The Russian Generals, said Virgil, are called Pissov, Sodov, Bugrov and Phukov. Childish.
But Flapping Eagle, already disconcerted by the stone eyes in the granite face, felt even more uneasy for knowing the meaning of the jejune phrase.
In the town now; flurries of activity around them, sporadic because the hour was late. A glimpse through another window: an old woman gazing at a photograph album, immersed in her past. It is the natural condition of the exile-putting down roots in memories. Flapping Eagle knew he would have to learn these pasts, make them his own, so that the community could make him theirs. He entered K in search of a history.
They saw ahead of them on the street the crawling form of the man called Stone, greeting the cobbles. Flapping Eagle could also hear a clip-clop of hooves, somewhere near at hand, hidden by the clustering houses; and every so often the noise of laughter came to them on the breeze, muffled by the mist.
At the far end of the cobbled road, the opposite axis from Madame Jocasta’s stood the source of the laughter. This was the moment Virgil had been dreading and which he knew must be faced. This was the Elbaroom, home of the drinking community of K, centre of village information. According to his plans, they would have to go in, not just to find a place to stay, but to show Flapping Eagle to K; so they would have to meet its keeper.
His name was O’Toole.
– Able was I ere I saw Elba, murmured Virgil Jones. Apart from the language called Malayalam, it was the only palindrome he could ever remember.
XXXII Blink
FLAPPING EAGLE SAW her first; and an eerie shape she made, half-woman, half-quadruped, coming at them through the circling mist. As she drew nearer, it struck him that she was one of the most palely beautiful women he had ever seen.
Elfrida Gribb suffered, albeit infrequently, from insomnia. When it struck, leaving her dry-eyed and awake in the midnight hours, she would get up, don her warmest shawl and ride through K on a small velvet donkey. Wrapped up well to spite the mist and damp, she found it a soothing thing to do. One had to keep oneself occupied, after all.
Elfrida: the name suited her, and she abhorred all diminutives. -A name is a name, she said. Elfin-faced and elf-boned, there could have been no other name for Mrs Gribb. She was delicately roseate skin fitting perfectly over soft rises and falls of flesh; her mouth small and softly-pursed and her eyes like sparkling water. Her clothes were old lace, her shawl embroidered with lilies, her hats as wide-brimmed as her wide green eyes, drooping across her face like long quiet lashes. Often she wore a veil. Mostly she was happy, her lightness of spirit infecting all around her; and when she was sad she kept it to herself. Other people had their own worries to fret at, she told herself stoically. She could cope with herself perfectly well.
Thanks to Ignatius. Ignatius Gribb provided her with a secure, immovable centre for her being. Her entire life and all her delight revolved around him. I thank whatever brought us together, she would tell him. If marriages are made in the heavens, then ours was made in the seventh. And he would grunt and nod and she would sniff his reassuring new-socks smell and be comforted and whole. A woman needed a love like this in a place like K. It kept away the darkness.
Shored up by the strength of this love, she felt it her duty to do her level best to impart something of her strength to the weak. To nurse the halt and feed the hungry was to her a privilege and a debt paid. This zeal made her as many enemies as friends. Not everyone likes to be helped; not everyone in K responded to her cosy goodwill. And the obverse of her sunny life was that Elfrida Gribb was something of a prig.
She was, however, beautiful, even through a veil; and Flapping Eagle stood entranced for a moment at the entrance to the Elbaroom, framed with Virgil in the filtering yellow light of the doorway and the flicker of the lamp above their heads, silhouettes watching the pale, lovely ghost on its night ride.
An instant when their eyes met; and at that instant, the universe went out for an instant, freezing the inhabitants of the town in a series of characteristic positions, a tableau fixed in the aspic of a blink in time.
The most unlikely duo in the Elbaroom sat at a low round table about halfway down the long, narrow hostelry. One of them was enormous, a bear of a man, an impression he heightened by wearing a bearskin coat practically all the time, for all that it was rarely very cold in K. Perhaps it was the coat that gave his face its bright red colouring. It was a face like a craggy tomato. Beads of sweat stood excitedly on its brow. Its eyebrows beetled inwards and downwards towards the rough peak of his nose, spilling over gleaming eyes on their way. He spoke rapidly; his hands swung in huge, dangerous, clawing arcs.
His companion was as slim as he was wide, as slight and elegant as he was cumbersome; a dainty man with a young face and Calf Island’s traditional ancient eyes. At present, these eyes held a look of infinite boredom-held it, moreover as though accustomed to doing so. They were discreetly downcast, watching his tapered hands pulling the legs off a spider, sharply, cleanly.
The dainty man was called Hunter. His full name was Anthony St Clair Peyrefitte Hunter, but his companion called him The Two-Time Kid. The name had stuck, not particularly because of the insult latent in it, but thanks to Hunter’s frequent avowal that he would ‘try anything twice’. The bear-like man, with his unerring gift for the obvious, had asked, why twice? and Mr Hunter had replied, with the slight disdain of centuries of good inbreeding:
– Once to see if one likes it; twice to see if one was right.
– Wal, guffawed the bear, you little two-timer! His bellow had effectively overpowered Hunter’s dainty sneer.
The bear was called Peckenpaw. K knew him as ‘One-Track’ Peckenpaw. He told stories no man questioned; he was too big to be accused of telling tall tales. His stories were full of the legends of the Old West; the time he stood up against old Wild Bill and stared him down; the time he bent William Bonney’s rifle into a knot with his bare hands; gold rush tales of mining towns where men were men and women were grateful. But at the time of the blink he was boring Mr Hunter with his favourite story, told a thousand times before, that was one reason for the title of ‘One-Track’. His repetitive, compulsive tale-telling was the other.