‘Oh no you can’t.’
‘Oh yes I can.
‘Why can’t he be trusted?’ I asked.
‘Because Humphrey is an oak tree,’ said the Doveston.
13
Tobacco hic,
If a man be well it will make him sick.
We shared a Brentstock moment.
There was a band playing up on the stage. The band was called the Seven Smells of Susan: five small dwarves with very tall heads and a rangy fellow in tweeds. The Seven Smells played ‘coffeetable music’, the 1960s precursor of Ambient. They only ever released one album and this, I believe, was produced by Brian Eno. It was called Music for Teapots. I don’t have a copy myself.
I was no great fan of the Smells, their music was far too commercial for me, but on this day they were magic. The sounds of the duelling ocarinas and the semi-tribal rhythms of the yoghurt-pot maracas[8] issued from the speakers in Argus-eyed polychromatic fulgurations, which were both pellucid and dioptric, daedal and achromatic, simultaneously. It was as if I were actually viewing the trans-perambulation of pseudo-cosmic anti-matter, without having recourse to an inter-rositor.
Nice.
But good as the band were, nobody seemed to be listening. The centre of attention was no longer the stage. The crowd had withdrawn to the riverside end of the allotments, to re-form in a number of Olympic Ring-like interlocking circles, each of which centred on one of the ancient oaks. Most of the folk were sitting cross-legged, but I noticed some were kneeling with their hands together in prayer.
‘The trees,’ I said to the Doveston. ‘They’re all talking to the trees.’
My words were tiny green transparent spheres which burst all over his forehead, but he didn’t seem to notice, or perhaps he was being polite. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I heard and saw him say.
‘Everybody’s tripping. Everyone. Someone must have dropped acid into the water supply, or something.’
‘Or something.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ My question was orange, with small yellow stars.
‘I’ll get Chico on to it.’ Red diamonds and fairy-lights.
‘He might be stoned as well.’ Pink umbrellas.
‘He’d better not be.’ Golden handbags and grated cheese guitars.
‘I can’t handle this,’ I said, in a mellowy-yellowy-celery way. ‘I’m going home to bed.’
I stumbled across the tobacco-stubbled waste, pausing now and then to let myself catch up, climbed carefully over the back garden fence and in through the kitchen window. The Smells’ music was really beginning to do my head in and I was quite pleased when, at the exact moment that I plugged in the electric kettle to brew a cup of tea, they apparently finished their set.
Obviously there were some who were not so pleased as I, because I heard the sounds of shouting and of blows being exchanged. But it was hardly any of my business, so I just sat there waiting for the kettle to boil.
It took an age. It took a lifetime. It took an aeon.
Did you ever see that documentary about the scientist Christopher Mayhew? It was made by the BBC in the 1950s. Old Chris takes mescalin and attempts to describe the on-going experience to this terribly proper BBC commentator-chappie. There is one classic moment when he stares briefly into space and then announces that he has just returned from ‘years and years of Heavenly bliss’. The bit that sticks with me is the part at the end. After the effects of the drug have worn off, he is asked what he has learned from his experience. Mr Mayhew concludes, ‘There is no absolute time, no absolute space.
As I sat and waited for that kettle to boil, I knew just what he meant. At that moment I stepped outside of time. It was as if the part of me that kept me forever only in the present had been removed or switched off. All times were instantly accessible. The past, the present and the future. I had no wish to revisit the past. I’d been there and done it and not been there and done it very well. But the future, oh the future. I saw it all and it terrified me. I saw what I was going to do and I knew why I would have to do it.
I saw myself a prisoner. A prisoner of time, perhaps? Shut away for years and years and then released to wander on a lonely moor. And then I saw bright lights and London town, and then myself, a man of property. I wore fine clothes and drove a snazzy car. And then, upon a bleak horizon, loomed a mighty house, a Gothic pile, and there, within, debauchery and drugs and long-legged women. I enjoyed this part considerably and lingered in my time-travelling to dwell upon the details and the depths of my depravity. And very nice it was.
But then came tragedy. A death that seemed to shake the world and shortly after, a great and wonderful party, which, for some reason that I could not understand, I did not enjoy at all. And then the world went mad. It was the end of the world as we knew it. Nuclear war. Then wastelands and scattered communities.
This part was all pretty crap. Like some cheap Mad Max imitation, so I skipped through it as quickly as I could. But I was drawn up short by a really nasty episode that made me feel sick in my stomach.
I was in a tiny underground room beneath ruins, with an old frail man who sat in a chair. And this old man was ranting at me, and I really hated him, and suddenly I was killing him. My hands were about his wrinkly throat and I was squeezing the life from his body.
And I could see myself here, today, in the year 2008, writing these words. Remembering then what I remember now, remembering.
So to speak.
I feel certain that I would have been able to see well beyond the extent of my own brief lifetime and off into eternity, had I not been quite so rudely interrupted. I don’t know who it was who came crashing in through my kitchen window and ripped the kettle plug out of the wall and started beating me over the head with the kettle. He looked a bit tweedy and rangy to me, but as I was soon very unconscious, I really couldn’t be sure.
Now, you know that panicky feeling you get when you wake up after a really heavy night of drink and drugs to find that you can’t move and then it slowly dawns on you that someone has glued your head to the floor and then it slowly dawns on you that no they haven’t, you’ve just chucked up in your sleep and the vomit has dried and stuck your face to the limo and— No. You don’t know that feeling, do you.
Well, it’s almost as bad as the police cell one. Almost, but not quite.
I tried to lever myself up, but I didn’t make too much progress. Luckily I happened upon a spatula I’d dropped a couple of weeks previously, which had somehow got kicked under the cooker, and was able to ease it between the floor and my face and gently prise myself free. It was a horrible experience, I can tell you, and I got all breathless and flustered and desperately in need of a nice cup of tea.
I really won’t bore you with what happened after I plugged the electric kettle in again.
But what happened might well have saved my life, or at least my sanity. If I hadn’t taken that second beating and if the ambulance hadn’t been called to whisk me off to the cottage hospital, I would certainly have gone back to the festival and what happened to all those innocent people would undoubtedly have happened to me. Whoever beat me back into oblivion spared me from all that.
But spared me for what?
And for why?
That I should go forward through my life knowing what was to come and yet be powerless to prevent it?
That I should be some kind of helpless puppet doomed to a terrible fate?
That the grinning purple kaftan of truth should shed its wings and eat the flaccid ashtray of tomorrow?