ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD chapter one
Prologue
Below, under, beneath, a subterranean ambiguous membrane pressed in all around us -- another space within, but, beyond this twisted mortal coil -- beyond the thin veil of consciousness distinct from this world as that between the pause and flight of birds. Only the wilful strength of those clutching claws of Tennyson's dreaming eagle, over viewing his kingdom from a high lonely crag, holds him from that other realm of majestic soaring flight!
CHAPTER ONE
On this sunny Autumn afternoon I'm sitting looking at a tree from the window of the Trommel (Drum) -- my favourite bar in Berlin at the moment. I'm wondering why this chestnut tree is so green, while on both sides of it, as far as the eye can see, all the other chestnut trees are dry and golden-brown. It seems to have something biblical about it! Or, has this tree sought and found a deeper richer substrata?
Besides the owner, Rothe, who is somewhere around, I'm the only one here. The bar isn't officially open for another half hour, but it's no sweat. While we have very little, besides dope in common, Rothe and I get along well. And I'll build a pure spliff to smoke with him, while he's getting ready to open. And as if on cue, he suddenly appears
from the back room with two green beer bottles in each hand looking like a magician about to tie a balloon-animal.
My name is Rig. It's not my real name. My real name is Stewart Rigly ' so, you can see where the alias comes from, and why I've stuck with this childhood moniker. For a 'Stewart' I've never felt like, and 'Stew', well, it just sticks in the throat. And so even now at fifty three, even my siblings still call me Rig!
I found myself here in Berlin after years of travel, mostly around Europe. That was eleven years ago. This is the longest time I've stayed in one place since I was a kid.
Berlin has become a shelter for me. I've finally found a city I can tolerate, and which tolerates me.... Here you can remain yourself, unlike many cities, such as London, or any other soulless British city for that matter, where you must adjust yourself to it. Metaphorically speaking when you live in a City like London, you are either of the quick or the dead. Then, on the other hand, a city like Rome is like a very elegant, dreamy elderly lady -- but, still beautiful and ravaging, who embraces you -- although a little too tight, and she dominates your every thought!
So it was to Berlin! Berlin! -- with its new come back clothes, but, dirty underwear -- where you have the room to be anything you want to be, and nobody cares who you are. Where, nobody whips you everyday for calling yourself an artist. Where you can, if you listen carefully, still hear the echo -- though faint -- of the Berlin of the twenties. But of cause, it has rounded up its fair share of wannabes, phonies, posers, dot-heads, and paper noses. Though no more than anywhere else. And, to its great credit, it has also attracted a handful of thorough-going, free thinking bohemians, with their wild child-like eyes for those sublime sweet diamonds!
* * *
One of the first things people say to you when you start to write, is: know your audience. Shit! My audience is anyone who picks up this book. My audience are phantoms -- my audience is you! -- whoever you are -- right here now! Why be selective? Why limit myself? Why skewer my spectral reader with a narrow pointed label? I'm not about to write a few hundred thousand words just to find a market of phantoms! Plato must have pondered this when he threw his little gem into the pot: 'A teacher selects a pupil, but a book does not select its readers'. You see, true democracy is only in books!
I've decided to give you my life then. To sing my memories for you. A journey of lives within a life.
I don't know why I've chosen to write about my life at this moment, for I've never been one for shovelling backwards, and I've been expressing myself happily for years as a painter and sculptor. Although, I have forever been a great lover of books. They have always enthralled me, and sometimes a book can save your life! oh yes, with love, beauty, and truth.
I have never got over the magic of those little squiggles on paper, which when you look at them explode into meaning in your head -- suddenly you are within a consciousness of another, full of ideas and stories of that mind. A mind that may have lived an unlike life in a different time. And when it bursts magically from the page into our consciousness it lives once again.... and again.... ad infinitum.
But I know something is happening with me -- I may be having another of my famous breakouts, or even a late mid-life crisis, or something....
Three months ago I suddenly give up tobacco! -- smoked happily and conscientiously for near on forty years, and quit just like that! Now I smoke only the weed of wisdom in pure spliffs, or in my little old hash-pipe 'Pipi'. And another thing -- astonishingly, I've begun regular jogging and swimming! This is like a fish who starts breathing air and takes up cycling! What is it all about? I ask myself! I mean.... I understand why I run, I want to keep fit, The same with the smoking. But what is this with this writing business? And why all these things together now?
The writing also began a few months ago. I found myself vacantly reflecting upon my past, and began to feel it is somehow important to write it all down. I have to guess it's a need to say something direct. As if my mind wants to catch up with my actions. And maybe it's a sure way of being free of the power time has over one. Maybe it's a kind of catharsis. Or perhaps, you the reader will read it like that -- bring it to the book.
Somewhere within me there's a mouse of a mystery gnawing at the foundations. It nags at me, it wants to make sense of my past.... As if it were the riddle of the Sphinx, that solved, would bring down a great curtain, revealing a simple mechanism for a new and deeper understanding -- like the Rosette Stone that suddenly becomes readable. But something is growing that insists on expression.... Or, have I merely and quietly gone to pasture...? I doubt it -- as I said, revisiting the past and chewing the cud, was never my cup of meat. No, I will treat the whole thing as just one more unfolding mystery in the on going adventure which is the life of Rig Rigley.
And why not write my life down? -- for it can never be said it has been mundane -- I haven't left dull tracks. But, god's socks, I only hope I can discern an appropriate way to relate it to such a bunch of allusive and ambiguous souls as yourselves.
This is my first book, I must try to get it just right.... pump blood into it and make sparks fly and bring it to life. The instinct is to improvise -- which is a wonderful state of mind -- and to kind of weave the readers into the tapestry. But I ask for no more than the readers' reality of their own imagination.
I can't tell you about the people I have been without also telling you about the person I've become -- am becoming, and my unfolding life here in Berlin.
So, here I am, in the Trummel writing while killing a couple of hours before I have to go home to prepare the next English lessons. An hour of intermediate English with two very proper middle-aged East German secretaries -- Antje and Anne, who, for one hour a week for the last three years, have been improving their English with me. Then my very beautiful Russian kindergarten teacher, Tatjana will come, who is reading Breakfast at Tiffany's. Which can be a bit like hard work -- her grammar is good, but her vocabulary is limited. So I spend oodles of time explaining things, while falling into her big soft brown, and wonderful eyes. She's married with two kids!
* * *
Do-do-dodo-do-da! All this do doing is just to show you ghost readers that I am really in a very good mood, that is, before I start talking about something that will probably rake my guts out from beneath the fingernails!
Well, where shall I begin? The big bang? The Logos? No? What brushstrokes of recall shall I paint for you -- to rebuild my now demolished past from slippery mind stuff to a palpable reality on paper? And to show you the brush strokes of my passed decisions that have painted my very life....
In the beginning was the word.... O ghost of memory. Time, time -- the luxury of gods. Time is like a wind that blows away the chaff and leaves what we call memory. And like sculptors we chip away to reveal what we are.... for ever chipping....
..The time is my time -- the sad millennium of my childhood. A time when clocks charmed and alarmed. And we are the people of the clock that tick tocks, and that tick-tocking in every household kept the pace of the plodding life of the Isle of Blighty -- Regina -- Albion -- this Jerusalem.... A slow sand-glass-time, that slipped and fell, and yet, flew by on unseen wings. A time when the map of the world was still stained -- but fast fading -- with that British Empire-pink. A time when the flag was still the religion, and congregations like automata still got quickly to their feet on hearing the opening plaintive bars of 'God Save The Queen'. A time shortly after what the Celts poetically called 'the weave of men', when bombs had fallen like rain from the skies over Europe. And the hate of men with horror in their wake sought out some to kill, but mostly they were indiscriminate. A hate which only finished when we were kicking and banging at the doors of hell with the big penis-bomb, with its mushroom ejaculation -- the scientific orgasm -- the ultimate ego trip. It was a time still poisoned by the effects of that war, which had contaminated everything: people, feelings, places, objects, religions. And it was a time, another time, pre TV, pre jet-planes, pre calculators, pre-PCs, pre-youth culture, pre, pre, pre!
And the place? the place was the fish-dockside slums of Hull -- yes, you may well ask where is Hull -- only two hundred miles from the centre of the British Empire, yet, as forgotten as an unwashed armpit. A place that had been trod on by Grenville's 'black ox'. A place that is fixed in time. A place where happiness and unhappiness both seemed to come from the same old bottle.
When I look back at the slum through my smoky recall, I think of it as an immense masticating gob -- slowly grinding everything down. With human psyches rolled and chewed up with it. A slow, foaming, rasping gob of decay, with its very own stink and filth, which contrived its way into the mouse-houses, regardless and in spite of the great and constant efforts of most of the women, as they, with my mother among them, swept, scrubbed, and scraped at the ten types of shit and dust with the patience of a Job or a Sisyphus.
The decaying slum stretched with cancerous, triffid like fingers west from the city centre. Where maybe twenty terraced streets stood arse to scabby arse on both sides of the Hessle Road, which ran parallel to the fish-dock and the River Humber. With only a pair of railway tracks and a single line of fish-factories and timber-yards separating the streets from the docks.
I lived in Gillette Street (Razor blade Ally) at the bank-end, which was closest to the docks -- so close, you could see the mask tops of the moored trawlers above the roof-line of the fish-factories etched against an, oh so often, soul sucking led-grey sky. As a child I would lay listening through out the night to the tugs on the river blowing their noses like crying whales -- haunting -- truly haunting!
They say the sense of smell is the most primitive one, thus, the most evocative! And so it's a hot Summer's day that is fixed most firmly in the mind when I think of that unfashionable fish-aromatic part of town. When the sun shined and burnt up every exposed corner the stench of spoiling fish from the factories and the docks would drift over the streets and cloy the air. Then every breath you took, every meal you ate would co-mingle with a vaporous bouquet of rotting fish! The fetor came and left with the whim of the wind. Easterly winds blew it away over the sea, then the air for awhile was fresh and rare as silver. But, it would always return with a vengeance when the wind dropped or blew over from the docks. The greatest stench came from the ever growing mountains of rotting fish-offal which stood waiting to be turned into pet food and fertiliser. For the seas were plentiful then, unlike now, after we have raped and violated them -- like we violate everything. But back then in the fifties and sixties the ships brought fish in abundance -- it poured in, it tumbled in, it almost swam into the hungry jaws of the slum. And was the only work for the people, who, along with their houses like holes, and the stinking factories, only existed, for fish, of fish, in fish-town.
And when I close my eyes I picture the airless and embroiled street in the weary heat of that slum-summer day. I see the hectic madhouse of traffic again -- a helter-skelter of chaos. I see a stream of lorries heavily loaded with ten stone barrels of fish coming from the docks, just passing through, or going to one of the numerous factories in the street. Always returning loaded with ever more of that god dam stinking fish-offal. But, I also see the cars of the office workers going to work, and the fat overfed fish buyers passing through after the early morning fish market. Returning to the over-world in their big expensive shinny cars. There are the fleets of taxis, in tune with the tides, going to deliver or pick up the fishermen arriving home after their three or four weeks in the Arctic fishing grounds of Norway, Iceland, or Greenland. I see vehicles of all shapes and sizes carrying hither and thither the myriad of paraphernalia involved in the fishing industry: pieces of large machinery, mountains of ice, food-stuffs, miles and miles of fishing-nets, etc., And I see there are still one or two horse and carts on the roads, though they are quickly disappearing.
Let me take you for a stroll down my street of memory.
This day I see, I surmise must be one of those deceptively long, seemingly never ending, summer days of typical childhood memories. I like to picture it in a cinematic way -- first an aerial view of Hull, then zooming in like a falling Icarus above Hessle Road and the docks, the people like thousands of swarming ants. Down down down to the strains of Connie Frances singing 'who's sorry now'. Down down to doom level. Then, we are on the ground and walking. We can hear the sound of engines and the blowing of their horns, and that universal sound of children playing. And above this din you can hear the cries of begging gulls swimming the skies.
The pavements and terraces as we pass are a mass of screaming jostling kids -- ragged-arsed boys and rag-doll girls with bread and butter pudding faces. Walking Colonies of nits, lice, and fleas! We must weave around them like down-hill-slalom-skiers. The prancing girls turn skipping ropes and play double-ball against a wall or in the air, while the more frantic boys invent games that require them to wrestle, or chase each other around like wild yapping dogs. Later, when the factories close their tired gates, and the traffic becomes almost nil, you'll see the older kids reclaim the filthy road as their playground. Then serious games of rugby will be played with rolled up and tied newspapers as a ball. And all kinds of invented skylarks and games with crazy names, ' eggitybudge, British bull dog, poisonous finger, reallio, and games played with small rubber balls, or even tin-cans. The games will continue late into the evening, until the echoes turn blue, and the street lights come on -- sucking in the fast closing black gob of night, finally only giving up after been pressured by their parents constant barking at them to come in.
At the bank end of Gillette street there are more fish factories than houses. At the top of my terrace across the street we now stand and watch an articulated-lorry pulling two trailers stacked high with giant tree trunks -- twenty feet long and as wide as cartwheels. They tower over us. Its size and awkwardness brings the insane traffic to a stand still -- blocking the street while trying to jack-knife backwards through the narrow gates of Bay's wood-yard. Where those great aged tree trunks will be gradually pushed through one banshee screeching saw after another till finally cut down into wafer-thin short planks, and knocked into boxes to transport fish to every part of Britain.
Looking up, you can see perched on the roof tops, lines of hungry indignant looking seagulls like impatient vultures greedily eyeing the fish offal on the back of the waiting lorries.
A worker with his hair and clothes speckled with sawdust comes from the wood-yard and stands in the middle of the street holding up a hand to the already waiting vehicles like a copper on traffic control. After looking thoughtfully like a cricket umpire at the potential space to spare on both sides of the lorry and the gate, he goes in behind the zigzagged load and begins shouting, and giving the driver hand-jive like signals to help him back-in his massive load. The load is so long and the street so narrow that the pavements on both sides are blocked. Each attempt to align the trailers within the gates fails and is abandoned, only to begin another manoeuvre. Ever growing knots of frustrated people tie the pavements on both sides of the street waiting to pass.
Then suddenly, from around the corner of a terrace, comes old one-legged Harry Crane -- a real piece of work -- with his shock of bone-white hair, now intensified by the sunlight. As ever, he is in his one-legged brown suit, which is neatly cut and hemmed below the stump of the missing leg, which flaps to and fro as he comes swinging along on his ancient crutches -- his frame of wood -- is cross. Everyone knows the story of how Harry lost that leg. And they would be happy to tell you that Harry's leg was lost in a hole in France, where he had marched in and later hopped out like a blooded robin. His loped limb was left in that hole in no man's land in France. Which was a hole in the ground, and a hole in a man, and the black hole of the lost voices of his comrades in arms. The sun now makes stick shadows of his wooden strides as he wrestles along by the power of woodwork.
Seeing the situation, he laughingly calls out, 'look out boys I'm coming through!' And the man in the middle of the road, spotting him quickly rises his hands to the driver and shouts 'stop!' And everything jolts to a sudden halt. The people quickly make way for Harry, swinging nonchalantly through a gap behind the trailer. Laughing like a horse, he calls out, 'I 'aven't learnt to stop with these buggers yet! I might fall down if I do!'. The waiting groups laugh with him, and take advantage of the situation by following in his wake. The man giving directions, and the very ruddy frustrated face of the driver in his mirror force a thin dud smile at Harry, and then each other.
The gulls seem to sense the distraction and suddenly swoop down and grab up pieces of offal from the fish-barrels on the back of a waiting lorry. One rises up with a dangling fish skeleton in its beak pursued by a flock of squawking robbers.
The stressed looking driver now returns to the trouble of having to manipulate his Chinese puzzle through the tight space. Which is causing an ever greater build up of traffic along the street. Some of the more impatient drivers blast their horns, their nerves jangling in frustration! But for the people in the street this is no big deal -- it's a regular occurrence. And they know everybody must wait -- well, everybody except Harry Crane of course -- oh and maybe the blind-man, too -- who is known only as 'the blind-man', and lives in the next terrace to me. He wears nothing but off-white clothes just like his stick (well, what does he care about colour -- at least everyone sees him coming).Yes, I'm sure everything would stop for him when he comes click clicking along. And what suddenly comes to mind is: where exactly did he get those off-white clothes? Off-white hat, off-white mac, off-white trousers, down to his very off-white shoes? Did someone, god dam it, paint them for him? Or were they handed out to all blind people by the Blind Institute? I bet that's right! Was it so...? Ah, but it's all surmise now.
Anyway, let us leave them with the obstruction, and with my child's recall we'll venture further up the street towards the Hessle Road. We continue dodging the playing urchins, and passing the kid crowded terraces, which are separated only by narrow allies -- so narrow that the back doors had to be made to open inward. Here the rats, yellow mangy cats, and scavenging packs of skinny dogs haunt and search the dustbins, which are the rock bottom of the food chain.
Going further we may come across Old Mrs Honeygold, -- poor old sod -- slowly going on her way to the shops, pushing her empty battered old pram for stability! A sweet kind soft spoken, little old lady, who even on hot days like this is always well muffled up in her long black Victorian dress that sweeps the ground, and her round flat cake-like hat. Not being able to see her feet gives one the impression she is also on wheels, slowly rocking and rolling over the uneven street like a wind-up mechanism.
She has a pet tortoise with a shell as large as a dinner plate, which spends summer days creeping in slow motion like a spider about the terrace. Children like to bring it lettuce or cabbage leaves, and sometimes they find it escaping on to the street, getting dangerously close to the road.... They'll pick it up and take it back home, and she'll give them a sweet or two. She is the oldest soul in the street, as old as anyone gets, but, no one can say just how old, or which of them, her or the tortoise is older.
A bread-van goes hurrying by, doing its rounds, delivering at the three or four corner shops in the street. Look! two young boys unseen by the driver are riding on the metal step to the back door -- with grinning dirty faces they cling to the hand rails, shouting to all the kids as they speed by. It's those young rascals Eddy Church and Jimmy Grace, who live at the top end of the street. They're in the same class at school as my brother, Peter, who is one year older than me. And they are always in some kind of trouble. And those two in a few years will spend time in a remand home, deemed as 'out of their parents control' by the authorities. Then they would only be seen on their holiday leave.
They jump off as the van stops, making sure the driver getting out of his cab to make his deliveries doesn't see them. Then they jump back on as the van takes off again.
As we get halfway along the street the smell of frying fish fills our nostrils -- we have come to Oakes' fish-shop with its steamed up windows. It must be eleven thirty in the morning now, as one of the women who works there is opening the door to let in the growing queue, that is always there trying to beat the mad dinnertime-rush about to take place. Soon the barrow-boys also stinking of fish will arrive -- sent out from the factories with long lists of orders for the workers' midday meal.
With sweat running down his pale wooden face, little Billy Oaks the fish fryer is dropping fish and chipped potatoes in to the big deep fat filled fryers. And the two women start frantically wrapping the orders in old newspapers as fast as they can. The queue will soon run from the counter around the walls, out the door and along the street. You could, and many did, collapse from the heat while waiting on a hot day like today.
We suddenly hear the sound of horse's hoofs clip-clopping. There look! here comes old Hoss-Shit-Charlie plodding along on his moth-eaten old horse and ancient cart. He pulls the beast up, and jumps down on his bowed old legs to shovel a mound of horse-shit onto his cart. A small cheeky faced bag of rags calls out! 'Where there's muck there's brass eh Charlie!' But Charlie only glares, and never speaks.
All along the street on both sides we see boys and girls of different ages forming into their gangs, hanging around, squabbling and scuffling amongst themselves. Becoming more and more bored by the minute -- with nothing to do all day but fill the tabula rassa -- which by degrees will determine the severity of their day's dastardly deeds. Their eyes are watching for something -- anything.... they don't even have a clue what to hope for.... A distraction from this.....
One crew is already trying to catch some of the hundreds of fat bluebottle-flies that glisten like glass in the sunshine. They wait for them to land on the windowsills before nabbing them with a well-timed sweep of the hand! Caught! -- a boy pins the fly down on its back by its wings with two fingers, while another carefully slips a loop in a length of cotton over and around the fly's frantic kicking legs, and quickly pulls it tight! And hey presto! You have a fly on a lead.
Yes, and I confess. I was just another of these irked and cruel boys. And that was the kind of wickedness we little bastards got up to. All kinds of bad and mad stuff. But what mattered to us little bastards above all else, was that big boy's game of violence. Violence was around a thousand corners, had a thousand reasons, with a thousand faces -- all ugly and all mindless. An infection -- a contagion of nefarious aggression. With a thousand symptoms of a full blown decease called fear.
In this paradigm of violence and ignorance, bullying and fighting were no more than popular pass times. Every kid wanted to be the hardest in his gang, in the terrace, in the street, in the school. You had to be rather hard or good at sports to impress anybody. And god help you if you wasn't. Jesus! even the girls were hard. And back then, we actually thought it was all normal. Reading a book was looked on as being idle, while cleverness was an ability to make money, or otherwise just getting above yourself.
There was no soft side to Hessle Road. No gentleness, it was both a rock and a hard place -- an underworld full of subjugated souls. Their pride rubbed out by constant compromise. Where men, women and children were brutalised by landlords, bosses, the living conditions, and each other. And generally tormented by everything of the same kidney. Which produced in them a Piranha like mentality.
I have lasting and upsetting memories of drunken men dragging their screaming women by their hair home from the pubs. The women's eyes black and blue from the beatings their bastard husbands had handed out. The women of the street would come from their houses and curse these beasts, while their own men stood by yelling at them to get in and mind their own business. Hearts had been blackened and hardened since childhood -- pulverised for years by the soggy-end of life. It was the dark ages. All the senses blind. Their minds as cramped as their lives. And all us kids would be looking on -- being educated in this disgraceful school of butterfly breakers.
Families back then were only large, and then there were the Bates', Frazers', Gordens', and the likes -- not families but tribes -- with maybe eight, nine, ten kids (who was counting). And somehow these broods packed themselves into those tiny cringing two-up-two-down brick heaped hovels. Looking into those houses was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope.
I can only picture a family like the Bates' as a single unit of cowed and graceless flesh. Spotty as dominoes, with teeth the colour of lions, tramping the streets -- look-a-likes -- ragged and dirty waifs -- boys and girls with the same snotty noses, and the same lost-look, and scribble of uncombed hair. Youngest to oldest walking in Indian file -- a caravan going to and fro to school or the shops. With their hobnailed-boots clacking and scraping, they took the form of a straggling but well-shod centipede. They would scour the streets picking up every shard or splinter of broken box-wood any bigger than a lolly-stick, to take home to burn. They were just eight, nine, or ten unnoticed sad tears rolling down that hard indifferent surface. And I wonder where are they now. How did they fare? I don't think I ever knew any of their first names -- truly they were never more than a vague compound -- and just how sad is that? It makes me want to scream from here to Hull.
I think we've come far enough -- I think I'll leave you here.... Remember you're with a child, and normally I wouldn't want to be alone here..... A lone boy at the wrong end of the street -- I'd be a potential victim. It would be safer for me to creep like a lizard -- a hunted creature through the labyrinth of stinky allies that run behind the front houses of the street. Anything could happen to you here -- from, a quick on the spot beating from one of these gangs of goons, to being taken prisoner and tortured and tormented till the tears finally come. This is the local sport and I could easily become fresh meat.
So, this is the surface of my street and its boneless life, with its slow suffocation by ugliness. I can still feel the claustrophobia that stuck like glue. A place with no true colour -- if something was red, it would be a dirty red. A very strange limited colour palette would be needed to paint it -- a mongrel muck mix.
The whole rotten barrel was in a state of disrepair. Everything was out of kilter. The ugliness wept and jarred against the senses. Everything that could be broken would be broken: the road, the houses, noses, arms, legs, faces, heads, necks, backs, silence, promises, marriages, families, lives, spirits. A place where even dreams didn't work. A slum nothingness -- a black hole end sucking at emptiness. But, lets not get too nostalgic.... It is just one day. but it could represent all days.... But I only wanted to give you a seasonal postcard of sunny Gillette Street -- a full frontal -- bollocks and all. Well.... I think my phone's ringing....
(link to others chapters:)http://www.abctales.com/set/chris-whitley/adventures-in-a-difficult-world-a-novel
Berlin May 2006
Please let me know what you think.
