The Complete Enderby (54 page)

‘You can’t, you mustn’t, you –’

‘Best to be shot, knifed, standing.’ He threw his blanket off. He was naked except for a safety-pinned towel like a baby’s diaper. ‘I insist, Enderby, you bastard. I’ll drink my terminal liquor in a bar, like a man. My viaticum, you swine.’ He started, cursing, to get up. Enderby had to help, no way out of it. He went further than he’d gone for anybody. He pulled off Rawcliffe’s diaper and wiped him clean with the clean part of it. He forgave his stepmother everything. There was a bathrobe on a nail behind the door. He put his arm round bare shivering Rawcliffe and shuffle-danced him towards it. ‘Better, Enderby, better,’ as he was clothed in gay yellow and blue. ‘Take me to the bar. Wake those bloody boys. They must be my crutch.’

Pushing Rawcliffe before him, Enderby yelled. Antonio peered out from the kitchen first, startled, naked as Rawcliffe had been. He went back in to get the others, himself yelling. Rawcliffe tried to yell but collapsed into coughing. He collapsed against the bar-counter, coughing, trying to curse. Soon Antonio and Manuel were
holding
him up, an arm each about him, in dirty white shirts; Manuel’s trousers were already black. ‘Now, Enderby,’ Rawcliffe gasped at last. ‘You say you’ve been a bloody barman. Mix me something. A cocktail called
Muerte
. Stop that blasted snivelling, you two.’ Tetuani, tarboosh on, came out, frightened.

And I will, thought Enderby. ‘Leave it to me,’ he said, adding, in desperate facetiousness, ‘sir.’ He took a large beer glass and slopped brandy in, then white rum, gin, whisky, vodka. The bottles flashed in the fair afternoon light. It was like celebrating something.

‘No need for ice,’ Rawcliffe gasped. ‘Get that, maybe, soon. That thing in bloody Shakespeare. Measure for measure, eh? Altogether fitting. Thrilling regions of ribbed ice. Top it, Enderby, with something spumous. Asti, memories of Rome. Add, for old times sake, a dollop of Strega. Strega, a witch. Witchbitch. That bloody man in Mallorca, Enderby, says the day of the moon goddess is done. The sun goddess takes over.’ Enderby found a bottle of Asti on the shelf, very warm, favoured of the sun. He cracked its neck against the counter-edge. ‘Good, Enderby.’ There was a fine gush. The stench of Rawcliffe was now well overlaid with powerful yea-saying aromas. But, admired Enderby, those boys’ stomachs were strong. He gave the full spuming glass to both Rawcliffe’s claws. ‘A toast,’ Rawcliffe said. ‘What shall it be, eh?
La sacra poesía?
The sun goddess? The survival of the spirit? to the,’ he began to droop, ‘impending dissolution,’ to snivel; the strong-handed boys began to snivel with him, ‘of this, of this –’ Enderby became stern: he didn’t like this snivelling. He cried:

‘Ah, shut up. Get that bloody drink down and shut up.’ It was strong fatherly talk; the medicine was wholesome; had not he, Enderby, once dared death, though dragged gurgling back? ‘Get on with it, Rawcliffe. Bloody traitor.’

‘Good, Enderby, good, good. No false compassion there. Excellent.’ Rawcliffe braced himself, pumped air into his lungs like a parody of a dog’s panting, then took his medicine. It spilled and rilled, the
mousse
got up his nose, he coughed some back into the glass, but he went gamely on to the dregs. Antonio put the flecked glass down for him. Rawcliffe gasped and gasped. ‘Put. That. On. The.’ He coughed, like payment, a coin of bloody sputum on to
the
counter. ‘I mean.
Muerte
. The. Ult. Ult. Ultmte. Cktl.’ He yearned towards his chair, feebly turning. The boys took him over, only his bare toes touching the floor. Rawcliffe collapsed next to his chair-side table, full of toys. Coventry Patmore. ‘Lil slp now.’ He at once began to snore. The boys put his feet up on the stackable. Enderby thought he had better now telephone Casablanca.

It was growing dark when Rawcliffe surfaced for the last time. Enderby had sent the boys out, sick of the hand-wringing and snivelling. He sat at the other side of Rawcliffe’s chair, smoking the local cigarettes that were called
Sporl
, not drinking. The thought of drink made him shudder. When Rawcliffe surfaced, it was with an accession – that condemned man’s supper – of clarity and calm. He said:

‘Who’s that there?’

‘Me. Enderby.’

‘Ah yes, Enderby. Know your poetry well. Stole one of your ideas once, a bloody good one. No regrets. Now I give you something in return. My last poem. It came to me in sleep. Listen.’ He cleared his throat like an elocutionist and intoned slowly but with vigour:

‘The benison of lights and the

Hides of asses and the

Milk of the tide’s churns.

She should not have

Rejected me like any copulative

Of the commonalty.

Too much light, Enderby. Turn one of those lights off.’

There were no lights on. ‘I’ve done that,’ Enderby said.

‘Good. Now where was I? Ah, I know. Listen.

At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers. There I him espied,

Who straight,
Your suit is granted
, said and died.’

‘That,’ Enderby said, ‘is George Herbert.’

Rawcliffe suddenly began to rage. ‘It’s not it’s not it’s not you fucking swine. It’s me. Me.’ In the dusk his head rolled. Quietly, ‘Your suit is granted,’ he said, and died. With the conventional accompaniment of rattle and postlude of rictus and liquidity.

‘AND,’ EASY WALKER
cried above the engine, ‘real donk dirt-bibles. Got a jarvey, brad, all towsermouth for that variety of how’s-your-Auntie-Doris-and-little-Nora-and-the-twins. So we’ll march on markers when this lot’s dooby-dooed.’

The physical assumption of Rawcliffe. His body, in clean pyjamas and wrapped in a Union Jack that Manuel had bought for a few dirhams in, of all places, the Big Fat White Doggy Wog, sat next to Easy Walker in what Enderby took to be the co-pilot’s seat. At least a kind of half-eaten steering-wheel or joystick in front of Rawcliffe twitched and turned in sympathy with Easy Walker’s. And also dead Rawcliffe had his share of very lively dials and meters and emergency instructions, exclamation-pointed. His arms were pinioned beneath the flag, and he was corded at neck, waist, thighs, and ankles. No danger of his, its, flailing around if ithe came back to life.

‘You sure he’s footed the old garbage-can proper?’ Easy Walker had asked while they had been bundling him in. ‘Because there’s been cases. There’s this case now, brad. Tell you after. Maybe you minced it all masterman.’

Enderby sat behind Rawcliffe, an empty seat next to him. It was a small but neat aircraft, American-made, though there was a spelling mistake, Enderby noted, in one of the instructions on the instrument-panel:
jetison
. That did not make him doubt the
airworthiness
of the craft, for it was always a matter of every man to his own trade. This one of piloting seemed as much a trade of Easy Walker’s as any of the others he professed. He had cried conversationally above the engine even as, tearing down the runway, he brought the speed up to air-speed:

‘A real donk passy too, there’ll be there. Left the whole bimbang kadoozer to you then, has he, brad?’

‘There’s the question of,’ Enderby had shouted. ‘That one of mine, I mean.’

‘Welcome to Bird County,’ Easy Walker had yelled as the craft nosed into the old-gold Moroccan air. The late afternoon sky to themselves, except for rare gulls and, far to port, a migrant exaltation of brownish birds that, after a rest on the top of Gibraltar, were crossing the Straits for their African wintering. No Air Maroc flight till very much later. Below on the cabochon-cut Mediterranean very few boats, though what looked like a rich man’s yacht gleamed to starboard. It was still the sun’s time. The moon, thin last night, was not watching over Rawcliffe’s ascension into heaven. Fattened, she would draw at him vainly from the deep, gnawed by fishes, his flag defiled. Over the aircraft wireless strange English crackled from Tangier control tower. Easy Walker ignored it. Aft lay Ceuta.

‘There was one,’ he yelled without effort, ‘Ricker Sugden did for like his booze brad when he kicked. Do too for this jarvey, I reckon.’ He recited, drowning the engine:

‘Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth,

Snipped like the stem of a caldicot flower,

Snarled time’s up ere he’d quaffed his hour,

Tossed to the tearing of the dour dog’s tooth.’

‘That’s not quite right for Rawcliffe,’ Enderby shouted. It wasn’t either. The right one was in all the anthologies, but Enderby’s calling of it would never prevail against this of Ricker Sugden’s. It was the right one only because it was the only one.

‘Bye, my brad, let the bright booze pour

That is suds of stars in the Milky Way,

And its door swing open all the joylit day

And the heavenlord landlord cry you time no more.’

‘Not one of his best,’ called Enderby, but he was not heard. Not obscure enough, too much meaning. Poor Rawcliffe. Traitor Rawcliffe rather, but he had paid. Your suit is granted. What suit? To be granted a cell, smallest unit of life. Enderby feebly tried to give out to sea, sky, and Easy Walker that last stanza (‘His salts have long drained into alien soil’), and then saw how inappropriate it really was. His soil would drain soon into alien salt. There was nothing for Rawcliffe. But it was something to rest in bones, rags of flag fluttering, at the sea’s bottom between two continents. It was a kind of poem. Easy Walker cried:

‘Nowsy wowsy. You right for the shove, brad?’ Enderby nodded, forgetting that Easy Walker’s eyes were ahead and there was no driving mirror. The corpse of Rawcliffe had lolled to rest against the perspex of the starboard door. Enderby roughly pushed it so that it began to topple gracefully against Easy Walker. ‘Watch it, watch it, brad.’ Leaning over, Enderby turned the door-handle, panting. It was rather stiff. Suddenly it opened and swung, and the huge roaring air without seemed to pull at him, but he dug his nails into Rawcliffe’s seat-back. ‘Nowsy wowsy powsy.’ Easy Walker made the craft list hard to starboard. There was a torrent of frozen air rushing in up diagonally now. Enderby clawed at the corpse through its flag-shroud, heaving it out, but, falling to the air, it seemed to be merely buoyed up by it. ‘Blast you, Rawcliffe,’ went Enderby for the last time. ‘Righty right,’ Easy Walker sang, and he kicked out at a dead shin. Then he listed farther. Enderby pounded and pushed. As it were reluctantly, Rawcliffe’s body launched itself into this quite inferior region of the sky, lower, surely, than Parnassus. ‘Got him, brad,’ meaning space had. The tricolour, crude in this sapphire and turquoise ambience, span slowly down. ‘Gone.’ Without sound, and with lips parted only as for a cigarette, the sea took him. Here lies one whose name was
not
writ in water, he had once said in his cups.

It was hard to get that door, which had swung open to its limit, back in place. But Easy Walker lurched violently to port and the door hurtled in and, on a lurch that brought them both lying on
their
sides as at a Roman supper, it slammed to. Then he righted the craft and, widely circling in the air, its nose sniffed round towards home. Home: what else could you call it? Green Africa ahead, then the geometry of the little airport, then a sudden urgent love for the runway. A three-point landing of the kind called insolently skilled, a taxiing towards Easy Walker’s waiting Volkswagen.

‘Talking about passports,’ Enderby said as they sped through the brown country outside town, ‘I’d like that back if you’ve still got it. I let it go too soon.’

‘Not poss, brad. Swallowed up, that, in the great dirty passy-hungry what-does-your-dad-do. Have this, though, your need being greater than. Dead jarveys help the living from their heart of darkness. Still. A pig of a pity.’

‘What I mean is,’ said Enderby. ‘I’m entitled to an official identity of some sort.’ But was he? And, if so, why? He might yet be taken somewhere, but he had no intention of making a move of his own. And, anyway, did bearing a name matter? Rawcliffe would be glad to be called anything or nothing if he could be alive again.

‘There was the time I got this passy just as the jarvey as todded it seemed like as to take off. But he came to, yes he did, when it was already swapping fumblers. Well, you’re all right, I’d say, with this Rawcliffe jarvey. He won’t come up, no, not never no more. Different from this jarvey back in Great Dirty Mum.’

When they arrived back at
El Acantilado Verde
, Rawcliffe’s other verbal monument, Easy Walker was eager to see what shady treasures there might be to buy cheap and sell dear. The three boys sat, in clean white, at a table by the bar-counter, playing some game which involved the linking of little fingers. They had difficulty in composing their faces to a funeral look. ‘All finished,’ Enderby said. ‘
Finito
.’ But there must be a better Spanish word than that.
Consommado?
It sounded soupish. ‘
Consummatum
,’ he said, pushing down to the roots.