Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings

  ‘I’ll come,’ Dody suddenly said.

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘Send Hamish along.’

  Bamber sighed. ‘He’ll be there.’

  Dody pedalled off toward Benet Street, red plaid scarf and black gown whipping back in the wind. Hamish: safe, slow. Like travelling by mule, minus mule-kicks. Dody chose with care, with care and a curtsey to the stone figure in her garden. As long as it was someone who didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Ever since the start of Lent term she had taken to brushing snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy centered in the snow-filled college garden. Leaving the long tables of black-gowned girls chattering and clinking glasses of water over the sodden dinners of spaghetti, turnips and slick fried egg, with purple raspberry fool for dessert, Dody would push back her chair, gliding, eyes lowered, obsequious, a false demure face on, past high table where Victorian-vintage dons dined on apples, chunks of cheese and dietetic biscuits. Out of the scrolled white-painted hall with its gilt-framed portraits of Principals in high-necked gowns leaning altruistic and radiant from the walls, far from the drawn, wan blue-and-gold ferned draperies, she walked. Bare halls echoed to her heels.

  In the vacant college garden, dark-needled pines made their sharp assaults of scent on her nostrils and the stone boy poised on one foot, wings of stone balancing like feathered fans on the wind, holding his waterless dolphin through the rude, clamorous weathers of an alien climate. Nightly after snows, with bare fingers, Dody scraped the caked snow from his stone-lidded eyes, and from his plump stone cherub foot. If not I, who then?

  Tracking across the snow-sheeted tennis courts back to Arden, the foreign students’ house with its small, elect group of South Africans, Indians and Americans, she begged, wordless, of the orange bonfire-glow of the town showing faint over the bare treetops, and of the distant jewel-pricks of the stars: let something happen. Let something happen. Something terrible, something bloody. Something to end this endless flaking snowdrift of airmail letters, of blank pages turning in library books. How we go waste, how we go squandering ourselves on air. Let me walk into Phèdre and put on that red cloak of doom. Let me leave my mark.

  But the days dawned and set, neatly, nicely, toward an Honours B.A., and Mrs Guinea came round, regular as clockwork, every Saturday night, arms laden with freshly laundered sheets and pillow-cases, a testimony to the resolute and eternally renewable whiteness of the world. Mrs Guinea, the Scottish housekeeper, for whom beer and men were ugly words. When Mr Guinea died his memory had been folded up forever like a scrapbook newspaper, labeled and stored, and Mrs Guinea bloomed scentless, virgin again after all these years, resurrected somehow in miraculous maidenhood.

  *

  This Friday night, waiting for Hamish, Dody wore a black jersey and a black-and-white checked wool skirt, clipped to her waist by a wide red belt. I will bear pain, she testified to the air, painting her fingernails Applecart Red. A paper on the imagery in Phèdre, half-done, stuck up its seventh white sheet in her typewriter. Through suffering, wisdom. In her third-floor attic room she listened, catching the pitch of last shrieks; listened: to witches on the rack, to Joan of Arc crackling at the stake, to anonymous ladies flaring like torches in the rending metal of Riviera roadsters, to Zelda enlightened, burning behind the bars of her madness. What visions were to be had came under thumbscrews, not in the mortal comfort of a hot-water-bottle-cosy cot. Unwincing, in her mind’s eye, she bared her flesh. Here, strike home.

  A knock beat on the blank white door. Dody finished lacquering the nail of her left little finger, capped the bottle of blood-bright enamel, holding Hamish off. And then, waving her hand to dry the polish, gingerly she opened the door.

  Bland pink face and thin lips set ready for a wiseguy smile, Hamish wore the immaculate navyblue blazer with brass buttons which made him resemble a prep school boy, or an off-duty yachtsman.

  ‘Hello,’ Dody said.

  ‘How’, Hamish walked in without her asking him, ‘are you?’

  ‘I’ve got sinus.’ She sniffed thickly. Her throat clotted, obliging, with an ugly frogging sound.

  ‘Look,’ Hamish laved her with waterblue eyes, ‘I figure you and I should quit giving each other such a hard time.’

  ‘Sure.’ Dody handed him her red wool coat and bunched up her academic gown into a black, funereal bundle. ‘Sure thing.’ She slipped her arms into the red coat as Hamish held it flared. ‘Carry my gown, will you?’

  She flicked off the light as they left the room and closed the door behind them. Ahead of Hamish down the two flights of stairs, step by step, she descended. The lower hall stood empty, walled with numbered doors and dark wainscotting. No sound, except for the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock in the stairwell.

  ‘I’ll just sign out.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ said Hamish. ‘You’ll be late tonight. And you’ve got a key.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘All the girls in this house have keys.’

  ‘But’, Dody whispered in protest as he swung the front door open, ‘Miss Minchell has such sharp ears.’

  ‘Minchell?’

  ‘Our college secretary. She sleeps with us, she keeps us.’ Miss Minchell presided, tight-lipped and grim, over the Arden breakfast table. She’d stopped speaking, it was rumored, when the American girls started wearing pajamas to breakfast under their bathrobes. All British girls in the college came down fully dressed and starched for their morning hot tea, kippers and white bread. The Americans at Arden were fortunate beyond thought, Miss Minchell sniffed pointedly, in having a toaster. Ample quarter pounds of butter were allotted each girl on Sunday morning to last through the week. Only gluttons bought extra butter at the Home and Colonial Stores and slathered it double-thick on toast while Miss Minchell dipped her dry toast with disapproval into her second cup of tea, indulging her nerves.

  A black taxicab loomed in the ring of light from the porch lamp where moths beat their wings to powder on spring nights. No moths now, only the winter air like the great pinions of an arctic bird, fanning shivers up Dody’s spine. The rear door of the cab, open on its black hinges, showed a bare interior, a roomy cracked-leather seat. Hamish handed her in and followed her up. He slammed the door shut, and, as at a signal, the taxi spun off down the drive, gravel spurting away under the wheels.

  Sodium vapor lights from the Fen Causeway wove their weird orange glare among the leafless poplars on Sheep’s Green and the houses and storefronts of Newnham Village reflected the sallow glow as the cab bounced along the narrow pot-holed road, turning with a lurch up Silver Street.

  Hamish hadn’t said a word to the driver. Dody laughed. ‘You’ve got it all set, haven’t you?’

  ‘I always do.’ In the sulphur light from the street lamps Hamish’s features assumed an oddly oriental cast, his pale eyes like vacant slits above high cheekbones. Dody knew him for dead, a beer-sodden Canadian, his wax-mask escorting her, for her own convenience, to the party of tea-time poets and petty university D. H. Lawrences. Only Leonard’s words cut through the witty rot. She didn’t know him, but that she knew, that shaped her sword. Let what come, come.

  ‘I always plan ahead,’ Hamish said. ‘Like I’ve planned for us to drink for an hour. And then the party. Nobody’ll be there this early. Later they might even have a few dons.’

  ‘Will Mick and Leonard be there?’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘No. Just read them.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll be there. If anybody is. But keep away from them.’

  ‘Why? Why should I?’ Worth keeping from is worth going to. Did she will such meetings, or did the stars dictate her days, Orion dragging her, shackled, at his spurred heel?

  ‘Because they’re phonies. They are also the biggest seducers in Cambridge.’

  ‘I can take care of myself.’ Because when I give, I never really give at all. Always some shrewd miser Dody sits back, hugging the last, the most valuable crown jewel. Always safe, nun-tending her stat
ue. Her winged stone statue with nobody’s face.

  ‘Sure,’ said Hamish. ‘Sure.’

  The cab pulled up opposite the pinnacled stone facade of King’s, starched lace in the lamplight, masquerading as stone. Black-gowned boys strode in twos and threes out of the gate by the porter’s lodge.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Hamish handed her down to the sidewalk, stopping to count his coppers into the palm of the featureless cabdriver. ‘It’s all arranged.’

  From the polished wooden bar of Miller’s, Dody looked to the far end of the carpeted room at the couples going up and down the plush-covered stair to the diningroom: hungry going up, stuffed coming down. Greasy lip-prints on the goblet edge, partridge fat congealing, ruby-set with semi-precious chunks of currant jelly. The whisky was starting to burn her sinus trouble away, but her voice was going along with it, as it always did. Very low and sawdusty.

  ‘Hamish.’ She tried it.

  ‘Where have you been?’ His warm hand under her elbow felt good as anybody’s warm hand. People swam past, undulant, with no feet, no faces. Outside the window, bordered with green-leaved rubber plants, face-shapes bloomed toward the glass from the dark outside sea and drifted away again, wan underwater plantets at the fringe of vision.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready. Have you got my gown?’ Hamish showed the black patch of cloth draped over his arm, and started to shoulder a path through the crowds around the bar toward the swinging glass door. Dody walked after him with fastidious care, focussing her eyes on his broad navyblue back, and, as he opened the door, ushering her ahead of him onto the sidewalk, she took his arm. Steady as he was, she felt safe, tethered like a balloon, giddy, dangerously buoyant, but still quite safe in the boisterous air. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. With care, she square-walked.

  ‘You’d better put your gown on,’ Hamish said after they’d been walking a bit. ‘I don’t want any proctors to nab us. Especially tonight.’

  ‘Why especially?’

  ‘They’ll be looking for me tonight. Bulldogs and all.’

  So at Peas Hill, under the green-lit marquee of the Arts theater, Hamish helped her to slip her arms into the two holes of the black gown. ‘It’s ripped here on the shoulder.’

  ‘I know. It always makes me feel as if I’m in a straitjacket. Keeps slipping down and pinning my arms to my sides.’

  ‘They’re throwing gowns away now, if they catch you in a ripped one. They just come over and ask for it and tear it up on the spot.’

  ‘I’d sew it up,’ Dody said. Mend. Mend the torn, the tattered. Salvage the ravelled sleeve. ‘With black embroidery thread. So it wouldn’t show.’

  ‘They’d love that.’

  Through the cobbled open square of Market Hill they walked hand in hand. Stars showed faint above the blackened flank of Great St Mary’s Church which had housed, last week, penitent hordes hearing Billy Graham. Past the wooden posts of the empty market stalls. Then up Petty Cury, past the wine merchant’s with his windows of Chilean burgundy and South African sherry, past the shuttered butcher shops, and the leaded panes of Heffer’s where the books on display spoke their words over and over in a silent litany on the eyeless air. The street stretched bare to the baroque turrets of Lloyd’s, deserted except for a few students hurrying to late dinners or theatre parties, black gowns flapping out behind them like rooks’ wings on the chill wind.

  Dody gulped cold air. A last benison. In the dark, crooked alleyway of Falcon Yard, light spilled out of upper-story windows bursts of laughter came, dovetailing with the low, syncopated, strut of a piano. A doorway opened its slat of light to them. Halfway up the glaring steepness of the stair, Dody felt the building waver, rocking under the railing her hand held, her hand slimed chill with sweat. Snail-tracks, fever-tracks. But the fever would make everything flow right, burning its brand into her cheeks, blotting out the brown scar on her left cheek in a rose of red. Like the time she went to the circus when she was nine, with a fever, after putting ice under her tongue so the thermometer wouldn’t register, and her cold had vanished when the sword-swallower sauntered into the ring and she fell for him on the spot.

  Leonard would be upstairs. In the room at the top of the stairs she and Hamish were now ascending, according to the clocked stations of the stars.

  ‘You’re doing fine.’ Hamish, just behind her shoulder, his hand firm under her elbow, lifted her upward. Step. And then, step.

  ‘I’m not drunk.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  The doorframe hung suspended in a maze of stairs, walls lowering, rising, shutting off all the other rooms, all the other exits but this one. Obedient angels in pink gauze trolleyed away on invisible wires the surplus scenery. In the middle of the doorway Dody poised. Life is a tree with many limbs. Choosing this limb, I crawl out for my bunch of apples. I gather unto me my winesaps, my coxes, my bramleys, my jonathans. Such as I choose. Or do I choose?

  ‘Dody’s here.’

  ‘Where?’ Larson, beaming, his open American face hearty, faintly shiny, as always, with an unsquelchable easy pride, came up, glass in hand. Hamish did away with Dody’s coat and gown and she laid her scarred brown leather pocketbook on the nearest windowsill. Mark that.

  ‘I’ve drunk a lot,’ Larson observed, amiable, shining with that ridiculous pride, as if he had just successfully delivered quadruplets in a nearby maternity ward. ‘So don’t mind what I say.’ He, waiting for Adele, stored niceness spilled honey-prodigal, with Adele’s lily head in mind. Dody knew him only by hellos and goodbyes, with Adele ever in attendance. ‘Mick’s gone already.’ Larson jutted his thumb into the seethe and flux of dancers, sweat smells and the Friday night stew of pungent warring perfumes.

  Through the loose twining rhythms of the piano, through the blue heron-hover of smoke, Dody picked out the boy who was Mick, sideburns dark and hair rumpled, he doing a slow wide brand of British jive with a girl in sweater and skirt of hunter’s green close-cleaving as frog-skin.

  ‘His hair’s standing up like devil’s horns,’ Dody said. They would all be girled then, Larson, Leonard. Leonard up from London to celebrate the launching of the new magazine. Straight-faced, she had taken in Adele’s rumors, questioning, casual, spying from her battlement until Leonard loomed like the one statue-breaker in her mind’s eye, knowing no statues of his own. ‘Is that Mick’s artist girl?’

  Larson beamed. ‘That’s the ballet dancer. We’re taking ballet now.’ A deep knee-bend, sloshing his glass, spilled half. ‘You know, Mick is Satanic. Like you say. You know what he did when we were kids in Tennessee?’

  ‘No.’ Dody’s eyes scanned the peopled room, flicking over faces, checking accounts for the unknown plus. ‘What did he do?’

  There. In the far corner, by the wooden table, bare of glasses now, the punch bowl holding only a slush of lemonpeel and orangerind, a tall one. Back to her, shoulders hunched in a thick black sweater with a rolled-up collar, elbows of his green twill shirt stuck through the sweater-holes. His hands shot up, out, and scissored air to shape his unheard talk. The girl. Of course, the girl. Pale, freckled, with no mouth but a pink dim distant rosebud, willowed reedy, wide-eyed to the streaming of his words. It would be what’s-her-name. Dolores. Or Cheryl. Or Iris. Wordless and pallid companion of Dody’s classical tragedy hours. She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever. Sending her corpse for a stand-in at supervisions. To read about the problem of Prometheus in a rustling, dust-under-the-bed voice. While shut miles away, sanctuaried safe, she knelt in her sheet before the pedestaled marble. A statue-worshipper. She, too. So.

  ‘Who’, Dody asked, sure now, ‘is that?’

  But nobody answered.

  ‘About wild dogs,’ Larson said. ‘And Mick was king of the wild dogs and made us fetch and carry…’

  ‘Drink?’ Hamish emerged at her elbow with two glasses. The music stopped. Applause spattered. Ragged scum on the surge of voices. Mick came, finning the crowd apart with his elbows.

  ‘Dance?’

/>   ‘Sure.’ Mick held Leonard’s hours in his navyman’s hand. Dody lifted her glass and the drink rose up to meet her mouth. The ceiling wavered and walls buckled. Windows melted, belling inward.

  ‘Oh, Dody,’ Larson grinned. ‘You’ve spilled.’

  Wet drops watered the back of Dody’s hand, a dark stain extended, spreading on her skirt. Marked already. ‘I want to meet some of these writers.’

  Larson craned his thick neck. ‘Here’s Brian. The editor himself. Will he do?’

  ‘Hello.’ Dody looked down at Brian who looked up at her, dark-haired, impeccable, a dandy little package of a man. Her limbs began to mammoth, arm up the chimney, leg through the window. All because of those revolting little cakes. So she grew, crowding the room. ‘You wrote that one about the jewels. The emerald’s lettuce-light. The diamond’s eye. I thought it was….’

  Beside the polished black hearse of the piano Milton Chubb lifted his saxophone, his great body sweating dark crescents under the arms. Dilys, shy, fuzzy chick of a thing that she was, nestled under his arm, blinking her lashless lids. He would crush her. He must be four times her size. Already, at college, a private fund had been raised among the girls to send Dilys to London to rid herself and her small rounding belly of Milton’s burgeoning and unwanted heir. A whine. A thump thump.

  Mick’s fingers gripped for Dody’s. His hand, lean, rope-hard, palm calloused, swung her off the hook of her thought and she kept going out, out of gravity’s clutch. Planets sparked in the far reaches of her head. M. Vem. Jaysun Pa. Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars. I’ll get there. Jupiter. Saturn. Turning strange. Uranus? Neptune, tridented, green-haired. Far. Mongoloid-lidded Pluto, then. And asteroids innumerable, a buzz of gilded bees. Out, out. Bumping against someone, rebounding gently, and moving back to Mick again. To the here, to the now.