The Holy City

  However, this much I knew — I never wanted it to happen again. I knew I couldn’t afford to let it. For once that zigzag fissure appeared: it had the potential to grow with a quite bewildering but fiercely destructive speed. But, thankfully, as I say, all of that is over now, and I can safely say we won’t be witnessing a recurrence.

  Thus the Happy Club opens up every night, with Vesna resting there, propped up on her lacy pillows, as her husband hums Tony Bennett or Karen Carpenter. Musing:

  — My Croatian love. We’ve only just begun, ha ha.

  The truth being, really, that to all intents and purposes we have more or less bidden goodbye to the club called Mood Indigo for ever. For, as Paul Newman once remarked of his own wife Joanne Woodward, why eat hamburger when you’ve steak at home. Vesna laughs whenever I say that. But there can be no mistaking the fact that she feels complimented. As I trace my finger along her pale-blue lips, placing little kisses all along her powder-white arms. Counting the minutes until it’s time — for the moon to come out and the golden treasury to be read.

  — ‘Escape at Bedtime’ in our Happy Club home, I’ll say to her, fixing us both a nice daiquiri.

  Although, having said that our days in the club most likely are numbered, only two nights ago I dropped into Mood Indigo. The minute I appeared Mike Corcoran shouting out:

  — Ah, there he is, the very man I was looking for, Pops McCool — you’re just in time to give me a hand.

  He gave me the job of putting up a few decorations, for they were throwing a party in honour of George Best — apparently it was the fortieth anniversary of the game against Benfica.

  — Hand me up those pennants there, Pops, come on now, lad, shake a leg — there’s work to be done! he laughed, climbing a stepladder with a red flag clenched between his teeth. As I reeled in a line of the Man. United triangles.

  By the time we were finished the place was a red-and-white ‘United’ wonderland. They had really gone to town on the Georgie stuff too — all of it adding to the ‘retro’ feel, which is part and parcel of the whole Mood Indigo attraction, the ‘sixties vibe’, as the proprietor calls it. With coloured advertisements pasted all over the walls, including everything from World Cup Willie to chewing gum to cigarettes and Chevrolet cars. They had done up behind the bar, too — it was a riot. A veritable Day-Glo kitsch montage: with Jackie Onassis in her knee-length black, smiling over at Sean Connery playing James Bond in Dr No.

  After we’d finished stringing up the pennants, I sat drinking with Mike, just laughing and joking and chatting away about old times. And although I kept insisting that I couldn’t remain long, that Vesna was on her own back at the apartment, he succeeded, as usual, in persuading me to stay — to listen to a couple of tunes from the band. And I was glad that I did, for, at my request, they played a lot of my favourites — including ‘No Milk Today’, ‘Goodnight Midnight’ and ‘Come Back and Shake Me’, Clodagh Rodgers’ two greatest hits.

  I was in my element, I have to say, sitting by the window, in my favourite place. Watching the go-go girls in their wet-look boots, mischievously teasing Fat Curly the comedian.

  — Och come on, me auld muckers! Surely youse have to laugh! he snorted as he did a vaudeville version of the twist, with the girl scissoring her legs around Fat Curly’s waist, before saying goodbye as Mike and the Chordettes started up anew.

  There were spot prizes after a while and one of the highlights was their cover of ‘Sugar, Sugar’, the theme by the Archies, if you recall.

  Outshone, however, as always, by:

  — I am the Eggmah! I am the Walnut!

  I can hardly believe it myself whenever I reflect on what happened after that. It’s mind-blowing, really — even to think about.

  For, with absolutely no warning of any kind, bold as brass, who should come walking out in front of the stage, wiggling her hips without so much as a care in the world? Lulu, if you don’t mind — arguably the finest female singer, bar none, of the sixties. And whose hits included ‘I’m a Tiger’, ‘The Boat That I Row’ — not omitting, of course, the quite unforgettable ‘To Sir With Love’, from the 1969 movie of the same name — with Sidney Poitier. Our visitor was sporting an Alice band and had her sparkling ginger hair turned up at the bottom in that absolutely adorable little sixties cutesy way.

  Before seating herself down right at the end of the stage, dangling her legs over the edge and looking up with those lovely dimples and smoothing her black-hooped orange miniskirt beneath her bottom. Just relaxing there comfortably, taking in everything that was going around, in that lovely big-eyed happy way of hers. It was at that point I realised just how far I had actually come. How far I had actually travelled — psychologically, I mean. And I felt proud, really. How could I not?

  You’ll often see Lulu on the TV these days — on daytime chat shows and the like, discussing her pop career and what it had been like to grow up in the rough-and-tumble Glasgow of the post-war era. And yes, her voice is as good as ever it was. Every bit as good. Relaxing there now, she didn’t seem a day over sixteen, the age she would have been when ‘Boom Bang A Bang’ had been a hit. Or, as my wife would have it, ‘Boom Bank A Bank’!

  And which the young singer had actually taken to Eurovision glory.

  Ironically, a fact which had not escaped me as I saw her waltzing onstage, Lulu’s movie To Sir With Love had been showing in the Magnet cinema in Cullymore on the night before The Soul’s Ascent was due to play in the cathedral. It had moved me a little, recalling that detail, and for a moment or two I diverted my attention from the vital, big-eyed Scottish vocalist, easing my handkerchief from my breast pocket as I dabbed a small tear or two away.

  Before returning my attentions to her — after strenuous efforts, at last attracting her attention. A delightful little ripple of pleasure running through me as I watched her pushing her little tiny fists up to her face, chuckling impishly in that girlish way — clearly gratified by the recognition.

  — Peter Wyngarde at milady’s service, I joked — and I could see she was getting a great kick out of it.

  Peter Wyngarde, of course, being the suave-talking English buccaneer who played the part of the secret agent Jason King in Department S.

  But that had just been a laugh, our little joke — and all the way through, subsequently, I remained as cool as a breeze. Before turning away at last, singing along with Mike and the rest of the Chordettes — effortless, nonplussed: easy come, easy go.

  Talk about coming a long way. I obviously had and what was more, I knew it. For, in any other circumstances, especially after the bitter row I’d had with Vesna before coming out, even the slightest glimpse of Lulu like that — I mean she couldn’t have been more than nine inches in height, about the size of the average milk bottle I would say — who knows what effect it might have had on my equilibrium? But not now. And, as far as I was concerned, that could only point to one thing. One’s essential, and indeed laudable, rock-solid stability.

  I had only just arrived in that morning — after that business in the farmers’ market, I mean. And being quite shaken, was obviously in no mood for altercations, serious or otherwise. Finding my wife, still as yet oblivious of my presence, talking in a low voice on the telephone: long-distance, evidently. Conversing with her sister, I surmised. Unless, of course, that too would turn out to be yet another self-serving fabrication.

  — I very worried, Carla, I heard her say. So strange. The way he look at me sometimes. I get frighten.

  As soon as she saw me she put the phone down.

  — Darlink! she said.

  — Huh-who was that on the phone just now, huh-who were you talking to? I asked her — with impressive detachment and coolness, even if I say so myself.

  But, somehow, comparatively rigorous as I was, I couldn’t seem to sustainedly marshal my thoughts. And my mind, maddeningly, kept returning to the stacked cardboard trays. And I kept on hearing — or thought I was hearing — that mute, collective cry: Please help us! I
would think then of mouths as they opened and closed. But then I remembered — they didn’t have any mouths. I stood there in the lounge of our apartment, with Vesna standing shivering on the landing directly above.

  I couldn’t stop myself staring at the wall directly behind her — where a hair-thin crack had, cruelly, already begun to form. A spiderline gradually appearing in the paintwork, oozing out of it now a glutinous amber fluid: the confluence of self-pity and sentiment, memory’s lava.

  It soon became apparent that if I didn’t act decisively — the only outcome was to become entirely overwhelmed. For, in a matter of mere seconds, I knew, the dread aperture would have fatally widened — exponentially. Exposing, in vivid detail, a bitterly taunting tableau, a hideously parodie, grotesque assembly. Depicting the following, unfailingly, I already could sense it:

  Little Tristram standing behind the high French windows, staring out — but not impassively. Standing there smirking — lofty, incurious. Blurred, sort of disfigured by the descending rivulets of streaming rain.

  — Hello, Christopher my half-brother, I heard him say. Are you not coming in? Or are you not permitted? What a pity.

  I flinched, covering my face with my hands.

  — Hello, I’m Stan, I heard another, deeper voice say. Yes, I’m Stanislaus Carberry — you’d probably remember me, a burly accountant who looks like a labourer. I rode your mother, C.J. Slipped her a length of pipe, as the boys used to say. Gave her a bit of a dart, oh aye. They’ll talk about mysteries, Christy. Mystery this and mystery that. But there’s no fucking mystery. They’re just like us, with the very same fears. They’re just better at covering it up, that’s all, and it’s money and class that helps them to do it. There was no mystery the night she begged me to take her to the barn. You’re far warmer than Henry’ll ever be, she said. Oh how I wish I could run away with you. I like Catholics — they know how to live. Living with Thornton — you make love to a statue. I love you, Stan. Take me away. Take me away with you, Stanislaus Carberry. Not so mysterious, is it, sonny? The Protestant fanny — why, boys, it opened wide. One wee tickle and, boys, but the Proddy, didn’t she go and let out the sacred light — after Carberry breached the walls of the city, after he tore the fucking gates down.

  He looked at me before turning away: shrugging, un-fazed.

  Then I heard it — ever so softly at first, the first fragile notes of the hymn beginning to rise and converge:

  — Abide with me; fast falls the eventide:

  The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.

  As always, there was the same strange, ethereal, beguiling beauty and I found myself helplessly caught up in it — quite lost. As, paradoxically, in that tiny fleeting second it seemed that, even yet, happiness might be within my grasp.

  But then I opened my eyes and saw him. I could not believe it — standing there, directly in front of me, just as he had been when we met on the street — Marcus Otoyo. In the very position where Vesna had been, directly above me. Attired in the girdled brown garb of Martin de Porres, he might have been on the verge of addressing a congregation.

  Where had he come from, I asked myself.

  Illogical though it might seem, I somehow succeeded in persuading myself that Vesna had for some reason shed all her clothes and forced herself into this somewhat shapeless and coarse brown Capuchin-style outfit. She was holding a missal and looking up, smiling, contriving an attitude of beatified rapture.

  I began to get the joke at last as I snapped my fingers and gave my thigh a smack, beginning to appreciate the hilarity of the situation.

  — Ha ha! I laughed. Vesna! Yeah, Stevie Wonder. You got the joke. You made it your business to find out who he was. Well, I have to say that I’m pretty impressed! The joke’s on poor old Christy now!

  I laughed again, doing a little dance. And said:

  — Oh Vesna baby, you for sure are outasite! A real gone kookie, that’s no lie!

  I even sang a little snatch of the song:

  — My Cherie Amour, distant as the Milky Way!

  But the longer ‘she’ stood there — unsmiling, almost grim — the more it became apparent that, regrettably, in fact, it wasn’t Vesna. Certainly it might have been her in the beginning. But, whatever the likelihood of that — it certainly wasn’t the case now. I would have given anything to make him like the others — to turn him into Lulu, Herb Alpert or Mukti. To make him too a mere six or nine inches high. The size of a milk bottle, or even a table-leg — so that he mightn’t represent the same threat as he did now.

  But he wasn’t, you see. He wasn’t the height of a table-leg, I’m afraid. No, unlike all the others, Marcus Otoyo was every bit as large as I remembered him in life. Standing there, smiling, haughtily gazing down at me — casually adjusting his Foster Grant sunglasses. So cool I might not have even been in the room — as his jaws rotated and, unflappably, he continued to chew his gum.

  Yes, chewing that gum, to be brutally frank about it, as if I had never existed at all. But what happened next I found even more difficult to come to terms with. As, without any indication or warning at all, he parted his lips, opened his mouth and began to sing. With his eyes uplifted and his dusky hands folded. Hardly even aware of what I was doing, already I had found myself falling to my knees, unconsciously apprehending myself as some crusader of old, a soldier of antiquity — exhausted and humbled, crouched in homage outside the gates of a sacred, shining city.

  — At last I have reached it, I could hear my voice, clear as a bell, extolling. This city of sapphire where abide the lost tribes.

  As Marcus Otoyo’s voice sailed out across the landing, approaching a crescendo — pealing, it seemed, in the hot desert sun, borne upon it the echo of forgotten trumpets, now resounding in glory across the ramparts of history:

  — Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Hosanna, hosanna, lift up your gates and sing!

  As the minarets flickered beyond the high stone walls, the Byzantine towers gleaming as then at last it came: the robust falsetto of a vast, massed choir. Rending, it seemed, the very roof of heaven itself, booming above me in the livid sunset:

  — Hosanna in the highest! Hosanna to our King!

  With his rich voice proceeding sonorously — exactly as it had done on the steps of the high altar during the play’s performance, when he had surpassed himself in his role as Blessed Martin as he continued:

  — In the holy place of love, he continued, the altar was heaped with fragrant masses of flowers: and as I prayed there, methought I saw the gorgeous crimson piles of glory in the west. Where a cloud floated across the western heaven, like a seraph’s wing in its flaming beauty. Far beyond that hilltop city of the Bible where they had placed them, God’s blooms. White flowers that were as clear and silent as my own soul, as I swooned and prepared for the descent of my last end.

  When I looked again, Marcus Otoyo had disappeared, with nothing remaining now but the thin, cowed figure of my wife staring fearfully through the fencing of the banisters. So pale, in fact, that I thought her quite beautiful. And told her so. As I slowly began my ascent of the stairs.

  — Vuh-Vesna, I said, as I stroked her cheek, Vesna. I want us both to be together for ever. Together for ever in the city of love. In our own sacred home, where the gates will remain closed to the outside world for ever. And where but we too, as eternal lovers, shall reside.

  I paused and looked away. Then I turned, and once more stroked her cheek.

  — Do you agree to that, Vesna? Duh-duh-do you, my precious?

  She choked and kind of stammered, but didn’t really give a response that was satisfactory.

  21 To Sir With Love

  As I never tire of repeating to my beloved, even the most unremarkable events contain the potential to yield the most rewarding of life’s pleasures.

  — For example, Vesna, I will often remark — particularly if I am in the process of daubing her black eyelashes with this tiny little mascara brush, or buttoning her dress up at the back — how consistent is t
he satisfaction these small, otherwise seemingly insignificant mementos of ours continue to give us?

  And which is why they are so much a part — an essential part — of our lives here in the Happy Club. All these little bits and pieces, so lovingly collected over the years: the numerous Carpenters albums, ancient singles by Herman’s Hermits — all lying randomly scattered about the club — amidst, of course, the other debris, namely all the empty Martini bottles as well as who knows how many crushed packets of Peter Stuyvesants. Then there are the other — even more precious — artefacts. Such as the gilt-framed photo of Ethel Baird, which proudly adorns the mantelpiece. And which, shamefully, I’m forced to admit, I illicitly removed from her house that day. An act I’m not particularly proud of, I have to say.

  But I simply couldn’t resist it. Depicting as it does those two remarkable women — Ethel Baird and my mother Lady Thornton, smiling in her girlish collar with its delicate edging of smooth seed pearls. Standing beside a baby grand piano one sunny autumn day long ago, in the grounds of Thornton Manor, singing hymns on the lawn. And in which they look every inch the Protestant ladies, in their hats and gloves and perms, with husband Henry standing stiffly behind. As if to say: However grudgingly, I must say, I do approve.

  For Marcus too, of course, Ethel never had anything but the highest of praise.

  — I have never encountered such — such honesty of feeling I remember her remarking, a quality particularly in evidence whenever he sings ‘The Holy City’ for me, that lovely old standard by Weatherly and Adams. Far and away the finest pupil I think I have ever taught, sweet Marcus Otoyo. The town of Cullymore should be so proud.

  I’d watch him going in, parking the Massey out of sight across the street. Thinking of him inside the parlour, fingering the notes of ‘The Holy City’ on Ethel Baird’s old walnut upright. At that time, it has to be emphasised, he had never demonstrated anything but the most exquisite manners towards me. In fact, was almost unbearably courteous. Sometimes, while he was waiting for Ethel to open the door, I could see him busying himself combing those tight corkscrew curls. And it would always seem as if time had stopped, as if this was a crystallised moment in history for us, with no past, no future — just this singular, lightflickering instant, sandwiched between twin unfathomable eternities.