Turning my back on the fetid heat of the room, I walked over to the unshuttered window. I could see across the street into the rectory of Christ Church, Spitalfields: the shadowy, dark-wood staircase designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. An inaccessible ladder in time.
III
There is a grove in Victoria Park much favoured by a snakedhaired former ‘rent boy’, and his inherited dog. Tucked contentedly into his fifties, he remains clear-eyed, unlined; though tolerably weather-beaten. His shaggy dust-powdered mane — unremarked in the Living Theatre years — now drew the odd disapproving sniff from brutally-cropped joggers. Expensive orthodontia (the gift of a fastidious oralist) is being gently eroded by a compulsive fondness for lethally dyed gobstoppers. He dribbles constantly from the corners of a wide and slack-lipped grin. He is known, to those who cannot avoid him, as ‘The Mad Mason’; or, more recently, as ‘Neb’ or ‘Nebby’. This sobriquet deriving from his tendency to crawl along the ground, searching for lost coins, and spirit-messages from the wind. Neb was another who had been ‘driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’. William Blake might have been using a polaroid when he caught Neb’s likeness in 1795. But ‘The Mason’retained, above everything, a mad and reckless joy. Nose among dog turds, he laughed. He lived in an irreparable feud with himself: loud, ungoverned, shouting and punching at shadows. Like a streetwise tom cat he chewed the coarse-spined grass only to make himself sick, to retch up the poisons of the city.
If you spoke to him he would not look at you, because he did not believe you were really there. He plucked obsessively at the lobes of his ears; he gouged his cheeks. Flesh fell from him: turbid fruit. But he had survived the gloomy medical predictions — the venereal probes, the brain wires — by many years; and now his pre-twilight days were spent roaming the broad estates of the people’s park. Within the circumference of what he had already discovered, Neb was a free man.
But he was certainly not one of your usual dog fanciers: an evil category that have conspired to turn London into a steaming slough of inefficiently recycled horse-pieces. Those yelping pragmatists, the dog-owning tendency, huddled together beside a bench, in a circle of dead white earth, talking of ‘points’, diets, canine bowel movements: so many mothers at the school gates. They watched, with barely-concealed pride, as their braindamaged inbreeds did unspeakable things to the legs of collapsed cyclists, or knocked over a howling toddler. They only came to life if any mere pedestrain retaliated and spoke sharply to their darlings; and then they would scream the foulest obscenities, and call on their protector, PC Plod. Park-keepers and policemen, possibly through some kind of genetic deficiency, have a sentimental fondness for these hideous beasts. And, by law, the first bite is on the house. It goes unpunished. Count yourself lucky if you don’t get rabies.
Neb’s grove, fringed with Edwardian trees, was shunned by the dog people. But they paused, in their flight, to monitor their pets while they strained at the stool, legs rigid, eyes on stalks, tails erect, panting knots of concentration. ‘You better watch it, Missus,’ Neb would invariably shout, resenting the trespass. ‘They’re going to let the Koreans build a camp here. That dog of yourn’ll be dizzy, turning on a hot spit. They’ll think this place is a takeaway.’
It was a game. Neb did not care. He was sifting the rubbish the wind had blown against the fence of the keeper’s house. No bagman, Neb stuffed his pockets with scraps of old newspaper; which, later, in his Well Street garret, he would assemble into a promethean scrapbook of unconnected narratives. The Daily Telegraph and the Hackney Gazette were particular friends.
‘SEX CHANGE WIFE’ MURDERED AFTER WITCH’S WEDDING. Husband wanted affair with another man, court told. DERANGED KILLER IS LOCKED AWAY FOR EVER — 54-year-old man’s fingernails were ripped off with pliers — Mr Berman was a loner. CLASS WAR DENY ATTACK. DRUGS DOCTOR BACKON REGISTER. WOMAN RAPED BY GANG WHO LACED DRINK — as the evening progressed a group of ‘nice Chinese lads’ introduced themselves — when she awoke she was surrounded by a group of men, giggling hysterically, who pinned her down and took it in turns to rape her, she said. The East London Licensed Victuallers’ Association emphasized that they have never discriminated against gypsies. There is a difference between gypsies and Travellers. As a shopkeeper born and bred in Stoke Newington… I am writing a documentary TV programme about people with original jobs and driving ambition… Stamford Hill, where she was beaten, slashed with a knife, forced to sleep in a broom cupboard and warned that if she breathed a word she would be visited by black magic spirits.
The book-running days ended for Neb four years ago, shortly before the legendary Nicholas Lane went into exile. Neb had an obscure commission to purchase any items appearing on the stalls that touched on the Masonic Craft. But this was not enough for him: he lectured loudly on the corruptions of the Brotherhood to all who would, or would not, listen. He flapped, he spat: beak-nosed pamphleteer, bog-leveller. A William Prynne, born again. He broke the oath of silence, he waggled his tongue: on flyleafs, he sketched the secret seals. Browsers, picking effetely at Ardizzone squiggles, were initiated into the outlandish mysteries of the Bora Ceremony.
Inevitably, Neb was noticed. There was a rivaclass="underline" black-suited, loose-wigged, a silver dealer, with leather gloves, and the pallor of a stagnant urine sample. A man who bought, and removed from view, anything that even hinted at knowledge of the Ancient and Accepted Rites, the Higher Degrees. He would explode with gaseous ripples of fury, in a chain-reaction bilious attack, if these forbidden books were not, on the instant, polished, triple-bagged, and slid from the sight of the vulgar.
Then came the fateful day when the Mad One — who was beginning to mix the polemic rant with shrill anecdotes of some of his stickier ‘rent-boy’ triumphs — spotted a punter, debating with his wife the purchase of a pair of sugar tongs, and yelled, ‘I had your old man, Missus, twice: in the pergola by Manor House Hospital. You know it? Just off the Heath. He wasn’t much. Do you have to start him talking dirty?’ The death-kit, silver-hoarding Masonic hitman cornered, unexpectedly, at that moment, bearing some swag from the Georgian Village. He appeared — with a look of lemur-like paralysis — to recognize Neb: in both his capacities. But it was too late. Neb was flying.
‘Wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Look at him.’ Neb’s voice leapt into the equine register of a Frankie Howerd impersonator. He was enjoying himself. The punter’s wife was calcified; while the accused man, in reflex shame, was stuffing his pockets with all the silver snuffboxes on the stall. The stallholder, swathed in money belts like a Zapataist guerrilla, was puffing herself up, cobra-fashion, ready to emit a scream that would take out most of the windows between the canal and Barnsbury. ‘Tight-arsed bugger. You should see what he did to me. I can’t walk down to the Job Centre without leaning over. Don’t let him near you, love, when he’s got a broom-handle.’
One of Neb’s flailing manic arms caught Nicholas Lane’s wine glass, and spun it into the air — a chalice of blood — causing it to invert, and the blush of cheap red claret to soak gratefully into the pages of J. S. M. Ward’s Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods. As Neb reached forward to repair the damage, he succeeded only in tearing, into two unequal portions, the fold-out plate illustrating The Templar Charter of Transmission. He stood there, open-mouthed; flapping ineffectively at the wine stain with the ravished drawing.