The Lady Eleanor had been left alone to cope with any dramas, short of a visitation from the angel with the key to the bottomless pit. Unable to lever herself from the adhesive surface of the stool, or to show her face in the retort of the street bar, she essayed a rising sequence of hysterical fit-inducing hisses and whistles. Joblard, ever the gent, was constrained to stagger forward; partly from a nice sense of social obligation, but mostly in quest of serviceable lowlife anecdotes, should it prove necessary — as it so often did — to sing for his supper around the dinner tables of such recently humanized investment opportunities as Finsbury Park or South-west Hackney.
The first Paddy, late of County Offaly — a sullen, custard-pallor student of Aquinas — made skilful use of a well-seasoned crutch; jabbing with dogmatic insistence at his opponent’s sauce-stained waistcoat, while mumbling a succession of discredited Latin tags. The cumulative effect of these guerrilla raids was to enrage his elderly adversary to the point of a massive sunrise apoplexy. The man’s spectacles — more decorative than functional — sported only to sustain the gravitas of a former ‘boy curate’ at Mooney’s House, Pearse Street, shattered when the sharpened crutch-tip caught him a spiteful blow behind the ear; bringing his misshapen blackberry-crusted nose into sudden and violent contact with the formica.
The engrossed but watchful North Britons saw their chance and, punting the crutch under a bench, left the Offaly sciolist grounded and cursing, while they dragged the honourably-discharged potman — whom they correctly assessed as the weaker vessel — out into the yard; where they proceeded to kick what remained of the living daylights out of him.
The potman’s fury was unabated; he was unusually blessed in still having a few functional grinders left in his mouth — which he clamped, with commendable pluck, in the green calf of the nearest Scotsman, whose howls brought the children in from the streets, and gathered quite a crowd of disengaged ladies of the night. Murder, cannibalism — or the first dentally-performed amputation — was narrowly avoided by the swift action of Joblard, who summoned the Count. Annoyed at being diverted by this puny affray from the imminent sacrifice of a non-Aryan fowl, Jerzy produced a baroque service revolver from behind the bar, and began to pistol-whip the Caledonian raiding party. They were put to ignominious flight, leapfrogging each other, through the liquid mush of an upturned bin, to reach the safety of the Doss House. It was Culloden Moor revisited.
So this was the curious social sketch with which Joblard lured me into a meet: at the modest cost of a couple of rounds of beer, and a probable tandoori luncheon. There was already a dotted ‘tear here’ track running down my spine. I was ready to split wide open. I trembled in that state of mingled inspiration and paranoid-dementia, in which the strangest characters I could capture on paper, after many sleepless nights, would interrupt my agonized efforts at composition with a brisk knock on the door. They only wanted to introduce themselves, to put a few simple questions about ‘the geometry of time and transformation’. They begged to confess, dragging sacks of documents into the hallway. They recited, with perfect recall, the legends I had not yet nerved myself to complete. Once, as I passed a cinema, on my way home from the bank (in the usual catatonic depression), a man I had only that morning ‘killed’ in the most hideous way, stepped out and touched me on the shoulder. Would I care to inspect the building’s haunted attic?
Unfortunately, there was no way I could resist the pre-fictional content of Joblard’s expertly pitched outline. A pub that seemed to have been christened by Rudolf Steiner? A Polish Count, with a potentially renegade past, who never left the safety of his protected enclave? What was the true history of this Billy Bones of Fieldgate Street: the door watcher, hugging his revolver to his chest, and having his food delivered in a basket on the end of a rope? Was it significant that he bore a remarkable resemblance to his fellow countryman, Karol Wojtyla, the Supreme Pontiff? Who was this bruiser in silks, this man of secrets? I could not wait to be initiated into these latest mysteries — even though I knew that my own fears had whistled them from the woodwork, like a bacterial culture from sweating gorgonzola.
II
There are mornings when the iron clouds do not press, when it all lifts, and your stride across the cobblestones is light and turf-sprung. You are accompanied by a sense of wellbeing: the world moves through an ease of recognition, and Fieldgate Street opens into a discreet metaphor of itself. The present stain — bricks, dirty windows, furnaces, generators — is accepted, but does nothing to damage the older sense, still vital; the unassumed joy of entering into the original field. White Chappell spreads out before us, muscular and calm, without fences or limits, expanding as far as we let the sight of it run. The great minatory blocks of the Monster Doss House and the London Hospital sink beneath their own folly; are absorbed in dunes of marram grass. That boundary, or edge of what is known, visited only in sleep, and towards the end of the night, is now gently insistent. Beyond the dry river of New Road, ruffled and buffeted by a false wind from vehicles attending only to the irrational need to be elsewhere, is the unachieved and unachievable meadow: the imagined shrine, solace to pilgrim and vagrant. The healing shadow of this resurrected earth mound, a clay Silbury, is set outside the severe concentration of the city.
Looking — a wild hunch — for something worth reading on the subject of runes, I turned to J. H. Prynne’s Pedantic Note in Two Parts, and found myself, at once, linked, or inspired by this text, to demand that the black sentences be made manifest in these streets: I would see the words take a physical form, painted on floating sheets of glass. ‘The runic concentration,’ Prynne writes, ‘is in each case the power of longing to include its desired end, to traverse the field without moral debate or transcendent abstraction; joy as the complete ground underfoot.’
And so it was: the inn sign of The Spear of Destiny was revealed as a barrier, or challenge, dropped across my track; visible to all deranged souls fleeing from their destiny with enough resolution to discover gehenna in this dusty warren: to go no further.
A familiar figure, puffing out his cheeks with the effort, clung precariously to the tilting signboard, while completing the last dramatic flourishes of a bogus calligraphy. What he had conjured, in a hailstorm of tachist enamel, was some solvent-abusing Siegfried’s vision of a bolt of lightning shattering an anvil of blue ice: more of a lager video than a primal race-memory. The lettering was a chaos of pastiched runes, based on a vague pictorial resemblance between the letters of the alphabet and the rune-marks on a Novelty Shop chart that the artist was consulting with great deliberation, by rubbing his nose against the plastic card. The steroid-pumped ‘S’ of Spear was represented by the rune of ‘wholeness’, sowelu; and the ‘p’ by the axelike purisaz. The system was a sham, mere decoration, artfully faked so that the letters seemed to have been cut into the wood. The covert occultism of this attempt was dispersed, made futile — and yet the cunning of the artisan, his painful snail-knuckled precision, created a shield of defence that, as it faded and took dirt, would achieve a significance unintended by its perpetrator. This benevolent dwarf honoured Prynne’s demand that ‘formulae of power’ should be ‘compact and anonymous’.