Richard and Beetle Billy scrunged in their jeans’ pockets and pulled out bank notes like used handkerchiefs, together with some pound coins and other change. Leroy stood and withered at them while they accumulated the score for the score. They gave him the money — he gave them the scag. Then he disappeared, evaporating into the thick fructifying air as suddenly as he had materialised in the first place. Further up the courtyard a four-year-old child was ejected from a flat and started to howl.
Some time later Richard was back on his dead bed, staring out over the Heath where schoolchildren screechily played. He set down the 2 ml syringe on the cardboard box that served him as a bedside table and fell back, his mind nuzzling in on itself. He was stoned enough to be blissfully unaware of his role as pacemaker, psychic vanguard, racing ahead of Ian Wharton, back to the Land of Children's Jokes.
CHAPTER NINE. THE MONEY CRITIC
Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardises situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialised type of ritual.
Dreamless sleep. No sensation even of having slept. Sleep simply as a gap, an absence. Sleep so blank and black that it shatters the cycle of the eight thousand moments that make up the waking mind. Hume spoke of consciousness as analogous to inertia, transmitted from moment to moment as force is transferred from one billiard ball to the next. In this instance a white-gloved hand of more than average size had come down to seize the pink.
Ian woke up and knew this before he opened his eyes. Then he opened them and found himself back in the Land of Children's Jokes. Pinky stood like some mutant Bonnard in the wash of lilac and lemon light that fell from the tall unshuttered sash windows. He was eating a Barratt's sherbert dip, using the stick of liquorice that plugged the cylindrical paper packet to dig out the yellow powder. He sucked the stick then plunged it back in and each time he drew it out more of the dusty stuff adhered. Pinky was eating the sherbert dip with great concentration and attention to detail but quite clearly he wasn't enjoying it. It was a task for him, to be carried out with diligence and application; nonetheless he had noticed Ian waking up.
‘Are you with us, dearie?’ said the gloriously nude man, and turned to confront Ian with his stubby cock and Tartar's-hat muff of white pubic hair.
Ian kept silent. The last time he visited the Land of Children's Jokes he had an awful time. The key to refusing entry into the delusion — or so he imagined — was not to manifest any kind of lucidity. That had been his downfall before, so he resolved to stay silent.
But then something moved in the corner of the room. It was too dark there to make out colour, or even shape, but something moved and abruptly.
‘What's that!’ cried Ian involuntarily, lifting himself up on his elbows. It was too late. Although the whatever-it-was had stopped moving he still found himself embodied, centre stage in the awful land.
‘I see you are with us again, dearie, now that the cat has left off your tongue.’ Pinky was welcoming enough, if guarded. He turned back to face the window and went on with his thrusting of liquorice stick into sherbert pond. Ian took a look around the room.
It had changed. It was recognisably the room in which Pinky and the thin man had entertained him before — there were the same high sash windows and there was the same fungal smell. The bed was also the same — huge with curling prows for the foot and headboards. It was even set in the same position, at right-angles to the window. But everything else was different.
The fungus was all gone. The button mushrooms that had clustered in fairy rings on the damp carpets had been dusted up. The giant toadstools and fly agarics that served as tables and chairs had been uprooted and removed. The enormous puff balls, which Ian remembered as being fully six feet across, had been rolled out from the corners of the room and disposed of. Indeed, now that Ian looked more closely, he could see that the room hardly had corners any more to speak of. He had the impression that the room's space had been translated into a vacancy within a far larger structure, some kind of barn, perhaps, or giant warehousing unit. The prevailing colours of the land were now slurry-greys and dried dirt-browns. The air had a sharp tang of high octane and there were lumps of formless detritus scattered around on the carpet.
‘What is this place?’ asked Ian aloud. ‘And why am I here?’
Pinky turned from the window and came and sat on the bed beside him. He went on eating the sherbert dip. On his face brown liquorice stains and plashes of yellow powder had combined, making it look like he'd been subjected to an attack with some new and vile kind of chemical weapon. He regarded Ian with an open but searching expression, not unlike that of a provincial bank manager. ‘I cannot say why you are here.’ He spoke softly. ‘This is not something that can be said. That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’
‘Wittgenstein,’ said Ian — it was one of the few quotations he knew.
Pinky flew into a rage. ‘It wasn't! It wasn't! The frigging little pansified bitch!’ He shook with anger, his ample bosoms swinging from side to side. ‘He stole everything, absolutely everything. All my best lines, all my best gags!’ He was like a child having a tantrum, a tantrum that departed as suddenly as it had arrived.
‘I'm sorry,’ said Ian, ‘I had no idea it was your line.’
‘No, no, it's my fault, I overreacted. I'm sorry, things haven't been going too well with the worm recently and you know how little sympathy I get from him.’
Ian glanced around quickly, Pinky had given such emphasis to the ‘him’ that he assumed the thin man was about to burst forth, twirling his cane and chanting his mantric ‘Cha, cha, cha!‘ but there was no sign of him. ‘What's the problem with the worm?’ Ian asked. By way of answering Pinky opened his mouth wide and indicated that Ian should look inside. He bent forward. In the red-ribbed recesses of Pinky's gullet he caught a glimpse of something with an alien's head. It was white and diffidently questing. ‘Is that it — is that the worm?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Pinky. ‘He won't have anything to do with chocolate now and he won't deign to come out of my bum any more either. It has to be my mouth and sherbert fountains are his preferred tipple. I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the things, they make me feel quite quite nauseous.’
‘What's your name?’ Ian broke in, keen to change the subject.
‘Pinky,’ said Pinky.
‘I knew that,’ said Ian and then, ‘What is this place, Pinky?’
‘This,’ said Pinky, getting up and turning a full circle with his flabby arms outstretched, ‘is the Land of Children's Jokes.’ His Hottentot buttocks hung behind him like a sack. ‘And your host for this evening is — ’ The thing in the corner that had stirred before moved again. ‘The one and only man in the Land of Children's Jokes with a spade in his head. Yes, Ian, with a spade actually in his head. Will you put your hands together, please, and give a big welcome to — Doug!’