We haven't seen a great deal of Samuel Northcliffe since the wedding. From time to time he drops round, usually unannounced but always bearing a gift for Jane, a bunch of flowers or a bottle of wine. Jane likes Samuel Northcliffe, she finds his quaint way of speaking amusing and thinks that he isn't nearly as ruthless a businessman as people like to say. She cites the ‘Yum-Yum’ affair as an example of how charmingly quixotic and dottily eccentric he really is.
With ‘Yum-Yum’ all but withdrawn from the market I didn't expect to come across him any more in my work; and with my soul, as it were, sorted, I felt certain that his interventions in my more personal life were over as well, over at a mundane level, that is. But this morning I had a call from him in the office: ‘You can call me the Tiresias of Transmigration,’ his oracular voice didgeridooed down the phone line, ‘for I understand the riddles of death's destructive art.’
‘Is it anything important?’ I said. ‘I'm rather busy.’
‘I thought you might like to come by the Lurie Hospital at lunchtime,’ he boomed. ‘Gyggle and I have orchestrated a little ceremony which you might care to witness. It's most instructive, a very efficacious ritual. We have drilled the jetsam for weeks and, now we are certain that they'll be able to handle it, we wish to proceed.’
‘With what exactly?’
‘Why’ — he sounded almost coy — ‘with the North London Book of the Dead, of course.’
Against my better nature I was intrigued. At noon I left off the marketing proposal I was writing for a new chain of restaurants to be called ‘Just Lettuce’ and took a cab over to Euston.
I found them both in Gyggle's office. The beard was looking rather greasy and bedraggled, he couldn't have been taking care of it. Gyggle was looking tired as well, so possibly it was the other way round, the beard hadn't been taking care of him. More shocking still was the appearance of my mage — he had reverted entirely to how I remembered him in the early-seventies, the period when he had first come to live at Cliff Top. He even had on the same snappy check suit, the one he was wearing on the day I first became his apprentice.
‘Ah, there you are!’ he bellowed. He was puffing on a cheap panatella and obviously not liking it too well. ‘Come in, come in, don't hover like that, boy, what's the matter with you? You look as if you've seen a ghost.’
‘Um, err, I don't quite know how to put it — ’
‘Is it my appearance that you're goggling at? Come on, lad, spit it out, vomit it forth, squeeze those lexical pips, in a word: tell me.’
‘Yes, yes it is.’
‘And you're wondering what it betokens, aren't you?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Well, all in good time but we're not here for that, we're here to watch Gyggle's junkies go through their paces — well, Hieronymus?’
‘Certainly, Samuel, they're all assembled,’ sibilated the hirsute soul doctor. ‘Shall we go through?’
He led us through the series of corridors, with their furrowed linoleum floors, and ushered us into a small, cubicle-like room, devoid of furniture save for a wonky table and a couple of institutional chairs moulded from heavy plastic. There was a speaker of some kind attached to the wall and next to it the door of a cupboard which was set in to the wall. Before departing Gyggle opened this door; behind it was an odd window, with longitudinal stripes running down it. ‘What's that?’ I asked.
‘A one-way window,’ he replied as the beard led him from the room.
Left alone, The Fat Controller and I sat down. He searched out a packet of cheap cellophane-wrapped panatellas and took one without even looking. He lit it, using a non-safety match which he struck on the sole of his shoe, and after slobbering on its end for a while said, ‘Filthy habit, I think I'll give it up soon.’
‘I'm sorry?’ I couldn't imagine what he was talking about.
‘Smoking, you booby, what the hell do you think I mean?’ But before I could digest this latest strangeness, there was a crackle from the speaker. We turned to the window and I saw that a group of Gyggle's junkies were assembled in the next room.
The voice that had triggered the crackle was Gyggle's — he was calling his group therapy session to order. Several junkies were sitting in a rough circle on tatty upholstered chairs. Their feet were propped up on the metal boxes that served for ashtrays at the DDU and they were all smoking, using three steepled fingers to bring the tortured filters to their bruised lips. Even I, who know little about drugs, could tell that they were all high on heroin. Several of them could barely keep their eyes open and one, a rather stupid-looking black guy, whom I vaguely recognised, was completely crashed out.
Gyggle was saying, ‘You're all familiar with the form here — let's go round the group and introduce ourselves, shall we? At the same time I'd like you to tell me what stage you're at in your detox, OK?’ The beard wavered around the circle like a bogus divining rod and settled on a thin-featured man who wore his hair tied back in a ponytail.
‘John,’ said the man, ‘eighty mls.’
‘I know who that man is,’ I whispered to The Fat Controller. ‘Can you see his jaw, where it's all kind of bubbling and melted — ’
‘Of course I can, I may be old but I'm not blind.’
‘Well, I did that.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yeah, I twisted all the loose skin round with a ratchet and then I smoothed over the folds with a soldering iron. Good, isn't it?’
‘It certainly looks like a professional job. I congratulate you.’
‘Billy,’ the next junky round was saying, ‘and I'm down to sixty mls.’ The words slurred together.
‘Now, Billy,’ said Gyggle sternly, ‘are you sure you haven't had any gear? Because if you haven't you're getting too stoned for someone on a reduction detox and we'll have to cut your methadone down a little faster, hmm?’
‘Uhn?’ grunted Billy, then as the realisation dawned on him that he was to be deprived of something, ‘Nah, nah, I'm not, honest, Doc. To tell the truth I'm sick today, I'm clucking.’ His grey-black hands went to his shoulders which he clutched spasmodically by way of illustrating this, but Gyggle had already given up on him and moved on round the circle.
‘I recognise him as well,’ I said, ‘that black guy, the one who's fallen asleep now.’
‘Well of course you do,’ replied The Fat Controller. ‘That's why I asked you to come. All of these junkies were used by Gyggle and me to construct the Land of Children's Jokes, my adipose little acolyte. A whack of heroin-induced hypnogogia is worth a whole year of ordinary dream states. It's because of this that Gyggle took the consultancy here, we wanted to have a good stock of it on hand.’
‘I see.’
‘The spotty one in the sleeveless anorak is Richard Whittle, it's him that your good wife was meant to be befriending. His mind is especially ductile and suggestible — ’
‘Yes, it's coming back to me, the plump woman in the orange skirt is Big Mama Rosie and the gypsy-looking type is her old man.’
‘Martin.’
‘That's right, Martin. It's strange seeing them all here in this place.’
‘Well, my dear boy, if you think that is strange, I wonder what you'll make of this.’ He was struggling to his feet as he spoke and with some difficulty — the plastic chair had become wedged on his behind. I helped him to free it and rise. It was the first time that I had ever seen the big man appear either absurd or ungainly.
He crossed to the other side of the little room and opened the door of another one-way window. ‘Come over here and take a decco,’ he said. ‘I think this will amuse you.’ Through this window there was a very different kind of group going on. Hal Gainsby was there, together with Patricia Weiss from the agency; they had a gang of the usual types who turn out for this kind of thing, a D.F. & L. naming group, that is. ‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘What are they doing here?’