Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel Read online

  Jasper Jones stood in the middle of the room, smiling grimly, twisting tobacco into a liquorice-brown cigarette paper. He stamped himself lower into his block-heeled boots (winced when the spur nicked him). He put the ruined tobacco-leaking tube into his mouth – the grim smile accommodated it without adjustment – and tugged down on his gun-belt. Having got that right he tipped his hat carefully over his eyes using his left hand, playing stiff-fingered arpeggios on the Colt with his right. Shreds of tobacco fell from his cigarette.

  Slaughter’s voice, unexpectedly conversational, could be heard in the street: ‘Whoa, boy, stop you stupid critter,’ and then rising again: ‘Come on out, I’m waitin’ for you, Jasper.’

  Jasper began slapping himself around the body. Lord Malquist stood up and obligingly held a match to Jasper’s cigarette which blazed up like a taper before dropping the ember and the rest of the tobacco onto the carpet where it sent up tiny smoke signals of distress.

  Moon walked past them into the hall. From upstairs came Jane’s brave proud call: ‘Marie! tell him I am not at home!’

  He opened the front door. O’Hara still sat up aloft on the coach smoking a short pipe. Beside the two greys was Jasper’s chestnut and then the mouse-coloured donkey. Crouching behind the donkey was its erstwhile rider with his right fist in his left armpit, warily looking on as the cowboy was being carried slowly by the house on a tight rein.

  ‘Whoa, boy,’ said Slaughter as the mare ambled by. ‘Is Fertility Jane in there?’ he asked Moon.

  ‘Moon’s the name,’ said Moon coming down the steps. ‘Perhaps I can be of some assistance.’

  He noticed that other people up and down the street were staring from doorsteps and through windows. He included them all in a nod.

  Slaughter heaved back on the reins, shouting, ‘Fertility! Here ah aym!’ The mare had her head pulled high and back, almost vertical, but strolled on unnervingly serene, as though contemplating a sonnet on the sky at dusk. ‘Stand still god-damit, what are you playing at?’

  ‘Ah, tis a fine lookin’ mare ye have there t’be sure,’ said the donkeyman placatingly. ‘I charge thee go in peace, boyo.’

  Slaughter looked down at him.

  ‘A mare?’

  ‘Ah, that’d be a great strappin’ she-horse an’ no mistake at all, yer honour.’

  ‘Whoa then, girl,’ said Slaughter somewhat repentant. The mare however was lost in her thoughts. She did not even give the donkey a glance as she brushed by. Slaughter turned in the saddle to get another question in: ‘Is Jones in there with Fertility Jane?’

  ‘Ah now that I wouldn’ be knowin’ at all, sir.’

  O’Hara had followed this exchange with furious bewilderment. His face was screwed up around his pipe. When he removed it his face unwound itself, allowing him to speak.

  ‘A Yid,’ he accused the little bearded man.

  ‘Not at all, begorrah.’

  ‘I should mistake a Yid?’

  ‘Whoa, you bitch!’ commanded Slaughter but he and the mare, like clock figures forever bound to the striking of the hours, passed on and out of sight.

  Moon thought of following them but finally could think of no specific reason why he should. It was just that the encounter felt incomplete, in the way that his brain signalled incompletion when he left half-eaten sandwich lying around.

  ‘I am reminded,’ said the ninth earl from the top of the steps, ‘of a certain critic who struggled throughout his career to commit himself to one unqualified judgment on the arts, and who after a lifetime in the cause of ambivalence, steeled himself to the assertion that in his opinion Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest one-legged female Hamlet of the age.’ He puffed delicately on Turkish tobacco papered in a heliotrope cylinder, and blew a perfumed wreath for the fading light. ‘I am reminded of him because subsequently he was reprimanded for this rash prejudice by Frank Harris who had witnessed a performance of Hamlet by a surpassingly gifted lady-uniped in Denver, Colorado.’ He tapped the ash off his cigarette onto the donkey’s head. ‘The unfortunate man had to be carried on a Utter to an asylum for the cruelly disappointed, where he died without uttering another word … Now, who are you my little man?’

  ‘I’m the Risen Christ, b’jasus an’ no mistake.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the ninth earl.

  The question gratified the Risen Christ – he was not used to the intellectual response-but aggrieved him by its impracticality.

  ‘Holy Mother, is it me papers ye’re after, yer honour?’

  O’Hara jeered from his box: ‘Papers-schmapers! A mile off I can smell a Yid!’

  ‘O’Hara,’ reproved the ninth earl, ‘enough of this Papist bigotry.’

  ‘A Roman, are you?’ asked the Risen Christ.

  ‘I’m a Holy Catholic already!’ shouted O’Hara. ‘I should tell a lie?’

  ‘I am alpha and omega,’ said the Risen Christ. ‘So look to your waggin’ tongue.’

  Jasper Jones appeared in the hall behind Lord Malquist. He walked straight-shouldered to the doorway with his right hand hanging deceptively relaxed at butt-level.

  ‘All right, Slaughter,’ he called. ‘I’m comin’ out.’

  Moon had been standing quietly, holding himself in with his eyes closed. He turned to go back into the house. Lord Malquist let him pass by and said to Jasper Jones: ‘Too late! he cried, the villain’s fled.’

  ‘Yellow,’ said Jasper Jones, and turned to follow Moon.

  Lord Malquist paused only to address the world severely from the top step: ‘There is no more empty debate than two apostles of a discredited faith matching their credulity. Religion has no meaning except as a refuge and no reality except when it aspires to art; and nor indeed has anything else. Good day to you.’

  Jane came into view at the bend of the stairs wearing a dress of peacock colours, gold-frogged round the neck and down one side as far as the slit which began at her stocking-top. She flung out her bare arms with a cry of ‘Darlings!’ and stopped the movie of her descent for a few frames in order to experience it. Her three dancing partners, ill-paid and respectful at the bottom of the stairs, waited to throw her artistically around the stage. Moon put out his right foot and right arm to help along the image. The violins swelled and rolled like dolphins, Jane came smiling down the stairs with her left arm hung out for Moon’s attendance, and as their fingers touched he thought maliciously, And then I woke up.

  She pouted at them all – ‘Really, I’m quite ashamed of you boys-all this shooting, so silly. I think it’s perfectly sweet of you to prove your virility and thrrrusting male thingy and all that, but why must you be so modern? Ah whither, I ask you, Your Eminence, whither has flown Romance!’ and brushed them all aside with the cumulative effect of her smile, her breast and her thigh.

  ‘Eminent I may be,’ said the ninth earl, ‘But I would be distressed if you took me for a cleric with connections. Feel free, I beg you, to eschew all titles particularly those that would deny me a life of self-indulgence, and honour me, dear lady, with my given name, which is Falcon-Earl of Malquist.’

  ‘Falcon, Earl of Malquist!’

  ‘Falcon would be quite sufficient.’

  ‘Darling Falcon, tell me, whom did you shoot?’

  She led him into the drawing-room and shut the door in Jasper’s face. Jasper forgave this inadvertence, re-opened the door and announced, ‘You’re safe now, Jane-that ol’ Slaughter git the hell outa here, he’s chicken-skeered.’

  Jane’s voice sailed out, ‘Oh go away, Jasper, go away and shoot him or something. You two’re always hanging about scowling at each other but you don’t do anything.’

  Jasper retired, closing the door. He nodded at Moon who had sat down at the bottom of the stairs, and went through the open door. He was surprised to see there a small dark bearded man in a white robe.

  ‘Excuse me, yer honour sir, wid ye be after havin’—?’

  ‘I don’t care what you’re selling,’ said Jasper Jones. ‘Piss off.’ His eyes
were hard as dinner plates.

  ‘Salvation!’ cried the Risen Christ. ‘I’m selling Salvation!’

  Jasper went out and the Risen Christ came in. He sat down next to Moon after some friendly hesitation. Neither of them spoke but Moon moved up a little for him. Jasper’s horse lurched around outside the door with Jasper hopping alongside it with one foot in the stirrup. They lurched and hopped out of sight.

  II

  Moon smiled at the Risen Christ. The Risen Christ bobbed his head up and down and up and down, grinning into his beard. They sat on the bottom step.

  ‘Have you always been the Risen Christ?’ asked Moon. ‘Or did you – become him?’

  ‘Well I must have been him afore I knew it meself, you see sir.’

  ‘And what made you think you were him? How did it begin?’

  ‘Ah well, sir, I always wanted to be him, you see, I always felt I could be him. Of course that was before I knew about the physical similarities, you understand.’

  ‘Physical similarities?’

  ‘Oh yes. The pictures of him in the books, it’s all the malarkey. Big strappin’ feller with blue eyes and yeller hair, you’ve seen them. It’s all rubbish.’

  ‘Well, different races see the Saviour in their own image,’ said Moon. ‘Black sometimes.’

  ‘Possibly, possibly. But I’ll tell you what – there’s only one man who described him at the time, you know, and that was a class of a Russian of the name of Josephus, and Josephus wrote down what he looked like, and that was a little dark feller five-foot four inches high with a hook nose and eyebrows that met in the middle. How d’you like that?’

  Moon examined the Risen Christ, impressed.

  ‘To the life, am I not?’

  ‘What do you do?’ asked Moon.

  ‘The Word, you know, the Word. Preaching, talking to people. I’m preaching tomorrow at St Paul’s.’

  ‘By invitation?’

  ‘Sure an’ I’ve been called.’

  ‘What do you preach?’

  The Risen Christ screwed up his eyes.

  ‘Well, you know-that this world is but a life’s shadow an’ all that, I mean that the world and everything in it is over-rated, you see, on account of it being just an incident on the way to the Eternal Life, d’you follow?’

  ‘That’s quite comforting,’ Moon said. ‘If you can look at it like that.’ He tried to look at it like that, but at once sensed the edge of some old haunting press into his consciousness. To protect himself he changed the train of thought abruptly. ‘If you are the Risen Christ,’ he said, ‘which I have no reason to believe and no reason to doubt, then does that mean you’re someone else who has been given the same responsibility or are you the same man returned? Have you got the stigmata, for instance?’

  Moon took the Risen Christ’s right hand and examined the palm. Nothing showed. He pressed his thumb into the middle of the palm. The Risen Christ yakked and snatched away his hand.

  ‘Of course you may be just one of the thieves,’ said Moon. ‘Or another thief altogether, an unknown. There was thousands crucified, you know. They don’t tell you that, they let you think that crucifixion was something invented specially for the occasion. Then again, it could be fibrositis.’

  The Risen Christ sat with his right hand clutched in his left armpit and muttered rebelliously.

  ‘Anyway,’ Moon said, ‘you can’t preach there tomorrow – it’s the funeral.’

  ‘I can preach where I like. All I’m needing is the multitude.’

  The multitude – and he felt them occupy him again; the hollows inside him contracted till their sides touched and set off waves of dull apprehension. The barriers which protected him as long as he didn’t acknowledge them, knocked each other over and his mind, caught unawares again, was overrun. He tried to separate the fears and deal with them one by one, rationally, but he couldn’t cope. They were all the same fear and he could not even separate the causes. He only knew that the source of it all was mass, the feeling of things multiplying and expanding, population, buses, buildings, money, all interdependent and spreading-a remorseless uncontrollable, unguided growth which ballooned around him, refusing to go bang and yet lacking the assurance of an infinity. It would have to go bang in the end and Moon had been tensed for it for years. He had learned to detach himself, insecurely, and then a word spoken or a figure in a newspaper or a street with cars parked down both sides would rout him all over again.

  ‘Would you be after having a crust of bread for a traveller? I haven’t had a thing to eat, sir, for three days.’

  Moon got up and walked down the hall into the kitchen, the Risen Christ following. On the table was a jumbled pyramid of tins identically labelled with a picture of a cowboy holding a tin with a picture of a cowboy holding a tin with a picture of a cowboy, and the words, ‘Western Trail Pork ‘n’ Beans.’ There were about twenty of them.

  ‘Pork ‘n’ beans?’

  ‘Well, I – ah – is it the pig with the cloven hoof?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, well sir, that bears thinkin’ about.’

  Moon asked, ‘Is it the animals with a cloven hoof you can’t eat or the ones you can?’

  ‘You’ve got me a bit confused there, sir. But I think it’s the pig I should keep off.’

  ‘No, that’s Moslems,’ said Moon. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  It was starting up again and he tried to concentrate on the tins but it got away from him. There was a pig and butchers and knives (who made the knives? the butcher’s apron?) and a packing factory, packing millions of tins, and a printing works for the labels, printing millions of labels, with machine-minders and foremen, all of whom lived in houses and travelled by bus and bicycle made by other people (and who looks after the coolies on the rubber plantations for the tyres?) and they all got given money and had children (and who makes the bricks for the schools and suppose they couldn’t find anyone and it all just stopped?) He was sweating again and he had cut his finger.

  ‘Ah that’ll be a feast, no more yer honour.’

  He had opened five tins. He tipped them all into a frying pan and turned on the gas and lit it, trying to keep his mind off the big power station across the river, which might have been for electricity for all he knew but it was a constant threat to his peace of mind for it sat by the river, monstrous and insatiable, consuming something – coke or coal or oil or something – consuming it in unimaginable quantities, and the whole thing was at the mercy of a million variables any of which might fail in some way-strikes, silicosis, storms at sea, a broken guage, an Arabian coup d’etat, a drop in supply, a rise in demand, a derailment at Slough, a faux pas at a British Council cocktail party, a toothache in the wrong man at the wrong time – and at any time, for no reason (if there were a reason one could do something about it) people might stop deciding to be dentists (why after all should anyone want to be a dentist?) and there would be no one to kill the agonising pain in the back teeth of black shiny-skinned miners who dig the coal which is put on the train which is derailed at Slough (yes and who will promise to go on milking the cows for the children of those who make the rails for the underground trains packed with clerks who take dentists for granted?).

  Moon squeezed tight his eyelids against the returning accumulated fear which he could not separate into manageable threads. All he knew was that the sight of a power station or a traffic jam or a skyscraper, or the thought of a memory of the sight of them, gutted him like a herring. The technical and human complexity of the machine shook on the edge of disintegration, held together only by everyone else’s un-awareness of the fact. It was an obvious fact and Moon did not know why he alone should have to bear the burden of it. He only knew that it was so. In a film cartoon when someone runs off the edge of a cliff he goes on running in mid-air for a few yards; only when he looks down and becomes aware does he drop. Moon had looked down and seen the abyss.

  He opened his eyes and saw nothing but steam and smoke, smelled charr
ed beans.

  ‘Is it burning at all, sir? It won’t have to be too well done for me at all, don’t you worry now.’

  Moon took the pan off the flames. He found a fork and stuck it into the beans and put the pan on the table. The Risen Christ rubbed his hands together three times (it might have been an abridged grace for his own use) and began to eat.

  ‘You wouldn’t be havin’ a bit o’ bread by any chance?’

  Moon found the bread, broke the end off a loaf and put it on the table. He saw that his blood had soaked into the white sponginess. He took the piece of bread back and carried it to the sink intending to tear off the stained soft-centre, but in doing that he let blood flow over the crust. He turned on the tap with some idea of holding his cut hand under it but realised that he was washing the bread. He threw the whole thing into a bin under the sink and stared hopelessly at a point framed in space by a window-pane.

  There was a terrace outside. A few yards ahead of him a marble balustrade crossed his vision and steps from the terrace dropped down between stone urns to a long green lawn that fell away towards a lake with an island and a summer house, and beyond that were green hills. The tension that had compressed itself around him, slackened, ebbed away and was gone, evenly distributed about his body. He turned away from the window and realised that his eyes were open.

  Moon licked his hand and watched the blood delineate the cut. He licked it again and then took out his handkerchief and wrapped it round the palm. He couldn’t knot it so held the end tight with his thumb.

  The Risen Christ bobbed his beanstuffed head.

  ‘You work here, then?’

  ‘Work?’

  The Risen Christ waved his fork around like a baton and having summoned up the stove, the sink, the refrigerator and all the cupboards into a single chord, repeared, ‘Work.’

  ‘Oh. No. I live here.’

  ‘You’re a friend.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Moon courteously, misunderstanding.

  The Risen Christ smiled at him kindly. He ate in silence, or rather in verbal silence, for a while. Moon watching him found the power station re-entering his consciousness.