Prose, poetry, philosophy submissions

Chapter One: Early Love and Early Death.
Sir Lancelot rode full tilt that night. He had to arrive at the tourney in disguise and discreetly. None must know his true identity lest they be loathing challenging him to a breaking of lances.
Sir Bors, Sir Lionel and Sir Hector De Maris waited patiently by the pavilion for all the jousters to assemble. Anon they espied a knight with red and black kerchief and a coat arms bearing the banner of a white swan sailing beside a black barge on a golden river. The kerchief was one neither of the knights had set eyes on before and the mysterious fellow wore these emblems affixed to his helm and looked right goodly to behold. His armour was the purest white silver that shone in the gathering dusk ablaze in an ominous grey and orange haze. All who gazed upon him were seized and beset by an indefinable dark foreboding that contrasted sharply with the manifest gaiety of his appearance.
Cornel had been reading boxing illustrated that evening. His mind began to wander and focus on the harrowing events of the day before. Mother had been pelted with eggs that day as she walked down the road on New Hall Lane. She had come to Preston in the mid fifties to work in the cotton mills but had left her birthplace in Jamaica to look for the father of her two boys who had abandoned her shortly after their marriage. Melmoth had fled to England away from the responsibilities of fatherhood it would seem. Cornel had thought there must be more to it than that but did not really know. Perkins, his stepfather, never talked about Melmoth ever and anyone in the family who did risked being put on trial as a spy.
What perplexed Cornel more than the grinding poverty and the working class prejudice of his mates was whether he was dreaming the whole damn thing or not. This idea had been placed well and truly in his head by him coming a across an occultist by the name of Immanuel Kant. Well, certainly that is what the guy must have been as Cornel had bumped into his work in the local library in Ribbleton under a section entitled superstitions and the occult. If time had a beginning, what came before? If it did not then the events, which had led up to him finding Kant, or Cunt as Steve Halshaw called him, would never have begun. Did this really mean that Perkins and Mr Lowe at Ribbleton Hall County secondary school did not know what the heck was going on? If time could neither have a beginning or end what the hell were Mr Lowe and Perkins then? Thank-fully they were figments of Cornel’s active imagination and mere figments could not exert any power over him and the pain they caused him was equally unreal. The pain felt real enough though and left him smarting under the humiliation of it as if things were not crappy enough for a thirteen-year-old boy of Indian extraction living in fucking Preston Lancashire.
Actually the natives may have had good motives to look down on the likes of Cornel. That kind of reflection left the defence of feeling sorry for himself way in the future after graduation. Right now formidable problems had to be overcome such as how to retain some dignity in the C-stream of the now renamed Ribbleton Comprehensive. The other streams in the school were the A- and B-streams and one’s self-confidence and positive attitude to the world were functions of which stream one had the aptitude to find oneself swimming in. The School board did not like the word “intelligence”; rather passing one’s eleven plus was the result of the sufficiently vague concept of aptitude. Certainly this allowed the Board to escape the embarrassment of not having a definition of Intelligence but this did not keep Cornel from smarting and seething under the label of educationally subnormal.
Sir Tor looked down the long table in his father’s house, the castle of maidens. In the middle sat his pure and goodly sister Elaine. She was said to be gifted in the ancient arts of healing and indeed Morgana le Fey herself had been her mentor. Her purity led those with sacred vows to call her the Lily Maid of Astolate. Seated around her was a gathering of knights the world had rarely seen at one sitting. Perceval and Gawain sat at the top on the right and left hand side of Tor’s father who glanced over protectively and proudly at his daughter every now and then. But Sir Tor’s attention was riveted on Le Chevalier Mal Fait who had arrived that day from Benwick in France to fight in the tournament. Le Chevalier did not sit and take meat and wine but sat at a small table with the seneschal and lesser servants and presented an unearthly presence in his gold chain mail and brown shawl that almost hid his entire face. The other knights marvelled at his comradeship with the lesser people, which they considered to be no worthy society for a man of noble birth. And they jested that perhaps the indistinguishable French knight had not sailed but walked across the channel!
Michael Lund’s mum had bought some fine rayon drip-dry crease free shirts from Courtaulds for her son. Michael was Cornel’s best mate and had been the first to welcome Cornel when the Perkins’ and the Karjohns’ had moved into Glen Grove in the autumn of 1962. The clean crisp look of Mick in his shirt had always impressed Cornel. He wished to put one on and go walking in the fields behind his home; at night would be the best time. Mrs Lund had lost her husband to cancer when her son was six. Mick had taken to long walks in the fields shortly after the death of his dad. He and his dog Rex, a little jet-black mongrel, were to all intents and purposes inseparable. He would never go with anyone and Cornel felt it a mighty matter of pride when Mick beckoned him to come along one day.
The rooks and jackdaws hovered menacingly above the two good friends in one of their thrice-weekly excursions into the bare and desolate countryside between Ribbleton and Grimsargh. The farmlands stretched out onto a mixed landscape of green meadows and purple skies, its uniformity only occasionally punctuated by deep dark mystical ponds dotted around on the rural horizons. The real stuff of the poet’s muse. One of the rooks suddenly veered from its trajectory and flew like a cruise missile straight at Michael. Without any time for thought Mick’s walking stick flashed like Excalibur slicing the empty air and by a stroke of luck felled his winged assailant. The stunned creature fell to earth like a stone and lay motionless for a moment. It was a toss up as to who was the most terrified. Mick handed Excalibur to his fellow hiker and Cornel poked the dazed attacker only to jump back with a start when the bird fluttered its mortally injured wings. It could not fly.
The Lily Maid glanced regally around at the distinguished dinner guests in the great hall of her father’s house. The whole family had been astonished at the response to the herald they had sent throughout the land for a tourney at their humble abode in Astolate. Assembled before them where some of the mightiest warriors in the world and the purest of heart. The most gallant and chivalrous had accepted the challenge her father the noble King Carbonek had presented to the host in Camelot. It was not only a tourney for the established or noble of birth but anyone could attend whether friend or foe, peasant or baron. Some of the knights of the Orkneys had grumbled about jousting in a tournament where they might end up being smote to the earth by knights not noble by birth. What was the point of being born in the upper class when they could killed by those from the lower!
Mick took the fallen creature home. He treated his attacker as a kind of messenger, an omen, but precisely for what he obviously was not conscious. The bird wandered freely in the Lund’s garden and it seemed to attach itself inexplicably to the whole family. Mick’s sister was almost dwarf like in proportion and Anita was overly protective of Mick, her baby brother. Mick was a sensitive, striking lad of thirteen and the Preston lasses were much taken with him though they found it difficult to get past the imposing surveillance of Anita. Mick liked this interference and the status and attention it brought him but Cornel was perplexed as to why he did not put more resistance than was forthcoming.
Preston, being uncompromisingly fundamentalist in its religion, took none too kindly to the explanations of Freud at the best of times. The two friends’ awareness was mercifully in complete ignorance as to the deeper symbolism of their naive realism. They had a robust common sense and accepted the objective existence of space, time, and mind independent matter as given and would certainly have taken part in any torchlight vigils to burn the books of those that questioned the objectivity of the external world. It was a world taken and lived as they found it, were merged seamlessly with it and would have scoffed and jeered at any other presuppositions. In the smoke filled bars of the Ribbleton arms pub quaffing on huge pints of lager and lime and bitter shandy, time was real and flowed inexorably carrying everyone along to some predetermined destiny.
Father McKenzie certainly preached the sanctity of strong links between the successive generations of Prestonians and his St Mary Magdalene church witnessed none of the lack of attendance of congregations up and down the land. He sounded his trumpet against the modern tendency of experiencing such links as chains rather than threads of life. He claimed that break down of community could be understood as rejection of the grand narrative. He meant by this that the parish had lost faith in the bible as a historical text that told a true story of the origins and purpose of human existence. The cup certainly ‘ranneth over’ as far as roll calls in his parish was concerned.
Mick and Cornel had gone against the unwritten code of the Ribbleton greaser gang and had been selected to sing in the church choir on Sundays. Steve Halshaw, the gang’s co-leader, had blamed ‘Immanuel Can’t’ for brainwashing Cornel into ‘airy fairy pansy pursuits’. He felt that Cornel’s evening visits to the local library after school had compromised his position as co-leader of the gang and in his mind the growing number of functioning telephone boxes in the area could surely be traced back to the dark influence of ‘Immanuel Can’t’. This was surely the time to challenge Cornel to a trial by combat to decide once and for all who was to become outright leader.
Cornel was a dark horse for Steve in more than the obvious way. Cornel stayed quiet during the horseplay and jesting about ‘Pakis’. ‘What goes now you see me now you don’t?’ Steve had once asked Cornel who shrugged his shoulders in ignorance. ‘A Paki walking over a Zebra crossing’, Steve blurted out gleefully. It never occurred to Cornel to take any offence; it was all so innocent, good-natured and upfront. ‘It’s nothing to do with you’, Steve reassured Cornel, ‘you don’t smell of garlic or have all that greasy hair, and you are one of us’. There was nothing phoney about this, it was an official declaration of comradeship by the original captain--Steve never spoke with a fork tongue. He had been the one to sanction the inclusion of the only gang member ever to come from the ethnic minorities in the Ribbleton Hall greasers. For a boy of only medium stature it was not far from true to say Cornel’s formidable sporting abilities in almost all ball sports had not gone unnoticed. Steve had especially found it amazing that Cornel had been invited to play for the professional Preston Grasshoppers Rugby team when he was only fourteen and had seen the letter of invitation himself.
Now Steve was a battle weary veteran and had never lost a ‘scrap’ in his many defences of his captaincy. He was lightening fast in his punching and an unfortunate challenger may find himself hit by at least ten punches in the space of a few seconds. The use of knives, chains and other forms of external weaponry was considered cowardly and violent sanctions were brought to bear on those that violated this code. Steve was adept in the use of all these if need be and was also a crack shot with his father’s twelve bore shot gun.
Doctor Boorman cast an astute eye over his patient as the latter entered the room of his office in the Karsudden psychiatric facility. The good doctor paid particular attention to the state of dress and personal decorum of the dark bespectacled gentleman that entered his domain. This was one of the most unusual cases the world-renowned psychiatrist had ever been presented with. The patient had been charged with serious offences and had been referred to him by a court of law that deemed the defendant mentally incapable of standing trial. It was his job to diagnose the presence of any mental illness that might have been active at the time the alleged offences took place. The colours of the patient’s clothes were bright and cheerful, nails were well manicured and hair in no way unkempt though not professionally styled. He noticed that the patient looked a good deal younger than his thirty-three years. The man had no previous offences and had held a bachelor’s degree and teaching qualifications. The patient had in fact many years teaching experience behind him. The immediate thought that ran through the doctor’s mind was what the hell had happened. Boorman had been briefed about the man’s psychodynamic history though this was by necessity patchy and unproductive as far as giving a clear picture of why the events of September 1987 had occurred. Was he mentally ill or was there some cause for suspecting some malingering going on? Certainly the patient had over zealously admitted his guilt and sent a generous hand written confession to the state board that decided on paroles and releases. The doctor had had nearly thirty years experience as a clinical state psychiatrist and often and unusually for a clinician trusted his first impression in keeping with his Dutch training which often emphasised the importance of canvassing normal peoples’ opinions and impressions in the judgements of psychiatric diagnosis. This man was not a criminal and though obvious weaknesses in personality presented themselves the man was not obviously insane.
Doctor Boorman knew if he was to save this man he would have to investigate beyond what was said and thought by him. Often, as Freud remarked, crystals revealed their hidden structure by the manner in which they came apart. Boorman reluctantly resolved to a course treatment that would involve the disintegration of the patient’s personality in an effort to see what symptoms would present themselves. Over the coming months the doctor would have to walk a tight rope as far as his ethics and commitment to the Hippocratic oath were concerned. His patient was an educated man and this would mean the normal clinical method of peering behind appearance into being would have to be revised and updated. The doctor would peel away the layers of the personality like an onion to reveal the core of the self we euphemistically call the true self.
Sir Tor boldly approached le Chevalier’s table and greeted the French stranger in a warm and forthright manner. ‘Methinks that the other guests would be deeply honoured to share your fair company, Sir Knight’. Le Chevalier remained silent and motionless for a moment and then with minimalist movements that often signalled the presence of a man of power or menace he turned to Sir Tor and grasped him firmly by the wrists. ‘Take my greetings to your father for my invitation to this splendid banquet’. Le Chevalier turned and said no more. Sir Tor’s inexperience got the better of him and he repeated his question. No answer. Sir Tor sat down beside him and asked if he would partake in the tournament in the morning. ‘By the grace of God I shall’, came a slow hesitant reply. Sir Tor felt satisfied and got up and went straight over to his sister Elaine who had been watching the encounter with mounting curiosity. ‘I have never met anyone quite like yonder knight’, said Sir Tor to Elaine. ‘Who is he?’ she enquired quite naturally. ‘By my faith I know not but by time the sun lights the skies I shall make it my business to find out’, boomed her brother rather dramatically. This fuelled Elaine’s interest and enquired after brother if he would not make an introduction for her. Sir Tor took his sister by the hand, led her over to the servants’ table and introduced her to Le Chevalier. Le Chevalier stood up gracefully and greeted her with a bow of his head and then turned suddenly to sir Tor and said ‘I must take my leave of this fair company, Sir Knight’, and without another word turned and left the banquet at the height of the festivities.
Elaine was known throughout the land as one of the fairest maidens in Christendom. She had thought in her heart that her brother’s introduction would have led to some wooing from this handsome intense stranger but could only stand there aghast as she watched him all of a sudden disappear behind the massive oak doors of the great hall. At that moment and inexplicably to herself she quietly made the resolution that she would love no other.
‘When’s the scrap going to be?’ said Mick to his good friend. ‘I’m going to cock him when he comes out of metalwork’, replied Steve. ‘He’s a frigging good fighter, didn’t you hear what happened outside of Mary Magdalene’s youth club the other night to Nelly Roberts--it was bloody over in three seconds’. ‘Yeah, I heard’, said Steve dryly, ‘doesn’t fucking scare me; I would have dropped him in two. But look what the fuck happened to Pete Kaminski’.
Now Pete was the son of a Polish immigrant and was reputed to have been the biggest guy in Ribbleton. Preston legend had it that Cornel had stopped Pete’s brother Colin from beating up Helen Skingsley’s brother Eddie and that Colin had promptly gone home and complained to Pete who instantaneously bounded off after Cornel. With Pete weighing in at least two hundred and fifty pounds and well over six feet Colin was absolutely sure they would have trouble-scraping Cornel off the ground with a shovel. As this particular legend would have it Pete finally caught up with Cornel who was sat on the wall outside his house with Helen, the latter of whom jumped over the wall into the garden right into the path of Perkins. Perkins asked who she was; she said she was a friend of Cornel’s. Perkins told her unceremoniously to get out of the garden and then sped off in his battered pale blue Bedford van to work on the two to ten shift in Courtauld’s Red Scar synthetic chemical factory. Helen instead hid behind the wall and peered over at her hero whom she feared she would not see again in this life.
Kaminski blotted out the sun for a moment, that was just time enough for an angel to pass. Which is more or less what Helen did as she saw the bloated ugly face of the ogre right up above her. After Helen had scuttled behind a tree for further camouflage she could barely watch as the gruesome giant approached the slight figure of her dark destroyer. ‘More likely the dark destroyed’, reflected Helen after she saw that the stories of the giant’s size had been in no way exaggerated. The ogre let out a bellow such that Helen’s blood not only ran cold but felt like it froze in her very veins. The oaf suddenly launched himself at Cornel who was not entirely taken by surprise to see the lumbering monster; he had expected news of Colin’s humiliation to have its consequences. Eddie had departed faster than a bat out of hell and had pleaded with Cornel to beat a quick retreat himself. Eddie had an inkling that his sane advice would fall on deaf ears. He had seen Cornel stand up to much older boys before and feared the latter must have some kind of death wish. Although Eddie had a reputation of a bit of a sissy he could and often did boast that he had never had any injuries to nurse.
Helen screamed from behind her tree for Cornel to run into her garden. The thought of running away in front of Helen was worse than death itself and Cornel resolved to hold his ground though butterflies flew freely in his nether regions and his knees were so weak with fear they almost buckled under him. But there was no turning back now and his mind scanned the story of the Liston/Ali fight and decided to fly like a butterfly himself, in other words he decided to employ a hit and run strategy.
Eddie staring out from the safety of his room, which was conveniently positioned to give him a ringside view, willed Cornel on. He hoped that Cornel would use his sprinting skills and get the hell out of there sooner or later. The first thrust at Cornel nearly succeeded in removing the entire arm but mercifully the hold the giant got on it ended with him on the ground and the entire sleeve ripped off from the shoulder down. Cornel could not afford the luxury of lingering around as both of them had snapped backwards to the ground as if propelled by an elastic band. He alighted at the speed of light before the rolling mass of flesh could steamroller him into oblivion. For next two hours the cat and mouse battle royal raged around the Glen Grove and Fairfield Avenue which was something of a no go area for the forces of law and order. People stared dumbstruck from their windows though no one attempted to intervene. The blob tried every tactic he could to swallow up the dark destroyer. The latter for his part engaged in a war of attrition to wear down the great blubbering mass that as Cornel rightly reasoned was stronger by far but the rolls of cellulite testified to very little staying power. The blob kept swinging punches but mostly only causing minor tornadoes in the battle’s aura. His grabs, gropes and lunges at Cornel was like trying snatch at a waterfall and disappeared into the thin air and inevitably began to take their toll on his strength and stamina. He leaned back for a moment directly where Helen was watching. She plucked up the courage to start cheering every time the bull charged and galloped past its sidestepping prey. The whole spectacle was working its way up to become a biblical saga with the blob proving to have more stamina than anyone thought. The end came suddenly as Goliath lifted an elephant’s leg to kick at David who promptly responded by catching and lifting it with a mighty heave off the ground high into the air, there followed a sickening thud and then what sounded like the orgasmic grunt of a large hippo. The giant had been felled and lay clutching the back of his head, which had slammed, into the garden wall like a sledgehammer. What followed was the stuff of fairy tales. Helen rushed out from her hiding place and ran and jumped onto Cornel and clasped her arms round his neck, laid upon him long lingering kisses with Cornel only thankful that the cellulite Goliath had not shown similar resolution speed.
At that moment Helen’s kisses had taken the definition of their relationship well beyond Cornel’s romantic worldview regarding such encounters as contrary to his concept of chivalry and proper mystical preoccupation. He was after all attempting to astral travel right after the Dawson School’s football cup, which would be held on Preston North End in Deep dale. Helen did not take the slightest notice of Cornel’s discomfort; she celebrated the victory over the giant as if it had been her own. Eddie came racing onto the scene but was stopped in his tracks by the sight of his sister in her warm embrace with Cornel. He had never viewed his sister in this light before; Cornel was his sporting hero but had a deeper hankering to be Freddie Truman. Kaminski rose slowly from the ground with blood streaming from a huge gash in the side of his head and staggered home with Colin. Eddie asked Cornel how he was and did not really listen to the reply stunned that his kid sister did not show any signs of embarrassment in maintaining her determined grip on Cornel’s neck. Eddie said no more and beckoned his sister to go with him, which she steadfastly refused to do. The excitement of the battle had brought up all the hidden and repressed emotions about her friendship with Cornel to whom she had lived next door but one for the last two years. She had the friendship largely through Eddie and had to stand and watch the two friends get macho together from the sidelines.
Cornel oddly felt no desire to gloat over his victory though he wondered if the giant would return after he had recovered from his wounds. The sun shone brightly that day and the orange tint of dusk was accompanied by the lengthening shadows of the prefabs on the Ribbleton Estate. Cornel got a longing to go out into his beloved fields and frolic on the long grassy banks of the River Ribble. Helen insisted on going along and much against Cornel’s better judgement he soon found himself walking down the railway tracks that led into the meadows with Helen holding his hand unashamedly. On the way there they saw a figure silhouetted onto the landscape and as it drew nearer Cornel noticed that it was Mick and his dog Rex. Mick had been out all day and was in a particularly sombre mood He knew nothing about what had happened that day and was mortified to see his best mate hand in hand with Helen Skingsley. He motioned Cornel over to him and asked if he was going out with Helen. A firm denial issued immediately from the lips of his mate. Helen looked on suspiciously and when Mick had gone on asked Cornel what they were talking about. Cornel told her the truth and she looked saddened but shortly she asked him if he had anything against being her boyfriend. This put Cornel into a none too easy situation. He was not old enough in the way Helen obviously was. She was one year or so younger but was infinitely more emotionally mature than him, but he valued their platonic friendship and did not really want to lose it if he could avoid it. Helen had a love of picking flowers and on the walk entwined some into her gorgeous honey blond hair. She collected a veritable variety of buttercups, bluebells and snowdrops, which majestically carpeted the speckled shimmering woodland that sprouted up here and there in Mick and Cornel’s fields. Mick had a date that night with his girlfriend Karen Beckensale, a local glamour girl who lived round the corner from him. Mick wanted to bring her into the fields so that they could all go on what he called a foursome together.
Mick was none to sure how long Cornel and Helen would stay together and had really pushed Cornel into going along with his plan while the going was good. ‘Come on,’ said Helen,
‘I challenge you to beat me to that tree over there.’ They raced off together with Helen winning the race but accusing Cornel of having let her, which he denied vehemently. They had many races that day. Helen was a top class sprinter and had represented her school in many competitions. Her beautiful shiny locks streamed behind her and like a valkary riding her fiery steeds through the heavens as she glided effortlessly on long sinewy shiny limbs through the evening mist of the lush green meadows over the hills and far away. Cornel showed off his mind-boggling arm strength by tossing huge branches into the air and they laughed, rolled around on the bonny banks of the infamous river Ribble. Sometimes catching themselves in an extended eye glance and touching their knees together as they sat watching the sunshine of their glorious adolescence sink into the green rays of the golden sunset. They ‘play fought’ together and while Helen allowed herself to be picked up and carried she closed her eyes and basked and bathed in the fountain of love from which Pegasus drank and trembled a little at the love that could not speak his name. She loved him and later that evening when Karen and Mick joined them she told Karen of her wish to marry her hero when she grew up. Helen was in love and Cornel was in trouble.
Glennys and Chris watched from their vantage point in the Park School balcony for the arrival of Cornel and Lyn Spence. They watched the couple set up the table tennis in the main hall. Glennys watched intently while the game progressed as Chris watched for the arrival of Steve Book. Book was a tall, dark slim boy who along with the notable distinction of captaining the school football team was also the Sixth Form College’s most feared fighter. Like Cornel’s childhood friend he was informal leader of the whole college. Steve could have any girl in the college but had set his eyes on Lyn, Cornel’s friend from his maths class. As Steve arrived from the boy’s school up the road an unheard gasp went up from the girls on the balcony, his long dark lank straight hair was a real hit with the female pupils who had not made an absolute decision as to whether they would be a boy or a girl. On his way to the common room for a cup of coffee and a large breast shaped baked loaf, Steve glanced over at the couple engaged in frolic and banter at the table tennis area. An unhealthy envious smile parted his thin wan lips. Who the hell was that guy with her? Steve to his credit did not oppose Cornel on any other grounds than that he had something he wanted. The sixth form had only been formed in the last two years and Steve, a grammar school boy, had not encountered the youth culture of pupils from secondary schools who were up until recently admitted to the institute whatever their academic ability. This was the fleeting golden age of Prime minister (the goodly) Harold Wilson who amongst many unsung achievements for the disadvantaged had become the founding spirit of the Open University. Cornel had amazed everyone by being directly moved out of the C-stream at Ribbleton Hall and into the A-stream. This had happened in the absence of Mr Lowe from his class through illness which in turn had led to the necessity of the deputy head Mr Ormerod taking over his duties for a month or so. During that time Cornel had amazed the deputy head by the quality of his essays, which Mr Ormerod had taken off A-level papers. He did a full investigation of Cornel’s performances in the other subjects and moved Cornel up immediately and had requested a full report from Mr Lowe on why Cornel had been left in the C-stream for so long without anyone noticing his academic talents. He never got that report, but had supported and encouraged Cornel to continue in Higher Education, the only boy from Cornel’s background ever to get there. Mr Ormerod’s dutiful authenticity had come too late to prevent a wounded inner child from leaving Ribbleton Comprehensive. This broke up Cornel’s leadership of the greaser gang and Steve Halshaw’s petitions for him not to go and join the ‘snotty lot’ had nearly succeeded but not quite.
The leader of the sixth form approached the table where the giggling couple pushed and shoved each other suggestively while playing table tennis. ‘Hi there Lyn,’ came a confident sergeant major voice. Lyn swirled around and greeted the owner of the confident voice. Steve came over and tried to kiss her biblically on the cheek but pulled away at the last second when an intensely uncomfortable signal was flashed to the little boy inside him from a symbolic mother centre in Lyn. ‘How about coming along to Winckley Square common room tonight?’ asked Steve in his middle class linguistic clarity? Lyn looked slyly over at Cornel and asked if he had anything to do that night. Cornel replied that he had some homework to do and was staying in the library and with that turned and offered his apologises for a visit to the gents. Steve did not waste time; ‘are you going out with anyone?’ came an expectant enquiry. Lyn had secretly been waiting for a long time to hear those words from her table tennis pal; in fact she had been hanging on for a whole year never quite believing that it was possible for a boy and girl to remain friends for that long without it becoming intimate. Cornel did not return from the gents that afternoon and did not go to classes either.
He had thinned out and grown taller since his Ribbleton Hall days and magically conjured some Engel Bert Humperdinck sideboards to boot. In his time at the sixth form he remained blissfully unaware and disbelieving of his popularity with the Park schoolgirls.
He had no idea that Lyn longed for their buddy-buddy relationship to bloom into full-blown romantic love. Underlying her infatuation with her maths colleague Lyn retained a little hostility concerning their official platonic relationship and was getting the feeling that she must let Cornel know that she would not wait forever. She had already turned down three grammar school boys that week. Cornel had sent out a full set of masculine fertility signals but had never approached her and whispered or otherwise the words she had been longing to hear all year long. She was seventeen now and she felt that she was wasting the best years of her life.
What the hell was wrong with this guy, Lyn was thinking while she searched the common rooms all over the winckley square building. Finally she decided to take a peak in the classrooms just above the games room. Cornel sometimes took his Sound of Music record and Camelot and played them there to escape the numerous objections of the other students if he played his square music in the common room. Why couldn’t he listen to T Rex or Cream like a normal person, thought Lyn? She had to culminate her search quickly before Steve and the in-crowd arrived to whisk her away. Cornel hid in the classroom to save Lyn the embarrassment of leaving him that evening for more promising company. He certainly felt no hostility towards Lyn for choosing to listen to ‘The Happening’ by the Supremes or a Ginger Baker drum roll followed by a glass of white wine over a candle lit dinner. All he had to offer was a bag of fish and chips and mushy peas from the local chippy around the corner followed by a moonlit walk across the eerie Avenham Park.
Cornel looked up in shock when the door of the classroom he was hiding in creaked open and the blond shiny unkempt hair of Lyn poked her head around the door.
‘What the bloody hell are you doing here’ said Lyn in an exasperated voice.
‘Err um, I’m just taking a break from studying a bit,’ said Cornel rather defensively.
‘I thought you were going out tonight’, he enquired shakily.
‘You are a bloody liar’, said Lyn not covering up her anger anymore,
‘You never were in any fucking library’. She certainly had a way with words when she was worked up. Cornel had not heard her say two taboo words in one sentence before and he knew their friendship could be in danger at this moment.
‘I’m sorry but we hadn’t agreed on meeting tonight’.
‘Well you never bloody-well came back from the fucking toilet this afternoon did you’. Cornel was at a loss to answer that one but decided to put a brave face on it and just apologise for that, which he did generously.
‘I wanted you to come to my place tonight and meet mum’, said Lyn not rubbing it in anymore.
‘That would be great sometime’, he replied nervously.
‘You don’t damn-well want to come, do you,’ said Lyn scolding.
‘Course I do, what about sometime next week’?
Anyway just at that moment a hoard of footsteps approached from outside in the corridor.
‘Turn off that bloody music’ said Lyn with clenched teeth,
Which Cornel did a bit annoyed she referred to his Camelot record in that way. The door opened, it was Mick Baker a conspicuous red headed friend of them both.
‘Hey Lyn, Steve Book’s looking for yer upstairs’.
‘Yeah, I’ve got to be off,’ said Cornel relieved at the prospect of getting out of there in one piece.
‘Fancy a game of chess?’ enquired Mick, who later in life was to end up a chief constable in the Preston Constabulary. But before Cornel could get a word out, Lyn got hold of Mick, took him by the sleeve and led him into the corridor.
‘Go and tell Steve I can’t make it tonight, would you’?
‘Tell him I might meet up later at Fulwood Barracks pub’.
‘Ok but he’s not going to bloody well like that’, said Baker.
Lyn went back into the room where Cornel was putting on Franco Nero singing ‘If ever I would leave you’, the one song Lyn could put up with.
‘What about us going out tonight somewhere’, said Lynn in that nothing to lose mood.
‘I’d love to but I haven’t got a penny’.
‘We could go home to my place’.
‘What’s your mum going to say’?
‘She’s meeting Sharon’, Lynn was proud of her kid sister who had just won a modelling competition in London recently.
‘It’s a bit late now Lyn’, it’s not going to be worth it, my last bus goes soon.
‘Come on, you could stay with me in my room, mum’s not back until tomorrow and Colin won’t bother us. I’ve told him about you and he’s my brother, no problem. He won’t dare say a thing.’
Now this was a startling prospect for a knight of the round table and had Cornel worn any armour it would have been rattling like an old ship.
She looked into Cornel’s large brown eyes which she always said were the most beautiful she had ever seen and held his arm which still ached from the battle with the giant years before. She slowly without causing any alarm put her arms around his neck and drew him closer to her but never losing eye contact. Nice as all this must have been for most full blooded young men Cornel had always more than dreaded this kind of encounter and secretly almost got a kind of ‘diabetes’ from over-dosing on the unadulterated sugar sweetness of it all
At that moment Steve and Mick Baker burst into the room. Steve had forced their location out of Mick who had been terrified all through his school years of Mr Book’s fearful fighting reputation. Without a word to Cornel with whom he had never spoke a word, he took him by the arm and pulled him into the corridor.
‘What the fucking hell is happening’, said Lyn too stunned to say anything else.
But in the deathly silence of Steve’s dominating attempt to humiliate Cornel, the tables turned suddenly and seemingly from out of nowhere as Cornel grabbed his assailants arm and wrestled his attacker to the floor and in the space of a few seconds the boot was well and truly on the other foot. Certainly not until Ali knocked out Foreman had there been a greater upset experienced at the well-heeled all boys Grammar school as Steve faced the fact of his impending and inevitable doom to his invincible image. Cornel having pinned him to the floor with a fist clenched and wound up right over his head ready to deliver the finishing blow. Mick Baker could not believe his eyes as Steve struggled in vain to get loose of the iron grip Cornel had on him but with a mighty heave managed one strike but thereafter he was paralysed by a flurry of blows that made him wish never to see this man ever again. Lyn screamed in sheer disbelief to see a ferocious uncompromising massacre of the middle-class hero. She like everyone else had believed that Steve was indestructible and had taken a bit of pride in the fact of his wooing her on account of this belief but right in front of her eyes he was miraculously vanquished in a few mere bloody seconds.
The blood flowed freely and Lyn begged Cornel to stop, which he did. Cornel backed slowly away from his stricken foe and turned and said to Lyn that he had to go home and with that instantaneously disappeared leaving his half conscious assailant on the floor as he walked out into the Winckley Square courtyard. Mick helped the fallen champion up the stairs to the first aid room. After she had recovered her composure Lyn ran into the courtyard but Cornel had already left with no satisfaction in his conquest but rather with a heavy heart and a threatening sickness of the soul. He had learned what all the existentialist philosophers that he was to study in university years later were to confirm—that love was never very far away from death.
Cornel made his way slowly over to Avenham Park. He was none the worst for wear after all the violence he had just come out of but dark dreadful foreboding filled up the hollow of the sunken garden of Winckley square like a lake of fire carved out by the flow of lava after the eruption of a volcano. His mind wandered freely to happier times to take his thoughts away from the trauma of battle. He saw Helen in his mind’s eye affixing golden buttercups to the silky tresses on the side of her temples, and had a vision of one of those cold wintry days when they would rise early for a quick walk in the country with only Jack Frost daring to interfere with the purity and legendary optimism of their young love. The scene changed and Steve Halshaw appeared pointing an accusing finger but failing to pick up the courage to cock him outside Mr Spurdle’s metalwork class. Neither he nor Steve wanted to hurt each other and the combat that everyone wanted never succeeded in materialising. But how Cornel missed his childhood buddy who represented a kind of clarity to life that Cornel now knew was his paradise lost. Steve never could grasp the influence of the flawed perfection of Lancelot and the deeply perfectionist call to duty of Emmanuel Kant. Men who were experts in the events of inner space would say Cornel was living in a fantasy world of his own making but what they failed to comprehend was that those fantasies slotted neatly into the unconscious collective of life in Preston and probably throughout the land. There at least for some Cornel would symbolise a yearning for lost innocence and certainty that would always have the very best knights and ladies of excellence bowing as he passed before them. Astronauts of the boundless and infinite extension of inner space could only orbit what made Cornel’s mental world go round; this notwithstanding however much empirical data they managed to collate. Trying to get into the head and secret garden of his castle in the air would be as futile as finding out what scrambled eggs tasted like to a cockroach. It certainly gave Cornel many sleepless nights wondering whether this implied some kind of elitism that would shamefully shatter the natural socialism of his Ribbleton postmodernism. Lancelot taught him that the perfection of the body was small potatoes compared to the living hell awaiting those who wanted to strive for the chimera of moral and spiritual perfection.
Avenham Park clawed at his back under his T-shirt with icy cold fingers that night. The dank freezing air was more than exacerbated by the river Ribble that ambled along at the bottom of its manicured lawns and gentle rolling landscape where Prestonians flocked at Easter to roll their eggs. The tradition was a real testimony to the power and glory of the biblical narrative specifically where the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb had been rolled away shortly before his ascension. Ascension was a perfect escape from reality mused Cornel, but knew he would never be anyone’s favourite son. There was no silver spoon between his teeth. Cornel headed over to the bridge that led toward Penwortham and one where he and Lyn often stood under on one of their romantic jaunts after coffee in Winckley Square common rooms. It held a special place in Cornel’s heart and always prevented his fall into any misanthropic soliloquies. It was also the bridge were his mother had thought about committing suicide and taking him and his brother Earl with her.
Chapter two. In the beginning.
Cornel’s family was really a cohesion and merger of two ethnicities and a multitude of worldviews. His mother’s father had arrived in Jamaica from in India in the nineteen twenties he was from one of the higher casts, his name being a modification of the Indian title Maharaja, notwithstanding all this he placed his feet on Jamaican soil a penniless migrant. He was built like an ex-footballer and quite lightly toned skin colour betraying his Northern Indian origins. He was always impeccably attired and had the raised chin and demeanour of a nobleman. By the start of world war two he had made his first million in the taxi and road haulage business and had prospered to such an extent that many would ask how many men he had murdered. He was none to pleased when his favourite daughter Joyce married his chauffeur and security man Melmoth. Cornel’s grandfather did grace his daughter’s wedding ceremony with his presence and blessing though this ran concurrently with a clandestine campaign to remove his daughter’s husband from the country or worse.
A couple of years after their marriage Melmoth vanished without word leaving his wife and children destitute. Joyce was devastated and was still very much in love with her man. He had been a kind and loving father to the boys so she had not the slightest inkling of what was happening to her family. Her father rather than coming to her aid cut her off from all inheritance rights and emotional support. He had taken a savage and brutal retribution on hearing his daughter was leaving for Britain.
She resolved to uproot and take her two boys to Britain on a pilgrimage to locate the lost father. She had found out from bank withdrawal receipts that Melmoth had bought a single ticket to London, Heathrow. She followed in what she imagined were the tracks of her husband’s tears. Both she and her children had British citizenship rights from Britain’s colonial obligations, which made travelling and settling in Britain only a formality.
The land of hope and glory did not live up to her expectations and one could hardly describe Britain as good enough mother. Things were getting better from the 1950’s onwards when Harold Macmillan had pronounced wryly that Britons ‘had never had it so good’.
Lancelot laid his spear at rest and raised his shield of the white swan and gave a last blood-chilling glare as he lowered his visor and charged like a white flash of lightening at the first challenger in the tournament at the Castle of Maidens. Elaine watching from the window of the castle, shrieked in terror as the lances splintered into a thousand pieces but took her hand from her mouth when she saw Le Chevalier ride out of the dust and melee of the Joust. The tournament was organised like a real battle and at the end the winner was the last man standing or the only one that did not yield. All gasped with disbelief as Le Chevalier smote right and left on horseback while many goodly knights fell to earth unable to resist the unimaginable power and fighting technique of this seemingly all but invincible warrior. Perceval Tristram and Gawain who had not yet entered the fray all stood on their feet as the mysterious stranger set his sights on the Turkish knight the formidable Sir Palamides. Tristram, who was considered one of the greatest knights of the world, let go of his thoughts on finding his Isolde for a moment. Turned and said to Gawain that he had never seen a knight dispatch twenty others in such quick time. Their amazement reached fever pitch when Le Chevalier smote the mighty Palamides out of his saddle breaking his horse’s stirrups and sending the rider sprawling with bloodcurdling ferocity along in the mud, sliding for some seconds before coming to a bone-crushing halt. When the other jousters saw the consummate ease with which the knight of the swan defeated one of the strongest men in the land, they quickly hurried to the sidelines and looked over to the pavilion for the undefeated and mystical Tristram to come and save the honour of all the knights of Camelot who were now biting the dust of the earth. Le Chevalier stood alone in the middle of the field visor raised and sword high in the air, as none dared to essay him in further combat. Over fifty knights cowered by the barriers unwilling to cross swords any further with the cold steel of Le Chevalier Mal Fait. Both Gawain and Tristram saddled up ready to do battle. Both knights were amongst the best that Camelot had to offer and if they failed this would not only do serious injury to the standing of the brotherhood of the knights of Camelot but also the majesty of the goodly King Arthur himself. The mighty SirTristram lowered his visor and set his lance at rest and charged.
Lyn waited for anxiously by the phone for Cornel to ring her. Her image of Cornel had been shattered like a vase falling off a window shelf. She had always thought of him as otherworldly and slightly fey. Who would ever believe that her friend who she sat up with many a night at Winckley Square telling gentle stories and reciting his favourite poetry would turn out to have the physical talents and resolve that she witnessed earlier that evening. His slim slight physique certainly betrayed a shift gearing system that could go well above overdrive that was for sure. He was nothing to look at as far as muscle structure was concerned, but she found herself asking the same question that she heard Steve Book ask as he was being carried upstairs to the first aid room ‘who was that guy?’. Lyn was not sure if she could feel comfortable with Cornel anymore.
Cornel did not call that night, he did not have even sixpence for the telephone to his name. He walked and ran the five miles home from Avenham Park and never was tempted to go round to Lyn’s place though it was only a stone’s throw from the park. He felt ashamed at showing another side of himself, a side that he did not even have the excuse of saying was not really himself. He had grown up in a rough tough neighbourhood and had retained nothing separate or distinctive from that environment. He was really only a kind of Steve Halshaw in educational drag. Cornel often teased Halshaw by calling him a cabbage because of his lack of social finesse, whereas Steve responded by jibbing that Cornel was a cauliflower, only a cabbage with an education.
Cornel was deeply troubled about his uncompromising attitude to imminent physical attacks on his person. He was for the large part and astonishingly a lapsed total pacifist, such strands of thought being consistent with the teaching of the wizard Merlin in the Arthurian legends. One could not say that Cornel was conscious of his commitment to the deep Christian values embedded in the latent content of those tales, but any casual look at his behaviour would certainly give one the suspicion that he embraced them in actuality. What particularly perplexed Cornel and that ran against his lessons in sociology at the sixth form college was that he felt completely uncompelled and free in his choices when he had engaged in the many acts of violence around his Ribbleton Estate. Up to a certain point he understood that many men in his situation might have turned the other cheek but he had to make the best of what he found himself to be and left such idle speculation to the metaphysicians in philosophy of law departments who secretly felt ashamed of the inhumane way twentieth century society turned its back on their in depth knowledge and reflection of the startling lack of control humans had in crucial matters such as who they were and where they found themselves born. Certainly posterity can forgive inhumanity based on authentic ignorance but had always been brutally condemning of propagation of pseudo ignorance for the purposes of letting go primitive pleasure in retribution and moral infliction of pain under the label of punishment. All this kind of speculation did not weigh heavily with Cornel because no hypotheses like the ones found amongst jurisprudents of a retributive inclination could include the imagined probability of someone possessing a point of view precisely like his. They had skated over the thin ice of the contradiction in the every day use of the expression ‘if I were you’ and had pinned their retaliation against freely choosing imaginary opponents of the normal path on the clipboard of that logically contradictory idiomatic expression and had done all this premeditatively. Cornel got on with playing the cards he had been dealt and would always act as if he knew what and where he was, who he was and for what he was responsible.
No moralist could ever in principle fairly conclude that they would not have taken the same stance if they had been Cornel himself. Cornel had obviously an unwritten code of conduct with clearly defined parameters. This code applied to everyone and he judged himself no less harshly than he judged the infringements against it by others. The code was fragments and elements of medieval standards of chivalry and honour, which obstinately stated that a knight must come to the aid of any victim being bullied by a mightier assailant. These virtues of chivalry, valour and honour were non-negotiable and absolute to his mind and applied equally to himself if he, God forbid, could ever be seen as the weaker party in a conflict. Cornel of course was vaguely aware of the immorality of hiding harmful selfish and not uncommonly psychotic motives behind damn fine sounding homely adages and values.
He was also aware of how groups could define themselves as kinds of supra-individuals outside the moral space of law and order, to commit morally reprehensible actions that would be looked on in horror if individuals had done the same things. Medieval chivalry peered behind these moral contradictions and focused on personal conscience, that was the source of its goodness in Cornel’s eyes and not merely that he had been brainwashed into these ways of life by the monks in Preston before he could think for himself.
He had not failed to remember the terrible suffering at the hands of others who had established sound moral credentials for themselves and did not forget either that Sir Mordred had tried to ground his vision for humanity on liberal and democratic slogans and branded King Arthur’s Camelot as benevolent despotism. Mordred had fought the last battle at Calumn under the banner of a dark ages form of republican democracy to mask an insane megalomaniac will to absolute power. Vice often travelled openly in the chariot of virtue and Cornel’s only hope was that his disgust for political expediency would not drive him into the hands of the very hypocrisy he so despised and which sickened him to his soul. He never wished to use violence even in self-defence though knew he often had hidden the cold dish of revenge behind acts of coming to his own self-protection. Would others have done the same things in those identical situations? Cornel considered that populist point a non-starter, how could anyone ever be him not even he was much responsible for that.
Lyn walked slowly down the tree-lined avenue of Moor Park that chained the girls’ park school to the boys’ grammar school. The pupils from the sixth form college often had to shuttle between each building during their change of period on their school timetables. She had just finished her maths period and there was no Cornel. He had not been to college all week and it was now Thursday. She had checked with Mick Baker but he had not seen him either. By chance she bumped into another good friend of his Steve Daly a fine upstanding fellow who was in times to come to occupy, some would say, the dubious honour and title of Cornel’s best mate. Steve had in fact met Cornel a day or so earlier and told Lyn that they had crossed each others paths in the local Harris library one of the finest buildings in Preston nestling majestically right in the heart of the town centre. Steve told her that Cornel had been reading on the second floor reference library. Lyn did not think twice, she rushed off to catch the local bus from Moor park to the massive white elephant known as Preston bus station once hailed as the biggest in Europe. She made her way slowly from gate ten passing down Tithebarn street which once had been the location of the old bus station in the early sixties and the acquired a notorious reputation as a hunting ground for local prostitutes. Ever since the construction of the Preston Guild Hall the area had been somewhat cleaned up. She crossed the road adjacent to the Guild hall but decided to tarry a while at the Miller’s arcade to buy some polo mint, ‘the mint with the hole’, as the television advertisement proclaimed, and a Galaxy chocolate bar. Lyn really loved chocolate and would often go on chocolate binges with Cornel in front of a television set somewhere. They would buy a bag full of the stuff, a typical collection might be an Aero chocolate bar, a bag of Malteasers , a Cadbury’s dairy milk chocolate bar, that another television add insisted had ‘a pint and a half of full cream milk’. They would sit and gorge themselves stupid all night, severely hampered in what they could do to entertain themselves by Cornel’s puritan medieval code of conduct which was as much a source of frustration for Lyn as it had been for Cornel’s other full-blooded healthy young female acquaintances.
Lyn’s thoughts ran on like a video machine in fast forward and rewind. What was she going to say, Steve Daly had told her a lot of the wannabe warriors from other schools were now most interested in winning their spurs by taking on the infamous conqueror of the formidable Steve Book. The fight culture of Preston schoolboys was as well organised as the World boxing associations organisation of the divisions of contenders and champions of professional boxers. The authorities knew very little about it and oddly did not really care if legions of schoolboys bashed each other silly, such was the prestige of the faith of masochism in the town. Lyn could not put her doubts over the character of Cornel to rest. The pacifist social sub-culture was still very much in evidence in Lyn’s system of values and Cornel’s unholy massacre of a suitor of hers had severely tested the sanctity of those fundamental commitments. Cornel had always been so gentlemanly and courteous, how could he do such a wicked thing? Steve Book had fifteen stitches in his pretty face and was limping badly around the place. She had felt extremely uncomfortable talking to him the other day. He was implying to a group of friends that Cornel had taken him by surprise and that things would be different in a rematch. Steve ultimately never lost enough of the memory of the pain of his defeat to ever approach Cornel again, there never was a rematch.
After making short shrift of a number of bars of chocolate Lyn climbed the marble spiral staircase to the second floor reference library as though she were six months pregnant. As she ascended the stairway, glanced over at some breath taking watercolours by Constable, and a Preston artist’s reproduction of those marvellous apples and pairs by Cézanne. They lined the wall all the way up and Lyn was lost for a moment in a wonderful mosaic of post impressionist works of stunning aesthetic delight. This was Cornel’s Joyous Gard, his Fortress of Solitude quite appropriate considering that Lyn’s friend, the lanky good hearted Christine Mulley, had longed nick-named Cornel Clark Kent on account of the identical nature of the initials and because of Cornel’s thick horned rimmed spectacles which gave him an image that Lyn now berated him as fraudulent.
She finally found Cornel hunched over a large volume of Gibbons’ ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’. He had broken his spectacles, not during combat but later on when he was jogging home from Avenham Park. Lyn looked on in disbelief, the same look of astonishment that Glennys, his future long time partner gave him when she saw him trying to watch the musical Camelot peering through a sliver of broken glass, all that was left of a lens after one of numerous accidents with them. Cornel’s eyesight was notoriously bad, a fact that had prevented him taking up a bunch of offers from professional teams to come for trials prominent amongst the high flying Burnley. From his dishevelled appearance Lyn could well enough see that Cornel had not had much sleep and had been working hard on his own curriculum. None of what he was reading was on the syllabus for his O and A levels to be sure. Lyn could not understand the concept of hard factual reading for pleasure and she often caught Cornel doing a lot of it. Lyn’s family were staunchly Lutheran Protestant and had inculcated a firm individualist work ethic that had no vision of any kind of work as a pleasure or intrinsically valuable. One worked to earn a living or studied to get a job, God helped those who helped themselves. It had always been a problem for the Lutherans that God had created beings that would be victims of a phenomenon such as pain. Rather than taking a defensive line they had gone on the attack proudly proclaiming the virtue of suffering against the charge that it would have been more rational for the Great Redeemer to gave created a world full of dandelions incapable of experiencing the torment of death and decay.
Her mind wandered for a moment to the time when she and her mother had bumped into Cornel on Fishergate with her mother remarking that she had been disappointed by Cornel’s ordinary looking presence and had wondered what all the fuss was about. She had never revealed to Cornel that Steve Book had also asked what the hell she was doing hanging around him. Steve had at that moment also marked his intention to prove that he was the better man and that Cornel had no business pretending that he had a right to a place in the hierarchy of the school sub-culture by going out with one of its elite women. Steve actually knew nothing about Cornel as Lyn had pointed out to him; Steve had made his judgement from a series of dodgy inference grounded heavily in Cornel’s lack of an imposing muscle structure and no recorded victories over any noted combatants that he had heard. One’s place in the social hierarchy was wholly determined by trials by combat where intellectual ability and good looks counted for very little. The best combatant became automatic leader and had an unofficial right to all the spoils of victory. Although Steve did not go into this with Lyn she as one of the best looking and certainly most popular of the sixth form girls was considered one of its ultimate trophies. No one let Lyn know this and if they had, she would have hit the ceiling; the rewards and the hurdles one had to jump to achieve them would always be kept unspoken and informal. Steve wanted Lyn to believe in his feminism and bed her at the same time, a contradiction that previous holders of the title had solved by coming up with the idea of unspoken commandments the first of which was that none must talk about them. The team did not want the girls they had earmarked as rewards for victories in leadership battles to start screaming about their human right not be thought of as a mere dressing to be put in the victor’s trophy cabinet. A distribution of benefits and burdens of College life by these criteria on the surface looked grossly unfair but as Steve often argued it was better this way than distributing them on the basis of a mere oath of allegiance which risked losing the system were the toughest guys could get the toughest positions. Was it rational, Steve said, for a bloke to get into the school rugby team because he had sworn he was loyal to the rules of the game and was a nice guy? Certainly he knew past insecure captains had allowed a sycophant to prosper but duly noted that the school had failed to win any championships even though the leader’s ego and potency were at maximum intensity. The captain’s potency won games but the best player for the right position won championships.
As Lyn strode single minded across the floor of the reference room a strong scented leathery aroma wafted from the beautiful gold inscribed, skin bound volumes on the dark brown Victorian styled library shelves. It brought her mind instantly to the image of the house in the country in the fairy tale her mother used to read to her, called ‘The lion, the witch and the wardrobe’. She felt at that moment an intuition of Cornel’s inner world where reason and fantasy managed to exist side-by-side smiling at each other. In that flash of insight she no longer was completely at a loss for how he could on the one hand embrace high rational ethical standards and on the other be more than willing to engage in the wicked intimacy of mortal combat. The internal legitimacy of an irrational action was grounded in the mere fact that there was a decent set of absolute rules from which it was an aberration. Lapsed idealism or pacifisms only retained their dignity because they were always reaching up towards a heavenly pure version of both. The knights of the round table not only embraced the inevitable defeat of their codes, they positively gloried in it obtaining immense self justification and gratification from adhering to a set of principles which contained the fact that they would fail at the moment they were written down. That was the stuff and origin of all romance. Constantly failing to be decent but earnestly striving to be so embroidered the shoulders of their knightly existence with mystery and imagination in opposition to the logic and science that threatened to unweave the plaited twenty-four carat gold necklace that betrothed them to their meaning. Imperfection far from being counterpoised to romance was identical with it, no way of life could be perfect and romantic at one and the same time. The fog in which Lyn and Cornel’s relationship had always existed began slowly but surely to lift as she made her way to the solid rocklike table at which he sat and reflected.
Adam looked up from behind his fingers that were splayed into the shape of a triangle as the good doctor sought eye contact with him in the second session of his psychic investigation. Adam’s eyes did not look away or waver as they fixed to Boorman’s equally resolute gaze.
‘I told your wife that it was not any of my duty or personal inclination to sit here in judgement of your situation’, began the doctor in an earnest tone.
‘I do realize you have job to do’ came a solid reply.
‘I have nothing against that and I will co-operate in whatever way helps’ continued Adam.
‘Do you feel up to telling me what happened? Take your time and take things right from the from the beginning’.
‘It’s an illusion to believe that there ever was a beginning of anything,’ came an enigmatic reply that reminded Boorman that he would have his work cut out to keep things firmly anchored in the doctor’s reality.
‘Have you ever belonged to any sect or cult, say the Scientologists or the Moonies?’ the good doctor went immediately on the offensive to make Adam ashamed for waxing philosophical.
‘Has anyone said that?’ came a caustic reply.
‘People have come here to the hospital to try and get me never to let you out.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘Oh?’ The doctor had decided to get the client talking. ‘So that doesn’t surprise you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Can I ask why’?
‘You can, but I can’t answer’.
‘Do you feel there is some kind of conspiracy involved’?
The doctor was half fishing for paranoid symptoms and half trying to get to the objective truth. Adam did not look like the charming socio-pathetic trickster that his visitors had tried to paint him . Boorman had been made to feel by their intervention that there was more to this story than met the eye, though he had to undermine the client’s version of events he was more than a little put off by the kind of impression the visitors had made on him. The psychological profile of sociopath as charming were more than exaggerated by the media whose job it often was to pursue rather nice people to get a story. The only drawback was that the public had to be coaxed into withdrawing their moral support of these popular media prey. What better than to constantly remind the public of the danger of being hoodwinked by charm. Boorman had to keep a close eye on all these factors if he was to get to the bottom of this perplexing case. His visitors clearly had as much to hide as his client, but what? Why was Adam’s story being blown out of all proportion?
Sure the charges were technically very serious but compared to the numerous murderers and serial killers who were by and large better treated than Adam, the point was why were they left in peace to rehabilitate and not the latter? Boorman had come across a very welter of horrible men in his thirty years of forensic psychiatry. Adam’s charges were morally pretty ordinary in relation to the number of incestuous men, cannibals and necrophiles who crossed his clinical path over the years. Most of these hardly appeared in the press or summoned the amount of attention his client was receiving. A question that was to become large in the doctor’s mind throughout this matter was why Adam’s case had thrown up all this outrage
and outpouring of wild fanciful accusations.
Doctor Boorman poured over his confidential files on Adam David Jessup in the privacy of his office at the back of his home that he had been purpose-built in the hospital grounds of the psychiatric facility in Katrineholm in the centre of Sweden. The doctor was proud of his hospital, which he had been recruited to develop by Swedish government many years before from his home in Amsterdam, Holland. He was one of those Dutch psychiatrists that had still very strong memories of the Nazi occupation of his home country, and was very sensitive to the telling symptoms of insanity of groups as well as individuals. He was also well aware that there had been much sympathy for the imposition of any kind of order in Scandinavia and the political parties that arose now and then promising it. He did however have great trust in the gentle simplicity of the Swedes and that their love of order and security would not ultimately take priority over justice. He had taken especial care to protect his clients from the moral hawks in the Swedish government that wanted the facility to add formal provision of punishment as well as psychological and medicinal therapy. Boorman had even got into a fistfight with another psychiatrist that had the audacity to suggest that a wall should be built around the entire hospital to prevent the periodic escape of inmates. Boorman had thundered that Karsudden was not a prison and that escaping inmates had very little chance of getting very far in such a highly monitored society. Pointing out that only five percent of psychiatric patients commit crimes, his pleas for humane treatment for his clients often fell on sympathetic ears within the Swedish beaurocracy.
What was he to make of the Mr Jessup case? At that moment he had no idea. His visitors had related a tale of Mr Jessup as a cold calculating individual who had megalomaniac pretensions to leading some kind of movement or cult. The visitors had warned the good doctor not to be misled by his clients normal looking appearance and had begged him not to release Adam at all. They had even contacted the local police station to try to get the police chief to remove three of Mr Jessup’s friends who had taken up residence there to be near him. To whip up a threat of the abnormal they branded Jessup’s friends as disciples. Psychiatrists and law enforcers were paid to hunt down the abnormal and reconvert to the status quo the visitors thought they were on to a winning formulae.
The case was getting more bizarre by the day and the Swedish government had wanted to see the back of it. Why again wondered the doctor. He had not particularly noticed any burning hypnotic eyes that exposed a desire to conqueror the world as had appeared in the national newspapers and had considered his client to be a kind and well-controlled man which he was later to write on the release forms. But clearly the doctor would first have to satisfy his political masters that Mr Jessup did not pose a danger to himself or others. This would be a very difficult task given that Mr Jessup had been invariably labelled a guru, a terrorist, a cult leader, a white slave trader, a scientologist and a Moonie. This brought a smile of incredulity to the doctor’s lips and the one thing his client was guilty of for sure was managing to draw out every hidden subconscious fantasy of the entire Scandinavian psyche, an insight that the doctor was most gratified to receive. He had himself in truth not heard the client proclaim himself the Son of God or that he had a father in heaven or prophesy that the kingdom of man was heading toward an eclipse of the sun and the spectacle of the stars falling from heaven. Adam had been reluctant to be drawn into the realms of other worldly talk as much as Boorman had tried to provoke this. Some of the unsympathetic personnel were torn between feeling that Adam was sick and only had to have his wrong buttons pushed , in the unguarded moment as it was called, or that he was playing the whole damn hospital at its own game. Did Mr Jessup have in depth knowledge of psychology and psychiatric procedure, some definitely thought so. Interestingly Doctor Boorman did not share these suspicions.
Cornel climbed the rickety magic swirling staircase right to the top of a crumbling Victorian house to his first tutorial with Ted Honderich. Professor Honderich had been allocated as Cornel’s tutor at the prestigious University College Philosophy department in the Gordon Square right opposite the Euston station in the centre of London. Chris Vowels and an Irish lass by the name of Nuala were already waiting in the dimly lit though cheerfully severe room of the professor. The latter showing his symbolic sympathy with that overused though highflying winged creature, the eagle, referred to his office as his eyrie, the eagle’s nest. Whether the choice of name for his study reflected his Mennonite Canadian German heritage was hard to say but some very notable political leaders had also been predisposed to envision their favourite haunt as the nest of that formidable bird of prey. In any case Cornel was not fooled by the surface informality of Professor Honderich’s entertaining pacing up and down as he spoke. The man had a mind sharper than razor blades and was built like an elegant relative of that mannequin model of the animal world, the ultimate in instinctual high fashion, the giraffe. The good professor liked to be addressed informally as simply Ted. Cornel mused that Ted implied Ed that in turn was linguistically related to ‘head’ indicating the professor’s worship of the intellect rather than the heart or the emotions. At least that was one obvious reading of the fanciful formula. The professor welcomed heartily his new protégés, took a few general questions and then famously ‘pushed on’, the latter slogan becoming his catch-phrase that baptised an imposing identity which was sure to end up in the insightful dreams of this malleable philosophy charges. The professor without much introduction started drawing balloons on his white board that left Cornel completely at a loss as to where the tutor’s squeaky felt pen was leading him. The green balloons cut and overlapped one another introducing to Cornel the novel idea that there be might some form and order to the universe, well at least in the linguistic one where some utterances exclude the possibility of making others and otherwise lead to some inevitable predetermined path we euphemistically call the logical one. It was an eye-opener for Cornel that the answers to questions he wanted to know could turn out by dint of a mysterious indifferent external authority, to be answers he did not want to hear. That first tutorial also predisposed Cornel to thinking that what he said was taken down and noted by some god of all possible errors and truth who, though existing outside of space and time, would always pop up to embarrass him if he was slack or disorderly in the way he framed a proposition. The professor’s ultimate objective was to make his poorly educated first years students as paranoid as possible about the feebleness and wooliness of their meagre state and public school beginnings. That was one of the juiciest educational worms he could drop into his pupils greedy open beaks.
Ted ogled Cornel in a perplexed kind of way though he was brutally honest in saying out loud that he could not squeeze Cornel into a category or a frame of thought. The professor was trying to work out who in the tutorial had a clean and decisive grasp on the subject and thought Chris was certainly promising material though he had an intuition, and said so, that Cornel was a representative of peculiar kind of excellence he could not quite put his finger on. Certainly the small town boy from Preston was an enthusiastic student of philosophy and wanted his bachelors degree badly notwithstanding the difficulty in gauging how much precision his punch-drunk mind could muster. The professor was a fine example of masculism, both politically and hormonally. His rat-a-tat answers to his pupils’ feeble questions came out of his thin expressive mouth like the bullets out of a Tommie gun.
‘So what you are saying is that no one can make a conscious decision to do wrong?’
‘What other kind of decisions are there?’ came the reply in a thick no nonsense Canadian accent.
‘Well there are unconscious ones, aren’t there?’
‘Well if they are unconscious how can they be called decisions?’
‘Well, err, you can just do something without really knowing what’s going on in your subconscious mind.’
‘Well how do you know anything is going on?’
‘By the stupid things we do.’
‘Might that only show that you did something and don’t want to take responsibility for it?’
‘So you are saying that we do bad things and get guilty about it and decide to forget it?’
‘Could be.’
‘Then wouldn’t we remember that we decided to forget?’
‘We might forget that as well.’
‘What you’re saying is that we can forget we forgot?’
‘I’m saying we haven’t had to mention fantasy worlds at all.’
‘The subconscious?’
‘Spot on.’
‘But we might have other cases were we will have to mention it.’
‘Well let’s have those mysterious scenarios then.’
‘I can’t think of them right off the top of my head.’
‘As nobody here can, then we have for the time being to consider the strong possibility that I have the truth.’
‘But what if we think of a refutation of what you said later?’
‘That would be a fine thing but between now and then what I have said will stand as truth.’
‘But that doesn’t sound right.’
‘Sound? I’m not singing.’
‘But we are just first year students. If there was another professional philosopher here he might be able to defeat what you said.’
‘Doubt it, but once again between now and then I have the truth.’
‘So truth belongs to just who wins an argument at a particular time?’
‘That sure seems to be the upshot. Let’s push on quickly.’
The professor returns to his balloons on the white board.
‘You see,’ said Ted, ‘if items in this balloon can only belong to that red one then they cannot be included in this green one. But if some items of both red and green balloons belong to this blue one, then that is what all three have in common, and that is one truth we have about the nature of our universe, and whoever uses truth the best wins.’
‘Well what do we win?’
‘You get where you want to go.’
‘Let’s say where we want to go is the opposite of what’s logical?’
‘That’s straight forward, you just deliberately mess up the maths.’
‘Is that all?’
‘If you want to go wrong logically you must go about that logically.’
‘We can of course go wrong by accident but that we call error.’
‘That of course occurs unintentionally but that’s quite a different subject.’
‘Let’s push on.’
‘But what you’re saying means that there is no answer to anything, we can’t freely go beyond the logical. What about mystery? Is there none?’
‘Firstly if there is no answer except the logical one that is an answer. The second thing is that mystery is only a feature of life that we have not yet encountered facts not for now known.
‘If there is no mystery then we can in principle know everything there is to know about our universe and its origins’ Chris blurted out this in a slightly desperate tone. He was a devote pious boy from a very a simple God fearing background and he felt all that was being said touched on the blasphemous. He was to shock everyone by dropping out from the course shortly after this tutorial.
Professor Honderich did not understand where Chris’s departure from the department came from. Ted had always proved one stereotypical observation concerning academics; that they could be absolutely brilliant and know nothing about life.
Cornel’s football team had just won the Coca-Cola cup in Preston. This was quite a remarkable performance as only a few months earlier the team had been languishing at the bottom of the divisions. The football team had then been mostly composed of Asians before Cornel had become captain. An Asian by the name of Ragbear Patel had been its leader for sometime before. This town had quite a smattering of people from the sub-continent attracted there by promises of a good living and working conditions in the cotton and synthetic chemicals industries. It was heavy dirty work and many died from various forms of lung congestion and cancer. The local population avoided working in these if they could. By and large the whole area was given over to work that involved high health risks and there was even the atomic energy plant close by in Sellafield. Cornel’s mother had contracted cancer of the thyroid gland whilst working in a number of these factories over the years though her doctors had told her that there was no evidence that the disease was work related. On the other hand the dangerous working conditions of Preston’s heavy industries had pacified the potential threat of large-scale racial unrest as the local people felt relieved that their life expectancy was at least much better than the immigrant population. Steve Halshaw had once told Cornel that his dad had nothing against immigrants because they did the dirty work. Ronny Kendal, another gang member, had said the same thing but at the same time marvelled that immigrant men and women could find each other sexually attractive. On the hand he had thought that Diana Ross was a real bird and would really as he put it like to get her with legs astride on his Triumph Bonneville motorbike. With the innocent and common sense distinction in Preston between the group and the individual he saw no contradiction in this whatsoever.
Ragbear Patel had bumped into Janet Sharples some months ahead of the time Cornel joined his football squad. She told him that she had met Cornel at a party. Ragbear, a full Sikh, was quite shy when speaking with white girls and this was the very first time he had done so on an extended social level. His inferiority complex could be traced back to one event in school in the early sixties when the huge publicity about the danger of contracting small pox from newly arriving Indians and Pakistanis. Ragbear had been mortified when a classmate had refused to hold his hand in the traditional dance round the May pole in Spring fearing that germs would come off onto her hand and infect her. He had often seen the very fine shiny Janet at football matches where she had come to cheer on her boyfriend who played for another team, but though secretly falling for her he was feeling too inferior to talk to her. She had come right up to him in the Preston market place and asked him how he was and if he still played at Penwortham Holme Recreation Centre. She easily recognised him because he never took off his turban, even for football matches but had noticed him fixing a shy glance at her during the football tournaments. Ragbear had done an unforgivable thing, he had joined the Jehovah’s Witness though still wore the turban. This was yet another of those infamous contradictions Preston was famous . However joining the religious group had given him the confidence to unleash a formidable though wasted intellect. He engaged Janet in a lengthy conversation in which he was trying to not only to persuade her to use her influence over Cornel to join his team inexplicably called Nazz but also to go along to the Jehovah’s witness Church Kingdom Hall right by the Preston bus station for a meeting with its leader. Ragbear felt like a traitor to his family and their Sikh religion and to offset the immense guilt and doubt he had become a zealous missionary for the group hoping that with each new convert his doubts would decrease. They did not. Janet’s father was secretary for one of the biggest trade unions in Preston and had a social consciousness well above average and though sympathetic to Ragbear she would not let this cloud her better judgement. She staunchly refused to attend and was quite taken aback that he thought she had any influence over the guy she had just met at the party but nevertheless she was flattered.
Ragbear had been a long time admirer of Cornel’s football skills and had gone to watch Ribbleton hall win the Dawson cup final on Preston North End in the summer of 1968. He was honest enough to see that victory was very much due to Cornel’s lightening speed on the left wing and his pinpoint crosses to that deadly eerie centre forward Phil Cook. He was not too keen on Cornel himself whom he had often seen in the town with blond beauties on his arm judging that no one could be seen with girls like that and be a serious responsible fellow at the same time. This was no slap on the wrists for Ragbear far prestigious persons than he would jump to that dodgy conclusion to their downfall in the future. Janet had not wanted to stand talking that day but felt Ragbear knew something about the strange guy she had met at a party thrown by a friend who also knew Cornel.
She had come to Brenda’s party and had been surrounded by a few guys who were as usual trying to chat her up. She by chance cast a bored glance at a group of guys huddled in a corner seemingly in intense conversation. Two of them were blond, one tall and thin and the other tall and well built. They were Steve Daley and Andy Kemp, both good friends of Cornel’s and part of some secret inner circle she mused. She noticed that the slightly built dark guy had something about him which Ragbear had a agreed with her was some kind of what he called personal magnetism. He had been reading books that suggested that people were born with varying degrees of this mysterious indefinable stuff, and had consciously looked around for those blessed with it. Janet had met Andy before somewhere and went over to the group and hailed him. The dark boy she had found rather handsome though he seemed to take very little notice of her, which secretly offended her. She noticed that Cornel had looked drunk though no one knew why he hardly even took part in any festivities and Andy said it was a miracle he attended the party at all. Andy had winked at her as if he had spiked Cornel’s bitter shandy.
‘What have you been talking about?’ enquired Janet curiously.
‘Not much,’ replied Andy looking sheepishly over at the leader.
‘No, tell her,’ ordered Cornel.
‘I’ve just joined the psychical society,’ said Andy reluctantly.
‘You mean you hunt for ghosts?’
‘Well, we investigate the possibility,’ went on Andy in a way that betrayed his upper middle-class origins.
‘Do you believe in that stuff?’ said Janet turning to Cornel trying to get an extended eye glance. Cornel did not look at her for more than a fleeting moment. Janet was not put off she slid slyly over and stood right next to him. This did not pass Steve’s notice and he winked heartily to Cornel who as usual felt a bit uncomfortable. At that moment Cornel seized the record player and put on a song called ‘Colours’ by Donavan. As it turned out that was one of Janet’s favourites and she identified herself with yellow haired subject of the song.
‘Have you ever seen one?’
‘No, never.’ Cornel continued to rifle through the LP’s and forty-fives, and picked out a song by Leo Sayer called ‘ I won’t let the Show go on’.
‘I have,’ said Janet
‘Where?’
Cornel’s mind began to drift to a story his mother had told. They had once been staying in a hotel on holiday, on a Caribbean Island and a violent hurricane had erupted with the whole place tottering on its foundations. His mother had carried the newly born Cornel into the foyer and all of a sudden an elderly woman came rushing into the hotel desperately attempting to evade the elements. She approached the new mother and with a flattened emotional tone calmly said that Cornel’s mother should be wary about showing so much concern for her newborn son. She said almost in a whisper that everyone would have cause to regret it if he reached manhood. The woman disappeared into the cavernous corridors of the hotel and Joyce never saw her again, though her words had echoed ominously and filled her with a dread that she still felt years later when she had related the tale to Cornel’s aunt Veronica while Cornel sat listening on.
‘My grandmother had told me she had woke to find a tall thin woman standing at the bottom of her bed,’
‘Why do ghosts always stand at the bottom of beds?’ Cornel said half jesting.
‘It’s true!’ shrieked Janet who clearly felt that the indefinable sensation of the uncanny needed a stout defence.
Freud himself had often puzzled over the nature and attraction of the uncanny, though Cornel had been none too impressed with superstition and secretly thought that those who professed contact with supra-natural worlds were probably severely neglected children who needed all the attention and controversy they could whip up around themselves. Janet was in militant mood over this issue and Cornel was not about to sacrifice his principles merely to possess her. Steve, alarmed that Janet was getting annoyed, deftly motioned Cornel to step aside a moment for a little word in the ear.
‘Listen, just agree with her. She’s after you, can’t you see that?’ said Steve in a seriously pragmatic mood.
‘Who gives a toss about that,’ hissed Cornel defiantly.
‘Ok, if you are not bothered, let me have a go.’
‘A go at what?’
‘Well, what the heck do you think I mean?’
‘ What do you want me to do?’
‘Just shut up for a start.’ Steve got right to the point.
‘Sure thing.’ Both friends then returned to the other two.
‘Fancy another drink?’ said Steve motioning toward Janet.
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll get it,’ Cornel offered subserviently.
‘What are you doing later on?’ Janet did not answer she was looking over at the drinks table where Cornel was standing.
‘What the hell is he doing?’
‘I told you he’s drunk or something,’ said Andy with a wide grin.
Steve, noticing this, wandered quickly over to where Cornel was standing.
‘Hey mate, do me a favour and piss off for a bit. Things will go a lot better over there.’
‘Fine, I’m off then.’
‘No, I don’t mean you should fuck off entirely, just get out of eye shot’
‘No it’s ok, I’m a bit whacked anyway.’
Cornel was beginning to grasp a historical pattern here so he decided to beat a quick retreat. He was kind of happy for Steve who rarely got enthusiastic over any girl. With that Cornel turned got his motorcycle jacket and left.
‘That’s the first and last I saw of him,’ said Janet trying to edge away from Ragbear.
‘You mean he just left without saying anything?’
‘That’s what Steve had said.’
‘Are you going out with Steve now or are you still with Brian?’ Ragbear noticing her imminent intention to depart began to talk faster.
‘No I’m not going with anyone at the moment, but I really have to get going.’
‘Just one more thing, next time you see Cornel let him know that Nazz would like him to play for us.’
‘I think Steve said that he was going to play for another team.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t remember... TB something.’
‘Not TB7?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Damn it.’
‘What?’
‘That would make them impossible to beat!’
‘Can just one bloke make that much difference?’
‘In my opinion he’s the best player I’ve ever seen.’
‘Come on.’
‘It’s true but I don’t know how much he’s busy with other stupid things.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s always hanging around with the wrong types.’
‘Who?’
‘You know.’
‘No, I’ve only talked to him once.’
‘So you won’t come along to a meeting then,’ said Ragbear changing the subject.
‘No, I’m sorry, but I think it would just be wasting your time.’
‘Well you are welcome any time,’ and hands her a copy of ‘Watchtower’, the group’s newsletter.
‘What’s all this about?’
‘It’s about a bit of what we believe.’
‘So you want me to believe what you do?’
‘No, only if you want to.’
‘But why do you have to go round persuading people?’
‘Because everyone likes to hear good news.’
‘Well, it might be for you.’
‘If it is for me, why not everyone else? I’m a human being.’
‘Do people always welcome you?’
‘No.’
‘You must really believe in this stuff a lot.’
‘I do. God wants his creations to love him and I’m here to bring that message.’
‘So how is what you say different from what all other Christians say?’
‘We think everything the bible says is true.’
‘Literally?’
‘Of course.’
‘You mean that nothing is symbolic?’
‘No.’
‘So Jesus did walk on water and turn water into wine and did come back from the dead?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Have you ever talked to Cornel about this?’
‘He’s a strange fish.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘He’s impossible to judge. Sometimes he seems to be serious and sometimes I think he’s laughing at us. There is no place for lust in God’s kingdom and he’s not one with us there.’
‘What do you mean, lust?’
‘I mean God says we can only have love in marriage.’
‘Only with permission?’
‘If you want to put it that way.’
‘I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what I do with my own body.’ Janet took a strong materialist line on these matters.
‘It’s not your body. It belongs to God, he made it.’
‘Well, whoever or whatever made it, it’s mine now and I’ll make the decision when and what I do with it.’
‘We think that Eve made the same error in Eden and look what happened to the children of Adam.’
‘I’m happy and I know lots of others are, so where’s the disaster?’
‘Maybe you don’t know how empty you are.’
‘If I don’t, how can you know?’
‘I think you should come down to Kingdom Hall and listen to our elder Rueben.’
‘So you can’t answer what I ask?’
‘I’m only a learner at the moment, the elders can answer the deeper questions.’
‘Like why you don’t allow blood transfusions.’ Janet decided to turn up the heat, Ragbear’s wimpishness began to irritate her a bit.
‘Every time people want to get at us they always bring up that.’
‘I think everyone thinks it’s as bad as circumcision.’
‘It’s nothing like that. We believe the blood is the soul and therefore it mustn’t be given to someone else.’
‘Even if lives are lost?’
‘Yes,’ said Ragbear firmly holding in self-doubt with a mighty show of authority that would have impressed even a police constable.
This was a point that had lost his religious movement a lot of battles and the popular press had seized on the policy of the group to show that they were a danger to the community.
Ragbear had been a diligent worker for the group and had hoped to attract other members of the ethnic minorities into his adopted religion to show that he was not the only immigrant looking for social acceptance by the ethnic majority. Secretly he had a few selfish motives he was none too proud of he thought angels would be sent to help him in his hours of need, specifically if he needed a job or credit, or simply to be invited along to someone’s home to a party. He had felt isolated in Preston and had been, quite naturally, attracted to some of the girls he had grown up with. They had not responded to his fertility signals and now he hoped things would be different. These thoughts had filled him with a new and unforeseen deadly form of self-loathing. For the moment the elders in his church had seen fit to send Ragbear into the West Indian area of Preston to spread the word. Ragbear had received mixed responses with the West Indians evenly divided in their willingness to listen to his good News. Cornel’s stepfather had been one of those West Indians to despise the growing number of what he referred to as house niggers. Ragbear had been wise to avoid men like Perkins who thought that the house nigger hated himself and wanted to see the back of his Negroid identity by donning the clothes and demeanour of the white man. Perkins was an ardent follower of the black Jamaican spiritual leader Marcus Garvey. Garvey had wanted all black men to return to Ethiopia and their Lord and master Heile Selaisse; in this worthy pursuit they had the full support of the likes of Ronny Kendal and the irrepressible Steve Halshaw.
Marcus Garvey had been hugely influential in the West Indian community and his message that the little criminal was being put into prison by the big ones who had all the cash was a real hit with the young disaffected black male who felt persecuted and victimised as the main cause of criminality not only in Kingston but also Brixton and Preston as well. He had attempted to show the causal links between the introduction of certain sects of Christianity and the growth of negative self-imagery and superstition amongst all West Indians. Voodooism was understood as an unholy marriage between the demon metaphysics of Catholicism and the African belief in fertility spirits and the unseen lords of the jungle that brought ill will and famine. The idea of spirits of the air stalking the night for unwary souls to possess and bodies to inhabit produced the obeah witch doctor culture, which in Garvey’s opinion kept the black man poor and internationally despised. Christianity had taught the black man that he must be constantly on the lookout for the plots and conspiracies of Satan and his minions. Wives and children could be possessed by these children of the night and the West Indian father had interpreted exorcism as a moral justification for beating any signs of disobedience or deviation from his authority out of his rebellious brood. The Jamaican man would often have to drive away an evil presence called a jumbie out of his house. The jumbie was frequently seen by men and usually made its appearance by a doorway or on the stairs at night, often after the father had returned from a good night out. Perkins had reported seeing a lot of these before reading the works of Mr Garvey. Perkins had wanted to remove the illusions that stood between him and economic and social status in the Jamaican community. When he had come over to Britain in the 1950’s he had immediately got himself into gang battles between West Indian groups and the Teddy boy culture which was none too welcoming of their colonial brethren. He would certainly have skinned Cornel alive had he ever realised that his stepson was not only a member of such a gang but its active head. Perkins was not a man to have anything but the most cursory relations. He was a strict disciplinarian inheriting his absolutist hierarchical values from his English upper class expatriate father in Jamaica who had married a black serving wench, his mother. Standing at six foot six and well over 300 pounds he was a man of imposing physical dimensions and he was nicknamed Peko by his West Indian compatriots. Perkins’ Diesels was an obscenely wealthy rolling stock company that his father had founded in the Blue Mountains region near Kingston and Perkins had high hopes to inherit some of this wealth. He was a man that ultimately was to be plagued and doomed by a fear of the very success that he so desperately sought coveted.
Ragbear had once had the ill fortune to encounter Perkins one day when he had been on a door-to-door mission in Ribbleton and Perkins had been visiting a friend who had wanted him to rig an aerial. Perkins not only did his job in the Coutauld’s factory, he had also a part-time wireless and TV business. Ragbear had not known who the colossus was who answered the door and as soon as Perkins set eyes on him he set about Ragbear like some angry god of Olympus hurling thunderbolts and lightening accusations at the visitor branding him a bribed informer of fundamentalist Christians who only thought black men were good for shining their shoes. The whole thing would have ended there had not the caller plucked up the courage to ask why.
‘Why?’ boomed Perkins, ‘you must have a coconut fer a brain man. De Lard will strike ya dead one day!’
‘But what have I done?’
‘Why nuh join a black man’s church? De white man only let you in his church to divide and rule. Yer are only a beast of burden and that’s all dem want ya for.’
‘But the things I believe are not bad, they come from the bible.’
‘Ya tel da white man that a black father figure does not possess the authority and serious power to have created the world.’
‘What does it matter what colour God is?’
‘What boy,’ came the thick West Indian accented reply. ‘If it nuh matter man, why not have de black Christ on de crucifix?’ Perkins had shocked and horrified Cornel’s mum Joyce by hanging up a crucifix of the black Christ in their hallway at 4 Glen Grove. It went mysteriously missing but hung there for some tense ridden months.
‘Well, because the bible says he’s white.’
‘Where does de holy book say any such ting?’
‘I think I read it somewhere...’
‘So you don’t know, so shut up nuh man and speak when ya know what the ras you are saying. If de Lard was white he must have been a Roman officer. But ya all nuh gonna buy dat. What de ras clout is a white man doing in Africa announcing that he is de son of gad?’
Perkins was unrelenting and Ragbear had been much afraid but had trusted his new Lord would protect him. He had not had Perkins’ in depth religious and political awareness and knew with his uncompromising integrity that Perkins had shook him up and it was not long after this encounter that Ragbear had a real crisis of conscience which stopped his missionary activities in their tracks. Deep down Ragbear had felt some sympathy with the open hostility and suspicion Perkins had shown toward Christianity’s division of society into good and evil, light and dark, pure and impure which he felt was subtly rejecting and outlawing his biological reality. He had suffered much prejudice and harassment in his neighbourhood because of his turban and had not forgotten or forgiven. He wanted desperately to turn the other cheek on this matter in the way his Lord had set the example but had not the spiritual might to resist the imposing reality of Perkins’ brutal direct intellectual onslaught . Why, he wondered to himself after leaving Perkins, did not the theocratic powers really welcome in the international flock by drawing up an image of Christ as at least mixed racial origins? Would not all those boys who had teased him relentlessly in school always be looking down on him if Jesus looked more like them than him? In history classes he learned that the coloured race had been the slaves of the white race up until recent times and in religion he learnt that God had punished the son of Noah by making him black and homeless for gazing on his father while the latter had been in the compromising position of drunk and naked. Even in sociology lessons he learned that blacks where really to blame for crime even if it was caused by their poverty and labelling. On the films and in the media coloureds where hardly ever the hero and not even kissing a white woman on TV was possible without some scandal. Even if the good souls down in Kingdom Hall were to extend an unconditional hand of friendship would they not always have the one up psychological status as the favourite of the Lord and would not this fact always make him feel that he was, as Revelations said, to be identified with the sons of darkness in their ultimately hopeless battle with the sons of light?
Ragbear moved his pawn to the King four position, he usually employed the Ruy Lopez opening game against Cornel whom he always took very seriously as a chess opponent. There was some status in beating Preston’s one and true immigrant glamour boy and the number of female onlookers always increased when Cornel was around either in football or chess. Janet had told him how to track Cornel down in the second floor reference room at the local library. Ragbear wearing his crown as the town’s best chess player lost no time in inviting Cornel to play a game downstairs in the library’s cafe. Cornel responded with Sicilian defence, the only respectable response to the mighty Ruy Lopez; black pawn to queen four. Ragbear studied hard Cornel’s unorthodox employment of the defence though Cornel did not read the formidable giants of chess such as Doctor Alekhine and the almighty Capablanca. The game went on for hours and the library was in danger of closing. The end game was a tight one and though Ragbear was a pawn up, he did not like Cornel’s positioning of his king and two pawns. Cornel had a passed pawn, which meant there was nothing standing in the way of him queening it. Ragbear wondered how Cornel had found time for playing chess so solidly and soundly considering his lustful lifestyle, fornication and other abominations. He knew nothing about Cornel actually but inferred like so many religious souls in the past that a non-believer could not be so popular without help from the Evil One. Ragbear had used the word fornication a lot during his missionary excursions into the valley of the shadow of death of darkest Ribbleton. He had campaigned with hearty zeal against lust and specifically sex outside of marriage not to mention the myriad of other ungodly perversions of the flesh. He had to admit to himself that though he did not like Cornel particularly he had found him such compelling company he was certainly worth saving. The formidable insight he had into himself revealed that he had become far more envious of the success of non-believers since he had become a member of the inner circle in Kingdom Hall. He had felt ashamed of this growing malignant tumour gnawing at the core of his sense of integrity. A part of him felt that non-believers should not be seen to prosper and he had to hold himself back from actively promoting this as a private policy in his Ribbleton crusades. Even if the richer disciples in the church withdrew economic co-operation, these lost sheep seemed to get hold of the good things of life anyway; the beautiful women always seemed to gravitate toward them and he felt at this time more than any other that God did indeed work in mysterious ways.
Cornel deftly pushed his pawn ever nearer to the back file of his opponent’s ranks where his lowly pawn would rise dramatically to the all-powerful status of queen. Mr Patel watched its unstoppable march with much alarm, how on earth was he going to halt its advance and avoid a humiliating defeat right after the capture of the Preston Chess championship? Cornel did not know that his opponent was a chess eminent and Ragbear had not told him anything of it.
Adam David Jessup lay back on his hospital bed in the D-block of the new inmates ward of Karsudden psychiatric facility. Adam was not a man who believed that one should hide unpleasant truths from himself and pleaded out loud to an imaginary protector: ‘father take this hospital for the criminally insane off my shoulders.’ He looked up from his bed and beheld the little tint of blue that Oscar Wilde had said prisoners called the sky. There was not much sky that was for sure and Adam looked out at the supremely grim eighteen foot wall that not only blocked out the sunlight, but life itself. The new inmates were not allowed to wear their own clothes and no shoes either. Boorman advised him that wandering around stripped of the trappings of one’s former identity was no bad thing for men in Adam’s position. The good doctor let him know as a favour that new inmates spent on average six weeks in isolation were they would have time to contemplate not so much the error of their ways but where they would go from where they found themselves, namely at very rock bottom of human existence. Things could never get worse than this for anyone. Boorman let him know that admission of guilt and a total acceptance of the court’s decision were non-negotiable pre-requisites of any thought of eventually getting out of the nightmare. The parole board was a combination of psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers, psychologists and a high court judge and were so terrified of adverse publicity concerning the release of inmates that hardly anyone had ever been given a full bill of health at any rate enough to escape the long arms of long-term institutional incarceration. They represented a thousand years of professional and clinical experience; they prided themselves on their intimate knowledge of the dark side of human nature and were not about to destroy their omnipotent reputation by making an error in judgement over the mental health of any patient. Adams psychologist had warned him in no uncertain terms that his life was never going to be the same again.
The social worker, a kind religious lady living in the town of Katrineholm told him that even if he managed to secure a release and no one had ever managed to get out of the hospital completely he would face the astronomical difficulties of finding a job and an apartment. Times where changing she had said to him, off the record there was a new right wing social current sweeping Europe. There was talk of official registers for all ex-inmates that would be made public. Her news was not good, he would have to look forward to a life of joblessness and social ostracism. The bad news did not stop there; not only was there to be official registers but an ex-offender would also face the prospect of being blackmailed through the threat of media publicity of his offence. The media would be empowered to list name, photograph, address and offence leading to the ominous likelihood of physical attack from ‘public spirited vigilantes’. If the inmate had children they too would become legitimate targets. Many eminent divines and judicial moral hawks had no sympathy with any of the fashionable determinist theories that had it that man was a victim of his unchosen circumstances, and wanted to extract life-long revenge on all enemies of the state and society. The financial and social cost of the implementation of Leviticus law and old testament style retribution did not matter, there was to be no post release mercy and the full weight of the wrathful god of Genesis awaited inmates returning to society. Of course being an enemy of the state did not mean one was also an enemy of society but the popular talk of victims’ rights got politicians elected and had become a powerful political lobby with many saying that as victims of crime were hurt life-long, so must perpetrators on the eye for an eye mind-set. In Adam’s advisor’s opinion, isolating and dispossessing ex-convicts rather than rehabilitate them was totally irrational and would make them more likely to commit crimes, thereby doubling the trouble for society. The social worker feared that ex-convicts may then be able to at least morally justify turning to crime to feed and shelter themselves, which would undermine the ethical underpinnings of the rule of law. She warned Adam not to be tempted to crime to answer these post release problems but was unable to advise him of how to handle these looming social and economic difficulties. She expected him to turn the other cheek if vigilantes, whom privately she thought more than likely with the huge ongoing media interest in this man, attacked him. She warned him that the parole board would think twice about any release if they thought he would take the law into his own hands. The police were very reluctant to help returning inmates and had felt off the record that they had attacks on them coming. Adam’s social helper scrutinised her client’s face for a response on the issues before she advised the parole board but did not get an answer from it.
Adam gazed long and hard on the portrait of the none too happy picture painted by his advisor of his grim situation. The social worker’s bad news almost made staying inside the hospital a worthy pursuit. Adam gave that idea careful thought. He strangely felt a pang of aesthetic appreciation of the sheer magnitude of the dread hopelessness of his fate. He contemplated the pure terror of this situation much like a disinterested art critic might peruse the aesthetic merits of an artistic reproduction.
Ragebear got up and walked around as he made a telling move in the end game of his chess match with Cornel. He had learned from reading the journals of the grand master Capablanca that walking around or blowing cigar smoke into the face of an opponent would often soften up an adversary enough to unnerve him.
The party thrown by the Bonham-Carter’s was the fourth one Cornel had been to in as many days. The freshers’ week at university had been a thoroughly enjoyable though tiring one for the small town boy just down to London for the first time. His first day at the philosophy department had led to a chance encounter with the Steve Halshaw of the academy, one Antonio Morelli who was to become Cornel’s best and most trusted friend during the next three years of his philosophy degree. Antonio and Cornel had bumped into one another during a wine and cheese party given by the overlord of London Philosophy, the incomparable professor Richard Wollheim. Antonio being something of a glamour boy had attracted the attention of Jane Bonham-Carter who had invited him to a party in honour of her father, the only real saint Cornel had ever encountered, the goodly Liberal Mark Bonham-Carter. Now Mark had had a full and productive life and if anyone could say they had died having bettered the lot of humanity he certainly could. He had been chairman of the Race Relations board and the B.B.C. and had been a tireless worthy campaigner for tolerance and compassion in the former and truth and freedom of expression in the latter.
Antonio introduced Cornel to Jane, as Hollywood would say a real ‘close encounter of the third kind’ that was for sure. She came from the upper class and the upper part of that to boot and he from the lowest of the lower. Jane’s family were Aristocrats. They were to the constant consternation of Cornel’s tutor professor Ted Honderich people of ‘settled distinctions’, they were not striving for more recognition or respect, and they had all the ‘society status’ that one family could muster. Ted with his incomparable character and hard working orderly life had never quite given up the socialite’s fantasy of the white-gloved hand beckoning him over to a gold embroidered sofa. Ted would have been more than honoured if that ‘gloved hand’ had belonged to Jane’s great grandmother Violet Bonham-Carter who was said to have been a confidante, and not to put too fine a point on it, the lifelong girl-friend of Winston Churchill or so it was rumoured. Violet was the most interesting member of the family; she had been a constant champion of personal freedom and international brotherhood since the turn of 20th century. Quietly and secretly she had influenced the naturally bullish Churchill to be more humane and decent and though her humanity had been lost in the gossip over memories we call academic history, oppressed peoples over the whole of Europe had a lot to thank her for.
Cornel had got the impression of the Bonham-Carter’s that earthly existence was not worthy of them. They had too much class even with all of their imperfections to be as low as upper class.
All of a sudden the small town immigrant boy was surrounded by a host of future highflying dignitaries from Christopher Hitchin to Martin Amis. Of course none took any notice of him except a bespectacled slightly balding gentleman who from a wheelchair in the corner had eerily set a firm and unhesitating gaze upon him. Sarah Harrity, one of the guests and a fellow student, noticed this and went over to Cornel and pointed out the obvious that Mark had taken an interest in him. Cornel in his likeable though intolerable hillbilly manner had said ‘Mark who?’. He had no idea who any of these sought after luminaries were and in truth for long after, with the exception of Mark, he never saw what all the fuss was about. Sarah took Cornel over and introduced him to Mark. Cornel could see she had a real love though sad concern for the man but at that moment he did not know the full story. The Bonham-Carter family and ‘hanger’s on’ had put an iron curtain around any publicity of Mark’s sad and ultimately fatal ill health.
‘I want to ask you something,’ said Mark taking the initiative immediately.
‘What?’
‘Where you curious about why I was looking at you?’
‘Sure was.’
‘I had a feeling about you, I often get them these days.’
‘Why these days?’ said Cornel intuitively.
‘That I’m not going to say, but you stood out from everyone here.’
‘Do you have premonitions?’ Cornel was remembering the story his mother had told.
‘In a way.’
‘What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking you have charisma and there’s something I like about you.’
‘Am I the son you never had?’ Cornel was deliberately provocative with a man he at that time had mistaken for a sparkling version of a Barclays’ Bank manager. This was the only time Cornel had wrongly misjudged a man on a first meeting.
‘That’s a bit forward, but yes, you maybe right, but seriously tell me about yourself.’
‘You tell me about yourself first,’ came the first shot of friendly fire.
‘Well, I’m interested in race relations.’ Mark was as genuinely modest as a man could be.
‘And you think that a coloured guy is best qualified to talk about that?’
‘I did not mean to insult you, but yes, you are right to have that suspicion that we do- gooders from the upper stratum think in these categorical terms. I think what you say is well said.’
‘Why can’t we talk on a social level where I and you are on equal terms, you couldn’t handle that could you?’
‘That’s an acute observation my young friend, I’m right to have my good suspicions about you.’
‘Suspicions?’
‘I mean you could easily carry the day as a leader of a movement or good cause in the future.’ Cornel had thought he was being patronising but Mark given him such a gaze of militant earnestness it stopped Cornel in his likeable, though unbearable backwoods slow style tracks.
‘I don’t think that’s for me.’
‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
‘What about Jane?’
‘Jane’s not really cut out for politics.’
‘You mean because she tried modelling?’
‘No, I don’t mean that, I just mean that she’s very close to the memory of her ancestor Violet. She wants to follow in her footsteps and be the inspiration behind a great man.
‘So she’s on the lookout for a husband?’
‘Well, she’s always scouring the academic circles for promising bright stars. It’s what the women do best in this family, they hunt around for some controversial cerebral upcoming intellectual and then proudly parade them at parties or invite them for supper. In any case they ultimately want the rubber stamp from the patriarch.’
‘You?’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s what I suspected. Jane can only be the great woman behind the great man.’
‘Yes, it has as I say been a failing of the women in the family but they are conscious of it and try to deny or cover it up. Upper class women are the ultimate exponents of the “as if”’
‘That’s why you would like a son?’
‘How do you know I don’t have one?’ Mark had got himself whipped up into a playful mood but Cornel did wonder how serious the last remark really was.
‘Have you met the other guests’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Martin and Christopher are fine chaps but both hate authority and will have to spend the rest of their lives trying to make what they believe look like it isn’t in honour of the neglect or over-protection they suffered at their fathers’ hand.
‘Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure’.
‘No I guessed as much, you haven’t a clue who they are, have you?’
‘Why should I, they don’t cut any ice in my world and I don’t like liberalism anyway.’
‘What have you got against us liberals?’
‘Well, I don’t know many followers of it. I’m not personalising the issue, I just think the whole ideology lacks clarity and is riddled with contradictions.’
‘That’s right, a movement is not responsible for the members, but what kind of contradictions?’
‘Well, that you expect personal freedoms to be protected by what ultimately amounts to a police state.’
‘Yes, there has to be a strong government that’s true, but we don’t quite need a police state to safeguard our freedoms.’
‘But once you start talking about the need for strong governments you’re on a slippery slope.’
‘Slippery it might be but we don’t have to slide all the way down it.’ Mark was an experienced statesman who could be quite slippery himself. Cornel was a remarkably good conversationalist when he had got the bit between his teeth but looking back he would feel this was possibly the one and only time he judged he had met more than his match. At that moment Sarah Harrity joins them and stands aghast at the way a first year student more than held his own against the formidable Mark. She was also happy to see that Cornel had managed to re-light a spark in Mark so that he was for the moment forgetful of the terrible suffering of his crippling degenerative illness. Cornel had brightened up a worthy man’s life and perhaps prolonged it a bit. No one could hope that was true more than he.
‘Sure, there is no logical necessity that’s true, but then it’s people who make governments and people are hardly to be expected not to get irrational when they get a bit of power.’
‘We have no choice but to trust ourselves my boy.’
‘In ourselves we can trust, but the state ultimately sets its own agenda and its interests become separate from the citizens’.’
‘We can formulate checks and balances to prevent that.’
‘You know as well as I do that those checks and balances fall apart at the mere touch of artificially arranged crises and at that moment all the protective powers of the state get turned on personal freedoms which become denounced as too much of a luxury.’
‘You don’t expect that we can do without any government?’
‘No, I just want you to know how much of a contradiction the liberal party is in ideologically.’
‘Well, come and help us, we have a policy division called the inner circle. Help us to iron out these difficulties, I would very much like you to think about this.’
Adam did not blame any one else for as his wife called it ‘the hellish situation’. He did not remember much about the night of the alleged attack and did not completely resent the fact that the police investigators had at the end decided that he could not be believed. It was certainly true that he and his friends had lied about why they had gone to visit the alleged victim that fateful night and that had effectively killed the credibility of their entire testimony. Ironically he and his fellow defendant had lied to save themselves from being branded as insane and suspicious by claiming that unknown assailants had stalked them. They had obviously failed. The police however had neglected to disclose to the court a truth that would have given irrefutable justification for the lie. The police had arrested a police driver by the name of Christer Rylander and his cohorts outside Adam’s apartment when they had been looking for Adam and his friends for questioning. At the time the police had made the arrest they did not know that the Rylander was a police officer (this they discovered later) because he had been posing as a private detective and even went as far as opening up his own agency. The police inspector Eklinder had decided to hold this back in court in order protect his colleague though he did not approve of Rylander’s actions. Though Eklinder knew that what the was doing was technically illegal he rationalised his actions by claiming that these facts had no relevance to the charges. This was in a way true though he knew as well as any that in a case where it was word against word the court would take the side of the first to be proved truthful. The reasons for Adam and his friends’ lie would remain forever hidden.
Rylander amongst being promised monies for other plots had been paid to use police computers and resources while trying to frame Adam for some unwinnable crime and provide an excuse for his legal deportation from the Sweden. Adam was to be investigated and intimidated by Rylander on behalf of the families of Adam’s friends without being hampered by the legal restraints of public office. One of the fathers had been given Rylander’s name by a well-known head of an insurance company based in Malmoe. Sven Moestue had been after Adam for sometime and had sworn revenge on Adam blaming him for encouraging his daughter to file a rape and battery charge against him. The daughter had alleged these attacks had been going on for years and had begged Adam to help her and give her refuge in his home in Eskilstuna, Sweden. Mr Moestue was a powerful figure in the oil insurance business and had often modelled himself on the character of J.R. Ewing from the Texan soap opera Dallas. Though this was a fantasy, his judgement of his power and influence in Oslo was not, and even if several Swedish psychiatrists believed his daughter’s story (after long clinical observation of her) the Norwegian authorities dropped the investigation after a cursory interview. Sven’s daughter had told Adam that her father had sworn life-long vengeance and that he would use his infinite resources to neutralise or otherwise get Adam one way or another.
It is true that Adam and his friends had gone to see a person they thought had been stalking them and off the record they had fantasised at the time that the person was an agent of the state. Adam had been defending the civil and human rights of his friends within the full chivalrous ethical remit of the stories of old he had been brought up on. Suffice to say the ‘robber barons’ had updated their act since then and were never going to dare to challenge the defender of the damsels in distress to a trial by combat. No, they had rather better un-attributable methods for dealing with the modern day urban hero. While the latter stood in the middle of the battlefield with visor up and sword high in the air, little did he know that the paid assassins sent to ‘neutralise him‘ had donned cloaks of invisibility and cast iron stories of deniability. To accuse them would mean instant self-labelling of paranoid schizophrenia, to openly confront them would mean imprisonment as a violent menace to society. Only the victims Adam was defending would ever know the full unbelievable truth. It was more than a ‘Catch 22’ and by the time Adam realised this he had already given his oath and word to fight to the end. There could be no going back on this, it was a matter of honour and Adam was prepared to die for that or fight for all eternity. Some tried to reason with Adam that it was not worth it but those who knew him well knew such entreaties were never going to succeed with a man like him.
Though he never had used drugs in entire his life, he had felt as though he was drugged up to the eyeballs on that fateful evening. Adam was later to baptise the event, the night of ‘the overturning of tables’ which spun his world off course forever into a dark boundless bottomless abyss from which he knew there, was never any return even for him. Though he had been symbolically blessed with the third power, that of resurrection, not even God himself could send his angels into Gehenna to help him. It was over. Boorman was very happy to hear about this experience of feeling drugged, it allowed him to at last categorise a symptom, one he was later to report to the parole board as splitting and depersonalisation. He did however formally ask Adam if anyone could have spiked any drinks or food he had been eating that day. This was partly because the good doctor could not imagine how an obviously principled man could be charged with crimes like his and partly to test if Adam had the fantasy that faceless enemies were tampering with his food and drink. This would have been one acid test of Paranoid Schizophrenia and Boorman was a bit relieved that Adam had cast scorn on the idea.
Boorman had been absolutely convinced since he had first set his eyes on Adam’s case that the tale of detectives and faceless stalkers was a fiction. Boorman felt quite naturally that there were good grounds to believe that these were certainly the fantasies of a troubled mind or an active imagination running away with itself. It was not until right in the middle of Adam’s incarceration after the publication of an article in the Swedish newspapers detailing the arrest of policeman Christer Rylander on the night Eklinder had been searching for Adam that the good doctor began to entertain another unbelievable truth. The head nurse arrived with the new disturbing evidence in the papers early in the morning and handed a copy to his boss. After a careful reading of it the doctor took the newspaper and unceremoniously threw it on the breakfast table in the day room where Adam sat with the other inmates. He ogled Adam without a word and then strode off single mindedly to begin the legal struggle with the parole board to have Adam released from psychiatric investigation. Adam was to become a free man.
Le Chevalier strode over to his horse Grinolet and quickly mounted it on seeing the imposing approach of many would say the greatest knight in Camelot, Sir Tristram. Not even Lancelot some mused could withstand the murderous strokes from his mighty hand. Possessed with legendary physical prowess he had won his spurs by dispatching the fearsome enchanted Irish knight Sir Marhaus. He slew Marhaus to help the King of the Irish from paying a tribute of eight maidens every year to Marhaus and his robber band that was ravaging the countryside. That combat had left his sword with a piece missing. The chip was found by Marhaus’ enchantress sister in her brother’s head. She had recognised the piece by fitting it into Tristram’s sword and taken her revenge by slipping a love potion onto Isolde’s table as she and Tristram took meat and wine to celebrate the death of the tyrant Marhaus. Isolde as well being a great admirer of Tristram’s fighting skills was also betrothed to the King of Ireland. The king on noticing their love had hidden Isolde away, and sworn an oath of retribution against Tristram, who heart-broken left Camelot to wander the wide world to find his lost love. He travelled in the guise of a wandering minstrel,
singing his sad song wherever he went:
‘Isolde of the Emerald Isle
Still I seek thee mile on mile
Though the world may wax old
Never shall our love grow cold.’
Le Chevalier had heard about Tristram and had sympathy and sorrow for his sad fate. He recognised Tristram’s coat of arms immediately but did not see how he could avoid combat. Tristram was known throughout the kingdom as a knight that would fight to the death with the devil himself once hostilities had begun and Le Chevalier knew as both of them went hurtling to the ground, their spears disintegrated and ground to powder from the shear force of their encounter, that he would have a grim and bloody battle to contend with once swords were unsheathed. This was the first time any of the knights and dignitaries of Camelot had seen Tristram biting the dust of the earth and a huge gasp went up from the crowds of many hundreds who had gathered to see what they thought would be the inevitable destruction of the mysterious knight from over the channel. They hoped with one mighty blow Tristram would dispatch him back over the channel from whence he came. Only Elaine and Tor wished that Le Chevalier would quickly retire from the tournament to save himself from the uncompromising relentless power of Tristram. Elaine could not bear to watch as both goodly knights staggered to their feet. No other earthly knights could have withstood the brute force of such an unholy collision between the white flash of lightning and the red thunderbolt. Tristram’s colours on his coat of arms were always scarlet which gave many knights who wished to avoid ending their days a chance to get out of his way through the consequent ease of recognition. Le Chevalier stood in his unenviable solitary position as Tristram with sword aloft and visor closed strode menacingly toward him. A hush went up from the crowd as they saw Le Chevalier was not going to give any ground. As Tristram approached, the crowd watched in shear disbelief as Le Chevalier suddenly sprang forward and smote Tristram squarely on the helm with a blow of such power and precision that he almost split the entire helm asunder. Sir Ector, Sir Bors and Sir Lionel, all distant cousins of Lancelot’s, fearing the worst decided things had gone far enough.

The Lily maid gazed down with glazed tearful eyes from the balcony where she sat next to her father, the goodly King Carbonek. She had wondered to herself when men at arms would stop their insane love of all forms of combat whether for real in war or in the play of the tournament or joust. She had been thrilled in one way by the spectacle but in another she marvelled how grown men could behave in that way. She was a healer, not a warrior princess, and her skill with mystical herbs and roots such as mandrake and the magical oils and ointments she prepared, had made her a woman of some substance and renown far and wide. As she sat watching, she like everyone marvelled at the incredulous spectacle that was unfolding before her gentle sparkling eyes. Could it really be true that the invincible Tristram was falling to the ground in the mere twinkling of an eye? ‘Who is that knight?’ screamed her father as Le Chevalier stood over the stricken champion of Camelot.
No knight in the world, not even Lancelot could have done this to a man that had defeated in one way or another every knight who had ever stood against him. To everyone’s amazement the valiant Tristram from his hopeless position lying prostrate and stunned on the earth instantaneously tore off his shattered helm and made gallant effort to raise himself off the ground. Le Chevalier could have finished matters there and then but nobly stepped back, he was actually allowing Tristram to alight. The Lily maid had heard about Tristram’s legendary star-crossed love for Isolde and had been filled with deep romantic stirrings by the very sorrow and romance of it. The day before while at the banquet she had noticed all the ladies of the court crowding around him as he made his entrance into the great hall. But she found herself unable to tear her heavenly ice blue eyes away from Le Chevalier who sat over with the kitchen boys and scullery maids. She had heard Sir Kay attempting to berate him for wearing his chain mail monk’s hood and sitting amongst the foul smelling lads and wenches but had backed off in terror after Le Chevalier looked up and caught him with a blood chilling, knee buckling stare. ‘By my faith that yonder knight fills me with evil foreboding,’ Elaine had heard Kay mumble to himself as he beat a hasty retreat.
Sir Tor leaned over craning his neck and whispered a jest about Le Chevalier eating the scraps and drinking vile watered down wine with his oily greasy table companions. Elaine made no comment but stared at her brother with an intent that let him know in no uncertain terms that she was not at one with him on this matter. Tor, noticing her silent disapproval remarked in a defensive way that no man of Le Chevalier’s obvious standing and valour should betray his fellow brethren of noble birth by fraternising with the underclass and doing it in a publicly and unashamed manner. What did he see in these ruffians and rogues who were only good for shining the spurs and cleaning the stables of their lords and masters? Le Chevalier’s obvious grace and chivalrous presence lent a kind of legitimacy to their status as soul bearing fellow creatures which went against various interpretations of the scriptures and this was highly subversive of the hierarchical values on which the brethren of knights was forged. As much as the entire assembly of noble lords and ladies let their hostility be known, Le Chevalier was unrelenting and the anger and ostracism of genteel society moved him not a jot. He sat with his peasants every evening after his victories in the tourney and over broken stale bread and water wavered not in his resolve and unfathomable loyalty to the red ruddy haggard faces around him. Every noble lord he smote to the earth in combat would be in their honour. He would be their champion and no lady however fair of face could ever take their place. Le Chevalier loved no man but he revered and pitied the lot of mankind and wept many lonely desolate a night for them.
Chris and Glennys, like two conspiratorial marginalized goddesses straight out the great halls of Valhalla or Olympus, plotted and schemed a ways of seizing absolute power from Zeus and Odin or anyone for that matter real or imaginary, that dared to come up against them in the strict rarefied atmosphere of The Park School Grammar Academy for Girls. Membership of the Park School meant that both of them had passed their ‘eleven plus’ exam and had been selected to attend this superior educational establishment that was supposed to prepare the refined young lady for the job of little Bo Peep, shepherding sheep later on in life. Notwithstanding the image of themselves as wolves in sheep’s clothing on closer examination it may have been appropriate to say that ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’ was a more apt symbol of their gentle kindly interiors. In the highly selective educational philosophy of the early seventies such divisions of school children at the age of eleven was not uncommon. Conservatives had the view that intellectual ability was hereditary. Opponents countered that poor physical and psychological environment injured a child’s cognitive and emotional faculties. This meant that unlucky children tended to the lose the emotional stability necessary for deep untroubled rational thought. Conservatives replied by saying that some kids from very poor backgrounds did well in intelligence tests. The progressives retaliated by saying just because Frank Shorter was an elite marathon runner this did not mean we all could be; intelligent kids from working class backgrounds were very few and far between and were the exception rather than the rule. Glennys was an old world working class Preston lass who was quite emphatically one of those inexplicable exceptions. She was from a very genuine though troubled social background but was the very cream of solid no nonsense proletarian talent. She was later to occupy the unenviable role of Cornels first live in common law wife of many years standing. Chris grew up in a more rational though emotionally restrained home environment. Whereas Glenny’s father was an unrepentant hard labouring working class man with good reasons for his alcoholism, Chris’s father was a orderly middle-class fellow of Norwegian ancestry who one might mistake for the head administrator of The Halifax Building Society. He was particularly thrilled with his surname ‘Thorburn’ a modification of the name of the Norwegian God of thunder Tor. Glennys was in a similar vein strongly insistent on the proper respect for the correct spelling of her surname Haworth not Howorth. Considering her lowly humble beginnings Glenny’s taste in almost everything was so refined and delicate one could easily mistake her for a Bonham-Carter. Glenny’s mother was a woman of strongly Welsh origins and character died when the latter was in her late teens. This had left an indelible taint on her belief and trust in anything and anyone, which was to be further exacerbated when her beloved sister Sheila died some few years later from a hole in heart condition that she suffered ever since birth. Sheila was only 28 when she passed away quietly one night shortly after her marriage to an eccentric engineering genius of some local renown. Glennys hated her older brother David and loved dearly her younger brother John but staunchly refused to discuss his sad fate with anyone including her best friend. Chris’s mother kept herself to her self and was rarely seen in social networks. Woe betides anyone who crossed these two warrior princesses’ paths in a manner unfit for their unwritten codes of proper respect and decorum. Such uncouth unwary assailants would find themselves subject to the most unrelenting sting operations known in polite police society. Stirring their boiling cauldron of frogs and snails and puppy dog tails garnished with larks vomit and powdered eyes of newt; none not even Medusa could turn a human to stone faster than the green and blue peppers of these formidable sisters of the dark arts. Their uncompromising sisterly disapproval would freeze beer and steam the oceans dry at the same time. They were the unthinking man’s thinking women with soundly severe first class minds. Though they represented the worst kind of enemy a man could have they could also be the stuff of a reflective man’s dreams. Cornel had not noticed them taking up their lofty corner position right above him as he strode naively into the Park School building in his tight shabby grey bell-bottomed trousers and purple long sleeve flared T-shirt held together by a brass-buckled red and green elastic snake belt very fashionable in his day.
‘Who does that bitch think she is?’ said Chris in a slightly rasping voice, the one she knew would curry favour with her unforgiving sister at arms.
‘It’s Pat Lacy, she’s Jayne Faechnie’s best friend,’ came Glennys’ as usual well researched informative reply.
‘She’s got cotton in her bra you know, her tits are not that big, I’ve seen them in gym class’
‘Yeah and she’s wearing one of those new Playtex wonder bras that lifts and separates.’ Both spell chuckers start giggling profusely at that juncture.
‘What the bloody hell is she doing with Rob Fordham? Isn’t he supposed to be going out with Suzy Roscoe?’
‘I don’t know but I heard Rob saying the other day that he liked girls with big budding breasts.’ More giggling but this time more uncertainly.
‘The bastard!’
‘That’s all his type go after.’
‘Where did you hear it?’
‘He was in the common room standing by the jukebox jerking around to “All right now” by Free.’
‘That guy Kossoff is just trying to be Jim Morrison.’
‘Yeah they’ve stolen their style from “Riders on the storm” and “Hello I love you”.
Like the sharpest arrows ever imagined, the morning beams of light smashed into every atom of the sparkling dewdrops that crowned the tops of trees and sheathed every blade of grass and shrubbery in the magical woodlands that encircled Cornel’s beloved river Ribble. Both he and Glennys had broken with their tradition that Saturday morning by rising before midday to take a hike into Cornel’s childhood countryside retreat of outer Grimsargh. This was where he felt most welcome. The trees and the white winged butterflies that fluttered and floated around elegantly from one rainbow coloured meadow to the other had nothing against him and he slotted neatly into the whole miraculous scene like a right piece in a jigsaw puzzle. There were no birds, insects or flowers questioning his right to be there, he was one with them and he melted and merged into the mysterious predetermined master plan whose purpose caused each and every tenant to understand without conjecture his station and duties. There was no government that sat to protect the small from the big the weak from the strong. There was no authority adjudicating any difference or conflicts of interests. There were no churches and priests comforting lost terrified creatures through pain and the fear of dying. Dandelions and toads went through the valley of the shadow of death, dying effortlessly and with no self-pity. Change was not something that any entity hid in fear from, there were no clocks in beehives and no pocket watches in the waistcoats of white rabbits. The whole of time was one flash of an unguarded moment. There were no parliaments in this natural order. No doctor ants applying medical remedies to soldier ants. No snowdrops practised psychiatry and no elections were held to find the best and wisest bluebell. In the indifferent incomprehensible immensity of it all Cornel did not hear a single ‘why’ or ‘wherefore’. Each and every creature was absolutely justified and redeemed in the mere fact of its existence and novelty. The whole wondrous soup bubbled, simmered and stewed harmoniously in this first and most primordial of melting pots. There was a God inside every flower and fairy in every tree that gave each the means to be simply what it was. As much as Cornel looked and listened he could not find a label or a definition inscribed anywhere in its green unfolding fabric. He looked up and down the grassy marshland but discovered nothing written down and no laws etched into the barks of trees or typed into the wings of the mighty eerie dragon flies that buzzed him gently and curiously as he and Glennys made their way through the evaporating dawn mist in search of Avalon.
Glennys had, stunningly, walked right up to her Aries in the foyer outside the Winckley square common room and asked him without too much self-consciousness if he would go out with her. Cornel, psychically blitzed by the offer, looked over his shoulder to see if she was talking to someone else, the request seemed to come out of nowhere but he agreed on the spot. Later he discussed her proposal with Steve Cook, the younger brother of the indefinable Moor Nook greaser and cold-eyed killer of a centre forward, Phil. Steve had thought Glennys was a real bird and asked Cornel if he could take up the offer if the latter changed his mind. He had thought Cornel was making up the whole story until he saw Glennys and her friend giggling and motioning toward them from a corner in the common room. It was unheard of for a Preston girl to ask a guy out. Glennys, not for the first time that was for sure, had broken standard hillbilly social practise and Park School etiquette and taboo to boot. Cornel had been impressed with her courage and the way she held herself with the graceful insightful demeanour of a Diana, the Roman goddess of wisdom and hunting. She was born with natural intuitive intelligence and was an original child of the universe always attempting to scale the stairway to heaven were the scaling rather than arrival held most of the meaning and fun. Had she made it all the way to the top, the mystery of life and the universe and everything would disappear, but her deep unfathomable essence would always elude capture even in the conceptual schemes of the Lord of Hosts himself.
She wore a brown plaid mini-skirt on their hike that day and a white pair of Greek sandals that fastened with white leather bindings criss-crossing all the way up to the knee. A simple brown corduroy jacket that she had borrowed from her sister Sheila protected her from most of the elements though her sister was not going to be too happy with state of the jacket after Glennys returned home in the wee small hours. Glennys had dressed to please her Cornel whom she had secretly adored from the dizzy heights of the Park School Balcony while riveted to his Antony and Cleopatra type soap opera relationship with Lyn Spence. Once she had seen Lyn rushing away from the table tennis game in tears and had dashed down the stairs from her lofty perch to the coffee room to get a closer look at what was going on. Lyn had gone and sat down trying to hide her copious weeping behind cupped hands. Glennys with her unequalled talent for collating data tried to listen by the door as to what the origin of the unfolding drama was. It appeared that Cornel had told Lyn that she might be better off going out with Steve Baines or Steve Book. Lyn liked to go out to dinner and lived a thoroughly intense and involved socialite life in keeping with her status as the sixth form’s most popular babe. Cornel had never been comfortable with Lyn’s well packed and stacked entourage and simply could not afford or stand any of her way of life outside sixth form. He had for some time guiltily hidden a desire to break off his friendship with her. Both Lyn’s suitors had cars and money from trust funds arranged by their well-to-do families. Cornel could not and did not wish to risk indignity by competing with these society boys for Lyn’s favours. It was fashionable for the well to do to claim working class envy as an explanation for this kind of reverse discrimination. Quite honestly they bored Cornel to tears and this was all that needed to be said notwithstanding what psychiatric apologists for the status quo and social hierarchy would say. He did not want their kind hanging around him, he considered their reality plastic and self-indulgent and an injury not so much to his moral rather than aesthetic sensibilities. If friendship with Lyn meant that he would have to rub shoulders with the pompous, cruel and hard-hearted--so much the worse for their friendship.
The fairy tale progressed ever so magically as Aries and Diana sprinkling stardust in their wake made their way slowly but surely over hill and dale without compass and North Star to guide them in their epic journey. If meaning was a function of the Disney-like displays in the theatre of the imagination then comparisons to the saga of Gilgamesh and odyssey were well taken. A griffin or jabberwocky could hide behind any approaching hill or ravine, a Leviathan could roar out of the river Ribble at any moment. There were unspoken trials and tribulations to meet and overcome if their love were to be crowned with sun, moon and stars and more importantly purpose and self-justification. All journeys, not to put too fine a point on it, structured human life, they gave the common little animal subsisting in a dung heap of volcanic ash something to do with his day and ultimately his life. The epic encounter turned the wanderer inward where space and possibility were unlimited in scope and content. It deflected him from the finite possibilities of an iron block universe where uniformity and repetition was one feature of its essence. One must never underestimate the power of the fear of boredom as the ultimate driving force of history and human concepts of progress. The frightfulness of insignificance drove man out of the arms of his mother Gaia not into the dark unforgiving external world but in direct confrontation with his capacity to invent myths to light his path and warm his stone cold terror in abandonment. Man would prefer to trek across a whole world full of mythical beasts and fabulous monsters than come face to face with his inner consuming fire and gangrenous emptiness in front of a gently crackling hearth complete with poker and tongs for peaceful stoking. Nothing filled the thinking man with more dread than the thought that he knew exactly what he would do on the morrow. Many thought that the longing of man was for an anaesthetised tranquil conscious state free from the white-hot tongues of fire that licked away greedily at his self-control; not much more could be further from the truth.
Glennys and Cornel had examined the serious possibility of discovering some kind of redemption or salvation in the mere fact that though they only lived literally up the road from one another they were a mystery and strangers. Both were from different and difficult social backgrounds but far from this being a problem that inner space experts might have predicted would compound psychic instability between them, these shared common experiences rather encouraged trust and loyalty. Their long loving relationship of over seven years testified to the truth of this insight. Societies of all cultural persuasions had always promoted fear and loathing of the strangers in their midst out of alarm at the prospect that members of their group had a natural inclination to trust those that had never done them any harm. Glennys and Cornel at first formed a bond not to mince words based on mutual ill fortune. They were extremely gifted working class young people impossible to fool, political and religious ideologies would roll off minds like water off a duck’s back. They knew where they stood and what they faced; at best they would have equal opportunities to fail or succeed unequally. Glennys had harboured inferiority complexes concerning physical appearance. This was by no means unusual for a young woman her age but at the time she did not know that. Glennys rejected the boys that her elders pointed her in the direction of. No one could understand this but the answer was obvious, they symbolised for her an image of her roller coaster love affair with her remarkably intelligent though emotionally unpredictable father. Glennys chose to see herself as unattractive because any battles she had won at home with the patriarch had to be won with guile and emotional manipulation. There was nothing morally suspect about this her very survival, and not just emotionally, had depended on her skill in these psychological arts. Cornel represented enough that was different as well similar to the significant male others in her family life. He was exotic in his appearance though proudly and uncompromisingly British in his cultural heritage. She could have a drink and a walk with a Prestonian but not have to gaze on a face that reminded her of depressing times with her father or brother David. Cornel’s image lacked the tension of incestuous attractions and repulsions. He was to become, and not for the first time in his relationships with opposite sex, first the redeemer and later the persecutor; or as psychologists would say first the positive transference and then the negative. Actually positive and negative transferences take place at one and same time. The ordinary man in the street would say one loved and hated a lover in equal portions. Years later after academic success Glennys would always be inclined to throw up over these kind of psychological explanations and would opt instead for theories showing the institutional ideological exploitation of the proletarian woman. Unequal power relations between women and men had corrupted and dehumanised the former but inadvertently the latter also. There would not be any nook or cranny left untainted by the worldview of the patriarchal society. In other words in the struggle for the good things of life the cards would be stacked in the favour men over women. The coloured man was a bit of an ideological misnomer, he was a man at one and the same time as being subject to the death penalty to varying degrees historically for the crime of inappropriate shading of his skin by menolin. Feminist definitions of oppressive power relations had always been plagued and bedevilled by the intersection of gender roles and ethno-cultural diversity. Some radical feminists took the view that a male person of colour was as much an exploiter of femininity as any white middle-class male. They even went as far as accusing the former of using and overplaying the race card to avoid the consequences of righteous feminist wrath. Often the black civil rights movements and liberal and radical feminists would collide none to gracefully with black activists accusing western feminists of attempting to label men of colour as more violent than their men of non colour counterparts. To those on the outside this would look like a propaganda war waged by both sides to prove each had the bloodier wounds. Did all men oppress all women or did all whites oppress all blacks? Both these camps had members who would answer yes to both propositions. This split the universal movement for social justice right down the middle leaving the middle-class exploiting person of non-colour laughing and taking full advantage of the ensuing civil war between groups that should have been natural allies. Never was it more true to say that arguments between friends presented opportunities for their natural enemies. The natural enemy would whisper invisibly to both sides that some were using gender and some using racial characteristics to escape moral responsibility for oppression. This was the greatest tragedy and scourge to descend on well intentioned whose only wish was for the eradication of all subjugation of the weak by the strong.
The farmlands between Grange Park and the Preston waterworks just outside of Grimsargh presented the young lovers with endless opportunities for day dreaming and unfulfilled romantic longings. The speck on the horizon suddenly came right into focus. It was and old abandoned farmhouse, a beautiful deserted household with a dark, tragic hidden secret. At least that was the wishful fantasy that flashed through the fertile unlimited imagination of the most exotic knight of the round table. The cottage even had the standard fairy tale porch with ivy and brambles gently and lovingly strangling it to a sweet and blissful demise. The house in the meadow creaked and groaned under the weight of nature’s unrelenting intention to regain what was rightfully hers. The cottage’s broken glass eyes and pale open mouth gateway reminded one of how the bodies in a morgue lay bolt stiff with the neck craning upwards gaping unseeing into the heavens. The two troubadours wasted no time in their conquest, they invaded the inner sanctuary immediately and walked around the dusty god forsaken living room which met their gaze when the rusty oak door with wrought iron door knob complainingly squeaked and squealed its way open. Glennys had an image of how she and Cornel might set up house together and mentally planned how to furnish and decorate it. Cornel rushed upstairs hoping to encounter some hideous goblin or one-eyed Cyclops to batter. Instead he fell upon a dank forbidding attic-like room, which had obviously been some kind of nursery where a first time mother had gently rocked her newborn babe into blissful somnambulistic oblivion. The wallpaper looked like an indescribable beast red in tooth and claw had set about it with a vengeance ripping and shredding to the screams of a young lady laying prostrate on the floor hiding her eyes from the terrible vision in front of her. The room gave Cornel the shivers and he reached down to make sure that Excalibur was still there. As he walked around the interiors his attention was suddenly diverted to a sheet of paper under the soles of his knee length brown boots he had bought with his first salary from his summer job at John Barnes’ cotton Mill. He and Glennys had managed to find work together that summer holiday. She worked in a mail order office right by Horrockes’ Paper Mill and just down the road from the Gem super store where Perkins used to buy groceries in bulk or wholesale to save money. The sheet of paper turned out to be a rolled up parchment that Cornel opened. It presented itself as a picture ever so faded of a man in a grey suit smoking a pipe by a window outside the window great flakes of snow glided like bits of ticker tape on their way down to earth. Behind him was the young woman Cornel had imagined before he set eyes on the picture and sure enough she was gently rocking a tiny baby in an old wooded green painted cradle with little boy blue painted onto a side of it.
Cornel felt himself in the somatic grip of the feelings of the uncanny. His scalp felt
like the hairs were standing on end and his heart raced a little and the proverbial
butterflies in the stomach started to flutter. Interestingly he also felt the sensible
scientist in him questioning the validity and rationality of his state of mind. Cornel
knew that superstitious beliefs of tales concerning the truth of precognition were
psychically pre-programmed in a religious community. These added to some other
more astonishing beliefs, of which the acceptance would prove adherence to group
values and distinguishing ways of life would set the Christian society aside apart
from other competing religious and political systems. The more absurd the belief the
greater the faith required to adhere to it, the more patriotic the believer. Cornel had
never been able to win any battles with the internal scientist, philosopher and
psychiatrist inside of him. There were many who would arise to challenge the wisdom of the objective ways of looking at the psychological and physical world. Many eminent psychiatrists would reject the idea that harsh economic and social circumstances eventually took their toll in the extreme by driving fragile humans into the madhouse and all that there. Weird and diverse sets of explanations were offered to explain madness and folly. These included the standard genetic hypotheses the lack of education or too much education. The latter view had became more popular in recent years and was motivated by the idea that some, such as women and immigrants, were emotionally too fragile to benefit from a good education and were ‘blinded by the light’. Higher education would drive the under-privileged into the nut house, while those with sufficient mental capacity could not be morally castigated if their innate ability led to better quality of life and longevity. Certainly such theories, along with glorifying the owner of those eyes that could easily tolerate the glare of reason and education, saved a lot of money that would have been spent on improving the physical and educational opportunities of the fragile poor. Such therapists and other social scientists were, not unnaturally, very popular with governments that wanted to keep a close eye on public expenditure and preserve the moral integrity of the Status Quo. In this matter God was terminally blind in the right eye.
Whatever the financial benefits were of promoting suppositious beliefs, the early Cornel, as opposed to the late, was as much subject to the alarming psychic influence of them as anyone else. The picture he found under his shoe had filled him with eerie dread and ill omens. As he rushed down the stairs he had a sudden anxiety concerning the safety of Glennys in the room below. Oddly the premonition of ill foreboding was to become a bit more than just another of those hunches or intuitions. He found Glennys downstairs still dreaming of a blissful domestic life with her new found mystical love. As he entered the living room from the shadowy stairway he saw Glennys standing by the front door gazing out toward the oncoming approach of a cart pulled by a battered old tractor, which had clearly seen better days. In the driving seat sat a large balding gentleman well built, flaring at the nostrils like a wild horse. He was shouting and gesticulating from the tractor well before the vehicle pulled up at the house. One arm was flailing around while the other hand could hardly steer the vehicle in a straight line, such was the fury of the man’s temper. In the back of the cart Cornel noticed a variety of farming implements and tools prominent amongst which was a set of ominous looking pitchforks for bailing hay. As the tractor drew up a little distance away from the front porch where the two star-struck lovers stood with bated breath the man on its arrival leapt from the vehicle and swung round to the cart where he selected the longest of the pitch forks and advanced towards the house still bellowing at the top of his lungs. Glennys turned, went instinctively and sheltered behind Cornel without a word between them. The look on the gentleman’s face was murderous.

What the hell do you think you’re doing on my property?’
`We are just going.’
‘You better come over here.’
‘I said we are going,’ repeated Cornel.
This was by no means a new situation for the leader of the greaser gang. Cornel had often faced uncompromising shows of territorial bravado. Once he and his mates had been to The Plough Inn in Grimsargh while on a jaunt out into the countryside. This pub was neither far from Cornel’s beloved Cow Hill on which no cows were to be found nor anything remotely resembling a hill. The hill was situated on the right fork of a road leading through the fields and on toward Squire Anderton’s Wood. The mild incline following on from a windy winding road flanked by fertile soft mossy meadows. This incline was taken by Cornel to be the elusive ‘hill’ though there was no real evidence for this assumption. Surrounding each field was a variety of prickly shrubbery and bracken, which defined each farmer’s plot of land in a way that was known only to those in the know. Trees whispered secretly to one another as Cornel, Mick, Diane Hart and Susan Clark ambled absent minded one blue hot summer’s day in the late nineteen sixties. Diane had a severe brother Brian who reminded Cornel of a Manchester United player called Stuart Pearce who was to be nicknamed ‘psycho’. Anyway it was Mick who had used his brooding charm to entice these two water nymphs out on one of his walks of contemplation for want of a more apt description. Mick had sold this idea to Cornel based on the premise that both girls were not the usual kind.
‘How did you pull it off, Mick?’
‘I told some stories about you.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Don’t worry, it wasn’t anything bad.’
‘I said you could jump over wide brooks and off high hills and that you were as strong as an ox.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Look, I didn’t tell them all the stuff you can do.’
‘What do you mean?’
Now, Mick had long held the suspicion that there was more to Cornel than met the eye. He had been curious about a lodger who had mysteriously come to live at Cornel’s home in Glen Grove. A Richad Von Hipple was the given name but nobody was really sure. It was said he came from Ireland and had gone to study amongst the lamas in Tibet and that he lived on a diet of locusts and rancid yaks milk. Well, that kind of foodstuff was in short supply at the local co-op where the Gang would hang around on shadowy nights when windows sweated profusely from torrential rain that would often bathe Gamull Lane in a pale yellowy blue hue on godless evenings of endless jest and mostly harmless pranks. Mick wondered at the strange antics that Cornel and Richard would get up to. He had watched them concealed by dense privets at the bottom of the garden through the apple trees. He saw the lodger hold up chipboards of various dimensions beckoning Cornel to strike at them. Sometimes the boards would inexplicably shatter. This was inexplicable because Cornel did not appear to use much backlit or observable effort in doing so. Richard did not seem to be interested in anybody or anything except instructing Cornel in what Mick surmised must be some version of the dark arts.
Actually Cornel did not dismiss Mick’s concern out of hand he too was at a loss of why Richard had singled him out for his unique instruction. The exact circumstances by which he ended up a lodger at Glen Grove was by all accounts hazy and nothing in all the various versions of these stories gave anyone any confidence that anyone really knew. Mick once took Cornel to task on what the lodger was teaching him and gave Cornel the distinct impression that he was more concerned that there was too much time spent with Richard and not enough for their country walks.
‘So, what the heck is going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With you and that lodger.’
‘Oh, only tells me about his life in the mountains in Nepal where he met the lamas and learned to live like them.’
‘But I saw you doing strange stuff in the garden the other day, what hell is all that about?’
‘He was showing me some moves for something called aikido.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s like Karate only it makes it so that you can defend yourself against a group of attackers at the same time.’
‘How does that work?’
‘Well, Richard says you gotta release your ki so that you can see and feel were they all are at the same time.’
‘What the heck is ki?’
‘It’s energy of your awareness.’
‘That’s mumbo jumbo to me.’
‘I know what he means a bit but not completely. He taught me to be able to see many people at the same time and what they are up to.’
‘Why does he only want you to do it?’
‘I don’t know, but he says I ‘ve got to go through five different levels of dan to get the fifth which only top shaolin priest reach.’
‘What can you do then?’
‘Well, Richard says I can walk and nobody can hear, go through walls, be faster and calmer than anyone, oh yeah, and astral travel to anywhere in the universe at the speed of thought.’
‘Is that why you keep winning all the gang’s fights?’
‘No, I am not allowed to use anything he teaches me for myself.’
‘But what stops you?’
‘Richard says I would lose all my dans.’
‘How the hell would he know?’
‘He said it would be enough that I knew and my powers would dissolve into the mist.’
‘What mist?’
‘To tell you the truth I haven’t got the foggiest idea.’

Mick would often take Cornel by surprise by cross-examining him at most inopportune moments. He would choose windswept icy evenings when the gang congregated around the local coop in Ribbleton just before the tiny bridge that led up to Long Sands Lane. Ribbleton was frozen in time as if a wicked witch had cast a spell over this otherworldly suburb of Preston. No one really wanted to live here and it was a curious mixture of lower working class and middle class from the very bottom like Cornel and Steve to Margaret Dewhurst and Helen Skingsley representing the cream of the middleclass young lady. Margaret Dewhurst lived between where Cornel lived and the Coop about half a kilometre away. She always had the reputation of a real nerd but one day suddenly decided to doll herself up in miniskirt and sling backs which she would don the moment Cornel and the other boys turned up at the shop. She would stand by the bay windows in the upstairs of her house, a semidetached dwelling positioned right on the main road of which Glen Grove branched off just a bit up the road toward Courtaulds chemical factory. As soon as she saw the guys she got dressed up and would parade provocatively with an equally sophisticated girlfriend right in front of the gang in order to get their attention at any cost. Steve and Mick did not know what to make of it; these were not the sorts of girls that they went out with normally. Glamorous working class girls like Christine Wilson and Karen Beckensale maybe, but well spoken educated ladies like Margaret and friend left them a bit lost for appropriate moves and chat up lines. Margaret actually had pretty bad eyesight but nevertheless she would peel off the specs before she came out and carefully positioned her hard contact lenses for maximum effect. She had always been the prim and proper pride of her dad, a stuffy bloke and a bit too old to be a father but with a formidable record of good citizenry. Margaret wanted to get some action when she turned sixteen and was rather self consciously and to her immense personal distaste attracted to bad boys and the ‘badder’ the better. She was a straight A student and was being primed for early inclusion in the small batch of Preston kids that went on to go to university. Margaret had other ideas, she wanted to frighten some life into herself by fraternising with the local lads and this was absolutely forbidden. The word had hardly left her mother’s mouth before Margaret conjured up the image of just the boy who would break all the rules. Margaret wanted to date the leader of the pack however bad and whoever that turned out to be. The immediate problem for Margaret and pal was how to find out who the leader was. She wanted to get one of these rough and rude guys that hogged the coop area terrifying little old ladies grimly grasping their brown paper shopping bags as they made their way to the bus stop terminus at Gamull lane. Margaret’s mother had laid down the law about not rubbing shoulders with the local riff-raff. These words were not long out her mouth before Margaret had conjured up an image of that kind of bloke for future intimacy. She wanted none other but leader of the pack.
As they strutted their stuff out side the shop Steve turned to Mick and asked who these birds were.

The rain whipped by unforgiving winds lashed everything in sight bending the aerials on the roofs of the private owner- occupier houses immediately behind the boys by the coop. Demonic gusts of wind rattled the corrugated tops of garages all the way up Fir Trees Avenue and the odd passer-by reeled under an indifferent sky that had seen it all before and would see it again for all eternity. The rain looked hard for the fir trees that had grown weather beaten before the existence of Ribbleton but could not find them. The street lamps glinting every now and then cast their blue and orange beams onto the rain sodden black tar streets where pools of water contained in pot holes of worn concrete threw the rays back again disintegrating the light into its colored elements which exploded in turn into a waterfall of horseshoe shaped rainbow hues. Whoever thought in their rational moments that existence had a natural explanation would have been hard pushed to explain how on these nights.
There was something everywhere on these streets but the black light of nothing shone through the holes illuminating everything extended in space and time with a gloating ‘now you see me, now you do not’. What came faded immediately and what left returned again. Cornel looked away from the gang for a moment and stared down the road between the coop and the small family run sweet shop across from them and adjacent to an Esso petrol station. The wind funnelled by the houses groaned and moaned its way along like it had come down a chimney and into a living room of brooding lost boys. Actually not a living room but kitchen where Andy Kemp sat on a window sill and Cornel lounged on a brown antique stool opposite a furnace for a central heating system where logs burned crackling and snapping connected to the outside by a thick pipe vent where air rushed through bringing all the nothingness down with it.
‘I am thinking of going to Huddersfield Poly’, opened Andy, both guys had just come back from a hard football match at Penwortham Holm.
‘What are you going to do there?’
‘There is a new bachelor of education course starting, I might take that.’
‘What about Becky?’ Becky was Andy’s long-standing girlfriend.
‘She going on to University herself.’
‘Which one?’
‘Durham.’
‘So you are leaving Preston finally.’
‘Yep.’
‘And what about you?’
‘I think I am going to hang around for a bit, but I don’t know.’
‘It’s a shame. You are so sharp you could easily get a degree.’
The wind through the vent picked up speed and and sounded like a bunson burner jetting on and off.
Andy went quiet. His was a lumbering blond Anglo Saxon frame which belied a sensitive soul that dithered between using his immense intellectual talents to promote his self-interest and his singular lack of confidence which threatened to hand him a mundane life. Andy had two sisters, Caroline and Felicity, both of who were highly thought of by the local lads. Caroline was a slim blond beauty well spoken and a Madame manner which thrust forward an off-putting superiority. She spoke pushily and had taken up a career in catering and left Preston to study elsewhere. She occasionally came home at Christmas and Easter and had the uncanny ability to really upset other young women who always kept their boyfriends faraway form this competition. Caroline lacked any sense of wrongdoing when it came to capturing the hearts of any wayward young men. In fact the entire Kemp family where sophisticated nihilists deep down and rued their fall from high status when their father left their mother for a female prize elsewhere. Class affiliations were perhaps the most important source of self-confidence that spurred the British psyche and it was daddy Kemp who had come from a socialite background that impregnated social status to the brood, which promptly evaporated when he ran off. Andy being the eldest was the hardest hit and a solid common sense could quite disconcertedly come unstuck quite sharply betraying an underlying mourning for his lost dad that he never quite got around to recognising and resolving. He often felt compelled to prove in many symbolic ways that he did not need departed dad and could rise to the challenge of fending for himself. In this he had varying degrees of success.

What Prestonians lacked in political and social awareness they more than made up for with -for want of a more parsimonious expression- an off the cuff one off put down comeback line. The relationship between Cornel and Andy ran the gauntlet from one-sided admiration to mutual ambivalence. The ‘one way’ contained three elements, Andy’s obsession with football, his lack of talent and his grudging envy of Cornel’s natural ability. Cornel for his part was suitably indifferent to Andy’s admiration guessing quite correctly that Andy’s unashamed defence of nihilistic relativity in morals meant he could not ultimately be expected to be counted on in times of need. Cornel was thoroughly caught up in Andy’s ability in poetry, an interest drawing its origins from the secret verses he himself had bestowed on the world. Andy could throw together a poem on almost any subject and any acclaim he would derive would fill the void of lost love and more specifically the lack of a male role model to aim his weak sense of identity at. Notwithstanding this Freudian explanation of the enigmatic Mr Kemp, his poetry could on occasion stand on its own two feet in the spirit of a latter day Chatterley. When Cornel thought of Andy the tragedy of that famous print of the poverty-stricken Chatterley lying dead on a single bed with left arm draped over the side would materialise suddenly in an unwanted daydream.

Cornel would often size up people in how they played games. As Cornel was captain of Nazz it was a real feather in Andy’s cap when he accepted an invitation to train together. They would stroll over to Avenham park some bright dewy mornings, put down two rolled up coats at two ends and play one on one football. The feel and sight of Avenham Park early on a spring day took one’s breath away. The light was crystal clear; it felt as if one looked at the world through a detective’s magnifying glass. The green of the grass on the gently rolling slopes sprang into the pupils with sunglass intensity. The smooth chill in the crisp air stung the insides of the throat like ‘an ice cold beer on a sunny afternoon’, l
In deference to the Kinks song. With the ball at his feet Andy stood resolute waiting for Cornel to come to get it after the throwing down of his iron glove. Andy looked on at Cornel’s slim wiry muscles and wondered to himself what all the fuss was about. He imagined Cornel running toward to challenge for the ball and bouncing off his bulbous hulk like facade and down to ignomious defeat. The way things went in the theatre of the imagination very often bore little resemblance to the actual way things turned out. Cornel for his part considered how he might save Andy from losing confidence if he took the ball away too quickly. He had included Andy in the Nazz line-up because of Andy absolutely insisting on it and in fear of the hurt glassy eyed hound dog look he could cast one’s way in the event of feeling excluded from any club he had applied for membership in.
Andy tried to use his imposing physical structure to intimidate his nemesis. He would wait for the ball to be pushed to either side of him before launching himself like Fred Simmons many years before in a bone crushing slide tackle. His opponent would ride these challenges with ease and Andy to his immense surprise found himself skidding nose first along the tender freshly cutgrass wondering what the heck had happened. Like other Preston guys before him, he did not see where the power had come from out of such an average looking bloke. Andy was methodical; he would study Cornel’s footballing skills in fine analytic detail. He often announced various solutions in which all the calculations derived one formula after another implying weak points in his foe’s armoury. Sadly, the practise always fell well short of the theory and Andy more often than not left his endless encounters nursing not only bruised shins but also more tellingly a bruised and battered ego.
On one fine Saturday morning in early June Andy arrived at Chaddock Street with ball under one arm and his youngest sister Felicity on the other. Caroline was coming later to Avenham Park, they were going to watch the training session. Felicity was sublimely different from her older sister Caroline. Her tanned skin, baby doll facial features, long, dark brown hair and authentic nature made her nearly a complete antithesis. She almost gave the impression of coming from one of those idyllic Mediterranean sunshine paradises while Caroline shone Scandinavian pink and yellow wholesome reserve. Cornel wondered how they could be related at all; there was only four years between them. Felicity had a bit of an ambivalent attitude to football and for that matter to Cornel. She was tired of Andy going on about being included in the Nazz team and specifically his endless analyses of the various games with particular reference to his own performance. She had only agreed to come because she secretly wanted either to see Andy get a good thrashing or Cornel prove to be not as good as everyone said he was. Her Saturday afternoon was a promising win-win social event, she mused. Felicity had always thought the mighty captain of Nazz would be an all right kind of guy if someone or something would upset his apple cart. If only someone better at all he was good at would come along and teach him a damn good lesson about how it was for lesser mortals, maybe he could become accessible. When he came round to her place he seemed to not even notice her existence. If Caroline was there he would either be engrossed in deep conversation with her by the fireside or else in one of those interminable discussions with Andy about who had won the F.A. cup or league titles in this or that year. Felicity always watched intently when Cornel and Caroline were together as a teaming of the two in any romantic relationship would have been more than life was worth. She did not wish to think long on the damage those two could have done as self-willed charismatic individuals to the edgy self-esteem of all the entourage. Andy was a walking encyclopaedia on football and cricket facts and did not seem to have any sense of how informing disinterested folk could shrink their estimation of him. In one way he lacked social awareness while possessing unique intellectual sharpness. In any case, Felicity secretly despised her eldest brother and thought him false and superficial.

Andy’s youngest sister wanted both her big brother and his unsung football idol to bite the dust not out of any malicious nature, but as a form of therapy. As both her and Caroline met outside the gates of Avenham Park she pulled her sister to one side and out of earshot of the two guys getting macho with one another.
‘They are just getting their football gear on.’
‘I don’t know why I agreed to come, but you know how pathetic Andy can be about things.’
‘Andy’s excited cos’ he got Sir Lancelot to train with.’
Both ladies start chuckling profusely.
‘Yea, did you see them last night at the party acting out that knight of the round table stuff.’
‘I think Andy really does see everyone as a lady or a knight.’
‘I know he thinks Cornel is Lancelot, Steve Daly Sir Bedivere, and Dickie Sir Ector, Earl is Sir Bors and Charlie Gawain and Ken Eccles Tristram.’
Hysterical laughter as this point.
‘Yea, he kept calling me lady Caroline Lamb.’
‘He said I was lady Enid of that tale Geraint and Enid. I think he he sees me as on some kind of quest with a knight errant.’
‘He’s in cloud cuck-koo land!’
‘We got to do something before his imagination running away with him gets him serious bother at the poly.’
‘Yea, he’s fallen in with some weird types, mum says a lot of hippies and that sort.’
‘You know what I’m going to do?’
‘No. What?’
‘I’m going to ask Cornel if he would go to cinema with me.’
‘Your kidding.’
‘No, I mean it, I heard him saying to Andy the other day that some films were coming on at the Odeon and he didn’t want to go by himself.’
‘You’ve got a real nerve.’
‘Yeah I know, I’m also going to go that dinner party for Linda Andy’s throwing.’
‘Yeah I heard about all that. What the hell is all that about?’
‘Becky going is off to University and they are taking a break from their relationship.’

Linda Littlewood was Andy’s childhood sweetheart and rock on which every attempt at wooing had shattered like a ship on the barrier reef. Andy had heard recently from Pauline, Linda’s elder sister, that Linda had actually known Cornel from school years before but still had a crush on him. Andy decided to hatch a plot that more than merged seamlessly with a self-destructive urge to find humiliating information. Talented insecure individuals often turned destructive impulses into self-harming events. Here in Andy the life force of libido was often found to turn in on itself and become mortido directed at this own psyche. He had a habit of placing himself in situations that injured his already low self-esteem or actually physically endangered him. This latest ill fated adventure was ostensibly to check whether both his ideal man and woman would remain faithful to him if positioned in a situation of real temptation The unconscious motive was really to experience as much pain as possible in order to punish himself for not keeping dad around and to provide invaluable material for his poetic exploits. Andy loved to put his shame and humiliations into verse.

Suddenly the phone went off in the living room where Andy and handpicked guests wined and dined on a bounty of standard party food and booze bought cheaply from the local off-license. Andy had invited his sisters, Pauline Littlewood and her boyfriend Hugh, Linda Littlewood and Cornel and a truly obnoxious friend of his called Wayne Lowry. The phone call was from Mike Farrish, a neighbour. Mike had just come back from London where he was in his final year of a history degree at University College London. He had asked Andy if he could join in with the festivities and bring along his friend Joe Irvine. Joe studied Politics in Oxford and they both shared an apartment together in East Finchley in London. When the two arrived Cornel and Joe immediately hit it off and got involved in a discussion about trade unions. Joe wanted to become a member and worker for the transport union and had rather solid old world working class political affiliations. He was not reluctant to air his political views, which Cornel found refreshing. Andy looked restlessly on while the two locked horns in political diatribe. Andy got impatient; he wanted to engineer a contact between Cornel and his beloved Linda. Not only this, he wanted them both feel at ease and unobserved. To this end he arranged for Felicity to show them around her bedroom upstairs and overlooking the back garden within eyeshot of the Harling sisters some few houses away. The Kemp’s lived in a council house just off Watling Street Road in the heart of Ribbleton. It was a standard three up three down dwelling. One entered through the front door to the hall with the living room immediately to the right while just a little way down the tiny hall came the kitchen with pantry adjacent to it where Cornel and Andy would often spend days together whiling away the early seventies. Before he could put his dastardly plan into action, Pauline suddenly appeared from nowhere and dragged Cornel unceremoniously away down the hall and into the pantry.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you from Linda.’
‘Really. Nothing bad I hope?’
‘No, quite the opposite.’
‘Didn’t you know each other at Ribbleton Comprehensive?’ Pauline quickly redirects the conversation to save her sister’s secret crush from getting to the source.
‘Yea.’
‘So you and Andy knock around together quite a bit, don’t you.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘You know you’re not quite like anyone else.’
‘Yep, I’ve heard that before, I’m not sure I am that complimented, though.’
‘I mean it in the best way. But I know what you mean. I suppose a lot of people can think that as they can’t put you in a box you must be wild or rebellious in some way. Are you a rebel?’
‘If you are asking if I would like to make things right, well then I am.’
‘That’s not the usual way of looking at a rebel.’
‘Well go on then, what’s the usual way?’
‘You know, just that a rebel is against authority no matter what sort it is.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s true. A rebel is someone who is attacked first and wants to fight again.’
‘You mean he fights again after some kind of defeat.’
‘Yea, you can say that. Anyway, he doesn’t attack first just to prove something, that’s just conservative gobbledygook, I think that’s something like ageism.’
‘Ageism?’
‘Yea, like sexism is prejudice against women this is older people’s way of boxing us so we look bad as though we are against everything just for the sake of it. I think a rebel has had his rights taken away and only wants them back. It is not a mindless way of life just to get kicks or attention or a product of raging hormones or something.’
‘Yea, that’s what my dad said that all the things I am against now like experimenting on animals and that stuff is just because young kids want to get attention. I always thought that was patronising.’
‘It is not only that, it’s is also trying to say that they are virtuous by definition and have not violated anyone’s rights which anyone looking at the world today knows is a load of hogwash.’
‘I can see why Andy and Linda go on about you. You think for yourself, don’t you?’
‘Well it’s better than someone doing my thinking for me which is what happens when we listen to gossip. Anyway, what do they both say?’
‘I can’t betray confidence.’
‘What are you, their secretary?’
‘What do mean?’
‘Well, secretaries are employed for many things but the biggest is to keep their bosses secret.’
‘Yea, I suppose that’s true you can hear that in the word. Okay, Andy goes on about you being some kind of sporting colossus and Linda say she has always liked you.’
‘It’s easy to be a big fish in a small pond when it comes to sport and I have always liked Linda.’
‘I think there is no such thing as small pond ‘cos there will always be one smaller and bigger so it doesn’t make sense to not give yourself some credit for being a good sports player in Preston just cos it’s small.’
‘You are quite calculating. What do study at Durham?’
‘Maths.’
‘I thought so.’
‘Why?’
‘Cos you are so clear in rationality.’
‘Maths and rationality are not the same thing.’
‘Yes, they are.’
‘In what way?’
‘They both involve calculation. You have to get the sums right in both or nothing adds up.’
‘I never thought of it that way, but yes, why not. How do you know all these things, you haven’t done any thing after school, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Then how did you get to know so much?’
‘When you’ve got nothing you’ve nothing to worry about when it comes to learning how to get knowledge.’
‘You come from a poor background?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think it’s great you didn’t just accept your lot in life.’
‘You know, that’s an interesting way of putting it, cos a ‘lot’ is a straw that was drawn by sorcerers and being born in difficulty is not a straw that will make my entire future.’
‘I thought Wizards were magicians who cast spells and that sort of thing?’
‘A common view but not true. A wizard was just a wise man and a sorcerer just told you what to do if he drew the wrong straw for you.’
‘They were the drawer of lots?’
‘Sure were.’
‘I’ve always felt something in common with witches. I thought they were like female wizards. I mean being a white witch gives me a thrill to think I could make potions and turn boys I didn’t like into toads. But now you say a wizard was only a wise guy. Takes away all the charm doesn’t?’
‘Yes, especially when you find out that a witch was actually some women that medieval villages designated as sacrificial lambs to purge all their sins and not women who could work enchantments.’
‘There you go again destroying all my illusions of grandeur, no one ever did that to me before. Well I’ve learned a lot tonight, do you fancy a walk?’
‘Where?’
‘I thought we could walk round the graveyard.’
‘Graveyard?’
‘Yea, I really think it’s peaceful in there.’
‘I see I’m not the only weirdo here.’
‘I don’t see why everyone is so put off by graveyards, they are like beautiful gardens to me.’
‘Yes, very fertile and for a good reason!’ Mutual amusement greets this shared insight.

‘What about Andy he wants me to stick around, after all it is his party.’
‘He won’t miss us; it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from here. We’ll be back in no time.’
‘Okay, but you point the way.’
‘I’m used to doing that. Hugh is a bit obsessed with running and maths.’
‘Andy told me you do a bit of academic stuff yourself.’
‘He did, did he?’
‘Yeah, he said you wrote some poetry but don’t show it around.’
‘Sometimes I jot down observations.’
‘What kind?’
‘Anything interesting I see in friends or people on the street, anywhere actually.’
‘You analyse them?’
‘Not really. I just record anything that’s beautiful or teaches me something.’
‘Do you do that all the time?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I better watch what I say then. I hope I don’t finish up in some kind of book.’
‘Would that worry you?’
‘I think it’s a bit like someone taking my picture. Everyone gets bothered by that.’
‘Well I can’t promise anything.’
‘You mean you would write all we did and said tonight?’
‘Maybe.’
‘If you say anything dodgy I’ll never forgive you.’
‘Don’t get paranoid.’
‘Well how do I know if you are only saying and doing things to draw out interesting stuff to fit in with your book. Do you ever get tempted to set people up like that?’
‘I want what I write to come spontaneously. But to be honest I sometimes do and say things that might get out something insightful from someone that might otherwise stay hidden.’
‘You mean you might say something you don’t mean?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Like what?’
‘ Don’t want to go into it.’
‘Why?’
‘Can make our talk unnatural. You could go on your guard and fail to be who you are.’
‘That’s true, I feel a bit uneasy right now.’
‘Why?’
‘Cause I am imagining reading all we do tonight in some novel you’ll write and I think I might feel stupid.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Because you might only say the things you say so that it becomes an interesting read. Can’t you tell some of the tricks you use to get write able stuff to happen.’
‘They are not tricks for a start, but I am interested in loyalty and I have told some of my friends untrue things to see if they will be tempted to act on what I say.’
‘I don’t get what you mean, give me an example.’
‘Okay, well once I thought Andy couldn’t resist exposing people.’
‘About what?’
‘Well anything, I felt he just liked showing off that every one else can get hood winked but not him. Some people get off on that kind of thing.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘It’s nothing deep, I might say that I’ve bought a new car or passed exams when it’s obvious I haven’t and leave him to his own devices.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He went and told everyone I didn’t of course, like a bat out of hell. I just sat back and watched him bask in the glory of being Sherlock Holms.’
‘But don’t you feel humiliated yourself because everyone might think it’s real?’
‘There is that danger but it’s worth it anyway.’
‘Yeah, I notice that about you that you don’t care what people think. I couldn’t do that. I suppose all novels are just a bunch of lies. That’s what fiction is, isn’t?’
‘It is not as simple as that.’
‘In what way?’
‘Out of all the random events that make up a life a writer has to choose just those he can chain or thread together to make his story.’
‘Oh, I see you mean, sometimes he will improvise like you did to Andy with that trick you played to make a link where there is none.’
‘Okay, that kind of thing might happen but not often, the thread exists in anyone’s life to those who care to discern it.’
‘Is it there or not?’
‘What?’
‘This thread you are talking about.’
‘I think there might not be, it could be only a mental pattern the author projects onto the world.’
‘So you just tell lies then?’
‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘But it seems true from what you are saying.’
‘Maybe, but no one can deny that life happens to them so there is a bit more than just the author’s pure interpretation. Maybe it’s half and half.’
‘I guess in the end people just see what they want to see, including writers.’
‘In some way, but there are some facts.’
‘But it’s not the facts that make the story, is it.’
‘No, they are building blocks.’
‘So what makes people like a story?’
‘The imagination of the writer.’
‘What happens if they don’t like it?’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘It’s got to hurt.’
‘I think that would depend on why they don’t like it.’
‘Yeah, that’s true I suppose it’s impossible not to write something that will upset someone.’
‘Unsympathetic readers have their coping strategies, especially if the book has some social implications that go against the received morality of the present day.’
‘What do mean?’
‘A book will be looked at for how it fits in with the present day power people’s world view, and I suppose that more than anything will determine what trials and tribulations the writer will have go through.’
‘You think that there are people out there that would say a book was bad simply because it doesn’t support their world view?’
‘Of course.’
‘How would they do that?’
‘Maybe the silence treatment or perhaps some tactic more insidious.’
‘Like what?’
‘Attacking the author personally.’
‘Usually by seizing on some theme in the work and presenting that as a danger or anaesthetic.’
‘What if a work is just plain bad, how would we know that if all that sort of thing goes on?’
‘By constructive criticism. But in my view other priorities take precedence and how much they do depends on how self-assured the ruling elite are at any particular time. How much censorship and liberty we get is inversely proportional to how secure the establishment feels.’
‘That’s a pretty radical view.’
‘I go further and say classics of literature and other art largely started out as kind of hygiene performances and some turned out to be quite good and got their timelessness inadvertently.’
‘Wow, that’s mind-boggling. My dad would be up in arms if he heard anyone say that Shakespeare was commissioned to write plays by the ruling group of the day in the first place to recommend ideal ways of citizenship. Correct me if I am wrong, is that what you are suggesting?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am but that doesn’t take away any credit from the Bard his stuff was still great writing.’
‘But you are saying the first motive was to certify the Elizabethan world order?’
‘Yes. I think there are loads of writers just as good as Shakespeare in any age but most of them don’t flourish because they are unlucky enough to be born under insecure regimes who regard free thinking as leading to the hangman’s rope so to speak.’
‘Hey, things are getting a bit serious, what do you say that we get going?’
‘But what about Andy? I don’t think we can just disappear like that.’
‘Okay, I’ll have a chat with him.’
‘What are you going to say?’
‘I don’t know, I’ll just make it up as I go along.’
Pauline dashed off to find the host while Felicity seeing Cornel alone for a moment seized the opportunity to get her own particular project off the ground. While Felicity got busy on her cinema project with Cornel, Pauline bumped into Hugh on her way to talk to Andy.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I’ve just been talkng to a guy called Cornel, one of Andy’s friends.’
‘Okay.’
‘Yeah, he seems worth pursuing.’
‘How so?’
‘I think that maybe the department has overlooked this guy.’
‘What do mean?’
‘I think he could be a useful addition in some way.’
‘In what?’
‘Well, I don’t know yet, I need more time to get to know him.’
‘Okay, if you think it’s worth the bother, what’s the story so far?’
‘I think he’s really special and it would be a mistake not at least to keep an eye on him.’
‘What kind of school did he come from?’
‘He went to Ribbleton secondary.’
‘A Secondary school?’
‘Yep.’
‘Well he can’t be that bright.’
‘I don’t know about that, I think in some way he’s slipped through the net.’
‘But he’s only a guy of average intelligence, what on earth could he be used for?’
‘I told you I don’t know yet, but even if we don’t use him for something we got to keep him out the hands of any opposition.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘He shows signs of leaning to the left and appears to be into all that black power stuff.’
‘So?’
‘He could turn out to be some kind of leader.’
‘A guy from a Secondary school, seems far fetched to me.’
‘Don’t get me wrong but I feel you’ve got a bit too close, are you sure you are not letting your emotions get the better of you?’
‘I knew you’d say that. Women in our department are always being accused of getting overinvolved, I’m fed up of hearing about it.’
‘Well face the fact sometimes female operatives do take everything personally and that’s not good for anyone. We get lousy intel and departmental money gets wasted on wild goose chases and that’s not why I got into this line of work.’
‘You are a real bleeding heart, Britain has taken in loads of immigrants since the war, dad says it’s our business to get the most out of them. That’s good for the country and good for them.’
‘Yeah, it also gives us a good living doesn’t it?’
‘That’s really cynical.’
‘But its true, isn’t?’
‘My family have been in the department for generations.’
‘But that doesn’t mean they weren’t in for the quality of life.’
‘They were in because they want to make the world a better place.’
‘I am sure on one level that’s so, but to be perfectly honest we are taught not to trust the ordinary citizen beacuse human nature is basically selfish, so why should I trust the operatives, they’re only human as well.’
‘I don’t know what you are trying to say, we get our orders and some time we just have to do as we are told.’
‘Sometimes that may be so, but the operatives in the Gestapo also used the same argument at Nuremburg to try to avoid the rope. We didn’t believe them and could easily see through their motives.’
‘Are you sure you are happy in the department, Hugh?’
‘So far, but I don’t like this kind of thing where perfectly ordinary people get singled out as ‘special’
which condemns them to a life time of survellience and other intrusiveness and all this on the whim of an individual operative who can’t be professional.’
‘Well that’s not the case, now this guy Cornel is special and not because I fancy him if that’s what you are implying. Actually I think that his talking about race all the time could get in the way of the department being able to act against dangerous immigrants because of fear it will be seen as racist. We got to put a stop to non institutional campaigns against racism in case any of our operations are compromised.’
‘You mean we have got to spin the story that racism doesn’t exist, and that all immigrants who say it does, are sick?’
‘Sometimes if we have to.’
‘I think that if we say our department is trying to better the world we have an odd way of showing it by denying that the greatest of evils, racism, doesn’t exist and only paranoid foreigners say it does. I can’t see us winning any war against our enemies if we have to sink to that level. We will be found out eventually.’
‘Yes, eventually, the bleeding hearts in the department are slow to react, the system is slow to react and by the time they do we would have already started the wars we want and they won’t be able to extract themselves from them because we’ll make sure we get into them good and deep.’
‘That’s the most cynical diatribe I have ever heard and makes us no better than our enemies. We have got to have to have universal and timeless standards of behaviour. I mean the very people who profess this ends justifies the means approach are to be found in the most relgious of groups all believeing in the universal timeless ten commandments, it’s hypocritical, and hypocrisy cannot be seen to prosper.’
‘You are too idealistic.’
‘I have never understood how selfish people can get away with inhuman cruelty using that rubbish argument against the benevolent.’
‘Are you calling me selfish?’
‘No, I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, you are coming pretty bloody close to it.’
‘Listen Pauline, I think we shouldn’t tell the department about this Cornel. The poor bastard has already had a hard life, as far as I can see what good would we be doing, we’d just ruin his life.’
‘I think others have already noticed him. I fear that’s too late, maybe we would be doing him a favour if we try and integrate him in our group. I think he’s really talented and if we could groom him a bit like all the others he could make a real contribution.’
‘That sounds like gobbledegook double talk to me. How would we go about that?’
‘Well, first off we would have to find out what buttons to push. We have to be able to control him.’
‘There we go again into all that controlling talk. Is it him that needs controlling or do we need to control.I wonder about these cunning plans of ours and what the true motives are for them.’
‘Sometimes I think you think we are the criminals.’
‘To be honest, sometimes I do think we always seem to end up bolstering the grossest of prejudices in the propaganda war against our enemies. Why is it alway like that?’
‘It’s not for us to wonder why it is, but for us to do and die.’
‘Yeah, you act as if you are joking when you say stuff like that but behind all jokes is some truth.’
‘Okay, but we are not the bad guys.’
‘If we are not we shouldn’t use their methods and then act as if we are on some noble cause.
I don’t like it that I have to lie to everyone about just being a university student and that we can never question our orders. Anyway, I don’t think we are pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes people are not stupid, they know something is rotten around us.’
‘What is rotten?’
‘Trying to fool the public into thinking there are separation of powers amongst institutions and that there is such a thing as privacy rights. I mean the department is going to want to know everything about this Cornel guy right down to when he ties his shoe laces. I don’t want to live with that.’
‘You know Hugh, I haven’t got the time to debate the finer parts of the question of ethics with you, I have a job to do. You have just got to make up your mind whether you are with it or against.’
‘ I am against this course of action but I will not stand in your way. I presume you are going to try make the poor blighter think that you care for him when you don’t?’
‘I havn’t decided yet but that way is certainly on the cards. I just have to see if he has something he could offer or if he is a lost cause.’
‘What happens if he turns out to be proverbial lost sheep?’
‘In that case I have to judge if he could be used by our foes and become a danger, a fact I would have to report to the department I’m afraid.’
‘Yes, sure, do your duty like the church was used too by the conquistadors as an information accumulation to decide if the Incas should be destroyed. This is indecent information gathering designed to bring about our will to power and for no other purpose. Just so that you know you have no moral foundations for this.’
‘Yes, yes, I know you’ve made that plain enough but that is the way things are and that’s my job.’
‘Spoken like a true believer. Yes, hide behind your job but why doing a job should insulate us from moral condemnation I don’t know. Maybe because it’s said a lot on telly in all those vulgar soaps.’
‘Listen, are you going to help or not?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Try and find out more about him from Andy.’
‘But wouldn’t the department have all that from his school records?’
‘They ought, but as I said I think the analyst of his files have made a complete bollocks of it all.’
‘Our people would have singled him out by now, I think this is a storm in tea cup.’
‘I am going to push on with this, Hugh, whatever you say. I think there is something more to this one. He’s not going to be content with a life of eating, drinking and sleeping like the rest of the flock. No, he’s going to have demands and maybe the power to push through what he wants. There are no small enemies. I’ve just had a chat with him, he knows an abnormal amount about the way things are administered. He’s uncanny.’
‘Uncanny, so now he’s some kind of super normal individual. There is a lot of this wishful thinking in our line, we would want our cases to assume massive proportions, all the more glory for us when we bust them. There is a lot of egotistical motive behind blowing clients up bigger than they really are.’
‘You haven’t met him. He’s too bloody charismatic.’
‘Don’t you have any conscience? The department are going to arrange for his isolation if he can’t be groomed. If he is as good as you say, grooming looks like a pretty lost cause.You know all the spin that would be used to do the foundation work. You wouldn’t put a charismatic member of your family through all that would you? I often think we don’t use the goodly biblical suggestion ‘do unto others as you would be done by’.’
Pauline takes her leave smarting from the moral bashing administered to her unmercifully by her colleague. She was caught in a vicious circle of sorts. On the one hand she was one of those students Waugh used to refer to as ‘bright young things’, that is to say the cream of aspiring debutants in the golden days of Oxbridge’s dominance of high society’s good taste and manners. Her intellectual judgements mattered to her; in this sense she was definitely swayed by Hugh’s convincing passion of reasoning. But she could not feel for these reasoned conclusions. She had a strong aversion to foreigners thinking they knew better than the mythical pure Brit. In a nut shell she simply could not come to terms with a foreigner as an intellectual authority, this being so notwithstanding her insight into the attitudes extreme unreason. As reason is just one small part of a person’s mental landscape she deduced in other mental areas that Britain’s social values must be the right ones if they had managed to beget an Empire. As her rational faculty was not in operation she could not see by parity of argument that tyrants from Genghis Khan to Stalin could have used the same insane daydream about their own societies. Like many of her fellow country men she found herself even more strongly supportive of British prejudice when it was shown to be such by smart Alec aliens. To deny the shame of institutional prejudice she would proclaim the time tested strength of them instead. In the employment of this psychological defence mechanism she was by no means alone. The director of her department had often inculcated the danger of his operatives being divided by the ‘charming deceptions’ of the country’s enemies. He had implored his young charges not to listen but instead to have faith in the great British traditions. Operatives like Pauline’s boyfriend Hugh had not taken any notice of this advice and had branded it as Orwellian double talk. Hugh had secretly felt that truth and decency also applied to the personnel and operations of his team and that these should take precedence, not faith. Even Stalin could utter a truth and it would be the vicious logical mistake of argumentum ad hominum if he were to say that he did not like the man so everything that man said would have to be false by definition. Hugh could not stomach this just to be faithful. For this bright young man his director’s call to faith was simply asking that operatives believe everything on their side even if it was a pack of lies. Unity under any condition was not on the cards. If this was what was required to maintain solidarity with his brothers in arms, the price was too high. This was to bring on a real crisis of conscience in his later life.
Cornel was to face this kind of clinical disinterestedness more than once in his life. With half the population of most countries watching the other half it was not surprising that the ordinary citizen would often mistake institutional attempts to stamp utter predictable conformity onto the foreheads of the populace as genuine love and friendship. When Pauline eventually found her way back to Cornel the emotional traces of her moral mauling by Hugh lingered so much that it set off a vision in Cornel of an event yet to happen.

‘Annette, you have now got the opportunity we have been waiting for so long.’
‘Hey Ola, I am not that kind of field operative, I work with the state drugs unit that’s not the kind of line I am trained to do.’
‘But he’s taken to you in a way we have failed with the others like Ann J and Cecilia B. We can’t afford to miss this chance, we have only got three years before he can apply for Norwegian citizenship. I mean you must get bored with posing as a drug taker. You haven’t caught many foreign drug dealers have you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘ Nothing, but to get back to the point, the Norwegian government has made it so that our department gets three years to break up interracial relationships if we don’t like the man the Norwegian girl has married.’
‘That can’t be true can it, that would break international law.’
‘Well the three year rule isn’t framed like that of course but that’s the hidden motive.’
‘So that’s why you are posing as private detective. I wondered why someone in Kripos homicide should suddenly decide to do private detective work, I suppose you can use all police facilities with none of the legal responsibility?’
‘I don’t want to talk about me, I want to talk about this guy we are after and you. We want try to get him out of the home he is living in with Niger and into your flat, all you have to do is set things up so that it’s easy for him to do that. Once that’s done we can either claim the marriage was a sham or that it has broken down so that he does not have enough contact with the country.’
‘But he’s got a son.’
‘We think that once he’s out of the way we can groom her to turn against him. After all, we have more than the total cooperation of her family and friends. Once we have done that we engineer things so that she removes custody and hopefully visitation rights, and low and behold--the bastard is out.’
‘That seems like a pretty vulgar plan to me, it’s not likely to work. The idea contains other elements?’
‘I don’t want to go into it but we feel we may be able to groom Inger enough to blow some problem they have had into something bigger in her mind so that she can be seduced into making a criminal complaint. She wants back in the family and the only way she is going to get her hands on the inheritance is to show that she genuinely wants nothing more to do with him. We have even got one of our psychologists ready and waiting to give her some pop psycho babble she is so fond of. I mean every marriage must have it’s downsides, we have got more than enough material. Furthermore she will become insanely jealous of you and that is all the leverage we need. I’ve seen it work many times before. We want these kids to be brought up on Norwegian values and the state will turn a blind eye to what we do for that purpose. I mean we don’t want jungle ways ruling here do we?’
‘I don’t like that attitude.’
‘I was only having fun. I am not saying this is going to be easy, this guy’s a hard nut to crack but if the worst comes to worst nobody is going to believe him against us as wholesome honest Norwegians. The judges of the country are Norwegian remember, we’ll say he’s a loony and considering the problems he’s had, no one is going to listen to a word he says. We can’t lose.’
‘I am not so sure.’
‘Hey we’ve got people like that Italian nut Irving stalking him right now. Sooner or later he’s going to attempt to thump our greasy wop colleague and accuse him of stalking giving us the perfect excuse to shout clinical paranoia. As I said, the plan is multi-dimensional and has utter deniability built into it. If necessary we can keep up all our strategies forever and we’ve got the help of some in institutions all over Europe. It’s easy to sell this kind of thing to our European compatriots, they are bored.’
‘But we have got to get this stuff out in public.’
‘I’ve already arranged for that, I’ve spun some story to my friends in TV 2 Norway that he’s a threat to young girls and they bought it hook line and sinker.’
‘But what happens when no one can find a young girl who says anything bad?’
‘We will just make it up by using one of our young decoys we use to catch sex perverts. We don’t have any problem, we will also dress one our immigrant friends up to look like him and have him around Oslo making suggestive comments to women and then print that in the newspapers and put it on TV. That’s as far we need to go to get the media in on it. There are many ways to skin a cat. He can’t get legal aid to challenge the story in court and the bugger won’t have the money to contest it.’
‘But will the media put this story in the papers on TV?’
‘Hey, don’t be bloody naive, I am a cop and when this is over I’ve been promised a job in Kripos. Kripos has got the media in its pocket.’
‘So was it Kripos who decided you take this secret identity?’
‘No, that decision came from much higher than that. The powers that be wanted all children who have one parent who is Norwegian to stay in Norway if the parents split up whoever was right or wrong, the government wanted Norwegian parents to look like the victim. It is my job to conjure that illusion. It was the politicians who created me. A resignation from the police force then set up a private detective company representing Norwegian women who wanted to get rid of a foreign father and not allow him to see the child at all. After all Norwegian culture is superior to jungle bunnies’ way of life isn’t?’
‘Listen, I don’t like that kind of language.’
‘You really lack a sense of humour, don’t you.’
‘I don’t think people in our position should be seen to express those kinds of views.’
‘Hey, I am only voicing what everybody thinks anyway.’
‘Maybe, but I don’t want to hear it. So your present position allows you to do things an ordinary cop would be prosecuted for?’
‘Yes, I suppose it does.’
‘Like what?’
‘An alien father isn’t just going to go away from the country after we arrange a loss of his parental rights in court. It is my job to make things so difficult he will not want to come back.’
‘Like how?’
‘Well, a lot of them claim social benefits from the state and we work with social workers to make sure they cannot get their social entitlements by hook or by crook. The social workers deny them their social benefits, they’ve got one of two options.’
‘And they are?’
‘He can commit a crime to get money or get out the country. Either way we win. If he commits a crime to get money to live on we lock the bastard up and deport him.’
‘This must put the poor sods under a lot of mental stress.’
‘Sure does, and if they break down all the better, we lock them up and have them returned to their country for their own good. We liaise with a lot of sympathetic psychologists and psychiatrists who have also given us a lot of useful tips.’
‘Don’t people know all this is going on? I mean how do officials from one institution to the other co-operate, what holds them together?’
‘We are all blood my girl, no regular Norwegian wants to integrate with these primitives or eat their strange food or live their way of life. Since the Clinton era voicing these opinions became a no no. Now we’ve got a good president in power from Texas whose State has centuries of experience of handling these low lives. We at last can let go what we all feel without being called a racist.’
‘So actually you blame the immigrants for not integrating when it’s Norwegians who don’t want anything to do with them?’
‘Yea, great isn’t? You know as well as I do they are not equal to us and we will never accept that they are as smart and beautiful as our race. We need a return to the sort of attitude there used to be before all this civil rights stuff started sweeping the world in the fifties and sixties. Too many of our girls look up to these monkeys and actually think it’s cool to marry them. That’s got to stop. Our girls have to feel repelled by them like they once did before Human Rights Laws came in. Immigrants have to be taught to remember their place which is doing the dirty work and minding their manners to their white superiors. Yes, we need to get back to the good all days before Martin Luther King and all those monkeys in suits got us on the run.’
‘You can really rant on, can’t you, but what really do you want me to do with this Cornel guy?’
I want you to get him emotionally involved so that he trust you. You will then learn what his weaknesses and movements are and inform us of them.’
‘What will you do with all this information?’
‘Stop him doing what ever he likes to do.’
‘To what end, isn’t this a lot trouble for one small foreigner?’
‘This guy has made himself a pretty large enemy.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, between me and you he took away the girlfriend of the prime ministers youngest son and she took that rather personally.’
‘I see, so that’s why a big wig like you are involved.’
‘Yes, amongst other reasons, you see how far away from civilisation we’ve come when a low life can do that.’
‘I am not sure if we are to integrate him or sabotage his image or what.’
‘That’s a good question, I would prefer the latter but I think it better that we make it look like we tried to rehabilitate and failed. This way we can keep the bleeding hearts off our backs.’
‘You mean we are really going to neutralise him, right, and make it look like he rejected our efforts to help and we were left with no choice?’
‘That’s it, you are catching on.’
‘Yea, but we’re not allowed to do this kind of thing, I am a bit stunned we’ve suddenly got all this freedom.’
‘Times have changed, there is a strong feeling at the top that political developments in America gives us the green light to stop our tolerant attitude.’
‘But has anything objectively changed?’
‘Only a swop in who’s boss in America and the feeling is that the law gets in the way of catching criminals and terrorists.’
‘But if we don’t follow the law isn’t that tyranny?’
‘Yeah, but whose watching?’
‘Why have you not managed to neutralise this guy already?’
‘He’s always one step ahead. He’s well educated, a fitness fanatic and appears to have worked in something that gives him knowledge of our tactics.’
‘So he knows about us.’
‘That’s a distinct possibility, but no need to worry nobody is going to believe this George Orwell story of his anyway. No, I think our secret is safe but you have to tread warily, he sees things quickly.’
‘So in effect you want me to break up his marriage?’
‘Yes, and all his other friendships, we must break off any friends he has in Norway and for that matter Scandinavia.’
‘That could take a long time.’
‘Have to do whatever it takes.’
‘Do I have immunity from prosecution?’
‘Look, the ex prime minister has a stake in this, you have nothing to worry about.’
‘I could try to get him to marry me so that he will divorce Niger and then divorce him soon after. He will then think he gets rights to stay through me but then I’ll drop him like a stone.’
‘One word of warning, don’t get too close emotionally, you know what Don Juans these types are.’
‘Yes, that’s interesting you say that because from what I read in the magazines you try to give that image of yourself.’
‘Why do you say interesting?’
‘Only because if a foreigner has charm with girls he’s a Don Juan, but if someone like you has, you are regarded as a hero to the rest of the boys and think you’re James Bond.’
‘I have the feeling you are not entirely sympathetic.’
‘Not entirely. but I agree it’s a bit offensive to see foreigners driving around in big cars with loads of jewellery, that really gets my dad blazing mad.’
‘Speaking of your dad, how is his drinking problem going?’
‘How did you know about that?’
‘I have my sources.’
‘What else do you know?’
‘I know he used go round to your mother’s apartment after she divorced him and beat her up.’
‘Did she ever report him?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it and I think you should mind your own business.’
‘That is my business, one of my cop friends stopped him drink driving in that old battered Mercedes of his. He just bought that to show off, didn’t he, lots of alcoholics do that, don’t they, they have such massive inferiority problems.’
‘You’re just being a sadistic bastard now for no reason.’
‘Oh, there is a reason dear, I also know about that shady buying and selling of cars he does out of Holland and what exactly is a man his age doing going on those trips to the Far East?
‘What are trying to say?’
‘Only that you had better do a good job and remember whose side you are on and your father’s little side shows will stay in good hands.’
Le Chevalier stared long and hard at his reflection, which haunted the polished surface of his now infamous device and coat of arms bearing the white swan and black barge. Sir Kay had arranged that Le Chevalier’s night chamber be at the furthermost end of the west wing of the Castle of maidens. Le Chevalier did not complain of the cold dark dungeon like ambience of his rooms. The sandstone slabs of granite from which the fabric of the castle had been hewn had been hand carried to sailing vessels from the south of France (around Avignon) which incidentally had been used in the structure of the numerous monasteries that had sprung so ubiquitously over the whole of Provence. One small lantern torch burned aggressively by the solid oak door of his chambers passageway it eerily illuminated his quarters and projected many daunting fanciful spectres of light, which danced in a demonic spectacle akin to a theatre of the macabre.
‘What manner of man am I’, whispered the mighty Chevalier to himself. He looked starkly at his image in his shield. He had hoped to be reminded of himself but the more he looked the more he failed to recognise the man who peered back at him so nerve-rackingly. The snow-frosted picture he beheld brought no comfort or any reassurance. Nauseated, the invincible warrior turned sharply away and wept for a loss he could not say or frame in thought or feeling. There was a face for sure but who’s was it?
Le Chevalier wiped the tears streaming down his cheeks from the inner festering wounds that blinded his eyes to the identity of the dark shadow of the man in his shield. At that moment he reeled around at the sound of light tapping on the mighty all or nothing door that blocked out the world from his loneliness and confusion. Instinctively a hand faster than the thunderbolts of Zeus grasped a sword that hung so unobtrusively over his left shoulder as he warily approached the wrought iron door handle, which he turned with one jolting movement to pry it open. A cascade of light peppered and patterned his gold chain mail bodice as the torches and candlelight light of the hall lit up the twilight interior of his chambers. A gust of wind from a hall draught slightly dishevelled his immaculate chamber garments and there standing in the doorway was the beautiful innocent white rosy cheeks, full red lips and wide-open pupils of the lily maid.
The breeze from the hall draught caught the honey and pearl locks of her hair and blew them tantalisingly over her smooth unhurried forehead. The goddess stood her ground without flinching during the astonishingly formal greeting of Le Chevalier--as if he was speaking from some far off country--she received from the dweller in those forbidding chambers.
At that moment Sir Kay appeared with a pretty scullery maid and kitchen lad he was leading to kitchens at the farthest end of the west wing. He lashed out with his sharp unmerciful mocking tongue at the boy and pushed him humiliatingly to the ground. The girl pulled her hand to her mouth and stepped backwards as Sir Kay hopeful of demonstrating his power and authority to impress her prepared to aim a kick at his helpless prostrate victim. Le Chevalier politely saluted the Lily maid and gracefully pressed passed her before she was able to utter a word. He took two lightening steps in the direction of the skirmish and with one flash of his steel gloved hand caught Sir Kay’s foot before it aye struck its terrified cowering target.
Sir Kay let out a howl of pain and protest and tried to wrest his stricken limb from out the iron grip of the Le Chevalier. But to no avail. A moment later Le Chevalier let down Sir Kay’s crumpled leg from which the blood supply had been momentarily cut off. He then bent down gently on one knee and softly spoke a few words of comfort into the ear of the mortified kitchen boy. All of a sudden he rose slowly and menacingly advanced toward Sir Kay who instinctively reached for the dagger by his waist but at that moment caught the eye of Le Chevalier and thought better of it. Lady Elaine rushed over to stand in front of Kay before Chevalier could reach the seneschal. On witnessing the Lily maid’s intervention Le Chevalier retired to the passageway of his quarters leaving Kay to draw an audible breathe of relief and release. Muttering and murmuring to himself Sir Kay left the kitchen maid and boy and hastily returned to the great hall. The Lily maid turned and made her way over to Le Chevalier and pointedly asked him if he would not invite her inside to which he uttered a most apologetic decline but swiftly added that he was more than willing to take counsel with her in the passageway for a short time.
‘Well if I am under a time factor I will come right to the point’ she replied acidly. Why do you avoid my father’s request for you to join us for meat and wine Sir knight? Are you under some cruel unspeakable curse or have such a bagful of woes that you are driven down into such monkish devotion?’
‘My fair lady, I beg your pardon mercy and your forgiveness but I have many pressing matters of unwitnessable import such that I have been unable to honour my obligations as an invited guest in your splendid household’.
‘Do you never remove your hood, can we never look upon your features?
‘It is beyond my powers to accede to your request on this matter my lady’.
Le Chevalier was not a man to flesh out his utterances on the meagre whitened bones of his statements. Losing her well-bred decorum for the moment the Lily maid suddenly blurted out the question more than she was curious about.
‘Who are you really sir?’
‘I am as you see me to be, I could not be any other than what you see and have in front of you. ‘
‘But is your name merely Le Chevalier’?
‘It is my lady, that is the name I have chosen and it represents my own self over which I and I alone am total sovereign.’
‘Do you wear your kerchief for a lady?’
‘I have but one Lady. ’
‘ What is her name?’
‘Blind justice, madam’.
‘So you have no actual flesh and blood lady,’ enquired the Lily maid hesitantly and nervously.
‘ Indeed not fair maid but I must now beg of you my leave for I am in haste to bed as I am early on the lists for the jousts on the morrow.’
The Lily maid was far too enchanted to take any notice of this and pressed on with her cross examination.
‘Both my father and brother and the others marvel at your knightly skills and valour and even more that we have never heard of your name afore. What is your secret?
‘My strength comes from the purity of my dreams and my courage for fear of all who threaten peril to these hopes’.
‘That is a unique recipe my lord’ replied Elaine in a slightly sarcastic tone.
‘I only speak plainly my lady, nothing more’ interrupted Le Chevalier picking up on her mild irritation. ‘I am sworn to the quest and have little time enough for society tastes and scorn’.
‘Yes I see clear enough that you care not a jot for the disapproval of your peers but perhaps you should take us all a little more seriously’, cried the lily maid passionately. ‘After all it may help you on your quest whatever that may be- do you never miss the charm of feasts and the joys of music and dance?’
‘ I am flesh and blood like all who do my lady, and can revel as much in the gladness and ecstasies like the next man’.
‘Then come and join us,’ screamed Elaine triumphantly.
‘ Not until everyone has stepped out of the hell of evil and poverty and into heaven can I accept your kind offer my lady, I am a man who will only begin the joys and temptations of society after all are invited and accepted. When the last shall be first. Otherwise I shall suffer the fate as if a captain of a ship and will go down with it or until all hands on deck are safely on their lifeboats or ashore.’
‘Thou doth position thy arguments and principles as well as your lance, my lord. Is there anything thou canst fail to do? Thou doth dispose thyself as a man who requireth little support from the rest of us mortals. Do you not have weaknesses like us simple-folk?’
‘My lady, thou doth possess an infinitude of conclusions which will not bear thee up in times of concrete happenstance. Gramercy madam, as I must refrain from sharing mine uncertainties of existence with you at the present. Under the greenwood tree on some fine dewy morn perhaps. But I must now beg your pardon and to bed, my lady.’
Le Chevalier returns to his chamber and the Lily maid reluctantly retired to her father’s quarters to give and take council.
‘What news do you bring from our enigmatic guest my dear’?
‘Dearest lord, I am loathe to discuss my encounter with Le chevalier but I can advise you that scarce little came out of it’.
‘I hear he is from Benwick in France though the envoys which I dispatched some days ago have failed to locate his kith and kin. I do not like the formation of unknown future contingencies surrounding this Le Chevalier fellow and I would have you quickly tear the heart out of this mystery.’
‘I am powerless I fear to unbridle this riddle. The noble lord has a mind as sharp as his lances and a will strong as his mighty hand.’
‘Well he can’t just have materialized from the mist over the lake my dear. If he bleeds he is mortal and I believe that we will find out once and for all on the morrow when Lionel Bors and Hector will essay him all at once’.
‘Altogether, my lord,’ cried the Lily maid most perturbed.
‘Yes, isn’t it the stuff of folklore, it’s going to be a jolly massacre.’
‘My sweet lord I beg of you to stop this impending shame’
I’m afraid I canst do right little, my dear. The fortune of our French friend if that be what he is has run its glittering course; all three knights have sworn an oath to defend the glory of the fellowship of the round table on which our ethereal guest has already sewn seeds of doubt and mockery.
‘I cannot bear the ill will of this plot my lord whatever the final truth may arise he is as fine a knight as I and the court have cast their eyes upon and it would be a great sorrow for his gallant reign to come to an end in such a pitch black and unworthy manner’.
‘I’m afraid it is his very valor and might, which has caused a very welter of onlookers and spies to swell our ranks. Such a man as he who wouldst cause men to go a feared and wring their hands at the sight of an encirclement of ladies following in his train (though temptation ay fails to hold his mind captive) must well know he will never be able to spend a waking hour unchallenged or an unwaking one completely at peace’ Already his mighty deeds have spread many a rumor and legend likening him to Satan or that the source of his might doth emanate from those dark enchanted legions.
‘I did not just now witness any perturbance in his countenance Sir. This man is not afraid of death and I for one would not be shaken in my orb if we find out he be he that reaps grimly himself’. There is an ominous beggary in his eyes though golden like the buttercups of spring they be’
I am most occupied with the fear that you are thinking as a woman beset by the malady of infatuation which seemingly roams the interiors of thy fancy without limit. Thou art the most beautiful maiden in all Christendom; do not throw thyself and love away on the manifestation of a mere specter. As time goes by our band of brothers will locate some shameful news concerning this fellow to make you understand the wisdom of my present words.
‘I doubt not my lord, that the so-called ‘band of brothers’ will find much mud to sling on the grave of Le Chevalier but often even the truth told with bad intent does come full circle to haunt the teller of the tale whether or not he can scream the duty of one peering out from between the huge legs of the interest and divinity of ends of the band to which he has sworn allegiance. Most ladies of noble birth doth respond with silent scorn to such lowliness of purpose and doth redouble their faith and commitment as a matter of honor and taste.’
‘Honor cannot cram bread in the belly or put walls around the shoulders to wrap us in blanket against the cold dark nights of winter. Honor cannot cut any ice, it is a mere hold all of empty ambition’.
‘Love is always right justified unto itself and none other and can find lilies and sunshine in the killing frost as well as in any exotic location. The scepter, the mace, the imperial red-robe of gold and pearls, a crown of thorns, weigh less than a feather but few would deny their power to stir men’s hearts to sterner stuff my dear father’.
With that the Lily maid turns away ready to depart.
‘You are not merely flesh of my loins but my most exquisite sight and beloved for the most chaste and goodly woman that thou art. Go not against me for this evil magician who in time you will learn to despise. I did observe the way you did gasp during the tournament at the possibility of his impending demise. Is he worth a hearth, a home, your kith, your kin, your very bloodline for you my not have the twain.
‘I hast no idea of the worth of any man save he that forces a choice against my free will. That man whosoever he may be must right well meditate on the consequences if he o’er mastered any Lady of substance whether he be kith kin or even god’s watcher. I know naught at the moment concerning my passion for Le Chevalier as the heart has reasons that are well disguised even in the mind of whose breast that organ doth beat’.
‘Right well know this my child, I on the pain of death absolutely forbid any flesh of mine from cavorting with any suitor who does not have mine express blessing. From this time forward you will refrain from communion with the accursed gentlemen without the company of a lady in waiting or a goodly knight companion whom I shall appoint. Failure to honour thy father as the Scriptures rightly commandeth is the gravest sin against God’ and his holy works.’
‘May the Lord have mercy on your charges against me my father, for I see nowhere in the Holy Scriptures where our Lady of the Flowers or our sweet Lord doth sanction such brutality against the liberty of a grown child and the holy word of God doth warn expressly for a father not to provoke their child to rebellion by ill conceived and ill willed demands that run against conscience or choice of love. Le Chevalier didst come to our household in good faith in response to the herald we sent throughout the land. He has dispatched himself right nobly in trials by combat and hast o’er thrown all who didst come against him. It seems to me his mighty deeds should be a source of cause for rejoicing and honour rather than provoking the dark stirrings of ignoble passion and misguided roaming fancy which doth dart hither and thither in search of an unworthy rock on which to build its hideous palace of green envy and pitch black hatred. I was indeed dumbfounded when Le Chevalier sought isolation from the court jesting and our merry notes but now I full well doth comprehend his distaste and discretion. For what wood to the flames he would stir if the court would truly behold in the entirety of his nobility and goodliness. Like all lovers from times immemorial I demand the right to be falsely led and even to be enchanted by whom I please. If my true love didst turn out to be the very darkest of dark stars I care only for his goodliness and nobility to my person and I swear by our holy lady that I will not be made excuse or a staging post for any malevolent plots or conspiracies to banish Le Chevalier from the land as I have heard through mutterings and murmurings outward from Sir Kay’s unholy tribe of cut throats and motley collection of rag tag and bobtail self-loathers. Not all the scents of the holy land can stifle the fumes of stench from the rotting smouldering dung heap of loose talk from unconcerned paid agitators'. |
‘I do rightly comprehend how the wings of both angel and moth are crisply shrivelled by the heat of the shining welcome of the cosy candle. I know of no intrigue against le Chevalier but it goeth without saying that if he not abided by the will of the multitude the monarchs will find a way to break down his unearthly ambition. His time in Britain shall never go unwatched and the smallest trifles shall unto him become as strenuous as Atlas’ daily toil. Invisible hordes shall speak ill and otherwise thieve all they can lay their hands upon and his seasons will be spent in discontented perdition’.
‘For a man as le Chevalier I do wager such torture and malicious pestilence will be but the gentle rain streaming to earth from the varnished wings of the gilded butterfly. Leap he not ever to the common spirits nor fall in with the wanton fancies of the ranks of the savage multitudes. Yes father let us see if thou canst erect a nightmarish scarecrow to stricken the knight with all manner of ill forebodings. For such a one as he the love o’ justice doth traverse beyond our mortal clay and is like for only one who crosses from one bank to another from one shore to the opposite country. By these maddening well-hid displays perhaps all may play the merry tune on the flute of splendid entrapment laid but hark me well sometimes the butterfly doth gather up the catcher’.
‘Your highbrow opinion of the might of this rare spirit shall be straightway put to the test by Lionel, Bors and Hector de Maris three damn strong warriors and thy faith should make ready for a shaking of itself to its very foundation. What can one mere mortal do against the combined might of the fellowship of the round table? It doth rightly seem that insubstantial opinion can exist in and of itself with no corporal reality in the fancy and logic of him that mistakes his gossamer world of words and wishes for serious truth. A house built on sand shall crumble without trace during the mildest storm rushing ashore to thwartly strike its ill-rooted fabric’.
‘The deeds of Le chevalier to date have spoken for themselves my lord and thus present real characteristics on which the said fancy and opinion doth feed. You have raised your daughter much too gloriously for any guarantee of comfort of propagation of thy self same image for she insists to stand to the letter on your own teachings in faith, truth and justice from whence to wage a holy combat against the brightly suited woes of folly and of lust for silver and gold at the expense of bell book and candle. I owe my duty as a daughter to you my father but the great redeemer has written that my soul shall belong only to the owner of the temple in which it inheres. I can well witness the possibility of beggary in the essence of character of Le Chevalier as well as the wisest of worldly men. But make no mistake a fellowship can just as swiftly founder in the thistle and thorns of the barren conditions in a desert of self-contradiction in which the seeds of its destruction did spawn the very moment of its own birth pangs. Did ever an army wish truly for security, did ever a hospice wish for the total health of the world, did ever a the church pray for total annihilation of the terror of death or sin? For had each done so they would have exclaimed and trumpeted the extinction of their own office and means of sustenance of those officers therein. Each of these offices of the kingdom from its nature cannot welcome self sacrifice in the way it couldst if it becomes a person. Le Chevalier is a phantom from your own well-hidden nugget of goodness, which doth lie majestically in the depth of the dark side of the heart of the fellowship, and did thus spring from the moral chaos of the war of dreams and broken heels of high ideals. To attack this worthy soul will be but temporary respite whereas the moral disorder of this variety of putrid action will live everlasting. You go not to war against one errant knight but the whole fellowship personified. When you all thus set your spears at rest to cowardly smite this troublesome warrior from his saddle be sure to dismount and to tear off his helm and be ready to behold the uncanny resemblance of your own face.’
‘Thou doth skip merrily down a gaily-adorned primrose path my dear. The way of things has always placed expediency well ahead of all moral priorities. What benefits the masters’ doth bestow on the serf are always in relation to any burdens that might temper the power or morale of the enemy from less happier lands. If the o’mastering of the maid doth bolster up and draw together our opposition’s body polity we doth take full advantage by liberating their counterpart to place our nemesis in the glare of a shameful eye. When our adversaries are brought to their knees and yielded the fellowship will straightway find cause cast scorn once again, and such liberties will fall faster than shrivelling comets out of fashion; heralded as mere playthings for the mirth of little children in their playpens. There are the right noble truths of the free flowing quill to be sure and then the real characteristics of the kingdom that exist independent of these sentiments in the cunning and deceit of the corporal world of what is.’
‘Your cynicism doth cause a rising blood moon to drop like a heavy boulder out of a flaming crimson sky and sink into a foamy purple sea to violently boil and evaporate as in a dreamless sleep of he that lives without hope or belief in the worth and honour of his fellow man and neighbour. Le Chevalier didst ask me how the many acts of heroism doth saddle up and into battle aye even in the smallest hamlet if nobility is not one spirit of our nature. There is the worldly crust of man and then there is the infinite summer of his inner core. Thou canst not skip with pure delight in the summer of our sacred heart inasmuch as thy eye doth squint forlornly when thou doest stand in the shadow of your own dark side. In the meantime the one eyed blacksmith of the fellowship doth sweat and strain to forge the killing tools of war to strike and hold with hammer and tongs; doth at once cause all problems to take on the demeanour as of rivets to be beaten into submission so that fabrics may hold fast. What thou do so ably describe father are the temporal silky thin threads of man woven conventions and what is spun verily can be unpicked patiently knot by stubborn knot. You speak not of any eternal truths of the essence of God’s greatest work of creation
Thou art grown into woman of wilful sprit but thou wouldst be prudent to confine thy machinations to the privacy of these stout walls. These are unmerciful times my dear and though I doth not condone thy language nonetheless I right well believe thou hast every right of hold thine own court. The realm is ringed by angles Saxons and Jutes and the kingdom cannot be trusted to honour the values on which the fellowship was forged some might take thy free flowing tongue and wide ranging views to be well neigh close to insurrection. Red blood eyes watch behind every thicket and bush whilst some maketh their home in the very matter of castle walls and light up the starless pitch-black night with their rude sight. In the whirling dervish of concerns for the security of the realm the sprites and goblins have already delivered their ill begotten rumour and hearsay and I fear that thy champion mayest shortly face the many headed snarling red toothed beasts of war cloaked in invisibility on guard at the very gates and ends of the kingdom. I do urge ye then my child to encircle a moat around thee one dark and deep enough to keep thee wrapped in from the sad fate that waits for all who are carried along in the gushing wake of this rare though doomed spirit.
Le Chevalier shall right well master his own fate my lord and I doth wager that lizard tears for his future shall be well answered. Should thy suspect him a gold digger or purse snapper an ill-fated shame shall haunt thy waking moments. Though the dogs of war shall seize every means for his corporal life I doth fancy the knight shall barter his unparallel skills in combat or verse. Wit thee well he shall throw down the gauntlet to all those who would offer gold and sliver for opportunity to win their name and spurs in battle and paint portraits for all he encounter to grow to resemble. I doubt it not there will be many takers and he shall not fail to butterfly the stomachs of the many all comers. His banishment from economy and reputation shall not prevail unseen hands appear through a wizards sway to bear him up while wild and windy haired nymphs shall trip daintily for his muse. Unseen footprints dance where he shall lay his head on the silver backed river banks lit sparkling in the beams of the love sick moonlight where invisible steps in green corn meadows nightly tinkle fairy bells cheerily against his drooping sorrow. As stars cap his blue black locks he be just a dewdrop on wildflower as his good will light up the storm filled night as far a lantern can send its quick golden beams. Though partial society lack grace to give him his due blind posterity shall perforce to liken him unto a jewel in the mire.

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