The day after he had arrived at Darren's Kevin had written to Forbes giving him their address. He had had no word from him.
One day, however, when he had been at Darren's a few months, they received a scrawled, soiled, and dogeared postcard. It said: ARRIVING TUESDAY 3.30 MEET ME AT STATION BRING FOOD FORBES.
The following day Kevin went to the station at the appointed time. Presently a train pulled in and Forbes got off. He was wearing a weatherbeaten greatcoat with a belt of rope around the waist and had long straggly hair and a wild and unkempt beard. He hurried towards Kevin looking over his shoulder with a harried look.
"Quickly," he muttered, "the railroad bulls are after me."
A small white-haired elderly ticket collector stepped off the train and came after him.
"Oi," he cried, "where's your ticket?"
"I've thrown it away," said Forbes. "I don't need it any more."
"Well I haven't seen it," said the ticket collector. "Why were you locked in the toilet the whole journey?"
"I have a bowel disorder, you insensitive brute," said Forbes.
The ticket collector took hold of Forbes' arm. "You haven't paid, have you?"
"Don't manhandle me, you miserable minion," Forbes cried snatching his arm away. "I have shares in this railroad. Tell him who I am," he said to Kevin.
"Perhaps you're not familar with Mr. Hiram P. Lundquist, the eccentric billionaire," said Kevin. "He has shares in this railroad."
"Look at him," said Forbes of the ticket collector with a sneer. "He thinks he's got shares in this railroad, instead of being the sad little minion he is. Little does he realize that next year he's going to be replaced by a microchipped chimpanzee. They'll even take away his miserable little hole-punch, which is obviously some sort of bizarre phallic substitute. He'll be reduced to riding ride on ghost trains terrorizing children by asking for their tickets."
The station master was preparing to blow his whistle. The ticket collector shook his fist at Forbes and got back on the train saying, "Don't try that again."
"Railroad bulls," Forbes muttered, staring after him with a wild and unbalanced look in his eye. "Did you see the blood-lust in his eyes? They have no greater pleasure in life than beating hobos to death in the mail van. Stooges of The Combine one and all. Little do they know an army of primates with wires in their heads are waiting in the wings. The plans are being drawn up even as we speak. But no, no, I mustn't get started on that again. I must still be half-crazed. Where's the food?"
Kevin handed over the kebab and chips he had brought along. Forbes started to wolf them down frenziedly as though he hadn't eaten for three days.
"I haven't eaten for three days," he said as they walked along. "I stole some eggs from a henhouse last night, but they all turned out to have chicks in them. I tried to build a very small barbecue but my heart wasn't in it."
"Jesus Christ, Forbes, what's been happening to you?"
Forbes shook his head. "No questions now. I don't trust myself to talk about it yet. I must have food and cigarettes and a great deal of cannabis and alcohol first. And a bath. Please tell me you have plumbing up North nowadays. There was none where I've been."
"Where have you been?"
"In the lowest circle of hell."
"What's that round your neck?"
Forbes glanced down at the large flat stone engraved with strange symbols hanging on a string round his neck. "An amulet. It wards off germs and illness and microwave emanations from the government." He tore it off and flung it away.
He refused to answer any more questions. The next words he spoke were when he beheld Cerberus in Darren's yard.
"Oh God," he muttered. "I thought I had done with dogs."
"His name's Cerberus."
Forbes raised an eyebrow. "Who's the classical scholar?"
Kevin expected Forbes to curl his lip at the interior of Darren's house, but not a bit of it.
"Oh, to be back in the lap of luxury!" he exclaimed with apparent sincerity. "A washing machine! An oven! A radiator! A television! A Sonic the Hedgehog! I never thought I should be glad to see a Sonic the Hedgehog."
Forbes took a very long bath, washed and trimmed his hair, shaved off his beard, and borrowed some clothes from one of Darren's absent brothers, explaining that his last change of garments had been several months ago. He consumed large quantities of food and drank several cups of tea. Eventually he sat in Kevin's room calm and relaxed and poised and every inch his old self again. He refused to go downstairs as Darren's grandfather was there and neither had liked the looks of the other much in their one brief contact. Alone with Kevin, he at last told his story, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a supply of cannabis and a bottle of red wine close at hand with which he replenished himself from time to time as he unwound his narrative.
"To begin at the beginning," he said, "the atmosphere in my house became increasingly fraught in the days following your departure. The invasion of Darren and your cruel usage of Agnes, coming on top of l'affaire Jessup and the business of the answering machine message, amounted to a final straw. My parents didn't speak to me and, after a series of shouting matches in which each blamed the other for failing to do anything about me and for the flawed nurturing or genetic input which had resulted in my becoming the ravening monster and shiftless parasite I was, soon ceased to speak to each other. My father retreated to his study, where he remained shut up for days on end playing classical music very loudly. You may not realize it, but Dvorak's New World Symphony can constitute an expression of hostility when played at enough decibels to vibrate ornaments off shelves on the other side of the house.
"My mother consoled herself with some very aggressive cake-baking and weeping over pictures of me and Agnes in the shining promise of our youth.
"My grandmother kept her own counsel, sitting in a corner brooding and burping a lot.
"Agnes, picking up on the dark emotional vibrations in the house on some brute animal level, regressed even further back into her childhood than usual, and took to having screaming fits and curling up in her wardrobe sucking her thumb. One day, like some frightened beast burrowing for shelter, she seems to have made an attempt to crawl inside a large antique doll's house of hers, but succeeded only in getting her head wedged in the hallway. It took some time to extricate her and for several hours she had to wear the thing like some baroque piece of headgear, while the rest of us shouted words of encouragement and advice and poked morsels of food to her through a window. My grandmother kept urging us to smear her ears with butter, but this may have been some private fetish of her own.
"Agnes also spent hours on end painting portraits of you which made you look like a cross between John the Baptist and Donny Osmond. One of them was an impressionistic rendering that depicted you with huge, staring, lamplike eyes, which haunted me for some time and which even now makes me afraid to be in the same room as you.
"Eventually things came to a head and I was asked to leave the house. In point of fact, my father slipped a curt typewritten note under my door informing me that unless I removed myself under my own steam within the next seven days legal proceedings would be started to have me evicted my bailiffs.
"I myself had spent the best part of this period lying on my bed plunged in a state of deathly torpor and Slavic gloom, making no attempt to find gainful employment or alternative accomodation. The arrival of this ultimatum, however, spurred me to swift and decisive action. You may remember that in Amsterdam I expressed an inclination to become a tramp. I now purposed to put this resolve into effect immediately. The ultimately trajectory of my life tended in that direction, I felt, and I saw no point in postponing the inevitable any longer. Mainstream society had failed me, moreover, had come to disgust me, and I now determined that henceforth I would live beyond its fringes. Accordingly, the next morning I donned a stout overcoat and, bidding a fond farewell to no-one, set forth for the nearest urban centre, there to become a down and out and mendicant.
"I should say that upper-middle-class tramps are no novelty down our way. The hedgerows fairly teem with Oxford undergrads who blew a fuse before their finals and ex-Lloyd's names fallen on hard times. 'I'm ten pence short of a bottle of Mouton Rothschild '61, guvnor,' is a common cry in many a high street. But I was never really cut out to be a beggar. I was too sulky and ill-mannered for one thing. Whenever people failed to cough up, I would ask them what foul thing they intended to fritter their money away on instead. Some more hideously tasteless clothes, perhaps, or some ghastly autoerotic sex toy? A couple of parting mutters of, 'I hope you die then,' when they still weren't forthcoming, and the Plod would inevitably be called. I spent several nights in the cells, which, of course, was preferable to spending them on the streets.
"At first I slept on the traditional park benches or in shop doorways, but after being tormented by a group of liquored-up young farmers one night, I took to spending the hours of darkness lying on top of a marble sepulchre in the graveyard. I would sometimes startle glue-sniffers or courting youngsters by suddenly sitting up with my arms held out before me in the manner of Bela Lugosi while making unearthly moaning noises. In the mornings I would steal the fresher flowers from the graves and then attempt to sell them to people in the street in the guise of lucky buttonholes, a shawl draped round my shoulders and a cry of 'Ah, God bless you sir, it's the fine man you are,' on my lips.
"A couple of times I got in vagrants' hostels for the night, but I found the house rules irksomely restricting. Drink was frowned upon. Passing out with drink with a lighted cigarette in your hand, setting fire to the bed, then waking up in the conflagration and attempting to piss it out was a definite faux pas, as I found to my cost.
"One night I contrived to secrete myself in a department store after closing time and slept in a luxury bed, after first amusing myself by arranging all the mannequins in various positions culled from the more esoteric passages of the Kama Sutra. I took one of them to bed with me attired in a negligee and a fur coat. I myself wore nothing but a dab of Chanel No.5. She was a pleasing bedfellow, although I was unable to consummate the relationship. I had a teasmade alarm clock by my bedside to wake me up in good time to effect my escape, although an early arriving minion almost caught me while I was making my toilet in the bathroom fittings department. I took with me a good dinner-jacket, and that night dined excellently in a four-star restaurant. I believe the unctuousness of the service and the standard of the cuisine were improved immeasurably by the cryptic entries I jotted into a notebook from time to time throughout the meal. Shortly after the crowning snifter and before the arrival of the reckoning, I insisted on passing backstage to compliment the chef personally on the excellence of his fare. Once in the kitchen, it was for me mere childsplay to ghost out through a side door and away into the night, leaving behind me only a cry of 'Who was that mysterious tuxedoed stranger?'
"At other times food was a problem. On a couple of occasions I was reduced to entering cafes, seizing a plate of food from the nearest patron, and haring away before anyone could stop me, eating as I ran. Once I wandered into Woolworth's with my fly undone, rolling my eyes and laughing alarmingly, scratching at invisible ticks, and muttering loudly about being persecuted by Joan Bakewell, and pigged out at the Pick and Mix counter for fully half an hour before anyone had the courage to stop me.
"One week I hit a very lean patch. No-one would give me money no matter how much I insulted them, my giro had been spent and another was not due for days, and I had lacked the nerve to raid a cafe ever since a horrific incident in which a fat cripple whose fishcake I had whipped brought me down with a well-aimed crutch and sat on me until the police arrived. Half-deranged after two days virtually without food, I came to the conclusion that my inevitable degradation must proceed to its next appointed step, and that I must swallow my pride and sell my body. I would allow myself to become a gigolo, the pampered pet and paid-for love-toy of some lonely old woman.
"The first step was to meet a lonely old woman. None of the town's nightspots featured a grab-a-granny night, and even if they had done I would probably not have been able to gain admittance in my current shabby state. So I took to hanging round outside Bingo Halls waiting for old ladies to emerge, trying to look available, eyeing them brazenly with a knowing smirk and with my thumbs hooked into the waistband of my trousers. I suppose by this point my mental processes were somewhat clouded by lack of food. I was aware that women who keep gigolos are generally rich as well as old, but I nursed the hope that there'd be at least one who'd like to squander her Bingo winnings on some prime British beef. But nothing was biting. The old ladies seemed more alarmed than allured by my appearance. The thought came to me that perhaps by this stage of my degradation I was no longer the sex-god I once was. A quick glance at my reflection in a shop window reassured me on this point. I was still lovely. A bit frayed around the edges, perhaps, but some women like it rough.
"I decided to try a more direct approach. I took to approaching ageing women in the street, asking for cigarettes and then looking deep into their eyes while they lit them for me, or else asking for directions to town landmarks and then admitting that this was just a ploy to enable me to talk to them. Usually this resulted in threats of the police being called unless I went away, but at last I struck paydirt. A small grey-haired woman in her late fifties asked me, stammering and blushing and barely able to meet my eye, if I was living rough. When I replied in the affirmative, she said I looked as though I'd scarcely eaten in three days. When I admitted that this was so, she asked me if I would like to come back to her place to have something hot.
"'The hotter the better,' I said, doing my knowing smirk.
"She took me back to her house and gave me food, smiling at me nervously as I watched her like a sexual panther eyeing up his prey. When I had finished eating I rose and, pricing her up from a rough estimate of her worldly wealth as represented by the house and its contents, put my hands on my hips and said, 'I go all the way for ten pounds.'
"'All the way where?' she asked, feigning innocent confusion, the minx.
"'I think you know where,' I said.
"To my surprise she suddenly broke the spell by announcing that Jesus was with me even in my darkest hour, handed me a bundle of devotional literature and pamphlets proselytizing for some obscure evangelical sect, and started to loudly and fervently sing hymns, accompanying herself on an upright piano, and encouraging me to join in. I was somewhat puzzled by this turn of events. Was it her idea of foreplay? Was I expected to jump on her at the climax of some ecstatic religious frenzy? Then just as I was nerving myself to do so, her husband came home, smiled at me warmly, and started to sing too. I decided the scene was getting too freaky and fled.
"Two days later, however, malnutrition again undermined my moral sensibilities and prostitution once more began to look attractive. Moreover, I deliriously decided that I had again been guilty of trying to forestall my inevitable descent to the depths, and that this time I might as well go the whole hog and trade my favours to members of my own sex. I started loitering inside the public toilets in the high street, again parading my come-hither look. My second stint as a trollop was no more successful than my first. The town seemed not to have a thriving same-sexual community. For several hours my presence produced no other results than a sudden epidemic of water-retention amongst the facility's patrons.
"At last a timid clerkly-looking man approached me and asked me to beat him up. We adjourned to a cubicle and I tried my best to oblige. But by that point I was so weak with hunger all I could manage was a rather ineffectual slap on the head, after which I promptly collapsed from the exertion. While he was helping me to my feet I inadvertantly trod on his corns and apologized profusely when he yelped. He explained that I wasn't really what he was looking for and left. I offered to verbally abuse him but he said he got enough of that at home.
"Undeterred, I once more took up my stance by the urinals, eyeing the incomers smilingly and, to make my position crystal clear, bantering with those brave enough to linger, regaling them with subtle innuendo reminiscent of the Olivier 'snails and oysters' speech that was expunged from the original version of Spartacus. 'My, you're a big lad,' and 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,' were among my better lines.
"Eventually a lorry driver sauntered smilingly over to me and asked if I would like to come and see the inside of his cab. I agreed, but inwardly wondered what I was letting myself in for and if I could really go through with this. I would have been loath to touch the least part of him even whilst wearing marigolds, and could not hope I would be so lucky as to be paid for his being allowed to touch me. I decided that by far the happiest plan would be to get the money up front and do a runner. When I broached the subject of payment, however, he merely laughed. 'You must be kidding,' he said, rather hurtfully. By that point I think I would have blown him for a Yorkie bar, but he didn't even have one of those, so I left.
"I was able to eat that day thanks to the intervention of a merciful providence, which caused an old lady to collapse in the street in front of me soon after my leaving the urinals. A nearby hotdog vendor left his stall and rushed over to attend to her. While he and a concerned crowd were fussing over her, I managed to stuff my pockets with enough sausages and bread to last for several days, and also sold a couple of hotdogs and pocketed the money. Two days later I obtained my giro and the crisis was over. That same day while I was sitting in a pub filling myself with food and whisky a strange man approached me and asked if I would like to come home with him and earn some money. 'Certainly not,' I replied indignantly. 'What sort of boy do you take me for?' The lesson there, Kevin, is the relativity of morals, in case you are too dull to see it.
"I went back to straight begging and occasional food pilfering. Things continued pretty much as before. Then one day whilst on the mooch I chanced to run across an old acquaintance of mine by the name of Simon Atkinson-Gilchrist, with whom I had been on terms of mutual masturbation at school. He was sitting on the pavement in front of Debenhams attempting to play Stairway to Heaven on a tin whistle in the company of a gnarled and mangy dog with fewer limbs than the average. He had a ring through his nose, his hair resembled a blighted aspidistra, and he now preferred to be known by the name of Timberwolf for no reason that was ever adequately explained to me, although it might be argued that a desire to avoid being called Simon Atkinson-Gilchrist is reason enough. He explained that he was part of a nomadic community currently encamped on a patch of common ground just outside the town limits, and asked me if I would like to join them. As pickings had been scant again recently and my mausoleum home had lately been menaced by juvenile vampire hunters, I accepted.
"You may imagine that the worst thing about being a New Age Traveller is never washing and having to listen to The Levellers all the time, but I can assure you that that is merely scratching the surface of the horror. The food, the dogs, the feral children, the crawling under aged Sherpa vans attempting to repair exhaust pipes with bits of string, the loose-thinking hippy talk, the homemade jewellery and the poor dress sense, the cramped and furtive couplings with girls with combat boots and pierced labias, the campfire singing and the ghastly community spirit - all these and other horrors I shall gloss over, and concentrate instead on the high points of my life on the road. I shall not even speak of the hazards of navigating slit-trench latrines in the dark.
"For me the best part of the experience was the actual travelling from place to place. As Timberwolf's vehicle was the most prone to breaking down, he was usually given the honour of leading the procession. I was his navigator, and thus the navigator for the entire convoy of some twenty-two vehicles. I am afraid the sense of power went rather to my head. By nightfall of any day of travel I was expected to get us to some agreed-upon destination, some meadow or sylvan glade suitable for our camping in, a feat which I usually accomplished - although once, due to a combination of inadequate map-reading, a particularly tricky one-way system, and Timberwolf's exhaust pipe falling off, we all ended up spending the night in an Ikea carpark on the edge of a very horrible Newtown - but I was given a lot of leeway as to how and when we got to where we were going. The established practice was to stick to arterial roads as much as possible, but I decided it would be more pleasant to wend our way through some of the more scenic and less-travelled byways of the English countryside. To be specific, I took great delight in arranging things so that we stopped for our midday rest halt and lunch break right in the middle of various picturesque and well-kept villages where certain dreadful friends of my mother's lived and in which I had had a horrible time as a child. The simple villagefolk seemed to regard us as some form of divine retribution or natural disaster as we descended on them like locusts, filling tiny high streets and poky squares with our gaudily-painted vehicles, sprawling over village greens, crowding en masse into miniature tea parlours and craft shops. I should hasten to say that my band of poor lost boys and girls were, by and large, the most gentle souls imaginable, hence their disenfranchisement in this cruel and horrid England, and took pains to avoid littering and wanton destruction, but their looks were agin them. If I had seen us coming I would have thought we were a Manson family outing. I have a particularly fond memory of a hulking giant of a lad with green hair, silver spikes through his eyebrows, and a naked chest full of pagan tattoos, politely asking a small white-haired old lady for two dozen Vegan cream teas and a slice of carrot cake, then enquiring if she would like to take a small consignment of homemade ankh necklaces and handcarved fertility totems in part payment.
"Under my direction we roamed rural Oxfordshire like Mongol hordes, terrorizing all who lay in our path. I even invaded my own village, and had the entire convoy drive up Colonel Massingham's driveway and circle his house three times. We sinisterly circled one small village for nearly half an hour, like Sioux on the warpath, merely because I couldn't find the bloody turn-off to get into it. When we eventually entered, the streets were deserted, every shop was boarded up, and a small sacrificial offering of sandwiches and ginger pop had been left for us on the village green, along with a note saying, 'Take these. It is all we have. Please leave us in peace.'
"I specialized in circling to no good purpose, actually. Once when Timberwolf was asleep in the back of the van and had allowed me to drive, I led us onto a very big ring road and missed the turn-off we wanted not once but twice. On our third revolution, I managed to escape, only to find when I had done so that I had made a mistake and we were now travelling back the way we had come. Attempting to get us back onto the right path, I took what I fondly hoped might be a short-cut along an interesting-looking dirt track that led off the road into a forest. I passed a sign saying 'Private road, no through route,' but treated this with a magnificent disdain. We meandered through the forest for several miles. Then, so suddenly as to give no room for pause, the forest ended and I found I was leading the convoy across an extremely well-tended lawn at the back of a stately home, where, as it chanced, a camera crew was filming what looked to be a scene from a 19th Century novel. I passed very close by a woman in a long silk dress and a moustachioed hussar kneeling before her, both of whom looked very surprised at our arrival on the scene. I suppose the shot was ruined, but if by any chance it slips past the editors it should rank as one of the great cinematic anachronisms.
"When we got to the main gate we found our way was barred, so we turned round and went back again. This time a man with a megaphone passed very close to my offside wing mirror, jumping up and down and tearing his hair. Somewhere in the forest I took a wrong turning, and after jolting down an extremely narrow, twisty and rutted track for some time we came to a dead end at a small stagnant pond, and the whole twenty-odd of us were forced to reverse back up it for about a mile. One vehicle missed a turning, fell into a bog, and had to be abandoned. I myself had lost my exhaust pipe, but wasn't sure where; I rather fancied it might have been back on the lawn somewhere.
"After this incident I was relieved of my duties as pathfinder.
"We lived brave and free in the wilds of Oxfordshire and neighbouring territories. Various police forces were constantly booting us from county to county. Once we were escorted to the border of one county only to see ahead of us a posse of the next county's police forbidding us entrance. The two police forces argued it out between them for some time. Meanwhile we set up camp in the car park of a Little Chef right on the boundary and claimed it as ours in perpetuity. I believe we proclaimed it the new republic of Freedonia or some such. Eventually we were granted passage straight through the second county and right out the other side into Herefordshire, rather in the way that Lenin was conveyed across Germany to Russia in a sealed train; I gathered the Chief Constable of this county didn't care for Herefordshire much and hoped we would undermine them.
"At one point we amalgamated with a group of tree-dwellers who were opposing a bypass. Here, as at the vagrants' hostel, my pyromaniac tendencies when inebriated and sleepy caused me to be censured. An accident involving an oil lantern and a bottle of vodka almost cost the life of a particularly old and beautiful oak tree. On a similar subject, I may say that waking up in the middle of the night in a sleeping bag lashed to the limb of a giant tree with no memory of how you came to be there is highly unnerving. I suffered a brief but powerful terror that I had been shanghaied somehow and lashed to a mast. Taking a piss in that condition is no joke either. Extricating yourself from the bag is no picnic; urinating whilst balancing drunkenly on the branch is not for the faint-hearted; perhaps the trickiest part of the operation is apologizing to those lashed to branches below you who have just woken up with a wet head.
"Before too long our treetop den was demolished by council workmen accompanied by the police and other armed thugs. There were sporadic violent clashes throughout the day and several of our number were arrested. I was urged to chain myself to a tree, but what with all the bulldozers and chainsaws around it didn't seem very sensible. I managed to garner some martial glory for myself by sneaking round behind enemy lines and stealing a couple of hardhats and a packet of sandwiches and a thermos flask of coffee some workmen had left unattended, but this was largely inadvertant, as I had been going for a dump but got lost. Later on someone poured some magic mushroom juice into the thermos and sneaked back and replaced it, with what results I never found out. The hope was expressed that the bastards would see the trees screaming at least. Someone claimed to have seen one of them weeping as he wielded his chainsaw, but I took this cum grano salis. I ate the sandwiches myself, hiding in the bush where I spent most of the battle.
"Not long after this our motorized tribe started to break up into smaller parts. One group wanted to go somewhere to celebrate the coming Equinox, while another intended to head for a late-flowering music festival. A couple of people surprised me by announcing they were returning to university for the autumn term, and someone else revealed he was a journalist in disguise. I had wondered why he kept persistently littering and urging us to trash the villages we passed through. His photographer had been converted to our way of life, however, and decided to stick around.
"A couple of people had decided to join a commune they had heard about in a house in Wales. Yearning for a proper roof over my head and floor beneath my feet once more, I went with them.
"The commune was a ramshackle farmhouse isolated in the middle of desolate moors. I never discovered if we had title to it or were squatting. There were some dozen or so members apart from me, many of whom, it quickly became obvious, were several sandwiches short of a full deck. Immediately upon my arrival a very thin girl with an axe-murderer's smile and chemically brightened eyes placed the amulet and then her arms around my neck and asked what star-sign I was. 'Herpes,' I responded wittily, possibly inspired by the crusty scabs around her mouth, and coldly detached her from me. I believe I was immediately marked down as a source of negative vibrations and possible agent of Big Brother and The Combine.
"The prevailing philosophy of the inhabitants was one of agrarian self-sufficiency, vegetarian mode, laced with a certain bent towards druidical lore and other New Age mumbo-jumbo, and a belief in the spiritual benefits of the heavy use of cannabis and psychedelics. There was a large kitchen garden, half a field of potatoes and several fruit trees, with the produce of which we managed to keep ourselves comfortably below starvation level, and a greenhouse full of skunk plants, partly for our own consumption and partly to barter for what we could not produce ourselves. There was electricity in the house provided by a petrol generator, but, apart from a kettle and a toaster, nothing in the way of household appliances and, as I may have mentioned, no plumbing. Water was drawn up from a well. It could be heated on a Primus stove for washing purposes, although the thin girl informed me that if I didn't wash for a while my body would eventually start to clean itself via the production of natural oils.
"We were required to shit on the rhubarb beds so as to avoid wasting natural resources.
"Free love was not merely encouraged but compulsory, and a shag rota was drawn up which had to be strictly adhered to, with no shirking allowed on grounds of personal taste or physical revulsion. Several times I offered to work an extra shift tending the vegetable patch if someone else would service the thin girl for me, but to no avail.
"We were officially a democratic community but in effect all decisions were made by one Elric, a Manson-style charismatic who ruled over us like a feudal chieftain. His real name, I learned, was Eric, a fact which you may be sure I lost no opportunity of pointing out. Elric or Eric was a latter-day Luddite and was writing a book explaining his philosophy and advocating the immediate overthrow of the tyranny of the machine and a return to a simpler way of life. I came to find his arguments persuasive. Indeed, under the influence of drugs, partial malnutrition, and Elric's hypnotic personality, I soon became an enthusiastic convert.
"Drugged to my eyeballs and lying on my bed brooding over all that had happened to me and all that was happening to England, I not only embraced Elric's theories but added to them, expanded on them, made them my own. I came to believe that it was the microchip that had robbed me of my place in the world. And indeed, is it not so? Consider, Kevin. The main brunt of the baneful effects of technology is borne not by the lower orders but by the likes of you and me. The working class will will always learn to adapt themselves to new contingencies. Look at Darren and his clan. An admirably resourceful family. They will always survive. This is what Britain needs, a return to cottage industry. No, the main effect of the information revolution has been to dispossess middle-class misfits like ourselves. We are too soft to do manual work, too dreamy and lazy to learn any real skills, too proud to wait on other men at table with the necessary servility, we lack the drive to succeed at business or crime. Fifty years ago, thirty years ago, we might have been humble clerks, living out our little lives pigeon-holed in tiny cubicles, poring over ink-stained ledgers and taking a quiet demented pride in the legibility of our handwriting and the accuracy of our addition. Oh, we would still have nurtured our pathetic dreams of escape from the rut, but by and large we would have been content. But the computer has evicted us from our warm and cosy office-wombs and turned us out into the cold and dirty streets.
"And this is only the beginning. In ten or fifteen years time when Mr. Gates gets his millennium, the only people who will actually be needed to run the world will be a few scientists and medics and the computer programmers. All office work will be done by computers. Shopping will be largely automated. In the short-term a handful of morons will be needed to sweep the streets and shine the computer-nerds' shoes and perform the kind of tasks we did at the camp, until the robots and the microchipped chimpanzees are perfected. Everyone else will be, literally, redundant. Apart from entertainers. Someone will be needed to supply the pablum the fibre-optics cables will spew into the homes of our leisure-enhanced masses twentyfour hours a day. All that will remain of the middle class will be a nucleus of artists, performers, and media types, with a tiny elite of technocrats above and a huge redundant underclass below. We will become a nation of media hacks. You should have stayed with your media studies course, Kevin. That was the sin for which you were thrown out of the garden, dropping out of that. You rebelled against one of the great gods of our age. Entertainment, that will be the only means to pay your way. Personally I intend to learn to juggle, or to give effective head.
"Actually, I have to admit you had the right idea in latching onto Ingrid. Househusbands are quite the coming thing. Women seem better able to fit into the modern workplace than men. They would probably claim they are more intelligent than us. I think it more likely that it is simply that their broader arses are better adapted to sitting in front of a VDU screen all day. An interesting thought. I may work it up into a monograph. Anyway, it seems at least possible that the 21st Century will belong to women. What a ghastly prospect.
"To continue my prognosticating: what is to become of those who can't programme computers or make television programmes or juggle or play guitar or design graphics? What is to become of the underclass? I have given this matter a lot of thought. They are seen as a problem now. Soon there will be a lot more of them. What is to be done about it?
The only solution that I can see, at least until we are able to genetically
engineer desirable citizens, is to
set aside an enclave for them. Make over an unused parcel of land to the
travellers and the tramps, the joyriders and the drug-addicts,
and let them have their own kingdom of the lost. Transport them out to the
Falklands, perhaps. They do not have the skills to flourish in
our society; why should they accept its values? Let them do their own thing and
stay out of the successful organisms' hair. I realize my modest proposal is a little ahead
of its time, but I am sure that with the right PR and once the savings in
social security payments are pointed out it will come to grow on people.
"But to resume my narrative. I lay on my bed in a fever, head filled with all these things. I burned with the desire to warn England of what was coming. I yearned to tell all the readers of the Daily Mail and Express, so intolerant of the feckless dole-ites now, that within ten years or so half of them would be down the Job Club with the miners, superseded by a sliver of silicon and a wisp of fibre-optics.
"Elric and his followers frustrated me. They talked and talked about the horrors of modern society but did nothing about it. We needed action. We needed a crusade.
"Then one day I had a psychotic breakdown of a magnitude to make my freak-out in Amsterdam look like a churchwarden getting tipsy off elderberry wine. I had been lying on my bed all day taking enough acid to keep the Vietnam War going for six months. All of a sudden it struck me: I was the one. I was the one who would save England. I would rid England of the scourge of computers and, while I was at it, satellite dishes, video games, personal stereos, out of town shopping centres, Nike trainers, McDonald's, Coca-cola, TV adverts for Nike trainers, McDonald's, and Coca-cola, and all other malign influences. I would turn the clock back so that things were nice like they used to be. I had been divinely appointed for this task. With a growing excitement, I rushed downstairs to where the others were gathered in the kitchen to share the news with them. The revelation must not be kept to myself. I must tell them who I was. Then it occurred to me: who was I? For I was not merely myself. That much was clear. I had been on this earth before, under a different name. Then, as now, I had led a struggle against tyranny, tried to lead men towards the light, and then too people had rallied to me. I was not, perhaps, Jesus, although that thought naturally occurred to me. Who was I, then? Ned Ludd? Captain Swing? St. George, perhaps? Winston Churchill, even? And suddenly it came to me: I was King Arthur himself! Risen from his long slumber to save England from her peril. Perhaps I was influenced in my thinking by the fact that the centrepiece of the kitchen was a big round table round which all the others were sitting. I suppose in a different frame of mind I might have thought I was Dorothy Parker.
"There was considerable consternation in the kitchen when I announced that I was not, as I had previously claimed, Forbes Grenville, indigent busboy manque, but Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, risen from his long slumber to save England from her peril. Actually consternation is the wrong word. Apathy would be a better one. A prophet is never recognized in his own country, and my cohabitors, slumped inanimately around the table skunked out of their heads and rather unwell, seemed sceptical of my claim to say the least. About the only response to my announcement was the words, 'Well make some fucking toast now you're up.' This angered me. 'I have not come to bring you toast,' I cried, 'I have come to bring you a sword!' This style of oratory came naturally to me; I began to think perhaps I was Jesus after all, or Charlton Heston at least. And if I was Arthur son of Uther, where was my fucking sword? All I could see was a butterknife embedded in a jar of Vegan marmalade. I brandished that for a bit but the effect was altogether poxy. Enraged by their indifference, I lifted up the toaster above my head and ceremoniously smashed it on the floor, rather as Jesus might have done it if he'd had to drive toaster salesmen out of the temple. When they asked me why I'd done that, I replied that I was freeing them from the slavery of technology. They riposted, somewhat prosaically, that what I had in fact done was break the fucking toaster. I explained that it was a tool of evil. Elric then tried to explain to me that technology was not evil in itself, and that only the uses to which it was put could be evil. Someone else asked him how a pop-up toaster could be used for evil and, feeling his authority threatened, he was sidetracked into a digression on things the secret police in Argentina did to dissidents using toasters, which, frankly, he made up. Then the thin girl told me that for breaking the toaster I would be awarded two demerit points on the personal behaviour chart - I forgot to tell you about this - and in consequence would have to work two extra shifts in the potato field or sleep with her that night. I was unmoved by their words and had to be forcibly restrained from smashing the tape player and then from taking a sledgehammer to Elric's van. It was suggested that I might benefit from a nice lie down. This was encouraged by my forcible incarceration in my room.
"I did not lie down, however. I stood upright in my room staring out an electric lightbulb. My feeling of incipient divinity was growing. After a time I came to feel I was connected to every object and living being in the house and immediate vicinity. I came to feel I could feel everyone moving, hear everyone talking, feel their hearts beating, feel the trees outside growing, feel the electric currents running through the circuits of the house. After a time I came to feel that I was causing all these things to happen and that if I ceased to concentrate on them they would stop. It became quite wearying after a while, being responsible for everyone's heartbeat and the trees and keeping the eleccy going and thinking of everything all at once. A couple of my housemates came in to try to talk to me. I irritably expressed the wish that they would stop moving around so much. Didn't they realize how much it was taking out of me to have to work all their muscles and nerves and so on? I had a sudden overwhelming urge to escape from the responsibilities of omnipotence. So, naturally, I jumped out of the window.
"It wasn't so much that I was suffering from the delusion that I could fly, more a belief that the force of gravity could be bent to my will. Fortunately, I didn't have far to fall, and there was a soft landing beneath me, namely the rhubarb beds with their covering of human faeces. Disgusted, I ran to a muddy creek some distance away and rolled around in it in an attempt to cleanse myself. Eventually my housemates found me and dragged me back. They forced a great deal of alcohol on me to cut the acid and recited soothing passages from Kahlil Gibran to me. Presently I passed out.
"I came to, calm and sober, in my own bed at dawn the next day. The thin girl was snoring next to me, a contented smile on her scabrous face. A small flea-ridden dog lay between us which she was embracing in a manner that was not strictly illegal but not entirely natural. There was a terrible smell in the bed, which turned out to emanate from me. Moreover, I believed I felt an ominous crawling sensation in the vicinity of my groin. It was then that I had my moment of clarity.
"I stumbled forth from the bed and found a looking-glass. I was appalled by what I saw. I was coarse and disgusting and unlovely in appearance. I looked as though I had spent the last seven years in a Siberian labour camp and been voted the worst-groomed man each year. I needed a long hot bath. I needed to burn my clothes and buy new ones. I needed to raid a well-stocked refrigerator and sit in front of a calming television for six straight hours. I needed the comforts of modern civilization.
"I penned a note saying that I had gone for a bath and might be gone some time and that the rest of them should consider doing likewise at some point in their lives, put on my coat, and left without a backward glance.
"It took me two days wandering directionlessly about the moors to reach the village from where I sent you the postcard. The bag of carrots I had taken with me ran out after the first day. It took me another two days on the road, living off roots and berries and wild milkbottles, to reach an outpost of civilization with a railway station. The rest you know. I rode the rails up here, dodging railroad bulls and singing Woody Guthrie songs to myself, and that is where you came in.
"And that is that. My days on the margins are over, and I am never going back. Mainstream society may have its flaws, but it is still the only one able to guarantee clean clothes and bearable armpits. I would like to be able to say I am a finer, broader person for my experiences, but, as you see, I am shabbier, thinner, and have a sore developing on my lip. The only thing I have learned from my travails is that you should never sleep with a girl who sleeps with dogs, and never jump out of a window onto a big pile of shit unless there's a laundrette within walking distance, but that's probably just common sense anyway."
He fell silent.
"An incredible tale," said Kevin at length.
"And absolutely true."
"Absolutely?"
Forbes looked thoughtful.
"I sometimes think," he said, "that the urge to confess or unburden oneself of traumatic experiences is simply the urge to redeem experience through art. No matter how shameful or humiliating something that happened was, it sounds less bad in the telling, even if there is no conscious distortion or embellishing. The words, even truthful ones, act as a shield between us and painful raw images. The words summon up a new set of images that push out the original ones, or so I find, anyway. And of course we always unconsciously shape the narrative so that the unreasonable things we did or which were done to us sound more reasonable, or at least entertaining. 'I can laugh about it now...' If something painful can be turned into an anecdote, it is redeemed in some measure." He reached for the wine. "Far too much of it is true," he said glumly, "almost every bloody word in fact."