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| I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of any individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race . . . This subject is a painful one indeed. That such individuals have so soared above the plane of their race, is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all biographies of “the good and the great” while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows. |
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| —Edgar Allan Poe |
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he tramp lay beneath the arch of a doorway in a puddle of his urine. He shivered in the cold, the half bottle of scotch that he clutched in his hand his only source of comfort. An inebriated, pinstripe-suited city lout had tossed it into a litterbin after being sick on his way home earlier that night. The derelict had retrieved the treasure from amongst the confusion of soiled newspapers, cans and sticky debris, hardly believing his luck in finding the bottle three quarters full.
Alcohol numbed him, making the cold more bearable. The painful tingling in his fingers and toes receded a little as he drank. His breath came in gasps between swigs, and thin clouds of water vapour from his lungs floated in the shadows of the doorway.
It was 8.30 p.m., on a Friday evening in the centre of London. The tramp was known as Gin Joe: a misnomer, for he had only once touched the stuff, but had been caught drinking it by his street friends, and the name stuck. He heaved his aching body up from the damp steps and stumbled out onto the pavement. After moving only a few yards he stumbled into a portly businessman in an Armani suit and expensive overcoat. The man reeled backwards with an exclamation of disgust, his face turning red with indignation. He hurried off into the night with the tramp’s mocking laughter still ringing in his ears.
Gin Joe shuffled onwards, trying to remember where he was and whether there were any doss houses nearby. His mind was so muddled he suspected that his final destination would be that place where all the worst unfortunates gravitate: The railway bridge near Embankment Station. That was unless Dublin Mary found him first and dragged him downstream to join up with her gang of Irish derelicts. Almost inevitably, if Joe were in a state of total confusion, he would find himself passing the dead of night with them in one of the stained cardboard boxes that served as beds.
The glare of the streetlights and the shop windows all around made him squint. Somehow he had strayed from the secluded back streets onto a main thoroughfare. Here, Joe’s presence was ten times more conspicuous. Hordes of well-dressed folk surged past him, aghast at the discovery of this creature of the pit walking amongst them. Most turned away but some caught his glance with defiant, accusatory stares.
“Go away!” They seemed to soundlessly scream. “You don’t belong here.”
Joe swore incoherently at them, between swigs from the life-giving bottle, savouring the fire it brought to his belly. They were right though; he did not belong here. They wore clean clothes, were washed and respectable. Joe’s clothes were stinking and torn and he hadn’t washed in a year. His huge side-whiskers had joined up with his Nietzschean moustache (his chin was too scabrous for hair growth), while his round glasses were broken, held together by gaffer tape, one lens just a network of cracks. He wore a tatty, wide-brimmed hat and a duffel coat that charity shops would have refused to accept. But perhaps what set him even greater apart was his mental state. Joe was the lunatic that could ruin your day, one that might strike out without warning or cause, a barbarian who’d wandered into Ancient Rome ahead of the invading hordes. He was a living symbol of madness, drunkenness and disease.
“Give us a fuckin’ ciggie mate.” Joe said to a passing smoker. The man nodded and stuffed a couple of Marlboros into one of his fingerless-gloved hands.
“Need a light too don’t I?” Joe added, jamming one of the cigarettes between his lips. The man held his lighter up as Joe lent forward and guided the tip towards the flame.
“Nice one. Cheers.” Joe drooled. As the passer-by retreated, he wiped his hands on his coat as if they were contaminated.
After a couple of drags, the tramp suffered a violent coughing fit and threw the cigarette to the pavement, stamping it out with brutal frustration.
He raised his head to look at the multicoloured decorations that were strewn from one side of the street to the other. There were gaudy window displays with fake snow and presents, and trees that blazed with spots of white light. A dim sense of recognition stirred within him and he realised where he was and the time of year. This was Christmas week and he was on Regent Street. People rushed by, clutching boxes and plastic bags full of gifts. They did not want to look upon an old wretch like him as they hurried after their purchases. He was the dark side of the city: a blackened goblin from its depths.
Past memories seemed to waver at the edge of the mind, thoughts of when he too, long ago, was a part of all this above ground activity, when he walked amongst them. How long had he been an outcast, he wondered, how long had men turned their faces away from him? He saw an alley close by, which was dark and inviting, so far removed from the gaudy spectacle all around him. Clutching his tattered coat closer to his body, Joe fled into the escape route.
He fell into a sheltered niche that was the entrance to a set of offices. His teeth chattered as he drew the half bottle of scotch from his pocket. The temperature was falling towards zero centigrade and would probably fall further as night wore on. Gin Joe breathed onto his fingers in a vain attempt to warm them, pausing only to cough repeatedly, forcing bronchial phlegm up from his lung passages. He spat the stuff out, ran his hand across his lips and drank heavily from the bottle.
Back there, memories from the past had begun to return, the years he had spent employed in an antiquarian bookshop, endless days locked away in a dingy, ill-lit basement, examining volume after volume of esoteric lore, for the compilation of a series of occult book catalogues. The proprietor had collected together a vast horde of these strange volumes and pamphlets, all of which passed before Joe’s eyes and which each required a synopsis.
As he read more and more of the curious tomes; Latin volumes on astrology, alchemy and sorcery; obscure modern editions on telepathy and clairvoyancy; Hebrew treatises on the Kabbala; the hidden doctrines of the Order of the Twilight Star; the astounding revelations of Fr. Montgomery Winters; so he came to believe that somehow these fragments were like pieces of an abysmal jigsaw. That basement room, stuffed with dusty old books and awash with a sea of papers, had become a tomb for all his past assumptions. Joe was convinced that a terrible secret lurked amongst the scattered knowledge therein, one that could unite the superstition of primal times with high metaphysics, and herald a new age of human perception.
Someone was shouting at him. Shouting and swearing. Joe looked upwards from his sprawled position in the niche, his head tilted awry. The door behind him had opened and a group of four office workers, with party hats, stared down at his prostrate form. They were wailing with laughter. One of them, a woman in a black dress suit, sent a sharp kick into his ribs.
Another began to pour a glass of champagne onto his head.
“Clear off you old bastard,” shouted the woman, “you stink of piss.”
Joe managed to heave his body away from the door and was about to get up and swear back when the largest of the bunch (a thug with a ponytail and a charcoal grey suit) kicked the tramp hard in the rear, sending him tumbling into the gutter. Amid more roars of laughter, they all bundled into a nearby BMW and drove off into the night.
It took Joe five whole minutes to get up. His body ached and his limbs trembled. Slowly, with great effort, he pushed himself onwards, aimlessly, meaninglessly, through the streets. The weather was worsening as the wind from the north gathered strength. Snow might fall soon. The sky was a blur of low sodium-orange clouds that reflected the streetlights.
Joe paused before the front of a shop window to try and catch his breath. In it was a large poster suggesting “Spend your Christmas in Sunny Florida”. He leant closer to examine the thing: Rows of bodies, like slabs of butchers’ meat, candidates for skin cancer, on white sands before a clear blue sea. He managed a sneer before shuffling away. Joe had to keep going so he could find a place to shelter for the night, although, the way he was feeling, it would be a miracle if he lasted until dawn. It was harder to breathe and his clogged lungs seemed to close themselves off against the freezing air that he tried to gasp into them. His wheezing was constant and his whole chest felt painful. It had never been this bad before.
He reached into his pocket for the half bottle of scotch. Realising it was empty, a desperate cry of despair gurgled in his throat, and he threw it against a wall. It shattered into glittering shards of glass, shattered . . . in pieces like that old scattered jigsaw—all those years ago . . .
Hadn’t he put the pieces together? Finally, after exhaustive study, of filtering out the worthless to reach the answer, he had, yes. But he began to be shunned by those around him. They mocked his theories, derided his revelations: It is impossible to rationalise an unreasoning universe, save through a disordered approach; insanity is the restructuring of the mind in accordance with evolution and heightened perception. Life is a freak accident, a multiplying disease on earth, a cancer cell in the otherwise sterile and perfect universe. He’d proved it, yet . . .
The sight of a twenty-four hour supermarket brought Joe back to his current predicament. He stood on Shaftesbury Avenue, that long, curved scythe of playhouses, all lights and flair, where puppets smeared with greasepaint acted out empty dramas. Joe rummaged through his pockets, for if he were lucky he might have enough change to buy a bottle of cheap wine. His fingers were cold and numb, but he managed to retrieve several coins from the folds of a soiled handkerchief. His luck was in. He had just enough money for the cheapest stuff.
He stepped into the supermarket and relished the warm air now around him. It was wonderful. He had hoped to linger in there, pretending to have enough money to buy a number of items, examining things as others did, but faces turned to him in disgusted shock. No, there was no chance of it. He was a filthy stain in this pristine, hygienic oasis and had to leave, before he was escorted away. He hurried along the aisles, seeking his sole purchase, trying to ignore the food (for he had not eaten in two days) but the drink was the priority. Drink brought a measure of oblivion to his world, made the foggy memories recede. He reached the wines section and sought out the cheapest bottle. Theft occurred to him, but looking around he saw that the gaze of a shelf-packer was fixed in his direction. Joe took the cheap wine that he could afford and made towards the cash desk with a shuffling gait. The young woman who took his money could barely conceal her disgust at the slimy coins he passed across the counter and at the wheezing, half-dead tramp that proffered them.
With the bottle in hand, wrapped in a plastic bag, Joe slowly made for the exit. As he stepped outside the blast of freezing air hit him like a wave. His lungs, briefly soothed by the warmth of the supermarket, again closed up in his chest as if in protest. The sight and sound of the people around him and the endless stream of road traffic, with the blazing car lights and exhaust fumes was startling. He couldn’t remember what had driven him into these well-trodden paths, why he wasn’t languishing, as usual, in some doss-house. Perhaps he had fled from the schizophrenia, depression, the piercing screams and idiot grins, from the bedbugs that crept from mattresses in search of the body heat that indicated blood.
Joe coughed up a mouthful of diseased yellow mucus from his lungs, spat it out in a ball, and saw it splatter on the pavement. The passers-by turned away at the sight. His chest felt like a vice around his lungs and his teeth chattered. He had a high fever and was staggering badly now. The memories were coming back again!
He stood at the corner of a passageway off the Charing Cross Road and opened the bottle of wine with his old Swiss army knife. He knew this place . . .
It was Cecil Court! He was back at Cecil Court!
The cheap wine washed the remnants of mucus in his mouth down his gullet and he stared at the bookshops around him. All those shops that he’d frequented, and the one in which he had worked night and day, the basement with the single light bulb, the smell of decaying books, the silverfish his only companions, and he remembered again . . .
He remembered the volumes concerning psychological and physiological matters that he’d read, as his quest for the solution drove him further afield from the occult and the metaphysical, as he traced the pattern of abnormality; Mankind preparing to undertake the evolutionary leap into morbidity of mind and body, into hopeless insanity and continual disease. A new order of human beings, resplendent in their mental and physical state, stripped of all delusions, and perpetually cognisant of individual and collective mortality, of the futility of thought and existence in this alien cosmos.
It was all there, in a thousand medical journals and casebooks, just waiting to be pieced together with the other esoteria; the grand destiny of mankind. How the herd, so long protected by their veils of illusion, would feel the darkness creep within them!
Joe tottered along the court, coughing incessantly, his face turning crimson at the effort. He stretched out his hand to the wall to steady himself. His sense of direction was fading as a combined result of the drink and fever. Yet he knew that, if he stopped drinking, the effects of the fever in isolation would be worse. He felt like he was hallucinating, that his sickness and drunkenness were becoming indistinguishable.
He seemed to be lost in a maze of alleyways with endless twists and turns, somewhere close to Covent Garden. It was as if he had stumbled into a hidden city, one of shadows and darkness, which lay behind the surface, but which had been there all along. There were arched portals leading into innumerable back streets where things that one would not wish to see lay endlessly dying. And there were empty, desolate warehouses where black windows gazed like the hollowed sockets of the dead. Was this then the future? Was this city one huge terminus for decaying flesh and minds?
The streets were like black corridors as he staggered and stumbled along, the pain in his chest surging with each step. His lungs were choked by mucus; his breathing a series of clotted rasps. His eyes had difficulty focusing and the falling temperature had long since robbed his limbs of sensation. The wine, like the scotch before it, had run dry and Gin Joe teetered on the brink of the abyss.
He fell forwards, and clutched desperately at a lamppost. Again the memories returned, more vivid than ever, as if to compound his torment. Subjective perception, he had discovered, was everything; our five senses and circumscribed thought patterns determined our view of the reality around us. And these were just veils to conceal that which, unfiltered, would be a vision of such hellish ecstasy that it would wipe away all human paradigms from the organism forever. He recalled his original name, rather than that of the drunken “Gin Joe” that had been bestowed on him, and it was “Joseph Scott.” He remembered also that fateful night when he’d decided to abandon the trappings of the prosaic world that held him in illusion; to meditate instead on madness, death and disease; to break through to that deeper consciousness of reality in drink-induced delirium, to achieve the immortal goal: Reconciliation with the cosmos. For it was there, in the frightful abyss, that the answers lurked.
Someone had taken his arm. It was a female tramp with missing teeth and only one eye. She looked as if she were in her sixties but in fact had only just turned forty. Newspapers were stuffed underneath her soiled raincoat to keep the cold at bay. Then Joe recognised her; it was Dublin Mary. She gabbled something accusatory in her heavy Irish accent and pulled him away from the lamppost, helping him to walk with her. Yes, that was it; he’d become a “down and out” years ago, his mind lost in drink and insanity, his lungs riddled with chronic bronchitis. It was all a spiralling circle of hell since the bookshop days, since the truth had found him out.
Along the banks of the Thames, some distance east, Dublin Mary half-carried her stumbling, mewling burden. Ahead of the two, huddled around a puny fire, were a group of tramps. All were in rags. They looked like the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Their faces were awful in the light of the flickering flames. They turned towards the newcomers briefly, and, recognising them, turned back to the blaze, drawing at their bottles of meths. Gin Joe was in a bad way again, coughing up his guts and pouring out a monologue of incoherent nonsense. Mary had again rescued him from a good kicking in a police cell. For a time, when he was close to the fire, he persisted in his ramblings about some “great secret,” but after guzzling Dublin Mary’s meths, he crawled silently away to his piss-soaked newspapers and cardboard box. His coughing reached a frightening intensity and then ceased as he lost consciousness.
It was Dublin Mary who tried to wake Joe come the morning. It had been a bad night, the coldest for years.
He’d been coughing up blood during the night and when the ambulance came to take him away, Dublin Mary was told that it looked as if he’d suffered a massive stroke.
Days later, she visited the hospital in which he was being treated, and was told by the doctor that his left side was completely paralysed. Gin Joe would never be capable of communication again. The damage to his brain was too great.
She’d seen him briefly in the ward. He just stared straight ahead without blinking and there seemed to be nothing left of the man but an empty shell. |
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