Alan Hunter - Gently Go Man

‘But you’re no Communist,’ Gently said.

‘Like I told you, we’re personal with ours,’ Deeming said. ‘The Communist deal makes the state a family, but like in the West we’re ashamed of our family. So we kick it, we’re individual. We go for it way out with the birds. That’s making the touch on a personal basis, keeping it down with having relations. You dig relations? It’s overvaluing someone, making yourself too vulnerable. When I feel I might be having a relation I pull up my stakes and get easting again.’

‘That way,’ Gently said, ‘you’ll finish up under a Bo tree.’

Deeming nodded. ‘You’re with me, screw. It might be a Bo tree at that. Like keep it down in every way and go for the final kick in the book. I sometimes think I’ll make that scene. I’m only part way out, yet.’

‘With a begging bowl?’ Gently asked.

‘Right,’ Deeming said. ‘A good Buddhist must beg.’

‘If all the world were good Buddhists,’ Gently said, ‘who would fill the bowls for them?’

Deeming chuckled. ‘Like you’ve put a finger on it,’ he said. ‘But all religions are contradictory, and the Buddhist jazz is the least so. I don’t know. I go some way with it. It’s got a logic that sends me. The Christers counter fear with faith, the Buddhists stare it in the eyeballs.’

‘It asks you to be ahuman,’ Gently said.

‘Don’t all religions?’ Deeming asked.

The Grieg thundered to a close. Deeming rose, turned over the record. The muted second movement began, a gentle, nostalgic meditation. Deeming sat down and ate a sandwich, sat listening, his yes beyond Gently. Gently also ate another sandwich. A motorbike blasted by on the highway.

‘I’m sorting it out,’ Deeming said, ‘I’m writing a novel, sorting it out. Like it was time it made the record, what I’ve been giving the jeebies here.’

‘I thought it had been done,’ said Gently. ‘By Kerouac.’

‘Kerouac,’ said Deeming, ‘like he’s John the Baptist. But I’m way out further than Kerouac was. I picked it up where Kerouac dropped it.’ He ate and drank some more.

‘I’ll try to give it to you,’ he said. ‘You’re the only screw I could ever talk to, so I’ll lay it on the line for you. Now the big jazz is touching the real — you dig me, man, touching the real?’

Gently nodded slowly. ‘Breaking through the illusion to the essence,’ he said.

‘Right,’ Deeming said, ‘that’s how a square would define touching. You make some action and grab a kick and like it’s wild enough, you’re touching. Now keep with me. Did you ever have a shock off a D.C. system?’

‘Once,’ Gently admitted. ‘It used to be D.C. in my rooms.’

‘It was like this, wasn’t it,’ said Deeming. ‘First it was like your fingers exploded. Then it was like them being burned. Then they exploded again when you broke contact.’

‘That’s roughly it,’ Gently said.

‘Take another instance,’ Deeming said. ‘You’ve turned a corner in a garden. You see a flower, a crazy flower; it sends you, looking at this flower. Now when you first see it you get that explosion, it hits you smack down to your bowels. Then it burns you, you aren’t with it, you just keep looking and thinking at it. Then, when you find you’ve lost touch, you turn away, and it hits you again. Only the first bang is the big one, like it is with the D.C. shock. Are you along?’

Gently nodded.

‘Take another instance,’ Deeming said. ‘You’re coming through a big belt of mountains. All day you’ve had these peaks around you, you’re getting dragged by so many peaks. Then you come over a pass and see a great plain beneath you, and the peaks are standing over the plain, and the plain is wide under the peaks. And that hits you, the plain and the peaks, coming together like that, though you’re dragged with the peaks and the plain is just nothing. But where they meet like that it pulls you up and sends you. You get the on-off-on like I’ve just been giving you.’

Gently nodded.

‘Take the instance right here,’ Deeming said. ‘Go and dig one of these neighbourhoods with all its contemporary style action. It’s nowhere, man. It’s a drag. Like you’d throw stones at the windows. Then dig it here, where it joins the old town, and you get the on-off-on again. Like it’s the same with the old town where it doesn’t meet the new.’

‘Is that the reason,’ Gently asked, ‘why you’re living just here?’

‘Too right it is,’ Deeming said. ‘I picked this spot out of a million. Like it doesn’t come older than this anywhere in Europe. The Abos were mining flints here, this was big Abo country. Then the Romans, then the kings, then the Danes and that jazz. And Tom Paine, you dig him? Like I wanted to see his country. Like the States would have been South Canada if it hadn’t been for Tom Paine. And right here, man, you’ve got the collision, where that wire fence runs. And that’s the jazz I’m trying to sound: that the real is timeless, and it’s at the borders. Like you want to keep touching you have to live along the borders.’

He smiled at Gently, lifted a finger.

‘Listen to this,’ he said.

The Grieg had swirled into a crescendo, was fading a moment into soft strings. Then a single flute sounded, filling in a trill like cascaded water, spreading out and losing itself in the heavy rocks of the cellos. Some bars later the piano caught it and made it a crashing torrent, then it lost itself in a thousand echoes of its brief, perfect poignancy.

‘Like that,’ Deeming said, ‘that was Grieg touching the real. You wanted it back, but he wouldn’t give it to you. He kept it timeless, along the borders.’

‘And Lister,’ said Gently, ‘was along the borders when he rode over the verge?’

‘Crazy,’ said Deeming. ‘You’re getting it, man. Like I didn’t think I could put it over.’

Gently put down his glass, watched it, let the Grieg clamour its finale. The gear clicked, raised the pick-up, dropped it on its stud and killed the motor.

‘And Betty Turner,’ he said. ‘Lister would ignore her, of course.’

‘He’d forget her,’ Deeming said. ‘He wouldn’t remember she was with him.’

‘Too bad,’ Gently said.

‘Sure, too bad,’ said Deeming. ‘But that’s the way of it, screw. You’re kidding yourself if you think it wasn’t.’

‘I don’t think I’m kidded,’ Gently said.

‘A square self-kidded,’ said Deeming. ‘Man, we’ll put this bottle out of its misery, then I’ll make with something really cool.’

‘Not for me,’ Gently said.

‘Come off it, screw,’ said Deeming, grinning.

Setters was back at the hotel at breakfast-time carrying a worn, empty-gutted briefcase, and he was shown into the dining-room where Gently was still eating breakfast.

‘We traced the serviette,’ he said, unbuckling the briefcase on his knee. ‘I had Ralphs type his report so you could have it first thing. He ran the serviette down in the Kummin Kafe, in the neighbourhood centre in Dane’s Green. That’s half a mile from Ford Road but only a step from Spalding and Skinner’s. The Turner girl worked there. We think he met her in the Kummin Kafe.’

Gently grunted, not overpleased to be disturbed so early. But Setters was ferreting in the briefcase and eventually handed across the report.

‘The man at the cafe, name of Greenstone, remembered Lister from the published photograph. Said he was regular there at the tea-break and used to meet a girl there.’

‘Did he remember the girl?’ Gently asked.

‘Not to be positive,’ Setters said. ‘They get a lot of them in there from the offices, there’s more girls than men work there. But Ralphs got some other stuff from him, as you’ll see in the report. It looks as though the sticks were passed to the girl and then she passed them on to Lister.’