Tristan Hawkins - The Anarchist

The wind picked up and the doors began to slam against their legs so they moved back inside.

Jayne saw something move on her coat and squealed. Yantra smiled calmly at her and remained silent.

‘Look, it’s a … flea,’ she said with disgust, attempting to move back from her arm.

Yantra pinched it from her sleeve, gave it a brief scrutiny and satisfied himself that it was of the dog variety. He crushed it with a tight twist of his thumbnail.

‘You killed it!’ she squealed.

‘I karma-ed it. It’ll reincarnate as a beetle and thank me,’ he laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. She flinched. ‘Come on Jayne. Don’t go all Monophysite on me.’

‘Call again?’

‘The Monophysites. A cool bunch of fifth-century Christians who abhorred cleanliness and referred to fleas as pearls of God.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Switched on, sure, but not half so wired as the Pythagoreans. Now old Pythagoras, of triangle fame, was also the founder of a religion based on the transmigration of souls.’

‘So?’

‘And the iniquity of bean eating.’ Jayne smiled. ‘Want more?’ She nodded. ‘Other sinfulness included, sharing one’s roof with swallows, walking on highways, picking up things that had fallen, stepping over crossbars, stirring fire with iron and plucking garlands. And woe betide the Pythagorean who, when he got out of bed in the morning, didn’t roll the blankets up and rub away the impression of his body.’

Jayne hooked an arm around her man and kissed his cheek.

‘Unadulterated bollocks,’ she told him forthrightly.

‘It’s true. Monophysite’s honour.’

‘Go on then, tell me some more things I don’t know?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well if I don’t know I can hardly say, can I?’

‘’Tis true, my dear.’

‘I know, five minutes life-swap you first.’

‘Mmmm. Where did we leave me?’

‘You were dating Astarot and taking your finals.’

‘Indeed. Well, having read my dissertation on Sir James Murray, the University of Serendipity duly awarded me …’

‘Who?’

‘You jest? Sir James Murray. The man was on a par with Sir Albie himself. Author of Electricity as a Cause of Cholera or other Epidemics, 1849. No? Well, the central thesis of the book was that germs didn’t exist and that all malaise was the direct cause of electrical disturbance. Cholera, malaria and influenza resulted from disturbed electro-galvanic currents. Thus the cure for illness was to lighten the density of the atmosphere around patients. So to ward off the mysterious and all perverting currents of irregular electricity, one should first cover the patient with silk then position buckets filled with quicklime in propitious locations around the house. He also recommended that houses should be constructed on nonconductive platforms and that cities should be surrounded by massive batteries to abate untoward galvanism. The point of …’

‘Yan, you’re doing it again. You. You’re supposed to be talking about you.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Jayne,’ he held his head in mock frustration. ‘You don’t seem to appreciate my difficulty in using the first person singular. The Zaparo have no word for I. It’s either you ( uamsca ) or everything ( ahpikondia ), which incidentally also means paradise. I’ve,’ he feigned pain at uttering the word, ‘told you this before.’

Jayne was an utter hog for the man’s seasoned bullshit. Whether any of it was true, which frankly she doubted, she had to credit him with hermetic consistency. The snatches of Zaparo language were always the same, as were his descriptions of life in the yage- swigging, snake- and jaguar-infested forests of the Amazon tributaries. Of course she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that any Ecuadorian Indian tribe could be fair skinned and ginger haired as he maintained (canopial colouring he called it), yet she half wondered whether there actually was or had been a shamanic tribe named Zaparo, whether recherché hallucinogens such as yage and ayahuasca really did somewhere exist and whether there actually had been sects and tribes called Monophysites, Eleusinians, Tschamikuro and Piro and individuals such as Sir James Murray, Tominaga Nakamoto, Al-Ghazzali and John Dewey.

So, he was mad. He was without doubt the kindest, least vindictive or proud man she’d encountered in her twenty-six and a half years on the planet – usually. And when it was over, which inevitably it would be because – as Buddha, Heraclitus, David Hume and Yantra all said – everything changes; nothing remains constant, she would no doubt kill herself. Yet, for now, she was determined to drink as much of this fleeting moment in this fleeting incarnation as was possible.

The dharma of Yantra’s life was indeed that everything is created by a series of causes and conditions and everything disappears by the same rule. At least, as far as women were concerned it was. Before Jayne, Biddy’s passenger seat was reserved for Sylvie, a Scandinavian au pair who had wanted to see the country. Well, he’d shown her the country all right. Left her sleeping in a tent in the Brecon Beacons and if that wasn’t the country then nothing was. Still he hadn’t been all bad to Sylvie (or Hathor), he’d given her a baby. Before her there was Jill who called herself Nephthys and reckoned she could foretell the future. One thing she hadn’t foretold as the acid went wrong in her at Glastonbury was that he’d moved into Sylvie’s tent. Then there was Juliette who gave him gonorrhoea – of the tongue – and forced him into a humiliating encounter with conventional medicine and the establishment. Before her there was Wolfsbane who taught him to juggle and throw diabolo. Cecily Simpson, the journalist, who’d interviewed him and wound up a participant observer preceded her. Indeed, as far back as he could remember, he’d been able to seduce women. Yantra held that as long as one had reservoirs of patience and gentleness, unfaltering respect for the feminine principle, an off-beat sense of humour, five thousand years of potted wisdom and the most beautiful eyes in the world, very few women on this wonderful planet were immune. Not that he abused his God-granted powers. For he maintained that one of the essential secrets of seduction was that a man should display a genuine desire to give pleasure to a woman and that this desire should exceed even his own lust. What woman could possibly resist, he wondered. And, of course, once initiated in Taoist lovemaking techniques, that was that, it was the open road from then on.

Still it had to be said, Jayne was different. They’d been together for over five years now and things had cooled only slightly from the initial white-hot. To ditch her merely for ideological reasons would be a needless martyrdom. Of course, Yantra was in no doubt of the necessity of their mutual infidelities (although he half suspected that Jayne only slept with other blokes to affect a childish revenge on him). Quite simply, people were not the sort of things that could be owned. Getting uptight about that sort of thing would be like throwing a wobbler over someone pampering Endy – negative to the point of annihilation.

‘Yan, you’re not listening,’ he heard her say.

‘Yeah well, I’m sorry but, you know, suburbia bores me.’ He yawned to prove this. ‘The only good thing about suburbia is that it’s next to subversion in the dictionary.’

‘And in my biography. Would you like hear about my subversion?’

One of the problems of being stuck in a van with someone is, no matter how much you may revere them, after about three months or so, you know pretty much everything there is to know about them. And though the repeated and time-tended tales of their rites of passage may offer a vague ritualistic comfort, they can also become bloody boring.