Godly integrals and Satan’s differentials, demonstrating the ballistics of heavenly orbs and satanic tridents that will occur — that SHALL OCCUR if I have my way . .
Unless we now take time to make the common pers— pers— pers — . .
Oh, heck, I dunno, y’see in that there is 7, 6, 5, 3, 6-point-1, AM 859R 45 HJ 88 turned insie-outsie . . This being the sort of thing he says when confronted by Miriam or Radio Gourevitch — the only residents besides Busner who’ve ever been robust enough to stand up to
the Creep . — His arm still sweeping for the fort-cube, and oofing with the effort, Busner realises this maddening recollection of monologuing is itself underscored by sing-song rhyming that slips up the stairs: Oh roister-doister li’l oyster, Down in the slimy sea, You ain’t so di ff’rent lyin’ on your shell bed, To the likes of l’il old me, But roister-doister you’re somewhat moister, Than I would like to be. . Perversely, despite everything, Busner believes he’d be content to listen to the Creep all day and for many subsequent ones. He’d ask the others to leave quite coolly, install himself in one of the straight-backed kitchen chairs, put Claude in the one opposite — then he could fully concentrate on
what this man has to tell me without recourse to the prejudicial pathologies — psychotic, schizophrenic, manic, schizophreniform — that he has steadily abandoned. True, without the compass of orthodox psychiatry or psychoanalytic theory, Busner finds it next to impossible to get a fix as he bobs up and down on Claude’s choppy wordsea, its surface criss-crossed by narrative currents swirling into whirlpools of song that subside into glassily superficial doldrums of what might be anecdotage, but beneath which, Busner is convinced, fluxes and refluxes of dangerous repression coldly circulate. This much the anti-psychiatrist will concede: the Creep’s soliloquies — and they are certainly this, the dialogic being effected only by mythical figures or imagined characters — display neither the stereotypies nor the overbearing unimagination of those. .
forced to play the schizophrenic game . On the contrary, the Creep in all he says or does is bewilderingly inventive, never prolix, and repeats himself only for rhetorical effect. He is, Busner thinks not for the first time — it’s that pleasing an image — a sort of desert island, upon whose sandy shores others — Radio Gourevitch included — can leave only the impress of their feet, mere dimples that soon enough
are erased by the next neural wave —. — The
cat-fuck-wail of the front gate snaps through his reverie — the postman is out there, his canvas sack lashed around his grey suit jacket with a length of sisal, and, as Busner rises dizzily, yanks open the bathroom door and stands naked at the top of the steep and uncarpeted stairs, all these benignant visions desert him. Claude! he cries, and Claude! he shouts louder — but it’s to no avail because
the bugger doesn’t hear any voices at all! while the mail has penetrated the flap and been grabbed before Busner has descended five steps. With rapacious efficiency the Creep wields his untrimmed and horny thumbnail to slit open an envelope, registering the futile intervention only by turning up his own volume: Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de MUFF-TASH ON HE FACE! — he then falls to censoring with a vengeance. Accepting this as a fait accompli, Busner sits down heavily, then rises abruptly
splintered bollocks! — An important fact about inter-experience — insofar as this can be said to transpire at all with the Creep — that he has kept resolutely to himself, despite urging the other residents to be completely open for
there is nothing to fear , is that on the one occasion Busner tried wresting the mail from its self-appointed censor he
hit me hard . A brutal uppercut — learnt where? In bar-room, barracks or Depression-era blackboard jungle — Busner couldn’t say. Indeed, he thinks: If I did know, I’d know everything — and, as he caresses the tempered skin of his cheeks, he touches also the memory of this violent coda. — From this angle the Creep appears pitiful: his balding shanks exposed by his hiked-up army-surplus trousers, his knobbly wrists sticking from the frayed ends of his red acrylic rollneck — the wiry U of him whip-lashing as he censors and sings, Ho, darkies, hab you seen de massa, wid de cudgel in he hand. . And it was that hand that cudgelled Busner. .
while still holding the felt-tip . For, when he’d managed to get back upstairs, he saw, reflected in the triptych of mirrors on the mauve-skirted vanity table, side views of bloody rivulets running from the corners of his mouth and a full-frontal of his swelling and
heavily censored top lip. — Sniffing any-old-iron and acetone, he’d Bloodknocked himself: Quick, quick, nurse! The screens! although he was scared and his heart shook, Claude having hit him sufficiently hard
to lay me out cold , the impact taking a big chunk out of Busner’s visual field, so that a maroon tide rushed in from its crenulated edges, eating up first the bebop lino’s screeching pattern — next his attacker’s calmly leering face, its lips
still flapping out words . . Then, for a few instants, all that remained afloat in this ruddy tide were Claude’s ruined teeth, which were falling out one by one until there was only a single closing-down white dot Jeanie runs towards, while Mumsie’s Fuck off out of it! scrapes her, an’ she scccrapes past the dinosaur wall where she an’ Hughie found the T-Rex bone but don’t see it coz she don’t see nuffin coz the bitch clumped her that hard like the see-eye-enn, see-eye-enn-enn-ay-tee-eye kid done in the film, whippin’ round on the footstool she was stood on nude, her skin all glittery where Jeanie had painted it with the Mela-wotsit lotion, an’ her face covered with diamond shapes coz the sun was shining straight inter the cottage winder. .
The bitch! hit Jeanie that hard that the graze don’t bovver her — if I live, she thinks, it’ll go all crusty-lumpy an’ be sumfing t’pick. If she lives —
an’ I ain’t blinded , because Jeanie sees nothing: the puckered silver-green skin of the canal, the poplars shivering on its far bank, the houses up the lane — all are drenched by the reddy-black wave that engulfed her when her mother
smashed me in the gob-da-dum, dee-dum, da-diddly-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da— daaa, da— daaa! This is what ’appens, Jeanie thinks, when Ollie stops bashing Stan on the nut an’ they’re both eaten up by the black mouf ’:
That’s all, folks! — By touch alone she feels her way across the road — the tar’s hot and Jeanie is the yogi-bear-man in Look an’ Learn, prancing on his flowery bed of bloomin’ coals, — then she does a
cray-zee gate vault over the five-bar and goes all dithery, running in circles, until her feet find a furrow for her and she ploughs along it, her legs scratched and her face stroked sticky by the full-eared wheat. — Still, she sees nothing: not the massy-green superstructure of the
Queen-Lizzy-beth copse she knows sails ahead of her through the golden wind-streaked rollers, not the high-tension cables she knows stave the sky overhead,
coz I can ’ear ’em singin’ —. She trips and does a forward flip. — When she struggles up, brushing earthy pellets from her T-shirt and shorts,
it’s done the trick , because she can see
the dead man’s head of chert and chalk turned up by the plough, and, lifting her head, the new weathervane on the Butterworths’ roof, which Missus Butterworth says is a fighting cock,
see-oh-kew — although when Jeanie told this to Mumsie, Mumsie laughed her naughty laugh and said, Fucking cock more likely! And Jeanie would laugh the naughty laugh now if Mumsie hadn’t tied
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