Russell Hoban: Come Dance With Me

21 January 2003. I read somewhere that a butterfly flapping its wings in Hong Kong could affect the course of a tornado in Texas. Sure, why not? Probably the first time I put on mascara I made it rain in Norwich three years later and Dick Turpin fall off a roof a year and a half after that. I don’t need a scientist to tell me that everything’s connected and a teentsy cause in one place can result in a big effect some other place. Chaos Theory is what they call it, which is the right name for any theory that concerns me. Life is full of problems, you have to expect that, but I have this extra thing that gives me trouble.

I was thirteen the first time it happened. We lived in High Hill Ferry by the River Lea, that’s in Upper Clapton. Across the river the view is very wide. Over the Walthamstow Marshes the sky is big, everything else is small. Beyond the railway the sheds, pylons, gantries and distant buildings are all very small under the sky.

It was in August: 7 August 1962, I wrote the date in my diary. I was walking by the river. The banks were all purple with Michaelmas daisies and there were moorhens nesting in the reeds. The sky was blue, the sun was warm, the shadows were cool in the tunnel under the railway bridge. Beyond the bridge the river stretched away all calm and peaceful into the distance. A boat came along, a big cabin cruiser, the Badroulbadour. The name reminded me of a princess in The Arabian Nights, Badoura, but this name had a different feel to it. There were a lot of people on the boat and some of them waved to me. As I looked the action seemed to freeze for a moment and it was like a photograph of people waving. ‘Better not,’ I said. Not loud enough for them to hear me. Why did I say that? The picture unfroze and the boat and the people passed out of my view while I stood there shaking my head and feeling strange.

After tea my stepfather went to The Anchor & Hope for his usual four pints and later on I went out too. I liked that time of evening when the lamps were lit and the sky was still light, it sometimes gave me good ideas for the poems I wrote in my diary. I saw a bat flittering about and tossed up a pebble. The bat followed it down for a moment but its sonar must have told it pebbles are no good to eat so it flew off into the dusk.

I didn’t ordinarily go near the pub in the evening when Ron, my stepdad, was there. But there were men on the benches outside The Anchor & Hope and I wanted to hear what they were talking about. They were all local and I knew some of them. When I got close enough to hear them Ted Wilmot was saying, ‘I was at the marina when I heard it blow up. You could see the smoke and flames from half a mile away. Killed all nine people.’

Without thinking I said, ‘The Badroulbadour ?’ Everybody turned to look at me.

‘That’s the one, Chrissy,’ said Mr Wilmot. ‘Did you know anybody on board?’

‘No,’ I said. I started to cry and I ran home. I knew that I was somehow connected to the deaths of those people, but how? When I said, ‘Better not,’ I wasn’t foreseeing anything, the words just came out of my mouth. I went up to my room and wrote what happened in my diary but I had no poems in me that evening. When Ron got back from the pub he came stomping up the stairs so the whole house shook and it was about a six-pint smell that came ahead of him. He flung the door open without knocking as he always did but I was used to this and I was fully dressed. ‘Piss off, Ron,’ I said.

‘I know for a fact you were in all afternoon,’ he said. ‘How’d you know about the Badroulbadour?’

‘I’ve got second sight,’ I said. ‘Want me to tell you what’s going to happen to you?’

His eyes got very big and he went pale and hurried out of the room. He died of a stroke a year later. I couldn’t see his future, I was only trying to scare him because he was a creep and I hated him.

When school started again I asked the English teacher, Mr Burton, about the name Badroulbadour. He was a short man who wasn’t fat but his shirts always seemed about to pop their buttons. He smelled of sweat and aftershave and when he talked to you his hands always seemed about to touch you in various places but he pulled them back before they did. I guess he was about forty.

‘You’re thinking about the boat that blew up?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ I backed away a little because of his breath.

‘It’s a variant of the name of the Arabian Nights princess Budur or Badr-al-Budur,’ he said, ‘and it’s from a poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate”.’ He took a book out of his desk and read:

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

Within our bellies, we her chariot.

Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

And, finger by finger, here, the hand,

The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

The bundle of the body and the feet.

Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

I almost said, ‘That’s gross,’ but I didn’t because it gave me goose pimples. There was nobody else in the room but the two of us. I remember the smell of the chalk dust and the distant voices and footsteps in the halls. ‘Worms,’ I said, ‘carrying her off in their bellies.’

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘This beauty who was the Moon of Moons, to this favour did she come at last. This book is his collected poems. There’s a copy of it in the library.’

‘Have you got a boat?’ I said.

‘No.’

‘If you had one, would you call it Badroulbadour?

‘No. Are you thinking of naming a boat?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Thank you, I’ll look for the book.’ I got it out of the library and read the poem. It put horrible pictures in my mind, the worms bringing out an eye and the eyelashes one by one and the eyelid. I wished I hadn’t read it but it gave me a kind of thrill that made me ashamed. I leafed through the book and page after page grabbed me with ideas and images I never would have thought of, like, ‘The bird kept saying that birds had once been men, / Or were to be …’ With my birthday money I bought a copy for myself and although a lot of it was way over my head and still is, the crazy reality of his poems seems to me a realer way of seeing the world than what you get on the ‘Six O’Clock News’.

The main thing on my mind back then was the blowing up of the Badroulbadour. Is there such a thing as luck? Most people think so, you even hear it said that some are born lucky, and being lucky is better than being rich. Was Badroulbadour an unlucky name to give a boat? I thought it was. When I said, ‘Better not,’ what exactly did I mean? Better not stay on that boat? I guess so. So maybe I really did have second sight, and from then on every time I had a weird feeling of any kind I expected something awful to happen but it didn’t work that way. Sometimes a bad thing happened and sometimes it didn’t, so I was never sure and I was always uneasy. Still am. I came to think that maybe I was just bad luck. I kept it all to myself and hoped that it would go away. I made friends and tried to lead a normal life and nothing happened for a long time.

I didn’t mean to get into all that right now. I should be getting my head around doing my thing yet again at the Hammersmith Apollo this Friday. I’ve never been very dignified but I’m getting too old to climb out of a body drawer while the crew do Hammer Horror effects with dry ice. Mobile Mortuary is the name of the band and I’ve climbed out of that drawer in a lot of places I wouldn’t mind never seeing again. In some of them the dressing rooms smell about the same as the toilets and the sink is the safest place to pee. I have to knock back a little vodka to get my voice straight and the guys in the band use up the same amount of liniment, painkillers, and knee and elbow bandages as a football team but we still make money and they love us in Tirana. So it’s hard to stop but it really isn’t me any more, I’m not who I was when I started rocking around various clocks. What else is new.