Anthony Burgess - Enderby's Dark Lady

"You can say that again."

"Too many fags a -"

"And dykes too. Listen. This is my show, right?"

"Well," Enderby said with care, "it's supposed to be Shakespeare's really. And let's get this straight about this er fag element in his life. He had an affair with the Earl of Southampton, no doubt about that, but it didn't express his true nature, which was passionately heterosexual. He had to climb through the pretence of ah faggishness. Not uncommon at that time. Their sexuality was so intense that it expressed itself in many forms. But in the sense that the Dark Lady is not only a woman but also a kind of destructive and creative goddess at one and the same time, and even perhaps a disease, well, yes, it is, to some extent your show."

"So the opening number is me, a production number. I'll put the shake in Shakespeare, I'll put the spear in too. Establish," she said, much in Enderby's manner, "priorities."

"Where did you get that from?" Enderby asked with some admiration. "That's rather witty."

"Just thought of it. Sharp as a pistol, brought up in Bristol. The white man's knavery sold me in slavery. Hey," she hailed the serving matron. "Two more of those."

"Thou art," Enderby said, "as wise as thou art beautiful."

"Oh, come on."

"Quotation from. Titania says that to Bottom. But," Enderby said with some urgency, "the beauty is real enough, God knows. I say this with total objectivity. Your beauty is overwhelming, of a kind rarely seen. But this, of course, you must know."

"Yah," she said, "I know it. My beauty is my bread," she added with mock solemnity. "Talent, too, baby, I got talent."

"That," Enderby said, "I still have to see."

"You better believe it. Right. That fag Silverass is on his way and you gotta have words to give him. Songs, baby. So I want you to steer your pinko ass into that elevator and get up to your room and start writing."

"Gladly," Enderby said. "After dinner. I thought," he thought for the first time, "we might have dinner together."

"That's nice, that's real nice. Like in old movies. Not tonight, baby, some other time."

"You," Enderby said, "have already arranged to dine with some other ah guy. I see."

"No, you don't see." She sipped at her fresh whisky sour and Enderby at his. The tumescence was terrible. "You see nothing. Ah has mah prahvit lahf."

"At least," Enderby said, "you've stopped saying shit all the time. That's a word I've heard Americans use even at table. They don't take in the referent of the word. It's become just a neutral expletive."

"Okay, no shit." And then a great handsome man of her own colour, though much darker, bore down on their table. She rose in shrill ecstasy and they fondly embraced. Baby honey-bunch and then an unintelligible duet in what Enderby took to be Black English. He drained his whisky sour unnoticed and unintroduced and stole off with his coat and packages. His shlong settled to neutrality. Black bitch and so on. Christ, jealousy, a dark wine long untasted. He hadn't come all this way to be jealous. He would leave it to her, bitch, to sign for the whisky sours.

But up in his room, strengthened by mahogany tea, he got out his yellow legal pad and started to scribble to her will. Lyrics, seeing her in a richly crimson silk farthingale belting them out, brown bosom fully exposed in the Tudor manner to proclaim, like the Queen herself, putative virginity. This vision was physically very painful. He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom and, on a face towel monogrammed with a fanciful S, fiercely discharge his heat. He saw himself fierce in the lighted mirror doing it and nodded fiercely at the fierce reflection. Then, less fierce, indeed encalmed, he went down to dinner and ordered a beefsteak and a half bottle of some ruby Californian muck, both restorative, indeed freshly inflaming. The waiter, a frail Viennese PhD immigrant, seemed to ask him what dressing he would take with his salad. No dressing because no salad. Green stuff was not good for you. April Elgar and her co-coloured fancy man were not there. Swiving like rattlesnakes some place. He, Enderby, willed himself not to care, finishing his french frieds with his fingers, ordering apple pie with ice cream on it. Then he belched his way back up to make tea.

The white man's knavery

Sold me in slavery

To an unsavoury

Household.

I slept in an attic all

Foully rheumatical,

Bedbugged and cobwebbed

And mouseholed.

I slaved like the slave I was,

Ripe for the grave I was,

But I was brave, I was

Ready

For my master's remorse and my

Freedom of course and my

Carriage and horse and my

Monetary source

Safe and steady.

Now see me here in London,

Ready for revenge -

All England will be undone

From Carlisle to Stonehenge

On the dayyyyyyyy

I get my wayyyyyy.

But here, by God, was corruption. You cease to celebrate the greatest poet in the world's history and ennoble nothing but lust of one kind or another. Goats and monkeys. Toplady was, after all, no fool.

I'll screw some sex into Essex,

I'll scourge Walter Raleigh's raw hide.

I'll make Francis Drake

Chase a duck on a lake

And eat Francis Bacon fried.

I'll inject the shakes into Shakespeare

And stick in the spear as well,

Wrench out Queen Bess's

Carroty tresses

And make her bald as a bell.

Right under your gaze

I'm going to raise

Elizabethan hell.

Enderby groaned, but not now with lust, that foul fundamental whose harmonics were admiration, awe and even the most dangerous word in the language. He had been drawn into the celebration of America, not Shakespeare. What voice from the dead had condoned the travesty to come? Robert Greene, perhaps, putting on the tame tiger's hide in his cunning. One in the eye for Shakescene. Enderby got blearily off his bed (lyricizing was bloody hard work) and dug his contract out of the dusty suitcase. He should have read the small print before signing. Sold into slavery, by God. Suable if he reneged. Best to embrace one's enforced corruption. He started to write one more song before sleep.

To be or not to be

Smitten by you

Bitten by you

Teased as a ball of wool is teased by a kitten by you:

That is the question

Which harms my digestion

Marry, à propos. He swallowed six Whoosh tablets with chlorinated water and got ready for troubled slumber.

The next day Enderby left them all to it. Let the bastards get on with it. He tried to work in the hotel lounge, but perpetual sedative music got in the way of his rhythms. He went to see the bell bald manager about it, but the manager did not easily comprehend his complaint. Anaesthetization of the ear or something. Offwhite noise. He returned to his room to find the bed yet unmade, but he was used to unmade beds. He stuck the DO NOT DISTURB notice up outside and made himself more tea. Fed up, fucked up and far from home. He dragged Ben Jonson grumbling from his long sleep and made him sing:

Ale and Anacreon,

Beer and Boethius,

Sack and Sophocles, these

Please my heart

More than the farting littleness,

Borborygmic brittleness,

Jokes and japes

Of the apes and jackanapes

One sees

Courting the great

At court, on estate -

Fleas!

He foreheard the bemerding response to that and crumpled the yellow legal paper up. Yet he needed Ben Jonson to sneak in a few extra blank verse lines to make the revival of Richard II relevant to the Essex rebellion which immediately followed and thus have poor Will bemerded. Keep out of the great world, sirrah, stick to your word games. I, your Queen, tell you so. Lucky for you your head rolleth not like his, that runagate traitorous earl, on Tower Hill. Get you gone from my royal sight. Will was turning out to be a very bemerdable character.