Anthony Burgess - Enderby Outside

"Well," said Easy Walker, rolling his refilled tumbler. "It's mostly Yank camps, junkies, had-no-lucks. See what I mean?"

"American troops in Morocco?" Enderby asked.

"Riddled," said Easy Walker. "All off the main, though. Forts, you could call them. Very hush. Moscow gold in Nigeria I mean Algeria. PX stuff-fridges mainly-for Casablanca and Tangey. That's why I've got this three-ton."

"A lorry? Where?"

"Up the road. Never you mind."

"But," said Enderby with care, "what are you doing here then?"

"Well that's the real soft centre," Easy Walker said. "See these niggers here? Not the Marockers, more brown they are than the others, the others being from more like real blackland."

"The heart of darkness," said Enderby.

"Call it what you like, brad. Berbers or Barbars. Barbar black shit but no offence is what I tell them. They bring the stuff up with them for this here racketytoo."

"What stuff? What is all this, anyway?"

"Everything," said Easy Walker, with sudden lucidity, "the heart of darkness could desire. Tales of Ali Baba and Sinbad the whatnot, and snake-charmers and all. Suffering arsehole of T Collins, the sprids they get up to in this lot. Hear them drums?"

"Go on," said Enderby.

Easy Walker did a mime of sucking in dangerous smoke and then staggered against the flimsy counter. The barman was lifting the lamps. "Pounds and pounds of it, brad. I'm like telling you thus because you won't gob. Daren't, more like, in your state of you-know-what. They grind up the seeds and nuts and it burns cold, real cold, like sucking ice-lollies. The Yank junks go bonko for it."

"Drug addicts," questioned Enderby, "in army camps?"

"Drag too," said Easy Walker calmly. "Human like you and I arent they? Loving Aunt Flo of our bleeding Saviour, ain't you seen the world? What you on normal, brad? What you do?"

"I," said Enderby, "am a poet. I am Enderby the poet."

"Poetry. You know the poetry of Arthur Sugden, called Ricker bugden because he played on the old rickers?"

"I don't think so," said Enderby.

"I know him all off. You can have the whole sewn-up boogong tonight on the road."

"Thank you very much," Enderby said. "What time do we start?"

"Moon-up. Crounch first. You crounch with me. Little stoshny I got up this street of a thousand arseholes. Up above Hassan the hundred delights. Know what those are? Glycerine like toffees with popseeds, stickjaw that'll stick to your jaw, shishcakes and marhum. And I mean a thousand arseholes. Not my creed. Yours?"

"I don't like anything any more," Enderby said. "I just want to get on with the job."

"Right, too. Ah, here comes the old jalooty." A sly black man came in. He grinned first then peered behind as though he feared he was being followed. He had a woolly cap on, a knee-length clout done up like a diaper, a stiff embroidered coat with food stains on it. He carried a grey darned gunnysack. Easy Walker tucked away Enderby's passport in the breast-pocket of his shirt, then from the back-pocket of his long but creaseless canvas trousers he pulled out a wallet. "This," he told Enderby, "is as it might be like my agent. Abu." The black man responded to his name with a kind of salivation. "Mazooma for pozzy, as my dad used to say. Died at Gallipoli, poor old reticule. It's my Aunt Polly as told me he used to say that. Never clapped mincers on him myself. Abu grabs what per cent he has a fishhook on. Leave it to him." To this Abu Easy Walker told out what appeared to Enderby to be no more than fifty dirhams. Then he took the gunnysack and shushed Abu off like a fly. "Now then," he said, his hand on Enderby's arm, leading him out to the flared and oil-lamped sinister gaiety of the evening, "time for the old couscous. You like couscous?"

"Never had it," said Enderby.

"The best one of Ricker Sugden's," said Easy Walker, as they walked among baskets and moonfruit in the reek of lights, "is The Song of the Dunnygasper." You not know that one, brad?"

"What," asked Enderby, "is a dunnygasper?" A youngish woman raised her yashmak and spat a fair gob among chicken-innards. Two children, one with no left leg, punched each other bitterly.

"A dunnygasper is a bert that cleans out a dunny. Now, the pongalorum of a dunny is that bad that you'd lay out a yard in full view if you drew it in in the way of normality. So he has to like under water hold his zook shut then surface for a gasp. You see that then?" An old man with a bashed-in turban tottered by, crying some prayer to the enskied archangels of Islam. Easy Walker started to recite:

"Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark,

I dream of my boola-bush, sunning in the south,

And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham's lark,

And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth."

"That's not bad," said Enderby. "Not much meaning, though." Meaning? Too much meaning in your poetry, Enderby. Arch-devil of the maceration of good art for pop-art. Kill, kill, kill. He could be calm at soul, whatever justice said.

"For here in the city is the dalth of coves,

Their stuff and their slart and the fell of sin,

The beerlout's spew where the nightmort roves

And the festered craw of the filth within."

A moustached man, the veins of his head visible under a dark nap, called hoarsely at Enderby and, with flapping hands, showed small boys in little shirts lined up behind the lamp in his shop-front. A woman squatted on a step and scooped with a wooden spatula the scum from a seething pot on a pungent wood-fire.

"That drink," belched Enderby, "whatever it was, was not a good idea."

"Feel like a sack of tabbies when you've gooled up a pompey of couscous." Graaarch, went Enderby. Perfwhitt.

"God's own grass for this porrow in my pail,

Surrawa's lake for this puke and niff,

Prettytit's chirp for the plonky's nipper's wail,

And the rawgreen growler under Bellamy's Cliff."

"Rawcliffe," growled green Enderby. "It won't (errrrgh) be long now."

Easy Walker stopped in his tracks. A beggar clawed at him and he cleaned the beggar off his shirt like tobacco ash. "You say Rawcliffe, brad? Rawcliffe the jarvey you bid to chop?"

"Plagiarist, traitor (orrrph), enemy."

"Runs a little beacho. Called the Acantilado something-or-the-

next-thing. Not far from the Rif. Not there now, though. Very crookidy. Quacks pawing him all over on the Rock."

"In Gibraltar? Rawcliffe? Ill?"

"Crookidy dock. He'll be back, though. Says if he's going to snuff he'll snuff in his own dung."

"Rawcliffe," said Enderby, "is (orrrfff) for me."

"We're there," said Easy Walker. "Up that rickety ladder. Niff that juicy couscous. Yummiyum. Then we hit it. Moon's up, shufti." Enderby saw it with bitterness. Miss Boland seemed to rage down from it.

"This jarvey Rawcliffe," said Easy Walker, leading the way up the ladder, "is some kind of a big jarvey. Big in films and that. You sure you know what you're on, brad?"

"I (arrrrp) know," said Enderby, following him up. A fresh beggar, wall-eyed, embraced his left leg passionately, shrieking for alms. Enderby kicked him off.

Ali Fathi sat on the other bed and pared his foot-soles with a table-knife honed to lethal sharpness on the window-sill. He was on the run from Alexandria, which he called Iskindiriyya, and was scornful of the Moors, whose language he considered debased. He himself spoke a sort of radio announcer's Arabic, full of assertive fishbone-in-the-throat noises and glottal checks that sounded like a disease. He was very thin, seemed to grow more and more teeth as time went on, and was always talking about food. "Beed madruub," he said to Enderby now. He had a passion for eggs. "Beeda masluugha." Enderby said, from his own bed: