Chapter 2
The fall of Mulciber
Just as every version of the
underworld has its guardian or attendant devil, infernal factotum or dog of
three heads, so too Europa House has Craig McCerrow. There he is now,
shirtlessly grappling with some ancient lead fixture in the sweltering boiler
room deep in the basement. His upper body is a patchwork quilt of tattoos, some
professionally applied and some of more home-made provenance. They record past
dalliances, the names of Craig’s awful sociopathic children, tribal affiliations
in the world of association football, nationalistic aspiration, and mythical
creatures, zombie overlords and full-breasted, broadsword-wielding vixens.
Craig’s mental life is correspondingly crammed and chaotic, but he is grateful
for the job of resident caretaker at Europa House.
Indeed, the job was a
godsend. Craig had had quite enough of his regular employment as doorman of
various risk-laden speakeasies across the city. He had been stabbed and
shanked, shivved and striped too many times to justify the money and drugs he
received in payment for plying his precarious trade, and the caretaker’s role
allowed him to exercise power without the accompanying perils of the order of
clientele to which he had become used. His biography presented here is a composite
work, for which I must note the work of residents Lars, Declan, Ricky Rick and
Mrs. Podolski, who together form a sort of BBC World Service concerning the
happenings at Europa House.
I dread Craig. On the few
occasions he had been inside my cubicle here at the House I had cringed in the
corner while he attended to trip switch or faulty tap, and he seemed exactly
what he was, a dreadful man in a city of dreadful men. There is an order of
being which seems to take place, to take its place, in a parallel dimension to
that in which we, the weak and frail and fallible, live and breathe and have
our being. To see Craig McCerrow, his sleeveless shirt showing enough of the
hinterland of his squamously illustrated body to indicate his likely passage
through life thus far, is to see a type of hell.
Now, he has simply turned
off the water to the entire block to attend to some dysfunction in the ancient
plumbing. Alerted by the boy, I have filled saucepans and the kettle and the
old tin pail for my ablutions. Two hours was mentioned, but Craig keeps to no
earthly temporal calibration. Once he turned off the electricity for an
afternoon but was persuaded by one of his appalling coterie of friends to go on
a three-day drink and drug field exercise, and Europa House remained plunged in
darkness for the duration.
As I accept that it is the
morning, I must prepare for my day. I heat water in my kettle, testing the
great orange gas container with the ball-peen hammer to see how much remains.
We are all of us hooked up to these containers, and Craig replaces them for a
stipendiary fee when they expire. There is no working gas supply system at
Europa House, a fact which exercises the gangling Estrella. She, like most of
her generation, is well versed on her rights, and claims that the contraptions
which Craig has rigged up in each of our battery cells (the original house has
been divided and divided again to provide more hutches for the inhabitants)
contravene various Health and Safety commandments. I wouldn’t know about that,
although I do know that the last representative from the council to visit
Europa House was so menaced by Craig that he had to take a month’s sick leave
from his place of work. That awful hobgoblin Bertie Spedding told me that.
Bertie Spedding, the Mercury of bad news and sniffer of ill winds.
My water ready in the
singing kettle, I fill the basin, select a flannel (one of two, royal blue and
washing-machine grey) and begin to soap and valet the various cracks and
orifices of my awful old body. The body, writes Plato. A shadow which keeps
us company. I can’t have a bath because the bath has a crack in it like
lightning-split timber. It also has about a hundredweight of academic papers,
newspapers, notepads dense with my scrawl, coverless books. Research, you see,
for my next book, the follow up to my university-banned and universally unread
debut. More later.
With my cleansed frame
snugly inside my billowing dressing gown once more, I sit and read, transported
to wherever today’s book (the first of many) will take me. Reading is life to
me, the phrases, ideas, concepts, new words and formulations all pouring into
the old Vanikin head like wine into a cracked gourd. I would rather be a
notepad for the sayings of great men, writes the pugnacious Julius Caesar, than
be a great man myself. Some time later, I rest my book on the frayed elbow
of the sofa’s arm-rest as I hear the light tappity-tap on my door which
announces the arrival of Lars and the news.
Lars is a bald and
shiny-domed Dane who was once a laboratory assistant before retirement drew him
to the dubious environs of Europa House. He eschewed a return to the Norse land
of his fathers on the grounds that it was now overrun by Mohammedans to an
extent that not even the sleeping Holger Danske (the giant but currently
comatose defender of the Danish people) could ever counter. He and I sit washed
by my pale bulb, and Lars will tell me of affairs in the wider world, carefully
préçising the main currents of
activity before expanding on one or two stories which have caught the attention
of his enquiring Scandinavian mind, and dutifully omitting to tell me the date.
Lars sits in my guest’s
chair, a sort of faux Regency throne with elegantly curved dark wood legs and
the look of a creature with nocturnal habits all its own. Tufts of old
horse-hair from a nag long dead protrude at intervals.
Lars speaks perfect English,
retaining the slightly clipped tunefulness of his native land. His round-up of
current affairs confirms the movements we all know to be taking place outside
the ramparts of Europa House, as the world outside marches slowly but
resolutely towards a second dark age, a sort of anti-Enlightenment. Money is
still acting like an insane woman in the market square, all matted hair and
flung excrement. Politicians still parade and speechify, like street vendors in
the last minutes of Pompeii. The young still rule the streets while the old
stay indoors praying to gods who are themselves frightened. Motor cars still
tear around culling the population, television still holds a nation in its
mesmeric grip, and it has not rained for eleven days in a row. I make tea.
Lars and I sip at our hot brew
as the amiable Dane begins a circumspect tour of what counts these days for
news. News. The media. These old shades are part of the reason I fell from the
heavenly ramparts of academia and landed here. I think of Milton’s Mulciber in Paradise
Lost, one of Satan’s angels pushed (by Michael, if memory is a good and
faithful servant) over heaven’s battlements to fall to earth in a leafy forest,
a descent which took a full day.
We are fallen too. Crashing
to earth where we sit huddled in a damp, loamy forest to be told tales by
various spirits of the wood who do not have our well-being in mind.
Inappropriate teaching methods. I tried to teach my students the truth; no one
had told me that the truth was no longer wanted. Think of Orwell, lanky,
pencil-moustachioed, public-school George with his fags and his TB. In a
time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. Vanikin
the revolutionary, Vanikin in a beret, bearded and chomping a cigar. I told them
that Media Studies, the degree for which so many of them clamoured like
ducklings at the water’s edge, was a waste of time. Media studies was what you
did in your own time. Media studies was just reading the papers and watching
television. University education should be more than a breakfast-time habit
tenured. Inappropriate teaching methods.
Lars is summing up the state
of world affairs. But we all know where the world is heading. It’s heading
here, to join exiled Vanikin in the underworld. The world outside my retired
theatre curtains was a rickety pier full of whizzing circus rides with the nuts
and bolts all loosened and the lights off when I last trod the boards. I
tremble to think what it has become since I groped my way below stairs, but I
suspect that if I were to re-emerge from my dank and Gyprocced chrysalis this
very day, I would not walk out into a second Renaissance.
It’s consciousness, you see.
Nietzsche called the brain our last and least developed organ, and he was
right, poor mad syphilitic old Friedrich. Giving consciousness to homo
sapiens was like giving the Large Hadron Collider (and there Lars did hold
my attention) to a saloon bar full of association football aficionados. There was
the Renaissance, of course, but it was hardly general issue. A Milanese
peasant born the day Fra Angelico was born and breathing his final rasping
breath, a rare octogenarian, the day Uccello passed away would in all probability
have lived his entire span without setting eyes on a framed painting. A frame was
what you grew your turnips in. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernism;
these were mostly things that happened to other folk, the folk on the hill. The
majority of the world’s population went on much as before while Michelangelo
was creating his wonders, dirt under the nails and trying not to get killed by
their neighbours. My tea is cold, and Lars has finished his report.
I bid Lars a fond farewell
in his native Danish. Farvel. It more or less exhausts my knowledge of
that jolly-sounding language, and sounds to me like a minor character from a
Dickens novel. Little Farvel. Dickens, with his mad hair and social conscience.
No, Vanikin! Come back here this minute. I feel vaguely unclean after being
sprayed with the ordure of the outside world, and I head for my bath tub. I
retrieve something soothing and recline on the buggered sofa, wondering who the
house will throw at me next.
Europa House was built at
the start of the 1960s, and so has no exterior charm and resembles a hybrid of
an East German tax office and a giant lock-up by a ring road. As mentioned, the
original spacious apartments have been cordoned and sub-divided and partitioned
to produce the current human hen-house, and I am merely one lonely occupant
among many. A surprising proportion of the inhabitants are, by any reasonable
usage of the phrase, clinically insane (I am one), but there are gems amid the
chaos. Part sanctuary for the disenfranchised, part asylum, part dormitory,
part ghost train, Europa House has been my abode these seven years since my
public disgrace and defenestration. After the fall, this is my pandemonium.
No one came to see me as I
cleared my office at the university. To associate with Vanikin was to be on
McCarthy’s black list, in the FBI’s little black book, marked down for a
Leninist show trial. I had become toxic, a pariah or pharmakos or
scapegoat. And so for seven years I have wandered in the desert of myself,
apart from the ways of men...
A small drum roll at my
hollow door. The boy has returned with my provisions. I trust him with my
pension, giving him a small stipendiary consideration of which I suspect Manda
would not approve. All modern mothers believe that all elderly men are sexual
predators with their offspring squarely in the crosshairs. The danger, however,
lurks elsewhere. Mentally and intellectually, the peril starts when teacher
arrives with her curriculum of anti-life skills. Outside the school gates,
meanwhile, the drug dealers lurk.
The boy, as always, leaves
two gossamer-thin carrier bags outside my warped front door, and I retrieve
them like a laboratory rat snatching at a food pellet.
Tinned fruit, tinned meat,
cordial, tea, milk, biscuits, porridge oats. Ahmed’s prices are reasonable, and
I have purchased enough to keep a sub-Saharan family for most of a week. I have
modest requirements; such is the life of the fallen angel, the outcast scowling
back at the city of the sun, the civitas solis.