Night of the Animals(43)
CUTHBERT EVENTUALLY MOVED BACK to Birmingham for a few years, but not to his parents’ house—they had told him never to come back. He loitered around the pubs in Handsworth, where his parents had met at the dance hall thirty years before. He would spend a night here and there in the local doss houses and missions.
He’d also plunged into his dreadful mysticism once again, stinking up bookstores and libraries to read about Sufism, the Mabinogion, the Legenda Aurea. He grabbed hold of a bit of Rastafarianism, too, and Navaho and Hopi myths. He started hugging other rough-sleepers when he would see them, exclaiming “Wa’ppun, mi key?”
One day, half-drunk, he was buying a tea in the coffee shop at the Selfridges department store in the Bullring, and something especially odd happened. Earlier, in a bin behind St. Martin’s church, he had found a big purple sequined dress, a sort of fancy old formal garment, like something from the 1950s. It had made him think of something tossed out after a funeral. It was enormous in size, the garment of a woman whose heart must have exploded. The top bit looked not unlike a kind of dress-up disco shirt, so Cuthbert cut it off with some old scissors he kept, and wore it into Selfridges.
It had been a mistake to enter the store in his state. A young man about his age seemed to be following him, he noticed, a gent in a sort of New Romantic pirate costume, with sky-blue knee britches, a flouncy shirt with a lace jabot, and a cummerbund. He wore dramatic pink-and-black eye shadow and overstated cheek-lines, and he unnerved Cuthbert.
Cuthbert decided to take his tea out of the shop part of the store, but then the man hurried up to him. They ended up sitting on one of the Home Department sofas in a faux sitting room. An array of television screens blared in front of them.
“Adu?” asked the pirate, in a strong Brummie. He smiled gently. “Ow am ya? I don’t mean to worry yow—yow look worried. I just, I’m new to this, and, erm, I just wanted to say ‘adu.’” The man took a deep breath. “I like your top—but yow’ve got a face as long as Livery Street.”
On the televisions, a woman presenter wearing a kind of khaki photographer’s shirt with many little pockets was talking while she stood in what looked like a farm pasture.
Cuthbert didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to talk.
“Come on,” the pirate said. He scrunched his eyes and said, “I’ll flog yow at dawn, lubber. Oi’s there something rung with me?” He seemed wholly amused with himself, but Cuthbert was oblivious, absorbed by the reporter.
The reporter said: “This remarkable coin, or bracteate, was found on Undley Common in Suffolk by a local resident out with his metal detector. Its inscription, written in Anglo-Saxon runes, is being studied by researchers at the University of Leicester. I won’t try to pronounce it!”
On the telly screens was a close-up of an embossed image from the gold bracteate. There was a helmeted man in a beard above a she-wolf. Two little human figures, crouched below the animal, drank from its teats.
Cuthbert turned toward the pirate and daringly put his hand on his knee, as softly as a sparrow. He said, in his deepest Brummie, “Do yow feel like a lost bab? That’s as oi do.”
The pirate-man looked petrified for a moment, and excited, and he looked around to see if anyone was watching. When he saw that others indeed were, he at once stood up, squinting dramatically and pointing at Cuthbert, and said, “Oh, f*ck off, yow . . . ya’ reek. It just bloody hit me. You’re just a street cunt, poncing about, aren’t yow—a poof probably, yeah?” He started walking away. “God damn it!”
“Oh, don’t do a bunk,” he said to the man. “Please.”
Shoppers turned to look. A man scowled at Cuthbert and pulled a little girl by the arm away from his vicinity.
Cuthbert felt humiliated at first, but also a bit pleased. This New Romantic odd-one—lashing out, fussy, wanton—had at least paid attention, had responded to his presence. It was as close to intimacy as he had been in ages. Cuthbert wondered if, given more time, he might have persuaded the man to take him to the gent’s and kiss him.
A university lecturer, a gaunt-looking man with long brown hair, was now being interviewed on the telly, and Cuthbert turned his attention and thoughts back to the television. The lecturer was saying, “It reads, ‘g?gog? m?g? medu.’ We don’t quite grasp what it means—not just yet—but we think that it’s a kind of blend of Old English and Old Frisian. It’s quite fascinating, really.” But Cuthbert felt he knew. Of course he knew. G?gog? m?g? medu was the language of otters.
BY THE SUMMER OF ’81, when the first riots started in Lozells Road, homeless Cuthbert dove right into the fray along with everyone else, blessed by Jah Creator. He tried to help (rather ineffectively) turn over a few cars, stoke up the street fires. Hundreds of young men, Caribbean, Irish and English and Bangladeshi, rampaged together, and Cuthbert felt as happy as he had ever before or since. He ended up getting truncheoned by a copper, fracturing his cheek. An almost imperceptible crushed appearance endured on the left side of his face. It was the subtlest of features, and something that still remained part of his own bloated countenance—the slightest depression on the left hemisphere of his skull, as if the gradual loss of logic from his life, over nearly a century, were physically visible.
Cuthbert remembered Rebekka showing him a news clip about the riots from the Birmingham Mail. He’d hitchhiked down to Hemel Hempstead to visit her at her house, which she shared with a divorced Danish woman. (Cuthbert had worked out that Rebekka probably fancied women more than men, but she couldn’t seem to acknowledge it.)