The Qliphoth

excerpt

…premises. (Imust not let PP clutter this retrospective. I’ve been doing so well up to
now,making the old storymy own,making it behave sensibly.At themoment the
day room is quiet, like an exhibition gallery. The exclusive clientele are swanning
about on their big dozy sofas like carelessly installed soft sculptures.)
So now I can relive my hour of decision, all fifty-five seconds of it, when I
rode the bouncing crests and waves of my own mental excitement, propelled
by a sudden access of manic curiosity, this virtually sexual lust for knowledge.
“The only things worth anything are these Crowley items; and they’ve been
rebound and scribbled in.” I tried to lay back. But Larry could sense the eager
flutter in my voice. He muttered that Charing Cross Road dealers had a whole
network of private collectors on permanent standby; there were no limits.
I found myself running downstairs to the till and pulling out notes, any
notes, perhaps a whole week’s takings, I can’t remember, I didn’t need to keep
records then, so I’ll never know what I paid for the Relics of the Lore.
Pauline was standing in the doorway. She must have seen Larry’s car blocking
the pavement and sniffed conspiracy.
“Everything’s cool, Pauline. Just a little antiquarian transaction, that’s
all . . .”
Larry had ambled downstairs. He took the fat wad, fanned it, and gave Pauline
his summer smile, before kissing her hand. I think he saw PP as some sort
of stern goddess, the goddess knows what the fuck she made of him, but his
grin stopped her ranting at me, she just propagandised instead.
“I don’t know what you men are up to but I don’t trust any of it. It’s not just
the pseudo-imperialist name, it’s the sight of all those greedy goblins rummaging
through the surplus of late-bourgeois production, masturbating over old
military uniforms. From Middle Earth to Middle Class! I wish you could stop
being middle men and create something useful for people.”
As she turned, she drove her elbow into a shelf of imported glass hookahs, a
very good line, which scattered on the matting. Our shattered alembics. She
strode through beaded curtains into the sunlight.
And I confess, I feel her glaring at me across the stormy miles, even now. Sitting
in one of her dim kitchens, staring over the top of the newspaper, glowering
at the latest imagery of Palestine or Iraq, and transferring all that
concentrated outrage in a direct psychic laser-beam aimed at my brain, my
heart, my decadent bourgeois/anarchist crotch.
That’s why Pol Pot has done everything she can to erase me from Lucas’s
calendar. She has, increasingly, rewritten the timetable of history to exclude
the subject of me, the errant father, the wondering scholar, the free…

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The Qliphoth

excerpt

It was a period ambience even then but it drew the global punter and I didn’t
want to tinker with the formula. The curios and the industrial relics were
doing well, a famous designer had just bought the shell of a Wurlitzer jukebox,
while over in the clothes section, some sunny blonde creatures in cheesecloth
and tight jeans were rummaging daintily through the old lace. Pauline the Sex
Police Person would accuse me of self-indulgence there—yes, she was firing
accusations even then—but this is a spiritual exercise, to recreate through sensuous
evocation the exact details of that crucial afternoon.
I was half-listening to the ritual shamblings of a local freak who claimed to
be a secret roadie for Hawkwind. Every week he expounded his scheme for a
Silver Machine to transport himself and the group to a deep space colony; then
he’d pester me for obscure sword’n’sorcery items. “Thrustmasters of the
Gormlands . . . Come on, man. It must be in here somewhere.”
I never replied, because Larry was strolling through the doorway. As I got
up, his long stone face, like an ethnic sculpture of Jean Paul Belmondo,
cracked into a smile. Lawrence Alexander Zachoides-Dunbar, my general
dealer with multi-way connections: a Greek father, a Scots mother, and an
assumed Balham accent. His multiple pasts included Cambridge, half a doctorate
in mediaeval literature, the curious end of the antique trade, and a
cameo role in a celebrated dope bust.
“You’re going to love this, Nick,” I can recall the exact cadence of his
catarrhal chuckle, his leer, as he wedged open the bronze door of his old Jaguar
3.4. (I have to get his status details right. Before the Puritan Paramilitaries
erase his memory from the surface of the earth.)
I helped him inside with a tea-chest. Then we struggled with the battered
black trunk on the roof-rack.
“This little business is for the upper room,” he murmured. I told my assistant
Willy to mind the shop; and hoped that his preoccupation with Krishna
Consciousness wouldn’t leave him at the mercy of the more mercenary customers.
We humped everything upstairs, cursing rusty protruding nails, and
dumped it all beside the sagging sofa bed in my office, pushing aside the rumpled
scrolls of day-glo posters,the heaped comix and sex mags. My fibre-optic
desk ornament had been left switched on, like a luminous jelly-fish slowly
expiring in the gloom. For the blinds of the upper room were never raised.
This was my sanctuary, where I could get stuck into my tacky stuff. PP called
it, with decreasing levity, the Chamber of Horrors.
I fumbled at the sink with dirty cups and coffee powder. Larry pulled out
Rizlas, and his tiny brass bird-shaped casket. He began skinning up.

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The Qliphoth

excerpt

(The producer has turned down faders and pulled out patch-leads at random.
He is under panic attack—what will Mr. Chamberlain say? A staff
announcer dashes to an adjacent studio. “. . . owing to technical difficulties, we
cannot bring you the conclusion of our interval talk by Colonel Arthur
Parker-Byrd . . .” The Colonel’s lips still move soundlessly behind the double
glazed partition, he continues his spiritual de-briefing and barely looks up as
the producer blusters in mouthing excuses . . .)
HOW DID I LOSE TRANSMISSION? BEDDOWES GOING TO
THE BOG IN THE MIDST OF DARKNESS TURNING ON ALL THE
LIGHTS I COULD SCREAM…
Afterwards I was never quite awake. Just the old rapid eye movements. Under
the woofly blanket. Under the flaky ceiling. Under the drip of the moon.
Waiting in vain for the next installment of my Teachings . . .
These memoirs confuse me. Why, why, do they insist on blocking my
neurotransmissions with chlorpromazine? Do they think my neurotransmitters
can beep out through my skull? As if I were the old Soviet transmitter
“Woodpecker”, bombarding the West on shortwave at forty million
watts?
It is closing time in the Gardens of the West, I know that for sure. Even
with my Rabbinical hat on, even in this sweltering noon, I feel a chill, a demon
of cold with long claws, and I feel that evil feeling crawling around my hatband.
My metal-framed glasses produce a curious stinging current behind the
bridge of my nose. The black jacket and the black books must protect me.
Jago was obviously exasperated when I first adopted this Hasidic style of
dress—domed hat, long beard and black suit. “I don’t see the point of it,” he
grumbled, “You’re not Jewish. According to our records, you’re not even circumcised.
Supposing we had some Jewish clients! What would they think of this
Hippy-Brigade intellectual in his fancy dress parade of stolen knowledges? I think
you are trying, are you not, to make fun of the Father of Psychoanalysis. Perhaps
in this way you hope to mock I, Jago, a surrogate father. Perhaps you act out your
metaphysical frustrations? Perhaps you read too many of the paper-bound books
on therapy, I don’t know. Better to take your lithium carbonate.”
But my brain ticks relentlessly. Every strand of each synapse is numbered.
Numbered are all the hairs of my beard. And mighty are the powers thereof.
It is overcast in the West, towards the sea. Perhaps it is already raining on
the holiday chalets, the weapon dumps, the garden tourist traps. I hear thunder,
distant megatons of it. All around the Western world…

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The Qliphoth

Gathering clouds are signalling instructions for a great escape. Jago’s drugs
have driven her into catatonia. Now Rocking Rod is haranguing her, jabbing
his finger at the Micky Mouse motif on his T-shirt. His full lips twist and
flex. Jago mechanically makes notes. I know this boy’s going to be lively. A
creature to go talk about with.
There again, the nut rocker might lively himself up so much that I never get
a chance to put a word in. Really I need to have words with my real
flesh-and-blood boy begotten by my ghostly embrace, no, no, my Power Poke
of Polly Pulchritude when she was young, fair, and unspoiled. I need to have
An Holy Word with my divine Son whose name is (honestly) Lucas.
Because I need someone, some living human body, to entrust with my Lore.
It must be passed on verbally, person to person. That is how the Qabalists
transmitted their secrets, word of mouth, a wispy whispering transmission of
spirit power. This record-keeping helps to steer the enormous energies hurtling
through my brain. It enables them to be preserved in the aether of eternity,
where PP and her dragons of dialectic can never destroy them.
Lizard-faced bitch.
Of course, PP, my alien wife-form, can use dialectic to justify everything she’s
ever committed—my committal, for a start. “Daddy’s sickness is simply the
underlying malaise of capitalism. A vast irrational belief system, based on supernatural
fantasy, obsessive commodity fetishism, and opiates of all kinds.” What a
thing to tell a little boy.When he’s being led away crying on a blustery day.
This afternoon is visiting time in the dayroom. Push back the chairs. Stop
dribbling your porridge. Turn up the telly. Eamonn will take round cups of tea.
Last week Beddowes had visitors, two worn women in smocks, and he shepherded
them out into the garden. Showing them his playing fields. I was busy, as
usual, notebooks on my knee, waiting for Lucas’s regular non-appearance.
“Of course, here at Oakhill, we have a vigilante programme of pastoral
care!” He farted importantly. The ladies looked anguished, but he gestured in
my direction.
“As you can see, my staff spend their breaktime keeping records and registers
up to date. Registers are the building blocks of a well run school. Along
with timetables, they are the blocks on which character is stretched.” Then his
face darkened, he began his favourite Shout: “I want men of iron! Fists of steel!
To crush the vermin destroying this learning-base!” As the tears came, his
grey ladies led him inside.
There are several versions of Beddowes’s crisis circulating on this ward.
According to Eamonn the Papist, he ended up locking a class in the woodwork
room and shoving burning rags through the window. Fight fire with cosmic
fire, say I. Sonny Boy Lucas will see the white-hot Light one day.

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