Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

Deadyawn dropped one of his arms over the side of the high chair and wriggled a languid forefinger. 'The Fly' (as the freckled midget was called) pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, but instead of passing it up to the Headmaster, he climbed, with extraordinary agility, up a dozen rungs of the chair and cried into Deadyawn's ear: 'Not yet! not yet! Only three of them here!'

'What's that?' said Deadyawn, in a voice of emptiness. 'Only, three of them here!'

'Which ones,' said Deadyawn, after a long silence.

'Bellgrove, Perch-Prism and Fluke,' said The Fly in his penetrating, fly-like voice. He winked at the three gentlemen through the smoke.

'Won't 'they' do?' murmured Deadyawn, his eyes shut. 'They're on my staff, aren't... they...?'

'Very much so,' said The Fly, 'very much so. But your Edict, sir, is addressed to the whole staff.'

'I've forgotten what it's all about. Remind... me...'

'It's all written down,' said The Fly. 'I have it here, sir. All you have to do is to read it, sir.' And again the small red-headed man honoured the three masters with a particularly intimate wink. There was something lewd in the way the wax-coloured petal of his eyelid dropped suggestively over his bright eye and lifted itself again without a flutter.

'You can give it to Bellgrove. He will read it when the time comes, said Deadyawn, lifting his hanging hand on to the tray before him and languidly stroking the hot-water bottle... 'Find out what's keeping them.'

The Fly pattered down the rungs of the chair and emerged from its shadow.

He crossed the room with quick, impudent steps, his head and rump well back. But before he reached the door it had opened and two Professors entered - one of them, Flannelcat, with his arms full of exercise-books and his mouth full of seedcake, and his companion, Shred, with nothing in his arms, but with his head full of theories about everyone's sub-conscious except his own. He had a friend, by name Shrivell, due to arrive at any moment, who, in contrast, to Shred, was stiff with theories about his own sub-conscious and no one else's.

Flannelcat took his work seriously and was always worried. He had a poor time from the boys and a poor time from his colleagues. A high proportion of the work he did was never noticed, but do it he must. He had a sense of duty that was rapidly turning him into a sick man. The pitiful expression of reproach which never left his face testified to his zeal. He was always too late to find a vacant chair in the Common-room, and always too early to find his class assembled. He was continually finding the arms of his gown tied into knots when he was in a hurry, and that pieces of soap were substituted for his cheese at the masters' table. He had no idea who did these things, nor any idea how they could be circumvented. Today, as he entered the Common-room, with his arms full of books and the seedcake in his mouth, he was in as much of a fluster as usual. His state of mind was not improved by finding the Headmaster looming above him like love among the clouds. In his confusion the seedcake got into his windpipe, the concertina of school books in his arms began to slip and with a loud crash, cascaded to the floor. In the silence that followed there was a moan of pain, but it was only Bellgrove with his hands at his jaw. His noble head was rolling from side to side.

Shred ambled forward from the door and, after bowing slightly in Deadyawn's direction, he buttonholed Bellgrove.

'In pain, my dear Bellgrove? In pain?' he inquired, but in a hard, irritating, inquisitive voice - with as much sympathy in it as might be found in a vampire's breast.

Bellgrove bridled up his lordly head, but did not deign to reply.

'Let us take it that you 'are' in pain,' continued Shred. 'Let us work on that hypothesis as a basis: that Bellgrove, a man of somewhere between sixty and eighty, is in pain. On rather, that he 'thinks' he is. One must be exact. As a man of science, I insist on exactitude. Well, then, what next? Why, to take into account that Bellgrove, supposedly in pain, also thinks that the pain has something to do with his teeth. This is absurd, of course, but must, I say, be taken into account. For what reason? Because they are symbolic. Everything is symbolic. There is no such thing as a "thing" 'per se'. It is only a symbol of something else that is itself, and so on. To my way of thinking his teeth, though apparently rotten, are merely the symbol of a diseased mind.'

Bellgrove snarled.

'And why is the mind diseased?' He took hold of Bellgrove's gown just below that gentleman's left shoulder and, with his face raised, scrutinized the big head above him.

'Your mouth is twitching,' he said. 'Interesting... very... interesting. You probably do not know it, but there was bad blood in your mother. Very bad blood. Or alternatively, you dream of stoats. But no matter, no matter. To return. Where were we? Yes, yes, your teeth - the symbols, we have said - haven't we? of a diseased mind. Now what 'kind' of disease? That is the point. What 'kind' of disease of the mind would affect your teeth like this? Open your mouth, sir...'

But Bellgrove, a fresh twinge undermining his scant reserves of patience and decorum, lifted his huge boot the size of a tray and brought it down with a blind relish upon Mc Shred's feet. It covered them both and must have been excruciatingly painful, for Mr Shred's brow coloured and contracted; but he made no sound save to remark, 'Interesting, very interesting... probably your mother.'

Opus Fluke's body-laughter did everything except break him in half or find vent in a sound.

By now several other Professors had infiltrated through the smoke from the direction of the door. There was Shrivell, Shred's friend, or follower, for he held all Shred's opinions in the reverse direction. But for sheer discipleship Mr Shrivell was a rebel compared to the three gentlemen who, moving in a solid huddle, their three mortar-boards forming between them a practically unbroken surface, had seated themselves in a far corner, like conspirators. They owed allegiance, those three, to no member of the staff, or to any such abstraction as the 'staff' itself, but to an ancient savant, a bearded figure of no specific occupation but whose view of Death, Eternity, Pain (and its non-existence), Truth, or, indeed, anything of a philosophic nature, was like fire in their ears.

In holding the views of their Master on such enormous themes they had developed a fear of their colleagues and a prickliness of disposition which, as Perch-Prism had cruelly pointed out to them more than once, was inconsistent with their theory of non-existence. 'Why are you so prickly,' he used to say, 'when there ain't no pain or prickles?' At which the three, Spiregrain, Splint and Throd, would all at once become a single black tent as they shot into conference with the speed of suction. How they longed at times for their bearded Leader to be with them! He knew all the answers to impertinent questions.

They were unhappy men, these three. Not with native melancholy, but in views of their theories. And there they sat: the smoke wreaths coiling round them, their eyes moving suspiciously from one face to another of their heretic brethren, in jealous fear of a challenge to their faith.

Who else had entered? Only Cutflower, the dandy; Crust, the sponger; and the choleric Mulefire.

Meanwhile The Fly Had been standing in the corridor with his knuckles between his teeth, and had been emitting the shrillest of whistles. Whether they caused the sudden appearance of the few stragglers at the end of the corridor or whether these characters were in any case on their way to the Common-room, there was no doubt that The Fly's shrill music added speed to their steps.

Smoke hung above them as they approached the door, for they had no desire to enter Fluke's fug, as they called it, with virgin lungs.

'The "Yawner's" here,' said The Fly as the Professors came abreast, their gowns fluttering. A dozen eyebrows were raised. It was seldom that they saw the Headmaster.

When the door was closed upon the last of them the leather room was, indeed, no place for anyone with asthma. No flowers could flourish there unless, indeed, some gaunt and horny thing - some cactus long inured to dust and thirst. No singing birds could thrive - no, not the raven, even; for smoke would fill their thin, sweet windpipes. It knew nothing, this atmosphere, of fragrant pastures - of dawn among the dew-bright hazel woods - or rivulets or starlight. It was a leather cave of sepia fog.

The Fly, his sharp insect face hardly visible through the smoke, swarmed up the high chair, hand over hand, and found Deadyawn asleep and his water-bottle stone cold. He prodded the Headmaster in the ribs with his little bony thumb just where Taurus and Scorpio were overlapping. Deadyawn's head had sunk even lower during his sleep and was barely above the tray. His feet were still tucked under him. He was like some creature that had lost its shell, for his face was disgustingly naked. Naked not only physically, but naked in its vacancy.

At The Fly's prod he did not wake with a start, as is the normal thing: that would have been tantamount to a kind of interest in life. He merely opened one eye. Moving it from The Fly's face, he let it wander over the miscellany of gownsmen below him.

He closed his eye again. 'What... are... all... these... people... for?' His voice floated out of his soft head like a paper streamer. 'And why am I' he added.

'It's all very necessary,' answered The Fly. 'Shall I remind you, sir, yet again of Barquentine's Notice?'

'Why not?' said Deadyawn. 'But not too loudly.'

'Or shall Bellgrove read it out, sir?'

'Why not?' said the Headmaster. 'But get my bottle filled first.'

The Fly climbed down the chair-rungs with the cold bottle and threaded his perky way through the group of masters to the door. Before he reached it he had, aided by the poor visibility in the room but mainly by the exceptional agility of his small thin fingers, relieved Flannelcat of an old gold watch and chain, Mr Shred of several coins, and Cutflower of an embroidered handkerchief.

When he returned with the hot-water bottle, Deadyawn was asleep again, but The Fly handed Bellgrove a roll of paper before he climbed up the wheeled chair to waken the Headmaster.

'Read it,' said The Fly. 'It's from Barquentine.'

'Why, 'me'?' said Bellgrove, his hand at his jaw. 'Damn Barquentine with his notices! Damn him, I say!'

He untied the roll of paper and took a few heavy paces to the window, where he held it up to what light there was.

The Professors were by then sitting on the floor, in groups or singly, like Flannelcat among the cold ashes under the mantelpiece. But for a lack of wigwam, squaws, feathers and tomahawks there might have been a tribe encamped beneath the hanging smoke.

'Come along, Bellgrove! Come along, man!' said Perch-Prism. 'Get those teeth of yours into it.'

'For a classical scholar,' said the irritating Shred, 'for a classical scholar, I have always felt that Bellgrove must be handicapped, grievously handicapped, firstly by the difficulty he finds in understanding sentences of more than seven words, and secondly by the stultifying effect on his mind of a frustrated-power complex.'

A snarl was heard through the smoke.

'Is 'that' what it is? Is 'that' what it is? La!'

This was Cutflower's voice. It came from the near end of the long table on which he sat, dangling his thin, elegant legs. There was so high a polish upon his narrow, pointed shoes that the high-lights of the toecaps were visible through the smoke, like torches through a fog. No other sign of feet had been seen in the room for half an hour.