‘It’s true. Monophysite’s honour.’
‘Go on then, tell me some more things I don’t know?’
‘Like what?’
‘Well if I don’t know I can hardly say, can I?’
‘’Tis true, my dear.’
‘I know, five minutes life-swap you first.’
‘Mmmm. Where did we leave me?’
‘You were dating Astarot and taking your finals.’
‘Indeed. Well, having read my dissertation on Sir James Murray, the University of Serendipity duly awarded me …’
‘Who?’
‘You jest? Sir James Murray. The man was on a par with Sir Albie himself. Author of Electricity as a Cause of Cholera or other Epidemics, 1849. No? Well, the central thesis of the book was that germs didn’t exist and that all malaise was the direct cause of electrical disturbance. Cholera, malaria and influenza resulted from disturbed electro-galvanic currents. Thus the cure for illness was to lighten the density of the atmosphere around patients. So to ward off the mysterious and all perverting currents of irregular electricity, one should first cover the patient with silk then position buckets filled with quicklime in propitious locations around the house. He also recommended that houses should be constructed on nonconductive platforms and that cities should be surrounded by massive batteries to abate untoward galvanism. The point of …’
‘Yan, you’re doing it again. You. You’re supposed to be talking about you.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Jayne,’ he held his head in mock frustration. ‘You don’t seem to appreciate my difficulty in using the first person singular. The Zaparo have no word for I. It’s either you (uamsca) or everything (ahpikondia), which incidentally also means paradise. I’ve,’ he feigned pain at uttering the word, ‘told you this before.’
Jayne was an utter hog for the man’s seasoned bullshit. Whether any of it was true, which frankly she doubted, she had to credit him with hermetic consistency. The snatches of Zaparo language were always the same, as were his descriptions of life in the yage-swigging, snake- and jaguar-infested forests of the Amazon tributaries. Of course she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that any Ecuadorian Indian tribe could be fair skinned and ginger haired as he maintained (canopial colouring he called it), yet she half wondered whether there actually was or had been a shamanic tribe named Zaparo, whether recherché hallucinogens such as yage and ayahuasca really did somewhere exist and whether there actually had been sects and tribes called Monophysites, Eleusinians, Tschamikuro and Piro and individuals such as Sir James Murray, Tominaga Nakamoto, Al-Ghazzali and John Dewey.
So, he was mad. He was without doubt the kindest, least vindictive or proud man she’d encountered in her twenty-six and a half years on the planet – usually. And when it was over, which inevitably it would be because – as Buddha, Heraclitus, David Hume and Yantra all said – everything changes; nothing remains constant, she would no doubt kill herself. Yet, for now, she was determined to drink as much of this fleeting moment in this fleeting incarnation as was possible.
The dharma of Yantra’s life was indeed that everything is created by a series of causes and conditions and everything disappears by the same rule. At least, as far as women were concerned it was. Before Jayne, Biddy’s passenger seat was reserved for Sylvie, a Scandinavian au pair who had wanted to see the country. Well, he’d shown her the country all right. Left her sleeping in a tent in the Brecon Beacons and if that wasn’t the country then nothing was. Still he hadn’t been all bad to Sylvie (or Hathor), he’d given her a baby. Before her there was Jill who called herself Nephthys and reckoned she could foretell the future. One thing she hadn’t foretold as the acid went wrong in her at Glastonbury was that he’d moved into Sylvie’s tent. Then there was Juliette who gave him gonorrhoea – of the tongue – and forced him into a humiliating encounter with conventional medicine and the establishment. Before her there was Wolfsbane who taught him to juggle and throw diabolo. Cecily Simpson, the journalist, who’d interviewed him and wound up a participant observer preceded her. Indeed, as far back as he could remember, he’d been able to seduce women. Yantra held that as long as one had reservoirs of patience and gentleness, unfaltering respect for the feminine principle, an off-beat sense of humour, five thousand years of potted wisdom and the most beautiful eyes in the world, very few women on this wonderful planet were immune. Not that he abused his God-granted powers. For he maintained that one of the essential secrets of seduction was that a man should display a genuine desire to give pleasure to a woman and that this desire should exceed even his own lust. What woman could possibly resist, he wondered. And, of course, once initiated in Taoist lovemaking techniques, that was that, it was the open road from then on.
Still it had to be said, Jayne was different. They’d been together for over five years now and things had cooled only slightly from the initial white-hot. To ditch her merely for ideological reasons would be a needless martyrdom. Of course, Yantra was in no doubt of the necessity of their mutual infidelities (although he half suspected that Jayne only slept with other blokes to affect a childish revenge on him). Quite simply, people were not the sort of things that could be owned. Getting uptight about that sort of thing would be like throwing a wobbler over someone pampering Endy – negative to the point of annihilation.
‘Yan, you’re not listening,’ he heard her say.
‘Yeah well, I’m sorry but, you know, suburbia bores me.’ He yawned to prove this. ‘The only good thing about suburbia is that it’s next to subversion in the dictionary.’
‘And in my biography. Would you like hear about my subversion?’
One of the problems of being stuck in a van with someone is, no matter how much you may revere them, after about three months or so, you know pretty much everything there is to know about them. And though the repeated and time-tended tales of their rites of passage may offer a vague ritualistic comfort, they can also become bloody boring.
Why she had the need to embark on almost poetic descriptions of the painful mundanities of Hemel Hempstead and her subsequent conversion to a life of the spirit through hallucinogenic chemicals was beyond him. He knew the script and would almost feel his stomach knot with shame when she paused before making the predictable aside that the decision to take that first blotter was the best thing she’d ever done in her life and express her, doubtlessly fraudulent, conviction that everyone should be made to take acid at least once in their lives by law. Still he knew that to stop her now would be cruel in the extreme.
‘Yes, tell me about your conversion on the road to the Essex University library.’ He’d said too much and she looked sadly down at the van floor.
‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed. ‘It’s very old ground, I know.’
He kissed her and ran his hands up inside her coat.
‘There’s little wrong in repeating a journey.’ He kissed her again. ‘In fact, baby, some journeys just get better and better and fucking better each time you do them.’
‘The usual is it, Mr Entwhistle?’ Jennifer asked with uncharacteristic verve and skipped over to the drinks cabinet. ‘Ho, ho. You romantic fool,’ she laughed glancing over at the flowers crowded into a couple of vases. ‘Expression of gratitude, five, three.’
Her husband raised an eyebrow.
‘Well now, a snifter, eh? I think that very much depends on the whereabouts of the Unspeakably Behaved.’
Jennifer went ahead and poured. She was humming and, perhaps, vaguely ecstatic. This was more than flower power. Doubtless something to do with the Telegraph cryptic, he concluded, and submerged into his armchair.
‘Guess.’
‘Joined a hippy convoy in Wiltshire?’
‘Nope.’
‘She hasn’t …