The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 5

  “Just got in.” Mo leaned across the tables, careless of the intervening people, and whispered in Dave’s ear. “I hear you got some mandies.”

  Dave’s face became serious. “Sure. Now?”

  Mo nodded.

  Dave rose slowly and paid his bill to the dark, fat lady at the till. “Thanks, Maria.”

  Dave took Mo by the shoulder and led him out of the café. Mo wondered if Dave was about to finger him. He remembered that Dave had been suspected more than once.

  Dave said softly as they went along; “How many d’you need, Mo?”

  “How much are they?”

  Dave said: “You can have them for ten a piece.”

  “I’ll have five quid’s worth. A hundred, yeah?”

  “Fifty.”

  They got back to Lancaster Road and Dave let himself in with two keys, a Yale and a mortise. They went up a dark, dangerous stairway. Dave’s room was gloomy, thick with incense, with painted blinds covering the window. Jenny sat on a mattress in the corner listening to Ace on the stereo. She was knitting.

  “Hi, Mo,” she said. “So you found him.”

  Mo sat down on the mattress in the opposite corner. “How’s it going, Jenny?” he said. He didn’t like Dave, but he liked Jenny. He made a big effort to be polite. Dave was standing by a chest of drawers, dragging a box from under a pile of tasselled curtains. Mo looked past him and saw Jimi standing there. He was dressed in a hand-painted silk shirt with roses all over it. There was a jade talisman on a silver chain round his throat. He had the white Strat in his hands. His eyes were closed as he played it. Almost immediately Mo guessed he was looking at a poster.

  Dave counted fifty mandies into an aspirin bottle. Mo reached into his jeans and found some money. He gave Dave a five pound note and Dave gave him the bottle. Mo opened the bottle and took out a lot of the pills, swallowing them fast. They didn’t act right away, but he felt better for taking them. He got up.

  “See you later, Dave.”

  “See you later, man,” said Dave. “Maybe in Finch’s tonight.”

  “Yeah.”

  8

  Mo couldn’t remember how the fight started. He’d been sitting quietly in a corner of the pub drinking his pint of bitter when that big fat fart who was always in there causing trouble decided to pick on him. He remembered getting up and punching the fat fart. There had been a lot of confusion then and he had somehow knocked the fat fart over the bar. Then a few people he knew pulled him away and took him back to a basement in Oxford Gardens where he listened to some music.

  It was Band of Gypsys that woke him up. Listening to “Machine Gun” he realised suddenly that he didn’t like it. He went to the pile of records and found other Hendrix albums. He played Are You Experienced, the first album, and Electric Ladyland, and he liked them much better. Then he played Band of Gypsys again.

  He looked round the dark room. Everyone seemed to be totally spaced out.

  “He died at the right time,” he said. “It was over for him, you know. He shouldn’t have come back.”

  He felt in his pocket for his bottle of mandies. There didn’t seem to be that many left. Maybe someone had ripped them off in the pub. He took a few more and reached for the bottle of wine on the table, washing them down. He put Are You Experienced on the deck again and lay back. “That was really great,” he said. He fell asleep. He shook a little bit. His breathing got deeper and deeper. When he started to vomit in his sleep nobody noticed. By that time everyone was right out of it. He choked quietly and then stopped.

  9

  About an hour later a black man came into the room. He was tall and elegant. He radiated energy. He wore a white silk shirt and white jeans. There were shiny patent leather boots on his feet. A chick started to get up as he came into the room. She looked bemused.

  “Hi,” said the newcomer. “I’m looking for Shakey Mo. We ought to be going.”

  He peered at the sleeping bodies and then looked closer at one which lay a little apart from the others. There was vomit all over his face and over his shirt. His skin was a ghastly, dirty green. The black man stepped across the others and knelt beside Mo, feeling his heart, taking his pulse.

  The chick stared stupidly at him. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s OD’d,” the newcomer said quietly. “He’s gone. D’you want to get a doctor or something, honey?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said.

  The black man got up and walked to the door.

  “Hey,” she said. “You look just like Jimi Hendrix, you know that?”

  “Sure.”

  “You can’t be—you’re not, are you? I mean, Jimi’s dead.”

  Jimi shook his head and smiled his old smile. “Shit, lady. They can’t kill Jimi.” He laughed as he left.

  The chick glanced down at the small, ruined body covered in its own vomit. She swayed a little, rubbing at her thighs. She frowned. Then she went as quickly as she could from the room, hampered by her long cotton dress, and into the street. It was nearly dawn and it was cold. The tall figure in the white shirt and jeans didn’t seem to notice the cold. It strode up to the big Mercedes camper parked near the end of the street.

  The chick began to run after the black truck as it started up and rolled a little way before it had to stop on the red light at the Ladbroke Grove intersection.

  “Wait,” she shouted. “Jimi!”

  But the camper was moving before she could reach it.

  She saw it heading north towards Kilburn.

  She wiped the clammy sweat from her face. She must be freaking. She hoped when she got back to the basement that there wouldn’t really be a dead guy there.

  She didn’t need it.

  Lunching with the Antichrist (1993)

  In the early ’90s, Moorcock began an ambitious project of reordering, revising and republishing much of his back-catalogue in a large set of definitive omnibuses.

  The revision process gave him the opportunity to change several character names in order to bring them inline with the developing “VonBek” series, which had begun in 1981 with The War Hound and the World’s Pain—although the name’s derivation goes back as far as Katinka van Bak in 1973’s The Champion of Garathorm—and which culminated in the “Second Ether” trilogy of Blood, Fabulous Harbours and The War Amongst the Angels (1995/’96).

  So, into many stories, old and new, along came the von Beks and their curious relationships with both Lucifer and the Holy Grail, plus assorted Beggs, Becks, Bekovs, Beckers, Van Beeks and the like.

  (For the purposes of this collection, any revised names have been reverted to their original forms.)

  Here is one such tale—a new story, rather than a revision—introducing us to Edwin Begg, the Clapham Antichrist. It was originally published in 1993, in an anthology, Smoke Signals (Serpent’s Tail), edited by the London Arts Board.

  “Lunching with the Antichrist” also features another mention of Jerry Cornelius’s scurrilous brother Frank.

  In memoriam, Horst Grimm

  Begg Mansions,

  Sporting Club Square

  The Editor,

  Fulham & Hammersmith Telegraph,

  Bishops Palace Avenue,

  London W14

  13th October 1992

  Sir,

  SPIRIT OF THE BLITZ

  It is heartening to note, as our economy collapses perhaps for the last time, a return to the language and sentiments of mutual self-interest. London was never the kindest of English cities but of late her cold, self-referential greed has been a watchword around the world. Everything we value is threatened in the name of profit.

  I say nothing original when I mourn the fact that it took the Blitz to make Londoners achieve a humanity and heroism they never thought to claim for themselves and which no one expected or demanded of them! Could we not again aspire to achieve that spirit, without the threat of Hitler but with the same optimistic courage? Can we not, in what is surely an hour of need, marshal what is best in us and f
ind new means of achieving that justice, equity and security for which we all long? The existing methods appear to create as many victims as they save.

  Yours faithfully, Edwin Begg,

  former vicar of St. Odhran’s, Balham.

  HEAR! HEAR! says the Telegraph. This week’s Book Token to our Letter of the Week! Remember, your opinions are important to us and we want to see them! A £5.00 Book Token for the best!

  1 My First Encounter with the Clapham Antichrist; His Visions & His Public Career; His Expulsion from the Church & Subsequent Notoriety; His Return to Society & Celebrity as a Sage; His Mysterious & Abrupt Departure into Hermitage; His Skills in the Kitchen.

  “Spirit of the Blitz” (a sub-editor’s caption) was the last public statement of the Clapham Antichrist. Until I read the letter at a friend’s I believed Edwin Begg dead some twenty years ago. The beloved TV eccentric had retired in the 1950s to live as a recluse in Sporting Club Square, West Kensington. I had known him intimately in the ’60s and ’70s and was shocked to learn he was still alive. I felt a conflicting mixture of emotions, including guilt. Why had I so readily accepted the hearsay of his death? I wrote to him at once. Unless he replied to the contrary I would visit him on the following Wednesday afternoon.

  I had met Begg first in 1966 when as a young journalist I interviewed him for a series in the Star about London’s picturesque obscurities. Then too I had contacted him after reading one of his letters to the Telegraph. The paper, still a substantial local voice, was his only source of news, delivered to him weekly. He refused to have a telephone and communicated mostly through the post.

  I had hoped to do a few paragraphs on the Antichrist’s career, check a couple of facts with him and obtain a short, preferably amusing, comment on our Fab Sixties. I was delighted when, with cheerful courtesy, Edwin Begg had agreed by return to my request. In a barely legible old-fashioned hand he invited me to lunch.

  My story was mostly drafted before I set off to see him. Research had been easy. We had half a filing drawer on Edwin Begg’s years of notoriety, first before the War then afterwards as a radio and early TV personality. He had lived in at least a dozen foreign cities. His arguments were discussed in every medium and he became a disputed symbol. Many articles about him were merely sensational, gloating over alleged black magic rites, sexual deviation, miracle-working, blasphemy and sorcery. There were the usual photographs and also drawings, some pretending to realism and others cruel cartoons: the Clapham Antichrist as a monster with blazing eyes and glittering fangs, architect of the doom to come. One showed Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini as his progeny.

  The facts were pretty prosaic; in 1931 at the age of twenty-four Begg was vicar of St. Odhran’s, Balham, a shabby North London living where few parishioners considered themselves respectable enough to visit a church and were darkly suspicious of those who did. The depression years had almost as many homeless and hungry people on the streets as today. Mosley was gathering a more militant flock than Jesus, and those who opposed the Fascists looked to Oxford or the secular left for their moral leadership. Nonetheless the Reverend Begg conscientiously performed his duty, offering the uncertain comforts of his calling to his flock.

  Then quite suddenly in 1933 the ordinary hard-working cleric became an urgent proselytiser, an orator. From his late-Victorian pulpit he began preaching a shocking message urging Christians to act according to their principles and sacrifice their own material ambitions to the common good, to take a risk on God being right, as he put it. This Tolstoyan exhortation eventually received enough public attention to make his sermons one of London’s most popular free attractions from Southwark to Putney, which of course brought him the attention of the famous Bermondsey barrackers, the disapproval of his establishment and the closer interest of the Press.

  The investigators the Church sent down heard a sermon touching mainly on the current state of the Spanish Republic, how anarchists often acted more like ideal Christians than the priests, how people seemed more willing to give their lives to the anarchists than to the cause of Christ. This was reported in Reynolds News, tipped off that the investigators would be there, as Begg’s urging his congregation to support the coming Antichrist. The report was more or less approving. The disapproving church investigators, happy for a lead to follow, confirmed the reports. Overnight, the Reverend Edwin Begg, preaching his honest Christian message of brotherly love and equity under the law, became the Clapham Antichrist, Arch-Enemy of British Decency, Proud Mocker of All Religion and Hitler’s Right Hand, a creature to be driven from our midst.

  In the course of a notoriously hasty hearing Edwin Begg was unfrocked, effectively by public demand. In his famous defence Begg confirmed the general opinion of his guilt by challenging the commission to strip itself naked and follow Christ, if they were indeed Christians! He made a disastrous joke: and if they were an example of modern Christians, he said, then after all he probably was the Antichrist!

  Begg never returned to his vicarage. He went immediately to Sporting Club Square. Relatives took him in, eventually giving him his own three-roomed flat where it was rumoured he kept a harem of devil-worshipping harlots. The subsequent Siege of Sporting Club Square in which the News of the World provoked a riot causing one near-fatality and thousands of pounds’ worth of damage was overshadowed by the news of Hitler’s massacre of his stormtroopers, the SA.

  Goebbels’s propaganda became more interesting and rather more in the line of an authentic harbinger of evil, and at last Edwin Begg was left in peace.

  Usually attached to a circus or a fair and always billed as “Reverend” Begg, The Famous Clapham Antichrist! he began to travel the country with his message of universal love. After his first tours he was never a great draw since he disappointed audiences with urgent pleas for sanity and the common good and never rose to the jokes or demands for miracles, but at least he had discovered a way of making a living from his vocation. He spent short periods in prison and there were rumours of a woman in his life, someone he had mentioned early on, though not even the worst of the Sundays found evidence to suggest he was anything but confirmed in his chastity.

  When the war came Edwin Begg distinguished himself in the ambulance service, was wounded and decorated. Then he again disappeared from public life. This was his first long period of seclusion in Begg Mansions until suddenly on 1st May, 1949, encouraged by his cousin Robert in BBC Talks, he gave at 9:45 p.m. on the Home Service the first of his Fireside Observer chats.

  No longer the Old Testament boom of the pulpit or the sideshow, the Fireside Observer’s voice was level, reassuring, humorous, a little sardonic sometimes when referring to authority. He reflected on our continuing hardships and what we might gain through them if we kept trying—what we might expect to see for our children. He offered my parents a vision of a wholesome future worth working for, worth making a few sacrifices for, and they loved him.

  He seemed the moral spirit of the Festival of Britain, the best we hoped to become, everything that was decent about being British. An entire book was published proving him the object of a plot in 1934 by a Tory bishop, a Fascist sympathiser, and there were dozens of articles, newsreels and talks describing him as the victim of a vicious hoax or showing how Mosley had needed a scapegoat.

  Begg snubbed the Church’s willingness to review his case in the light of his new public approval and continued to broadcast the reassuring ironies which lightened our 1950s darkness and helped us create the golden years of the 1960s and ’70s. He did not believe his dream to be illusory.

  By 1950 he was on television, part of the Thinkers’ Club with Gilbert Harding and Professor Joad, which every week discussed an important contemporary issue. The programme received the accolade of being lampooned in Radio Fun as The Stinker’s Club with Headwind Legg which happened to be one of my own childhood favourites. He appeared, an amiable sage, on panel games, quiz shows, programmes called A Crisis of Faith or Turning Point and at religious conferences eagerly displaying their
tolerance by soliciting the opinion of a redeemed antichrist.

  Suddenly, in 1955, Begg refused to renew all broadcasting contracts and retired from public life, first to travel and finally to settle back in Begg Mansions with his books and his journals. He never explained his decision and then the public lost interest. New men with brisker messages were bustling in to build utopia for us in our lifetime.

  Contenting himself with a few letters mostly on parochial matters to the Hammersmith Telegraph, Edwin Begg lived undisturbed for a decade. His works of popular philosophy sold steadily until British fashion changed. Writing nothing after 1955, he encouraged his books to go out of print. He kept his disciples, of course, who sought his material in increasingly obscure places and wrote to him concerning his uncanny understanding of their deepest feelings, the ways in which he had dramatically changed their lives, and to whom, it was reported, he never replied.

  The first Wednesday I took the 28 from Notting Hill Gate down North Star Road to Greyhound Gardens. I had brought my A–Z. I had never been to Sporting Club Square before and was baffled by the surrounding network of tiny twisting streets, none of which seemed to go in the same direction for more than a few blocks, the result of frenzied rival building work during the speculative 1880s when developers had failed to follow the plans agreed between themselves, the freeholder, the architect and the authorities. The consequent recession ensured that nothing was ever done to remedy the mess. Half-finished crescents and abrupt culs-de-sac, odd patches of wasteland, complicated rights of way involving narrow alleys, walls, gates and ancient pathways were interrupted, where bomb damage allowed, by the new council estates, totems of clean enlightenment geometry whose erection would automatically cause all surrounding social evils to wither away. I had not expected to find anything quite so depressing and began to feel sorry for Begg ending his days in such circumstances, but turning out of Margrave Passage I came suddenly upon a cluster of big unkempt oaks and cedars gathered about beautiful wrought-iron gates in the baroque oriental regency style of Old Cogges, that riot of unnatural ruin, the rural scat of the Beggs which William the Goth remodelled in 1798 to rival Strawberry Hill. They were miraculous in the early afternoon sun: the gates to paradise.