Wilson - Ripley Bogle : a novel

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, The beggars are coming to town.

Ripley Bogle

It Begins

(Enter man with money. He waits. Enter woman, misclothed and passionate. They rut. Exeunt.)

' Aaaaaaaaeeeeeeiiiiccchhhh!'

The world's disquiet gets underway. Birth scene. The calm cry of parturition. For the one. The incandescent infant. Mrs Bogle screaming her way to the unwilling production of Master Ripley Bogle, the famed. Splayed knees and bucking loins. Dirty, heavyheaded, eponymous bastard shoving his angry way out.

' AaaaauuuuuuuuunrrriTCCCCCttttttttccccchhhhhh!'

Mrs Bogle breaks wind in a loud spluttering rasp. Middle-aged midwife, Mrs Johns, creases her brow in distaste while naughty Nurse Carter tries but insincerely to hide her smirk. Young Dr Poole, fledgling medicaster, vents an eyeless smile of considerable width. Blushing, boyish, he looks at Nurse Carter across that great swollen belly and the messy, wideopen legs.

'Yeeeeeaaaaeeeaeaeaearrrgggghhhtthk!'

There is no song, no celebratory ode, nor any rejoicing nor merrymaking in the castle halls of his great Godly Gaelic clan. The pipes are still as he tears and splatters his uterine path into the wilder world. A bawl will come soon, a trumpet of arrival and hardy intent but that will be very much of his own making.

' Aaaaaaaaarrrgggghhhhhhaaaeeieiiiiiikkkkk!'

Little bastard pushing hard now. Has to. Stretching those mother's loins to impossible, inelastic lengths. His first debt.

Everquick, he has caught the general fever of confusion and panic in the world and he's buggered if he's going to suffer for it. This is his moment and a pox on the others. 'Oooooooooooooohhhhhhh.' With a quiet, weary retching noise, Mrs Bogle completes her ripened task. From her parted, stirruped legs plops a son. Unnamed and ugly, he makes little impression on that worldroom. An augury of his rivercatching life.

Thursday

Thank you.

I seem to be spending increasing amounts of my time in thinking about my birth. This is, I freely admit, a futile thing to be doing. The event was, alas, poorly documented and my own recollections of it are ranged upon the impenetrable side of hazy. However, that is probably how it was - more or less. I feel it in my bones.

It must be said that now is not a good time for birthly thoughts. The world is but little like a womb at the moment, for me at any rate. For instance, a slow, inexorable pulse of cold shivering is in the process of threading its way from my coccyx to my liver and I'm damp and dribbling and dank. I've run right out of fags and I have not eaten in rather more than three days. Now, does that sound womblike to you? No, indeed.

June. Lovely frozen June. Curiously enough, a large proportion of English folk tend fondly to think of the month of June as being situated during the summer. This is patently bollocks. Admittedly, the trees mount a spurious verdance and people endeavour to play feeble cricket on a variety of blasted heaths but I can assure you that there is no way in which the term 'summer' can be justified. No way! Only we - we the destitute, the homeless, the vagabonds - only we know the Siberian truth of an English June. We are its allies and confidants. We are on first-name terms with its frozen strangle and frosty grip.

Thus, here I am in the middle of that month, with frostbitten testicles and iceberg feet, doing serious hand-to-hand with hypothermia. I'm so cold I'm not even hungry, for chrissakes! (Though Malnutrition and Attenuation coyly beckon with

mild eyes and smiles urbane.) Yes, the cold is bad but fading slowly. I'm ignoring it as best I can. This seems the sensible course. Anyway, after a while, real cold - the proper Arctic assault - becomes theoretical. Like a disquieting intellectual conviction, it nags but fails to irritate. It anaesthetises against itself. Which is nice of it. All this gives the business of frostbite a kind of grotesque ascetic respectability but I could still do without it... that's just how I am.

Just at the moment, I'm sitting on an icy parkbench in St James's Park, grimly satirising the shoddy prismatic glimmer of evening. This is, I concede, a wildly emetic thing to be doing but my menu of alternatives is not exactly encyclopaedic just now.

Two curious things to be noted.

First; despite the arse-numbing temperature and general high discomfort, I can't help feeling rather sentimental about this particular parkbound glide of twilight. I hate to say it but it looks as though the world has really dressed up for me tonight. It must be going somewhere nice. If I knew it a little better I'd try to cadge a fiver or something. Now, that's aestheticism for you. I won't though. The world and I are a little sniffy with each other these days.

The second thing to be noted is the fact that I am sitting on this frozen bench, threatening to flop over at any minute and die of pure poverty and all the while I am less than three hundred yards away from Buckingham Palace. (This thought has an annoying tendency to make me giggle hysterically.) The Queen is in there. Jesus, maybe she's even sitting there at one of those rigid, blinking windows right now, watching me! Laughing at me while I get all Belsenesque and pissed on. (It's raining now. Fucking rain.) It wouldn't surprise me in the least. I mean, the merest mutts in that place are better fed than I am. Well, then again, the merest mutts in most places are better fed than me, for that matter. (Here I giggle again like the true arsehole that I am.) It occurs to me that I am better educated better looking and a nicer person than the Queen and yet I am still starving to death in her front garden. What would Charlie Dickens have said about this, I wonder?

Actually, there is a third curious thing to be noted. The most

capricious and witless of all and that is that I don't really mind too much about any of this. Not really. Not desperately. I mean to say, the fact that I am a filthy, foodless, cashless tramp doesn't seem to be bothering me in the way I'm sure it should. I must be off my chump. Since when has indigence been a breeding ground for blithe insouciance? But there it is. In the midst of my poverty and degradation I am strangely, nebulously happy. Prat and irrepressible little curie that I am, I sense that things aren't after all so very bad. Needless to say, I am hugely mistaken. Things are very bad indeed and set fair for getting worse. Nevertheless, I view myself in this pure, cool moment; chastened and made lean by hardship. The fight is on but I'm standing still. Ducking and weaving is not for me. I leave that to the well-fed, the wise. Okay, so I may well be missing the old bedless, malnutritional, frostbitten point here but it matters little.

Just think of what it gives me, this deprivation, this harsh philanthrope. Whoops! Rather frantically I scrabble for the recollection of what exactly it does give me. Ah! Oh yes, that's it. Of course.