CHANGING WORLDS
Long Prose
Copyright © 1976-2009 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
Chapters 1-8
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CHAPTER ONE
Michael Savage wearily sat on his bed and casually ran his hand
over its puffy white quilt, as though to brush away some loose hairs that had
fallen out of his head during the evening.
He had just ceased listening to side two of a cassette and, now that it
stood motionless in its deck, he was in some doubt as to his next choice of
musical entertainment, particularly in light of the fact that his tape library
was, as yet, comparatively small in relation to the considerable size of his
by-now redundant record collection.
Naturally, his
neighbours wouldn't want to hear the same cassettes too often. Indeed, to judge by the philistine nature of
their pursuits, it was more than probable that they wouldn't want to hear
anything of his at all; though what he was supposed to do with himself, all
evening, other than listen to music and play his acoustic guitar, God alone
knew! Perhaps his neighbours would have
preferred him to watch TV or listen to some serial on the radio, to do
something they could all relate to, irrespective of the fact that young Savage
had never felt any great inclination to acquiesce in what he considered to be
philistine indulgences. True, he did
possess a small radio of reasonably decent hi-fi, but he had no qualms about
being rigorously selective, and only listened to it when there was anything
worth listening to, which, from recent experience, didn't seem to be all that
often!
However, there
occasionally came moments when he was at a complete loss for something to do,
when he didn't fancy walking the drab-looking local streets, listening to
music, reading a book, or practising blues runs on his clapped-out acoustic
guitar. Then, in desperation, he would
turn to the radio, find a discussion, broadcast, story, or play and, if the
subject-matter didn't particularly appeal to him, just listen to the words,
noting pronunciations, vocal inflections, tonal changes, individual mannerisms,
etc., and contenting himself, as far as possible, with the English language,
that ubiquitous tongue of the modern world.
At least that sufficed to keep one in touch with the human voice. One could learn a lot from that, indeed one
could! But not tonight. For some reason the thought of listening to
the radio never even crossed his mind.
He got up off his bed,
wearily shuffled across to his radio-cassette player and removed the tape. 'Too much dust here,' he thought, giving the
tape deck a quick inspection. 'It
wouldn't cost me that much to buy some head-cleaning fluid. I suppose I don't normally take such things
that seriously, not being particularly fussy about the condition of my
equipment.'
He quickly slid the
cassette into its plastic case and returned it to its allocated place in one of
the three racks which served to house the rudiments of what he fancied to be a
quintessential distillation of choice sounds, the making of a musical
obsession. As usual, he scanned both the
composers' names and titles of these tapes, as if to reassure himself that
nothing infra dignum or irrelevant to his
tastes had crept-in on the sly, that he wouldn't have to throw anything out
because of a suspicion of being duped by incompatible material. How often, in the past, had he waded, with
critical self-doubt, through both books and records in search of misfits,
cultural pariahs which seemed a grave obstacle to his peace of mind, a source
of sporadic incertitude and sleepless nights!
Ideally, he wanted his various collections to be representative of his
current tastes, the essence of a private and highly personal culture that
changed as he changed, enabling him to discard those examples of his literary
or musical curiosity which somehow failed to satisfy him. He had no desire to participate in the habit
of one who hangs-on to everything he buys.
For the sight of a work the cover or contents of which he detested was
not beyond evoking an analogue, in his wayward mind, with the sight of a
crucifix to Count Dracula!
He turned away from both
tapes and ruminations alike, walked slowly across to his one and only clock
(which rested face-down on the top shelf of his bookcase because it rarely
worked in an upright position), picked it up and noted the time. At
"Hello? Oh, hello!" As usual it was for the ugly-looking female
student from the room above. "How
are you? Yeah, fine. We went out for the day. Are you?
When? Well I never! Oh, don't!
You're kidding! He's such a ...
Ha-ha! Yeah, I thought as much. Aren't men ...?"
Michael turned away from
his bookcase, from where her strident voice was all too easily overheard, and
wearily sat down on his bed again. Not
once in over six months had he answered that damn telephone. He had consistently shunned it, even though
it usually rang dozens of times a day. It was never for him anyway, so what would
have been the point? He certainly wasn't
one to run around in the capacity of unofficial servant to his neighbours! He didn't even know who they all were anyway;
they came and went and, as far as possible, he took little or no notice of
them. In this house, people generally
kept to themselves and didn't ask questions.
"I see. So you're going next week? Oh, damn!
Too bad. Okay then. Bye."
The telephone clicked off and heavy feet, shod in high heels, ran up the
thinly carpeted wooden stairs to the first-floor landing, leaving him to his
thoughts again.
'Subdued conversation,
footsteps above the ceiling, coming to a halt, starting again, stopping,
starting, shuffling across her floor. Be
helpful if I had eyes that could see through the ceiling, see exactly what
goes-on up there. Frustrates me,
listening to their noise every evening without being able to see the cause of
it. Better still if she's wearing a
short skirt. See if her legs are any
better than her face.... Reminds me vaguely of when I was about three years old
and used to crawl between my mother's feet to discover what she kept up her
skirt. She usually kicked my toy cars
away when I got too close, so I never did get to see very much. Something in the order of an early rebuff,
you could say. Made it difficult for me
to get the impression of being wanted.
Like that time after she had cold-bloodedly sent me to the Children's
Home, several years later, when the house parents there kicked me around the
floor and told me that I was the lowest thing on earth because their infant son
had a moment before wriggled through my arms and fallen onto the carpet,
slightly bumping his head in the process.
Hard to forget an experience like that because your emotions are so
highly charged at the time, and that's generally how memories stick. Of course, in the heat of the moment his
parents wouldn't have realized they were inflicting nasty memories on me, and
even if they had they probably wouldn't have cared, considering that their only
child was slightly hurt in falling and I was adjudged responsible for it. Then in the throes of what one can only
suppose to be a repentant mood they later turn around and tell me that God
knows all about my sins, but that He will stick by me in times of need if only
I give my heart to His keeping. Yeah,
and a vengeful old jerk He must be too, if they were anything to judge by!'
He angrily stared a
moment through the narrow french windows of his bedsitter, seeing but not looking. He had no real desire to look at anything
anyway, since the view beyond them hardly constituted anything particularly
worth looking at, so overgrown with weeds was the back garden. He might just as well turn back to his
thoughts again.
'Thank goodness that
phone doesn't ring quite as often as the one in my last lodgings! Conversations going on most of the night, and
sometimes as late as
On the opposite wall the
large colour poster of a painting by Salvador Dali entitled Swans
Reflecting Elephants began to impose its outlandish landscape on his
lethargic sensibilities, and the almost instantaneous mental assimilation of it
engendered, in his imagination, the notion that he was driving some space vehicle
through uncharted territory towards the edge of a lake where the aforementioned
scene suddenly arrested his stunned attention and brought the vehicle in
question to a jolting halt. He was
staring through the windscreen at what might well have been a scene on
Mars. For had a weirder vision
previously crossed the windscreen of any imaginary space-vehicle of his, he
would have known it and been able to corroborate it with dozens of examples
freshly culled from the repository of a memory well-furnished with such
landscapes.
However, for the time
being he was both highly absorbed in the insight afforded him by this latest
discovery and secretly elated that he should have conceived of such a notion in
the midst of several more down-to-earth ruminations. Indeed, Dali's brilliant idea of fusing the
watery reflections of swans and nearby tree trunks with the heads and legs of
on-the-spot elephants had already appealed to his imagination, and he now
thought it just as well that you didn't discover everything about any given
thing all at once but, on the contrary, gradually woke up to various aspects of
it when the time and mood were propitious.
For such a gradual process of enlightenment helped to make life more
interesting. As with a multitude of
other things, you had to wait until you had matured into them before really
acquiring a worthwhile appreciation of their true worth.
'When I was in the local
bookshop the other day', he resumed thoughtfully, 'that book on Dali easily
caught my eye. Bit I read about his
meditating in front of a Vermeer and subsequently sketching a pair of
rhinoceros horns ... very surreal indeed!
The essence of Dali.
Surrealism-while-you-wait; camera poised to click real-life surreal
montage. Vaguely reminds me of a former
friend of mine who thought Dali a lunatic because it was reported that the
painter had told some interviewer he would rather go to a restaurant and order
a lobster with telephone, or lobster telephone, than the usual gastronomic
fare. Typical example of what Baudelaire
called "Universal misunderstanding", as if Dali were a plumber,
insurance agent, clerk, or lawyer to spend time mouthing their jargon instead
of his own, i.e. that of a fully fledged genius of the surreal. I suppose few people would think it odd if a
lawyer discussed law in a restaurant.
Perfectly feasible, if a shade tasteless. Could even give his fellow diners
indigestion. More lawyers in the world
than artists of Dali's calibre anyway.
The sanity of numbers.'
The old woman who lived
in the next-door room had just closed the front door behind her return and was
busily rattling her keys about in the hallway.
'She always makes such an abominable row in trying to find the keyhole
to her room that anyone would think the damn thing kept moving about!' thought
Michael in exasperation.
However, she wasn't
quite the doting old crone he liked to imagine, and he half-surmised that she
made a nuisance of herself on purpose, as a form of retaliation for the music
he habitually played in the evenings.
Bearing in mind the thinness of the wall separating their two rooms,
that seemed a fairly plausible conjecture, at any rate!
Succeeding with the key
at last, she entered her room and Michael Savage's thoughtful head heard the
door slam-to behind her. 'Safe at last!'
he went on, with her still in mind, 'safe from an evil spirit, perhaps one of
her former accomplices in life who, like Maupassant's
Horla, will continuously dog her steps, inhibit her
from either feeling or touching herself, make her imagine she's being watched,
etc. Old spinsters like that usually
don't have any company. They gradually
disintegrate. Probably wouldn't want to
make fools of themselves by trying to gain access to the company of people well
accustomed to it. They gradually become
more wrapped-up in themselves, more suspicious of others, increasingly the
prisoners of their personal circumstances.
I don't even know her full name.
Just an ugly old bag who occasionally receives a formal letter addressed
to a Miss J. Bass. Creeps around in her
room as though she were at a private séance.
Often has the radio on. Usually
classics. Not much else a woman of her
age can really listen to, is there?
'Well, I would sometimes
like to feel sorry for her but, try as I might, it's no use. The net result is that I only end-up feeling
sorry for myself, having to live next to her.
Pity really, because there are so many lonely people in the world, these
days, and not all of them are elderly either.
No-one to talk to. Probably
wouldn't feel like talking to anyone even if the opportunity were to
arise. I mean, where could she begin,
assuming solitary deprivation hadn't rendered her wholly inarticulate? Does part-time work somewhere during the day
though, so she evidently has something going for her.... Wonder if she's ever
had a man? It wouldn't be impossible
but, all the same, I'd hardly be surprised to learn that she hadn't. Must be awfully frustrating for a woman,
living alone so many years. All work and
no play. And they say the sexual urge is
stronger in women? I suppose it depends
on the woman really. Some of them are
awfully tame. If I've seen each of the
three or four females who live in this house more than a handful of times since
moving here, over six months ago, I'd be very surprised. Like the rest of my neighbours, they scuttle
away into their own rooms before anyone can accost them.... Not that I'm a man
for forming crab-like gestures! Heaven
forbid! But they don't know that, so
they scuttle away in good time. Saves embarrassment,
I suppose.'
He lay back on his bed
and languidly watched a large fly darting around the room. It seemed to be getting highly annoyed with
itself as it flew round and round, up and down, in and out of one thing or
another, while buzzing vehemently and colliding with just about every damn
thing that got in its way.
It was always the same
on warm evenings. You opened the window
to let-in some fresh air and, before long, some winged insect had found its way
through the opening and commenced torturing itself between the walls. However, the most obvious solution, namely to
acquire some cotton mesh with which to prevent ingress, hadn't exactly met with
Michael Savage's approval, in view of the fact that his room was rather dingy
and he preferred, in consequence, to let-in as much light as possible. It was simply too bad that these unfortunate
insects had to stick their snouts into everything! Short of shooing them out again or swatting
them to death, he would just have to put up with it. At least he had the consolation of knowing
that a fairly clean room wasn't something that would greatly appeal to flies.
He rose from his bed
again and wandered over to the mirror, which appeared to hover atop the
dressing table like a guardian angel.
The sun had lightly tanned his face, and this aspect of his overall
facial appearance now pleased him. His
hair was growing beyond the six-inch mark, but that didn't particularly bother
him because he was due to visit his local barber within the next few days. A six-inch growth of hair was no great
inconvenience to a young man who hadn't yet turned twenty-four!
He closely looked at his
eyes and nose in the mirror. The former
was indicating, through some puffy rings, signs of tiredness, the latter,
through its gently aquiline contours, the mark of what he took to be a man of
literary and philosophical, though especially philosophical, disposition. 'No boils in view anyway,' he thoughtfully
mused. 'Grew out of them some time
ago. Still get the odd one sprouting
from the epidermal undergrowth now and again, but it seems they're fast running
out of virgin pasture. They don't thrive
on the old spots quite so well. Have to
find somewhere else to sprout up, like my back and chest. But I usually nip them in their purulent bud
before they get a chance to really tarnish my relatively handsome
appearance. A few small scars, but
nothing serious. Worst place is up in
the nostrils. Bad on the lips, too. Used to put me through hell as a youth. Probably some blood trouble at the root of
it. Might even have had something to do
with that burst appendix I experienced at sixteen. Some of the poison seeped into my
bloodstream. Seem to recall getting my
first boil at around that time. All very
unnatural, when you think about it.
Adolescent tribulations! Had a
difficult time obtaining the right prescription from the local doctor;
everything he prescribed only seemed to exacerbate the problem, making the
boils worse. Ended-up going to him every
other week with the same sorry story: "Those pills didn't work for
me. Have you any other
suggestion?" Must have exhausted
most of his options by the time he got around to prescribing chest pills. At first I didn't realize, but they seemed to
do the trick. A question of faith. Got the psychology right in the end. Faith works miracles we're told. Believe something will do you good and the
chances are you may pull through.
Believe it won't and, no matter how applicable it may be, you might as
well write yourself off there and then.
Comes down to the witch-doctor principle, the frame-of-mind you're in at
the time. Reason doctors are generally
so positive about things, to prevent you from worrying yourself into a worse
condition. More or less the same
principle with fortune-tellers and astrologers.
Giving people what they want, flattering the ego, conciliating,
appeasing. "Why, yes, you ought to
become a poet with that sort of gift for words. - Why, yes, I think you'll do
very well in that field if you utilize your considerable diplomatic potential.
- Ah, yes, you'll meet a highly attractive and very intelligent young woman
pretty soon, during the next few weeks in fact." Financially shrewder than giving them a lot
of bad news, I suppose. People don't
usually consult fortune-tellers and astrologers for bad news anyway. They're mostly screwed-up at the time, hoping
for an indication of better things ahead, a favourable prognosis, as it were.
'It's strange when you
think about it really, but there are planets in the Solar System by the names
of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, which are
in turn symbolically identified with different abstractions culled from Roman
mythology, like Venus with love, Mars with war, etc., and astrologers tell you that
you came under the influence of certain of these abstractions when you were
born in a certain place at a certain time.
But if you're honest with yourself and look at astrology from a sort of
existentialist angle, you'll see clearly enough - and without the need of
long-range telescopes - that there really aren't any such places as Mercury,
Venus, Mars, etc., because what one actually has in the Solar System are large
orbiting bodies which, for want of an alternative name, we choose to call
planets, with their respective pagan names and mythological symbolism, so that
we can commonly agree on what's what.
Okay, so we commonly agree that Venus is symbolic of love, since the
planets derive their names from Roman mythology and Venus was the goddess of
love. But that really isn't good enough,
because you're only too aware there's really no such place as Venus, that
there's just a large mass of molten stuff up there in space which you could
alternatively agree to call Elephasia if you wanted
to, and that mass of molten stuff has as much to do with love as my lexicon,
think what you like!
'Indeed, now I've gone
this far I can imagine the sort of argument which some die-hard astrologer
would attempt to counter me with. A
ludicrous one, to say the least, but an argument of sorts all the same. He would inform me that even if those large
masses of planetary stuff aren't given mythical names, they still exist and
consequently continue to exert an influence on your birth or mind or
destiny. In other words, now that, as
nameless things, the planets are stripped to their bare
essentials, viz. size, position, velocity, etc., it would simply be necessary
to plot their positions, note down all the people born under a given planetary
pattern, say the universal influence of Libra, round them up in adult life,
take particulars, and then see whether they possessed anything in common....
Which, considering the vast numbers of people involved and their geographical
diversity, could well prove a daunting, not to say impossible, task for even
the most obdurately irrational of persons!
Well, I won't go into further suppositions on that score. Let those who want to deceive themselves
continue to do so, until such time as they might learn sense or come up against
the Last Judgement. After all,
superstitions won't die out overnight.'
Leaving his mirror, the
young 'rationalist' ambled across to the sink, cleaned his teeth with a bent
and worn toothbrush, drank a glass of slimy tap-water, and then began to
undress. It was barely 10.15pm, so he
was getting ready for bed well before his usual time, a realization which made
him feel slightly ashamed of himself for seemingly giving-in so early. True, he had read for over two hours earlier
in the evening, had listened to music from about 8.30-9.15pm, had thought quite
a lot of exacting thoughts. His day at
the office hadn't exactly been what one would call a bed of roses. On the contrary, it had well-and-truly
exhausted him. It was almost impossible
to write successfully, to write as he would have liked to, after such hard
work. One instinctively took to
recreation or relaxation, to whatever one imagined made one's life worthwhile
or at the very least bearable. Well, a
majority of people did anyway, even if he had always been a bit more obdurate
or idealistic, a potential artist who felt himself to be somewhat restricted
through solitude and consequently coerced into more intellectuality than was
good for him. If he had never
particularly gone out of his way to make friends, it was partly on the grounds
that what he took to be his real work only began in the evenings when, clerical
routine behind him, he was comparatively free to dedicate the rest of the day
to the service of his literary aspirations.
In the pursuit of these
aspirations, which alternated between reading with intent to study and
dilettantish composition, he had neither the time nor the inclination to rub
shoulders with others in, say, some neighbourhood pub, since too dedicated to
his 'deeper calling', as he liked to think of it, to be able to break away from
it without feeling the frustrations of a seemingly futile existence. He would certainly be deceiving himself if,
with all his knowledge and literary know-how, he continued to rot away in the
boring company of people who knew virtually nothing about the world's greatest
literature, had never even heard of Flaubert, Kafka, or Hamsun,
let alone read them, and would have been extremely hard-pressed to define the
meaning of a word like 'eulogy', or to spell 'instantaneous'. A reasonably profound education was only
justified, it seemed to him, if one could make use of it rather than become its
victim. Education without a purpose or
outlet was of scant avail in such a fiercely competitive world, a world
orientated towards the survival of the smartest. Whether one liked it or not, one had a duty
to oneself, one had to live with oneself, and that, as he knew only too well,
wasn't always an easy thing to do! Why,
this very evening he was too tired to have attempted any serious literary
work. It didn't pay to goad oneself
mercilessly, even if one's circumstances were so disagreeable that, in one's
impatience to escape them, one was driven to exert oneself more than would
otherwise have been the case. No, one
had to succumb to lethargy sometimes, to face facts. Maybe he would have some interesting or
gratifying dreams, during the night, which would partly compensate him for his
current impotence? Like dreams with
pretty women in them, for instance.
Yes, but you couldn't will
it. You had to entrust yourself to your
mind's keeping, let it make its own enigmatic decisions irrespective of your
conscious priorities. It would amuse
itself in its own fashion, in due course.
Something interesting was bound to turn up, if you waited patiently and
weren't regularly insomniac. Even
medieval people would have had access to a world of interior visions which
probably transcended the visual impact of modern film by as much if not more
than the best of our dreams do today.
Of course, Michael was
aware that his dream-world was no simple paradise, that it contained as many
vicissitudes as one either cared or dared to imagine, and some of them beyond
imagining; experience having endowed him with a peculiar aversion to that kind
of dream which, by dint of its pictorial clarity and sinister feasibility,
well-nigh convinces one it isn't really a dream at all but a prolongation or
resurrection of waking life, and subsequently engenders a combination of relief
and thanksgiving, in the mind, that what took place there wasn't real after
all, since one is still free to get out of bed and go about one's usual
affairs, which seem relatively congenial, not to say trivial, by
comparison. Fortunately, however, those
kinds of oppressively impressionable dreams were comparatively rare, so it was
unlikely, on balance, that anything of such psychic magnitude would envelop his
sleeping mind tonight. He would just
have to wait and see what fate had in store for him.
Having undressed, laid
out the same clothes for the morning, and then inserted malleable wax earplugs
into his ears - a strategy he had developed with a degree of physical
inconvenience to safeguard himself from the even greater inconvenience caused
by the various noises in which his nearest neighbours freely indulged
themselves every night - he switched off the light and gently eased himself
between the nylon sheets of his moderately comfortable, albeit long-suffering,
single bed. He reflected that the
earplugs would have to be changed in the morning, since it wasn't wise to allow
them to become so grubby, through repeated use, that one ran the risk of a
serious ear infection. Since they were
already fairly grubby, he decided he would only push them right in to his ears
as a last resort, i.e. if there was too much noise. However, his neighbours were relatively quiet
at present, in fact so quiet that he found himself free to wander down some
fairly congenial avenues of thought.
'Muffled sounds above,
connubial bliss. Television on in house
next door. Old woman coughing in front
room, whether ironically or otherwise I don't pretend to know. - J'espère, tu espères, il espère,
nous espèrons, vous espèrez, ils
espèrent. Je sors du train maintenant
parce que je suis malade. Vous aimez ces choses?
Je les ai achetées hier matin
chez le marchand de gants. Je voudrais une petite chambre pour deux personnes seulement. Oui, mon amie et moi. (Complet, monsieur,
malheureusement.)
O, je vois. Eh bien! J'aime vos belles jambes, ma petite fleur.
'Just a few French
phrases to round off the day, pretend that things aren't as bad as I picture
them. Might even get a sense of
intellectual or cultural achievement if I keep at it long enough, go to sleep
with a good conscience. Won't get to sleep for an hour or two anyway,
maybe longer. That period of insomnia
last year - terrible! Too much
consciousness, brain breaking under pressure of it, incipient neurosis. Even tried sleeping pills, but they only made
me feel like a moron next day. Wound-up
with too many psychological disparities, thoroughly neurotic. Next stop paranoia, persecution complexes
running riot. Final stop ... no thanks! Too many sharks pulling everywhichway
as it is. Soon learn to stand on your
own two feet again, ignore the mob's acrimonious banter. Little alternative. Feel much better without pills anyway, have
faith in myself again. See through it
all after awhile. Find your way out of
the maze of incertitude. Breeze clear
before you get lost again.
'Je vais seul,
tu vas seul, il va seul,
nous allons seuls, vous allez....
Haven't fantasized so much recently, though I had a regular spell of
it at one time. Goes on and off, like
dreams. Wake up to the realization, one
day, that you could go mad if you kept at it too long, get caught in your
habits and wind-up preferring fantasy to the real thing. Same with magazines, which can lead you
seriously astray if you aren't careful.
Like walking along the street with a talkative bloke beside you and
missing out on a glimpse of the occasional attractive female who passes by,
because he demands too much of your attention.
One path to perversity. Have to
watch who you mix with, binding habits engendering excessive sexual
constipation. Find yourself in a social
cul-de-sac of your own making!
'Wonderful power fantasy
has, though. Best of a bad job, so to
speak ... I mean, think. But annoying
when you can't sustain the images. Very
frustrating! Frustrates me, too, when
her bedsprings are jingling upstairs and her boyfriend is doing it for all he's
fucking-well worth, and she's moaning and coaxing and giving off irresistibly
endearing little incentives to goad him on, the stupid prick, and I'm lying
here in the doldrums wondering how to ignore their noises altogether.... Well,
at least they're fairly normal, considering how merciless city life is at
breeding perversions. Plenty of wankers about. Used
to indulge in a stint of masturbation myself occasionally, just to keep my hand
in, so to think, and test my virility.
After all, it wouldn't do to go impotent all of a sudden. One should have at least three erections a
day, according to what I was reading somewhere.
It comes on you unaccountably sometimes, the most seemingly innocuous or
incongruous of contexts. Like sitting in
a crowded bus. Realize you're alighting
next stop, so you try to get it down, make it shrink back to normal. You wouldn't want to draw too much attention
to yourself, especially in summertime, what with the possibility of old women
in heat. Could even give someone the
wrong impression, someone you couldn't in the least fancy.
'Je vidé, tu vidés,
j'ai vidé, tu as vidé, je
vidais, tu vidais, il vidait,
vidons.... Pity I can't exercise my
French on an attractive young Frenchwoman.
Have to throw yourself in at the deep end if you want to swim. My ex-teacher, Jacques Potôt,
authentic Frenchman. He knew most of the
contemporary idiosyncrasies of Parisian communication. Typically French in many ways. I found it difficult not to laugh in his face
sometimes, the way he pronounced certain words so emphatically, screwing up his
features and accentuating his vocal delivery with the help of violent
gestures. Bit of an actor really. Good company, though. Taught me like a friend. Infinitely better than those stuffed parrots
who always keep you at a psychic distance and never reveal anything about their
personal affairs. Only in it for the
money.
'Faites
attention, mes eleves. Parlez après moi les mots "bon",
"gros", et "grand". Il y a deux choses sur cette
table - un livre et une
plume.... Glad I didn't have to put up with too much of that
sort of thing! It would have been like
being back at school again.... Oh, these words, these words! Innate obduracy, labial contortions, cerebral
exigencies, precocious jeremiads, anathematized pudenda, incipient duplicity,
clitoral enthralment, inveterate nonchalance.... Idiot who poses with open
mouth and inaccessible sex dreams penetration.
Mornings are a good time, though.
Almost invariably wake up with a hard-on. Wasted potential really. Still, there's always the possibility of my
luck changing for the better some day.
Conquer somebody! Preferable to
fantasizing all the frigging time.
Cerebral exigencies again, high blood pressure. Think you're going to get a brain
haemorrhage, what with all those lewd images flickering through your mind,
performing strange rites and requiting unrequited love. Possession of favourite image hardly
sufficient for one's bodily salvation, however.
Have to do better next time, not let her get away scot-free or get
snapped up by somebody else, somebody maybe even worse than myself. Touching hands. Peeling clothes to bring delectable fruit of
female's body to lustful exposure.
Impending embrace in soft silky night-time, light-time, right-time,
sight-time honeymoon. Must sleep,
s-l-e-e-p before I go completely crazy.
Sleep!'
CHAPTER TWO
Gerald
Matthews stretched out a hand and switched off the tinny alarm on his
pocket-sized alarm clock to prevent it ringing unnecessarily. For he was already wide awake, having
anticipated the alarm some fifteen minutes in advance of the 7am deadline at
which it was usually set. On this
occasion, as on a number of previous ones, it was an inconvenience he might
just as well do without!
The practical details of getting up were
normally an ordeal for Gerald but, today, the sight of the sun streaming in
through a narrow gap in his curtains and the exuberant twittering of local
sparrows acted as a kind of invincible goad, and before long he was up and
about, frantically hunting for suitable
clothes to wear, scrutinizing his stubble-ridden chin in the oval mirror of his
dressing-table, and generally making a fuss of himself. When, in this fussy fashion, he had washed
and dressed, combed back his curly fair hair and polished his new shoes, he
sped downstairs, threw open the front door and, almost skipping out onto the
garden path, began to vigorously inhale and exhale large draughts of suburban
fresh air. Yes, it was definitely the kind
of day to make one feel pleased with life!
One just had to be grateful for weather of this magnificent
calibre. If the cloudless warmth lasted
through to the weekend, he would take himself off somewhere for a long walk.
Sated by his spell of
deep breathing, he re-entered the semidetached house and swiftly made his way
towards the kitchen at the rear.
However, he hadn't been in there long enough to fry some bacon when a
clamber of footsteps above the ceiling indicated that Mr David Shuster,
eligible bachelor, lecturer in English, and sole owner of the two-storey
property, had risen from the living-death of drug-induced sleep and moronically
entered the bathroom, where he would remain for at least another thirty minutes
- the fact of his regularly being obliged to contend with the often critical,
though sometimes admiring, attention of large numbers of female students having
made him, in Gerald's view, somewhat over-solicitous of his facial
appearance. Thus by the time Shuster
arrived downstairs, impeccably well-groomed, Gerald would be either clearing
away the dishes or, assuming he had already done so, reading one of his many
music scores in the adjoining study.
As it happened, Gerald
had just swallowed his last mouthful of toast and was greedily downing a large mugful of thick, sweetish coffee when Shuster entered the
kitchen and was heard to proffer exuberant salutation, a manner of greeting
which Gerald automatically reciprocated, albeit slightly surprised by the
other's uncharacteristic early-morning exuberance. "Now don't tell me that you're in a good
mood this morning," he hastened to add.
"What, exactly, were you dreaming about?"
"Oh, much ado about
nothing," Shuster briskly replied with Shakespearean gusto. "It went in a flash as usual." He walked over to the fridge. "Good God, don't tell me we've run out
of bacon already!" he cried, peering in.
"On the top
shelf," said Gerald, carrying his empty mug and plates to the sink. "I only took two slices this
morning."
"Ah,
yes." Shuster's hungry eyes alighted
on the elusive bacon like a bloodthirsty hawk upon its tender prey. "So how did the music lesson go last
night?" he asked, taking command of the frying pan. "I trust you weren't overly exasperated
again?"
Gerald Matthews smirked
ironically in tacit response to this assumption, since he was only too aware of
the cause of his Thursday evening tantrums, and replied that it was fortunate
for him that he didn't have to see Lorraine Smith more than once a week, since
she had all the traits of an utter wastrel.
"Something of an
unwilling piano pupil by the sound of it,"
conjectured Shuster, turning the sizzling bacon over and adding a couple
of small eggs to the rather large frying pan.
"You seem to get lumbered with so many like her."
"Yes, and, what's
worse I can't get rid of them," Gerald sighed. "Why, she still can't properly
differentiate between major and minor diatonic scales!"
"Really?"
exclaimed Shuster with apparent unconcern.
"And I've been
going over them with her for the past five months!" cried Gerald, patently
exasperated. "Her sense of interval
recognition is virtually non-existent."
"Dear me,"
mumbled Shuster, more for his own benefit, it appeared, than for Gerald's. "So you lost your temper again."
"Fortunately
not! But I certainly took it out on the
piano afterwards. The grand style, so to
speak." Gerald thought he detected
an involuntary wince on Shuster's clean-shaven face at this point and,
transferring his washed crockery to the draining board, tactfully added:
"I believe you were out at the time."
"I was indeed. Invited out to dinner, actually."
"Not your eminent
colleague, the unmusical physics genius, by any chance?" conjectured
Gerald smirkingly.
Shuster smiled
patronizingly as he scooped a well-fried rasher onto an empty plate. It was a standing joke between them that Loper, the physicist, couldn't tell the difference between
Mozart and Beethoven, being tone-deaf.
"No, not this time," he calmly replied. "Friends of a colleague, in fact. Keen literary minds from down under."
"So you actually
had dinner with Australians for once."
It was like Gerald to jump to concrete conclusions.
"New Zealanders
actually," Shuster corrected.
"Though, quite frankly, I wouldn't care to be entertained by them
every week. It was a demanding
experience, both gastronomically and intellectually. Still, a refreshing change!"
"Glad to hear you
say so," said Gerald, who was now ready to depart the kitchen. "Well, I must be off in a minute, since
I don't want to arrive at the office later than eight-thirty this morning. Incidentally, there's a literary chap there
by name of Michael Savage who might interest you. I made his acquaintance some time ago, but
he's certainly an unusually elusive man.
Not what I'd call sociable at all.... As it happens, I invited him over
here last week, but since then I find it difficult to avoid the impression that
he's trying to snub me."
Shuster feigned
indignant surprise. "Really? And how old is he?"
"Oh, twenty-three
or twenty-four. He did tell me the other
day."
"Good grief, don't
tell me you belong to that perennially eccentric category of
age-forgetters!" exclaimed Shuster with cynical relish.
"Not as completely
as I'd like to!" retorted Gerald, whilst admiring his fair countenance in
the hall mirror. "I should like to
have remained twenty-five for ever."
"Humph! Think yourself fortunate that such wishes are
only granted in fairy tales," the lecturer's manly voice boomed from the
kitchen. "Else you might have lived
to regret it!"
"Not the way I
live," the twenty-eight-year-old narcissist shouted back and, with a
departing chuckle, he was out through the front door and into the sunny street.
On the tube, Gerald
pondered various events of the previous evening's piano tutorials. Like the two occasions, during the second
lesson, when he had almost lost his temper with that wretched girl Lorraine
Smith, who would never, it seemed to him, come properly to grips with her
scales and arpeggios. Of course, her
parents were fairly well off and only too keen to help her get on in life, as
they say. But, as often happened, the
children of such parents had their own ideas on that score, being disinclined
to take seriously those things that they didn't want to take seriously, with a
consequence that they not only wasted their parents' money but, in combating
parental pressures, simultaneously reduced their own flair for life.
This Lorraine Smith, for
example, was fifteen or sixteen (he couldn't quite remember which) and a
strapping wench, to boot! For all he
knew, she might have been going through the sorts of emotional upheavals which
young girls of that age usually experience, and consequently be susceptible to
periodic mental aberrations of the kind she often exhibited during her piano
lessons. Still, he couldn't be sure and
wouldn't have wanted to conjecture presumptuously, for both their sakes! He recalled that midway through the Mozart
sonata - a performance, incidentally, with fewer mistakes on her part than
during the four previous attempts at it - his eyes had wandered from the score
and keyboard to her hair and profile, before encompassing her breasts with a
swiftly penetrating glance doubtless encouraged by the low-cut blouse she was
wearing, only to return thereafter to the bright ivory keys of his upright
piano and refocus on her gracefully tapering fingers. To be sure, he had then summarily corrected a
misconstrued interpretation of Mozart's legato indication. For such little sly investigations of this
and certain other pupils' physical appearances to which he occasionally
succumbed usually had the effect of morally rejuvenating him, and he would
undoubtedly have corrected her playing a lot more, had the opportunity of a
more leisurely and detailed investigation of her person regularly presented
itself. However, as a piano teacher,
business had to take precedence over pleasure, since he couldn't afford to
jeopardize the sanctity of professional etiquette over some teenage beauty who,
in his opinion, still couldn't properly differentiate between major and minor
diatonic scales. That would have been an
unpardonable indiscretion! Besides, if
compensation was desired, he would be instructing Miss Stephanie Power that
very evening, and she was even more attractive than Lorraine. He definitely wouldn't mind seeing more of her.
Alighting from the
half-empty carriage at his usual station, he hurried up the escalator as though
it were merely a staircase, dashed, season ticket in hand, past a
slightly-bemused ticket collector, and rushed out into the dazzling sunshine of
the glorious 25th June. It was a
ten-minute walk to the music firm and he would be there in good time if he
didn't stop en route, as sometimes happened, for a coffee at the nearby
Italian café where, at this time of day, a wait in the queue was almost always
guaranteed. Glancing at his watch he
decided, in view of the fact it had just turned 8.20am, to abstain from another
coffee until lunch.
Even at this relatively
early hour the streets leading to work were thronged with purposefully striding
bodies of all shapes and sizes, each of whom was pursuing a secret destiny
oblivious of the many other destinies hurrying by to time's pressing
dictates. Yet, although he was very much
a component of this universal coercion, Gerald had enough presence of mind to
note a variety of features - from an old man's white-washed wizened face to a
young girl's rather heavily made-up eyes - which engaged his passing
attention. He stopped briefly twice en route
to stare, firstly, through the window of a small music shop with many bright
covers of topical and even post-topical songbooks on display, and, secondly, at
an array of saucepans and other domestic utensils in a nearby general store -
an experience which instantly connoted with the fact that Michael Savage was
leaving the firm today. For they had
visited this particular store together just over a week previously, and on that
august occasion Savage had divulged his intention of leaving while Gerald had
been closely examining a large baking tray, an item he reluctantly but
stoically purchased the following day.
So much for the
facts! At any rate, it was up to Gerald
to seize upon the occasion of his colleague's imminent departure by inviting
him for a drink and/or meal at lunch time, thereby acquiring the opportunity
for an exchange of mutual intentions and problems, as well as possibly even
securing ongoing access to his colleague's potential friendship - assuming, of
course, that that was mutually acceptable.
However, the recollection that he wanted to be at the office by 8.30am
immediately precluded any further dalliance on his part, and he set off, once
more, at a fairly brisk pace. It was now
8.27 and he would certainly have to hurry if, in accordance with the rules of
flexitime, he wanted to leave work at 4.30pm that day. He was so looking forward to seeing his star
pupil, Miss Stephanie Power, again!
CHAPTER THREE
'Phew! I'd better open that
window and let-in some fresh air,' thought Michael Savage, getting up from his desk
and going across to the nearest window.
'That's better! No wonder people
fall asleep on the job. Too stuffy for
clear thinking.... Well, I couldn't ask for a better day to be leaving this
place. Such a cloudless sky must be a
good omen. The twenty-fifth of June,
effectively my D-Day!'
Returning to his desk,
he cast a furtive glance around the elongated office in which it had been his
fate to labour in various clerical capacities
for the past five-and-a-half years, before continuing: 'Eight-thirty and
still not many people here. Even old
Gerald hasn't arrived yet. Just as well
I got out of bed on time this morning.
Being here at eight-twenty is early for me.' He turned his eyes towards the young clerk at
the desk opposite, a comparative newcomer to the clerical scene, and
encountered an impassive gaze, the gaze of reticent youth which, however, he
sought to investigate by tentatively smiling upon, the youth duly reciprocating
this smile in an equally tentative manner, thereby reassuring him of the
latter's shyness or perhaps even deference.
On more than one occasion in recent weeks Michael had been disconcerted
and almost intimidated by this adolescent's impassivity, this enigmatic
judgement which rarely exposed itself to close scrutiny, although he
subsequently dismissed the accusations he had hypothetically, and some would
say pathetically, levelled against himself on the grounds that he had as much
right to live as anyone else, even if he was occasionally a little paranoid,
and that the youth, far from holding himself critically aloof from someone he
despised, was probably uncertain of himself and, hence, fairly
noncommittal. That, at any rate, seemed
as plausible a conjecture as any!
'At least old grumpy
guts won't be in for a while,' Michael resumed, thinking of the more
experienced clerk who sat beside the one in question, as he turned the pages of
a recent reprint of the G.B. and Channel Islands rail guide through
which he was obliged to investigate the routes and times of the various intercity
services the more important representatives of the firm would be obliged to
utilize, in due course, for purposes best known to themselves. 'So many stations in these things. I'd better make sure I keep a close check on
the days of the week to which I'm referring.
It wouldn't do to put someone who'll be working Saturday onto a Sunday
service! Also refer to period
validity. Make sure the timetable is
still operative. Some of them don't
begin to apply until the tenth of October.
It keeps your mind alert anyway.'
At that moment a
smartly-dressed, portfolio-bearing clerk of average height, but slightly more
than medium build, threw open the office door with a flourish and proceeded, at
brisk pace, towards the Signing-in-Book at the far end of the room. He politely smiled at two nearby clerks
before casting a glance at the newly-installed electric wall clock, which
appeared to hover above the Signing-in-Book like a vulture over a carcass.
'Ah, there's Gerald
now! Eight-thirty three, eh? He's a bit late this morning....
What-on-earth's he done to his hair? It
looks a different colour today. Maybe
it's down to some fancy shampoo he uses.
He's growing a beard it seems.
Suits him anyway. Looks slightly
more like a man now. Always did strike
me as being a bit effeminate. Wonder if
he'll say hello.'
"Morning,
Michael!"
"Morning,
Gerald." - 'Christ, that surprised me!
He hasn't been so friendly since I cold-shouldered him last week. Has probably changed his attitude on account
of my imminent departure.' - "How did the piano lessons go last
night?" Michael hastened to inquire of him. "I trust you weren't too tired after
yesterday's initiation into that job I gave you?"
Having removed his
summer jacket and rearranged the contents of his rather pretentious-looking
black-leather portfolio, which included a sheet of music, a small packet of
paper tissues, a wad of writing paper, and a pack of envelopes, Gerald Matthews
abandoned his desk and, as though to shield his reply from potentially malevolent
ears, replied, sotto voce, that the lessons in question hadn't gone too badly,
that yesterday afternoon's headache had gradually subsided, and that his first
pupil, an intelligent young fourteen year-old, had put him in a better
frame-of-mind to deal with the second one, a young woman of dubious potential
and inveterate laziness whose weekly lesson he would have no option but to
seriously consider discontinuing if things didn't improve between them. Undoubtedly, being a rather garrulous fellow,
he would have expatiated on that and similar themes at quite some length, had
not Michael intuitively foreseen his colleague's verbal self-indulgence and
thereupon quickly changed the subject to their office work. More specifically, to the fact that certain
examples of Gerald's recent train-timetabling required slight amendments, the
forms to the right of the latter's desk being the examples in question.
"Oh, right!"
said Gerald, returning to his desk and nervously thumbing through them. "I'll deal with these as soon as
possible. Thanks for drawing attention
to the mistakes in pencil, by the way.
I'm afraid I wasn't at my best yesterday afternoon."
"Not to
worry," responded Michael, getting back to his own work. "We all make mistakes - good, bad, or
plain indifferent.... As for me," he continued in a lower voice,
"I'll try not to make too many today." He winked at Gerald, who smiled insightfully
on the reception of this ironic remark.
For it struck him as really quite esoteric.
"Lucky you,
Michael," he said. Then, after a
short recollective pause, added: "By the way, if
you'd like to celebrate the occasion at lunch time, we could go to that little
restaurant again. Or to a pub, if you'd
prefer that."
Michael's feelings
clouded over slightly at the prospect of being invited to take part in this
virtually inevitable formality, to eat and talk in the company of someone he
didn't have all that much in common with, especially in view of the fact that
he hadn't envisaged any such invitation, having made no close friends at the
office and hardly being on particularly intimate terms with Gerald, who was
anything but his idea of a compatible conversationalist! Still, it was jolly decent of the bloke to
suggest something, all the same. He
would certainly have to oblige him on this occasion. After all, it wasn't every day that one left
a firm. "We'll go to that
restaurant, then," Michael decided.
By 10.00am all the staff
had arrived, including grumpy-guts Vlad opposite, and
the office was beginning to seethe with purposeful activity. The telephones would continue ringing
virtually non-stop until lunch time, the gift of an hour's reprieve, and then
at 1.30pm, when most of the clerks were back at their desks and diligently
scribbling away, off they would go again, an incessant barrage of rings and
voices, voices and rings, with their accompanying retinue of doubts, queries,
unreasonable demands, abject pleas, pointless remarks, piss-provoking
complaints, and last-minute cancellations.
If you survived a week's telephone duty during the peak period of
customer/supplier communication, answered all the queries, overcame perpetual
earaches, and learnt to become ambidextrous, you were well on the way to a
permanent position in the firm.
However, having been
responsible for answering the majority of routine calls hitherto, Michael opted
for a breather on his last day. He
assured himself that he had quite enough paperwork to be getting on with
anyway, and consequently decided to allow Miss Daphne Smalls, who was seated
beside him, to take sole charge of the telephone closest to-hand, it being
understood that the 'rise', as he facetiously put it, would do her good. Well, someone would have to replace him on
Monday and she, being the nearest and eldest, if not the most experienced,
seemed as good a candidate as any, despite her inability, at present, to cope
with a majority of queries. But she
would learn in good time. A woman of her
charm and intelligence could go quite some way in the firm!
When Michael Savage next
glanced at the bright-red wall clock it was just turning 10.30, time for a
mid-morning tea break. Everyone appeared
to be rushing around like mad now, as the chief clerk, the assistant chief
clerk, and various other personnel of a subordinate though supervisory capacity
dished out orders, intervened on the telephones, corrected clerical blunders,
sorted letters, scolded junior clerks, and generally worked things up to fever
pitch. Even Gerald, despite his
customary composure, was busily engaged in ironing out a ticklish problem with
his immediate colleague, a quiet, inoffensive little man by name of Ernie
Brock, who had been a loyal servant to the firm for over six years, and who was
now rubbing the end of a new pencil against his left nostril in indication, perhaps,
of some imminent revelation.... Although, to judge by the worried expression on
his clean-shaven countenance, it evidently wasn't a thing permitting an easy
solution! As could also be confirmed by
the equally tense expression on Gerald's somewhat more robust features. To be sure, life was full of such problems,
and little Ernie Brock was as susceptible to the vicissitudes of fate as the
next man, despite the double bonus of an innate and acquired sagacity which he
indefatigably strove to utilize from morning till night.
'By Christ!' thought
Michael, smiling in spite of himself, 'you just have to smile at the way those
grey-flannel trousers come up to his chest, as though he were dressed in a sack
every day. Up to his chest, with that
tacky little belt girdling his ribs and the seat of his pants all shiny at the
back from where he's been sweating in them too often. Must be an odd sight for the wife every
evening, his coming home looking like a glorified scarecrow. Probably makes him more loveable, brings out
her maternal instinct. ("Yes,
there's nobody quite like my Ernie. He's
so individualistic.") Never seen
him without a tie on, either. Probably
against his religion. Might even
...' For a moment the shrill ringing of
the nearby phone startled Michael out of his sarcastic reflections and he was
about to answer it personally when he remembered he had left that privilege to
Miss Smalls. "Hello, are you going
to answer it? Yes? Good!" - 'Give her plenty of
practice. She'll soon get the hang of
things. Oddly enough, it does take you
out of yourself sometimes. Occasionally
find yourself talking to some quite charming people. One of the few real perks here.... Whew! Am I glad of that breeze! Makes me feel like a new man. A great advantage in this stuffy place,
having a seat near the window. Sustained
concentration!
'That chap
opposite-but-one, old grumpy guts, still hasn't said a word to anyone. You have to wait until he gets a phone call,
then you hear a few terse words from him.
Perfunctory but pertinent. Isn't
really what I'd call the most generous of conversationalists. Quite the contrary! A member of our unofficially incorporated
society of verbal misers, a strictly taciturn type. Swears under his breath quite a lot though,
particularly in the morning. Often
arrives late at the office in a terrible temper, makes that youth next to him
quake with fright. You'd imagine it was
the work, or the prospect of work, that riled him, but not at all! He's one of the most conscientious of people,
a stickler for duty if ever there was one!
In all probability, the work prevents his mind from wandering along too
many unsavoury paths, keeps him on the track, as it were, especially when he's
in a foul mood.... But what it is, exactly, that upsets him ... his Polish
ancestry or a dislike of the West or a recollection of the number of attractive
females he has to pass-up on his way to the office every morning? I shouldn't think he's gay or whatever. At least, he doesn't appear to show much
interest in any of the males here, Gerald not excepted. Indeed, now I come to think of it, he made an
unsuccessful pass at some young woman who used to work here last year, some
little flash-arse by name of Cathy.
Usual thing, however: already engaged, try again later. Such, at any rate, was the implication of her
rejection. Well, it's my last day
opposite him, thank goodness! I don't
think I'll miss the sight of his ugly mug
too much.
'I wonder what sort of
thoughts pass through his mind every day?
Quite chilling, if his face is anything to judge by! Something approximating to a chamber of
horrors or even to a private mental orgy.
Then that conscientiousness could be more than just a guard against the
possibility of his thinking too many harrowing thoughts; it could be a sort of
penitence, a form of self-punishment, a kind of Kafka complex he wields with
all the manic determination of a born masochist, in a desperate attempt to
atone for his numerous shortcomings. Still,
he doesn't work too hard, the way I see it.
Although, to be honest, I don't make a point of looking at him all that
often, because he would only revolt me and probably return me a nasty look, to
boot! However, what I have gleaned
from an occasional curiosity indicates that his introspection is by no means
confined to inscrutable reflections but also manifests itself quite unashamedly
in what I can only suppose to be a form of demonic humour, some little
idiosyncratic joke which the combined dictates of reason and commonsense are
unable to restrain from bursting out in all its impassioned exhibitionism. Maybe some sexual innuendo going on in his
head, or a personal moral victory over some senior member of the staff. In sum, something approximating to a
self-induced deliverance from the general tedium of his work. Dangerous game, though. You could find people staring at you as if
you were a madman. They have to know who
or what you're smiling at. He's probably
been alone too long, no-one to take him out of himself, like my nearest neighbour,
Miss Bass. Therefore no alternative for
him but to amuse himself in his own waywardly introspective fashion, to
initiate an interruption of the funereal.
Still, it's a very strict upbringing some of those East Europeans get,
really. Too damn strict, judging by the
results of it! Seems to have turned him
into a fully-fledged dreamer, turned him in upon
himself, a fish out of clerical water.
'Well, he can't be
expected to restrain himself from lewd or vicious thoughts all the time. Nobody can do that! A person isn't born to be entirely good or
evil. You have to mix it up, face the
facts.... Gentle dreamer writes bitter satire.
Gentle nun regularly indulges in self-flagellation. Impotent priest admires The Rite of
Spring. Boisterous rock star turns
reflective poet in his spare time.
Inoffensive gent thinks scandalous thoughts. Offensive labourer regularly attends
Mass. Meditation master writes A
History of the Roman Empire.
Spiritual guitarist plays hell with his guitar.
'Yeah, and that's precisely
where a lot of people come unstuck, because they won't or can't accept their
other self, whichever self that happens to be, and wind-up going either mad or
neurotic. They may be in a social trap
which demands a rigorous consistency in behaving politely, and the only thing
they can do then, short of changing their lifestyle, is to effect a subtle
deception so that good and evil are effectively interchanged, their particular
brand of evil being fobbed off as a manifestation of good and their particular
brand of good fobbed off as a manifestation of evil, depending where they're
at. The gentle "spiritualist"
who writes revoltingly violent music and the violent "materialist"
whose music is enticingly gentle are really two aspects of the same coercion,
the coercion which leads you to realize that you're neither an angel nor a
demon but a man, and therefore a subtle compromise between two absolutes.
'Yes, Vlad is a man whether or not he likes the fact, in
consequence of which he has to swear under his breath every so often, because a
more audible form of swearing could lead to his being dismissed from a firm
which is compelled, by commercial necessity, to maintain what some would regard
as a highly repressive verbal conservatism.
This repressed anger wells-up in his psyche like molten lava, like a
kettle on the boil, and comes bubbling out of him in spite of any last-moment
efforts he might make to impede it. But
that's what happens when you haven't got a girlfriend to act as a kind of vent
for repressed emotions, enabling you to release so many pent-up feelings
through coitus and lovemaking generally.
In fact, I'm in a similar boat to him, and it wouldn't surprise me if
Gerald was in a similar boat to us either, something akin to a Ship of
Fools, because there are so many of us who are suffering from a dementia
peculiar to the age, an age abounding, for all its show of promiscuity, in
sexual frustrations, general repressions, and simulated violence, which has
given birth to the paradoxical phenomena of the womanly man and the manly
woman: the former finding it difficult to assert himself in view of his social
repressions and the latter finding it difficult not to assert herself in view
of her new-found occupational freedoms.
Indeed, most of the other men in this place appear to be suffering from
it too, I can see it on their faces. For
the male sex has been rather undermined recently!'
"How's the poetry
going, man?"
'Good God, someone's
asking me a question!' - "Oh, not too b-badly," stuttered Michael,
feeling somewhat embarrassed at being asked such a question at such a time in
such a place. "I try to do a little
every day," he added, turning towards the tall, denim-clad figure of
Martin Stevens, the general office's only black guy, who had just concluded a
favourable telephone conversation with his latest girlfriend and was on the
verge of returning to his desk at the opposite end of the room when he
evidently thought it appropriate to offer Michael the sop of some friendly
curiosity. "That's the way!"
enthused Stevens, his large plum-like eyes veering towards the open
window. "Keep plugging away."
"I've no real
choice," Michael averred.
"There's little else I can do."
"Really?"
"Well, you know
what I mean."
"Ha-ha, sure thing,
man!" chuckled Stevens, his big round eyes abandoning the window. "Hey, it's your last day here, isn’t
it? Ha-ha! Glad to be leaving?"
"Well, I wouldn't
be smiling if I wasn't," replied Michael, who was slightly taken aback, in
spite of his apparent good humour.
"Then you won't be
coming back this time?" drawled Stevens with a mischievous glint in his
eyes and a broad grin baring his immaculate white teeth. "Not like you did on the previous two
occasions?"
"No, it's third
time lucky for me," confirmed Michael impatiently.
"Ha-ha, that's the
spirit, that's the fucking spirit!
Five-and-a-half years in this sodding place is
evidently long enough, right?" It
was the sort of rhetorical question to expect from a guy who had never been in
any job longer than five months, or so Michael supposed. Meantime, Stevens had switched track to a
more pragmatic question. "Got
another job lined up, man?" he asked.
"Not yet,"
replied Michael, turning red in the face at what he took to be a sarcastic edge
to Stevens' tone. "As a matter of
fact, I intend to concentrate on my, er, literary
writings for a while, see if I can produce anything worthwhile."
"Gee, I hope you
do," concluded Stevens, before slinking back to his desk with sensuous
ease.
"I didn't know you
wrote," Miss Smalls suddenly confessed in an almost begrudging
tone-of-voice. "You look like a
writer anyway."
"Well, I have to do
something with myself in the evenings," declared 'the writer' solemnly,
not quite understanding her. "I
can't play with my thumbs all the time, you know."
Visibly taken aback by
what seemed like a cruel remark, Daphne Smalls tightly focused her large
dark-blue eyes on him in seeming anticipation of another statement. But, to her disappointment, nothing else was
forthcoming from Mr Michael Savage, gentleman poet, potential genius, literary
maniac, stultified clerk, womanless scribbler, so she turned back to the pile
of forms and envelopes on her desk.
"I occasionally write too," she presently and almost
blushingly confessed, looking-up from the envelope she was at that moment
addressing. "Bits and pieces for
magazines and local papers."
"Are they women's
magazines?" asked Michael, feigning interest as best he could in this, the
most recent of Daphne's personal confessions.
However, the young woman emphatically shook her head and replied that
she had written short articles on psychology and sociology in fairly
influential scientific journals, albeit declining to name any.
"I see,"
responded Michael, his thumb between the pages of the aforementioned G.B. and
Channel Islands rail guide, a number of the pages of which
were beginning to come unstuck from their bindings. "And when was this?" he asked her.
"Oh, a couple of
years ago. I was actually doing
part-time work at the time, so during my spare time I often sent letters on
psychology and sociology to a variety of interested publications."
"I see,"
repeated Michael, who was unable to strangle the acute feeling of ennui
stealthily creeping over him, like a wary spider, at the prospect of having to
continue this rather half-hearted conversation.
"And did they publish them?"
"Sometimes. It really depended on what I was writing,
actually. These days, however, I hardly
write anything at all. I'm usually far
too busy in the evenings."
"Doing what?"
asked Michael.
Daphne took a deep
breath, as if unsure whether or not to reveal the truth, but finally her ego
got the better of her and she confessed: "Well, I do a lot of social work,
mainly locally, which keeps me busy for about three hours a night on three
nights a week. Normally I spend a lot of
time just talking to people, finding out what I can about them, what makes them
tick, what their views are on various subjects, what problems they have, and so
on - a whole host of different things! Of course, I also read quite a lot, especially
late at night."
"Is that a
fact?" rejoined Michael indifferently.
"Oh,
yes." And here, to his surprise,
Daphne dipped into her brightly striped shoulder bag and extracted from its
jumble of heterogeneous contents a thick paperback entitled A History
of Madness, its cover like something by Hieronymus Bosch, which she then
proceeded to brandish quite unashamedly before the startled eyes of the
gentleman poet, potential genius, etc., who appeared to be momentarily
hypnotized by it and unable, in consequence, to formulate anything even
remotely resembling a coherent response.
"I've been reading it for quite some time," she went on,
"as you can doubtless tell from the somewhat battered condition it's in at
present. But it's a most enlightening
book!"
'I thought at first
she'd got it from a jumble sale, to judge by the state of it,' thought
Michael. 'Poor girl, I knew she was
neurotic from the moment she started here.
Might have been born unbalanced, for all I know. Whew! I'll become neurotic again, if I have
to sit next to her much longer.
Something in the oppressive atmosphere she creates. Thank goodness it's my last day here! I'll be rid of her for one thing!'
Meantime, Daphne having
returned the battered tome to her overcrowded shoulder bag, Michael felt called
upon to say something. "I
see," he reiterated, as though entranced.
Then, snapping out of it: "Are all your books like that?"
Daphne pondered a
moment, her mouth hanging open, as though in mute expectation of some spiritual
visitation. "No, not really,"
she at length replied. "Mostly
psychology, psychiatry, and sociology, with just a little, er,
literature thrown-in for good measure."
'Hum, she certainly
seems rather matter-of-fact about it,' mused Michael. 'Leads a regular social life in the evenings,
does she? Well, she won't do herself a
power of good, the way I see it, by mixing-in with the spaced-out crowd she's
evidently into at present.'
"Soon be lunch time,
Michael," the voice of Gerald Matthews was heard to interpose from a saner
section of the office. "Cod and
chips for me today. How's the work
going, by the way?"
Michael glanced at the
pile of completed forms to the right of his desk, the bulk of his morning's
labour. "Oh, not too badly,
thanks. Now that I don't have to keep on
answering the phone, I can get on with it.
You needn't worry about having to take over from me after today. Most of it's done now."
"Jolly good,"
smiled Gerald. "I'd hoped it would
be."
'Ah, it’s
twelve-twenty,' observed Michael to himself.
'Think I'll take a wash break, clean the sweat off my face.'
Grasping his bright blue
tea-mug, he strode purposefully out of the office, along the corridor, and down
the top flight of stairs towards the GENTS, wherein he proceeded to urinate,
wash his hands and face, rinse the mug, comb his hair, and retie the flagging
laces of his desert boots, which were usually somewhat loose by this time of
day. Finally, since there was nobody there
to disturb him, he leaned his elbows on the windowsill and, gazing out onto the
dreary scene the open window afforded one, began to ruminate on what he would
eat for lunch. Certainly not fish and
chips, at any rate! That was far too
much the done thing on Fridays. It would
be better to order a doner. Yes, a kebab would do fine.
At that moment little
Ernie Brock shuffled onto the scene and, noticing him out of the corner of his
eye, Michael greeted him cordially, because he was an inoffensive little man
who mostly kept himself to himself and consequently inspired a degree of
veneration. Reciprocating Michael's
greeting in his customary laid-back fashion, Ernie began to straighten his
checked tie and to modestly inspect his priestly countenance in the nearby
mirror. "Nice weather we're still
having," Michael ventured to opine from his vantage-point by the
window. "Let's hope it continues
over the weekend." He glanced
uneasily at Ernie. 'Not much chance of a
positive response from him,' he thought, becoming slightly embarrassed. 'Bit of a drag always reverting to the
weather anyway, particularly where he's concerned! I suppose it's just a formality between us.'
- "Incidentally, how's the wife?"
Although still
preoccupied with his clean-shaven reflection in the grimy mirror, Ernie managed
an affirmative nod with his balding head, which was then corroborated by a
terse statement to the effect that she was fine. "Good!" sighed Michael, who was
grateful for every little crumb of verbal response he could garner in such
fashion. "And how are the
babies?"
Having shuffled to the
loo proper, standing-room only, Ernie smiled self-satisfactorily on the
reception of this question which, unbeknown to anyone else, directly related to
his chief pride in life: namely, his two baby daughters. "Oh, quite well, thanks," he
replied, while simultaneously relieving what sounded to Michael like a
hard-pressed bladder. "The youngest
one's teething at the moment, but it shouldn't last too long."
"Dear me, that must
be somewhat painful for her," Michael ventured to speculate, feeling
completely out of his depth. To which
speculation, however, there was no reply, so he asked: "Is she crying a
lot, then?"
"No, not
really," Ernie replied.
"Fortunately she's a very good sleeper, so she isn't aware of her
situation all that often. Then, too,
we've given her a plastic dummy to suck, in order to relieve the pain
slightly. But she's really quite a tough
little creature." At which point,
to Michael's surprise, his narrow face expanded into a broad grin, as though in
acknowledgement of his own contribution to his daughter's toughness.
"Good for
her," rejoined Michael. "And
how's the other one - talking yet?"
"We can't stop
her," Ernie smilingly averred.
"She evidently takes to the language."
"Must be a busy job
for the wife, then," opined Michael while staring disinterestedly at a
couple of large pigeons which had just that moment alighted on the flat roof of
a nearby warehouse, the male of the species being engaged in wooing the other,
a similarly light-grey pigeon that appeared to be completely ignoring the
male's song-and-dance routine in her intense preoccupation with a
grubby-looking apple core which someone must have thrown from one of the firm's
back windows. However, she soon
discarded this titbit and straightaway flew off towards the roof of another
building, while the male, having seemingly enacted a gratuitous performance,
picked or, rather, pecked up his wounded pride and took off in the opposite
direction, leaving the titbit untouched.
'These damn male pigeons
are always at it!' thought Michael solemnly.
'Making bloody fools of themselves every minute of the frigging
day! I suppose they have little else to
do. Food and sex, sex and food, in a
vicious circle. It must be dreadfully
annoying for the female, being accosted every day by any number of puffed-up
males on the make and having to take evasive action most of the time. Not exactly a bed of roses for the male
either, having to contend with so many ill-mannered rejections. Something of a regular cock-up, you could
say. Still, he's not to know one way or
the other at first, is he? Not, of course,
unless the mate of the female from whom he happens to be soliciting favours is
also there, assuming they do actually establish any sort of long-term
relationship and aren't wholly promiscuous, as one might be led to suppose from
their general pattern of activity. But
surely, if the mate of the female was nearby, a stranger would have more sense
than to accost her, wouldn't he? Ah
well, analogies enough with human life, without the necessity of my having to
feel sorry for these damn pigeons! They
breed like flies anyway. There ought to
be something done about them. After all,
they aren't that much of a tourist attraction.
Terrible mess they make everywhere!'
"... and she'll
soon be old enough for nursery," Ernie was saying. "How quickly they grow!"
'Good God, I'd virtually
forgotten he was there!' - "By the way, what time is it?" asked
Michael, as Ernie, having washed and dried his cup, shuffled towards the
door. "Er,
twenty-seven minutes past twelve," the latter pedantically obliged,
consulting his wind-up.
"That's good,"
said Michael. "It seems to have
been a long morning."
Ernie made no reply but
smiled sympathetically before gently closing the door behind him, so once again
Michael was left alone with his thoughts.
'Wonder how he gets on
with his wife. She must be quite a
different sort of person, because I certainly can't imagine him living with a
woman as quiet as himself. It would be
bad for the children when they got older.
But maybe he comes out of his shell a bit more in the evenings? Still, he has managed to knock two kids out
of her, so there's evidently more there than first meets the eye. Probably the attraction of opposites. Like-poles repel, unlike-ones attract. Then again, homosexuals are like-poles,
aren't they? And they attract. No, what
I mean is the attraction of men and women towards people who are
temperamentally different from themselves.
I mean it would be terribly boring otherwise, like talking to yourself
most of the time, with little or no incentive for debate. So if his wife is a garrulous person, she
doubtless needs a sympathetic ear, someone on whom she can exercise her passion
for speech, someone, like him, who's a good listener and therefore won't shout
her down or tell her to belt up. Well,
that strikes me as a fairly feasible conjecture anyway, something along the
lines of a solid foundation for a durable relationship.
'But I can't imagine him
sexually dominating her, though. That
seems a bit unlikely to me, especially when one begins to take this place into
account. Why, there's too much male
servitude here, women ruling the clerical roost. Ah, but wait a minute! Perhaps it's his sagacity which stands him in
good stead with her by granting him a more subtle domination. I mean, with a man like him who, unlike old
grumpy guts Vlad, never seems to get worked-up about
anything or rarely shows it if he does, you'd think he had the most
sought-after secrets of the world in his head, that he knew all the spiritual
dodges or schemes and was only keeping calm because he also knew, from bitter
experience, that resignation was the wisest course. I mean, one's imagination begins to wander
with a man like him. You never know
quite what he's up to!
'Mind you, he's no
dope. He has a great memory. His little round head is absolutely crammed
with knowledge, superfluous or otherwise.
He's not as simple or lethargic as a superficial appreciation of his
personality could lead one to suppose.
On the contrary, there's much of the genuine mystic about him. He probably knows the Christian religion inside
out, back-to-front, and upside down, as well as the right way up, and that
undoubtedly has a lot to do with it, with his general air of complacency, as if
all's well with the world. He has faith
in the divine plan, in the omniscient omnipotence behind everything, in the
diurnal scheme-of-things in which he has his allocated place and, as such, he
isn't going to get foolishly worked-up about various problems, real or
imaginary, when that wouldn't solve anything but more than likely turn him into
a neurasthenic idler with peptic ulcers instead! No, he's all for a quiet life if he can get
it, babies or not!
'Ah, footsteps on the
stairs. That means it's
half-twelve. Guess I'd better put in an
appearance just for Gerald's sake.'
And, so thinking,
Michael Savage hurried out of the GENTS and headed back, mug in hand, towards the
general office.
CHAPTER FOUR
Gerald Matthews had been waiting for over three minutes on the
firm's front-door steps when, a shade breathless, Michael eventually arrived on
the scene. "Ah, there you
are!" he reproachfully exclaimed, evidently somewhat relieved. "I wondered where you'd got to!"
"I was just taking
a leisurely wash-break," said Michael by way of an excuse. "Unfortunately, I got rather carried
away by my reflections."
"Nothing lewd, I
trust?" rejoined a smirking Gerald, as they set off in the general
direction of their chosen restaurant.
"Rather prosaic,
I'm afraid," chuckled Michael.
"Certainly nothing worth recounting."
"How
disappointing! And I was under the
impression that you were a poet."
"Did I tell
you that?"
"No, not
exactly. But I was given to understand
that you had literary aspirations and, consequently, knew a thing or two about
poetry."
"Well, I probably
do know a thing or two about it," said Michael as, crossing the road
together, they bore left down a side street, "but I'm no modern poet, I
can tell you that! In fact, I haven't
written anything remotely resembling poetry for over a year now, because
there's a world of difference between being a clerk who writes something
resembling poetry in his spare time and actually being a poet. So when I eventually realized that I was only
a clerk and not a poet, ah! that was when I gave-up trying to write
poetry."
Gerald Matthews blushed
slightly in regard to his own artistic pretensions. "My humble apologies, Mike," he
said. "I suppose poetry isn't
exactly the most lucrative of occupations anyway, since a majority of people
appear to take no great interest in it."
"Highly
understandable," declared young Savage, his gaze firmly to the
ground. "These days there's so much
obfuscation involved with its production that it would hardly appear to be
worth their while. Besides, a majority
of people are either too stupid to appreciate great poetry or become so
philistine in consequence of their daily chores and jobs, that the serious
perusal of anything beyond the popular newspapers would seem to them a complete
and utter waste of time! No, the proper
appreciation of genuine poetry has always been confined to a comparatively small
minority of people, which, like it or not, is nothing to be wondered at. However, these days I'm too preoccupied with
the study and practice of prose to have much or, indeed, any time to spare on
verse."
"Really?"
Gerald responded in a slightly disillusioned tone-of-voice. "Yet, to return to what you said a
moment ago about not writing poetry because you're a clerk, isn't it the same
with prose; that even though you write prose in your spare time, you're not
really a writer but a clerk who amuses himself by attempting to write
prose?"
Michael Savage's eyes
shone with unspoken admiration for his fellow-clerk's perception. "Absolutely!" he replied, without
the slightest trace of embarrassment.
"But, you see, the prose I now write is only done as an exercise, a
means of keeping my hand in, so to speak, and therefore it isn't something I
take very seriously. I don't think I
would want to offer it to a publisher when it's merely the work of a dilettante
rather than a genuinely professional author.
No, if after today I subsequently acquire more time in which to write, I
shall be either obliged to ignore it altogether or, assuming that's impossible,
revise it extensively. The point is, one
has to have the psychology of an author, not the psychology of a humble
drudge-ridden clerk who imagines he's an author. Do you see what I mean?"
"Perfectly,"
Gerald averred.
"But that was no
easy lesson to learn," said Michael gravely. "For a long time I was like a drowning
man clutching at straws. I chose, in my
capacity of full-time clerk and spare-time scribbler, to be incredibly
optimistic concerning my prospects of producing work of an acceptably
professional quality. From which fact
you can probably deduce how dissatisfied I was with my clerical role at the time."
On arriving at the
restaurant, they quickly spotted three empty tables near the door and, Michael
leading the way, elected to sit opposite each other at a small circular one.
"Well, it's not as
busy as I had expected it to be at this time of day," observed Gerald, as
he peered into the restaurant's Spartan interior before casting his eyes over
the menu. "Now then ... yes, I'll
settle for cod, chips, peas, and a coffee" he went on, largely for the
benefit of the short, dark-haired waitress who, to their mutual satisfaction,
had lost no time in offering them her professional services. "And a doner
kebab for me, please," requested Michael without bothering to consult the
menu.
"As you like,"
the waitress responded in a politely matter-of-fact tone, writing out and
handing them their respective bills on the spot. "Oh, and I'll have a tea as well,"
added Michael rather belatedly.
"And one tea,"
she echoed, amending his bill accordingly.
Then she crisply turned on her high-heeled feet and shouted: "Cod, doner, coffee, and a tea!" at an old man with a bald
patch and a fat middle-aged woman who were stationed behind the counter in
working proximity of the food. "And
is that salad ready yet?" she asked impatiently. "That customer's been waiting over ten
minutes down there!"
"Salad coming up,"
replied the old man, suddenly producing a copiously stocked plate of assorted
vegetables from behind the counter. The
waitress snatched it from his shaky hand and briskly descended upon the
customer concerned, a rather pompous-looking fellow with a thin moustache and
thick eyebrows who sat, elbows on table, at the far end of the room.
"She evidently
rules the roost in this place," opined Gerald, leaning across the small
table in a confidential manner.
"Knows what she's about, by the sound of it."
"Yes, she's pretty
quick-witted," Michael conceded.
"French actually. Maria
somebody."
"Well, she
certainly has some body," joked Gerald, his eyes on her perambulating
form. "Not one of nature's prosaic
types, by any means."
'It wouldn't surprise me
if he was gay,' thought Michael, instinctively leaning back in his chair. 'I don't want him to get too close to me if
he is. Bad enough my being celibate,
without running the risk of becoming gay as well!'
Slightly disappointed
that he hadn't amused Michael by his slight show of wit, Gerald turned the
focus of conversation back to his colleague by saying: "I expect you're
looking forward to the count-down of being propelled into freedom this
afternoon."
"Yes, I might well
celibate, I mean celebrate, the occasion later on today."
"That's the
spirit! Take your friends for a merry
drink somewhere."
'I'd like to inform him
that I don't have any friends, but it would only complicate matters,' thought
Michael. 'After all, this is supposed to
be a friendly get-together. Change the
subject!' - "Are you teaching tonight?" he asked.
"Yes, but just the
one pupil fortunately, assuming she turns up," Gerald replied. "She had to cancel last week's lesson
because of a cold, but I expect she'll be alright now. A very good pupil actually, much better than
any of the others."
"That must be quite
a relief for you," said Michael, who was quite relieved, himself, that Mr
Matthews would be engaged all evening.
"From what you've told me about some of them, it seems that you'd
be better off teaching full-time in either a school or a college again."
Gerald offered his
colleague the benefit of a sceptical smile, but was not altogether devoid of
positive feelings on the subject.
"Well, I have actually been thinking along such lines in recent
weeks," he confessed, "considering there's a vacancy, this summer,
for an Assistant Director of Music in a pretty good West Country college. But I'll have to wait and see what sort of response
my application receives before committing myself to any high hopes on that
score. I don't want to build castles in
the air right now, as I'm sure you can appreciate."
"One tea for you,
and a coffee for you, sir," the waitress suddenly interposed, positioning
their respective cups on the table.
"Thank you,"
responded Michael, who repositioned his cup closer to-hand, before removing the
two sugar cubes from its saucer. He only
took sugar in coffee, as a rule. 'Now I
don't want him to start going on about that public-school trip again, what with
its bigoted scientologists or something,' he mused. 'I'd rather he ...'
"Incidentally,"
rejoined Gerald, "you'll have to show me that short story you told me
about last week, the one concerning a music teacher's amorous relationship with
his favourite pupil. It sounds rather
fun."
"Oh that, I'm
afraid it's only a sketch at present," declared Michael blushingly. "I'll have to touch it up a bit before
it could be considered worth your while."
"I'm sure you
will," said Gerald, a childishly ironic smile in swift accompaniment. "I can assure you, however, that there's
nothing I won't believe if it really sounds convincing."
Michael sipped some tea
and gently shrugged his shoulders.
"Hmm, I'm not sure it will," he drawled. "But I'll mail it to you, all the
same. You live at Forty-Eight something
or other, don't you?" he conjectured.
"Eighty-four,"
Gerald corrected.
"Ah yes,"
confirmed Michael, peeping into his tiny red address book, which had been in
his possession for longer than he cared or indeed was able to remember. "You're the only tenant, eh?"
"Fortunately for
me, otherwise my piano lessons would probably constitute an unpardonable
indiscretion, and I'd either be thrown out of my lodgings or compelled to hire
a hall somewhere," Gerald averred.
"But doesn't your
landlord ever complain about the noise?" asked Michael incredulously.
Gerald's pale pink face
turned a deeper shade of pink, as though at a slight but, thinking better of
taking exception to the word 'noise', which was doubtless innocently intended
on Michael's part, he merely replied: "Well, now you mention it, he has
occasionally hinted at being disturbed, especially when he's had a few too many
drinks somewhere. But he's generally
fairly level-headed and no enemy of music, so, for the most part, he doesn't
mind what I get up to in the evenings.
In fact, he's usually out of audible range when he confines himself to
his study at the rear of the house - a thing he doesn't always do, however,
when inebriated."
"And thus of the
peripatetic school of Aristotle," Michael ventured to speculate.
Gerald exploded with
peremptory laughter. "Yes,
effectively. Call it irritated
itinerancy, if you like. Anyway, I don't
have to bang the piano to pieces every night, thank goodness."
"Presumably in
order to vent your spleen on it," conjectured Michael.
"Or split my seams
on it," chuckled Gerald, most of whose attention was now focused on the
two plates which were steadily approaching them by way of Maria's capable
arms. "Our luncheons are about to
be served!" he gleefully observed.
"Cod, chips, and
peas for you, sir, and a doner for you," Maria's
deep-throated and more than faintly-seductive voice boomed across the table.
'Hmm, that smells good!'
thought Michael. 'Looks like a fairly
decent-sized helping, too. Not like the
few crumbs one gets in so many of these places.'
"Getting back to
what I was saying," said Gerald in a muffled voice, his mouth stuffed with
fish, "it's just as well that my landlord is a keen music-lover, otherwise
I wouldn't be able to live there."
"Quite
understandably," averred Michael.
"You can't live with just anybody.
I know how it feels, having to contend with a houseful of incompatible
and often hostile neighbours every day.
It's one of the least acceptable aspects of single-room
accommodation." - 'Yes, life too often becomes a kind of diabolical
farce,' he thought. 'By Christ, you have
to laugh at it sometimes! It makes you
wonder why-the-devil you were born in the first place, when it's so often like
that. You feel you may even have to ask
permission to smile in public. Too much
dead meat for dinner, is it? Too many walking
cadavers around? Well, I've certainly
got more self-respect than to turn myself into a fully-fledged psychological
masochist, woman or no woman!'
"Yes, I've been
very fortunate in that respect," confessed Gerald, respecting the
symposium. "My neighbours have
generally been fairly congenial people, some of them quite charming, in fact. Mind you, I did have a spot of trouble with a
few fellow borders while teaching at Darksdale."
"Really?"
responded Michael casually. "And
what was the outcome?"
"Oh, nothing
dramatic. I just felt my teaching
abilities weren't being properly appreciated, in view of the fact that I didn't
subscribe to their religious persuasion.
Had I been a scientologist, I would doubtless have had a more successful
career there. But it was rather a closed
shop, so to speak." Here he paused
for breath, in order to chew some more fish, while Michael, swallowing the
chewed-over pulp of a large slice of succulent lamb, unleashed a question to
the effect that if what Gerald had said was true, why had he bothered to teach
there in the first place, it being evident that the authorities were of sectarian
inclination and unlikely, in consequence, to make allowances for black sheep
like him. "But I had no idea
whatsoever, initially, that my career prospects would ultimately be jeopardized
because of my professed scepticism concerning their beliefs," retorted
Gerald angrily.
"Ah, I see,"
sighed Michael, regretting his mistake.
"So you gradually fell out of countenance, if that's the right
word, with the status quo. Tell me, do
you profess to any Christian beliefs?"
"Well, there's
certainly a lot I admire about Christianity," admitted Gerald, scooping up
a forkful of peas and then appearing to deliberate over exactly what he next
wanted to say before committing himself to an opinion. "Now, I'm no expert on theology
..."
"I shouldn't think
one would have to be to answer that question,” interposed Michael impatiently.
"Well, I won't have
someone who probably knows as little about it as me lay down the law, as if
those who've studied theology are simply anachronistic fools," rejoined
Gerald, "because I do know that there's some good in it, irrespective of
my ultimate beliefs."
'Ironical bastard!'
thought Michael. 'As if a thorough study
of the subject would necessarily lead one to greater enlightenment! Apparently, you're only good once you've got
the faith. - Emerson shouldn't have advocated things that concur with
Christianity if he wasn't a Christian, Ernie Brock said to me the other day
in response to a volume of Ralph Waldo's essays I had lent him, quite
overlooking the fact that people can theorize and arrive at similar conclusions
from completely different standpoints.
As if one couldn't know how to differentiate between good and evil
unless one was a Christian, i.e. a person on what they take to be the only true
path through life. The ignorant
pricks! Unacknowledged goodness wells up
in me, prevents me from throwing myself at someone - possibly Gerald Matthews -
and slashing his throat with this knife.
My kindness is spurious compared with the overwhelming authenticity of
theirs. It lacks the faith. I ought to join the fold and acquire a
certificate enabling me to practise genuine kindness.' - "Of course
there's some good in it," he at length responded, not a little annoyed. "There are always elements of right
thinking in theological doctrines, national or international. But I think it has to be conceded that the
converse is also the case, and I don't for one moment believe their upholders
can carry on plugging the logical gaps which continue to appear in them, in
relation to modern life, with quite the same 'right thinking' as has evidently
been the case for some considerable period of time now, however much certain
people may like to believe that they're invariably doing the world a power of
good."
Gerald was more than a
shade surprised by the vehemence of Michael's denunciation. "Well, I don't think you'll ever find a
system of dogma that's entirely perfect," he rejoined, "not even
among the latest sects, who evidently strive to worship in a manner they regard
as representative of their ideals."
'Oh, but haven't I heard
all this before somewhere?' thought Michael.
'Wasn't the better part of my childhood psychologically poisoned by
people who strove to worship in a manner they evidently regarded as representative
of their ideals? Don't I still
suffer from regular relapses into self-deprecation, self-abnegation, the jaws
of Christian humility bearing down on me, like some vast whale? Haven't I had enough of people accosting me
in the street, handing me religious pamphlets, inviting me to meetings, free
tests, lectures - to just about everywhere but where I really want to go -
under the cult-sanctioned vice of disrespect for individual freedom, because
someone higher up has put it into their gullible heads that they're the links
through which my salvation can become a reality? Am I not he who, in the interests of
charitable trustees, was subjected to such an overdose of Christian asceticism,
in his youth, that he constantly suffered from psychological withdrawal pains
in later years? Yes, they evidently
strive to worship, these humble souls, but who or what it is they're actually
worshipping affords a wide solution, if you ask me. I wonder what his reaction would be if I told
him that, to my mind, true believers are all fundamentally mad. Try it anyway. It's about time someone said something
again.' - "Personally, Gerald, I think a large proportion of so-called
true believers are either simpleminded, psychologically vain, or virtually
mad," I said. "They don't
realize they're deceiving themselves, because they've taken their habitual
inculcations so much for granted as to end-up being duped by them. It's rather like that POW who feigned madness
as a strategy for getting himself discharged on medical grounds - a novel idea
all right, but one with the unforeseen consequence that he was obliged to
maintain his deception so persistently and to such a credible degree that he
gradually became enslaved to it and ended-up actually going mad. I mean, we're all mad to some extent,
Gerry. It's just that most people don't
realize the fact."
"Oh, I quite
agree," coughed an embarrassed Gerald Matthews, pushing his empty dinner
plate to one side and then nervously lighting himself a mild cigarette with the
aid of a silver lighter. "Most people
are perfectly aware of the fact that there are religious maniacs in the world,
and not just in places like Iran or Ireland either. Yet even if a significant number of genuine
believers are mad or, at the very least, self-deceiving, I can't pretend
it's a fact which has detracted from my enjoyment of playing the organ at
Sunday-evening services. On the
contrary, it has probably enhanced my enjoyment!"
'Naturally, mutual
preoccupation,' thought Michael, wincing slightly. 'Madness in your favour. After all, he'd be something of a protagonist
there, wouldn't he? A big wheel, a sort
of sophisticated sheepdog vis-à-vis the participating flock. It makes you wonder, though, why people so
often say irrelevant things when you talk to them, never quite understanding how
your mind works in relation to the subject of discussion. All these anachronistic concepts we're
obliged to put-up with every day! By
Christ, an atheist winds-up subsidizing the clergy, a non-Christian ends-up
supporting Christians! - Yes, but you're Christian, one person says,
if you were born in a Christian country. - No, you're not a real Christian, another
says, because you don't go to church regularly and believe in Christ as the
Son of God Who ascended from the grave on the Third Day and will return to
earth during the time of the Antichrist in order to restore order throughout
His Kingdom by calling upon the forces of Light to defend His Dominion to the
End of the World and Last Judgement. I
doubt, myself, that the Messiah will literally be called Jesus Christ when next
He appears on earth. That wouldn't go
down too well with peoples of non-Christian descent for one thing, whether they
were born inside or outside so-called Christian countries!'
Meantime, Michael having
lost the thread of his interlocutor's argument, Gerald was saying: "Of
course, it is rather difficult to believe in a Son of God Who was separated
from the Father and sent to earth via a Virgin Mother, a woman, in other words,
who had never taken seed save divinely, if one lacks faith in miracles, in
God's omnipotence and ..."
"But what you're
saying," interposed Michael, "suggests to me that Jesus was somehow
preconceived by the Father and subsequently dropped, as it were, into the
Virgin's lap without the necessity of having to undergo foetal life, which
strikes me as even more preposterous than the theory concerning Mary's
virginity vis-à-vis St Joseph, whose role as her husband would appear somewhat
suspect, not to say gratuitous, in consequence!"
Gerald's face darkened
perceptibly in the turbulent wake of his colleague's rational thrust. "Now don't take what I'm saying so
literally," he responded. "For
if you had listened properly and allowed me to continue, you'd have heard my
justification for alluding to such a theory.
Now what I am saying is that, according to Scripture, Mary was endowed with the
ability to conceive a child without the necessity of her husband fertilizing
her, and that, whether you like it or not, is the whole crux of the Immaculate
Conception."
"Well, it still
strikes me as preposterous," confessed the rationalistic Michael Savage,
suddenly feeling self-consciously embarrassed about getting carried away by
such a juvenile argument in what had by now become a crowded restaurant, and,
with so many businessmen present, one overly heathen in character at that! "I mean, surely a virgin would be in
some considerable difficulty forcing a baby through her birth canal, to cite
medical terminology, when no-one, not excepting her legal husband, had
previously copulated with her and thus 'broken her in', as the saying
goes? Now if St Joseph had copulated
with Mary, she wouldn't have been a virgin and therefore the concept of a
virgin birth would be a misnomer. But if
St Joseph hadn't copulated with his wife prior to the virgin birth, then what
the blazes had he done to justify being her husband in the first place?"
Gerald's face became
momentarily ponderous as, petulantly exhaling cigarette smoke, he gave
Michael's questions, which struck him as somehow overly rhetorical, some
lightweight consideration. "Yes,
that's an interesting remark," he reluctantly averred, blushing slightly,
"and one that seems to tie-in with the, er, fact
that we aren't told anything much about the circumstances surrounding the
actual birth of Christ, apart from, you know, a few terse references to a bed
in a manger, as though the matter were a sort of soft underbelly of theology
that didn't warrant closer scrutiny. But
I suppose all this is really beside-the-point from the strictly theological
point-of-view, which is less concerned with reason than divine
credibility."
"Well, when one
considers the miraculous side of things, it appears to warrant more attention
than the Evangelists were evidently prepared to grant it," said an
unrepentant Michael Savage.
"Incidentally, the celebration of Christ's birth ties-in with the
visitation of the Three Kings which, if scholarly memory serves me well, wasn't
actually on the day of his birth at all but some weeks or even months
afterwards, and therefore anything but a reliable source of information
concerning the events preceding it."
"Yes, that appears
to be the case," conceded Gerald wearily.
"And quite understandably, when one bears in mind the primitive
nature of both communication and transportation in those times. However, returning to what you were saying
about the alleged madness of true believers, and considering the fact that
there are so many unreasonable people in the world these days, what, tell me,
would you propose to replace Christianity with if, by some near-miraculous
transformation in the existing state-of-affairs, you were given the
opportunity?"
"A species of Zarathustrianism," replied Michael, alluding to
Nietzsche. "Either that or
reason. For the more I think about
Christianity, the less Christian I become.
I see little or no difference between a man who believes himself to be a
reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte and one who believes in the Virgin Birth. To me, they're equally mad. So either Zarathustra
or reason!"
"Tell that to a
fool," chuckled Gerald before beckoning to the waitress. "Tell that to someone who, besides not
knowing anything about Zarathustra, doesn't realize
his dilemma. Like me, for
instance."
"That will be £4.75p
for you, sir, and for you ... £4.50," Maria declared, picking up and
reading them their respective bills.
'Hmm, not a bad-looking
woman, all in all,' observed Michael to himself. 'Eight-out-of-ten, I'd say. Wonder who her husband is, assuming that
isn't an engagement ring she's wearing.
Not a bad pair of calf-muscles under those sexy black stockings,
either. Nice little arse on her,
too. It could bring out the beast in me,
rejuvenate my Old Adam, as it were.'
"By the way, to
what madness do you profess, if that's not an impertinent question?" asked
Gerald, once the waitress was safely out of earshot again.
"Well now, that would be
telling," smirked Michael, reluctantly responding to his colleague's
curiosity. "I've passed through
quite a few distressing states-of-mind in recent years. However, the most distressing one entailed a
kind of savage neurosis induced by unrequited love, which lasted about
three-and-a-half years. It resulted from
the fact that I'd fallen helplessly in love with someone else's woman and,
being unable to obtain her in the flesh, could only carry her image around with
me in consequence. She was a student who
only worked at the firm during vacation time, meaning, effectively, that I
didn't get to see her very often. In
actual fact, I was so infatuated with her that the two attempts I made to leave
the firm during those years completely failed, with a result that I ended-up
going back there again, getting myself re-employed - a disconcerting, not to
say humiliating, experience - and subsequently taken advantage of and landed in
deeper clerical water, so to speak, because I just couldn't have worked
anywhere else in the knowledge that she would probably continue to reappear
there, from time to time, in my absence.
I was effectively chained to the spot.
Though what I found most humiliating was the way she would greet me
cordially, when she reappeared on the scene for the first time on each
occasion, and then inquire of me why I hadn't left the firm by then, as I had
previously if fatuously intimated doing in an attempt to bluff her as to my
true position."
"Poor you,"
Gerald sympathized. "And so you
returned to the fold just for the opportunity of being near her during those
weeks in the year when she was on vacation from college. And then, presumably, without your having any
physical contact with her?"
"That's love,"
averred Michael, who felt what he had taken to be the long-dormant pain of this
old wound momentarily awakening itself afresh, as though once again he was being
cast out from the centre of life and left to suffer on the periphery in a
terrible fall from emotional grace.
"One does many strange things under the influence of such a
powerful master, or perhaps I should say mistress," he continued. "I mean, the fact that I remained so
long in a job I didn't like all that much, simply because I'd fallen so
desperately in love with this young woman, meant I was constantly exposed to a
variety of conflicting emotions: those, on the one hand, which bid me stay there
because of her and seemed to lend the place a strong sentimental value in my
eyes, and those, on the other hand, which bid me leave it because I didn't much
care for the work and had budding literary ambitions anyway, the grand result
of these conflicting emotions ultimately being the rather savage neurosis, no
pun intended, from which I've only comparatively recently recovered. But it's certainly a major setback in life to
have things go against you like that, to be trapped for a number of years in a
prison of unrequited love with no prospect of emotional bail, no genuine sex
whatsoever, and then to find yourself ignoring other women because they
absolutely fail to match up to the one who emotionally enslaved you in the
first place!"
"I know it only too
well," admitted Gerald, feeling slightly ashamed of the fact. "Unmerciful life, isn't it?"
"Well, it's women
who rule this world, to judge by the number of poor bastards currently in
it," young Michael Savage truculently averred. "That's doubtless why we've got the
popular notion to the contrary!"
Gerald Matthews had
begun to blush fiercely now and: "So it would seem, so it would
seem," was all, in mumbling fashion, he could bring himself to say.
'That time a female
acquaintance told me the firm's manager, old Welsh, had one day asked her, my
beloved, if she would like to attend a classical concert with him the following
evening,' thought Michael. 'My God, I
nearly passed out! We were sitting in a
kind of pub cellar, I recall, with a rock band playing only a few yards away,
people dancing all around us, contented couples blissfully wallowing in
one-another's funky sweat, the bar fairly seething with drink-crazed bodies,
men shouting across the smoke-filled dance floor or frantically jabbering into
nearby ears, everyone appearing to buzz with excitement as the music rose in
intensity, goading them all into greater feats of participation - an orgy of
sound and movement. Then suddenly that
ill-timed and cutting allusion by Trudy to the manager's sexist intention which
completely poisoned everything there and then, driving me back upon myself to
such an extent that I had to physically withdraw from her, find another seat,
endeavour to regain my equilibrium, and attempt to console myself in the
knowledge that Julie had made excuses to him, had told him she was fully
engaged all week, that nothing had come of it and I was still in with a chance
of securing her love, even if only an extremely slender one. Indeed, whenever I met Trudy, who was
probably jealous of me, I knew in advance that she could be relied upon to drag
up the past and, wittingly or unwittingly, inflict some such mental torment on
me. I ended-up going out of my way to
avoid her.'
"Incidentally, what
do you think of all this latent feminism we've got nowadays?" Gerald was
asking, in an attempt to escape from the all-too-formal reality of his
embarrassment as quickly as possible.
"Frankly, I think
you'll find enough information on that at the office," replied Michael
offhandedly. "Female authority in
virtually all the senior clerical and secretarial positions having had, it
seems to me, a noticeably detrimental effect on the dwindling amount of male
initiative that's still to be found there.
For what do you suppose happens when, through some such arrangement, the
male becomes unaccustomed to dominating the female?"
Gerald shrugged his
shoulders. "You tell me," he
said.
"Bugger all, old
boy!" quipped Michael. "For a
majority of the male staff currently employed there are either effete or effeminate,
think what you will! Naturally, it makes
a certain amount of sense that women who aren't also mothers of young children
should be given employment, paid a fair wage for their work, given ample
opportunity for advancement within their chosen careers, allowed to express
themselves as they want, et cetera. All
credit to sexual and social emancipation!
But I, personally, would rather work under a man than under a woman any
day. For, in the final analysis, it
seems to me that women should exist in the service of men, not vice versa, no
matter how liberated from domestic servitude some of them may consider
themselves to be. However, the
overwhelming amount of female authority at the office makes it virtually inevitable
that the only males who can tolerate the place for any length of time tend, as
I've said, to be either effete or effeminate, and probably gay as well!"
Gerald deliberated a
moment or two before deciding to commit himself to any overt corroboration of
this rather disturbing and possibly chauvinistic assessment on Michael's part
which, to be sure, struck a painful discord within him, having confirmed an
intuition he had formulated (though subsequently dismissed as arid
subjectivity) shortly after joining the firm.
Indeed, he wondered whether the time had not come for him to divulge a
secret which had been gnawing at his peace-of-mind that very morning, causing
his concentration to wander from time to time, with the unfortunate consequence
that, unbeknown to himself, there were now more than a few serious clerical
blunders to his name! In regard to the
young man opposite, Gerald sensed he was a potentially sympathetic confidant, a
person who had evidently experienced his fair share of life's misfortunes and
consequently developed an understanding, not to say forbearing, nature. Yes, he would swallow his pride, that virtue
of the unthinking strong. "Whilst
on the subject of gayness," he commenced, in an uncharacteristically
subdued tone-of-voice as they rose from
the table, "and in view of the fact that you're leaving today, I'd like to
let you in on a little secret of mine concerning a male friend who, I regret to
say, claims to have fallen deeply in love with me."
Michael raised his
eyebrows in apparent concern but said nothing as they made their way to the
door and out into the sunny street again, where the crowds were now thicker on
the ground than before and the women correspondingly more plentiful. 'That's the worst of having a talkative bloke
with you when you're in the mood to ogle women,' he thought, as they hurried
along as best they could, already fifteen minutes over the lunch hour. 'I find it difficult enough to concentrate on
most of what he says anyway, not having listened to steady conversation for so
long. It reminds me of that harrowing
experience I had at the chief clerk's flat last year when, largely on account
of her ugliness, I couldn't focus my mental attention upon her properly, kept
losing the thread of her monologue, and wound-up feeling thoroughly vertiginous. I remember giving her some of my poems to
read as a sort of vengeance for all the inconvenience she had inflicted upon me
both then and previously. I regretted it
afterwards, though. She realized, from
then on, there was more to me than first met the eye!'
"Are you still
listening, Michael?" Gerald was asking rather petulantly, as they turned
the corner into the street which led to the office.
"Carry on, Gerry,
I'm all frigging ears," lied Michael obligingly.
"Well, as you can
imagine, I'm somewhat loathe to disappoint the poor fellow, since we've known
each other for several months now, the occasional drink and casual encounter
gradually developing our relationship along ever-more congenial lines. But now that he's sprung this profession of
love on me, well, I feel sort of imposed upon.
It's a rather tricky situation."
Michael's first impulse
was to laugh out loud, since he could never quite take declarations of love
between men seriously, but he endeavoured to sound sympathetic as he merely
said: "So it seems, Gerry. The fact
is, you'll just have to break ties with him if homosexuality isn't your
thing. I mean, what's the sense in
making a sodding martyr of yourself if you lack the
faith? You'll only succeed in making
things worse than they already are."
"As I fully
appreciate," sighed Gerald, with more than a hint of bitterness in his
voice. "Indeed, how often does one
fall in love with someone who doesn't care a damn about one, only to discover,
in one's turn, that someone else has made a similar mistake with regard to
oneself! Now what kind of a world is
that?" It would have been evident
to even the least attentive of people that, by now, Gerald Matthews was well-nigh
exasperated.
"Yes, it does seem
rather paradoxical," replied Michael, as they crossed over the road. "Fortunately, however, one doesn't fall
in love too often - at least not in my experience. But so many of our failings to reach a mutual
arrangement with other people only constitute an aspect of what a famous French
poet called 'universal misunderstanding', if you know anything about
that."
Gerald didn't really,
but he pretended, for appearances sake, to the contrary, before quickly going
on to say: "I'd much rather lavish my amorous attentions upon the young
girl I may be in with a chance of - you know, the one I told you about earlier
- than waste time on this fellow whose claim to be so deeply in love with me is
positively indecent, no matter how sincere he may appear."
"I'm sure you
would," smiled Michael as they reached the foot of the office steps, now
some thirty minutes late back from lunch.
CHAPTER FIVE
It had just gone 2.00pm when Mrs Mary Evidence, wife of Gus
Evidence and mother, through her first marriage, of Michael Savage, arrived back
at her flat on the Stroud Green Road in Finsbury Park, North London. As usual on a weekday she had finished at
noon in the large West End hotel where she was employed as a chambermaid, and
had decided to walk the six or seven miles between these two locations. The flat she rented consisted of three
medium-sized rooms on the second floor of an otherwise uninhabited three-storey
house, with the addition of a combined bathroom and WC on the first floor. She had lived there for over nine years and,
although well aware of the fact that the old house was in a condition of
advanced dilapidation and due for extensive renovation in the near future, had
nonetheless resigned herself to inhabiting what, by objective criteria, could
only be described as an inner-city hovel.
Like many other working-class people accustomed to continual domestic
deprivation, she had undergone a paradoxical inversion of egoism and eventually
become sentimentally attached to her squalid living conditions. The prospect she now faced of having to move
from this old tenement into a new block of high-rise flats met with scant
approval on her part. In her current
abode she felt she did at least possess a vestige of privacy and independence,
the sort of freedoms that would probably be denied her, she reflected, in a
tower block.
True, she might have to
contend with the ceaseless noise of the numerous heavy vehicles, including
lorries and double-decker buses, which passed up and down the busy main road
outside; to listen to the local drunks shouting and brawling outside the
all-too-local pub at night; to put up with occasional all-night parties in the
immediate vicinity; to bear with the mind-numbing disturbance of some
neighbourhood shop's unchecked burglar alarm every so often; or to live with
noisy young juveniles playing their uncouth games in the adjoining streets and
next-door back garden during the afternoon.
But, all these and a host of other things besides, she still maintained
that she was to some extent compensated by the consolation of knowing she was
mostly her own boss in her own unpleasant little world, independent of those
towering monoliths she regarded as infra dignum.
Gus Evidence, a laconic
West Indian who worked at a local engineering plant specializing in precision
tools, didn't normally arrive home until around 6.00pm, so Mary almost
invariably spent the afternoons either dozing, listening to the radio, or
reading books, albeit the kinds of books which her son, with his predilection
for the classics, inevitably regarded as of inferior quality. Apart from a few occasional attempts at
serious literature in her youth, Mary Evidence had absolutely no inclination,
these days, to read works in that category, preferring the general run-of-the-mill
library romance or thriller. But so much
for that, and each to his or her individual tastes! She would read what her tastes and
temperament permitted her to, and no more!
Having dusted and
swept-up in the kitchen at the rear of her flat, prepared herself a small
though nutritious salad, and brewed some mild tea, she took herself into the
bedroom with tea in hand and sprawled out on the convertible settee which stood
bathed in sunlight beneath the large front window there, expressly with the
intention of reading from just one such romance - a novel by a certain Martin
Curly entitled Nursed Back to Health. Opening it on page 69, she began,
tentatively and without real enthusiasm, to read:-
"I wanted
the nurse more and more with each appearance she made in the ward. She had only to hold my wrist in order to
check my pulse and, to all intents and purposes, I could swear it virtually
doubled. When she reached across the bed
of my nearest neighbour to straighten his blankets or, better still from my
point of view, bent down to tuck them in, I could swear my vision became ten
times sharper at the sight of her sexy black-stockinged
legs, the sudden violence of her movements momentarily exposing a glimpse of
thighs which were among the most seductive I had ever seen. She was indeed sexy in the best sense of that
word, with firm legs, a shapely behind, ample breasts, fleshy arms, a pretty
face, and a mound of pinned-up hair, dark and fine, such as one usually only
encountered on women of good breeding.
"We had scarcely spoken save in the
context of matters appertaining to my health and comfort, but I sensed that she
delighted in my presence, as I in hers, by what seemed to me the extraordinary
efforts she was making to conceal her desire, to avoid looking at me too
closely, to steady her nerves, and even by the way she remained shyly reserved
with me in conversation, when she was anything but reserved with most of the
other patients, seeming to overdo the formality of each routine visit as, with
slightly moist palms, she checked my pulse or took my temperature. Indeed, on more than one occasion I had
caught her looking at me when she evidently thought my attention
elsewhere! But she swiftly averted her
gaze and returned it to the business to hand, as soon as my optical penetration
had found her out.
"The realization that I would soon
be well enough to leave hospital encouraged me to stroll round the ward more
often, and even to strike up friendly though inconsequential conversation with
a number of my fellow patients who, for the most part, were still confined to
their beds in various stages of post-op somnolence. Nevertheless, I was in some concern regarding
my little nurse who, in all probability, would drift out of my life as casually
as she had drifted into it, soon to forget that I had ever existed. Well, if that was the case, I would just have
to bear up to it and carry on as best I could.
Fortunately, however, I still had the consolation of knowing that such
pessimistic conjectures in no way detracted from my admiration of her many physical
assets, which somehow struck me as inviolable anyway, since belonging to one of
those special categories of esteemed females of whom nurses, nuns, and teachers
comprise the most conspicuous examples; women whose near-angelic activities
seem to prohibit, in men, the formulation of lewd thoughts and, more
especially, lewd actions in relation to their physical persons.
"However that may be I felt it
incumbent on me to 'make' this curvaceous little angel if it was the last thing
I did, my sole intention at this juncture in time being to take her in my arms
and let her know just how much I thought of her, how much I wanted her, how
much I would satisfy her, irrespective of the adversity I might encounter from
the elderly Sister for accosting a junior nurse in the throes of ward
duties. The question was not whether but when could a
rendezvous be arranged on the sly?"
Mary Evidence put down the book at this point and reflected, while
sipping some tea, upon the number of words she had been obliged to skip because
of an inadequate education. True, she
had grasped the gist of the narrative thus far.
But that wasn't enough to prevent her from feeling annoyed with herself
for having to indulge in yet another superficial assimilation of the many
difficult words and phrases encountered, Curly's
novel being more complex and even highbrow than she had initially
suspected. Ah well, maybe she simply
wasn't in the mood to lavish patience on this brand of literary foreplay
today. She would give it another try,
however, because there was little else to do but read at this time of day and,
besides, the afternoon still had some hours to run.
"As it
happened, an opportunity fell to me to make my desires known to Nurse Adams the
day before my discharge. For I
accidentally-on-purpose touched the back of her left thigh with my right hand
as she dramatically bent over my bedside locker to retrieve a book she had
knocked to the floor while making my empty bed, and, in doing so, caused her to
smile in what I took to be rather a coquettish fashion. Caught between a disinclination to make a
blundering fool of myself and an overwhelming inclination to appease my desire,
I had unwittingly proffered an ambiguous gesture which, fortunately for me, met
with her approval. However, now that her
attention was momentarily fixed on me, I hastened to consolidate my advantage
by placing an arm round her waist, while she, in what I could only suppose to
be instinctive reciprocity, delicately brushed her hand over my forehead and
smoothed my mop of hair, thereby inducing me to smile up at her from where I
was sitting. Since my nearest neighbour
was preoccupied in his customary studious fashion, and nobody else seemed to be
aware of us, I furtively slipped my right hand down the back of her left thigh
again and gently ran it up and down the flesh above her stocking top a few
times, while simultaneously looking up at her with an eye to catching her
approval. Blushing profusely, she
moistened her lips and, bending down, kissed me tenderly on the brow. She evidently approved of my act!
"However, not wishing to get caught
in such an amorous position by anyone in the ward, least of all her superiors,
and, fearing that I might have the audacity to take matters further, Nurse
Adams quickly disengaged herself from my wandering hand and summarily made off
in the direction of a nearby patient, an old sod on the other side of the ward
who, to judge by the pathetic noise he was making, evidently had need of some
urgent medical attention! That being the
case, I straightaway groped for my writing pad and scribbled my nurse a brief
note to the effect that I desperately wanted to see her after my discharge,
adding, in block capitals, my full name and address, together with telephone
number, and concluding with a line in praise of her beauty. I slipped the note, suitably folded, into her
hand at the first favourable opportunity later that day, taking care to
ascertain whether this further gesture met with her approval. It did!
She smiled reassuringly and then safely tucked it into her breast
pocket. The deed was done!"
Yawning profusely, Mary Evidence closed the book, got up from her
settee, and returned to the kitchen, wherein she proceeded to eat her
salad. She was of the opinion that it
was always wiser to leave the salad there an hour or two in order to have
sufficient time to acquire an appetite, and now that one had arisen she lost no
time in placating it.
Oddly enough, it was at
this point that her mind began to return to what her son had said, the previous
evening, about his hereditary influences, the main reasons for his innate
coolness towards her and preference, during childhood, for his maternal
grandmother, a rheumatic old Galway woman with a loving smile who had died when
he was barely nine years old, to be shipped back to Ireland for burial. It was rather vexing to her that he should
now choose to uncover and understand things which, out of tact, she had
contrived to hide from him in the past, especially in light of the fact that he
seemed to know on which side of the ethnic divide that effectively though
unofficially existed between them his bread was buttered, so to speak, and had
no qualms about being ruthlessly frank with her. Had he not been so much a product of his
late-father's genetic legacy, of the sperm which that man had sown during his
brief but productive existence, Michael would doubtless have viewed her in a
rosier light. But the Savage in him was
too strong and this, with her predominantly loyalist instincts, Mary Evidence
bitterly regretted.
She, too, was largely a
product of her father, a Donegal Protestant who had met his Catholic wife-to-be
while serving with the British army in Southern Ireland during the War of
Independence, and subsequently converted to Catholicism for matrimonial
purposes. She had a deep respect for her
father, who was to retire from the forces as a non-commissioned officer after
twenty years service to king and country, subsequently acquiring the lease of a
pub in Aldershot and becoming a jovial if rather rotund publican. However, following his premature death from
fever, her mother had decided she wanted to return to Galway, which she hadn't
seen for over three decades. And so
mother and daughter set off, as soon as was conveniently possible, for Ireland.
Once there, they swiftly
acquired the lease of a pub which the pair of them were to run, amid much
bickering and quarrelling, until such time as Michael's father-to-be further complicated
matters by appearing on the scene and precipitating Mary into the worse
calamity, from her viewpoint, of a hastily arranged and fundamentally misguided
marriage, a marriage she thought would save her from her domineering mother but
which was soon to flounder on the rocks of an apparently compatible but
essentially incompatible relationship between socially and ethnically
mismatched partners. For Patrick Savage
was an entirely different kettle-of-fish from anything she had known before,
the middle-class product of a deeply intellectual and catholic family who, try
as she might, had about as much interest in becoming an assistant publican as
in abandoning the more stimulating company of his friends in other public
places.
Reluctantly, Mary Evidence
pondered awhile the unfortunate consequences of that premature, unsettled, and
subsequently short-lived marriage to a man whose social and occupational
intransigence was a contributory factor in bringing about the demise, through
flagging revenue and willpower alike, of their business, duly resulting in the
return of both mother and daughter, plus tiny son, to the town from whence they
had previously come, where alternative accommodation and, in her case, menial
work were assured them through old contacts.
This return, she reflected, was probably for the best, so far as young
Michael was concerned. For although he
had subsequently experienced an unhappy and unsettled childhood in the sole
company of his mother and grandmother, had suffered from undernourishment
and physical neglect, missed out on a considerable amount of elementary
schooling (though by the time he went to school at six-and-a-half years of age
he could already read simple books, thanks to the private tuition of a local
priest), and, following his protective grandmother's death, been sent to a
Protestant Children's Home in Carshalton Beeches (from whence he immediately
wrote a shocked letter informing his mother that the house parents of the
place, being Baptist, were of 'the wrong faith' - a thing he would never cease
to hold against her thereafter), he had nevertheless managed to weather the
storm, make a few friends in Surrey, improve in health, and acquire, through an
intellectual persistency doubtless inherited from his father's side of the
family, an uncommonly high standard of education. So, in spite of his misfortunes, he still had
something for which to be grateful.
However, as to her son's
attitude to England, she realized, despite his English upbringing, that he was
not and would never become an Englishman, but always be an outsider: a quiet,
withdrawn, solitary man who would rely on himself as much as possible rather
than seek an accommodation, culturally or professionally, with that which was
fundamentally alien to him and for which he had no great respect.... Not that
he was incapable of establishing close ties with the odd individual here and
there if the opportunity presented itself, a big 'if', however, in view of the
extent of his latter-day solitariness!
Still, even if he hadn't found a mind worthy of his attentions since
moving from Surrey, and didn't profess the warmest of attitudes towards his
mother's largely philistine mentality, nonetheless he had acquired, through
reading and observation, a number of useful realizations which partly mitigated
the pain of his ethnic isolation.
Yet his mother had been
extremely vexed when, following the pattern of his daily ruminations of late,
he had suddenly sprung that piece of genetic detection on her in his endeavour
to comprehend the reasons why he had become so solitary, why he favoured one
thing rather than another, why he disagreed with her on so many issues, why he
was so often discontented with life, so often sad. "By Christ!" he had said to her one
evening, "most other men in my position would have committed suicide by
now."
"Oh, don't be so
silly!" she had automatically responded, not quite understanding him. "Why don't you go out and meet
someone?"
"Meet
someone?" he had incredulously echoed.
"And just where do you suppose I'm going to do
that?" But the implication of what
he regarded as his intellectual and moral superiority over most others in this
inner-city environment was wasted on her, and whenever he sought to remind her
that he was the product of a broken marriage, that his self-hatred partly
derived from the fact that she had not only married socially above herself but
to some extent ethnically contrary to herself, in consequence of which he had
never known his father and was of ambivalent class and ethnic allegiance, she
would tell him not to dig up the past because the past was dead and he ought to
be living in the present. As if the
tortuous present wasn't in some measure conditioned by the
past! It was the present that was
troubling him because he was living as a kind of shadow of his father and
absolutely despising his mother, not having anywhere else to go in the evenings
but to her place.
And so the plot thickens
as we come to the realization that, after barely six months out of England, his
mother had married the first good-looking man to come her way, her congenial
and protective father having already passed away and accordingly engendered in
her the need to escape from the clutches of what she regarded as an imperious,
unreasoning, and contemptuous Catholic mother.... With the unfortunate
consequence that, in jumping out of the familial frying pan of mother/daughter
friction, she had duly landed smack in the ethnic fire of premature marriage to
a staunchly Catholic Irishman who hadn't realized, initially, that her
Catholicism was only a thin cultural veneer, so to speak, over her
late-father's Protestant influence, and that she was the daughter of someone,
moreover, who had married a British soldier and spent many years of her life
outside the country. In consequence of
which their marriage, beset by deprecatory
rumours, would quickly go downhill, with the inevitable corollary of
separation and, so far as Mary was concerned, the difficulty of bringing up a
young son in conditions of acute poverty, living with her rheumatic mother in
an upstairs front room of an old house on the Victoria Road in Aldershot.
In fact, it was this
latter aspect of her social make up, this confinement to poverty in such a
densely urban part of North London as she was now living in that her son, with
his traditionally suburban sympathies, artistic temperament, and intellectual
aspirations - which had been given a boost by several years domicile in leafy
Carshalton Beeches - mainly objected to, insofar as he would have preferred to
feel more compatible within the family link, to have had a mother who would
appreciate and encourage his literary ambitions rather than one who, by her
actions and thoughts, only sufficed to remind him that he was the product of a
failed marriage, an incompatible and short-lived parental liaison. His impatience with her was more often than
not the manifestation, purely and simply, of a young intellectual's defence
mechanism designed to protect him from the encroaching influences of an alien
lifestyle and to maintain, as far as possible, his studious integrity in the
midst of an unsympathetic and often hostile environment, particularly now that
his mother's ethnic sympathies were channelled into the bonds of her second
marriage, with her allegiance to Gus - the dour, unambitious,
television-addicted West Indian who only succeeded, it seemed to Michael, in
further accentuating the underlying ethnic disparities which already existed
between them and making him feel even more unwanted than before.
Well, that was how
things were, irrespective of any good intentions he may have had. Things were what they were, and for good
reason. History could never be reversed. He would just have to put up with the
indifference and largely commonplace attitudes of his mother and stepfather
until he either found someone suitable with whom to set up home or acquired
himself quieter and more congenial lodgings.
That was all!
Having consumed her
salad and returned to the settee in the front room, Mary Evidence decided to spend
the rest of the afternoon merely dozing, since there wasn't anything to which
she particularly wanted to listen on the radio, and that extract from Nursed Back
to Health, with its highbrow connotations and general beating about the
bush, hadn't really fulfilled her initial expectations, so didn't warrant
further attention this afternoon. She
would see how she felt about it the following day.
For the time being,
however, she might just as well delve into the pages of her own unwritten book,
the book of her life, to see if she could discover anything especially worth
remembering, anything unusual that had happened to her during the course of her
humble existence, rather than a rehash of long-standing grievances - like the
recollection, for instance, of what had happened in connection with her
father's funeral, all those years ago, when, given due military honours, his
bier was wheeled through Ulster to the Donegal border with the Irish Republic
by a cortège of mixed military and civilian composition, the civilians all
northern Protestants who had no idea that he had married a southern Catholic
because he had always been careful to hide that fact from his relatives and
who, on encountering a priest at the border, now turned back in shock and
embarrassment while the military continued apace towards Carndonagh,
the destination of his burial, along with the startled priest and such Catholic
relatives, including her mother, as had either directly or circuitously made
their way from various parts of Britain and the Irish Republic to his ancestral
home. She had been with her mother at
the time and was only too glad, despite the shock of hearing firsthand from the
priest later on, that she hadn't been party to that larger cortège which, out
of sectarian intransigence, had been unwilling to cross the border and follow
their relative's coffin to its final resting-place. Even now the thought of what had happened
that fateful day still rankled with her, though something inside her told her
that his secret was bound to have been found out one day anyway, and that he
probably got no more than he deserved.
Frantically, she scanned
her memory for more agreeable material to delve into, like that time some
twenty years ago when she had given birth to a girl which, following baptism,
was subsequently entrusted to the care of local foster parents. It was such a sweet little child that life
could have been so much better if fate had permitted her to keep it. But the fact was she lacked adequate domestic
facilities, had to work at an hotel in Aldershot during the day, and already
had one little child to cope with anyway.
It was just as well that she had managed to find this baby girl a decent
alternative. Naturally, it had been a
very difficult possession to part with, but the feeling of maternal
estrangement, at first almost unbearable, soon passed, leaving her free to
contend with young Michael who, given his predilection for the best in
everything, was anything but an easy child to satisfy!
As it happened, she had
just turned twenty-three when the 'accident' that led to the birth of her baby
occurred. It was a Thursday afternoon
and, being off work that day, she had dressed up and gone out for a leisurely
stroll. Not having had any sex for a
number of months, she didn't mind the idea of giving somebody handsome a good
long, lingering look at her shapely legs if the opportunity were to present
itself. She had opted for a red skirt
and a white blouse, she recalled, and had taken the precaution of putting on a
clean set of white underclothes, including a matching petticoat, with her
then-customary black stockings and high heels.
The weather was agreeably warm, and her stroll had taken her to a
pleasantly deserted location out towards Farnborough, where she had decided to
sit on the grass and while away an hour or two with the help of a women's
magazine. As luck would have it, she
hadn't been sitting there longer than twenty minutes when she noticed a fairly
handsome, clean-shaven man of about thirty, possibly an off-duty soldier, take
a nearby seat from which he proceeded to stare at her in a conspicuously
shameless manner. Maybe she ought to let
him see a bit more of herself, she thought, considering that he was seated in a
favourable position, with his bright-blue eyes fixed firmly upon her face.
Yes, she ought to do
something daring, now there was no-one else about to inhibit her. So she lay back on the grass and, keeping her
attention superficially fixed on the magazine in her hands, opened her legs
just wide enough to give him optical access to what lay between them. And how well she remembered her next
move! How, after a few polite exchanges
during which it was ascertained that he was only too interested in sampling
what she had on offer, they went off together to a more remote part of the
field where, out of harm's reach from marauding eyes, he proceeded to sample it
for all he was worth, his large powerful hands busily caressing her body, as
his small though far from powerless tongue elected to probe her flesh.
Yes, he was very
powerful all over and would dominate and condition her every move. Soon her clothes were in complete
disarray. She sensed the futility of
putting up a struggle with him, of running the risk of getting her clothing
torn. After all, she had voluntarily
brought this upon herself and would just have to take the consequences. He had her where he wanted her. There was absolutely no point in trying to
close her legs, not now that something hard had forced its way up between them
and violated the sanctity of her womb, driving its way deep into the cavernous
depths of her vaginal interior with a ferocity which momentarily caused her to
wet her drawers and loose her sphincter in the confusion of the moment.
CHAPTER SIX
'That's a relief!' thought Michael, as he shut the door to his
room and flung himself down upon the bed.
'I've just closed the chapter on five-and-a-half years' service to a
firm specializing in classical music examinations. I'm free at last! A brisk handshake with the manager, last
thing this afternoon, settled the matter for good. From now on I'll have to condition myself to
another life, another world, and bury the past.
I'll have to work hard at my writings over the next few months, do
something creative for once, utilize my time constructively. By Christ, I should have enough to write
about! A dream become reality. I wanted to dream about being a writer, so I
dreamt about it. The time was ripe for
dreaming because I was so far removed from the possibility of actually becoming
one, so deeply enslaved by the conditions under which I was then living, that
the dream served as the basis of an intention I subsequently proposed to
enact. For a while the dream was more
important to me than its possible future realization. I was immersed in it, in the natural flow of
events, the genesis of my intentions until, with the passing of time, those
events and intentions began to fade away, to lose their legitimacy, their
potency, and the dream accordingly ceased to function as a guideline to future
actions but became, instead, an encumbrance, leading me inexorably towards a
situation I hadn't in the least bargained for - namely, a painful neurosis!
'My dream had ceased to
maintain the balance with reality, to function as a legitimate reaction to my
being unable, at that time, to do anything else. I no longer dreamt of being a writer, I was a
fish-out-of-water, a piece of psychological flotsam on the road to paranoia, a
creature in desperate need of recentring,
reintegrating. I had read in Camus, somewhere, about the hero being irremovably centred,
though I didn't quite understand exactly what he meant by it. There seemed to be so much hidden meaning
there that I automatically undervalued it at first, even though the phrase
stuck in my mind and was to haunt me for several weeks. But those days are now dead and buried! One learns from one's mistakes. I've since come to view that notion in a
rosier light, to perceive it as a beacon on the road to moral enlightenment.'
Getting up from his bed,
he ambled across to the alarm clock, which was still resting face-down on the
top shelf of his bookcase, picked it up and read the time. As it was now 5.35pm, he had almost
half-an-hour to kill before setting out for his mother's flat, some twenty
minutes' walk away. He wished to himself
that he didn't have to visit her flat two or three evenings a week just because
doing so afforded him a change of scenery, a little variety, a chance to talk
to someone, and the possibility of being able to read and/or write relatively
undisturbed by neighbour noises.
Although one did have to contend with a busy road there, which wasn't
particularly conducive to sustained concentration or deep thinking! Frankly, he would much sooner have avoided
the dingy old tenement in which her flat was housed, if he could possibly have
done so. But when, from time to time, he
had endeavoured to break free of her place, he had found it well-nigh
impossible to concentrate on anything intellectual in his single room on account
of the various radio, television, stereo, telephone, voice, footstep,
front-door, and next-door noises either simultaneously or successively imposing
upon his sensibility throughout the rest of the house and its immediate
vicinity. A somewhat lamentable
situation which usually discouraged him from making further attempts to go his
own way. Besides, it was too
disheartening, being left alone in the evenings after a hard day's uncongenial
work. One had to see someone, even if
only a relative.
'My goodness, I am in a
sombre mood this evening,' he thought, turning away from his alarm clock. 'I suppose it's a kind of significant
turning-point in my life, leaving the firm today. It makes me want to break out in more than
one direction; for instance, leave London, which has always been something of
an embarrassment and even humiliation to me.
Maybe also something to do with that conversation I had with Gerald
Matthews at lunch time, his spilling the beans about having a gay man after
him, and all the rest of it! Though, in
all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if he was a bit that way himself, what
with his effeminate airs. Even smokes
his cigarettes in a cigarette holder, doubtless afraid that his delicate
pianist's fingers may get stained with nicotine, to the detriment of such
professional standing as he may have in his pupils' eyes. Then touches his hair up every now and then,
as though to make sure it hasn't got out of place or is still there or
something. Always makes me feel
self-conscious, walking along the street with a bloke like that. False representation. You imagine people are staring at you,
weighing you up, seeing if you really look all that different from other
people, people who aren't gay, that is.
Still, you feel much better afterwards, once you've ditched him
somewhere and gone your own way. A great
relief in fact! Better than being pushed
around from hand to hand, made to feel sorry for yourself because you haven't
the guts to disappoint anyone. If I
couldn't get the woman I wanted, I'd rather stay solitary any day. At least you're still in with a chance then,
provided you aren't solitary for too long of course. Anyway, I probably won't ever see him again,
so what matter? I'll mail him that short
story tomorrow, the one about a music teacher's illicit relationship with his
favourite pupil, and then keep my fingers crossed that he won't get in touch
with me about it. If he doesn't want to
read the damn thing he can always throw it away. That would be the simplest course.'
Shortly before 6.20pm
young Michael Savage was sitting in the company of his mother and stepfather,
tersely discussing the day's events. He
had brought his mother a one-scene playlet to read, a
dialogue between two strangers who happened to be seated together on a park
bench, but had declined at the last moment to hand it to her partly from
private misgivings and partly on account of the need he now felt for certain
rudimentary adjustments to the text. He
would re-read it himself later, to see exactly what was required. In the meantime, he was anxious to discover
whether she had read the playlet he'd submitted to
her a few nights previously, another one-scene affair concerning the artificial
termination of unrequited love through the systematic application, by qualified
persons, of a specially deep hypnosis to the victim's psyche, and, if so, what
she thought of it?
"Yes, it was pretty
good," replied Mary Evidence automatically, not really remembering to
which playlet he was alluding. "But I'm afraid I didn't grasp it
all."
'No, I didn't think you
bloody would,' thought Michael, taking the typescript of the playlet in question from the mantelpiece where, unbeknown
to himself, it had lain ever since he first parted with it. 'It's just one of those things!' For it certainly embittered him to think that
he only showed her his literary efforts because there was nobody else, apart
from his stepfather (who, in any case, took absolutely no interest in his
affairs, literary or otherwise), to whom he could have shown them. If he only had a dog for company he would
probably have felt compelled, by force of circumstances, to show examples of
his work to the dog instead. It was like
that with creative endeavour. You wrote
something that you believed had value, and then you wanted someone to read it
in order to corroborate your belief, to verify that you weren't wasting your
time, to confirm that you could commit your thoughts and experiences to paper
in a passably accomplished manner, and to establish that someone, even someone
intellectually insignificant, could acquire a degree of enjoyment and
worthwhile preoccupation from it.
Whether or not his mother read the works he regularly entrusted to her
keeping, she almost invariably said something encouraging about them, if only
to keep the peace or get the subject out of the way as quickly as
possible. But such encouragement, being
superficial, had ceased to mean anything to Michael. He had seen through it, sensing that anything
he wrote would only serve to remind her of his late-father's influence, of the
fact that Patrick Savage had more brains than her and didn't really belong to
the same social class. What was the use,
he had so often wondered, in saying or thinking things which your actions
subsequently contradicted?
For example, he had on
more than one occasion decided not to visit his mother again, to stay in his bedsitter all evening and keep his literary efforts to
himself. But the very next day, when his
mood had changed and bed-sitter life was becoming (under renewed pressure of
neighbour noises) somewhat distressing, he would change his mind, only to
return to her place, hand her another typescript, and marvel at the
unpredictability of his intentions. And
yet his mother was a woman who, in his judgement, had never read a worthwhile
book in her life. A woman moreover who,
at the behest of her TV-addicted husband, could send him scurrying for shelter
from some sordid serial or raucous comedy into their spare front room, where he
would immediately seek out spiritual companionship from the works of the
handful of authors whom he could still aspire to read. Well, life was certainly no joyride as far as
that was concerned! His mental
isolation was virtually complete.
"So how's the
cricket going today, Gus?" he at length asked his stepfather, in an
attempt to change the subject to what was currently taking place on the screen
in front of them.
"Oh, not too
bad," replied the latter, after due deliberation. "The West Indies stand a fair chance of
winning this Test if the weather stays fine over the weekend. They've certainly put England in the hot
spot."
"Have they
indeed?" responded Michael, as a multitude of black arms shot into the
televised air to the resounding encore of 'Howzzat!',
and another belaboured England batsman, mindful of the lateness of the hour,
awaited mortal judgement from an umpire whose hands, surprisingly, remained
imperturbably confined to his coat pockets.
Not having any real
interest in cricket herself, Mary Evidence turned to her son and said: "So
today was your last day at work, then."
"That's
right," he confirmed. "I got
free of the firm at precisely four-twenty this afternoon."
"Then you may have
to do some extra writing next week," stated his mother while
simultaneously picking up the evening paper. "I'll let you know when it's
nine o'clock," she added, making sure that he was reminded of the time he
was customarily expected to leave for his lodgings.
Reluctantly, he opened
the thin laminated door that separated 'their' room from 'his' room on such
occasions and, gently closing it behind him, ambled over to the front
window. As usual he was thoroughly
depressed by the way his life was spent in the evenings, by the absence of
compatible communication between his mother and himself, by the absence of
congenial companionship with people his own age, by the absence of regular or,
indeed, irregular sex with a young woman of his choosing, and by his consequent
inclination to withdraw into what he not altogether uncontemptuously
regarded as 'enforced intellectuality' in the spare room. If there had ever been an occasion when he
had exchanged more than ten minutes' inconsequential chatter with his mother
and stepfather, he had long since forgotten all about it! His mother only succeeded in exasperating
him. He would never, so long as he
lived, be able to hold an interesting conversation with her. She was an incorrigible philistine who cared
absolutely nothing about the arts, took no interest in classical productions,
and, frankly, didn't give a damn about his literary aspirations. It was more than likely that his visits to
her flat only succeeded in arousing self-hatred in him by reminding him of his
past, by placing him in direct contact with her stupidity, ignorance, poverty,
lethargy, etc., to the lasting detriment of his self-esteem. If only he could get away from her for good,
get far away from this constant reminder of all the things he was in rebellion
against and which he now perceived as the root cause of his parent's incompatibility
and the demise of their all-too-brief marriage, his life would take on new
horizons, find happiness, become reintegrated.
He would never be content with it so long as he lived under her
influence. Not in a hundred years!
Gradually his reflections
ceased to run along these rather depressing lines and returned, at length, to
his art, his writings, the various attempts which he made to express
truthfully, unashamedly, even boldly, the soul and situation of Michael James
Savage, a young man who might one day be permitted to present his work to the
English-speaking world, assuming he could find a publisher who, sympathetic to
subjectively-oriented literary
productions, would be prepared to embrace those aspects or areas of life with
which he was becoming increasingly familiar!
Turning away from the
window, from where the steady rumbling of heavy traffic was as obnoxious as the
physical and even metaphysical evidence of it passing up and down the Stroud
Green Road, he took the typescript of his one-scene playlet
from his jacket pocket and, sitting down in his favourite of the room's two
identical armchairs - the one farthest from the window - proceeded with
difficulty to read it. This particular playlet, half-fanciful and half-realistic, concerned the
chance meeting of two young people in his local park and, despite the banality
of the context, had been quite absorbing to work on, the previous week. Maybe it wouldn't require all that much
adjustment, after all. Though it would
certainly require a title, as, for that matter, would the one concerning the
hypnotic termination of unrequited love.
A small
suburban park in North London. A
summer's afternoon. A young man and
young woman are seated at opposite ends of a plain wooden bench, the young man
having taken the seat some minutes after the young woman. They are complete strangers to each
other. However, feeling subtly attracted
towards the young woman, who is reading a book, the young man decides to say
something to her.
YOUNG MAN:
(Turns towards her) Is that an interesting book you're reading?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Slightly startled) What...? Oh,
yes! Quite interesting.
YOUNG MAN: You
wouldn't be interested in some conversation, by any chance?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Blushes slightly) No, not really.
YOUNG MAN: I
just thought you might like to talk to someone.
To put it bluntly, you appeal to me.
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Thinks to herself, "God, he's forward, isn't he? Fancy telling me that! He might as well have asked me to make it
with him. I'd better be careful.")
Sorry, I'm waiting for someone.
YOUNG MAN:
(Coolly impertinent) You're not wearing red panties under that skirt, are you?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Somewhat startled) Pardon?
YOUNG MAN:
(Smiles) I bet you're wearing red knickers.
YOUNG WOMAN: (Starts
to get up from the bench) Sorry, but I don't want to answer that!
YOUNG MAN:
(Catches her by the arm) Just a minute!
I'm not intending to rape you, if that's what you're thinking. I'm essentially very civilized: in fact, too
damn civilized! Sit down a moment, let's
talk together. Are you really waiting
for someone?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Reluctantly sits down again) Why should I lie?
YOUNG MAN: To
keep me at a distance, of course.
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Laughs nervously) I needn't lie to do that!
Besides, even if I were, what business would it be of yours? (She closes her book and is about to get up
again when he puts a restraining hand on her arm. She begins to look frightened.)
YOUNG MAN:
You're very beautiful. That's the main
reason why I must speak to you. A man
like me could spend years looking for someone like you, someone who corresponds
to his tastes. In a sense, you're very
fortunate to be so beautiful. Probably
more than 90% of the young women I encounter in this area make either no
impression on me at all or only a rather unfavourable one. Very few of them actually appeal to me, the
loner of loners. But I won't go into
details. Normally I'm quite incapable of
getting worked-up about strangers. I
have to get to know people first, to find out more about the person I happen to
be taking a physical interest in, just to be on the safe side. But you pleased me from the moment I set eyes
on you, and that's very unusual. Look, I
don't really know why I'm telling you all this, spilling the beans to a complete
stranger ... but, well, I haven't spoken to anyone like you for ages and, since
you look intelligent, I'm making a fool of myself for your benefit. You see, I need someone who'll listen to me
with a sympathetic ear because, whatever you may think, I'm no monster but a
human being in need of a little love and understanding once in a while, just
like a lot of other poor buggers who are daily coerced into maintaining a
false, pernicious, and self-defeating persona without necessarily realizing it! Believe me, I'm not homosexual or stupid or poxed or mad or dangerous or commonplace or ... believe me,
I'm a damned sight more caring and considerate than most of the men in this
world! Maybe you wouldn't understand ...
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Shows signs of interest, in spite of her misgivings) Go on.
YOUNG MAN:
Well, for a time I thought I was homosexual, not having a woman and not
particularly going out of my way to get one.
But slowly, gradually, it dawned on me that I wasn't really homosexual
at all but simply choosy. I mean (He
sighs, as from a realization of the complexity of what he is trying to convey
and the odds against his conveying even a fraction of it convincingly), I had
to have someone whom I felt it would be possible for me to admire, to talk to,
to love, even to worship - yes, don't laugh!
I mean it! But poor and solitary
as I was, I never encountered anyone who sufficiently inspired such noble
intentions in me. In fact, I rarely
encountered anyone at all, even casually.
So things just drifted: weeks, months, years, a face here and there, the
occasional disappointments, blunt refusals, hypocritical excuses, etc. I didn't go to university and I left all my
school friends behind in Surrey. I
loathe church institutions, pubs, discos, bingo halls, snooker clubs: you know,
all the usual social conveniences that are basically intended to cater for
average people. I loathe them all!
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Begins to show concern) But haven't you tried computer dating?
YOUNG MAN:
(Faintly smiles and nods) Yes, I was desperate enough to give it a go. And d'you know what
happened? (He hesitates to choke back rage and resentment) I wasted my
money! Most of the bitches the firms
informed me about didn't even have the courtesy to reply to my letters, quite
apart from the fact that those who did took ages doing so. Even some of the firms had to be reminded
about my application virtually every-other-month! And when they eventually got round to
replying, it seemed as though they'd taken a lucky dip and, to pass muster,
sent me whatever came up, irrespective of my preferences. Anyway, the few women I eventually got around
to meeting were plain, to say the least!
They'd have humiliated me on the street and exasperated me in the
bedroom. As far as the likelihood of my
being able to kindle any genuine desire for them was concerned, it would have
been tantamount to flogging a dead horse!
In fact, they might as well have been cows or sheep, for all the passion
I felt towards them! No, I regret to say
that computer dating didn't work for me.
You never know exactly what you're getting and, besides, I found the
whole idea too degrading. I had to take
one girl back to the station after barely an hour of her company, because she
was so damned incompatible. She hadn't
even read one of the several hundred books in my possession at the time. Not one!
And that was after I'd categorically stipulated a preference for someone
literate. But if that was bad enough, I
thought it even worse that she hadn't even heard of, let alone heard, any of
the albums in my record collection. And
they call that compatibility? Well, I
soon got rid of her, as well as most of the others they inflicted upon me, too! Of course, a majority of people always end-up
doing what they imagine everyone else is doing at the time. Climb on the bandwagon, let others think for
you, and wait for the lucky number! For
if, by any chance, a man with an ounce of self-determination approaches an
attractive female in the park, on the street, or in any other public context
with the intention of acquiring her, the spirit of technological progress will
declare him to be either an anachronistic idiot or a potentially dangerous
maniac who should learn to live with the times instead of wilfully following
his personal inclinations, obeying the voice of his desire in his own sweet
fashion, and taking the law into his own hands irrespective of the
consequences. As though men were still
capable of self-determination in an age like this, when the sheep-like collectivity counts for everything and the lone individual,
especially the self-willed creative individual, next to nothing! Thus speaks the spirit of technological
progress!
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Raises her brows in apparent concern) I see!
But what makes you so sure that I may
be able to assist you?
YOUNG MAN:
Simply the fact that you appeal to me. I
mean, I wouldn't mind being seen in your company. You're very beautiful and, from what I can
gather, intelligent as well.
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Smiles) Flattery will get you nowhere.
Anyway, I'm waiting for my boyfriend, as I think I told you.
YOUNG MAN:
(Frowns) So what's he like: strong, tall, handsome?
YOUNG WOMAN:
Oh, good-looking, hard-working, intelligent, loyal, generous, considerate,
able. A good all-round sort really.
YOUNG MAN: And
how long have you known him?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Obliged to scan her memory a moment) Just over a year actually.
YOUNG MAN: And
you had other boyfriends before him?
YOUNG WOMAN:
Yes, a few. (She becomes puzzled) Why d'you have to
ask so many questions?
YOUNG MAN:
(Unable to restrain himself from shouting) Because I haven't given so much as
one kiss to a woman in nearly ten years!
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Becomes indignant) Is that my fault?
I'm sorry, we all have our problems, you know.
YOUNG MAN: Yes,
and some of us more than others! (In desperation) Can't you drop him?
YOUNG WOMAN:
Are you out of your mind?
YOUNG MAN:
(Frowns and sighs in exasperation) Why should that bastard take all my share of
loving? Haven't I as much right to love
as him, as you, as anyone? Or is that
merely presumptuous of me, a gross delusion, a mode of self-deception
engendered by the sight and sound of so much commercial propaganda pertaining
to sex?
YOUNG WOMAN:
(On the verge of tears) But it's not his fault. He's as entitled to choose a woman
as anyone else, isn't he? It's not his
fault if he happened to be in the right place at the right time and you,
through no particular fault of your own, weren't.
YOUNG MAN: No,
it's life's fault! Life is always to
blame. That's why some people get
everything whilst others get next to nothing.
Fate!
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Unable to hold back her tears) Oh, don't make such a damned fuss! There are plenty of people worse off than
you. Look, if everyone went about
spilling their problems over people the way you do, we'd have a civil war on
our hands. At least you're still young.
YOUNG MAN: Yes,
and that's precisely what riles me!
Young and bitter! My God, it
sickens me to see so many blatant half-wits, so many ugly, uncouth, depraved
men with good-looking women just because they happened to be in the right place
at the right time. I might as well have
been born crippled, considering what use I make of the advantages I possess!
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Dries her eyes) Haven't you ever had sex with a prostitute?
YOUNG MAN: No,
I haven't! For one thing, I can't afford
to. And, for another, I distrust
them. Besides, they're not the kind of
women who appeal to me, as a rule. So
for anything approaching sexual satisfaction, I'm mostly dependent on the
occasional wet dream. Actually, I used
to be a bit of a wanker at one time. However, these days masturbation would only
arouse my self-contempt, so I tend to avoid it.
YOUNG WOMAN:
Masturbation's puerile.
YOUNG MAN:
Fortunately I didn't succumb to it all that often, just once or twice a month
in order to clean the works out, as it were, and reassure myself that I hadn't
become impotent. After a while I loathed
the self-degradation involved with the use of sex magazines, the models of
which I rarely found stimulating. So I'd
resort to my imagination instead, fantasize myself into a climax and hope that
I wouldn't become irredeemably perverted or the victim of a cerebral
haemorrhage. Nowadays I don't fantasize
as persistently or regularly as I used to; I stop myself going beyond a certain
low-key point and limit myself to one or two a day.... Frankly, I believe the
fact that I was born in Southern Ireland has something to do with my situation,
since I'm the end-product of several generations of Catholic Irish breeding and
don't feel particularly attracted towards Englishwomen. Now I don't mean to sound unduly endogamous,
but the fact remains that, when it comes to the crunch, I prefer women of my
own race and nationality and ethnicity to those of any other. I mean, there's nothing particularly unusual
about that, is there? (The young woman smiles guardedly but says nothing, so he
continues) Look, I'm sorry to keep going on like this, and I didn't mean to
upset you just now, but there aren't that many other people around here who
would listen to me and, besides, it isn't every day that I get a chance to talk
to someone, least of all to someone like you.
The majority of people would probably think me mad and scuttle away in
panic. They'd crucify me if they
could. For most people are frightfully
suspicious of what they either can't or won't understand. They only see what they want to, and are more
inclined to consider anything that transcends their imaginative or intellectual
limitations to be a form of madness rather than simply something which lies
beyond them. They'd strive, with all
their limited powers of argumentation, to make me feel in the wrong, to
humiliate and ostracize me, and not simply on ethnic grounds. If I suddenly went up to that fellow over
there, the one in the open-necked red shirt, and asked him what he knew about
manic-depressive psychoses or the psychological effects of long-term celibacy,
he'd either take fright or, assuming he's as stupid as he looks, become
abusively violent. Indeed, he might even
point to the nearest female and say "Why not ask her, mate?"
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Smiles through her nose) I wouldn't particularly blame him. After all, one doesn't normally ask strangers
those sorts of questions. In fact, one
doesn't normally approach strangers at all, at least not in London.
YOUNG MAN: I
suppose I was being a bit silly then but, well, one sometimes feels the urge to
do or say something unusual, if only to prove to oneself that one is still
capable of self-determination and isn't utterly predictable.
YOUNG WOMAN:
But having it off with a prostitute, or just about anyone, presumably isn't one
of those urges in your case?
YOUNG MAN: No,
I guess not, since the thought doesn't hold any great attraction for me. With a man of my sort it has to be all or
nothing. I'd willingly continue to
remain celibate until death, if only to keep away from half-measures, or
anything which only served to compromise and humiliate me. I've seen too many half-measures in life to
be particularly impressed by them. God
knows what would become of me if I had to settle for someone I secretly
despised! I'd probably become
bad-tempered, jealous, cruel, cynical: any number of disreputable things!
YOUNG WOMAN:
But aren't you most of those things already?
YOUNG MAN:
(Sighs dejectedly) Well, at least I'm suffering on my own terms at present,
which is some consolation. There's
always the possibility of my meeting someone who'll really matter to me. I wasn't born for charity, that's all. I've seen too much of the negative side of
it, its detrimental consequences.
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Smiles gently and edges closer to him) So you think I may be able to provide
you with the companionship you lack at present?
YOUNG MAN:
(Visibly surprised) Eh? But aren't you
waiting for someone?
YOUNG WOMAN:
No, not any longer.
YOUNG MAN: You
mean someone else is going to suffer on account of me, then?
YOUNG WOMAN:
Not necessarily. Anyway, you've been
alone long enough already, haven't you?
YOUNG MAN: Yes,
I suppose you're right. But I may take
some getting used to.
YOUNG WOMAN:
(Smiles encouragingly) Don't worry! I'm
a fairly patient person.
YOUNG MAN: Yes,
you are, aren't you? (He squeezes her hand thankfully) By the way, my name's
Stephen Kelly. What's yours?
YOUNG WOMAN:
Susan Connors. And I'm not wearing red
knickers.
YOUNG MAN:
You're not? (Blushes profusely) Oh damn!
I was just teasing you. Please
accept my sincere apology. (They embrace each other and, following a tentative exchange of
kisses, the scene ends with the young couple slowly walking away from the bench
hand-in-hand.)
'So much for that!'
thought Michael, throwing the typescript to one side as soon as he had finished
with it. 'I must have been out of my
mind to have written such a thing! Why,
I could spend the rest of my life writing about sexually-frustrated solitaries
if I'm not careful! Imagine I'm enjoying
myself, what with all those lewd images monopolizing my imagination to the
point of surfeit, the inevitable consequence of the gratuitous existence I
lead. Maybe I ought to write a thesis on
the pros and cons of celibacy.... No shortage of sexually frustrated people
about these days though, and not all of them are ugly or stupid either! Most of them probably don't know what to make
of themselves. They wind-up blaming their
celibacy on the times or, failing that, the sort of people around them, the
environment in which they live, or are obliged to live, etc. Well, I wouldn't get unduly worried about it. Either you've got access to regular sex or
you haven't. Solitude and frustration
are quite enough to bear, without the need to drag an overwrought imagination
into the problem as well! Too many
people become the victims of that tendency, quaking beneath some Lawrentian or Reichian sex
propaganda. Indeed, you might as well
keep an eye on your potency by jerking off every so often, as quake beneath
that! Admittedly, a somewhat
disreputable kind of self-indulgence, and quite inadequate as things go. But far safer than the pox, and financially
attractive in these economically hard-pressed times.
'Depends what sort of
imagination or moral sense you've got, though.
No use degrading yourself beyond a certain point. Bad enough with conventional sex. Remember what happened to Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Flaubert, Maupassant, and Nietzsche, to name but a few of the
nineteenth-century's most famous victims of syphilis. It didn't matter who you were, the pox was
rife in those days. At least they were
fortunate not to have got mugged on the job.
Did happen sometimes. Even
happened in Villon's day. Coquillards! Some callous brutes hiding in the background
with the express intention of robbing the client of his money and/or valuables
as soon as he was in a sufficiently compromising position. Better safe than sorry! Too many risky situations in life as it is,
and not merely in relation to mugging and prostitution! Risky situations in virtually every context. For example, computer dating. Find oneself dating a woman who embarrasses
one by not matching-up to one's aesthetic requirements. I'd feel somewhat self-conscious in public,
what with people evaluating her, comparing us, identifying me with her and vice
versa. I'd have to get rid of her as
soon as possible and, if I couldn't find someone else, return to my solitude
again. At least that's preferable to
indulging in an ungainly compromise with anyone. No altruistic hypocrisy here, thank you! Haven't the charity for it anyway. Risky in other ways, too. Might lead to an "accident" some
day. Find myself partly responsible for
putting another cynical brat into the world, the unfortunate consequence of an
ill-matched liaison.'
He halted in his mental
tracks a moment, tired of the one he had just gone down and anxious to change
to one not having any particular connection with his playlet.
'World population on the
rise and hope on the wane,' he went on thinking. 'Imminent spiritual recession prophesied by
eminent spiritual authorities.
Detrimental materialistic consequences virtually inevitable.... I must
watch out for the Devil's disguises since, according to what I was reading on a
religious pamphlet someone had the audacity to put through the front-door
letter flap the other week, it appears that His current disguise takes the form
of powerful psychic emanations which, penetrating the brain cells of the
unwary, goad people into perpetrating all manner of despicable crimes. Of the crimes listed for what appears to be
the benefit of the general public, we find activities such as mugging, rape,
murder, theft, and arson, but don't find activities like fraud, perjury,
blackmail, and embezzlement, presumably on account of the Devil's preference
for coarse minds in matters of brutality and for subtle minds in matters of
deceit, the environment I inhabit evidently having more of the former than the
latter in it!
'Well, he's certainly a
versatile old devil who always has an iron in the fire, kindling crime. Uses the unfortunate to further his
infamy. Instigates all manner of callous
deeds, from the theft of a young bride's wedding presents by the best man to
the murder of an old woman's husband by one of her long-standing
girlfriends. Won't stop at
anything. It seems that even the
Almighty can't manage without him. He
wouldn't have Quakers quaking if it wasn't for the Devil's influence in the
world. They might become too
complacent. Even forget to pray
sometimes.
'But I dare say that a
majority of religious maniacs don't realize they're crazy. I mean crazy in a particular way. They've been indoctrinated so persistently
and scrupulously, by the clerical powers-that-be, that they actually wind-up believing all the
superstitious nonsense they hear. I
mean, what real choice do they have?
It's like that POW who, in order to get himself discharged on medical
grounds, feigned madness to such a convincing extent that he eventually went
mad. Or like a fellow who hears so much
talk of reincarnation that he ultimately comes to believe in it and, in order
to appease his spiritual vanity, conceives of himself as a reincarnation of
some famous historical person, like Caesar or Napoleon. Indeed, our capacity for self-delusion is one
of our mainstays in life, provided, however, that we recognize it for what it
is and keep a regular check on things, in order not to get ourselves locked
away, exploited, or overly abused in consequence of allowing it to develop
beyond a certain socially acceptable point, and thereby get completely
out-of-hand. We might still be climbing
trees or grovelling in underground caves if it wasn't for our capacity to
evolve both logical and illogical tendencies in a fairly
harmonious if exceedingly complex manner.
Darwin ought to have added a chapter to The
Evolution of Species entitled "Competitive Man - a Guide
to Future Developments", as a sort of thesis on the human rat-race. Every man for himself and the Devil take the
hindmost! What choice does one
have? Anyway, at least I have the
consolation of knowing that I'm not a religious maniac, since whatever madness or capacity for
self-delusion I incline towards I've at least taken the precaution of
channelling it into a fairly inoffensive belief.
'How shall I
explain? Well, I occasionally abandon
myself to the delusion of believing certain people to be endowed with an
ability and/or device which enables them to penetrate my mind and listen-in, as
it were, to what I'm thinking at the time, just as a Christian might believe
that God was listening-in to his thoughts on account of His divine omniscience. I say "occasionally" because I
wouldn't dream of allowing my thoughts to be highlighted in such a delusive
fashion on a regular basis, especially with regard to those changing moods and
circumstances which make yesterday's self-esteem tomorrow's self-contempt. Indeed, I might as well endeavour to believe
in God's omniscience ... as allow the recollection of a few past friends,
acquaintances, or potential girlfriends to usurp my mental freedom to such an
extent that the ensuing delusion claps me in psychic fetters. After all, what's state-organized religion if
not a means society has gradually evolved for channelling the psyche's
illogical tendencies into a given theological context, thereby providing
significant numbers of people with a common vent for tendencies which might
otherwise impose themselves upon society in any number of unexpected and
possibly detrimental ways?
'Naturally, any free
thinker can tear established religion to logical shreds in the cut-and-thrust
of his rational arguments. But that
won't prevent him from being illogical in his own fashion, nor ensure that his illogicality won't cause the world more trouble than the
institutionalized illogicality of the Faithful. I guess that was something I overlooked at
lunch time when talking with Gerald Matthews about religion, criticizing
Christianity for its irrationality and praising the spirit of rationalism. But the fact that I have certain beliefs of a
more private and secular nature makes it virtually impossible for me to cherish
various religious and occult beliefs, since, by their very existence, they
exclude the possibility of others. So I
don't consider myself a reincarnation of either Caesar or Napoleon. I don't go about with thoughts of some
transcendent Afterlife on my mind, and neither do I literally believe in
Christ's Ascension into Heaven or His miraculous ability to change water into
wine. I don't pay much attention to
astrological revelations in the papers, and neither do I put much faith in the I Ching, or Book of Changes. I make no effort to take spiritualism
seriously, since I disbelieve in ghosts, and neither do I seek to have my palm
read. In fact, I could draw up quite a
long list of beliefs, hypotheses, superstitions, allegiances, practices,
neuroses, etc., which mean scarcely anything to me, if I really wanted to
distinguish my illogical predilections or irrational manias from more prevalent
ones in the world at large. At least I
have the consolation of accepting the situation in my head for what it is, whereas
a good many religious maniacs, class maniacs, nymphomaniacs, demonomaniacs, megalomaniacs, dipsomaniacs, erotomaniacs, melomaniacs, and
other types of maniac will probably spend the greater part of their lives in
virtually total ignorance of their mental situation. Yet they're often among the first to accuse
others of being mad, the self-righteous shallow pates! Still, when one begins to consider the large
numbers of overt maniacs around, it's understandable that the more subtle,
refined, or introverted manias should sometimes get overlooked.
'You'd think, though,
that these public exhibitionists would have more sense than to expose their
misfortunes to the vulgar eye in such an open manner, arms waving in the air,
head nodding vigorously up and down, tongue wagging incessantly, stupid grins
transforming their ugly features into grotesque masks. Evidently not, because they're more often
extroverts. Well, I certainly wouldn't
want to invite reproachful comments from passing strangers if it could possibly
be avoided! Nor would I want to deliver
myself into the hands of psychiatrists or social workers on account of my
personal delusions, either. I'd far
sooner grapple with them on my own and in my own sweet time than deliver myself
into their clutches. They'd probably
cure me of one thing only to expose me to something else, and probably to
something worse at that - say, an institutional or otherwise external
delusion! I could wind-up becoming a
pathological numerologist or obsessed astrologer instead! Who knows the number of beliefs or manias to
which one could alternatively succumb, given a push in the wrong
direction. You meet people and the
chances are that, by degrees, they influence you in some way and even coerce
you, eventually, into developing a different lifestyle. I was a confirmed atheist until, God only
knows how it happened, I met this young lady who was a devout believer and she
pleased me to such an extent that I gradually turned renegade, so to speak, and
went along to Sunday-morning worship with her until - wonder of wonders! - I
duly discovered a new lease-of-life and became a ductile convert to the
faith. That sort of thing has
probably happened to a fair number of desperately lonely and sex-starved people
over the years, though I certainly wouldn't want it to happen to me, even if
the woman I happened to fall in love with was very
beautiful.
'Imagine me standing in
church while the vicar commences praying, and she is next to me with her
worldly goods all wrapped up, some of the congregation privately admiring her black-stockinged calf muscles and perhaps even wondering what
colour underclothes she's wearing, whilst others prefer to turn a blind eye to
such things and shut out all ungodly thoughts until the final AMEN, when the
doors are thrown open and the flock streams towards the fresh air outside
amidst respectful whisperings and discreet rustlings of quality garments worn
by chastened penitents who fear their psychological halo may fall from the
tenuous support upon which it perches if they don't get out of the church
quickly enough. And me wondering what
the hell it's all about, turning my nose up at other young women and pretending
to be unimpressed by her shapely little buttocks trembling in front of me, as I
wait my turn to shake the clergyman's hand and cause a smile to illuminate his
sagacious countenance. Though I needn't
have worried, because he hadn't noticed anything and wouldn't, in any case,
have said anything condemnatory, considering the nature of Nature and the
coercive element therein which, however one chooses to address it, initially
sanctioned the sexual bond between us.
But no matter, the sun's shining shamelessly outside the church and her
skirt's flapping in the breeze, though she keeps everything in place as best
she can in order not to give anyone a moral advantage over her, least of all
those old women cluttering up the doorway in their eagerness to shake the
vicar's hand, every one of them now moral vultures who would be only too
grateful for the prospect of alighting on unchaste behaviour among the young
people, the spectacle of someone whom they wouldn't have dreamed capable of
wearing bright underclothes on such an occasion.
'Good God, is that
it? The one who led me back to the
fold? No, I haven't fallen so low that I
could abandon my atheistic principles on account of someone else! If, by any chance, I encountered a woman like
that, I'd twist her arm in my direction,
make her see sense, convince her of the futility of her behaviour. I'd tell her that she's a fool to other
people's games, that it's high time she got her head together, instead of
continuing to make a fool of herself, and that if she didn't mend her ways
she'd have to find somebody else to slobber over in future. I'd give it to her straight, make myself feel
like a man again ...'
"Nearly nine,
Michael," declared Mary Evidence, popping her head out from behind the
door she had just thrust open. "Now
don't tell me you've been day-dreaming all this time!" she added reproachfully.
"No, just
thinking," responded Michael, as he stretched out his hand for the angry
little playlet which had lain neglected on the nearby
table.
Mrs Evidence smilingly
sighed, before saying: "Well, we'll see you Monday, then. Have a good weekend."
"I'll try to,"
he said.
"'Night,
then," concluded his mother before returning to whence she had come, where
the TV was still inanely droning-on largely for her husband's moronic benefit.
'I think I'll call my playlet A Romantic Encounter,' thought
Michael, as he swiftly made his way downstairs and out into the street. 'It may as well be called that as anything
else.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
"Yes, I like that one very much," said David Shuster,
who sat in close though respectful proximity to where Gerald Matthews had just
concluded an impromptu piano recital.
"It's one of Erik Satie's compositions,
isn't it?"
"Partly,"
replied Gerald, turning around on his piano stool to face his questioner. "But that's only because of quite a few
mistakes on my part, I'm afraid. It isn't
going as well as it ought to at present, despite some recent practice."
"Well, it doesn't
sound too unlike Satie to me," confessed Shuster
before asking, in his customarily nonchalant fashion: "Which composition
is it, by the way?"
"Oh, the Sonatine Bureaucratique
actually," Gerald obliged.
"I dug it out of my pile of scores in consequence of an unexpected
eulogy concerning some of Satie's piano music by that
chap Michael Savage last thing this afternoon, notably this and a few other
late pieces for which he has apparently acquired a taste."
Shuster raised his bushy
eyebrows in a show of surprise.
"Does he play the piano, then? " he asked, his right-hand
index finger momentarily caressing the bridge of his gently aquiline nose.
"No, not to my
knowledge," replied Gerald. "Although
he claims to play the acoustic guitar in a mainly improvisatory
fashion." There was a pause before
he continued: "From what I was able to gather from a brief conversation
with him during the week, it would seem that he generally dislikes notated music
on account of its perceived antiquity, mannerist conventions, and religious
connotations."
Shuster smiled wryly
before asking: "Is he an atheist or something, then?"
"Well, he's
certainly no Christian," said Gerald in oblique response. "I believe he's one of those people who
regard religious music as an embarrassing anachronism and therefore won't
acknowledge its inspiration, especially in the vocal context, on account of its
more or less explicit references to God, meaning principally the Creator, or
Father. You couldn't imagine him singing
hymns, cantatas, oratorios, or suchlike religious works. He thinks people are simply deceiving
themselves or, more usually, being deceived by others."
"So there's
evidently a lot of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, etc., to which he won't lend an
ear," speculated Shuster, leaning back in his capacious armchair, as
though to distance himself further from his only tenant. "And quite a few modern compositions
too, I'll wager."
Gerald reluctantly
nodded his aching head, then said: "Yes, he isn't what one might call
enamoured of the general curriculum."
"Wise man!"
averred Shuster. "I suppose he has
his literary tastes down to a fine art too, does he?"
"That wouldn't
surprise me," said Gerald, who was already beginning to regret he had
brought up the damn subject of Michael Savage in the first place! "Although I'm not at all sure what forms
they take, even given the fact that I overheard him mention James Joyce and
Henry Miller to someone during the afternoon.
But that didn't leave me much wiser, considering I haven't read either
of them and don't really know all that much about their works in
consequence."
Shuster raised his brows
anew and remarked in a sort of reproachful tone: "Then you were evidently
making a big mistake in attempting to secure his
confidence, Gerald, since you appear not to have that much in common with
him." He withdrew himself into a
moment's silent deliberation, before continuing: "At a guess, I'd imagine
him to be the sort of chap who, being an outsider by force of circumstances,
relates to writers like Camus and Sartre, amongst
others."
"And who exactly
are they?" Gerald wanted to know, in the face of his almost
complete ignorance of modern French writing or, more specifically, that branch
of it which had never particularly appealed to him on account of its overly
left-wing sympathies.
Shuster opted to forego
the ordeal of raising his brows yet again by simply replying: "Highly
influential theorists, who constitute the more famous part of what is commonly,
though in large measure erroneously, known as the 'Existentialist Movement': a
largely philosophical school of writing inspired by Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and
Heidegger. Interestingly, I was re-reading
Sartre's Nausea only last week.
It takes the form of a fictitious journal having more than a little to
do with the mysteriousness and even brute horror of existence."
"Hence
existentialism?" Gerald conjectured from the ivory tower-like
vantage-point of his piano stool.
"Yes, in a manner of
speaking," confirmed Shuster half-smilingly. "You see, according to one aspect of
existentialist thought - and not the least important aspect either - I am now
seated in a manmade 'thing' which, from social expedience, we agree to call an
armchair, so that, through uniform conditioning in the matter, we can concur
with each other and those around us as to exactly what an
armchair is, thereby saving confusion.
However, what you chose to call it outside the everyday world of
commonplace references and human relationships is entirely your own affair,
bearing in mind its relative reality, or the fact that you can alter its shape
at the planning stage and call it a bookgrope, a tiemark, a manpoke, or a showflake, depending on your whim." It was evident to Shuster that Gerald was
anything but happy with this notion, probably because, in his fundamentally
conservative nature, he would never have dreamt of doing any such thing. Nevertheless Shuster continued, saying: "Now
that is the entire crux of the matter, of the fact that so many of
the things we commonly take for granted as immutable realities are actually
mutable and, hence, contingent realities, contrary to popular prejudice."
"How very
enlightening!" declared Gerald bravely, his blue eyes almost hypnotically
focused on the right arm of the armchair in which the eccentric and possibly
even mad lecturer was still seated.
"I'm afraid I have neither the time nor the inclination for reading
anything overly intellectual these days.
In fact, I rarely get beyond a half-dozen pages of my romances after
going to bed. I fall asleep in no
time."
"Lucky you!"
exclaimed Shuster, getting up from his 'bookgrope'. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could all
fall asleep so easily!" He stared
fixedly at Gerald a moment, his mind turning somersaults of intellectual
daring, and then, changing to an almost resentful tone-of-voice, he said:
"Well, I assume that young lady pupil of yours will be here soon, so I'll
temporarily retire to my quarters. See
you later."
Gerald watched Shuster's
tall frame pass through the doorway and out of sight with certain misgivings as
to just what would transpire later, if things didn't work out to his liking
with the young pupil in question. But,
for the time being, he was relieved to have the room to himself again and to be
able to get on with replaying the second movement of the Sonatine Bureaucratique,
which was trickier than he had remembered from past experience of the
piece. His technique was competent,
overall, but by no means perfect, and he reflected that he would certainly have
to spend a number of days practising hard if he hoped to bring his playing up
to performance standard. As he had given
public recitals in the past, he saw no reason why he shouldn't give a local one
in the near future, since the challenge of performing publicly could only
induce him to achieve a higher standard of technical proficiency in the
meantime, a thing he greatly desired in view of the restrictions his role as
private teacher of low-grade piano pupils was placing upon him at present. Perhaps he would incorporate a few nocturnes
by Schubert or Chopin into his prospective recital? Maybe even a Beethoven sonata, a selection of
Debussy's preludes, Ravel's magical Le Tombeau de Couperin, or
Mussorgsky's incredibly demanding Pictures at an Exhibition in
its original version, assuming, of course, that he could bring them all up to pianistic scratch?
He would see anyhow. There was
still plenty of time for him to make up his mind.
While toying with these
enterprising ideas his hands toyed, as though of their own accord, with the
bright keyboard of his Broadwood piano, experimenting
with various gradations of tone and touch, inventing strange harmonies, forming
arpeggios, scales in contrary and parallel motion, major and minor, diatonic
and chromatic, his facile fingers easily in command of the notes. Yes, he could still bring this old upright to
life, cause it to respond to him like a mistress, coax the best out of it, make
it rise to the occasion of his occasional nocturnal rhapsodies, when
technicalities were safely subordinated to the essential musicality of whatever
he happened to be playing and, his head thrown back in rapturous abandon, wave
after wave of ecstatic pleasure swept over and engulfed him, bending his will
to its omnipotent embrace. If music was
an exacting taskmaster, it could also be an extremely enriching one, a solace
from the manifold perplexities of life and a defence against its untimely
vagaries. It had brought him back from
the depths of despair in the past and would doubtless do so again in the
future. Music was something that, short
of a fatal accident to hands or brain, no-one and nothing could take from him.
While his nimble fingers
continued to explore the hidden depths of sound and meaning which lay buried
beneath the bright ivory keys, waiting only for the right touch to release them
into the air, his mind slowly changed track and began to explore the imagined
body of Miss Stephanie Power, his most attractive and brightest pupil who,
providing she had recovered from her illness of the previous week, was due to
make an appearance at any minute now.
She had studied under him for just over six months and, despite a slight
disinclination to take music of the sort piano lessons thrive upon very
seriously, was beginning to reveal latent talents, and not simply with regard
to the piano either! Indeed, her 5'
8" of shapely physique was beginning to have a serious effect upon her
teacher's emotional life. He would have
invited her to accompany him to a restaurant on at least three previous
occasions had not professional etiquette, incertitude concerning her emotional
status, and egocentric reticence combined to inhibit the verbal formulation of
his desires, producing a weekly procrastination. It was certainly high time for him to act if
he really hoped to secure regular access to this young eighteen-year-old's enticing physical charms and thereby put his mind at
ease. It definitely didn't pay to let
her slip away from the lesson unsolicited every week. He was beginning to feel more than a trifle
distracted - indeed he was! For it had
deeply pained him, the week before, to hear from her mother that she was unwell
and would accordingly be staying at home.
That was another opportunity lost, another procrastination to contend
with. It was a wonder to him that he
could carry on giving her lessons at all, subject as he now was to nervous
strain, coupled to periodic emotional aberrations, whilst in her company. But one had to carry on with one's duties as
best one could, to somehow learn to repress one's emotional intrusions, since
man did not live by love alone. Well, he
would just have to see what transpired from this evening's lesson, before committing
himself to any further folly! Things
might still work out in his favour.
Shortly after 8.00pm the
musical chimes of the doorbell suddenly awoke him from his morose reflections
and, in eagerly answering it, he discovered, to his immense relief, that
Stephanie Power was seeking admittance, and doing so in a tight-fitting minidress that emphasized the contours of her figure in a
most provocative way. "Well,
hello!" he blushingly exclaimed, before ushering her into his music
room. "I feared you weren't coming
this evening," he almost desperately added, as they crossed the threshold
together. "How are you now?"
"Oh, I'm fine,
thanks," said Stephanie, removing her bag from her shoulders and then
extracting a music score from amongst its jumble of heterogeneous
contents. "I had a touch of tonsillitis
actually, strange as it may seem at this time of year."
"Poor you,"
sighed Gerald, eyeing her in an overly sympathetic manner. "And I had been led to believe from your
mother that it was just a cold. Still,
you're looking very well, I must say."
She smiled but said nothing, so he asked: "How's the music coming
along, then?"
Stephanie duly placed
her copy of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on the ledge
formerly occupied by the Satie piece and replied that
it wasn't coming along too well, bearing in mind that she had only begun to
play the sonata a few weeks previously, and that it was unquestionably more
difficult than anything else she had thus far been called upon to play, even
with old Miss Edwards, her former teacher.
"I'm certainly doing my best," she concluded, "but it's
no easy task, not even in the first movement."
"Indeed not,"
confirmed Gerald, as he drew his spare stool up alongside the one on which she
was now sitting. "However, it will
soon develop along the right lines if you practise it at least an hour a
day.... I say, that's a refreshingly sweet perfume you're wearing tonight. I can't recall having smelt that one
before."
Stephanie was unable to
prevent herself blushing as she turned her admirably bright-blue eyes upon her
piano teacher's admiring gaze. "No,
I haven't worn it here before actually," she replied.
"Well, it's
certainly very refreshing," averred Gerald, while continuing to admire her
face. "You make these lessons a far
sweeter experience than most of my other pupils do," he boldly added.
"How very
flattering!" cried the young woman, who was momentarily in some
confusion. "I appreciate being
appreciated."
"I thought you
might," said Gerald, turning his attention back to the music score and, as
though for his own benefit more than hers, saying: "Now then, shall we
begin?"
There was a pause while
both teacher and pupil adjusted to the basic requirements of the task to
hand. After a rather tentative start on
her part, during which the sustain pedal was left down rather longer than it
should have been, Miss Power gradually gained in confidence, steering her way
past the various broken chords, tonal indications, and pedal changes with
relative ease. For his part, Gerald
coaxed her along in his usual tactfully deferential manner, overlooking the
occasional blurred harmony, misplaced note, faulty tone, and dubious timing
which crept into the performance in order to keep it moving along as much as
possible. He felt confident that she
would soon come properly to grips with the sonata in any case, irrespective of
her current failings, because she possessed a natural feeling for music and was
usually aware of when and how mistakes were being made. No doubt, these mostly minor errors would
cease to occur as she became increasingly familiar with the music and her
technical grasp of it grew correspondingly more comprehensive. In the meantime, however, he need only draw
her attention to those bars of the first movement which were causing her most
difficulty, to demonstrate how they should be played, in order not to undermine
her own judgement overmuch or cause her to lose confidence in herself. Quite apart from professionally being the
best policy to adopt, he was of the express opinion it was also socially the
best, as far as his prospects of keeping on good terms with her were concerned.
After demonstrating
various technical points to Stephanie in this way, Gerald liked to impart
additional confidence to her by guiding her fingers over the notes in question,
and it certainly wasn't beyond him to put his nearest arm around her waist or
take a peek at her rather conspicuously displayed breasts, highlighted, as they
invariably were, by a low-cut blouse or dress.
To be sure, she seemed not to mind these little familiarities of his;
though it never ceased to amaze him that he hadn't transformed them into
something more concrete by now, and thereby achieved a more intimate knowledge
of her person, in consequence of the incontrovertibly powerful attraction she always
exerted on him. Was it really a question
of professional etiquette over personal vanity or of personal vanity over
professional etiquette ... which inhibited him from extending the range and
degree of his familiarities? Or were
such considerations no longer applicable because the distinction had gradually
become blurred and, having passed the point of no return, he would now simply
have to act, regardless of his habitual egocentric reticence, with its retinue
of prohibitive demons lurking in wait to ambush every genuine adventurer on
love's treacherous highway, before matters got completely out-of-hand and
became absolutely unbearable? Perhaps
that was so? In which case it would
undoubtedly be wiser for him to get it over with soon, in order to ascertain
exactly where he stood with her. After
all, life wasn't specifically intended for the fostering of disturbing
aberrations. And even if it would be
dreadfully embarrassing, not to say humiliating, for him to continue teaching
her if she rejected his advances, at least he would then have the benefit of
knowing exactly what the position was, as well as the relative consolation of
accepting that he had done his duty, as it were, and needn't continue to delude
or persecute himself any longer.
It was towards the end
of this lesson when, the Moonlight Sonata's first
movement having been played several times, Gerald finally plucked up sufficient
courage to proposition Stephanie for a date.
But even then he could only manage to approach the matter indirectly,
via the subject of music, by telling her that he had a spare ticket for a
concert at the Barbican the following week, and was wondering if she would like
to avail herself of it to accompany him there.
Stephanie halted in her
playing tracks and stared incredulously at him a moment, obviously unprepared
for any such invitation, which, as soon as she could gather her thoughts
together, struck her as both impertinent and undesirable. Nevertheless, she did her best to sound
regretful when, blushingly, she replied: "Thanks for the offer, but I'm
afraid I shall have to disappoint you, since I've decided, in consultation with
my mother, to discontinue my lessons as from today." The words were hardly free of her lips when
Gerald's mouth fell open in shocked surprise.
"Oh?" he
responded unbelievingly. "What
appears to be the problem, then?"
"Precisely that I'm
sick and tired of playing this sort of crap and want to do something better
with my time, like joining a rock band and playing electric keyboards!"
shouted Stephanie in exasperation.
"Besides, I've had enough of your sneaky little voyeuristic games
and sly caresses. If you were really a
man, and not a snobby little wimp who's afraid of getting rebuffed, you'd have
asked me out long ago, and not in such a roundabout way either! My boyfriend's twice the man you are, what
with your smelly aftershave lotion and spotted cravats!"
Gerald was virtually
speechless and almost on the verge of wetting himself. "But I only w-wanted to h-help
you," he stammered, blushing scarlet.
"Yeah, well the
best way you can do that is to leave me alone and let me get out of here so
that I can meet my bloke as planned!" yelled Stephanie, jumping up from
the piano stool and reaching for her shoulder bag. "Find somebody else to take to your sodding concert!" she added sarcastically, and was
already through the door by the time a stricken Gerald Matthews noticed that
her music score was still on the piano stand.
Instinctively grabbing
hold of it, he ran out of the room and, catching up with her at the front door,
pathetically held it out to her, as he stuttered: "You'd b-better take
this with you in c-case you ever n-need it or have a ch-change
of h-heart in the f-future."
"A change of
heart?" jeered Stephanie, opening the front door. "You can take that sodding
thing and stuff it up your big fat arse!" she screamed and, without even
bothering to look back at him, ran off down the path and out into the
comparative freedom of the empty street, leaving Gerald Matthews standing speechless
in the open doorway, the Beethoven sonata limply dangling from between his
sweaty fingers.
"Dear me, looks
like another woman's run out on you!" a deep voice sounded from behind him
and, turning round in a sudden panic, he encountered, to his considerable
embarrassment, the tall figure of David Shuster standing in the hallway with a
glass of Scotch in his hand. "You
don't seem to have much luck with young women, do you?" he added in a sort
of unpleasantly rhetorical fashion.
With a gruff sigh, Gerald
quickly closed the door and was about to pass swiftly in front of his landlord
when the latter stretched out his free arm and stopped him in his bolting
tracks. "Seems to me you were
deluding yourself over that vulgar little titbit," said Shuster ironically,
as he wrapped his arm around Gerald's shoulder.
Although he would have
preferred to extricate himself from both the taller man's embrace and the
stench of whisky emanating from his breath, Gerald was feeling so shattered by
the totally unexpected outcome to his evening's plans, and by the vulgar
ferocity of Stephanie Power's onslaught upon his romantic sensibilities, that
he reluctantly resigned himself to the situation in which he now somewhat
shamefully found himself, and even allowed the semi-drunken lecturer to tighten
his embrace as, with tears welling-up in his eyes, he stuttered: "I just
d-don't understand what c-came over her, that she should have t-taken such
strong offence to what I s-said."
"Now, now!"
soothed Shuster, solicitously patting Gerald on the shoulder blade, "don't
take it all so damn personally! She
probably didn't mean the half of what she said.
Besides ..." and here he paused as though to add emphasis to the
significance, in the circumstances, of what he was about to say "...
you've always got me to fall back on, old boy."
Gerald was unable to
prevent himself blushing with this remark and, although he fought the
temptation that now assailed him to sob-out his grievances on Shuster's ample
chest, the conspiracy of pressures which surrounded him was too great, and
imperceptibly he found himself sliding towards total submission to Shuster's
will, as the older man, scenting victory, gulped down the rest of his Scotch
and ran his free hand caressingly over Gerald's trembling back. "There, there!" he soothed. "You'll soon be feeling better!"
CHAPTER EIGHT
'What a sleep!' thought Michael, emerging from the nocturnal
depths of image-bloated subconsciousness. 'Did I dream all those dreams or do I imagine
I did? There were horsemen, I
remember. Yes, horsemen wearing top hats
and riding through a deserted town. But
then everything goes blank. I don't even
know what they were doing there or where they were going. They disappeared too quickly. Then there was that woman, probably Julie, my
usual temptress, scheming in the background.
But I think that was another dream, possibly the one before, because she
certainly didn't have anything to do with top hats and horses! Anyway, she didn't run away from me as on
previous occasions, though I have no clear recollection, at present, of exactly
what she did do.
'We must have had sex
anyway, because I can distinctly recall being shown a pair of black suspenders
before her flesh well-nigh smothered me.
At least that's how it appears now, though I don't dream sex all that
often, alas, and I can't will myself to either, because dreams have a life of
their own and only show one what they want to, irrespective of one's personal wishes. Since I haven't so much as kissed a woman in
over five years, my dreams tend to be a bit unromantic, if not downright
dismissive of women generally!
'Perhaps I ought to
return to Ireland, even though, not having brought myself over here, I don't remember
anything about it, profess disbelief in Christianity, speak with a suburban
Surrey accent, and intend to work as a free-thinking author? I don't seem to have much romance living in
London anyway, though I've known one or two nice girls in the past. If only I knew someone nice at present, it
might help a bit. But apart from Gerald
Matthews, whom I've no real interest in, and a couple of old friends in Redhill, whom I ceased to have regular contacts with quite
some time ago, there aren't any people to speak of really. In fact, it's almost as though I was an
Englishman until, being obliged to move from Surrey to London several years
ago, I got lost in the crowd somewhere and became just another man with an Irish
name in London, meaning a sort of outsider.
Yet, to be honest, I've always felt myself to be an outsider anyway,
even as a child in Aldershot, and particularly as far as love is
concerned. I even used to have dreams in
which everyone went out of a building through one door and I alone went out of
it through another.'
Desiring to break away
from these troublesome thoughts, Michael Savage turned over in his bed and
began listening to the continuous clumping of high heels across the floor of
the room above. It was both annoying and
puzzling to him that the tenant there couldn't arrange to wear something
quieter indoors, like a pair of slippers or sneakers, instead of always making
so much damn noise. Such an arrangement
would doubtless have been more considerate of her, and would have prevented
Michael from assuming that she did it just to annoy him, since he had never
taken any real sexual interest in her.
Yes, there were always women who turned spiteful or vindictive when they
realized that you had no romantic designs on them, probably because the
ultimate decision as to with whom one had sex for whatever purposes was
fundamentally a female's affair which didn't warrant male objections!
However, before long,
Michael's thoughts began to get the better of him again and, after a further
dose of resentful subjectivity centred on personal truth, they shifted up a
gear, so to speak, to a more objective realm of mental inquiry.
'You stare
manifestations of truth in the face when you realize that, against their
innermost desires, many young people are obliged to sleep on their own every
night; that evil is as ubiquitous as good and that, in theological terms, the
God who apparently made you also made the people, animals, insects, etc. which
regularly torment you; that before He made man His speciality was reptiles,
including dinosaurs; that a priest who involves himself in politics is
betraying the cause of religion to the same extent as a politician involved in
religion betrays his political responsibilities; that inequality between people
is not a social anomaly but a fact of life; that many people pass through life
without ever having experienced genuine love or friendship; that the
subconscious mind plays a greater role in determining consciousness than might
at first appear. Indeed, now that I come
to think of it, some author I was reading recently was of the opinion that we
haven't got a subconscious, that the subconscious is basically just a myth, and
consequently something to which we oughtn't to attach any great importance. As if a person thinking "1066, Battle of
Hastings, defeat of King Harold by William the Conqueror" was simply
pulling such factual thoughts out of thin air instead of drawing on his
psychically submerged, and hence subconscious, internal memory bank! Now is that the
truth? Is that the kind of
enlightenment people are daily surfeiting themselves with, lacerating what
remains of their intellectual integrity?
Jesus! I wish I hadn't ... there
I go again - Jesus! By Christ! God Almighty!
Bloody Hell! My God! Damn it!
Holy Smoke! Good God! Heaven Forbid! - invoking the usual kinds of
religiously inspired exclamations the modern "rationalist" dredges up
from the depths of his subconscious to torment himself with, to remind himself
that, no matter how rational he may imagine himself to be, he's
still the inheritor of several generations of transmitted psychological
attitudes, and therefore very much a product of traditional
religious belief!
'Goodness me, haven't we
learnt better by now? Or is it that
we're simply decadent and don't take ourselves seriously enough these
days? That we're too often conscious of
living a lie which we can't do anything about, which only psychologically
cripples and humiliates us, transforming our thoughts into inarticulate bubbles
that well-up, like pieces of flotsam, to wash against the shores of our
consciousness where, confronted by twentieth-century life, they burst and
fester? Well, what would be the point of
writing a serious thesis on behalf of those who find conventional religion an
embarrassment if nobody could learn anything from it? Or if it could be discarded as a source of
idiotic self-deception, a blatant example of free thought which, coming from a
contemporary intellectual, is all very well in its place, but nothing to be taken
too seriously because it takes all types to make a world and, besides, someone
else is bound to come-up with an alternative view before long, so what
matter? Reminds me of that dubious
notion we have concerning sunset and sunrise, the going down and coming up of
the Sun, as though the Earth stayed perfectly still while the bloody Sun danced
around it! Seems more accurate to think
in terms of, say, "earthrise" and "earthset";
though I doubt that a majority of people could be re-educated on that score overnight! After all, delusions, deceptions, illogicalities, absurdities, etc., are pretty much an
integral part of the crazy world we inhabit.'
Having thought which,
Michael stretched out his hand to pick up the battered old alarm clock which
had lain face-down by the side of his bed all night and, noting the time,
dropped it back down on the floor, before continuing: 'It's 8.00am, so I've
been awake nearly half-an-hour.
Half-an-hour too long, since I resent waking up when what I was dreaming
promised to enthral me. Usually end up
either thinking or fantasizing too much.
Then, in the latter event, getting up with a hard-on and not being able
to use it because there's no woman around is a pretty frustrating
experience. A regular affair in my life,
though. Like what I was thinking the day
before yesterday about bumping into old acquaintances in the street,
particularly those females who were potential girlfriends, and being asked how
you're doing, etc., and, to minimize embarrassment, you reply "fine",
considering they probably don't really give a toss about you anyway and, having
had the misfortune to bump into you, are only too eager to get away again, to
escape from the unpleasant connotations or feelings you awake in them in
consequence of the recollection that they were already happily attached to some
other male when you'd had the nerve or audacity to proposition them in the
first place, and therefore had no real alternative but to reject you, while
you're simultaneously annoyed with yourself for allowing them to get away with
a lie from your mouth, even though you're well aware that it probably wouldn't
have served your purpose to let them know how you're really doing, in view of
the largely paradoxical nature of modern life, with its social hostilities,
fears, suspicions, prejudices, and hypocrisies lurking dangerously close to the
fragile surface of its ostensibly promiscuous standards.
'Indeed, the notion of a
promiscuous society seems to me more like a myth than a reality, something that
has no real applicability to the world a majority of people are accustomed to
living in these days. Unless, however,
my upbringing was so strict that I now suffer from the delusion of taking what
I project of myself into the world for the world
itself? Anyway, you'd expect certain
persons and categories of people to be promiscuous in any age, regardless of
the prevailing Zeitgeist. Take
students, for example. These days it
appears that, having plenty of time on their hands and a fair number of
attractive members of the opposite sex to choose from, most of them can usually
have their sexual desires satisfied more easily, not to say frequently, than
other people. For college should be an
ideal mating-ground, especially when there's a fairly even distribution of the
sexes there.
'That student upstairs,
for instance: no sex starvation in her life! She certainly knows what's good for her, if
the noise I'm put through every night is any indication! She should get an honours degree if she stays
the course and doesn't lose her current lover in the meantime. Though I don't think there's much chance of that happening. Why, she's too accommodating! Keeps him satisfied. A morale booster, if ever there was one!'
For a moment he had to
smile, in spite of the relatively cynical nature of his thoughts, which were
all-too-symptomatic of his self-image as an outsider, a man who had no real
choice but to live on his own in view of the absence of alternative solutions.
'I wonder, though,
whether life wouldn't be a bit harder for her if she lacked a man, if she
hadn't been so much as kissed by a man in several years,' he went on, turning
onto his other side. 'Indeed, she might
require a little extra coaxing out-of-bed in the mornings, perhaps a little
extra incentive to stir herself, because it certainly isn't a good thing to be
continuously cut-off from congenial company, to be on your own every
night. You get some nasty thoughts that
way, some nasty feelings inside, particularly when you're all the time
surrounded by neighbours whose lifestyles are so alien to your own that you
have no alternative but to keep to yourself in the evenings. You could soon become neurotic if you weren't
careful, swamped by incertitude and guilt, the incertitude and guilt of a man
who fancies himself to be in the way, living against the grain but unable to do
anything about it because he is what he is and they are just as surely what
they are, and no compromise seems possible.
I wonder how she would feel with no-one to visit her apart from the landlord
once a month, with no-one to keep her company in the evenings, to flatter her
vanity and explore her flesh. She'd
probably wind-up frightened of going mad.
Wind-up like Sartre's leading character Antoine Roquentin
in Nausea: too conscious of the fact that she exists because she
hasn't got anyone to help her be instead.
'Well, at least I have
the consolation of knowing that I can sleep much better now than I did during
the first year or two of my enforced exile in London. No wonder I became so hopelessly neurotic
then. Too much consciousness is the
ultimate torture, akin in Lawrentian parlance to
being at "a perpetual funeral", bearing in mind the gravity of the
matter. For you need to black out every
night in order to effect a partial rejuvenation of the organism and be
resurrected, as it were, the following morning.
Still, I needn't get unduly intellectual at present, because it isn't
particularly dignified lying here with the smelly sheets all rucked up and the quilt smeared with sweat from past
abuses.... Now my temples are throbbing from the pressure of so many
thoughts! Perhaps I had better fantasize
instead, although it's always unnerving to fantasize in this state-of-mind,
afraid of bursting a blood vessel or concussing myself. Imagine myself dying from a cerebral
haemorrhage or partly concussed and crawling out into the entrance hall for
some meddlesome person, like old Miss Bass in the front room, to phone for an
ambulance and have me carted away on a stretcher. And what would I say to the hospital staff,
assuming I wasn't dead on arrival?
"I had just got my imaginary tongue between her imaginary labia
when, to my utmost surprise, I experienced a mental ejaculation which knocked
me out." Case of another
over-idealistic paddy biting the realistic dust? Or just another victim of unrequited
love? Probably better off dead than
alive anyway.'
At which point Michael
gave way to another smile that seemed to assail him from beyond the focal-point
of his conscious mind, as though in response to an interested spectator of the
principal proceedings which now, as on other occasions, were overly cerebral.
'I remember having a
favourite fantasy that involved a pretty dark-haired nurse,' he resumed
thinking, 'who would take my temperature in the orthodox fashion, thermometer
to mouth, and then allow me to take hers by inserting the instrument into her
vagina, until I was sufficiently satisfied with the ensuing reading and could
thereby verify the continuation of her habitually good health. "And how many times have you been
fucked, Nurse White? Thirty-five times
by the age of twenty-two? But I would
have thought at least five hundred!"
'Yes, how the mind
functions! One minute I'm deadly
serious, the next minute I'm able to joke.
To be sure, it would be an incredibly weird experience writing all these
thoughts down on paper without any punctuation, the way Joyce did for Molly
Bloom in Ulysses, to draw attention to how the mind gets carried away
with itself in a torrent of verbal excitement.
That would be even weirder than ... ah! That reminds me. I mustn't forget to post that short story to
Gerald today, the one I told him about in the restaurant yesterday. It will give him a surprise. He probably thought I was just bluffing him,
considering I didn't really relate to him and, if the truth were known, had no
real sympathy for his problems, what with him being so effeminate and all that.
'In fact, I'm more than
a little relieved to have finally got away from him and, no less significantly,
from that music firm, what with all the strange people who worked there! For instance, little Ernie Brock. Reading in the street every lunch time. Why-the-devil he couldn't take a walk without
reading, I'll never know! He was lucky
not to get pushed off the pavement and run over, the way he walked about
virtually oblivious of everyone and everything except the book he happened to
have his nose stuck into at the time.
And while he held a book in one hand his other hand held an apple, which
he would nibble at from time to time in positively Adamic
fashion. In fact, it seemed to rank
fairly highly in his hierarchy of daily priorities, including, in addition to
sustained silence, a regular perusal of the Scriptures, particularly the
Gospels, which he appeared to know back-to-front and right-to-left. Though that didn't prevent him from
re-reading them or induce him to boast of his knowledge. Oh, no!
He was far too knowing to fall for that crass
shortcoming! An authentic Christian if
ever there was one, an earnest crusader for the dissemination of Christ's
message, and a classical scholar, to boot.
'He apparently knew a
little Greek, because it's the done thing in the clergy and he intended to
become a clergyman one day. You wouldn't
hear him comment on it though, not him!
Wouldn't comment on accidents, either.
Some over-weight fellow at the office got himself knocked down by a car
on his way to work one morning and all little Ernie Brock could manage to say,
when the chief clerk informed him of it, was: "Oh, I see". She never got another word out of him, not
even some simple curiosity! In fact, I
can't pretend that I reacted very concernedly to the news myself. But at least I endeavoured to show some interest,
because things like that didn't happen very often and it provided one with a
pretext for dropping work a few minutes.
'Still, Ernie might have
shown some concern, even if the fellow who had to stay off work all week with
severe bruising to his buttocks did happen to be a self-professed atheist! But I suppose, not being particularly
accident-prone himself, it didn't really occur to him, bearing in mind the
extensive nature of his perambulatory reading habits. Never in the wrong place at the right time. Too absorbed in his reading to have any time
to worry about the possible consequences of being pushed off the path or
failing to spot the curb. Didn't give a
damn about the world, but kept himself to himself most of the time. Seemed to carry the Gospels around on his
conscience, as though intuitively aware that he was constantly under strict
surveillance from the Omniscient, the justification for his priestly etiquette,
and therefore under binding obligation to behave in a thoroughly moral
manner. That could be the reason why he
often reiterated childish banalities under his breath whenever experiencing
what I can only suppose to have been a premonition of anger, as though to
shield his thoughts from the possibility of cursing or swearing, and thereby
protect his claim to an afterlife of eternal bliss. Perhaps afraid that such sinful aberrations
could leave a rather conspicuous moral stain on an otherwise exemplary record?
'It must be terribly
frustrating for a person to develop that kind of neurosis, though. More frustrating, still, if you're a Catholic
who goes to confession every week. You
could end-up wondering whether you hadn't forgotten to mention something,
whether you oughtn't to make a note of all your sins, or potential sins, as
they happened in case, either by forgetting or overlooking some of them, your
omissions subsequently went against you, come Judgement Day. But, then, if you failed to understand
exactly what constituted a sin in the first place, as so many people ...'
Michael Savage drew a halt to his thinking at
this point, since the clumping of high heels across the floor above him
momentarily arrested his attention. He
still couldn't prevent himself from imagining it was all done on purpose as a
kind of punishment for his sexual reticence, his self-containment, his disinclination
to get into conversation with the woman.
Although, in another and more rational part of his mind, a little voice
was telling him that, like so many of her kind, she probably suffered from an
inability to remain still.
However, it didn't occur
to him that she might be totally unaware of the extent of the noise she was
unwittingly inflicting upon him, as he went on: 'I wonder who it was once
informed me that the Church always "comes out" in times of
persecution? Naturally, he wasn't lying
to me, because you'd ordinarily expect people who were being persecuted to
stand up for themselves, whatever their beliefs. I mean, most people would probably retaliate
if provoked strongly enough, not just stand put and bless their enemies, like a
bunch of cowardly masochists! He was
more than likely seeking an ulterior motive to justify the Church's
"coming out", to enable him to puff it up a bit with otherworldly
connotations. After all, it would be too
down-to-earth without the Creator's backing, that ultimate authority which men
like Moses wielded so successfully not only against his Egyptian oppressors but
against virtually every other godforsaken people either audacious or stupid
enough to get in his way as well! Indeed,
I can well remember having sat behind a row of nuns at a cinema showing Moses,
or some such religious epic, in all its martial ferocity and blood lust, with
people succumbing to a violent death every-other-second, especially among the
Hebrews' enemies, while (to judge by their rapt attentiveness during the
screening and their excited chatter in the intermission) the nuns were
positively lapping it all up, taking it all for granted, never for a moment
doubting that the "badies" didn't get what
they deserved, that Jehovah's ruthless retribution wasn't the sine qua non for
one's optical acquiescence in the slaughter, or that the "Chosen
People" weren't perfectly justified in driving other peoples from their
"Promised Land".
'Now, much as I'm no
anti-Semite, it seems to me that there's little sense in endeavouring to argue
with people like that: minimum response!
They'd probably consider you mad.
What would be the point in arguing, anyway? I'd only succeed in arousing their
resentment. A waste of time bashing your
head against such an impervious wall.
You wouldn't alter it to any appreciable extent; it's been there too
long. Besides, whoever heard of anyone,
least of all a religious maniac, relinquishing his habitual source of
consolation in the face of opposition from the first scoffer or cynic who
happened to cross his path? You might as
well expect people to renounce religious faith altogether, if it was that vulnerable
to attack! After all, it wouldn't really
be a genuine faith without some form of steadfast loyalty to the cause. Returning to what I was thinking yesterday,
they'd probably have some other faith or mania instead, something that would
adequately serve the purpose of an alternative delusion. Who knows the number of godforsaken beliefs
or manias one could alternatively succumb to, given an opportunity to begin
afresh? Even I acquiesce in a delusion
which a good many people, in their inability or unwillingness to draw simple
conclusions from it, would doubtless regard as an exceptionally unique species
of madness!'
For a moment the sound
of heavy footsteps in the hallway, coinciding with the cessation of clumping
noises across the floor above, put a stop to his thoughts by indicating, to his
great relief, that the upstairs tenant had exited her room and was rapidly
proceeding towards the front door which, upon reaching, she would thoughtlessly
open and, just as thoughtlessly, slam shut with a firm grip of the door
handle. That done, Michael Savage could
relax back into the grip of his thoughts again, without having to fear an
immediate resumption of her noise.
'As for my personal
delusion, which seems to have less hold on me these days than formerly, due in
all probability to the slow emergence of alternative delusions of a no-less
personal nature, I shall permit myself to expand on it a little more than
yesterday, indicative of the degree of spiritual emancipation to which I've
recently attained, insofar as I would previously have felt too constrained by
the imaginary presence, as it were, of my omniscient eavesdroppers to be able
to reveal myself to them in such an open fashion.
'Well, these psychic
eavesdroppers may not have been Gods the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost,
but the impression I frequently had of being listened-in to by extraneous
beings undoubtedly suggests something analogous to the sphere of orthodox
religion. Yet if I confess to the fact
that I suffered unrequited love so intensely, for several years, that I was
eventually compelled to carry an image of both the form and spirit of my
beloved around in my head every day, then I'd probably be getting somewhere
nearer the root of the problem. For it
was during this period of intense emotional attachment to a particular woman
that I experienced, in addition to neurosis, a sort of Rimbaudian
derangement of the senses. I would have
been utterly incapable of transferring my love to anyone else, since my
devotion was so powerful that, even had I eventually succeeded in finding a
viable substitute, the very fact of her inherent otherness from the woman I was
in love with would ultimately have precluded me from taking her seriously. So I went solitary through the crowded
streets of London, while Julie's image accompanied me where another man's woman
would accompany him. In fact, she became
such an integral part of me that gradually she wormed her way into my daily
consciousness as a sort of witness, a person whom I had mysteriously endowed,
in imagination, with an ability and/or device for penetrating my mind and
listening-in to my thoughts, much the way that, say, God the Father might be
perceived as doing the same by people of a more traditional, not to say
institutionalized, disposition!
'But if Julie could
invade my mental privacy in this fantastic fashion, then what was there, by a
cumulative effect, to prevent her friends or acquaintances from doing so,
too? And not only them but, by further
extension of the delusion, some of my acquaintances and former friends as well
- for instance, people at the office? A
regular retinue of omniscient eavesdroppers who come-and-go according to the
circumstances, the frame-of-mind you're in, who or what you're thinking about,
how busy you are, where you are, or what you're doing, because, no matter how
blatantly absurd it may seem, you do then have some kind of company, however
simulated, transient, indifferent, or even hostile, to put you on an imaginary
pedestal, to witness your daily joys and tribulations, failures and successes,
and, last but by no means least, to induce you to objectify your thoughts. You do then have people, however attenuated,
imaginary, or secretive, with whom to share your favourite rock albums, people
who'll comment from afar, as it were, on what you're playing, who'll
corroborate and stimulate your own opinion of a particular instrument, musician,
composition, tone, tempo, arrangement, melody, harmony, or anything else
notably pertinent to the album concerned.
As though you had established a private audience or loyal band of
followers with whom a psychic communion could be sustained by dint of whatever
connections you may formerly have had with them on the planes of friendship or
acquaintanceship. So maybe, in extending
the delusion into the realm of sentiment, Julie wants to be near you, wants to
know exactly what's going on in your little world but, because of various
social commitments, attachments, or misgivings, can only satisfy these wants
indirectly, discreetly, clandestinely, through the medium of a kind of
telepathic communication, with or without certain of her friends or
acquaintances being present while she listens-in to your thoughts.
'Yes, they speak of the
insanity of love, how a man would cross the globe ten-times-over if only to be
near the one person who truly pleases him; how entire armies are destroyed in
the wake of his frustrated desire for sexual fulfilment; how the temples of
dedication crumble to dust with the sacrifice of his beloved's lips; and how,
in the throes of some tortuously unrequited passion, the poison is imbibed, the
noose tightened, the bullet fired, or the water embraced. The ineluctable ferocity of love, slayer of a
thousand peoples, betrayer of a million secrets, ravisher of a billion hearts,
desecrator of a trillion truths!'
There suddenly ensued a tremendous
explosion of rattling keys or, rather, of key and keyhole in head-on
confrontation, as the old woman next door, having evidently exited her room,
grappled with the manifold complexities of her lock, preparatory to dropping
first keys and then handbag on the floor in consequence of a sum of
perplexities which the lock had unmercifully brought to a head! Eventually, after gathering both belongings
and composure together, Miss Bass went on to exit the house in her customary
discreet fashion.
Meanwhile, Michael had
turned onto his opposite side and begun to reflect back on what he had been
thinking in relation to his ideal temptress, the one with the plaited
hair. She had come to him in a dream, as
on many previous occasions, only this time she had been friendlier towards him,
even to the extent of abandoning herself to his caresses and promising to
requite him. That, to be sure, was a
rather novel experience in itself, one which he had no reason to suppose would
ever happen again.
'So I believed, albeit
tactfully, sparingly, intermittently, that Julie could penetrate my mind and
thereupon secure access to my thoughts,' he continued to muse afresh,
encouraged by the departure of yet another neighbour. 'I even went so far as to dupe myself into
assuming that one of her friends, an impulsive young woman I had spoken to on
more than a few occasions, could succeed in winning me over and subsequently
disentangling me from what had gradually become a somewhat ambivalent
predicament. That this friend, being no
less seductive in her own fashion, could provide an amorous diversion which
would somehow mitigate the hardship of my futile allegiance to Julie -
something, alas, which wasn't to be underestimated by such a naive presumption! But such is life, and since nothing can be
sold without a price, so I had to pay dearly, in my perverse imagination, for
the imaginary presence of my beloved.
And not just in a purely physical sense, but also with regard to those
shameful feelings of remorse which invariably descend, like famished vultures,
upon anyone who habitually disappoints his idol, who is acutely conscious of
every mortal mistake he makes and who, in the manner of a mortified penitent,
needs to apologize to this idol for having thought the wrong thoughts, done the
wrong deeds, and generally failed to live-up to the idealistic standards he had
formerly set himself. I even wrote a
short poem which went:-
The people who
listen-in to
His
thoughts restrict him.
He is
afraid to offend them.
Among
their number might be
The
woman he loves.
What
if he were to think her
A
ruthless whore?
'Yes, that's it! A kind of lyric poem, to which I later added
a short prose poem of similarly paranoiac import which, if memory serves me
well, ran as follows:-
The thing that
would particularly make subservience to Christianity unattractive to me would
be the constraint of mind attendant upon acknowledging an ostensibly omnipotent
and omniscient Deity. The constraint of
fearing to let slip from one's thoughts anything which, to Him, might seem
improper - a tirade of self-abuse, an observance of religious doubt, a hatred
of one's fellows, the formulation of lewd or violent fantasies ... in short,
anything that could serve to render one guilty to such a Divine Witness, and
thereby necessitate the onerous obligation of regular confession accompanied by
sincere contrition. Too great a mental
constraint, conceived under duress of imagining oneself being listened-in to by
the Omniscient, would almost certainly lead, sooner or later, to a
hypersensitivity in the matter, a fear of sinning or losing track of one's
sins, and even, at a more advanced stage of the neurosis, to the possibility of
a full-fledged religious psychosis and the persecutory concomitants thereof of
eschatological paranoia.
'Yes, that was it! So even if I hadn't exactly fallen into the
religious trap, I had fallen into the unrequited trap and virtually elevated
the source of my distress to the status of a goddess. Even if I hadn't fallen into the traditional
delusive trap, the one I had fallen into
was no less exacting, encouraging though it was to know that my delusion
precluded any possibility of an imminent conversion to institutionalized
madness. Fortunately, however, I had no
reason to split my mind into two or three parts, having absolutely no desire to
play a question-and-answer game with an imaginary interlocutor. The consciousness I frequently had of
imagining myself being listened-in to by a particular woman was sufficient to
enable me to sustain my thought patterns, to augment them, to coerce them into
supplying self-evident descriptive explanations of my varying circumstances, in
order to put her in the picture, as it were, and simultaneously justify my
actions.
'Thus if, during a day's
clerical routine, I paused to rest awhile, it was usually because I felt
mentally fatigued. Now although it would
have been perfectly feasible to have thought "Jesus, I'm tired!" at
such a moment, I would have thought it largely on the understanding that Julie
was listening-in to me and consequently required to have the situation
explained and even justified. However,
since I was concerned to keep this delusion under tight control, and thus
refrain from allowing it to develop into a veritable madness, I kept a fairly
constant check on it and finally succeeded, after numerous frustrations and
self-criticisms, in keeping it down to a tolerable level, thereby acquiring the
freedom to observe my deceptions with more than a hint of ironic detachment.
'Well, so much for all
that! Whatever happens to me in future,
I think I ought to get up fairly soon because, quite apart from the lateness of
the hour, my empty stomach is beginning to protest in a rather disagreeable
manner. I'll tidy up my room, find something
to eat, play a few tapes, take a short stroll around the neighbourhood, and
just get used to the idea of leading another life, a life different from the
one to which I've grown accustomed in recent years.'
Thus, with an ardent
desire to enacting his intentions, Michael Savage clambered out of bed and,
after briefly scrutinizing the weather, immediately set about the conquest of
his various domestic duties. He spent
the rest of the morning in a lighter mood in a brighter room, glad it was a
warm, dry Saturday and that he didn't have to worry about going to the office
today. In fact, now that he no longer
had an office to go to anyway, he already felt himself to be a different
person, no longer a discontented clerk but, at the very least, an incipient
writer and man of destiny - someone, in short, who had just changed
worlds. And, as though to underline this
fact, he read and posted to Gerald Matthews the short story he had promised
him, which, though still untitled, went as follows:-
I had just removed
her brassiere and was in the preliminary stages of fondling her quite copious
breasts when, to my profound consternation, the damn telephone rang. "Now who-the-devil can that be?" I
asked myself as, reluctantly extricating myself from Sharla's
grip, I hurried out into the hall, picked up the receiver, and straightaway
heard a gruff voice asking: "Hello, is my daughter there?"
"She is indeed!" I impulsively
replied.
"Ah, could I speak to her a
moment?"
"Er,
certainly. Just a sec." I turned towards the piano room, the door to
which was still slightly ajar. "Sharla!" I called.
"Yes?"
"Your, er,
father wants to speak to you."
"Oh, damn him!" she groaned,
automatically putting on her vest.
"What-on-earth can he want?"
It wasn't a question I could answer
there and then, so I patiently held the receiver against my chest until,
arriving breathlessly in the hall, she was able to take it from me and say:
"Hi dad!"
Fearing that my presence beside her
wouldn't help any, I ambled back into the piano room, where her bag, coat,
shoes, miniskirt and underclothes lay strewn across the floor, and her perfume
permeated the air with its delightfully sweet scent. Indeed, everything about her was delightfully
sweet. Even the room itself, ordinarily
so drab and formal, seemed to have taken on a romantic dimension which lent the
furniture a mysterious poignancy, as though it had acquired the semblance of
life and was now a silent witness to this evening's amorous events. Fortunately for me, however, Sharla's high intelligence permitted her the equivalent of
two lessons in the space of one, so I never had to fear that her musical
education would lag behind or be seriously undermined in consequence of my
weekly devotions to her sexuality. In my
view, she was potentially a distinction candidate, the next and final
examination grade almost bound to lead her to studying piano at one of the
country's principal music colleges.
"Okay," her voice came from
the hall, "but I won't be late home, in any case. Yes, thanks for letting me know. Okay, bye then." She replaced the receiver with a peremptory
slam and swiftly tiptoed back to where I lay, ruminating on the couch.
"Well, is anything amiss?" I
tersely asked, while fixing her with a searching look.
"He wanted to know if everything's
okay,” she drawled, still a little under the influence of our bottle of
medium-sweet wine.
"What a silly question!" I
asseverated, my hands instinctively groping under her vest for the milk-laden
globes which were now generously advancing towards me, compliments of Sharla's graceful return to the couch. "What did he really say?"
Her long spidery fingers crawled nimbly
over my stomach and up and down my chest.
"A friend of the family has invited my parents over to dinner at
the last moment, so they'll be out when I get back.... Which means that my
father has hidden the front-door key in one of the two small lanterns affixed
to the wall either side of our front door."