TUESDAY
28th SEPTEMBER
It is Tuesday afternoon
and I have just returned from The Cornerstop Café where,
as usual, I had lunch. Unlike the place
to which I go for breakfast, this café is situated on the brow of one of the
steepest hills in
Anyway when, somewhat out-of-breath, I eventually arrived at The
Cornerstop Café at about one-thirty today, the
place was jam-packed. Indeed, I had
never seen it so full. At first I
considered turning around, taking an extended walk or, preferably, visiting the
nearby public library in order to kill time while most of the customers
gradually paid up and left. Just as I
was about to opt for the latter solution, however, I caught sight of an empty
chair in front of a table at which an old man was laboriously churning some
nondescript stuff over and over in his mouth, as though he were a cement
mixer. I could plainly discern some of
it sliding around between his teeth.
Nevertheless, without wishing to disturb his ruminations, and scarcely
bothering to reflect on the obvious inconvenience of the situation from my
point of view, I hastily sat down opposite him and took hold of the menu, as
though to balance myself. I could tell
by the peeved expression on the old bastard's haggard face that he wasn't
particularly pleased at the prospect of having a young stranger seated opposite
him, but I couldn't help that. After
all, one has to sit somewhere and, besides, the sight of his thoroughly
masticated food being churned around in his big mouth wasn't the best thing
that could have happened to me, either.
Quite the contrary!
Well, I duly ordered a tea and some shepherds pie with chips
from the plump waitress, and then sat there pretending not to notice him;
though I must have looked fairly apologetic or self-conscious from his point of
view. However, my attention was soon
diverted by a young man at a table to my left who probably entered the café not
long before me, since he had just finished his soup and was now speaking in a
rather loud and passably middle-class voice which sounded at loggerheads with
the generally informal tone of the place.
He was dressed like an office worker, possibly an insurance clerk or estate
agent, and his manner of speaking suggested someone both effeminate and
moronic. It apparently didn't occur to
him that his loud and ponderous manner of speech was attracting attention from
virtually all corners of the café.
Evidently, he was oblivious of everything save his determination to get
some message across. Indeed, the fluffy
haired girl, to whom his words appeared to be addressed, was staring
incredulously at him whilst he spoke, her mouth hanging open like she hadn't in
the least expected his words to be directed at her, even though she was the
only other person at his table. It must
have been all she could do to refrain from laughing in his face, the way she
was now looking at him. However, the
waitress appeared outwardly calmer as she approached him, bill-pad in hand,
with intent to taking his order - a thing to which he didn't initially respond
in view of his verbal preoccupations.
"Er, I think I'll have a
steak-and-kidney pie, if you don't mind," he eventually decided.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we're only doing shepherds pie today -
unless you'd prefer fish or a roast?"
"Oh, I see. In that
case, I'll have shepherds pie, then."
"With boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, or chips?"
"Er, boiled potatoes, if you
please."
"Peas or carrots?" By now it was beginning to sound like an
interrogation.
"Er, peas, I think. Thank you so much."
"Tea or coffee?"
"Oh, yes."
"Which?"
"Just a tea, please. But make it weak."
"Thank you, sir."
I am trying my hardest to remain coolly detached and to mind my
own business, but he speaks so loudly and slowly that it's virtually
impossible. Noticing the attention of
the girl opposite upon him, he suddenly launches into renewed conversation
with: "I say, it's just as well that we've had so much rain recently, what
with all that horrible drought, isn't it? I was beginning to lose hope, you know."
Somewhat to my surprise the fluffy haired female replies:
"Yes, it was a bit worrying."
"Still, we mustn't allow ourselves to become overly
complacent about it," he remarks.
"According to the latest weather reports, there's still a serious
water shortage throughout the country."
"Is that a fact?" the girl exclaims with apparent
unconcern.
"Oh yes. It'll be
some time before the normal facilities are completely restored. In point of fact, the water authorities will
have to process all this recent rainwater so that it'll be fit for consumption,
won't they? Otherwise it would taste
ghastly and might even do some mischief.... I say, you aren't waiting for the
menu by any chance, are you?"
"No, not at all."
"Oh good. I just thought you might be. I didn't mean to hold on to it like
that."
The girl seems on the point of giggling or blushing, but remains
silent.
"I say, it is busy in here today, isn't it?" he
resumes. "D'you
know, I've never seen so many customers in here at the
same time before. Let me see now ...
Why, there must be all of thirty people, you know!"
The waitress suddenly serves me my dinner and tea. The old man opposite has just finished eating
and is now picking his false teeth - for that is what they plainly are - with
the grubby index finger of his right hand.
There is a little pile of spat-out gristle on the side of his
plate. Every few seconds, despite the
general noise in this far from quiet place, I can hear his guts rumbling, and
he belches quite vehemently - evidently in response to the post-prandial exigencies of his digestive system! Now the old devil is going to roll himself a cigarette.
I turn back to my dinner but, as can be imagined, I don't really
feel too enthusiastic about eating anything.
Besides, I have a painful suspicion that the old devil's eyes are
following the progress of my loaded fork out of idle curiosity. I intensely dislike this suspicion because it
usually makes me feel uncomfortably self-conscious, and I can also feel my
nerves beginning to shake a bit. The
chances are pretty high that some of the peas will roll off the edge of my fork
when next I endeavour to lift it towards my mouth. I ought to reassure myself by re-entering the
whirl of events. Then I shall at least
have the consolation of being an accomplice instead of simply a hapless victim
of some potentially cynical appraisal.
Sure enough, he was watching me!
For his reflexes were predictably slow, his eyes remaining fixed on my
fork for a second or two.
"Excuse me, d'you think I might
borrow your saltcellar for a moment?
There doesn't happen to be one on my table."
"Sure, go ahead," I respond, scarcely bothering to
look-up from my dinner.
The young man reaches across the table and, as a bony hand
clasps the saltcellar, I can distinctly smell some sweetish aftershave lotion
from his face and neck.
"Thank you so much.
I won't be a minute!"
Good God, what's he getting all apologetic about? Anyone would think I was doing him an immense
favour!
The fluffy haired girl opposite him throws me a conspiratorial
glance, the implication of which is clearly derogatory, but I don't commit
myself to a response of any kind, primarily because I am too busy thinking
about my generosity. Also I can see out
of the corner of my left eye that he is virtually swamping his dinner with
salt. He shakes the saltcellar much too
vigorously, it seems to me, though its hole might well have become partially
blocked. Now he is coming back again.
"There you are."
He repositions the saltcellar with the utmost care, as though afraid it
might break or that something might get knocked over in the process, and then,
noticing the pepper pot, says: "Sorry to be such a nuisance again, but d'you think I might borrow the pepper as well?"
This time I say nothing, since it seems unnecessary to answer
such a question, particularly in view of the fact that the pepper pot doesn't
belong to me personally and I am hardly in a position to refuse him, even if he wasn't
already in a position to take it. Once
more I get a whiff of aftershave lotion from him which
mingles violently with the savoury smell of my shepherds pie and the acrid
aroma of the old man's tobacco. Looking
up, I notice that the young man, on reaching his table, gives the pepper pot
almost as vigorous a shaking as the saltcellar, but for what reason I can't
fathom, since there appears to be no obstacle in the way of the pepper as it
cascades down upon his shepherds pie in cloud-like prodigality, a prodigality
which has the not-entirely-unpredictable effect of causing him to sneeze, and
to sneeze so vehemently that a large globule of snot shoots out from one of his
nostrils and lands smack in the middle of his dinner. I abruptly look away in disgust. This really is the limit!
But I'm not saved from my disgust, however, because the old man
has just started coughing, probably on account of his evil-smelling cigarette,
and without having the decency or presence of mind to cover his mouth, so that
I can plainly see his false teeth joggling about.
"There's your pepper back.
I shan't be needing anything else. Thank you so much."
The girl throws me another conspiratorial glance, the sort of glance
I had been half-fearing she might throw, but this time its derogatory
implication is so brazenly unequivocal that it completely ignites me and I
burst-out laughing to myself without the least compunction. I laugh so loud, long, and convulsively that I
am more afraid of choking and possibly throwing-up my dinner than of disturbing
anybody else. I get the impression that
everybody is now staring at me, in any case, but it doesn't bother me in the
slightest; in fact, it only serves to rekindle my amusement. For all they knew, I might be about to do a
dance on the table or to verbally insult them all. Indeed, my amusement changes up a gear, with
this further consideration, into a wonderful gutsy laughter that completely
obliterates everything, the sort of humorously cathartic experience I haven't
had in years, which seems to release all my pent-up emotion, all the repressed
humour of my lonely existence. Then, all
of a sudden, without my in the least willing it, the convulsions cease and I
quickly calm down again, remorsefully recollective of
the fact that I was only laughing at some trivial incident sparked off by a
half-wit to my left.
For a moment I feel almost penitential; I should like to
apologize to someone - possibly the target of my outburst. But, strangely enough, there doesn't appear
to be anyone I could directly apologize to, since all the nearest customers,
with the notable exception of the old man, have resumed their eating or talking
as though nothing had happened. Even the
pompous poofter to my left is now shovelling what I
can only presume to be snot-coated shepherd’s pie into his big wide mouth
without the slightest sign of embarrassment.
Being the kind of prat he is, he probably
hasn't realized why I was laughing.
Unlike the fluffy haired bitch opposite him who, despite the slightly
flushed look on her face, has returned to something approximating
civility. The old man has stopped
coughing and is now observing me with a resentfully stubborn expression. He probably imagines I was laughing at him,
the old bugger! Well, what of it? Isn't that a good enough reason to laugh?
I stop eating for a moment and observe him with a sort of
detached amazement. There is some damp
tobacco on his protruding lower lip and also on his double chin. His face is a mass of lines, of deep wrinkles
which run in every direction, reminiscent in a way of my Grateful Dead
brochure, whilst his hairy nostrils project upwards in an unabashedly retroussé nose.
There isn't much hair on top of his head, but what little he still
possesses is of a distinctly greasy texture, streaked with bits of off-yellow
that blend-in with the preponderating greyness in a way strongly suggestive of
a compost heap. His ears are big and
lumpy, as is his nose. His eyes,
diminished by two incredibly thick lenses which must weigh a ton, appear dull
and lifeless - virtually dead. In fact,
they look more like the eyes of a fish than of a man and are also slightly
bloodshot, with an appearance of instability in their sockets; one gets the
impression that he blinks to keep them in place or perhaps even to stop them
from tumbling out.
Since I don't wish to continue my observation of his ugly
features, nor to run the risk of having to enter into
conversation with him, I look away in some disgust and address the puddle of
tea which has slowly formed in my saucer.
I have more or less finished eating without really having enjoyed
anything. It was a wonder to me that I
didn't throw up. But this ugly old fart
who now wears a vacant expression on his face, as though he had withdrawn from
the world into a private chamber of the mind which is closer to death than to
life, has started me thinking along other lines, and I am wondering whether I
wasn't correct in my assessment of old people the other day, after all.
As far as I can now recall, it began when I visited the local
grocer's and noticed a hideous-looking old crone seated near the till and
talking to the man behind it. I had
noticed her there on several previous occasions, always seated in the same
place and either talking to the grocer or to herself if he was busy, but I
hadn't paid her much attention, probably because she seemed so perfectly
ordinary and unassuming. On the occasion
I'm thinking of, however, I could tell that the grocer - ordinarily an
extremely polite man - was at some pains to remain patient with her, that her
presence and continuous chatter had become an oppressive burden on him, and
that he would have preferred to be left in peace to serve his other customers,
including me. So when, in a pretence of listening to what she was saying, I took a
good look at her, I perceived that she wasn't as innocuous-looking as I had
previously imagined. On the contrary,
she seemed positively wicked, in fact so conspicuously wicked that, had she
been wearing a high conical hat and holding a broomstick instead of a walking
stick, you would have had no difficulty in taking her for a witch.
Well, that was what started me thinking more seriously about old
people in general and, if I'm not sadly mistaken, this
enfeebled specimen of organic degeneration in front of me has corroborated my
suspicions. Admittedly, what can be seen
on the outside isn't nearly enough; there is much more to him than meets the
eye! But I know for a fact that this man
is decadence personified. He has fallen
so low that it would be virtually impossible for a young person like me to
ascertain the true extent of his decadence.
In order to get anywhere near a realistic assessment of his condition,
it would be necessary to examine the workings and/or not-workings of his mind
as well as his body, to plumb the depths of his subconscious in search of
buried material - for instance, remnants of former selves. Needless to say, we are unlikely to achieve
very much in that regard. But we can at
least hazard an intelligent guess as to the efficacy of his cunning and
perseverance in dealing with the many problems, frustrations, shortcomings,
etc., which life has hitherto afflicted upon him, a guess which might indicate
that his lengthy existence on earth has taught him as many dodges as he needs
to know in order to survive, and that his experience in dealing with people has
often obliged him to be shamelessly wicked, ruthless, immoral, treacherous,
cantankerous, callous, deceitful, and a hundred-and-one other disagreeable
things to boot, so that, through force of habit, he has become quite an adept
in dealing with the manifold demands of life.
Indeed, the older one becomes the further into sin one plunges,
ever deeper and deeper, as Hermann Hesse puts it,
into life until, as an enfeebled old sod, one is compelled to pay one's dues,
as it were, and one's ultimate moral and physical dissolution is wholly
justified. From a tot reared on Jack and Jill to a
sot besotted with Ulysses or Tropic of Cancer to a dot who
doesn't read at all ... is just a matter of time. As the personification of innocence, a baby
is generally worshipped by its parents, especially its mother, whereas an
elderly person, say, a grandparent, receives no worship at all. In fact, he/she is hardly even noticed!
Of course, if you were to put a fresh young sunflower beside a
wilted old sunflower, one approaching its demise, you would see clearly enough
that the former was superior to the latter, since it was healthy rather than
sick, decadent, or an eyesore. There
could be absolutely no doubt in your mind concerning the relative merits of the
two sunflowers - not, that is, unless you were stupid or blind or, worse still,
possessed by a mad belief in the existence of a sunflower afterlife. For, whatever the analogue you choose to
adopt in this context, you come back to the same conclusion every time: once
one has passed one's prime, one effectively becomes a second-class citizen. One takes a back seat in life, and whether or
not he likes it, whether or not he realizes it, this old creature chewing
strands of stale tobacco and staring fixedly at the blatantly unattractive legs
of the chubby waitress, is inferior to me in almost every respect. He is wrinkled, short-sighted, thick-eared,
double-chinned, stunted, hunchbacked, pot-bellied, bronchial, grey-haired,
bald-headed, flabby-skinned, smelly, uncouth, toothless (despite or perhaps
because of his false teeth), feebleminded, forgetful, vulgar, and a lot of other
unfortunate things which I can't ascertain simply from being seated at the same
table. But, in the event of an argument
on this matter, he will doubtless turn accusative, maintain that old age is
wiser than youth, disagree with me on as many issues as he can, condemn my
attitude to old people, remind me of 'the good old days', and, to cap it all,
intimate that his experiences in life have earned him considerable influence,
in consequence of which he has a right to be consulted on matters of
importance, to have the final word on things - even to be venerated for his
wisdom. To wit, he will even go so far
as to inform me that a wilted sunflower is inherently superior to a fresh
one! He will conjure up every
conceivable ruse that he can think of to daunt me, to dissuade me from exposing
him and putting my finger on the painfully unchristian truth. Maybe at this very moment his mind is full of
memories, erotic or otherwise, and the older he gets the more important these
memories become, the more they remind him of what he used to be, of what he could
do about forty years ago, before the torments of a decaying body affected his
mind and persecuted his soul. At times
he is little more than a walking dream, and those are comparatively fortunate
times!
I stoically and perhaps even rudely undertake another
penetrating observation of him, but I don't encounter anything new. One would think he was wearing a death mask,
to judge by the lifeless expression on his face at present. There is hardly anything about it which would
fail to suggest that the seeds of death aren't already sprouting from his pores
and slowly draining the life out of him.
Admittedly, it's not really his fault if he looks so abominably
cadaverous; that was bound to happen eventually. But, all the same, he is a fact, a walking
fact, and the least society can do for such people is to treat them with a
certain amount of civility, to ensure, as far as possible, that they're not
suffering overmuch, and to guarantee the majority of them that when they die,
other routes to salvation being blocked, their corpses will be destroyed in a
time-saving, money-saving, space-saving, work-saving, health-saving, and
superstition-saving manner, freed from the traditional obligation of
organically continuing the vicious life-cycle by indirectly breeding millions
of superfluous, pestilential vermin, as what passes for heaven degenerates into
hell!
No, I don't hate this old man.
But I am nowhere near admiring him, either. He simply leaves me cold. Time is steadily rotting him away; he will
soon cease to exist. If, by any chance,
he happens to be buried, he will eventually be metamorphosed into a seething
mass of worms and maggots. The worms
will burrow into his entrails, his molecular structure will slowly
disintegrate, and the air above his grave will become permeated with the sickly
odour of death and decay. Once the life
has gone from his body, it will be too late for him to consider moral
reparations. He will be completely
submerged in a bath of icy darkness from which there is no escape. He won't even have time to regret that he had
often been duped by certain things or people whilst alive. Regret, like remorse, is a privilege of the
living!
But let us just suppose, for the sake of argument, that a priest
has blessed him and sped him on his way to Heaven, encouraging him to have
faith in God when, after a life of unmitigated profligacy, profanity,
indifference, and ignorance, he had just received the Last Sacraments and
thereupon made his peace with the Church.
Our old man is granted a good conscience through having been absolved
from his earthly iniquities and formally prepared for the inevitable meeting
with his Maker. At the very worst he
need only fear a short stay in Purgatory, while St Peter's angels deal with his
moral particulars. For when he's finally
admitted to Heaven, he will wallow in everlasting peace and be permitted, so
the priest benignly informs him, to converse with as many former great men as
he pleases or, if he prefers (since to judge by the old man's blank expression
there is no way that intellectual conversation could possibly appeal to someone
of his type), follow any number of beautiful maidens to their resting places,
where they will subsequently please him to his heart's content, etc.
To be sure, the priest may soon divine, after a short sermon of
this seductive import, that, in his impatience to
cross into a better world, the old man can't die quickly enough. Perhaps, who knows? But all his hopes will be to no avail when he
eventually stops breathing and is absolutely powerless to determine whether he
is in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory simply because there will be no consciousness
of anything.
Now if, by some remote chance, he were to return from the dead
just as he was being buried, before the first spadeful
of earth had thumped against the coffin lid, before the mourners (assuming
there were any) had finished mourning or pretending to mourn, and immediately
began pounding on the coffin, to be quickly hauled back to the surface and
rescued from suffocation, he would probably wonder what-the-devil was going on,
why-on-earth they had buried him when his heart was still functioning normally
and he had only a short while before received divine absolution. Yet if, to crown it all, the godly flock of
mourners then proceeded to question him about life after death, he would more
than likely stare at them incredulously, as though they were idiots or lunatics
to expect him to know anything about such a thing when he hadn't gone anywhere. What was time when you were dead? Could he seriously be expected to even know
that he had died? He certainly hadn't
been asleep, at any rate. For when you
sleep the mind is still alive, blood is being pumped around the body, you
almost invariably dream of something and retain, in consequence, a vague notion
of time or, more specifically, of the sequence of events within the dream. But he couldn't remember anything. There had been no dreams because, assuming he
had in fact died, no
blood was being pumped around the body to keep the mind alive. You can't dream with a dead mind. Therefore, as far as he was concerned,
nothing had happened. One moment he was
whispering penitentially in the priest's ear, the
next moment he was pounding on the coffin lid from the wrong side of the
grave. There had been no transition.
"What?" the priest cries out, in horrified
amazement. "You weren't taken to
meet our Heavenly Father by one of His angels?"
"No," the old man replies, dumbfounded. "I didn't go anywhere."
For a moment the priest is nonplussed. "Oh, my God!" he groans and,
speedily recovering some composure, turns to the flabbergasted mourners by the
grave and screams: "This man has been dead almost a week and his soul
hasn't gone anywhere!" There is an
ominous pause before he continues conclusively: "That can only mean one
thing. This man is a child of
Satan!" And immediately, before the
old man can say anything, before he can even attempt to climb out of his coffin
and defend himself, the priest grabs the spade and begins furiously beating him
over the head in an attempt to return him to the everlasting sleep from which
he had so unexpectedly awoken, as though from a nightmare.
Suddenly I come-to with a shuddering start! I haven't gone anywhere, either. The old man is still opposite me and the
loudmouthed moron is still to my left.
The waitress is staring at me with suspicious eyes, as though to reprove
me for having withdrawn into myself at her expense. There is quite a hubbub throughout the rest
of the café. Indeed, you would never
think, listening to it, that people could possibly be communicating with and
understanding one another. It is much
too uproarious to be intelligible.
Anyway, for the time being, I have no further business here. I need only pay the bill.
Just as I get up from my chair I become unpleasantly conscious
of the fact that someone, presumably the old man, has farted. A rising quantity of rectal gas lodges in my
nostrils and sharply disgusts me. It
must have been a very soft fart because, irrespective of the general hubbub, I
didn't hear anything. But whilst I am
pushing my chair in, I can distinctly hear a loud one followed, almost
immediately afterwards, by a barrage of softer ones which explode in quick
succession. A mature woman seated behind
him has turned around and is now regarding him with unmitigated disdain. She has evidently found him guilty of a
serious breech of propriety! He should
have done his best to hold on to his post-prandial
flatulence until he got outside, the dirty brute, or at least have allowed her
to finish her meal! Not knowing of the
woman's proximity, however, the old man appears completely unconcerned about
this minor metaphysical indiscretion, which he probably didn't hear or smell in
any case, and continues chewing his tobacco as though nothing had
happened. A privilege of the senile,
after all!
While the plump waitress reads my bill, I take a final look at
the over-polite moron with the loud voice.
He has finished his shepherd’s pie, presumably snot and all, and is now
scrutinizing the menu with intent, I suppose, to selecting a dessert. The girl nearby still appears to be staring
at him, though from where I stand I can't see the expression on her face. For all I know she is probably laughing at
him under her breath - either that or holding her nose because of the old
man. As they say, one good meal a day is
quite enough!
