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
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
'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
'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."
"But don't you have a key of your
own?" I asked, astounded.
"They still won't entrust me with
one," she sighed.
"How
silly!" I exclaimed.
"Why, you're almost eighteen."
"And old enough to be my piano teacher's
favourite pupil," she enthused.
I smiled impulsively, as much from
relief as from genuine amusement.
"Yes, but at least I'm a private teacher and not a
schoolmaster."
"What difference does that
make?" she cried.
"Less
scandalous, of course."
"The hell it is!"
I had to smile in spite of my attempt
at seriousness. "Look, this is a
perfectly natural state-of-affairs actually.
Let's just say that both of us are pupils in the art of making
love."
"But you're always teaching
me," Sharla protested, clearly no easy girl to
convince.
I sighed faintly and said: "Not
as much as you may imagine, sweetie."
"Well, that's not the impression I
get," she smilingly retorted.
"Frankly, you're a very
precocious young lady who knows, as well as anybody, that the
recently-perfected transition from the keyboard to the couch considerably
enhances your enjoyment of these piano lessons," I averred,
"particularly when you can spend part of your fees on the quiet and boast
to various classmates at school of having intimate connections with a handsome
music teacher nearly ten years your senior."
"I don't boast!" Sharla incredulously exclaimed. "Whoever told you that?"
"Now, now, don't blush,
baby!"
"I'm not b-blushing," she
stammered. "I never tell other
girls anything about you."
"Ah, but they tell me," I
smiled, teasing her.
"What d'you
mean?" she cried. "No other
girls ..."
"Alright, I was only
joking," I admitted, the back of my hand caressing her cheek in a pacificatory manner.
"But you do tell a few friends."
She lowered her large plum-like eyes
in apparent shame. "Okay, only my
closest friends," she blushingly confessed.
I smiled but said nothing as we lay
motionless together on the couch, basking in the gentle warmth of each other's
bodies. I ran a hand through her black,
wiry hair and then ever so tenderly kissed her on the lips a few times. Eventually she responded in kind and our
kissing became more intense.
"The time always goes too quickly
when I come here," she at length sighed, coming-up for air.
"Indeed it does," I
sympathetically agreed. "It's a
pity you don't come here more often."
"Humph! I might be able to if you weren't always so
busy giving piano lessons to other girls every night," she
complained. "Don't you ever take an
evening off?"
"I don't teach at the
weekend," I obliquely replied.
"Then why can't we arrange to see
each other on Saturdays or Sundays as well?" she asked a touch petulantly.
"That might be possible," I
conceded.
Smiling, she drew herself up closer to
my face and brought her big dark eyes directly into focus with mine, or so it
appeared from the way I saw her pupils contract so
rapidly. "Do you have other girls
like me?" she asked with a directness that momentarily embarrassed me.
"Unfortunately not, Sharla," I confessed, in what was probably an overly
frank sort of way. "The others are
mostly too young, too plain, or too thin.
Besides, I couldn't afford to let that many people keep a part of their
piano fees as recompense, since I'm not exactly rolling in money, you
know."
"But you do have a girlfriend
besides me, don't you?" she asked in a tone of voice and with a facial
expression which suggested she already knew the answer. So, to save myself extra complications, I gently
replied in the affirmative. "And
you see her at the weekends?" she went on.
Again I replied in the affirmative.
"Humph! That explains it," she solemnly concluded.
"Explains what, Sharla?"
"Why you won't see me then."
"Not entirely," I responded
half-smilingly.
"Then
what?" - She seemed on the verge of tears.
"Don't upset yourself,"
I gently chided her and, sliding my hands down her back and over her rump,
proceeded to comfort her as best I could.
"What time is it?" she at
length wanted to know, looking a trifle concerned.
"My goodness, it's nearly
8.50!" I exclaimed, glancing at the watch and scrambling to my feet. "I've another pupil at nine."
"What a drag," she drawled.
"What, having another
pupil?"
"No, getting
dressed!"
I smiled as, reaching for our
respective clothes, the pair of us sought to cover our nakedness as quickly as
possible.
That done, we briefly returned to the
piano and to the Schumann piece which still stood, as though to attention, on
the stand where it had been abandoned some time before. If it had presented her with a few minor
problems it was mainly because her legato technique was still insufficiently pianistic, depending too much on the sustain pedal. I therefore suggested that she spend some of
the following week practising scales in order to make her fingers work harder,
since they were still rather too lazy and stiff for comfort (in marked
contrast, I reflected, to the way they behaved on the couch). "In actual fact, it would be better if,
for the time being, you ignored the pedal markings altogether," I
continued, growing in confidence.
"For the pedal is fast becoming a crutch,
and not exactly the most helpful one either!"
Thus after a few amendments to her
Schumann technique, a brief display of scales, and a couple of aural tests, I
set her free, saying: "And don't be late next week!" as a final piece
of advice which, however innocently intended, was bound to sound ironic to Sharla.
"Oh, don't you worry about
that!" she smilingly retorted and, much to my delight, planted a firm
farewell kiss on my lips before regretfully taking her leave of me.
