Op. 03
CHANGING WORLDS
Long Prose
Copyright © 2013 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
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
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
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
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
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
'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
"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
'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
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
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
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
'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
"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
"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
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
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
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
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
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.
'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
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.
LONDON 1976 (Revised 2012)
