‘It’s for you Tom,’ she says, as the table falls silent. Already on my feet I was able to lift the huge lid with some dignity. Underneath was a chicken.
‘It’s your chicken Tom.’
She’s telling the truth. Poking out of the ass of the chicken, I can see my copy of L’Etranger by Albert Camus. It hasn’t been shredded, so I can take it out. When I open it I see that there are no words left on any of the pages. The pages are blank.
‘We wanted to help you Tom.’ Her eyes are full of tears. ‘Not just me. All of us. A helping hand for Tom.’
Slowly the table starts to clap, faster and louder. The table shakes, the dishes roll from side to side like the drunken tableware in a sea story. This is a sea story. The captain and the crew have gone mad and I am the only passenger. Reeling, I ran from the dining room into the kitchen and slammed the door behind me. Here was peace. Hygienic enamelled peace.
Tom slid to the floor and cried.
Time passed. In Newton it always does and everyone knows how long it takes for time to pass and so nobody gets confused. Tom didn’t know how much time had passed. He woke from an aching sleep and put his fist through the frosted glass kitchen door. He went home and took his big coat and filled the pockets with books and the books seemed like live coals to him. He walked away from Newton, but he did look back once, and what he saw was a table stretching out past the bend in the road and on through the streets and houses joining them together in an orgy of matching cutlery. World without end.
‘But now,’ says Tom, ‘the hills are ripe and the water leaps at my throat when I shave.’
Tick-tock says the clock in Newton.
Holy Matrimony
My fiancé and I would like to be married in church; an ordinary hypocritical sentimental impulse from two people who do not believe in God.
My fiancé and I would like to be married in church but this is proving difficult because the people who do believe in God are selling them.
Now I know that Jean-Paul Sartre and Mr Camus were right when they claimed it is the Absurd that obtains. The Absurd, with a most capital A, that declares in this Year of our no longer Lord that unbelievers still wish to use the churches the faithful have denied. What you sell reveals what you value. The Church must be accountable. Why should I care? Why should you? But what then for my spirit now that every spirit-thing has been price-tagged?
Pity St Peter. Pity the charred ranks of martyrs, their fired bodies in the cool earth. Pity uncounted sacrifices and recorded zeal, work of hands and hearts to raise monuments in stone to the Invisible. Pity those who could not guess that to convert the unconverted the latter day Church would hire an architect.
Lengthen my stride. How long a stretch to get away from the insistence of the past? The past, ripped out, pulled down, sold off. What my parents were and what my grandparents were, and further back, through time, landmarks of a people built on more than rock, built out of bone, the framework of a commonwealth, a commonweal. What you inherited and what you were to leave behind. A thousand years of history and an island faith.
My fiancé and I will get married in a consecrated tent. This tent will be supplied and erected for the day by Dazzle Bros. Matrimonial Ltd. and all proceedings under canvas will be blessed by the Flying Vicar. These Persons of the Cloth, strategically based and conveniently close to rail and air terminals, will travel at speed and First Class to any wedding funeral or christening to offer that special touch of godliness. Video and details 0800 666.
Lengthen my stride. Walk as fast as I can, north, south, east, west. Do some complain of tinnitus? The bells are ringing across the city, faster, faster, my back to the bells, the bells at my back, each vertebra live-notched to the scale where the past still hammers its communal note. The round metallic sound of warning, of death, of summoning, of celebration. The hollow bell, and in it, teeming life. Look up; the towers are swarming.
It is not so. The light on the copper is killed. The bells have been carted away to back lots on film sets, museums municipal and maritime, well groomed gardens in need of a folly, even as sculpture in a concrete park. Forgetting, all, that a bell’s business is to ring.
The Reverend Wreck. Trap jawed, a guffaw man who likes a belly laugh and owns the necessary surface area. Monkish habit, salesman’s eyes and a worrying twitch of the right hand that he claims he picked up whilst in India, unlike the left which he bought at a car boot sale. I believe that Dazzle Matrimonial supply the jokes.
The Reverend Wreck says that he will marry me. Not personally of course, another baboon snort here, but gladly, legally and cheaply. He is Budget and we both know that I cannot afford Somerset’s Canon Snap. No vulgar money talk here, the vulgar Dazzle’s will see to all that, and for my kind attention in due course.
The Reverend Wreck will counsel me by video on marriage and its duties, marriage and its pleasures, marriage and its pleasures and the consequences thereof. Nine months to be exact are his last words before he flickers out in a blizzard of clerical adverts. If I want him back I will have to find another penny for his slot. Do you remember those fairground peep-show machines? Folies Bergère and What the Butler Saw. I never had enough money to get past her knickers. Now I have a credit card and the Reverend Wreck.
Lengthen my stride. Buy a wedding bell for good luck. Little, lacquered, lost its clapper, wall mounting hostess model, hostess mounting wall model. Pocket pigmy dumb to say that much more than a bell has been melted away.
Progress Progress. I am getting married. Spiritually speaking we shall unite as one flesh but for all practical purposes my husband will remain a cut above me.
‘Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded Sunday joint? Will you roll her and bone her garnish and consume her? She has been sealed in her juices unto this perfect day. Please, sit down and eat, we are all cannibals now.’
Marriage. The waste paper basket of the emotions? My love poems, my diary jottings, my billet-doux, jetted into you, or if not you, what you represent: Approval, security, companionship, children, a piggy bank, a sex toy, an action man in a stagnant world.
Till death do us part. Will you update me darling? Will I go the way of all your other worldly goods? There is so much pressure on you to move with the times and I admit that I will lag behind, not least in my bosom, gravity’s friend. The hands on the clock hour by hour drag me down, ‘Your wife is ticking Sir, crossing off the minutes with unfeminine haste. Sir, regard her fingers moving round her face, surely her hour is at hand?’
Progress progress. More and more people want an old fashioned wedding. The new slim-line Church is doing a roaring trade, not least because the lion had lain down with the lamb to create that genetically engineered beast that used to be called a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing.
Now, now, don’t be bitter, the Church must march ahead, no matter that the flock has been lost. In any case, flocks cost money, much better to kill the fatted calf and charge for it.
A rose by any other name is not England. There is something to be said for words. Change the words and you will change the meaning, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but the day after, and what we thought we could keep without valuing it will be gone. A thousand years of history and an island faith.
Is that the bell? I would like to say ‘I will.’ I would like the sincerity of a promise others have kept. I would like to know that brick by brick, stone by stone, heart by heart, my country, my city, my town, my village, my house, myself, will not be taken away. My ancestors lived in a place their ancestors could recognise. I can recognise less and less. It moves so fast, my modern world, blurring what detail is left. No wonder I seek for certainty in your face.
It is not enough. You were not designed to be my landscape or my life-line, nor I yours. Adam and Eve to each other, perhaps, but with fruit trees and animals between and with someone else who walked in the Garden, and who called us by name.
What can a human being do? The men in dog collars no longer offer me a lead. The men in the
white coats and the men in the pin-stripe suits have come to take away security of home and security of work, security of family and security of faith. Some security I must have and in return for all that taking away I have been given more gadgets than a 1950s housewife and the twenty-four-hour Valium of the small screen. And you.
Why should I care? Why should you? But what then for my soul that still seeks yours?
Lengthen my stride. Let the wedding list be long. Happiness is a sandwich maker and a bed settee. What’s that darling? You don’t need either now that you have me. Quick open a present. Let every minute be a present, some fresh novelty we must have to forget the future and the past. I can afford it. Sell what I am, sell what I could be, sell myself to you for a gold ring. This is our last refuge isn’t it? The last connected place, where for a moment you and I join hands with all the others who have joined hands and where, just for now, we make a pact with the past. Friendly ghosts will visit us but not for long. The bell tolls and we have found that every man has become an island and every woman too. Never mind, the salesman says I can call you on our mobile phone.
If everything I have become were not machine-made I might be able to take the risk of being human with you.
On top of the cake two figures feet in frost. His patent leather, her satin shoe, anchored by icing thick and deep. Beneath their tiny toes, currants and almonds, sultanas and candied peel, muscle through the white flour and halt around a sixpence. Good luck! Good luck! The bows and the bells and the tinsel and the lace, the confident Doric columns and the sugar roses in regimented rows, these will lie at last on the exhausted tablecloth, to be pocketed by the caterers for next Saturday. The little figures, totemic of a thousand tomorrows, are safe in the waistcoat of the groom.
And I? No safety without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Sun on my face I must re-cast the bells and ring them too. I must make out of the furnace of my fears what this world is burning away. Make out of the tiny you and the tiny me, not a late Adam and Eve, but a heaven and an earth re-created. New.
A Green Square
I left my house this morning with no desire to return.
Who was in the house? My family.
Who was outside the house? Myself.
I stood looking up at the tall house in between other tall houses and I understood that I always had been outside. The insider me, the belonging me, was a dark projection on to darker walls. I am my own magic lantern, casting my body through thin air, a ghost among ghosts, lights out, wondering when the day will come.
When will the day come?
The Big Day. The Best Days of your Life. The day I was born, my birthday. Graduation Day. Pay Day. The day we met, the day we no longer met. When I take out the pocket calendar of my life I want someone to tell me where the days have gone. There are none in January. Where are my Januarys? Forty-one years of thirty-one days and I cannot remember any of them.
Is there such a thing as January? You say, ‘Such and such happened.’ Did it? It didn’t happen to me. I watched it on a screen. I heard it on the radio. I read it in the newspaper. You told me such and such. It didn’t happen to me.
Is it so unreasonable to want to play the main part in your own life? When January was showing, I was asleep at the back of the stalls, Rip Van Winkle of the snowy world. And February? And March? And April? And May?
It didn’t happen to me. The lantern flickers. The light is poor. There’s nothing worth watching anyway.
This January day, the woman on the bus has a travel brochure. ‘Open your world’ it says, and there’s a photo of an aeroplane serrating the world’s rim, as though the world were just another tin can.
The world is your (tinned) oyster. The packaged hygienic world with a sell-by date of Book Now.
She fingers the pearls around her neck. Her neck is dull white, English. Her pearls are brilliant white, Japanese. She pulls them round and round, like a rosary, until the cheap tin clasp is over her bosom, and the grinning beads curve behind.
She marks possible destinations with a quick Biro. India, Antarctica, Africa, Tibet.
‘Don’t you think?’ she says. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘What?’
‘It would be nice.’
Twenty-one days a year paid holiday. I can make a note of that in August.
Where is the glittering world? I remember the salmon leaping in the Irish sea, and the wake of our boat a white triangle, in the sea sun-sphered gold.
The sea was glass, continually broken, heat-blown again into smooth panes then wind smashed. Out of the breaking and setting, the curved salmon in heraldic pairs, water-shot.
The water burned as if oil-skinned. My mouth was dry. I had drunk fire-water. My mouth was dry.
Where is the river where I was born, salmon-confident of return? Where is the sureness of an undertaking, its purpose plain, the adventure and the reason for it coded in DNA? I should have run away to sea and come back to spawn myself in my own river. I should know, instinct sharp as a fin, when the tide turns. The voyage out, the journey home, life circling itself bead by bead. Something to turn over in the hands. Something to pray for.
Prayer? Well yes. I pray as you do: ‘Don’t let this happen.’ ‘Please let it be all right.’ Improvisations of need addressed to who knows where. God the horoscope column, god the tea-leaf, god the lucky lottery numbers, god when I die with the lid screwed down, this god forsaken life.
There’s a man on the bus who gives out stickers saying ‘Seek ye the Lord.’ The woman with the brochure takes one and uses it to note her page. The Lord will be found in the Seychelles this year.
My eldest daughter has joined a tambourine sect. The kind who stamp and praise and give up cigarettes only to light up a certainty every five minutes.
My daughter wants to tell me the Truth. She knows what it is and I don’t. Meanwhile my son is using her Bible for rolling tobacco. The paper is the right weight and he doesn’t think she’ll ever read all the way to the end. She’s reading Proverbs, he’s smoking Revelations.
And I am looking for the sign that says ‘WAY OUT.’
‘Do you come here often?’
Yes often. This fork, this point, this hesitation. I look at my house in between other houses and I wonder why I cannot accept my halter alongside the row of indentical halters that yoke us together as a society. This is how we live; house by house, family by family, pulling together along history’s dirt road.
‘Do you come here often?’
She means the park. The park bench that she and I share. I did not go to work this morning. I got off the bus at the park. There was a vagrant and a squirrel and a man mowing the grass and a man with a spiked stick who pierced abandoned paper cups with botanical satisfaction.
I sat on the bench without a thought, with only a great weight that would not be thought, a boulder in the cerebral cortex, my rock that I push up and down, up and down through the years of life.
When the woman spoke I assumed she was mad. We do don’t we when strangers speak to us? In any case, people who sit on park benches usually are mad aren’t they?
‘No. I never come here.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What a coincidence that we should be here at the same time.’
She looked at me oddly. She was thinking, ‘This person is mad.’ People who sit on park benches usually are mad.
‘Warm for the time of year isn’t it?’ I said
‘I’ve known warmer Januarys,’ she said.
I turned to her with intense interest.
‘Have you? When? Which ones? What year?’
‘Are you one of those amateur weather forecasters?’ she said.
The helium balloon, the barograph, the pressure sensitive needle registering the rise and fall of warm and moist, the hottest, the coldest, and all normality in between.
What could I invent to measure my changeful days? And if I could be carefully recorded on special paper would it help? Help me, that is, to have
a sense of who I am?
Never has so much been recorded by so many; the documented, identified, archival, tagged and saved world. The British Library has a copy of nearly every book written since 1840. Weather records began in 1854. Births, deaths, marriages, all there. Planning consents and blood groups. Tax returns, passports, dietary habits and driving licences. Where to find me, what I’m worth, what I watch, what I wear, my goings out and my comings in, for my security on surveillance camera. All you need to know except what I need to know: Who am I?
‘Ask a silly question,’ she said.
‘What colour are Mickey Mouse’s underpants?’
She looked pained. ‘I meant, ask a silly question/get a silly answer. You’re not a weather forecaster are you?’
‘I never said I was a weather forecaster.’
‘Are you on drugs?’
‘Are you?’
She stood up. ‘I’m going to call the park keeper.’
‘Here, use my mobile phone.’
‘You’re a pimp.’
‘I’m desperate.’
She started to walk away. I shouted, ‘I can’t walk away, don’t you understand that? I can’t walk away.’
Every year thousands of men and women disappear. I don’t mean the ones who sell up, move away, remarry, get a job in Acapulco, go into a nursing home or mental hospital, or even out onto the streets. I mean the ones who are never seen again. The ones untraced and untraceable. Faded photographs, out of date clothes, the years piling up in the place left behind. The place where they walked away, without a suitcase or a passport, bank account untouched, appointments still fresh in the diary.
The World and Other Places: Stories Page 11