I claimed my complimentary P & O blanket, and kept walking until I found a seat by the window. If I was lucky, I’d get some sleep, but with the ship’s engines rumbling through my stomach I often woke up in rambling thoughts of Rifka.
You’re sitting on a goldmine.
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Something something something dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
Through scratched perspex the brown sea wallowed nauseous to horrible under a sullen morning sky. I could make out dirty white cliffs. I stretched, folded my blanket, then took a blustery walk on deck, where the wind had the tang of sea-salt and seaweed and horsedung. Twice as Nice were still in the speakers.
You Are, uh, Like a Hurricane.
Well maybe I am, I thought, maybe I am. You Go, uh, Around and Around.
At the relevant announcement, I rejoined my vehicle, and after nudging it down the ramp and following All Directions, I parked it in the staff car-park of Westminster Abbey, with my clerical collar clearly visible on the dash. By the time the on-duty deacons made up their minds (Does he have the right? Should we clamp him? Yes. No. Yes and no.) I could easily have taken a helicopter to wherever it was I was going. Or maybe I couldn’t.
I could take a limousine, though that was absurd, because helicopters and limousines were reserved for the special and distinguished. Dream what you know: I started to run. The wings of my suit jacket flapped out behind me, my coloured socks flashing at each upward stride. Out of breath, fading, where was it I was straining so very hard to go?
To heaven. Obviously. Always to heaven.
Joseph Moholy or Mason Senior was blocking the way, the two-in-one of them sitting behind a table wearing a tight overcoat at least a size too small, the sleeves stopping well short of bony, hairy wrists. I couldn’t resist asking, ‘Why is your coat so small?’
‘It’s not our coat.’
From across the table, Dad bumped his shoulders and shot his cuffs, the sleeves barely reaching midway from his elbow.
‘It’s an experiment, but it isn’t working yet. It’s a celebrity coat, but at the moment I just feel stupid.’
‘I think it might be working. I’m sorry, Dad, but I gotta go.’
‘Give me a hug, then.’ He held out his fleshless fingers, his all-bone wrists. ‘Give me a final final kiss.’
‘No.’
My step-through Honda was on its stand, engine already puttering. I made a long, cold, cross-country journey in tight-lipped, ear-plugged silence. While I should have been watching the indicators of container lorries, I cursed Dad and Moholy for their parting words, following me along the hedge-enclosed ribbons of B-roads.
‘Be yourself!’
Such useless advice that I had to laugh as I stood there on the verge of the road, the wind coming up behind me, parting the hair at the back of my head, the cold wind on the white line of my scalp. I had my thumb out, waiting for the next kind person to offer me a lift.
I lay awake for some time, warm and safe in the darkness beneath the duvet. Why, I was wondering, on life’s grand journey, was I the one redirected through Geneva? I had godless contemporaries in their thirties living freely and making fortunes in London, with no care for tomorrow. And here I was, penniless and celibate in the non-place of Switzerland, with a disturbing sense of fate.
On the verge, the road stretching far in both directions, nothing on either horizon.
As a sermon, it was rubbish: life wasn’t like that. Hitching wasn’t anything even close. Get back on your bike. Or better, buy a car. Decide where you want to go, and go there.
I flipped myself out of bed, and went to re-read Helena’s note. She needed space, and time to think. She’d gone to a hotel, and left the number. I could call her tomorrow, she said, but only if I was ready to pull myself together. I was tempted to call straight away. First, though, I had to pull myself together.
I let the suit drop off me, leaving it crumpled on the floor. Then I stood in the bathtub, and showered myself clean in water so hot I had to keep moving and scrubbing. Recently, I’d scarcely been in one piece. If it went on like this I was going to break apart, and I couldn’t accept that this disintegration was what it meant to be ageing and alive, until I reached a hundred. My weakness and inconsistency was a cause for shame, my life an embarrassing series of postures.
“I am. I am a weak and selfish man.’
No more breakdowns: I had to take a chance on being myself. I had to stand on my own two feet. Otherwise I could see it stretching out indefinitely, not knowing what I thought, or who I loved, or what was worth protecting. The time had come to stop skimming along the surface of things. I was what I was, and that was all, and all there was.
I turned off the shower, and stepped out of the tub. I didn’t bother to dry myself, or dress. I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of sherry, but I didn’t drink it, because that wasn’t the kind of person I was. I took it into the bathroom, left it on the shelf at the back of the sink. I fetched a white candle left over from the Basilica, and my father’s unsafe safety-razor. Then I sat for a quiet moment with Jung’s knee, cross-legged on the damp floor of the flickering and candlelit bathroom.
The psychiatric ethic, its objective as popularised by Jung and others, had never sounded overly demanding. Admit to yourself what you’re like and what you want. Go on, sit at Papa Jung’s knee and admit it.
– I’m like you, Carl. I’m just like you are. You were.
– And vot are you vonting?
– The same as you wanted.
The Old Wise Man of eighty-five, Grand Master of Freemasons, Fellow of the Royal Society, with his own boathouse and choice of mistresses and nineteen galloping grandchildren.
No, that was no good. Jung wasn’t interceding, he was interfering. Inside my head, there was always someone waiting, a kind of conspiracy in which a collusion of Masonic Knights Templar had planted a psychic trail of mandala, bones, something phenomenal. I was prepared to lose all this relativity and race memory in favour of an existential self. That would be fine. That’s what I want, and not all that other stuff. I just want to be me.
I went to the kitchen for a roll of clingfilm, and, threatening Jung’s knee with that hard plastic baton, I gave him one last chance. Despite all the guff and madness, Jung had still been capable of the purest insights. Analysing displaced persons from the Western Front, he noted that the closer people were to the really big issues the calmer they became. He also watched and waited for the deranged to cheat at Patience, a reliable sign of recovery. And despite the collective unconscious, despite the land of the dead, he encouraged the one whole man.
I saw, in the final analysis, that I’d been in fragments, in bits. I was fighting many concurrent battles, and parts of myself were scattered over a broad field, each one wrestling with a different impulse or instinct, a different idea of who I was. It sometimes led me to act in ways that were fundamentally out of character, like Carl Gustav Jung, with his cyclothymic personality in manic-depressive psychosis.
Only it was simpler than that. I was acting like an arsehole because Dad was dead and Helena needed a decision. That’s right, I was in denial. And most probably alienated from my inner self.
I scratched at the silver roll of clingfilm, eventually snagging the edge. I unrolled yards of it and bandaged Jung’s knee over and over, in layer after plastic layer, so many times that the ball with Jung at its centre began to look like ice. Which I put in a plastic box.
Back in the bathroom, by the light of the candle, I unscrewed the razor and took out the blade. I dipped the blade in the sherry, and while I held it there, I at last looked in the mirror. I hadn’t changed, and my face was asking the same old questions. What do you think you’re doing? Who do you think you are? How many years do you think you have?
No more sweeping aside and starting from scratch. I could not change between one personality and another at will, and I had to tackle this vac
illation head on. Put simply, I’d had enough of not being me, and was about to opt out of the crush of the collective unconscious. As I took the razor-blade from the sherry and shook it dry, Jung’s influence was already fading. Across my history, in his bold Gothic hand: Erlassen. Discharged.
I was going to perform an individual act, on my own body, without mythical dimensions. It was all my own idea, mine, the brainchild of Jay James Mason Minor, who wasn’t suggestible to variant personalities and pieces of old bone. He had his own life and his own memories, and his own deep desires. He had his own body, and couldn’t be conquered so easily.
I didn’t think.
Jay Mason Minor’s Thigh
‘I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is.’
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
OW. OW OW. Ow.
It hurt. It hurt a lot. I hadn’t been expecting it to hurt so much.
By the next morning, with the help of only three white butterfly stitches, the wound had stopped bleeding. I squinted at the brown blood on my pillow, the duvet up to my chin as I listened to the building’s early-morning noises, including salsa, doorbells, and somewhere below a stop–start screaming-fit. It hurt, and I probably deserved that. But I was also very pleased with myself.
James Mason Minor, Jay. There is something different about you. Even if you’re not sure exactly what it is.
I swung myself out of bed, wincing a little as I went to make tea. I reached for my ear, and then thought better of it, and went instead to check in the mirror. It didn’t look too bad, almost unnoticeable, and the rest of my face was still mine, the same face that reflected every single day, the one which was always there and therefore the least interesting of faces, hardly worth describing.
I thank thee Lord that I am not as other men are.
I thought back to the last time I’d felt genuinely myself. Childhood didn’t really count, but after that there must have been anchors, true memories always with me of an unchangeable person fixed and knowable as Jay Mason Minor.
I remembered thinking, all by myself, that I’d never die. But everyone thinks that.
Before Mum left, I’d wanted to be everyone. After, I didn’t want to think about it. I escaped to University, and making the right noises I took advantage of the new modular system to study for a degree in Plantagenet Britain with History of Science with Genealogy with Film Studies and Analytical Psychology. I specialised in a little learning as a dangerous thing, and drifted like Moses blissful and ignorant in his basket, occasionally bumping the banks of the river. Mum had always predicted something grander, Moses with outstretched arms high and peerless on the mountain. She wrote to me often. From her tanned exile in Spain, gradually moving south, she urged me to aim for something more than my father, in all the obvious categories: women, action, money. Conflict, obstacle, resolution.
I tried my best for her, but I had girlfriends who wouldn’t co-operate. They were merciless opponents, like Norse gods, finding no good in any of my actions. It was as if they were always waiting for me to do something wrong, which they then put aside for later, not in a closet but a scabbard.
When they left me, I was heartbroken. And when my timing was out, and I was the one who did the leaving, then I was also heartbroken.
Until then, I’d never been afraid of growing older, assuming there lay in store for me some particular greatness. But at twenty-five, running out of girlfriends and modules, I went back home. For half of every week I helped in the diocese, saving redundant churches. We climbed ladders, and painted and plastered and grouted, but without much success. The churches turned out to be redundant.
Mum wrote furious letters, asking me what the hell I thought I was playing at. I wrote back to say that, deserted by the gods, I was mostly playing at Patience, which wasn’t a great game to play, deserted by the gods. She said come over, I said I was busy, and on sunny days just had to stay inside and watch the TV news. I was discovering something insubstantial in just being me, and, without the bracing example of others, I sank back into the swamp, or at least stayed in bed, with no idea of what I was actually for. All the bones dissolved from my body. I collapsed, in the tradition of centuries of over-thoughtful Anglicans, into human blancmange. I had no core. No pips. I had no nuts, no cojones. No backbone. I read many novels with indomitable heroes, and then went back to bed.
Was that me? Was that all I was? One day, while Dad was out in the parish helping the helpless, I opened a bottle of Christmas sherry, drank too much of it, and ended up in his wardrobe. I took out one of his vicar outfits, his costumes, and held the hanger appraisingly under my chin. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, listening with compassion to direct experience of suffering, jumping my eyebrows at the offer, yes rather, of just the one more delicate triangle of egg-and-cress sandwich.
– Mmmm, quite delicious, thank you so much.
It was a simple black cassock, in polyester. I pulled it over my head, and found a mirror. It fitted me better than I’d have guessed, but my teeth were too good to be convincing. A few years of obligatory cake-bakes would soon see them off, and I’d looked a lot worse, especially at solstice. As I preened myself in Dad’s mirror, I made drunken self-pity into a kind of compassion. I needed to look after number one, and, along with the uniform, church perks included rent-free accommodation and a licence to preach. Not forgetting the bonus superpower, granted directly by the Almighty, of absolving my fellow pagans and ex-girlfriends from sin.
It felt like a vocation: I had no idea what I wanted, in itself a strong qualification for the Anglican Church. We were both in decline, obvious to everyone, and joining the losing side was a true English instinct. We were a perfect match.
Dad was appalled. ‘Don’t do this to me.’
‘I thought you’d be glad.’
‘Don’t you understand anything?’
Resigned, philosophical, practising my vocation, I said: ‘I am the sheep of the family.’
Dad had expected more intelligence, especially after my exhaustive education. Instead, his own son was about to repeat the family mistake, doing what his dad did, somehow failing to see that a career in the Church was a life lost, like a death in battle: admirable, maybe, but also slightly dim, outdated, and a calamity which happened only to other people.
‘Your mother isn’t going to like this one little bit.’
‘I’m not getting any younger,’ I said. ‘I need a career. And I know how this one works.’
‘You don’t even believe in God.’
I shrugged. ‘I might change for the better.’
My brother Tom thought me inspired. I could pick my spot. In all its history, the Church intake had never been of such hopelessly low quality. Now was therefore a better time than ever to climb straight to the top, pushing the good and timid aside on the ascent to an enviable bishop’s palace, and a forgiving red bench in the House of Lords. With a cute strategy and a little luck, I could dodge the provincial day-centres and the disabled children, starting as pastor to an exquisite private school, then chaplain to the England cricket team, travelling in all humility during the English winter to the balconies of the MCG.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Mum said, in a special and very rare telephone call. ‘You just can’t. I’d never speak to you again.’
‘She’s right, you know,’ Dad added. ‘It’s absurd. You can’t ape a life in Christ. And you can’t just walk in. That’s not how it works.’
I had a fairly good idea of how it worked. I padded my letter of application with weakness: I was indecisive and didn’t know what I wanted, not even convinced by my own sense of vocation. It was exactly what they wanted to hear. I suggested I might incorrectly have heard the call, compensating for my mother’s sudden absence. In any case, even if I’d misheard, theology college would give me an opportunity to reflect, among like-
minded seekers, on just who I was, and who I wanted to be.
At interview, they asked me what I was really looking for. I was twenty-seven years old, and finally proving that I was my own man by opposing everyone’s wishes.
I said: the same as everyone’s really looking for.
‘Which is what?’
‘I don’t really know.’
I was offered a place for one year, in the first instance, at a theology college in a Victorian mansion which had once been the County Lunatic Asylum. It was isolated, at the top of a hill, and as a compulsory part of the curriculum it had impressive views of the weather, breaking and changing over the three-way channels of a motorway. The windows were many but small, hardly wide enough to squeeze through on a black February day. It was also an amazing place for magpies, and, in magpies, sorrow statistically outdid joy by about two to one.
On the day I arrived, the first thing I saw was a single magpie, strutting across the lawn towards me. I saluted. I spat. And briefly made good the difference.
There was no immediate evidence of a shortage in recruits to the English Church. On the paths between wings of the building, under clouds which often looked like rain, there was a bustle and hum about the shared thrill of operating at the limits of socially acceptable behaviour. The college attracted the stubborn, and the lonely, the clinically nostalgic, and rebels seduced by the challenging discovery that wanting to be good felt rebellious. Everyone was ex-something, ex-airline pilots and ex-fast-food operatives, ex-husbands and wives. I was an ex-pagan, an ex-long-term student, and an ex-church-renovator, and I felt at home among all these ex men and women, SAS officers and divorced Montessori teachers who in pursuit of a primitive self had recently slept every night for a month in a coffin. In the middle of a copsey roundabout. Somewhere off the M6.
Dry Bones Page 16