I buck and twist beneath him, trying to jerk him out. He apes my every movement, ramming in still deeper, following where I lead, as if we’re locked together in some new and violent dance. He can scratch as well as bite and thrust, and all at the same time. But so can I – and harder. All I need are images to fuel me. I’m seeing him again in John-Paul’s room, hurling insults, breaking up my session, breaking up my life. Okay, Seton, so you want to kill John-Paul, but I love the man, I need him, so I’m going to have to stop you – stop you killing, stop you bloody fucking me.
I use every last muscle in my body, call up every scrap and shred of strength, pummelling him, and threshing, lashing with my fists. He’s furious himself now, furious with me for being in the tower when he wanted John-Paul on his own and to himself. Our two rages meet and kindle; our two breaths rasping, searing; our two rhythms syncopated. My hair is trapped beneath his arm. He’s pulling it, and hurting – hurting everywhere, though I hardly feel the pain now. I’m too involved, too angry; taunting him with insults, the very ones he shouted at John-Paul. Once he leaves my mouth free and is snicking at my neck, I yell them out aloud. ‘You stupid lying bastard! I’ll …’
He did lie, didn’t he? Called himself a doctor, pretended he was trained, charged me all that money for his expertise, his skills. And then pretending he’s so busy when he’s really painting pictures – no, not even painting, smearing shit around. I slump back for a moment as I try to take it in John-Paul a fraud, a nothing. The hurt feels like a madness. All those endless minutes that I counted every day, totting up to pain and disillusion; all that infinite circling round a crumbling cardboard tower. I stare up at the porthole, see nothing but dull grey; no grass, no sky, no water, just a dead and blinded window. The lamp is hissing still, sounds weary, disillusioned. Nervous shadows fidget. I’m lying in a shadow, feel dark and half-extinguished.
Seton takes advantage of the pause, heaves me off the bunk and to my knees, rams in again the back way. I don’t care. I’ve got more scope to move now, and I’m no longer slumped and passive, but mad with rage, rage against John-Paul, his cowardice, his treachery, his greed, his greasy lies. The cabin floor is wooden – old and splintered – tears my knees and hands. Seton’s hurting, really hacking into me, yet we’re bonded now, at last. His anger’s changed, like mine, is directed at John-Paul, and not at me. We turn on him together – he’s there in person, we brought him in the van – drag him to the floor.
‘I know,’ I shout. ‘I understand. Of course you had to kill John-Paul. We’ll kill him now, together. We’ll …’
My shouting drives him wild. I can feel him gathering speed, his nails digging in my flesh as he grips my waist to steady him, slams in from behind.
‘Don’t come!’ I shout. ‘Don’t come yet.’ Too late – he’s coming – a scorching maddened brutal come, as if he’s pumping me with bullets, not with sperm. I pull away before he’s even finished, feel him leaking out. He doesn’t say a word, though his breathing’s very rackety, shuddering and dangerous, as if something’s loose or broken in his chest. He falls back on the bunk, shuts his eyes as if to snuff me out. I understand. Bodies aren’t too pretty after sex. Mine is marked and reddened, filmed with sweat, knees grazed and bruised, top lip split and bloody. He still has all his clothes on, which saves him, in a way – just his grubby jeans unzipped. I watch his prick deflate. It looks wizened now and shrivelled, as if it’s grown old in just a minute, can no longer stand up on its own, needs help, needs sympathy. I lean across and touch it, pity in my fingertips. Seton twitches irritably. ‘Don’t!’ he snaps, eyes shut still.
I sag back on the floor, watch his semen oozing down my thigh. It seems too thin, too pallid, too meagre altogether for our murderous double rage. Shouldn’t it be scarlet, not that wan and sickly white; Niagara, not a dribble? I scoop it up, suck it from my fingers. It tastes slimy, slightly salty, like the marsh might taste, outside. Seton hasn’t moved. I’m glad he isn’t stroking me, or asking ‘Did you come?’
I don’t need to come. I’m sated.
Chapter Nine
‘But you always said your mother was so tidy. “Neat to a fault” was the phrase you used, I think.’
‘Yes, she is, of course she is.’ Bryan felt a rush of shame. How could neatness be a fault, especially in a world where there was no order, regularity? John-Paul had simply failed to understand. He wasn’t talking about chaos in his house or cupboard drawers, disorder in his Mother’s fridge or larder, but chaos in the sub-atomic world. The problem was he didn’t have the words for it. The books had made it hard enough, especially the huge new one he’d been working through all week, but there was still no avoiding its main theme: the universe was essentially chaotic, at least on the atomic level, and the total amount of chaos was going up and up. According to the author (and the second law of thermodynamics, which he remembered only vaguely from his schooldays), chaos was far easier to achieve than order and therefore far more likely. In fact, chaos was the norm. Mountains eroded, stars burnt out, buildings crumbled, people grew old, clocks ran down, the universe itself ran down.
Bryan closed his eyes a moment, listened to John-Paul’s clocks. He could hear their ticking growing weaker, weaker; feel the tall and solid tower slowly tottering. He’d always loved the tower, had looked up its history in the library (a snug and cosy refuge until he’d found the science section) – amazed to find it dated from 1280, and had lost its nave and chancel only in the 1940 Blitz. The site had remained a ruin until the later 1960s, white with pigeon droppings, lush with tangled weeds. Then the bulldozers moved in, cleared the rubble for a block of monster office blocks. The tower was spared as an ancient monument, had been declared a listed building, its one remaining gravestone girdled with a preservation order. Ten years later, it had been legally deconsecrated, leased for secular use by the London Diocesan Fund, but still sacrosanct in one way, since there were extremely strict conditions about who could or couldn’t lease it and exactly what they could or couldn’t do there.
Sacrosanct! Bryan clenched his hands, shifted on the couch. What use were preservation orders when everything was doomed? You couldn’t slap one on the universe, or tack one to each atom. As far as he could gather, atoms weren’t quite there at all, weren’t things with an identity which you could pin down or define. In fact, the author had concluded that matter was in a suspended state of almost-schizophrenia and suffering from an identity crisis. Which-called for a psychiatrist – except how could one be found, when even John-Paul, with all his experience and training, hadn’t seemed to grasp the point at all?
Bryan glanced up at the window. The morning light looked dirty and half-hearted. It would soon be dark at seven in the morning, clammy-cold as well. If he could only stop his therapy, he could stay in bed a whole hour longer three days every week, have time to chew his breakfast. (He could feel a piece of toast still whole, one sharp corner digging in his ribs.) How could he stop it, though? John-Paul had said he needed at least five or six more years (yes, on top of the first four), and now he’d discovered all these horrors in the subatomic world, it might well take even longer.
‘I’m not talking about my Mother,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m talking about the cosmos.’ He broke off instantly as he heard the faintest rustle from behind him – John-Paul lighting up. He hated the way they had to be positioned, so that John-Paul could see him, but not vice versa. It roused such painful memories. For many of his boyhood years his Mother had sat behind him, knitting coloured squares while he struggled with his homework. It had made him very tense, sapped his concentration as he’d listened to her breathing – the sighs or sudden in-breaths which meant she was displeased. She could see right through his back, knew when he was daydreaming or doodling in the margins. The knitted squares were something of a comfort, though – even if a mystery. She never joined them up to make scarves or shawls or blankets, just added to the ever-growing pile. Yet, nonetheless, they proved important in his life, endowed him with a sen
se of order, very early on: horizontals tallying with verticals, all angles ninety degrees. He wished John-Paul would knit. It might afford him some distraction, dilute his total concentration on his patient’s feeble words.
‘But don’t you see, Bryan, you have allowed your mother to become so all-embracing, so central in your life and in your psyche, that she now appears to constitute your world? So in talking about the cosmos, as you put it, you are, I think, talking about your mother, though you may feel the need to deny it.’
Bryan said nothing. He didn’t like to contradict a doctor. It sounded rude, ungrateful, and anyway, it would only be called ‘denial’. The room seemed cold, unwelcoming, the couch hard beneath his back. He wished they could sit face to face, like friends. He hadn’t any friends – well, a few acquaintances at work, and the woman in the paper-shop who always asked him how he was, but no one close or special. John-Paul was special, in a way, but so remote, so shadowy. He didn’t even know his age. He was bad at people’s ages. Both John-Paul and his Mother seemed old like rocks were old, or old like old cathedrals.
The silence felt unkind, yet he couldn’t seem to fill it, despite the fact it cost so much – vintage-champagne-minutes simply pouring down the drain. Free association might sound fine in theory, but in practice it was difficult – nerve-racking, embarrassing, and probably very dangerous. He’d heard it called a sort of mental x-ray, and x-rays showed up frightening things like tumours, fractures, clots. Was his own mind cancerous, fractured or obstructed, ulcerated, haemorrhaging? And why did it remain a stubborn blank – even now, when his doctor radiologist was impatient for a picture, waiting for a shadow on the screen?
A real x-ray would be infinitely preferable. At least he would be given his instructions, clear and firm instructions, like swallowing his barium-meal in a series of swift gulps, or holding his breath and counting up to ten. Whereas therapy was vague and quite amorphous, left him always muddled and confused, longing for more structure in the sessions, some goal or sense of purpose, some objective he could grasp, a methodical instruction-sheet setting out the guidelines. Even after four long years, he had a strange uneasy feeling that he’d somehow missed the point and been doing things all wrong, wasted all those costly baffling sessions. He didn’t even understand the jargon – terms like ‘splitting’, ‘super-ego’, or ‘ca-thexis’, which remained nebulous but menacing, like the many mysterious concepts in his physics and astronomy books; a source of endless tribulation, yet impossible to pinpoint or define. Was it any wonder he lay awake most nights, when super-egos assaulted his frail psyche, and supernovae threatened further off?
He stared up at the ceiling, feeling quite demoralised, but still trying to find some topic he could broach. The ceiling offered nothing, so he examined all the in-trays in his head, all those pigeonholes and filing cabinets, which he always did his frantic best to organise and order, so that his anxieties were kept separate from his fears, his depressions from his phobias. Though even that was tricky. Most fears were depressing, so he often spent an hour or two nervously debating which section they should go in, or how large they had to loom before he refiled them under ‘Panic’. And some items fitted every slot – chaos, for example, which induced panic, fear, depression and anxiety.
‘Chaology,’ he murmured, trying out the word aloud, which he’d never dared before.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It’s a new word in the dictionary. I looked it up last week. It means the science of chaos. You can study chaos now, you see, like people study biology, or zoology, or all the other “ologies”. Which proves it’s there – and growing.’
‘Bryan, it seems to me quite obvious that it’s your inner world which is experiencing the chaos. We all tend to fear chaos when our own personal lives are threatened, so it may well be that since you’ve yielded all control to your mother, you feel you’ve returned to the powerless state of a child. I mean, it’s surely not insignificant that you brought your toy snake with you today – a familiar object from your childhood, which once gave you comfort and security.’
Bryan glanced down at his side, still astonished by the fact that the snake was lying on the couch with him, its green head resting dumbly on the pillow, its red felt tongue lolling like a drunk’s. However had it got here? He remembered sorting through his briefcase just last night, putting in his report on departmental stock control, his pakamac, his pilchard sandwiches, but not a green and yellow knitted snake. It had been knitted by his Auntie Anne, his mother’s younger sister, when he was only four; had shared his life (and bedroom) ever since. It was now limp and rather lumpy, its stuffing semi-rotted from his constant childhood tears, one black button eye lost, its skin distinctly grubby. But he had to admit he was very much attached to it, couldn’t simply chuck it out, or give it to a jumble sale. And anyway, he felt he owed it something, a refuge in its twilight years, when it had done so much for him when he was small. Even now, its one dim eye was fixed on him, imploring; its tail curled in towards itself, as if scared it might be docked. Yet if anyone at BRB should see it … He tensed in sudden horror. There was no privacy at work, not even in a briefcase, not even in a locker. He’d become an instant laughing stock – sniggers in the office, titters in the gents.
‘John-Paul,’ he stuttered out, almost gagging on the name, yet using it deliberately to stress the importance of his request. ‘I … I wonder if I could leave it here, the snake? Oh, only for the day. I don’t want to be a nuisance. I could pick it up this evening, if it wouldn’t inconvenience you. It’s just that …’ The sentence petered out. How could he pick it up, when Friday was his class night? How could he brave the class at all, face Mary, face his Father? One hand groped blindly out, reaching for his snake, the comfort of its presence and its shape. He longed to pull the blankets over him, as he had done as a child, sob into its soft and yielding body.
He heard John-Paul shift his chair a fraction, do something with an ashtray. ‘So you wish to leave your phallus with me?’
Bryan felt a blush suffusing his whole body, like a painter with a roller slapping scarlet on a wall. He hated that word ‘phallus’ which John-Paul would keep using and which made him feel inferior since he was sure he didn’t have one. It sounded too important and definitely too large. He had something different – something English, insubstantial.
‘Snakes have always been a symbol of sexuality, in many different cultures – the upsurging life-force which can move with neither wings nor legs. I find it very interesting, and perhaps significant, that your snake is not only multi-coloured, but knitted in a complicated stitch. Which makes me feel your genitality is complex, in some way – and probably confused. You appear to be drawing my attention to your phallus at this moment – in fact, wanting to “leave it here”, which suggests you can’t handle it yourself. Does your snake have any name, I wonder? What did you call it as a child?’
Bryan’s blush had reached his ankles, now flooded down his feet. ‘Anne.’
‘Anne?’
Bryan nodded. He’d never been imaginative. Anne, to please his aunt.
‘So you feel your snake is female?’
‘No – well, yes. I mean …’ He hadn’t really thought about its gender. Everything was female in his home. It had seemed safer that way, natural.
‘In designating your phallus as female, you’re obviously seeking to deny your masculinity.’
‘I haven’t got a phallus,’ Bryan said irritably, his eyes beginning to water as a new cloud of cigarette smoke drifted over his head. ‘I’ve got a …’ Abruptly, he broke off, couldn’t get the word out. There wasn’t any word for the footling thing he kept between his legs. His Mother had studiously avoided all the words, even childish ones like ‘willie’; had always made him feel he shouldn’t have that … that carbuncle, excrescence, cluttering up his underpants, when it was clearly very germy, probably highly dangerous, and certainly unnecessary. He’d never liked to touch it, even when relieving himself, felt he needed su
gar-tongs as he stood above the toilet bowl, or perhaps extra-long chopsticks, specially sterilised.
‘So now you wish to castrate yourself?’ John-Paul exhaled more smoke. ‘Isn’t this the central issue? All your talk this week about sub-atomic particles is avoidance pure and simple.’
‘It’s not.’ Bryan wiped his eyes. ‘It’s real. I mean, it isn’t real. That’s the point, the one I keep trying to explain. Nothing’s real, not even basic matter.’
‘Yes, I think I understand. You feel a sense of unreality located in your body, and especially in your phallus, because you doubt your own masculine identity. This may spring from basic guilt, of course, which brings us back to your snake. Serpents have always been a symbol of temptation. I expect you read your Bible as a child – the story of the Fall, in Genesis. The snake created chaos in the world, shattered the serenity of Eden, as your guilt about your phallus is causing chaos in your own world, or at least a fear of chaos. And even in the Babylonian creation myths, which Genesis derives from, there’s a sea-monster called Tiamat, who …’
Bryan had lost the thread. John-Paul was far too clever for him. He’d never even heard of the Babylonian creation myths, yet John-Paul just flung them in as if they were as common as Red Riding Hood. No, he mustn’t think of wolves. He’d been a lustful wolf himself as far as Mary was concerned, had spent thirty-seven seconds gazing at her breasts – well, only through her blouse of course, but he’d imagined them without the blouse, or brassiere; seen himself alone with her while she undressed after the class – a hundred classes, actually, two hundred swelling breasts. John-Paul was right – he did feel sexual guilt, though he’d never laid a finger on her, not even in his fantasies, just gazed and gazed, and longed.
Fifty-Minute Hour Page 12