The Society of Others

by William Nicholson

  “I heard what you said to that woman,” he informs me. “The one with the kids.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  No good deed goes unpunished.

  “That was good. What you said.”

  He reaches into his bag and pulls out a notebook while driving over seventy in a high-sided vehicle on a blustery day.

  “Wrote it down.”

  He tosses me the book. There it is, the most recent entry, written in pencil, in capital letters.

  USE YOUR POWER GENTLY.

  Right above it, also in capitals, he’s written:

  GODS ARE MORTAL, HUMANS IMMORTAL,

  LIVING THEIR LIFE, DYING THEIR DEATH. HERACLITUS.

  I ask him what that’s supposed to mean, and he says he thinks it means nothing very much but at least it makes you think. I’m inclined to be amazed. I never knew ancient Greek philosophers talked like Bob Dylan. I wouldn’t mind thinking about it for a while, only Marker wants to talk. He knows more Heraclitus.

  “You can never step twice into the same river. What do you say to that?”

  “I don’t have a problem with that.”

  “It’s bollocks. If I step twice into a river, and I’ve not gone anywhere else, then it’s the same fucking river, isn’t it? It’s not a different fucking river. It’s not a bowl of porridge, either. Don’t make me laugh.”

  Next Marker tells me how Socrates went wrong.

  “Socrates has this big idea that if you really know what’s the right thing to do, you’ll do it. You only do wrong things out of ignorance, because everyone wants to lead a good life and be happy. What do you say to that?”

  “Well,” I say, growing more cautious. “I suppose everyone wants to be happy.”

  “What about the fuckers who are plain evil? Come down the Rainbow at the bottom of our road and I’ll introduce you to a whole roomful of people who get their jollies by being evil. It’s their idea of a good time. Stroll on, Socrates.”

  “Right.”

  “He killed himself, you know? Drank poison. ‘The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness, for that runs faster than death.’ So he takes the poison. Now if I’d been there, I’d have said, Avoid unrighteousness, but avoid death too. Don’t give me this either-or shit. Stay alive. Make yourself useful.”

  After this Marker launches into an attack on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the general will.

  “You want a short laugh on a wet Sunday? Try Rousseau’s social contract. The deal here is we give up our freedom so we can be part of the general will. So you ask, what the fuck is the general will? Okay. Rousseau says you find out by taking a vote. So you say, what about the villains and half-brains and comedians who would vote for their own dick if it was standing? No, not them, says Rousseau. Every voter must be educated and fully informed. No two voters must talk about the issues before voting. Each citizen must hold to his own thoughts. So where does Rousseau live? The real world, or fairyland? You tell me.”

  I guess fairyland.

  “It’s not South Croydon, and that’s for free. But guess who bets the ranch on Rousseau? Robespierre! Monsieur Terror himself! The God of Reason tells him he can guillotine every poor sod who disagrees with him. The general will, c’est moi!”

  By the time we reach the Channel Tunnel Marker has demolished Aristotle’s theory of happiness, Aquinas’s proofs of the existence of God, Kant’s categorical imperative, Marx’s labour theory of value, and all of Wittgenstein.

  “Wittgenstein went to school with Adolf Hitler. Did you know that? The Realschule, in Linz. A whole lot too fucking real for me.”

  I tell him how I’m struck by the fact that he, a self-educated truck driver, is so much smarter than all the great thinkers of history. He says it surprised him too at first, but he’d come to the conclusion they couldn’t see the wood for the trees.

  “All they do all day is read each other’s books. They should get out more.”

  He does allow that some of them get it right sometimes. He has a grudging respect for Schopenhauer.

  “Try this for size. ‘The gratification of desire is like alms thrown to a beggar. It keeps him alive today, so that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.’ Not a barrel of laughs, but true enough as far as it goes.”

  Again I’m amazed. I thought I was the only person who’d had that idea.

  We have to wait to drive the truck onto the shuttle train that will take us through the Channel Tunnel. Marker stops telling me about the failures of Western philosophy and starts looking round like he’s expecting someone to show up. So I look round too and soon wish I hadn’t. The shuttle terminal is designed to overwhelm the human spirit and cause it to lie down and weep. Everything is enormous and made of either steel or concrete, and everything is fenced in behind serious prison-style fences. Even the train onto which we load the truck is built like a cage.

  There’s no driving to do once we’re on the shuttle, so Marker opens his fridge and brings out food and drink. The food is cold pork pies, doughnuts and apples. The drink is bottled water.

  “Help yourself. Or did you bring something with you, as if I don’t know.”

  I have no supply of food. My plan is to live off the land. I don’t mean nuts and berries, I mean burger bars and pastry shops. I have cash.

  “You’re not what they call proactive, are you?” says Marker.

  He has a jar of extremely hot mustard to go with the cold pork pies. The combination is very successful. The doughnuts have been chilled in the fridge, which is another new experience for me. The train starts to move so quietly at first I don’t notice it. It slides quietly into the tunnel. I don’t like the feeling. I’m not claustrophobic, it’s just that I like to see out.

  “What’s in the truck?” I ask.

  “Well, fuck my uncle with a chunky monkey! Was that a question?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “And there I was beginning to doubt you were gifted with the powers of external perception.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s say you’re not exactly curious by nature, and I am.” I start to feel irritated.

  “Actually you’re not all that curious. You just tell me things. You don’t ask me things.”

  “Touched a nerve, have I?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  As it happens I do get quite quickly pissed off when people tell me I’m passive. Like, how do they know? They’re not inside me. Just because I’m not jumping up and down they assume nothing’s happening. What I call passive is following the herd and being a sheep. Sheep don’t choose to be alone in their room. Sheep don’t hitch a ride to nowhere. Enough with passive. I go my own way.

  It’s only later I realise Marker never answered my question.

  FOUR

  The Complete Home Removal Service carries me across northern France or Belgium or Germany. You can’t tell any more. There aren’t any borders and everyone drives the same cars. Then darkness falls and all I can see are the headlights of approaching vehicles and without meaning to I fall asleep.

  When I wake the truck isn’t moving and Marker isn’t there. Then I hear this loud snore from behind the blue check curtains and I realise he’s on the bunk, asleep. I look out of the window. We’re parked in a service station somewhere in Europe.

  I climb down from the cab to stretch my legs and walk across to the main building, in search of toilets. It feels like it’s the middle of the night. The windows of the restaurant are brightly lit so I can see inside. There aren’t many people about.

  The toilet has an automatic flush that knows when I’ve finished. To be precise it knows when I walk away from the urinal. If I wanted I could stop peeing in the middle, walk away, wait for it to flush, walk right back, and go on peeing. It would never know. But I don’t. Instead, I go to the restaurant and get myself a cup of coffee and a roll. I pay with English money and get change in euros, which I don’t understand. You could charge me anyth
ing and I’d just hand over the money.

  The coffee is quite good. It actually has a taste. I can feel my body coming back to life. There’s a rack of postcards near me, and I toy with the idea of sending Cat a postcard with a view of Heidelberg and a message on the back saying Greetings from Nepal, but I don’t. The other people bent over their cups of coffee all look like truck drivers to me. I think about Marker and wonder where he’s going and again I get that zing of excitement that I don’t know.

  That sets me guessing about Marker. Where does he live? How come he doesn’t have a second driver in the cab with him? You don’t usually see removal vans with only one man in the cab. One man can’t lift all those sofas and washing machines that have to be moved in a complete home removal service. And what has he got in the back of the truck?

  Since he’s not here for me to ask, I make up a life for him. He lives in South Croydon, in a three-bedroomed house built ten years ago as part of a development called Rainbow Village. The front gardens all join up. He has a wife who works as a receptionist at a beauty salon, and two children who stopped listening to him when they started primary school. He has a shed in the back garden where he keeps his books on philosophy and lives a parallel life in which he duels with the great minds of the past and is victorious.

  As I walk back to the truck, I see a brief movement behind it. There’s someone walking away, head down, hands in pockets. He’s not heading towards the restaurant, he’s going down the lines of parked vehicles. Then I lose him in the darkness.

  Marker is out of bed.

  “Thought I’d lost you,” he says.

  “There was someone hanging round your cab.”

  He looks up sharply.

  “What sort of someone?”

  “I couldn’t see. A man.”

  I can tell this bugs him, but he says nothing more. He pulls out a wash-bag and goes off to the toilets to shave. I look round the cab. At the foot of the bunk there’s his bag, where he keeps his notebook. I open the bag to take another look at the notebook, but the first thing I see is his passport. Yesterday when he showed his passport he took it out of a wallet in his coat pocket. And the name on this passport is not Arnie Marker, but Armin Markus.

  We drive on. He’s not talking philosophy any more.

  “When will we get there?”

  “We’ll be at the border by lunchtime.”

  Not quite what I asked.

  “You have any plans?” he says at last. “For after we get there?”

  “Not really,” I say. “Nothing I can’t change.”

  He nods. He thinks I’m an aimless drifter. That’s not a problem with me.

  “You want to do me a favour?”

  “If I can.”

  “In the fridge, in the little ice-making compartment, there’s an envelope. You could take it out and put it in your coat pocket until we’re the other side of the border.”

  This does not sound so cool. I want to help but I don’t want to end up in some Eastern European jail.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Nothing of any importance. But these border guards, they can be very stupid.”

  “Will they search us?”

  “They might.”

  “So they’ll search me too.”

  “You’re not the driver. They won’t bother with you.”

  “What if they do? They’ll find it.”

  “Then they find it.” I’m rattling him. “It’s not a big deal, okay?”

  “So why hide it from them?”

  “Christ on a bike! Do you want to do me a fucking favour or don’t you?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Actually I don’t want to do the fucking favour but I can’t see how to get out of it. He’s given me this giant ride and shared his food with me and told me his philosophical thoughts and somehow it just feels like I owe him. Plus he’s right here sitting beside me and saying no takes more effort of the will than saying yes.

  I believe this is how it goes more times than people admit. The theory is we make moral decisions according to what we believe, or what’s in our best interests. Like fun. Most times we go for whatever will cause the least grief to the other party. I once knew this girl, I had a thing with her which lasted all of three days, and afterwards she went round saying she’d never been that bothered about me in the first place. So I ran into her somewhere and asked her straight out, if that was true, how come she’d done it with me the night we met? She said, “Because I couldn’t think of a reason not to.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Yes. I’ll do it.”

  After that he calms down. I look out of the window. We’re somewhere where they believe in window-baskets like it’s their religion. Or maybe it’s the law. Maybe they have teams of enforcers going from house to house, making sure the petunias have been potted out.

  So I’m in the truck with a guy who’s carrying a false passport and an illegal envelope and this whole thing could go very not funny for me if I’m not careful. On the other hand, what does it mean in this context to be careful? What am I to guard against? I lack information. So really I might as well go with the flow. My protection is my ignorance, which will carry the ring of truth, being true.

  A few miles before we reach the border Marker tells me to take the envelope out of the fridge. It’s right at the back of the ice-making compartment, and folded over and frozen in.

  “I can’t get it out.”

  “You really give up fast, don’t you, son?”

  I hate being called son. He’s not my father. And anyway, my father never calls me son. Still I keep on scrabbling at the frost until my fingertips are numb and I get it out at last. A deep-frozen folded-up brown envelope. It’s not so fat or anything, so I don’t see how it can be drugs, which is a relief.

  “You have some kind of inner pocket?”

  I put it in the breast pocket of my coat. That’s as inner as my pockets get.

  The border is a serious border, not one of these blink-and-you-miss-it Eurozone borders with a sign saying Please drive carefully while passing through Belgium. This one is a retro–Cold War frontier complete with razor wire, guard towers, goons with guns, and striped poles that go up and down. We get into line for the passport check and I can feel that Marker is tensing up. I start to wonder what country we’re about to enter, but then remember I’ve decided not to ask. Without realising I’m doing it I let my eyes scan a big notice which is in a language that looks like German but isn’t. Underneath is an English translation. I read as far as the part that tells me please on alighting at my destination to register the self with the authorities. I kind of like the picture this creates in my mind. Maybe once I register, the authorities issue the self with a licence that allows me to operate it within designated limits, like on public roads and in places of entertainment.

  The line of vehicles moves faster than I’d expected. Most cars get waved on past by the border police. Our truck is pulled out of the line for a more thorough search. Of course.

  “Everything’s going to be cool,” says Marker, sounding like he’s in the process of soiling his underwear.

  They check our passports without a word and then sign to Marker to open up the back of the truck. They give us back our passports and go to see what we’re carrying. I’m interested myself. Brown cardboard cartons, stacked floor to ceiling, side to side. Another sign from the guards, meaning, Open up one of the cartons. You begin to realise the human race needs much less spoken language than is widely believed. Most times the meaning of what a person says to you can be inferred from the context. My grandmother, who became very deaf before she died, would do this all the time. She would see someone speaking at her with a be-kind-to-dumb-animals smile and she would answer, “Not so bad after all, considering my age,” or “Tottering on, a little slower every day.” She once told me her life was like being in a cinema and trying to find the exit in the dark. Behind you there’s gaping faces and flashing lights but all you want to do is
find the way out and leave without making a fuss. She was fine, my grandmother. I miss her.

  Marker reaches up for a carton. No, they gesture at him, not that one. This one. So he pulls down a different carton and opens it in front of them. There’s nothing on the outside of the boxes, but inside, very tightly packed in tissue paper, are pairs of Nike trainers. The guards look at them. My guess is they’re fakes. Then one of the guards pulls a pair of trainers out, and another pair, and throws them onto the muddy ground, as if he doesn’t care how dirty they get. Marker makes no complaint. The guard keeps on pulling out tissue paper and trainers and more tissue paper, and then all at once he gives this fat grunt of satisfaction. Out from the lower half of the carton comes a videotape.

  He shows it to his companions. It’s called Nympho Diaries. Just in case their English isn’t so good, the picture on the case shows a mostly naked woman pulling a completely naked man towards her by his enormous erect dick.

  Marker is smuggling hard-core pornography. So much for Western philosophy.

  I sneak a look at him. He’s diving into the box and pulling out more videos. Stick It Up. Dirty Debutantes. Big Butt Action. He gives them to the guards like he’s handing out sticks of chewing gum. The guards love it. They’re grinning and studying the pictures on the cases.

  “Keep them,” says Marker. “For you.”

  Suddenly they’re all the best of buddies. They slap Marker on the back and help him put the trainers back in the carton. So they’re not going to throw us into prison for corrupting the morals of the nation after all. They’re going to take their free gifts like Christmas has come and go and do what a man has to do. Now that they know Marker is a sicko pervert peddling rip-off filth they’re all smiles. It’s a funny old world. Though actually I’m not as moralistic as this may sound. I understand the surge of fellow-feeling that is coursing through the goons’ veins. It’s not really porno-lust at all. It’s plain relief at finding their own secret self mirrored in a stranger.

  So we’re back in the truck and we’re on our way.

  “You’ve done this before,” I say.