by John Metcalf
Lacking in drama, some might say.
Pastel colours. Too traditional.
I know all about that.
. . . marred in its conclusion by an inability to transcend the stylistic manner of his earlier work . . .
If I were interested in finishing this story, in cobbling it up into something a bit more robust, it’s here that I ought to shape the thing towards what would be, in effect, a second climax and denouement. It’s at this point that I should make slightly more explicit the ideas which have been implicit in the detail and narrative matter, treating them not baldly as ideas, of course, but embodying them, in the approved manner, in incident. (As a story-writer, I’m concerned, needless to say, with feelings, with moving you emotionally, not sermonizing.) And what is it exactly, then, that I would wish to emerge a touch more explicitly were I interested in rounding the story off for your entertainment? Certainly nothing intellectually stunning. Platitudes, some might say. That the guard is as much a prisoner as those he guards; that the desire to conform, to fulfill a role, distorts and corrupts; perhaps, to extend this last, that the seeds of Dachau and Belsen are dormant within us all.
And how, in the approved manner, might I have effected these ends? Dramatically, perhaps. A confrontation with the deranged Headmaster, the mirrored sunglasses worn even in his dim room, the venetian blinds permanently shuttered.
David and Goliath.
Or, more obliquely, affectingly, by an encounter at a later date with the recaptured Dennis.
Simple enough to do.
But I can’t be bothered.
It was while I was writing this story that something happened which disturbed me, which made the task of writing not only tedious but offensive.
What happened was this.
It was Open Evening at the public school my son and daughter attend. My wife and I dutifully turned out, watched the entertainment provided, the thumping gymnastics, the incomprehensible play written and performed by the kids in Grade Seven, renditions by the choir, two trios, a quartet, and the ukulele ensemble. We then inspected our children’s grubby exercise books which we see every day anyway, admired the Easter decorations, cardboard rabbit-shapes with glued-on absorbent-cotton tails etc. Smiled and chatted to their teachers. A necessary evening of unrelieved dreariness.
And driving back home along the dark country roads replying to my children’s back-seat interrogation—Which did you like best? The gymnastics? The choir? What about the play? Wasn’t the play funny?—and assuring my wife that I wasn’t driving too fast, that the road wasn’t icy, I passed the township dump. The dump was on fire. I looked down on the scene for only a few seconds. Twisting above the red heart of the fire, yellow tongues of flame. In the light thrown by the flames, grey smoke piling up to merge with the darkness of the night. Two figures. And high in the night sky, a few singing sparks. Then the sight was gone.
At that moment, my heart filled with a kind of—it’s a strange word to use, perhaps, almost embarrassing, but I will say it—filled with a kind of joy.
What disturbed me, upset me, was that the feeling was so violent, so total. No. No, that’s not what upset me. In the aftermath of that feeling, what upset me was its strangeness, the realization that I’d felt nothing like it for so many years.
Since then, and during the time I’ve been trying to finish up this story, I’ve been thinking about Dennis, for there was a Dennis, though I have no idea now what his name was. Let’s call him Dennis and be done with it. Those events, in so far as they’re at all autobiographical, happened more than twenty years ago in a country which is foreign to me now. So. Dennis. I’ve been thinking about him. And me.
And the vision of fire at night.
Fire at night seen through winter trees.
Drifting into sleep or lying half-awake, I picture fire. And I’m filled with an envious longing. Though I ought to qualify “envious.” As I qualify most things. This isn’t making much sense, is it? But listen. This is difficult for me, too. I want to make clear, you see, that I’m in no way romanticizing Dennis. I think that’s important.
I know his life quite intimately. Much to my parents’ distress, I admired his local counterparts and played with them for much of my childhood. I can imagine the pacifier smeared with Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup when he was a baby, the late and irregular hours as an infant. On the casually wiped oilcloth of the kitchen table, the buns with sticky white icing and the cluster of pop bottles. I can imagine him and his brother and sister like a litter of hot-bellied puppies squabbling, gorging, sleeping where they dropped oblivious to the constant blare of the TV and radio. I can see his sister, off to school in a party frock, his snot-blocked brother with the permanent stye. And as Dennis grew a little older, ragtag games that surged in the surrounding streets till long past dusk.
I know his mother, warm and generous but too busy and always too tired. Too soft with him, too, after his father died. Not a stupid woman but slow and easy-going. I can see her dressing herself up on Friday nights in a parody of her youth, a few too many at the local, and after the death of her husband, consoling herself with a succession of uncles who’d give Dennis a couple of bob to go to the pictures to get him out of the way.
And then the drift into playing where one should not play, railway-yards perhaps, bouncing on the lumber in timber-yards, the pleasures of being chased. And as the world of school closed against him—hand-me-downs, incomprehension, hot tears in the school lavatories—the more aggressive acts. Street lights shot out, bricks through windows, feuds in the parks, and running stone-fights with rival gangs across the bomb-sites where willow herb still grew. Webley air-pistols, sheath knives, an accident involving stitches. Shoplifting in Woolworth’s. Padlocks splintered from a shed. And edging towards the adult world, packets of Weights and Woodbines bought in fives, beer supplied by laughing older brothers, and, queasily, the girl up his street they all had, the girl from the special school.
And, years past the year I knew him, I can see him in the pub he’s made his local, dressed to kill, his worldly wealth his wardrobe, dangerous with that bristling code of honour which demands satisfaction outside of those whose eyes dare more than glance . . .
No. I’m not romanticizing Dennis.
I wonder what became of him. Did he become a labourer perhaps? Carrying a hod “on the buildings,” as he’d say? Or is he one of an anonymous tide flowing in through factory gates? Difficult to imagine the Dennis I knew settling down to that kind of grind. More probably he’s on unemployment or doing time for some bungled piece of breaking and entering.
Dennis.
I did see Dennis again after I’d left the Approved School that afternoon. I saw him after he’d been recaptured. I know I’m not organizing this very well. It’s difficult for me to say what I want to say.
It happened like this. I’d got another job in Eastmill almost immediately in a Secondary Modern School. Dr. James—let’s call him that anyway—got the information from my parents, whose address was on the application I’d filed at the Reception Centre. He phoned me at the school and told me that Dennis had been caught in London, had been held down naked over a table by Uncle Arthur and Mr. Austyn and savagely birched by our friend in the sunglasses, was in the Eastmill Sick Bay, was feverish, and kept on asking for me. Dr. James, with considerable bravery given his personality and circumstances, smuggled me in one evening to see the boy. He was obviously in pain, his face gaunt, the eyes big and shadowed, but he smiled to see me and undid his pyjama jacket carefully, slowly, lifting it aside to show me his chest. His brother, the one in the army who’d been home on leave, had paid for it. It was just possible to distinguish the outlines of a sailing ship through the crust of red and blue and green, the whole mess raised, heaving, cracking in furry scabs.
I can’t remember what we said. I do remember the way he undid the jacket as though uncovering an icon and the tremendous
heat his infected chest gave off.
This incident, now I come to think about it, would have made a suitable ending to the story. Touching. The suggestion of a kind of victory, however limited, over the force of evil. David and Goliath. Readers like that sort of thing. But it would have been a sentimental lie.
Dennis was no hero. He was a bloody nuisance then and he’s doubtless a bloody nuisance now. And the staff of that school weren’t evil, though at one time, my mind clouded by the prating of A.S. Neil and such, I doubtless thought so. They were merely stupid. Their answer to the problem of Dennis was crude, but it was at least an answer. I just don’t know any more. Time and experience seem to have stripped me of answers.
My life has been what most people would call “successful.” I have a respected career. My opinions on this and that are occasionally sought. Sometimes I have been asked to address conventions. I love my wife. I love my children. I live a pleasant life in a pleasant house.
What, then, is the problem?
Fire at night seen through the forms of winter trees.
That is the problem.
You see, what I’m trying to get at, Dennis, is this. They told you all your life, the Wechsler-Bellevue merchants, the teachers, the guardians of culture, and, yes, me, I suppose, that you were wrong, stupid, headed for a bad end. But you had something, knew something they didn’t. Something I didn’t. Do you see now why it’s so important for me to stress that I’m not romanticizing your life, Dennis, or the lives of the ignorant yobs and louts who were your friends? You can’t even begin to grasp how appalling it is for me to attempt to say this. Say what? That my life, respectable, sober, industrious, and civilized, above all civilized, has at its core a desolating emptiness. That, quite simply, you in your stupid, feckless way have enjoyed life more than I have.
I’ve never escaped, you see, Dennis. I’ve never lived off hostile country.
Did you burn down houses in Penge? I don’t know, can’t remember if I invented that. But if you did, the blood gorging you with excitement, the smoke, the roar as the whole thing got a grip—I can hardly bring myself to say this, must say this—if you did, Christ! it must have been wonderful.
You don’t understand, do you, what it means for me to make these confessions? To have to make these confessions, to face the death I feel inside myself?
Let me try to put this in a different way. Let me try to find words that perhaps you’ll understand. Words! Understand! Good Christ, will it never end, this blathering!
Dennis. Dennis. Listen!
Dennis, I envy you your—
Christ, man! Out with it!
Dennis. Listen to me.
Concentrate.
Dennis, I wish I had a tattoo.
GENTLE AS FLOWERS MAKE THE STONES
Fists, teeth clenched, Jim Haine stood naked and shivering staring at the lighted rectangle. He must have slept through the first knocks, the calling. Even the buzzing of the doorbell had made them nervous; he’d had to wad it up with paper days before. The pounding and shouting continued. The male was beginning to dart through the trails between the Aponogeton crispus and the blades of the Echinodorus martii.
Above the pounding, words: “pass-key,” “furniture,” “bailiffs.”
Lackey!
Lickspittle!
The female was losing colour rapidly. She’d shaken off the feeding fry and was diving and pancaking through the weed-trails.
Hour after hour he had watched the two fish cleaning one of the blades of a Sword plant, watched their ritual procession, watched the female dotting the pearly eggs in rows up the length of the leaf, the milt-shedding male following; slow, solemn, seeming to move without motion, like carved galleons or bright painted rocking-horses.
The first eggs had turned grey, broken down to flocculent slime; the second hatch, despite copper sulphate and the addition of peat extracts, had simply died.
“I know you’re in there, Mr. Haine!”
A renewed burst of doorknob rattling.
He had watched the parents fanning the eggs; watched them stand guard. Nightly, during the hatch, he had watched the parents transport the jelly blobs to new hiding places, watched them spitting the blobs onto the underside of leaves to hang glued and wriggling. He had watched the fry become free-swimming, discover the flat sides of their parents, wriggle and feed there from the mucous secretions.
“Tomorrow . . . hands of our lawyers!”
The shouting and vibration stopped too late.
The frenzied Discus had turned on the fry, snapping, engulfing, beaking through their brood.
A sheet of paper slid beneath the door.
He didn’t stay to watch the carnage; the flash of the turning fish, the litter floating across the surface of the tank, the tiny commas drifting towards the suction of the filter’s mouth.
He went back into his bedroom and worked himself into the sleeping bag. Four more weeks and they would have lost their tadpole look, growing towards their maturity, becoming disc-shaped.
He studied the All-Island Realties notice. Nasty print. Two months rent: $72.50 per month; $145.00. And two more months before he could apply for the last third of his Arts Bursary. He reached for the largest butt and, staring into the flame of the match, considered his position. A change of abode was indicated. And preferably by evening.
Taking his night-pencil, his Granby Zoo pencil with animal-head pictures, he wrote on the back of the notice God Rend You, All Island Realties. And then doodled. And then found himself writing out again from memory what he had completed the day before.
Into your hands, my father and my mother, I commend
My darling and delight, my little girl,
Lest she be frightened by the sudden dark
Or the terrible teeth of the dog who guards your world.
“Your world” was exactly right. No use in fucking about with “Hades” or “Tartarus.”
Parvula ne nigras horrescat Erotion umbras
Oraque Tartarei prodigiosa canis.
“Sudden dark” wasn’t bad, either.
There was a sense of rightness, too, in dividing the sentences of the original into stanzas.
The night had produced no advances on stanza two.
She would have been but six cold winters old if she had lived
Even those few days more;
That could stand. But
Inter tam veteres ludat lasciva patronos. . . . “Patronos,” that was the bugger. “Protectors” was impossible; “guardians” too custodial. Something grave was needed, grave yet tender.
“veteres patronos”
His pencil worked loops and curlicues on the paper.
The muffled phone in the kitchen rang twice, stopped, rang again. Pulling on his jeans, he went to answer it.
“Jim? It’s Jackie, man.”
Jackie’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“The Desert Express Is In.”
“Good shit?” said Jim.
“Up a tree—you know? A real mindfuck, man.”
“Far out,” said Jim.
“Hey, and that Gold, man. What a taste! Two tokes and you’re wasted!”
“Tonight, man,” said Jim.
He hung up the phone and sighed.
“veteres patronos”
veteres patronos
His possessions, by design, fitted into two large cardboard cartons. Kettle and mug. Sleeping bag and inflatable mattress. Clothes. One picture. Writing materials. An alarm dock. The few books he had not sold.
He stirred the coffee and Coffeemate together and wandered into the front room. On the table there lay the medium felt pen, the fine, and the fountain pen. Beside them, the three pads of paper, white, yellow, and pale blue, the porcelain ashtray, the square of blotting paper, the Edwardian silver matchbox.
; He sat at the table drinking the coffee. He tried to visualize the three stanzas of the completed poem on the page. He’d have to supply a title; and at the end, in brackets, “The poet commends the soul of a pet slave girl to his parents who are already in the lower world. Adapted from Martial. Epigrams. Book V. 34.” Less distracting than under the title.
“veteres patronos”
He stared at the aquarium; had only a half of the fry survived a little half of all his pretty ones—growing to the size of a dime, a quarter, a silver dollar, he could have sold them through Réal to Ideal Import Aquariums for twelve to fifteen dollars each.
With the medium felt pen on white paper he wrote:
Sixty Symphysodon discus at a conservative $12.00 = $720.00
Minus $25.00 for the tank
$10.00 for the pump and filter
$30.00 for the breeding fish
$15.00 for weed, tubifex worm, whiteworm, brine shrimp, and daphnia.
An inevitable profit of $640.00.
Work was impossible.
He needed money; he needed a place to live.
He began packing his belongings into the two cartons. The $3,500 of his Canada Council grant eroded by child-support payments, eroded by the cling of old habits. He would have to abandon the aquarium and hope that Réal could get it out.
The last of the air from the mattress.
Pevensey!
Pevensey might be good for a $30.00 review. Maybe even $60.00 for a round-up. If he could be trapped. He rolled the mattress and sleeping bag brooding about the toadish Pevensey. Who had promised to review The Distance Travelled and lied.
Lack of space, old boy. Hands were tied.
In his Toad-of-Toad’s-Hall tweeds and deerstalker.
In his moustache.
Who weekly reviewed English Formal Gardens of the Eighteenth Century or The Rose Grower’s Vade Mecum, toadish Memoirs of endless toadish Generals.
Opening the freezer compartment of the fridge, he took out the perspex map-case which contained his completed poems and work sheets and wiped off the condensation; he kept them there in case of fire.