by Glen Duncan
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking of my ma. Not Freudianly. Just something funny.’
‘What?’
‘You had to be there. Sorry, it was rude of me. What travel plans?’
She reached for her Marlboro Lights on the bedside table, lit one, offered. I gave up smoking seven years ago but still have the odd one. I’d had one after dinner at Putti with an espresso. (Served by an Italian waitress with eyes and hair as dark as the coffee, outlined brown lipstick and despite a tidy figure a look of transsexualism.) Took another now. All those hours and days Scarlet and I had spent in bed, smoking, eating, boozing, having sex. We live in bed, she’d said, that first summer. Do you realize that?
‘Well, I’m going to New York at the end of the month to see a friend. Then I’m coming home for Christmas and New Year, then I’m going to the Caribbean for three weeks. After that I don’t know.’
‘Whereabouts in the Caribbean?’
‘Barbuda. It’s a luxury resort. I’m doing it now in case I run out of self-indulgence later.’
‘What about your dad?’ I asked. We’d established over antipastos that he was willing to see me. There remained, troublingly, since here I was in bed with Janet again, the question of whether Nelson Edwards was in fact George Edward Nelson Skinner. This question, fundamental, remained unanswered.
‘He’s okay, actually,’ Janet said. ‘He’s got a home help comes in a couple of hours a day and we’ve got him hooked up to one of these private RapidCare things. He’s got a gizmo he can press and they contact the emergency services straight away if it’s anything serious. Plus my sister’s in Earls Court. She’s around if I’m not. He can pretty much do for himself, and besides he’s a stubborn old bastard, hates being helped.’
I’d never considered other family. Her interest in herself had made me think of her as an only child, but her childlessness was responsible for that. The effect was always similar. Look at me.
‘Is Nelson Edwards his real name?’
Wrong. Should have said, Did he publish under his own name? I hadn’t known it was going to come out right then. She paused fractionally (which on its own would have tipped me off ) before saying, ‘Why d’you ask?’
I yawned for camouflage. Out of the tail end of it said: ‘Colleague of mine’s doing a paper on pen names.’ I stared up at the ceiling. ‘You’ll love this: Social Dynamics and Pseudonymity: A Study of the Politics of Literary Identity.’
‘Christ, you’re the guys with the catchy titles.’
‘Makes mine sound pretty sexy.’
‘What was yours again?’
‘Moral Exotica: Race and Pulp Fiction. I can’t believe you’ve forgotten already.’
‘Well, I’m like that, you know.’
Which was all well and good but we’d cul-de-saced. I could-n’t ask her directly a second time. She was still calculating. Just habit, I thought. There might have been a time when it mattered, years ago, not any more. My guess was the reflex and its redundancy were reminding her of how old her father was, how much it couldn’t at this late stage in the game matter. It released another little pheromone of sadness from her. Mixed in was all that we’d just done. We had–there was no denying it–liked it, been surprised by how at only the second encounter so many of the awkwardnesses had been rubbed smooth. Which made her want to trust me. Made her trust me. Someone does all that to your anus, you’ve got to trust them. She’s going to say, It isn’t, actually, and I’m going to say, Isn’t what? and she’s going to say, His real name, and I’m going to hold my breath and be very delicately ready and she’s going to say, His real name’s George Skinner.
‘I’m going to get that lemon meringue out of the fridge,’ she said. ‘I hope you think that’s as good an idea as I do.’
Or maybe you don’t have to trust them.
You can’t go into Departures unless you’re departing, and the martial frenzy of Check-in has little to offer. There is of course the sprawling pre-departures lounge, with its pub carpet, its fluorescents, its shops, its roped-off smokers who stare out from their zones as from a purgatory of ennui, but of late, these days of suddenly filling up with tears and being unable to stop thinking about death, I come to Arrivals. People in all shades of brown (as Updike says in Brazil, as far as skin’s concerned, white is a shade of brown) emerge from the gates pushing their trolleys, carrying their bags, blinking, as if they’ve arrived in the afterlife unsure of what to expect. The lovers’ faces are tentative, open, the eyes with that mixed flicker of doubt and hope. In the first look each brimful face asks the other: Do you still love me? Is it all right? Did you fuck someone else? I watch the lovers meet. And make no mistake: if he doesn’t still love her, if it isn’t all right, if she has fucked someone else, that first look will tell all, will accommodate the poisonous bulk of the truth; he’ll know, she’ll know. They may smile, kiss, embrace, hold each other, hurry home to fuck, smother it with all the clutter of habit but its information will have gone in anyway, like a solitary quill from a deadly plant, and sooner or later it will start to hurt, will start to take effect. I watch the lovers meet and it makes me feel lonely, paternal, far away from all that, as if I’m their benevolent grandfather finished with sex and passion and blood, thinned or purified by time into a papery chaste guardian. They don’t notice me, and that’s right and good, I tell myself. It hurts my heart, pleasantly. I think of Vince telling me of Nazi sentimentality, inwardly nod my head, yes, yes, of course, it’s come to this, it’s bound to come to something like this, without God or love or meaning.
Or rather that’s usually the way of it. Now (the thought makes me feel abstractly flirtatious, flirtatious with the world, which is surely being flirty with me) there’s Janet Marsh, the surprisingly refined sex, unawkward mutual visibility. Now there’s for the second time not quite having closed the door on further carnal trysts. Breakfast at the glass-bricked breakfast bar hadn’t been great. She’d taken two phone calls and for both of them walked away with the cordless into the bedroom. I took reassurance from it, that she didn’t want me hanging around, that we weren’t going to attempt half-dressed ease, newspapers, the always disastrous shared shower, a day together. It gave me a glimpse of the formidable force she must have been as a businesswoman. As soon as she registered the call was work (or rather ex-work) her face tightened and her voice moved up into her nose. By the time she’d finished the second conversation I’d laced up my shoes and drunk all but the last mouthful of coffee. I saw the relief–He’s going; good–but also lingering puzzlement. In the moments we knew were leading up to saying goodbye we avoided looking at each other. Then when I picked my jacket up off the couch and turned to face her we stopped, looked, conceded…what? That it had been too enjoyable not to repeat? In the end I said, This is slightly mad, isn’t it? She’d nodded agreement, almost physically bundled me towards the door, saying, We’ll arrange something for seeing my dad. Next week. I’ll call you.
That afternoon I got on the phone to Pasha.
‘What’s that?’
‘Dad, listen carefully. Is Ma in the room with you? Just say yes or no.’
Two or three seconds of rising heart rate for him to sort this out. He hates talking on the phone.
‘No.’ Then, quietly, ‘She’s in the kitchen.’
‘Right. If she comes in you say, “George Bush,” and I’ll start talking to you about the election, okay?’
He had to run all this by himself internally again before replying: ‘Okay.’ I knew how he’d be sitting: in the armchair by the window, leaning forward, right elbow on right knee, left hand mashing receiver against left ear, the Sun open on his lap at something like ‘ASYLUM SEEKER BENEFIT CHEAT HAS SECRET YACHT’.
‘Now listen, Dad, but stay calm. I think I’ve found Skinner.’
It was a fraught conversation. He had to George Bush twice, nearly deafening me. He couldn’t stop with the questions. ‘Dad, for God’s sake hush up a minute, will you? Listen. We may only have on
e shot at this and it means you’re going to have to come to see me next week. Can you do that?’
‘What’ll I tell your mother?’
‘Tell her a friend of mine’s got comp tickets to an evening of amateur boxing here and I thought it’d be nice for the two of us to go. You know, like I took her to Les Misérables that time.’
‘When next week? I’ve got my feet on Thursday.’
‘Jesus Christ. Just cancel it. This is him, Dad, I’m sure of it.’
‘But how did you find him?’
For a moment I completely forgot. Then remembered. Stacks of Books seemed a long time ago. Raj Rogue. A fluke, I told him. Just a random bit of luck. Incredible, really.
I’ve booked him an open return. He’ll be here Monday. I woke this morning with the feeling that things are tightening up around me. When that happens, there’s only one place to go.
There’s a weird atmosphere here today, a vibe of urgency in the wake perhaps of the US presidential elections. It’s only days after the return of George W. Bush to a second term of office. The swing states didn’t swing, but the main problem was that John Kerry looked like a troubled pre-op transsexual. Or the Republicans spent more money on cable ads in Ohio. Or they rigged the electronic voting machines. Or released hundreds of thousands of artificial persons cultured in underground laboratories and genetically engineered to vote Republican. Some such explanation will follow in Michael Moore’s next book, which will be another huge seller, gobbled up by the millions of people like me for whom very occasionally reading a horrifying exposé of political corruption at the highest, most serious, world-wrecking level is a titillating and more than adequate substitute for doing anything about it.
Vince and I are in one of our strange little spells of being interested in the news. We find ourselves buying the Guardian every day, the Observer or Independent on Sundays. We’ve let various things grab us: Enron, Miloševic, the war in Afghanistan, guerrilla atrocities in Zaire, Abu Ghraib, the Sudan crisis. We go through bubbles of time in which, for a week, a fortnight, a month, we’re compressedly informed, grown-up, high on appropriate anxiety. ‘They’re raping the women in Darfur,’ Vince said, not long ago, over a Saturday kitchen breakfast where everything was fiercely sunlit, the teapot’s languid S of steam, the marmalade jar like a lump of amber; even the hacked-at Lurpak creamily glowed. ‘Militia and government forces, together. Blair says the reports are a cause for great concern.’ Not without emotion I closed my eyes and squeezed my molars together. Three layers of feeling: first, a gauzy filament of distress and compassion; second, a richer stratum of satisfaction at discharging my duty to know what’s going on in the world; third, a fathomless bedrock of boredom and self-disgust, since the deep knowledge, the knowledge of myself is that I’m not going to do anything about it, not even write a letter to my MP. Not even open the email from Oxfam when it comes: Darfur: Humanitarian Disaster, though I’ll lack for weeks the integrity to delete it.
‘Did you know,’ I asked Vince in response, ‘that in Berlin the Russian army raped the Jewish women they were liberating before liberating them?’ It’s not a competition. More like a shuttlecock we’re batting back and forth. In an earlier phase, before the war in Iraq, Vince told me that Saddam’s goons had murdered a boy, dismembered and beheaded him, then taken all the severed body parts and dumped them outside his mother’s house. They told her she must leave them there for a week, and that if she didn’t they would come for the rest of her family and do the same to them.
When the Abu Ghraib story broke, both of us resisted the reflex–to respond to the pictures with our usual moral fracture and frowning urgency (as if we know the government will be on the phone any minute asking us what, exactly, should be done)–and plumped instead for jaded irritation: these are soldiers with prisoners, for fuck’s sake, of course they’re going to torture and sexually humiliate them. Soldiers have been doing this sort of thing to prisoners ever since there have been soldiers and prisoners. Now because it’s Americans on camera we’re supposed to be shocked? Americans are supposed to be better than that? The only amazing thing, we agreed, was that Americans were dumb enough to think that in this day and age you could take photographs and not have them leak out and incriminate you. ‘It’s in the nature of diaries to be found and read,’ Vince said. ‘That’s why mine’s full of lies.’ The more interesting discussion, we agreed, with a Radio 4-style self-congratulatory sidestepping of the obvious, was whether the act of photographing yourself committing a crime was really an expression of the desire to be caught and prosecuted, which was the referred desire to be relieved of the burden of your own freedom. Vince said no, he thought it was just that for twenty-first-century Western humans (especially American humans) the validity of an experience, our ability to remember it, to believe we’d had it, resided in its photographability.
Meanwhile, the news will accumulate, circle, repeat its deep structures, and the novelty of following it will wear off. Another experiment in being the sort of people who keep up with current events will be over. We’ll stop reading the newspapers we buy, then stop buying them. Like cohabiting women whose menstrual cycles gradually synchronize, Vince and I have lived together long enough to enter and exit these phases at more or less the same time. A blessing. Asymmetry would mean judgement, difficult weekend breakfasts, a flat filled with the dark matter of unhad arguments. It’s like something we have to keep trying out, to see if, after all, we are the sort of people who care. So far it’s failed to convince either of us. So far our cogs, as Vince would say, haven’t bit. But how bad does it have to get before they do? he wants to know. What sort of atrocity has to be perpetrated, what sort of corruption uncovered, before we become political? You know, do something. It’s hard to imagine. What if it directly affected you and me? he says. What if there was a major political party that was campaigning for the rounding-up of Anglo-Indians and queers and sending them to death camps? No one’s heard of Anglo-Indians, I tell him. Jesus Christ it’s hypothetical, Owen. Suppose. Would you get off your arse? Oppose them? March? Shout slogans? Get involved? It’s hard to imagine, I repeat. I’d probably emigrate to Sweden.
However, American marines have begun the taking of Fallujah. Last night on Channel 4 News Vince and I watched footage first of aerial bombardment by attack helicopter, second of apparently indiscriminate mortar bombardment from perimeter positions, and third of penetration of the city’s outskirts by ground forces. The reporter went into the city to show us a couple of kaftaned civilians wailingly bemoaning the destruction of their houses. ‘What I wonder,’ Vince said, in the bitter, righteously facetious manner we reserve for this sort of thing, ‘is how, when the insurgents decide they’ve had enough and take their headgear off and chuck their guns away and walk out of the city with all the other civilians, the Americans are going to know that they aren’t civilians at all, but insurgents?’ We were on a couch each in the living room, eating one of Vince’s chilli con carnes off trays in our laps. (It’s dark early these nights, and last night raining, too. If Vince and I had partners, romantic partners, sexual partners–or were such partners; the possibility’s a threadbare gag between us–this would be a welcome inducement to stay indoors. As it is it just makes the prospect of having to go out and find sex more dismal than it already is. I’m still thinking this way, obviously, though I repeat there is the matter of Janet Marsh, about whom Vince knows. It’s all right for you, he’s been carping since the first encounter, you’ve got a bird. A rich bird, more to the point, you jammy bastard. She hasn’t got a rich gay brother has she?) ‘Maybe,’ I said, equally facetiously, ‘they’re hoping they’ll have forgotten to remove their insurgent T-shirts and badges.’
Rumsfeld had been on earlier, talking at a press conference (the cameraspeak, the film whirr, the shutter click, the flashbulbs that don’t go bish any more except in your imagination, evoked the red carpet outside a Hollywood premiere) about minimal civilian casualties. ‘Yeah, Don,’ Vince said, ‘sure, Don, ab
solutely, Don, we trust you, Don.’ I was racking my brains to remember in what way, precisely, Donald Rumsfeld is bad. I’d read all about it somewhere, Moore’s book, probably. Pharmaceuticals? Or was he in on the Enron thing? Actually, what was the Enron scandal again, exactly? I know it was something massive and simple and fundamental, but outside the phases in which we’re interested in this sort of thing the facts refuse to stick in my head. Slippage. I accept Rumsfeld’s evil in the way I accept that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, not because I can remember the proof, but because I can remember that there is one. And still, the man’s press-conference look of perplexed outrage and his delivery of plain-idiom common sense impressed: he was saying that you can’t have people cutting off people’s heads as a way of trying to stop democratic elections. Who could argue with that? We’ve tried everything else, he said. He really looked like he meant it. (He’s handsome, in a mannish, liver-spotted American way; you can still see the side-parted headshape of the seven-year-old boy in him, whereas with Bush all you see–though he walks as if holding a tennis ball in each armpit to indicate a superabundance of testosterone–is the two-year-old, specifically, as I think someone in the Guardian said, the two-year-old who, after having had his first on-the-potty bowel movement, has been told by his mother that he’s a good boy.)