I Hear Voices

by Paul Ableman

  “You’re not Susan,” I protest. “You’re an utter stranger.”

  “I’m not really Susan,” she admits, crushing mint under my nose to demonstrate its virtue. “My name’s Mother Stockings. Either that or Mother Gin, depending on what they call me.”

  “They never call you Susan.”

  “They haven’t yet,” she agrees, fluffing little pointers of mint all around in the tray. “Now, you’ll have some mint?”

  She waves a small bouquet of it, reeking of chemicals, towards me. Naturally, I have no use or desire for her adulterated mint, or any other wares, but I feel in some small measure attached to her.

  “Your legs are bad,” I point out.

  “Nasty things,” she agrees. She sets down her mint. “My legs are nasty red things with the veins sticking out. They’re fatter now than they were but they were always fat. I was never thin and pretty. I was always fat. You can have all that mint. You’ve killed my enthusiasm.”

  “I’m sorry,” I exclaim.

  “Perhaps it’s best. To tell you the truth, you didn’t kill it. I didn’t have any enthusiasm. I was casting about in my mind to think of some way of getting more money and I remembered my grandmother sold mint. But things must have been different then,” she stares away, down the natural focus at the polluted cloudlet, the seethe, and the massed commodities riven by driving grinders, “very different. Does Susan sell mint?”

  “Of course not,” I smile.

  “No,” she considers, rubbing her defective chin. “Well I’ve got my bus fare. You’ll take that mint?”

  “No,” I explain. “I don’t want it. Don’t be angry.”

  “No,” she shakes her head vaguely. “We’ll leave it there. The dogs won’t hurt it. You never see children in these quarters. Only those minders running bets and liaisons and press and such-like. I thought it would be a good place.”

  “For selling mint?” I ask.

  “Of course there’s no place left,” she confides. “No, too straight. Too many panels—it’s all that congealing. Thank God, for my little place. You passed it sometimes.”

  “When Arthur pressed me,” I confirm. “When I mentioned you to him, how I nearly asked you the time.”

  “You should have done,” she insists. “Oh, I know, you were put off, seeing me on the corner with my greasy dress and my head down. You thought I was sulking. Perhaps I was or just tormented by the children. I can’t remember.”

  “Anyway,” I say, as gently and encouragingly as I can, “I saw the iron cavities and dark recesses and slits of soot.”

  “Yes, well—” she hesitates, on the point of departure, and then brings out: “If you pass again—you know—I’ve got a stove—”

  I stammer an embarrassed acceptance. She goes away and gets on a bus and I start away too but I do take a little sprig of mint and sniff it before I go.

  And then I go somewhere and think something and someone asks me—

  “Depressed? Yes?”

  “Yes, depressed—fearful—”

  “Fearful? Yes? We’re tourists. Where do we go? Depressed?”

  “Yes, a bit depressed—I’ve just left that old hider—lurker—”

  “It’s hot. Jonas?”

  “Yes, hot,” agrees Jonas. He crowds towards me. “Help us tourists, us two. Well—we find lots of things—bad good—”

  “Bad food,” corrects his nephew. “He means bad food. Not bad good. Depressed? Yes?”

  “Yes, a bit depressed,” I admit, wishing I could direct them to some reception place. “You saw me numbering those scales.”

  “Bad good—”

  “Bad food, Jonas. He likes fish—like those scales. Ours are better. Bigger, whiter—very clever. Jonas?”

  “Is he depressed?”

  Jonas now looks at me attentively, with worldly, vulgar eye.

  “Give him some money.”

  Then Jonas summons a blow from his fund of common humanity and knocks me forward a few inches.

  “Well, Jonas is very sorry,” interprets his malicious nephew as he notes the look of distress on my face. “He’s not a brutal man—though his strength—his strength is brutal. That’s how he bellies through. He makes lots of money and bellies me about with him. If someone spit—Jonas’ strength cabbage him.”

  “Give him money,” suggests Jonas once more, consulting a guide and focusing a hooded eye on a spire. “He’s stupid.”

  “You depressed?”

  “Yes, I was,” I try to make clear. “I was sitting there, not ready even now to go home and I’d had another experience when you came dazzling into sight. No you sort of sprang up—I did manage to say ‘pleasant holiday’ but you didn’t hear me.”

  “I heard,” says Jonas, sweeping the pulsations for his wife. Then he leans paternally towards me and entrusts me with, “Our climate is better— much better.”

  “He says where we come from—” begins his wife but I interrupt.

  “Yes, your clouds and sun and beach. Your blue brine and gulf—”

  But the nephew silences me with insistent eye and hand.

  “No, I’ll tell you. We’ve been everywhere. How old do you think I am?”

  But mercifully a disaster of some sort tremors into light and noise, taking Jonas’s dull eye first and then his corpulence, while the nephew springs away. Mrs. Jonas tries to intercept them and spins fleeting thoughts of the disgraceful in the minds of several. I am left alone, at last, with my dolphin. But not really alone. Jonas’ peers and colleagues are loitering and stewing all about, scorching their brains on the fiery signs, but surely it was merely evil chance, unlikely chance, that brought Jonas to my patch of air? It is a little time, however, before I can keep an independent and disruptive glance of suspicion from darting towards any who patrol too near. Except for the inarticulate pigeons. But slowly I resume my dolphin. This voluptuous fish has leapt from the middle sea, pausing to be petrified and decked in mannered curls. Now it leaps again, towards a blue deceit. Not having attained this unequal goal, it has stuck itself to some cement and permits a sluice down its tail. If its poor wet form, if its finny structure were in any sense valid, one might postulate tranquility. Anyway one might postulate relative tranquility. And the proposition gets even more compelling if you circle around like a descending pigeon and take in new veils and sections. It suffers a little, one can’t help admitting, from the sweet gobs with which Merkitt’s young sister continually excites her palate. It also suffers from the meager turnout of parliamentarians.

  I realize this and I also realize, with increased dejection, that things are becoming stickier and more obdurate. In my high presumption, I thought it would be a simple thing to be a philosopher, to minister to Southern husbands and fractured schoolfriends. But it is not a simple thing. It is the very devil and lies, diabolical lies, it is to float on the corrupt, Stygian sea and offer the castaway a cup of the only liquid available. Susan gives me eggs and warms my clothes. Maria draws my curtains and has laughed, Arthur wheels the hoop and that placid, shrewd woman gave me money. I make a very faint hum in the drone of that huge machine. And I want—I want—

  And so what was, is not, and my triumphal progress has become a pilgrimage of repentance.

  “I’ve come to repent, not to practise philosophy,” I tell the same woman. “That’s why I didn’t wait until it was perfectly dark. It never gets perfectly dark in a modern city since the whole place is charged with power. I didn’t think repentance should wait on social conventions and so I didn’t buy a special suit.”

  “You’re very early,” she admits, casting a backwards glance at an oscillation. “You haven’t spent your repentance!”

  “No I—”

  But she immediately silences me with a curt gesture. We both pause and listen to someone tinkling.

  “That’s Lewis,” she explains, “doing something intimate. You see how difficult it is? How can I invite you in?”

  “Yes, you can,” I say, with a surge of authority that
surprises me. “You can do so quite easily. You may have to accommodate yourself and Lewis to the new circumstances. But you certainly can.”

  “You are persistent,” she smiles. “I wondered if we’d see you.”

  “I’m persistent about repentance,” I explain. “I have to be. I have to clear off that stuff, that corrupt accumulation—like tidal ooze—before I can think anything new. Perhaps Lewis would relish my repentance. He might regard it as a joke or a party game or a new manner of interview. Anyway, you have no right to deny it to him. You have no right not to consult him.”

  And with a sudden, unpremeditated access of agility I stoop past her and leap down the passage to the lavatory where Lewis is urinating.

  “I’ve come to repent,” I explain breathlessly, fearful lest his wife hurry after me and try to organize discord. “I’d prefer concord but anything rather than philosophy. She may have mentioned me to you—our rather gallant encounter in the park.”

  Lewis, it turns out, is a slow, bulky Italian, slow in thought and action but very human and very tolerant. He does not seem in the least perturbed by my irruption and goes on peeing stolidly though lending an ear to my plea. Finally, we turn together to confront his wife who, torn between delicacy and indignation, has been turning and frowning in the hall.

  As we emerge, she rounds on me, now genuinely annoyed at last.

  “Well that was very clever. Good heavens, I do think you’re extraordinary. I’ve made every allowance—I knew in the park that you’d need special handling but I saw you were gentle with my Timothy—but you make it impossible—”

  And then fresh awareness of the prodigy overwhelms her.

  “Good heavens, to burst into someone’s private dwelling—”

  “Well,” booms Lewis in such a powerful, albeit slow and unruffled voice, that his wife listens, “he says he’s come to repent.”

  But by now the impulse to repent has abated. How can I admit this? During the course of the evening, over toast, views, cards, visions, Lewis helps me in a ponderous, human but hardly tactful manner and his wife, an essentially placid soul, forgives me and rallies in a rather brittle, suburban way. At one point, between a gleam and a Tuscan glimpse, a plebian but vivid glimpse, a certain lean betrays a prominent element of Lewis’ concern.

  “There’s been nothing between us,” I assure him. “We sat side by side for five minutes in the park. That’s absolutely all.”

  He does not believe this, nor is it entirely true, and his wife greets the assurance with no more than a snort of derision as if the notion of anything more intimate were merely grotesque. The intruder, however, once raised can not quite be laid and lurks about the room, going some way towards vitiating the solemn and impressive rite of repentance. So much so that at one point Lewis, after studying an official document to occupy the time between several items of repentance, suddenly looks up and booms through his moustache:

  “You’re sure you want to repent? I don’t mind. I haven’t got any interest in it one way or the other.”

  “Well, he said—” begins his wife.

  “I know. Still, I don’t think his whole heart’s in it. I might be wrong and I can wait. You passed on that message?”

  Fortunately his wife did remember to conclude a minor commercial transaction or to set barren wheels in motion, so that Lewis, who has by now almost ceased to be a force making for successful repentance, can turn to me again.

  “Well, that’s a few things—nothing very much—that bit about vowels I didn’t even understand. Is there anything else? Italian repentance—a good, real, lively repentance—come on.”

  “I repent my sneaking,” I say in a cowed and thoroughly miserable voice.

  “Sneaking?” repeats Lewis doubtfully. “All right. Write that down.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” objects his wife. “Are you sure you mean sneaking?”

  “Oh, do write it down,” I plead. “This is very hard and painful for me. Don’t stop me every few seconds.”

  “Well, we’re not really the right people for this,” she points out, a little sharply. “Perhaps, you’d have done better to go to the right people.”

  And soon after this, the repentance breaks down completely and, until her friend Maria comes in and provides a new impetus, is not resumed. During this interval, we just sit, I very conscious of the fact that I have spent their handsome retaining fee and not provided any philosophy. Through this veil of drenched moss and self-reproach I can just see Lewis fatting about as on any other evening and just tell myself that he does not yet condemn me, not yet, but that if I can’t soon part the dank streamers and dripping vines and issue into the familiar again, he soon will. Convulsive effort finally forces to my lips—

  “I see you’ve got a new, nice—”

  But the object, any object, and a hundred suitable ones must be within eye’s vista, eludes me and I am verging on the ultimate inarticulate when the ruined Maria mercifully arrives.

  “Oh repentance,” she cries. “Jolly ho, jolly, jolly. Get on with it.”

  And she sits spinning the silver fleece of repentance that I now cough profusely forth.

  “I repent this and that,” I begin. “I repent the demands I have made, the whips I lay to bowed backs at every step. I repent the sun into whose heat I have propelled my servants. I repent the service I have rendered them. I repent the motion and the deadly little vortex I stirred one afternoon near the shoe shop. I repent the drainage of other vortices. What may not have drained away? I repent my ability and my inability and my thoughts of either—”

  When I have repented sufficiently, I leave them, all three transported a little beyond themselves by the fervor of my repentance, and, for the first time that day feeling genuinely calm, return to my egg.

  Before long, however, Susan brings a message that they must have despatched almost immediately I left. It is in three parts.

  “Your repentance was not bad.” This part is signed by the wife.

  “Your repentance certainly got better. It’s my honest opinion that you have a flair for this sort of thing. Congratulations.” This part is signed by Lewis, and poor broken Maria, whose brief contact with me I selfishly utilized exclusively for my own ends, writes:

  “I wish I had your cheek. Oh, I know, I helped—still—if we ever meet again—I never bother with repentance—I don’t see why you should think—anyway, I don’t want to be nasty, if it helped you.”

  “And did it help?” asks Susan, but her manner and expression indicate that she thinks of the matter exclusively in terms of personailities.

  “It seemed to at the time,” I admit. “But this sequel has a terrible effect.”

  “You shouldn’t mix with those people,” grumbles Susan. “I got wind of it. They say the husband’s an Italian and that she’s shameless. I’ve heard lots of bad things about them. I can hardly believe people like that really exist.”

  She looks at me severely and then says, almost defiantly:

  “Well, you’re back safe now. I hope you’ve learned your lesson and will be loath to wander away alone again. We can look after you here.”

  “Oh yes,” I jeer, “and consult the professor behind my back.”

  “Well, it’s just as well for you—” she begins hotly and then something makes her suddenly remember some news she’s been looking foward to telling me. She looks eager and then leans forward and confides, “Arthur’s talking of getting a palace.”

  And she explains how Arthur, increasingly bloated on the gas of success, has long been swelling out of our dear, familiar Cabbage Street. Now he feels that, in order to redress the world, he must put on a palace.

  When she goes, I lie back and consider the implications of this news. It is not an easy thing for myself, an invalid, confined to a small, sordid room but one nevertheless that, through custom, has become a sort of refuge, to contemplate the ghastly upheavals contingent upon removing to a palace. If it were to be a real palace, there might be some consola
tion to be found in the prospect of eavesdropping on the state occasions and glittering functions that would doubtless be continually taking place in the accessible vicinity. But I know well enough that Arthur is not seriously talking of getting a real palace. No one does anymore. Real palaces are dead, deader than anarchy which is deader than personality. No, what Arthur must have in mind must be simply a larger house with a drive. Where? Wired in somewhere with a blossoming vine. Beside a different stream.

  I lie back and look out at the house-tops again and the distant facings. There is a new framework near a distribution hub and a Westward dispersal of murk. How much longer will I be able to contemplate Hunter’s wife’s glossy stand? How much longer furl with the beech leaf?

  Then I ask myself—what can Arthur be up to? Surely I must know? I am with him, marching along. Can it have something to do with the sky? I turn my attention to the sky which is now very white, very blue and colorless. I call it the bowl of day, the arch of heaven—or pannikin, but what is it? Is it my generation, my potential, my pasture? Is it the lung of time? Is it a conjugation?

  It is airy atoms all floating together. It is unthinkable. It is the deceitful portal of the dreadful chasm of never-ending incompletion. It is here, here in my hands and far beyond the furthest grasp of the most tireless pilgrim. It is my heart, the red muscle has congealed from it. It is my brain which it has secreted and which, a ghastly progeny, turns back to devour it. Serene though it appear, it is the treacherous model of our time-wracked row of houses. It is Hunter departing in his old van. I do not know what it is.

  “All right, Arthur,” I shout. “I withdraw my objections. If you want a palace, I’m willing to move. I—”

  “Shut up!” cries Arthur, coming indignantly to the door. “What are you shouting about? At this time of the morning? Jane’s sleeping.”

  Then he hurries a bit closer, dropping flakes of lather onto the shiny floor.

  “And anyway, after your extraordinary behavior at the office, I should have thought—well, that you wouldn’t be so anxious to shout your opinions about. Anyway, what is it?”

  At this, of course, I am completely subdued. What can I have been thinking of, to have shouted condescending approval of Arthur’s plans? Finally, I murmur: