- Are you there? Pete said.
- Yes.
Pete came down the stairs into the room and sat down.
- I want you to listen, he said.
He sat upright.
- It won’t take long.
Mark turned to the wall.
- You don’t surprise me, Pete said. But we’ll leave that. I can speak. There’s something to be said. Not that you’ve surprised me.
Because you haven’t. But that’s another thing. A couple of hours, you see, make all the difference. There’s this to be done with. It’s time. I’ll say it. It’s best. You can say what you like, if you like, afterwards. Fair enough?
You see, I want to understand. What I can’t sympathize with, I can only try to condone, by way of friendship. But quite frankly you must be mad to sweep it all away in a gust of new affection.
I like the way you’ve painted me black. It’s blunt, but erroneous. I can afford a joke, but this one has gone too far.
It was a kick in the balls, I admit it. Shows I’m still subject to human pains. That’s all. Illuminating in a way, but nothing more. The bones. The bones are far more interesting than the soft parts of the belly.
No. My motives were never inspired by any great love or respect for Virginia. They were neither unselfish or generous. So you can be all the things I can’t be to her. All right. Why not? I considered her a great asset to me when we had something in common, but it was very little and quite honestly very seldom.
I can bury all that without too much of a strain.
Listen. I’ve liked you when you were positive, generous and friendly. When you revealed yourself. All I can do at the moment is appreciate it.
It was a bullet. But there’s nothing in my hair about Virginia. What you two get up to is your own business.
But the point is this. You don’t care about me because in a fairish way you’ve fallen short of the truth. Well short. What have you got against me? Lies? Did I talk behind your back? Is that the sum total of my virtue? The whole business is ludicrous. Of course I’ve spoken behind your back. Of your qualities and your faults. If you complain of one will you do without the other? Perhaps so. But you’ll do quite well without my praise.
I’d rather you hit me in the eye than this lark go on. I may go to hell but not for this business. Of course the whole caboodle might well be an efficient idea.
I’ll add when I haven’t liked you. I haven’t liked you when I felt, which I did nearly all the time when we were alone, that I was a bloke you were speaking to between one bed and another. You may find that injurious to the truth. You may feel a lot happened which was worthwhile, which was of value.
If you know me at all, you must know that my personal relationships have nearly always been of secondary importance. My natural disposition is to be alone and play the old joanna. There’s always some tune or other. You understand. It’s not surprising, you see, that my friends have, however wellmeaning, drained my blood dry.
No, I’m not cutting capers. Perhaps I’ve got one knacker missing, after all.
What it means, for us, is that I didn’t give back what I owed you, because I didn’t have the wherewithal to pay. I take it you’re mortally sick of bunging your affection down a cesspool. That being in my society was an infection. Or that I’ve bit the hand that willingly tried to feed me. Or that I’ve desecrated the temple. But how much of it is true? I haven’t got failings I can’t admit in the face of a true reproach, but how much of what is true, and who is alive to reproach me?
Can you put a word to it? Because I know all about it, better than you. Believe me. Voluble and unclean and all the rest of it. I did a ridiculous thing sometime ago, which I doubt if you’ll understand. I sold my better soul to God and he has paid me dividends.
I can survive to write out the new Psalms of David. Perhaps you are unaware that he is one of my ideal men. I have believed in Christ but that was purely voluntary. But as for the terrors, there’s no word for them yet. They’re something quite different. Lunatics believe in them and regard them as relevant and decisive. It’s a moot point.
But I believe there’s more to you and me than this abortion we called friendship. We misunderstood it and each other, and practically everything else.
You must have lost your true self if you can’t listen to what I’m saying and get something from it.
What I want you to get, above all, is that we ought to have the opportunity to blacken each other’s eye, if we decide it’s necessary. Also, that people like you and me, who aren’t an unmixed blessing, ought to survive a love affair without being vicious, stupid or blinded.
That’s it.
Mark remained still.
I suppose you’ve got something to say.
- Yes. Mark said, I have.
He turned from the wall and sat up.
- Yes, I think so.
He looked into the grate and across the room.
- The point is, you see -
He stretched and looked up at the ceiling.
- My trouble is, he said, that I have to convince myself that you don’t really consider me a cunt. At least I have to assume you don’t, before I can say anything at all.
So I’ll assume that you don’t, for the moment.
I’ve listened.
You see, I can appreciate, Pete, that you reserve the right to bestow contempt. So do I. I can also appreciate that a great deal of your time is spent trying to reconcile it with something else, which you consider as valuable.
But it seems to me that when it comes down to it, you inhabit a stronghold of contempt from which you can’t escape. You can reconcile in theory. You may believe it possible. But in fact everything is, and must be for you, cooked in your oven.
You can’t cook in anyone else’s oven.
You say friendships and whatnot have never been productive. Most of the time then, I was under a delusion. In truth you’ve never shared. You’ve been incapable. So I’ve been up the garden. I resent it. I thought there might have been at times a sharing, a meeting. I was wrong. And you knew it, always.
The point is, to what extent are you, in fact, responsible? Are you to be treated as responsible and concerned or not? I mean, what does concern you? Surely not your friends as they wish to be, but only in so far as they can fit your requirements. Where they fail to do so, contempt, by your own logic, is the only outcome. It’s their epitaph. They become for you an academic exercise in failure. Not because they themselves have necessarily failed, but simply that in attempting to retain what is their own, they have failed you.
You have no other criterion.
You’ve always known I was a lost cause, yet you’ve continued to knock on my door. Why? Because you considered me your equal? Not by a long chalk. It was because you didn’t really take me seriously. In your terms I was damned from the kickoff, beyond redemption. You couldn’t work your salvation on me as you might have done on Len and Virginia, so because I was outside your moral consideration association was permissible. You could use me as a shining example of the wrong way. As copy.
But I can see. There is another thing I can see. Don’t think I can’t. We have met. You and me. One time at a bus-stop, we were drunk. But then when you were alone? I can’t trust you when you’re alone.
It’s what you are alone that you must be in me. Or nothing. What’s the point, any longer, of playing a game? I can’t see any profit.
You talk of bones. What are the bones? That you’ve been a bloodsucker, and I think you’d do well to admit it.
We, the lot of us, have only been necessary to perform a caper in your pageant, to pay homage at your court. Listen. The function of a friend, that you would call a friend, must be that of an ambassador to yourself from yourself. A go-between. Then he’s a man of your soul. But enough’s enough.
We’ve all been your accomplices but mine is the grossest fault. I’ve let you get away with it for too long.
The point is, I’ve admired. I’ve admired you
on the warpath. I’ve stayed in the hunt because I’ve enjoyed killing with you, however many rats I may have smelt. Because that’s the sort of bloke, the sort of jackal I can be too. I smile, I think that’s a good smile, I look in the mirror to see what it’s like. So you never really got me on your kitchen staff. I played you at the same time. It’s all been a dirty doublecross. Sure I’ve used you.
But at the same time I know what’s been good. I know what’s been real, in despite of us both. I know what has stood, what part of the cheese won’t go bad. Because cohabitation brings forth, even in a monster with two heads, something sound in the body of the creature.
I lay the thing bare, but that can’t alter the fact that you have always had an irrevocable lodging in my house, and I don’t regret it. It remains so. But too often you’ve brought your own sheets, your own blankets, everything. You had to kip on your own terms. But you couldn’t change the furniture inside because I had my feet fixed. I know where I live. You’re not a fool. You knew I was as cunning. But with Virginia nothing could stop you. You may have lost a kingdom but it was your own destruction did it. You buggered the issue. I was needed. Do you know that? But I took nothing from you. It was all your own work.
You may have lost but I haven’t won. That’s what you want to get into your nut.
She needed a change of air. You exist, but just remember that so does she, in her own right. And I too, exist.
All right. I’m willing to meet you for a cup of tea. But I won’t be your Fool and I won’t be your Black Knight.
He stopped, sat back, waited.
- Well, Pete said.
His eyes screwed, he rubbed his mouth.
- Well, well, he said, that’s very interesting.
- If we are going to define what we are, and our territorial limitations, then I’m afraid I can’t honestly do it for myself. Being simpler and saner you may find the job within your scope.
I can’t say though how pleased I am that you do recognize my faults. I must believe that what you point out is a working deficiency, quite of some magnitude, but it’s one inevitable to the kind of way I have declared for myself.
I’ve always known that neither you nor Virginia were the gods of my inner sanctum. I had and have weighed you both as carefully and as honestly as I can. And I find that even in ordinary decencies you have been ignorant and unworthy, not even when I pushed you to it.
Experience is the testing ground. This one has shown I can survive and not shove the dead on other people. It has left both of you alive. See to it then. Buck your ideas up, because there’s an allpervading stink.
What you seem to say is that I let you down. Both of you prefer to blame me. I haven’t tried to make this a cause fatale, but if both of you don’t watch out it might very well become fatal, for both of you. It’ll be your death and your suffocation. Pass the word on. You can do her, and yourself, a much bigger favour than you’ve managed up till now.
Where does it all come from? Yes, I admit, to a great and overwhelming extent it comes from me. The whole thing is a child of my womb. I can apologize to you, but you alone could not forgive me. It is not in your power. This is what you must listen to. I cannot, it is sinful, to apologize for your faults.
You made of your friendship a tool to bludgeon me with and you went off and slept with Virginia. I feel very angry about this, not without cause. I would have avoided the subject because I was prepared to have you as a friend. I don’t believe - in fact I shan’t - hold rancour against you for it. If anything I can like you more. But let there be no doubt at all about where we stand. For this, by itself and alone, to me the virtue. Let me bring it into the open.
Up to this point and no more, I have been proved a wiser and a better person than any of you. I am, I think it, though you may not believe it, a god in my essential dimensions. Of course, I cannot be worshipped. I have to be lived with. But I am sick, nearly to death and to suicide, of this supposition by Len, by Virginia, and by you most of all, that I have anything at all to do with this cycle of love and despair that is essentially your motive and business. I haven’t. I can help you. I can pray for you. A prophet in his own country. But it’s ridiculous to think I can live with you.
You have all tried to be friends with me, and therefore for as long and as well as I can I shall be grateful for it. But if you get inside and eat my stomach I will always bite back - in spades.
I have been the longsufferer. You have done the jumping up and down on my belly, you have tried to bash my head in, have tried to infect my bloodstream, have tried to cut up my bowels for mincemeat. You have done the deserting, have been small and smaller, parasitic, strangers when I needed you. You have observed, never really been sympathetic. My firework exhibitions have amused you. I have laid myself on tap. There has been no reward but that which I expected. A lot of desecrating, bloodsucking talkers and natterers over cups of tea and the certainty of perishing by vanity, ignorance and moral suicide.
I will say that about some things you have been more or less on the mark.
If I am a god at all it is the god of futility and remorse. I have never done anything for you. I should like to. I will try. I’m awake. I’m wide awake.
You can take this or leave it. I think it, however, worthwhile to point out that a granary, if it has no wheat to crush, is bound to be destructive. I haven’t been hoodwinked about that. I will yet move worlds when I find my lever. Count yourself lucky, but keep a sense of proportion.
Of course all I have to do to destroy you is to leave you as you wish to be. I could lay a curse on you that would certainly find you out. But I have no wish to avenge myself. I have no need to curse you. There is no end to the objections of good sense. But insofar as the truth is mine so also is its power. That has always been so. So I can give you a tip. What you’ve got to do is move. While you’ve got the chance. You’re a stagnant pool. You have, quite frankly, the air of a man who is finished.
Your social faults don’t interest me, if I could trust you. But you ask too much when you want me to take them as credible. Your morality, your bedmanners, are something I no longer want to interfere in. It’s your stink. Carry it. But it’s your integrity that’s in question and you haven’t proved that you’re worth it. I am asking you to be honest. It was fear and anger led you to bed. A mess of it. It’s true that my integrity has vanished on many occasions. It was frustration and hate that did it. I had at all costs to survive, and I have bitten, cut and slashed with a good will and enjoyed doing it. It was a question of overriding justice. Did I, above everything, believe that my being killed might be not only an overwhelming disaster for me, but an irreplaceable lack in the sum total of human knowledge, and an irreparably lost opportunity for creating good? There is very little on my conscience about that. It’s all supposition.
I think you’ve made a fool of yourself over this bed business. It was a clangor. When the echoes of it die I hope you’ll be there to smile at the ruins. You won’t by thinking I am wrong. The damn thing will bounce up and give you such a crack in the bollocks you won’t know where it comes from.
But if this is the status quo of creation I’ll take no more bites out of anybody. The flesh is sour. I’ll go hungry. I’ve had many a laugh at the crumbs Len threw away. I’ve been alive to the comfort you’ve both tried to give. Let it be said, even if it damns me, that I appreciate it. But don’t let it blind us to the issue. You reproach me because I should be perfect. No. And I can’t be dallied out of my spot. Don’t entice me with just affection. I have more to offer of that than a dozen of you. Merely listen to the truth. It’s shaming to all of us but it may do some good.
You can see the fix I’m in. I’m ready to listen. I will listen intelligently. I will go and understand. Make a journey for it.
But I will not cut my suit entirely to measure you, on a pretext. In a spirit of trying most things are possible. For that reason you can go to hell. We’ll both toe the line. I’ll come as far as I can. If we can’t meet, t
ough luck. But so far as the truth is concerned, you have a lot farther to travel. If you don’t think it worth it, I’m sorry. It would be many miles of good road wasted.
In the past, I haven’t been able, or made it my habit, to speak the dog’s honest truth about me. This time I have. You have heard it.
Mark did not answer. After a few moments Pete stood up and walked to the window.
- You’ve got me, he said, acid and all. On the supposition that it had to be said I’ve said it.
Mark coughed and spat into the fireplace.
- I hope the acid hasn’t blinded you to the meat and salt.
- I think, Mark said, it has.
He struck a match and watched it burn.
- Right, Pete said. I’ll let myself out.
Thirty-one
They’ve stopped eating. It’ll be a quick getout when the whistle blows. All their belongings are stacked in piles. But I’ve heard nothing. What is the cause for alarm? Why is everything packed? Why are they ready for the off?
But they say nothing. They’ve cut me off without a penny.
And now they’ve settled down to a wide-eyed kip, crosslegged by the fire. It’s insupportable. I’m left in the lurch. Not even a stale frankfurter, a slice of bacon rind, a leaf of cabbage, not even a mouldy piece of salami, like they used to sling me in the days when we told old tales by suntime. They sit, chockfull. But I smell a rat. They seem to be anticipating a rarer dish, a choicer spread.
And this change. All about me the change. The yard as I know it is littered with scraps of catsmeat, pigbollocks, tincans, birdbrains, spare parts of all the little animals, a squelching squealing carpet, all the dwarfs’ leavings spittled in the muck, worms stuck in the poisoned shitheaps, the alleys a whirlpool of piss, slime, blood and fruitjuice.
Now all is bare. All is clean. All is scrubbed. There is a lawn. There is a shrub. There is a flower.
The Dwarfs Page 15