10
What is it that lasts the distance? he wonders. The small stuff, maybe, paintings he has seen and not forgotten. There’s a canvas he saw once, the size of a ladies handkerchief, in a show brought to Rome from the Hermitage, by Rouault, and it’s stayed with him like a jewel glimpsed through a window. A single, appropriated jewel, because wherever it hangs it’s his. And there are paintings he carries with him, from house to home, and objects, pocket-sized sometimes. On the back of a miniature he once found the words He who is not consumed by love grows cold. The truth is that he has always loved artists. He has been lucky. His art has loved him back.
1
He’s first aware of work as absence, his father’s absence. Following that, as intrusion, living behind and above the grocer’s shop his mother buys to gain her freedom. She takes on a woman to look after the children and her house, and a second woman to help her in the shop. Thus work breeds work. One day, perched on the edge of the bath, he tells his father he wants to be an entomologist. His father cuts himself shaving. Wiping the blood off, he says, Insects? That’s dirty work. His mother is telling the woman who helps in the shop to cover the bacon before the flies can lay their eggs on it. He dreams about entomology, spreading his wings.
2
They tell the woman in the pub the pop bottles come from the back of her parents’ cellar. The woman shakes her head. Madam’s family don’t buy their drink from here, she says. They’re far too high and mighty. The girl is pulling at his sleeve but he won’t give up. They’ve worked all morning, scrubbing bottles clean. These must have belonged to the people before, he says. In that case, the woman smirks, there’s no deposit. I never charged them. She stares down, her eyes like dirty stinking wells for them to drown in. He separates three bottles from the others. These are mine, he says, from my house. I want my nine pence. He reaches up his hand.
3
When he thinks about his future, work plays no part. He thinks about places and people, about words and faces and foreign signs, flavours that remind him of no food he has ever tasted, of men and their bodies, and it is larger, more intense and less predictable than any work could ever be. At school, his careers officer suggests he join the army. He’s scornful. He chooses the least vocational subject possible to read at university. He wins a scholarship, receives a grant. Sustenance falls from the air. On his gap year, he signs on, makes no plans, preferring freedom. His life unrolls before him, waiting to receive his feet. He’s given the job of signing other people on.
4
He works in a tax office one summer, a view of bare hills from the window. He finds a corner in the archive from which to blow smoke into the air. Later, he works in another office, a shop, and then a stall. He sells fruit to foreigners at inflated prices, steals from the till. He spends what he steals in shops he will never work in, shops where handsome men offer him clothes he could never, otherwise, afford. He buys himself a snakeskin belt as thin as a whip from a shop called Castigation. He eats in fashionable restaurants, with pop stars at adjacent tables. Days later, he is scrubbing fat from oven trays in their endless, echoing kitchens.
5
There are jobs that lead nowhere but out of where he is. He applies to build schools in the Congo, but is not accepted. He’s offered a job in the deserts of Arabia, deserts he will irrigate in some mysterious fashion, but his sponsor dies unexpectedly. He’s called for interview by a shipping line, but gets drunk in a dockside pub and is fucked by a sailor between two bins, missing his appointment. He applies to teach in a school in another country, and is interviewed by a mad woman with a mink, who takes him on. Soon he is the only person in the room who speaks English. His students stare at him. He sets the timer and begins.
6
Places in which people work include factories, offices, restaurants, schools and fields. He has worked in all of these, except the first. He has learned he would rather work than not, and wonders if this would be true if work weren’t paid. In economic theory, work is divided into the production of goods and services, but he’s never produced a good that can be bartered or sold in his life, unless he himself is that good. He has proffered his services in more ways than one; his body cut and trimmed to fit. He reads about alienation and wonders, Is this me? as he dips his hands into soapy water or takes a call or adjusts his mouth to suit.
7
One boss treats him like an adopted son, feeds him and reads his poems and sacks him because workers’ rights are nothing beside a mother’s love and she has paid him with her heart. Another boss promises to listen to his complaint and do nothing but listen; days later, the man betrays his trust and destroys a friendship with a colleague. A third boss holds a gun to his head. It seems the workplace has deep, unspoken loyalties but sometimes it is hard to know what they are; they are bonds and boundaries, and he feels like the honey bee in the web of the spider, a web so large the spider can labour within it and not be seen.
8
He wishes he had been a dancer. He would like to have been light-footed, hard-muscled, stripped down to sinew and bone and sweat, able to carry another man across a stage as though there were nothing in the world that could not be lifted, his body an instrument of his will, his will the instrument of an art that has life in that moment and no other, the weight and the weightlessness enhancing and denying each other within the circle of a single blue-white spotlight, and, beyond that, darkness and silence. He would like to have been tired and aching and fit for purpose. He would like to have woken up alone and found himself surrounded by roses and applause.
9
For each day worked there is a price to pay, but no one has told him what it is, nor where it goes, nor whose purpose it serves. It’s a slow drip that might be used to torture him if it wasn’t so benign, so inevitable, such a trivial amount it’s barely noticed. It’s taken, a drop from a vein on the inside of the arm, or gradually scraped from the softer tissue of the mouth or the surface of the tongue; it might be a hair of the head or the stomach, a particle of nail so small it disappears into the wax as soon as it’s dipped. Until the wax hardens and the doll he is is forged.
10
His work is the only thing that counts. One work after another until they are works, collected, his name on the spine. He had a friend who began his collected works as a boy by writing the contents page, beginning with juvenilia, which he set himself to compose; but his heart wasn’t in it. Already, the real work had been done. The one true work is the one that works something out, uncertain what it is, working in darkness, working the inside out. Outside the circle of light is the darkness and silence of a mine and there is no telling what the mine may hold. What’s mine is yours. There is no sense to work but in the doing.
1
He’s sitting in the back of the car with his mother and sister. His godfather, in the front beside his father, who is driving, is singing a song he’s never heard before. His godfather has a baritone voice, he finds out when he learns the names of voices, and he is singing about a kid with a drum and the building of towers, and about railroads, and about dimes. He wants to know what dimes are but his mother tells him to hush. And then there is hell, and a long word that sounds like hankydoodledum, which makes no sense. He had no idea that his godfather’s voice could go so low. He feels like crying, he can’t say why.
2
He is part of the choir in a village school so small there are only two classes, and one large ever-hungry cast-iron stove. It is just before Christmas and he has been chosen to be the king who carries frankincense to the infant Jesus. He wanted to sing the king who bears myrrh, its bitter perfume. He is sulking. The infant Jesus is a girl doll in a straw-lined basket, wearing his christening dress, lent by his mother. There will be real animals, they’ve been told, on the day, but he’s sceptical. When his turn comes to sing, his voice breaks on a deity nigh and his teacher, carrying coal to the stove, says no wonder the fire’s gone out.
3
His aunt is living w
ith them, for reasons that aren’t clear. In the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, is an upright piano, and his sister is sitting on the stool beside his aunt, who is fine and dry, and speaks in a different way, more clipped and flat than the rest of them. She is his father’s sister and his sister is his sister, which means that they will all grow up. There is no escape. It is all a question of practice and application, his aunt says, and his sister nods, and he understands practice but not application, unless it applies to glue, and belonging to something older and flatter than himself, and as hard to learn.
4
Out of the blue, his favourite aunt buys a record player for them both, a grey and crimson box with a handle on one side. They each choose an EP, his sister opting for Freddie and the Dreamers, while he picks out the first Rolling Stones EP. He plays it constantly, dancing in front of the mirror, his lips and hips thrust out, pouting hands shaking imaginary maracas. Money, he sings to himself. Give me money. He is driven by need as Mick Jagger is, he can see it already in his eyes, and wrists. He is eleven years old and dancing. He dances for his mother and her friends, before the banked-up fire, their amusement a million notes away.
5
Normally he’s in bed by half past eight but tonight is a special night and he stays up until ten because the whole world is watching. He is one of four hundred million, although he doesn’t know this. What he knows is that there, in the global studio, someone is keeping his place warm for him. By the time they have finished singing he knows the words, which are as easy to remember as words from a nursery rhyme, and he sings them to himself. He lies in bed. Love is all you need, he sings. The next day, in the back row of a school bus on its way to the Royal Show, he sings the entire song, note-perfect.
6
He is watching Eartha Kitt being carried onto the stage of the London Palladium, curled on a leopard-skin chaise longue, borne high on the shoulders of muscular men in loincloths, to purr ‘Old Fashioned Millionaire’. He is learning about glamour, and illicit wealth, and desirability, and all of it is a secret to everyone else, his secret. He is learning about the audacity of rhyme, which marries ‘in the back’ and ‘Cadillac’ and makes them one. Years later, in a discotheque in Rome, he hears the same voice growl ‘Where is my Man’, and he realises he’s been waiting for her all this time. He’s been waiting for the chaise longue and the men. He’s been waiting for Malibu. Capri.
7
He is with his closest school-friend and they are becoming cultured by taking whatever the world can offer them. They have seen Mother Courage with the school, and Coriolanus in the round in modern dress, and raga-jazz fusion. They have hitchhiked a hundred miles to watch Tyrannosaurus Rex and The Nice, and a little less to see Fairport Convention and Soft Machine. Their tastes are broad, and they would like them to be broader. They travel to Manchester for Wagner. Dizzy, exhausted, they perch a hundred feet above a stage where helmeted women have been singing about the twilight of their gods for what feels like hours. At the second interval, they admit it. They have had enough. They dive.
8
So when did music become background? At school, he ordered LPs he’d only read about, dreaming their sleeves like tattoos of nationhood. He sat in their garaged car each Sunday to worship John Peel in holy peace. He wept when David Ackles sang ‘Down River’. He studied NME each week, and spent his grant at Andy’s Record Stall, and loathed Led Zeppelin and adored Lou Reed and Loudon Wainwright. He measured his ever-changing upside-down heart against Bowie and Diana Ross. He queued in the cold for John Cale, his breath Antarctic cloud. He danced to Kraftwerk in trans-European discos, and George McCrae, and there was no end to it, his boat was rocking, there was no end to the music.
9
He’s standing in a supermarket in Rome when he hears Joni Mitchell singing ‘Ethiopia’ over the tinny speakers. Is that when it happened? His hands in the freezer, reaching for calamari or some other luxury item. If music is the food of love, then canned music is the bolted snack, the hamburger after the weekend binge, refined carbohydrates, an almost immediate sense of emptiness. One fart of music and it’s gone, and there is all the noise of the world outside the store, its traffic and brutal, atonal indifference. Children are dying, he thinks, his taste for music altered, adulterated, as the strands of it are woven into the tackier fabric of the market, from which he’d imagined it immune.
10
Noise greets them as they leave the bus and walk down the hill towards the square, which is filled with trees and surrounded by tourist bars. They sit outside the smallest bar with glasses of soda, the sea at their feet. The sound of the waves is drowned out by cicadas neither of them can see. The source of the music is always invisible, he thinks, and he sips his slowly warming soda and waits for a moment’s silence, an intermission, as though absence were the uninvited, welcomed intruder. The sound, he’s been told, is produced by the friction of thigh against abdomen, but he could easily have been misinformed. They wait for a taxi to take them somewhere quiet.
1
The bedroom overlooks the garden, which must be where it has come from. He lies on his side, his face towards the moonlight, watching the curtain move in the breeze. He wants the window shut, but his mother and father want it open. There is another bed behind him, but he isn’t scared of that. His teddy bear is soft against his chin. The curtain is shifting a little and this might be how it enters the room, passing from outside to inside in tiny particles scattered in the air, confetti, dust, as small as dust until it settles on the chair he dare not look at, and builds into the form of a man, waiting as he is waiting.
2
He is standing in front of his mother’s wardrobe, staring into the mirror. He shouldn’t be in here by himself, but he isn’t alone. Behind him is his uncle, but not his real uncle. A man he has never seen before today. The others are downstairs, eating salmon and cucumber sandwiches, but he is upstairs in his parents’ bedroom with this man, who is taller than his father and has too much hair, who is standing close behind him and staring into his eyes through the glass, as he is staring into his uncle’s eyes so as not to see the hand on his chest, holding him in place, and the other hand with the open razor at his neck.
3
The path leads into the churchyard from the road, high hedges on each side, brambles and yew. It’s just wide enough for a bicycle, but bicycles aren’t allowed. They walk along it single file. It’s cooler than everywhere else, as though a cloud has covered it. There are stories about the path, and about the churchyard, and he believes them, but only when he’s alone. He’s ten years old, too old to admit he believes in ghosts. The night they get up when their parents are at a party to meet at the mouth of the path they see a white shape moving before them, dragging a chain. They turn and run as it bleats behind them, gurgling like drains.
4
The house is deserted. It’s the house they found the empty bottles in, the ones they took to the pub. Downstairs is the green-stained scullery, and the room with the fireplace as large as the wall, which reminds him of a story he’s read about a wall that eats the room. There is a bad smell about the place, of dead birds and of something deeper, not dead. They comb the rooms for booty, without success, before going upstairs. The steps are broken in places, but he reaches the top. She’s waiting below as he walks into the first room, and then the second, the bad smell stronger all the time. A noise comes from the farthest room. A snuffling.
5
They are stories he reads at night, using a torch beneath the sheets, when the rest of the house is dark. His father has built him a bed above his desk, so he’s raised above the room, but none of this matters as he turns the pages of his paperback of horror, each story more awful than the one before. Years will pass and he will still remember the body of the rapist transformed into a monster by a revengeful father and his scalpel, and the gape of the famished wall, and the skittering of the tumour that roams the victim’s body at will. There is an eyeball in his palm. The light flic
kers on, then off. His heart stops.
6
It’s during their walking tour of western Scotland. They are holed up in the north-westernmost youth hostel of the British Isles, a gull’s spit from Cape Wrath. Among the hostellers a fierce-browed woman is reading a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories. She has a red pen in her hand and, now and again, with a stifled grunt, she circles something in the text. When she leaves the room to pee, he can’t resist. He sneaks a look to see what she’s been marking. The word she’s ringed, over and over, with a heavy hand, is blood. He drops the book, as though scalded. That night, in his bottom bunk, he feels a fumbling at his ankle. He screams.
With a Zero at its Heart Page 5