So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

“Oh, and it was an impressive natural phenomenon, certainly, but I felt above all that to cast such a shadow, there must be something terribly huge and silent behind me. My logic tells me the huge something must be my own planet—I understand this—but I feel now an idea of the size of that planet. I am balanced on an enormous surface, but it does have a limit, it is only a surface. While I watch I can see the evidence of its shape and movement darken the moon whole, then allow it to light again. Intellectually I was happy to accept the principles of eclipse, but to know them in my heart, from experience, was something I found more mystical than scientific and more frightening than comfortable. I do not think any one man should feel the reality of his globe quite so personally. This is how I felt then and how I feel now. I don’t want to fall.”

  “That’s wonderful, Martin.” His head moved very slightly as he tried to look up at me.

  “You’re remembering. That must be a good thing. All this is, is a panic attack. People have them. It’s not real.”

  “I feel it.”

  “Doesn’t make it real. I’m here, too, and I don’t feel it. I’ll be with you when you’re ready to sit up and we’ll take it from there. This is all very good. I bet you’ll remember who you are soon. Probably this was a little shock and I’m sorry I gave it to you, but it will turn out well in the long run.”

  Odd, the things I’ve ended up saying in my life. Today I think I would be less assured of my grip on the future and the turns it might take.

  In the park I was doing my best to be encouraging and was slowly able to coax Martin up and out of the park. It took us half an hour to make it all the way home, including a final slippery fumble at the front door as I tried to get the key in the lock left-handed. Martin kept my other arm locked round his waist.

  Once he was safely in the hallway, Martin bolted up the stairs to his room, calling a thank you over his shoulder that reached me along with the sound of his door locking.

  I went down into the kitchen. Before I turned on the light, I could see the last shine of Martin, still on my hands and deep in the cloth of my shirt. There was something not altogether unpleasant about that. I can think of such little incidents from time to time and consider them memories of something good.

  “Did you ask him?”

  That was Liz speaking, following me into the kitchen and delivering a friendly blow across my shoulders as she picked up a teaspoon and headed for the fridge. You haven’t met her yet, but this doesn’t make her a bad person, only one it’s difficult to meet. I often wonder why and how I know her at all. We share the same house, that’s been true for a long time, but she has developed being absent into her principal character trait. This can give her an air of changeability—between sightings she may gain or lose weight, develop a suntan, put on earrings. To be brief, Liz is the kind of person you talk about because she is so consistently unavailable for talking to. But then, you’ll have noticed that yourself, by now.

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  “What? Oh, ask him about the rent?”

  “Mm. And all the bills and being careful with the immersion heater and noting down phone calls and all of that stuff.”

  “Yes, he did sort of fall through the net, as far as house rules go. But I’m sure, well, probably Pete filled him in.”

  Liz closed the fridge door with her foot and began to eviscerate a yoghurt.

  “He’s messy in the bathroom. Not just messy—offensive.”

  “No. He was messy, but Arthur sorted him out. It was more confusion than not being tidy. He’s scrupulous now. I mean, he seems to be a tidy person.”

  “Okay. But he needs to know about the bills—we don’t want to end up with someone like that pal of Arthur’s.”

  “No. He was a bit much.”

  “Never mind a bit much. If I ever see him again, I’ll cut his bloody head off. That guy was a vampire. I kept expecting to come across Arthur handing him over his kidneys to sell.”

  “Only one kidney. He’d need the other.”

  “Yes, but this is Arthur we’re talking about. He’d have been sorry he couldn’t have handed over three. You will talk to Martin, though, won’t you? I don’t know him at all and he makes Arthur nervous. I thought you might have told him while you were both outside.”

  The observant type, Liz, very hot on spotting our ins and outs. Only when she is here, of course. Perhaps she goes away to get a rest.

  “I was going to ask him, but then he was ill. Well, not ill exactly—a bit agoraphobic.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him, though?”

  “No, I don’t think so—he’s just a bit sensitive.”

  “Gay, you mean.”

  “Sensitive. It’s allowed for straight men to be sensitive now, I’ve read it in the magazines. Not that I know what Martin is, either way. It’s not very obvious and it’s none of my business.”

  “Sensitive.”

  “Sensitive. But don’t worry, it’s not infectious.”

  “If you’re implying that I am insensitive, you can fuck off. I’m in love, of course I’m sensitive.”

  “Adolf Hitler was in love. Think about Eva Braun.”

  “And all those Alsatians. Exactly. He painted in watercolours, too. Very sensitive.”

  “It’s just that we don’t see that side of you because you’re away so much—being in love.”

  “Well, you’ll be seeing a little more of me than usual while Frank calms down again. He will not understand that being in love and playing houses are not the same thing.”

  “Men, eh?”

  “Hmm.”

  And all through this conversation I knew what you know—

  Martin isn’t Martin.

  Somewhere, there must be a real Martin.

  The more time passes, the closer to us the true Martin must come.

  As far as I can tell, our Martin has no money.

  Without money, I do not know a way that he can stay here.

  Our Martin is upstairs and may be lonely, or disturbed, or ill, or something else I cannot yet imagine.

  I would like to tell you that I went upstairs to see how he was, just tapped on his door to let him know that he wasn’t alone, but I did nothing like that because I didn’t know how. I had no appropriate form of action or speech. The rest of that day passed without a sight of Martin, or a thought of him on my part. I think I watched a video with Liz and then turned in early, nothing more. I paused a while on the landing near his door when I was going to bed and then I walked on. I am not a good host, even now.

  I have a feeling about that—I’m guilty. Guilt is of course not an emotion in the Celtic countries, it is simply a way of life—a kind of gleefully painful social anaesthetic. And like the dear, freefloating psychic ether it is, guilt pours around us, always readily available for no especial reason at all, but sometimes I do experience guilt because I am guilty. I am guilty because I wish I had done better by Martin and I would do differently now, given the opportunity. Which is, of course, the one thing time will always take away.

  MY JOB. I said I would tell you about it, so here you are. I talk for a living. Don’t act, don’t move, don’t sing, only talk. I am a professional enunciator.

  Really. Someone has to do it. Radio prayers and poems, British voices for American faces, neutral voices for criminal faces—terroristically digitised—jolly encouragements to purchase who cares what and, of course, calm accounts of current chaos, who cares where. I’ve tried a little of almost everything in the vocal line because this is all I can do. I don’t have any skills or talents, so within a very tiny field I try to be inexhaustibly flexible. Doing what everyone else can, only better.

  For a long time I had an idea that most other jobs were not like this. At school, I was taught about trades and training and apprenticeships and the serving of time, during which lucky people would learn how to make things or think things, or both. Never having known what I wanted to think or make, I drifted into speaking instead. I was a failure.

/>   Now I find that it is no longer admirable to make or to think. People take modules and courses and options, or don’t, and then, in either case, they try to be inexhaustibly flexible. Just like me. Failures.

  Sometimes I feel as if my generation was galloped one morning over a huge, metaphorical employment cliff and some of us were saved immediately, scooped up by angels or helicopters or convenient safety nets and given a useful and meaningful life. Some of us bounced a little further on, had to scramble to avoid the full drop. Then right down, just before we crossed the line into unprofitability and disaster, there were people like me, lodged in funny but quite comfortable places, overlooking the enormous mess beneath.

  I would like to say that I am lucky in the life I have but my good fortune is so obviously arbitrary that it can also make me rather tense, if not actually guilty, or troubled by impending doom. Will they take it away or make me pay—for all this undeserved good fortune? That’s something very like the question I always want to ask. In many situations, but most especially when I’m at work. At the time I first met Martin, my principal employer was a local radio station and every time I appeared there I would be drenched in my expectations of dreadful discovery—surely, in the end, they would find me out, throw me out. The longer I was successful, the more imminent my failure, that’s how my logic went.

  Which all sounds rather bleak when I fully intended to say that I really enjoy what I do absolutely. That’s the truth. It tastes nice. I place something invisible into the air, just so, give it a tangible shape and somewhere, someone, a stranger, will get a word and the feeling in that word—both of them at once and because of me. I can do that.

  Now, when Martin found out about all this—and the broadcasting, in particular—he was very impressed. He didn’t have a clear understanding of my position, or its limitations, and so he became very enthusiastic about its possibilities.

  “Eh, but this is wonderful!”

  I should say that we had this conversation some time after our outing to the park. In the intervening period, several things had changed—most importantly, Martin had begun to remember who he was. His real name and all that. He was becoming more talkative, larger.

  “This is what you do? All the time? For your work?”

  I nodded and eased down another gulp of fruit tea and honey. The glands in my neck had swollen to the size of apricots and were having the same effect as a strangler’s thumbs. All morning my eyes seemed to have been bulging and there was a raw tension every time I blinked. But I would be all right if I didn’t say anything until I had to, until I was at work. I would manage, follow the drill—a speaker knows how to look after a voice.

  What I didn’t know was that I had an abcess nestling in my throat and not just a cold or a ’flu. I would hold out, expecting the whole thing to pass, but becoming more ratty and feverish by the hour. I don’t like to be ill, ever, but more importantly, at that time I felt I had no choice but to keep working. Things had been rather thin in the speaking line and I wanted to keep what work I had.

  At night I would no longer know where I was and in the daytime reality would seem just the same as always but an eighth of an inch to one side. Everything I can remember from that time is smirred with confusion and slightly out of order. Which is why I’m telling you this bit first, even though perhaps you would rather hear about who Martin turned out to be. I don’t mean to keep you waiting—I would love to tell you who he is right now— but I can only seem to focus on this particular afternoon and conversation. I may remember it so clearly because it was the first time I noticed Martin becoming more of himself. He was smiling and his shoulder-blades lay smoother to his back.

  “Wonderful! You can speak to an entire city and the province around it immediately. No matter what you intend them to know, they will know it, hear it as if you were speaking their thoughts. There you have a position of remarkable power.”

  I shook my head, which he either interpreted as false modesty on my part, or simply ignored. In half an hour I could take my soluble painkiller without risking fatal damage to my liver. Meanwhile the throttling in my throat was making my patience suicidally short.

  “Ah, but that would be genuinely a wonderful thing. There would be no bounds on one’s influence, no record of one’s words; neither cost nor delay and no possibility of censorship because no one can censor a word in the air. And you yourself would be quite invisible. Marvellous.”

  I shrugged with one hand.

  “I have, for example, been giving madness my consideration for quite some time. The lunatic in particular has long been an enthusiasm of mine. You could ask almost anyone who knew me and they would bear witness to my close association with all varieties of lunacy.

  “Imagine then my delight in finding that your own state and public functionaries not only share but excel my humble fondness for the insane.”

  He had begun to pace, but stopped to grin over at me, slipping his hands comfortably into his pockets.

  “Do you realise I could say this and—PHAOU—it goes, without a drop of ink, everywhere.

  “Eh! So I can tell myself I am truly fortunate to discover I live in times of such genius. Precisely when your world and existence were so dull and commonplace and pitiful, your government— whom you have the wonderful opportunity to elect—has chosen to empty out the madhouses on to the streets. Now everything about our lives can be a question of interest and debate. Does a tree grow upwards, or does the ground recede? Who can be sure? Do I cast up my eyes in the night and see stars, or the eyes of demons, or cherubim, or God’s silver buttons or horse’s teeth? When the world is peopled by madmen (and madwomen) even the simplest matter can float merrily away from any divine intention into a sea of Jesuitical debate.

  “I can only view my future here with delight for now every day will become new and unpredictable. How am I to know, among the people I meet, who are the lunatics and who are their keepers? Who are the lunatics without keepers? The lunatics who are keepers? Will the next stranger I encounter fall on my throat, or shake my hand, or offer to buy my soul? Adrift in this new community of the mad, I could be murdered or married at any hour of the day or night and no one would see any difference between the two. How exquisitely interesting.

  “And what if the country should become alive with superstition and dread? This will surely provide cheap and ready entertainment for the otherwise idle. And what if some liberated souls should take to devouring infants at the roadside, or mashing in every fifteenth skull they see. We have people enough to spare and barely the work, or the bread, to support them. Our only other recourse to prevent rioting and sedition would be the gathering of men for war—an admirably insane but very costly exercise.

  “Who will be sure, in that Babel of opinion, that infanticide and the other noble forms of slaughter are not the most virtuous forms of enterprise? I can foresee that we will embrace them as excellent means of saving weak or innocent souls from the hardships and temptations they might otherwise meet and succumb to in life.

  “But how will your government survive when this supremacy of the demented is fully achieved? Let me tell you, gentle listener, it will walk among us finally unafraid to be itself. These are the men and women who are paid to improve your health by removing your physicians, to educate your scholars by removing their books, to shelter your people by removing their homes, to guard your souls by destroying your faith, to cherish the truth by hiding it in petty ignorance, who imprison the blameless, free the guilty, nourish your poor with starvation and let loose senility, terror and confusion in your streets because this will be to the benefit of you all. We are mad to suffer them and they are, most assuredly, true paragons of madness, every one.

  “They are, however, to be blessed for taking evil from the land. Your language is turning pleasantly on its head and I find myself unable to remember the meaning of that small and singular word evil. I wonder more and more how there could ever have been such a wicked term to describe the glorious conduct
of mankind. Surely, if there were evil in this world then the good would rise up against it, they could not bear its presence and power in their lives, they would condemn it, name it, drive it out. And as, everywhere in your country, there is only peace and amiable concord, one vast silence of agreement in the midst of an apparent turmoil, I am finally reassured that there is no evil. There is only the unfamiliar, and to this I may always become accustomed. At last, in my mind, all becomes good and well for the lack of any other definition.”

  He paused, his palms caught on the turn, head back. When I nodded, he flinched back down into a simple standing position, utterly still.

  “Of course, I would have prepared what I would say. I would wish to combine a certain immediate fire with a smoothness in the flow of speaking.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “I have offended you. That was not my intention. I am sorry. I never have seemed to be content with anyone who has decided to govern me. I may, even on this point, still have an argument with God.” He tugged at the hair over his forehead and began to move for the door.

  “No.”

  “I can go now, this is not a difficulty.”

  “No. Just. I can’t speak. My throat. Saving it for later.” Catarrh was making me slightly deaf and wadding my facial resonators tight. Even aiming the words around the pain, I sounded terrible—thin, flat, breaking up across long vowels.

  “Ah, I do apologise.” He pinched his hands together with a worried little flutter. “There are times when I become too . . .”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, yes, you are aware of this by now. You will be able to, ahn, perform, today?” I made a praying motion. “I do hope so also. What you do offers such opportunities, they carried me along for a while.” He kneeled beside my chair, a finger at his lips. “Nod if I can tell you a secret? Only nod, please, I don’t intend to cause any further discomfort.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No one knows this. No one alive. I can remember lying with a friend of mine on grass—we had been swimming and were letting the sun make us dry. Physically I could not have felt more at my ease, but I had something cold under my heart, it seemed there was only space inside my ribs and not the material of a man. I turned to my friend and I heard myself ask him, if you can imagine, ‘Do you think I will be famous? Will I truly be celebrated? When I am dead?’