“Martin, Martin? Can I help you?” He opened his eyes. “It’s all difficult just now—seems that way—but it needn’t be, I’m sure. Something. We’ll do something.” He coughed. “Are you ill?”
“No. I think I am not. I wish I were ill.”
“You’ll have to help me with that, I don’t know what you mean.”
“I have a number of choices I can make. Now I really do apologise for this.” He waved his hands over himself, as if he had become a problem, something to motion away. “Perhaps I am too tired to be capable of thinking.”
“Try and see.”
“I have been trying!”
Even as he was shouting his hands were signalling, dispersing any offence, lifting in surrender.
“I am sorry. I feel too much alone and when I am alone, I am afraid and more than a little impatient. I have been trying to think, do believe me. And I have a number of choices. Either I am mad or in some other way very ill and disturbed, or I am dead.”
“Dead? You mean when you were hurt?”
“Hurt?”
“The . . . the scars. I’m sorry, Arthur mentioned . . .”
“Scars? Oh . . . oh no, I remember that. When those happened.” He almost smiled. “At least I believe I remember that— you see?” He slapped at his forehead. “If I can remember and what I remember is true, then I was injured as part of the business of a war (two little disagreements with arms) and I would rather this never happened again, but I didn’t die then, that didn’t kill me. My difficulty is the time, I mean time . . . time must have moved . . . Where have I been for all of this time? Where have I been?”
He seemed at the edge of something again, his mouth moving uncertainly, but he swallowed, rubbed at his cheeks with both hands. Turning quickly to peer at one corner of the room and then at me. “Do you know, I wanted to live to be a hundred? It seemed a very neat, a very memorable number. I don’t look to be a hundred, though, do I?”
“No.”
“How old, then?”
“I don’t know, I’m bad at ages. Maybe forty.”
“Not even that. Actually. Tell me, so that I can see if I am sane. If I begin at the very beginning to ask you where I am. This is the Earth, yes? This planet?”
“Yes.”
“This is a globe which revolves on its axis once every day of twenty-four hours and also each year makes a circuit of the sun.”
“Yes.”
“Accepted knowledge? Fact?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good.” He seemed a touch disappointed that his information had come as no surprise. “No argument there.”
“We are in Europe?”
“That’s a matter of opinion, but geographically speaking, yes.”
“And we are how many years after the birth of Christ at this point?”
He avoided my eyes.
“One thousand nine hundred and ninety-three.”
“One thousand nine hundred and ninety-three. And the calendar is?”
“The calendar.”
“What kind of calendar? Has it been changed?”
“No, not for . . . I don’t know. Hundreds of years. I can’t remember, it’s named after a Pope.”
“Naturally. Unmarried women, prisoners and popes—always have an interest in time. But which Pope? Julian? Gregory? Who?”
“Well, he sounds familiar. I mean, I really don’t know, but we’ve been using this one for ages.”
“Then I am the loneliest man in the world.”
Which is the perfect place to end this section because it looks so conclusive on the page. Except that we didn’t finish there, we kept on, two unfictional people speaking in the emptiness of a small room. If I could, I would write his voice so that you could feel it the way I did, dark and simple. Also good, very pleasant to hear— except for the chill of confusion under it that left him speaking from somewhere I couldn’t touch.
“I have no one now.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Believe me I would rather not, but spoken out, it sounds much less terrible than it does here in my mind. These are thoughts I do not wish to be alone with. I am out of my time or out of my mind, which seems such a simple choice, but I cannot make it. Tell me, did you enjoy when you were a child?”
“Oh, I . . . parts of it.”
“Yes. I can always recognise another—another partly happy child. I enjoyed parts of my childhood also. Do you know what I thought of this morning? No, of course you don’t, I am inviting you to be with me in this, not really asking a question.”
“I know. I’m with you.”
“I’m glad. I am glad of that.” He snatched a look at me to underline his meaning. “Well, I watched the sun move across these boards here on the floor this morning. I watched dawn opening and then the movement of the light. And I remembered sunlight hanging in a plum tree, caught in round little yellow plums, making them shine like liquid.
“Then I am out in the gold of the sun and running along a path away from water. The path is made of big, hot stones and passes a wooden door with a huge lock in it and eyes. Mmm, oh yes, I see a door with eyes. Someone has cut them, up high in the wood, sad sloping-down eyes, black. If I was tall enough I could see through them into the black space beyond, but I can’t, I can only look up at them, looking down at me. I was always afraid of the eyes in the door. It was the only bad thing in all of that place. I would—Bouaff—kick it when I ran past, being brave. I was a very brave boy, always. The way you can be brave if you’re used to getting only partly happy and very afraid. You have good intervals in your past like this?”
“I suppose.”
“No, you must know.”
“All right then, yes I do.”
“But are you sure they ever happened? Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“You see, I don’t want to be sure. I would rather have lost my past. I wish it was gone. Can I ask you an unusual question?”
“Well, why not, it’s been that kind of day.”
“Do you believe in heresy?”
“Believe in it? Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not even sure that I know what it means. In fact I don’t.”
“That you go against God. That it is possible for a person to offend God. Heresy.”
“You weren’t ever a priest, were you?”
“Ha! No, no I was . . . hardly that. I think you could say that I had a certain difficulty with belief. I have always found it hard to believe in most things. For example, my own existence appears very unlikely to me at the moment. But I did think I was with God, I never thought I was alone or against . . . not against. How can a person be against God? I am such a small thing in the universe, I can’t think I could be a disturbance at any significant point. It would be like a moth offending a mountain: ridiculous.”
“I’m sure.”
“To let you understand at least a little, I can say that I was a soldier for some time. Yes? Arthur told you, I thought he would. Well, on the edge of a battle, in that thick, heavy waiting when you watch for tiny signs to tell you what will happen and such and such a buckle must be fastened in the right way, the right order, fitted with all the other orders and habits and words that meant you didn’t die the last time. It’s a very secret place, to be with men there, their lives burning away into moments. They are all here and now and love and quiet. In that place, I would pray. Or, rather, a friend of mine would pray and I would listen.
“I would believe him absolutely. He told me:
“ ‘We make our allegiance to the Kingdom of God. We are soldiers of the regiments of the Kingdom of God and our lives are of those regiments and no others. We may never betray God’s Kingdom or commit any treason against it for the sole amend of treason is death, the death of our souls. Our souls are soldiers in the regiments of God. We are of God and with God and God must surely keep us for we are true.’
“I can feel myself kneeling in the grass with my hands hold
ing other men’s hands and all of us holding those words. A sour wind would rise from another world and blow in about our faces and we would shiver, kiss, embrace, walk away and be ready to kill other men.
“Sometimes I would say the prayer in my head to myself, or I would make poems. Right in the thickened red heart of siege, there is nothing like a poem for giving light, a pleasant kind of transportation, freedom. But now I don’t know about freedom, certainly about freedom from death which it was my intention to cultivate. I didn’t die then. I believed it was a good thing that I didn’t die. Now—”
He let his eyelids fall, exhaled. “I am sorry, I have a terrible ache in my head.”
Which made me know what I should do. When somebody has a headache, I know what to do. You walk up and cup your hand at the back of their neck and you feel the heat of their blood under their skin and you support them. Tell them to close their eyes. Tell them not to speak. Hold them. Press at the forehead and temples with no more than your fingertips. Watch their face clear and empty. I’ve done that for a lot of people, my mother taught me how. It’s easy and emotionally neutral, doesn’t mean a thing.
“Thank you.”
“Sssh.”
“Why do you think I am here?”
“Sssh. I don’t know. But you need to go to sleep. I let you talk too long. We’ll sort things out in the morning. No, don’t say anything.”
He swallowed and smiled and slowly, said, “I would only like to say that I do believe that God still keeps me, because I was true. I was Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac and I was true.”
So, there you are. I was the first one he told it and now I’ve told you. Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac. Odd name. A big name— literally big on any page and enlarged by familiarity and a certain kind of popular use. I must say I didn’t quite know what he meant by using it. I didn’t quite understand. I intended to ask him if he’d mind repeating what he’d said, but he was drifting out to sleep, already beyond me. I rubbed my throat and swallowed, looked down at his sleeping face, heavy in the shallow slope of pillows. I moved my hands away from him, from the delineation of his forehead, from the familiar pattern formed out from his particular bones and I made sure that I didn’t disturb him.
When I drew the door closed behind me, left him alone, I felt a peculiar constriction in my chest. Even as I prepared myself for work, swallowed the last of my soluble pills, there was an unfamiliar tightness keeping snug under my scarf. I blew my nose. It didn’t help.
AT WORK IT was quiet, it always is. I sat at a felted table, in a muffled room defended by two sets of double doors. The doors at work are smooth and heavy and peel softly away from their frames, they are impossible to rush through or fluster. Nothing disturbs the heart of the station, nothing you can hear, in any case.
Every thirty minutes, I was required to tell a fat, black goose-necked microphone about traffic irregularities, mutilated children, the wreckage of peace in Europe and the weather. I felt the syllables warm and open against my teeth, I licked and pushed and breathed them, kissed them goodbye. It was almost moving, even with a crippled throat.
But in the intervals between? I sipped on my thermos of honey and lemon and thought of the night that carried my voice. Potentially I was going with it everywhere, through walls and under buildings, into all the little corners of my city and several more beyond. Very few people were actually listening of course—other back-shifty workers, the taxi-cruising, night-watching types, professional seducers and policemen, the lone insomniacs.
Whenever I spoke I had the insomniacs particularly in mind. I would tell them, and really only them, if it was raining or if anyone special was dead and I would once again wonder how many hundreds or thousands of them had masturbated themselves into compromise relaxation, coincidentally listening to my voice. Nice to be of service.
A caring female sort of woman once shared with me how she had learned to appreciate herself as a caring female sort of woman by discovering her own body. By this I take it she meant showing her own body a good time, rather than waking up screaming one morning, shocked by the unmapped expanses of her, for example, inner thigh.
I think she hoped, in a kindly but evangelical way, to encourage me into exploring and discovering Good Times of my very, very own. This would, eventually, turn me into a caring female sort of woman, too. Or not.
Hoping to appear quite caring already I thanked her for her concern and smiled a lot. I nodded. She smiled. I didn’t tell her that myself and I already knew how to get out the good times and roll. And as it happened we hadn’t found this liberating, or an unalloyed joy. We didn’t like to be the only people who genuinely knew which was what in the technical sense. We were even slightly sad that we couldn’t be sure why this was—if we were the only ones we trusted, or the only ones ruthless enough to really get things done—either way, we made us lonely. There was no romance about us. We didn’t send flowers, we never phoned, we made it abundantly clear we were only with us because we were all we’d got. The minute that anyone better came by we’d be off—no tears, no goodbye dinner, not even a note. We did not improve our self-esteem.
It’s remarkable what you can think of while your mouth is saying something else. I find that’s shaken the last of my faith in conversation as anything other than sleight of tongue. But I don’t doubt the words, never the endless, unappreciated fact of the words. I perched in front of my microphone that night and, through in the booth, my voice flicked over needle dials, stacked and dissolved the lighted blocks of graphic sound displays. This is the only place in the whole wide world where everything moves according to my breath. Just now and then I like to have that much power. To see how it feels.
And of course the power is relative—I have no say in what I say or even how I say it. I spent the first hours of the morning in another soundtight room filling its aeroplane-quality air with precisely the prescribed number of seconds on a private health care scheme. The job was less than delightful. I was very tired and almost hoarse, intermittently deafened by the miseries going on in my nose and throat, but still doggedly trying to edge out the caring female sort of womanly tone I had been asked for.
“Light but warm. You want us to share the good news.”
“Good news, for only a moderate outlay you can buy the peace of mind a welfare state would probably provide if our national priorities were not entirely fucked.”
“Save your voice. That was about the tone, though. Apart from the words.”
“Isn’t this what we pay our taxes for, though? Or have I completely lost the place. This isn’t even insidious, it’s barefaced trading on fear. Protection money.”
“Could we just get this over with?”
“Of course, of course. I do understand the principle—nobody appreciates what isn’t paid for. If our unsolicited lives are given to us free, we won’t ever learn what they’re worth so it’s perfectly reasonable that we should pay for their healthy continuance. We should always have paid—fancy getting away with it for so long.”
“There’s the painkiller still to do.”
“Any free samples?”
“Starting on my signal, light and warm.”
“Okay, Steve.”
Yes, Steve. The same Steve—the same Steven—the one that I used to know better than I do now. For a while he worked in the station, sometimes with me. God has a funny sense of humour. In a way, I even helped him get the job. (That’s Steven, not God.) He wasn’t interested in radio until I met him and then he got very keen. I encouraged him. (Also Steven, not God.) Something like a year had passed since we’d split up and then there he was in the studio one morning, quite at home and ready to record. (Once again Steven and not God. I’d split up with God a long, long time before.)
Which is what I thought while I closed my eyes and then lightly and warmly recommended the low cost of good health and mental well-being. For only a small additional fee, my listeners could safeguard their teeth and eyesight and have children, all of their own and
delivered at source.
The painkillers were even more reassuring and also sexy. There was just a suggestion of “Yes, tonight dear, I’ve got a headache.” Which would have suited Steven right down and on to the ground. I could be as husky as I liked for the public’s benefit, but what would make Steven’s motor run wouldn’t be me, it would be thinking of possible pain.
Each to his own, of course, and there’s nothing like a touch of fantasy, a ritualistic element to stave off that nasty old sexual ennui. Pain was an interest Steven had before I met him, but I will admit, I did encourage him. I was a very encouraging partner, all round. It made him happy to be hurt so I made him a game to be hurt in. We played at Captain Bligh: “Very well, sir, you shall kiss the gunner’s daughter.” Snibbed together close in the dark we were Captain Bligh almighty and the Stupid Sailor and it was fine fun. At first it was fine—all salty and striking and fierce. I had no objections to my part and Steve, my hapless seaman, my gladly unfortunate pun, was nothing if not happy and if he was happy then, my goodness, I was happy, too.
No. I was happy anyway. Steven enjoyed himself, he got what he asked for and more, but I was happy anyway. He’d let me into somewhere I hadn’t found before, a compensation for other less satisfying areas of our relationship. After all, I could never have done on my own what I did with him. Only politicians are able to sit by themselves and still make other people hurt.
Of course, these things are not quite as manageable as they might at first appear. In the end, our situation was far from ideal. Our roles had developed a life of their own, far more intimate than anything we could achieve without them. I worried we might damage each other permanently somehow and so we ended, winding the whole thing down to the ultimate cliché—the one where the masochist waits and trembles, at the absolute mercy of the sadist.
So I Am Glad Page 6