“I’ll get out of your way, let you relax . . . you do seem...” And I couldn’t describe how he seemed—it was other than I would have wished, or frail, or like a damaged animal, or almost frightening. There wasn’t a phrase I could say out loud. “I’ll go. Thanks for, well, for telling me what you have. I didn’t realise it would be so, such a thing for you. You know.”
“I think I do, yes. But, if you wouldn’t mind, I would rather you didn’t go. I will only sleep a little while, perhaps you could stay. If you intend me to relax I think another person in the room would be a source of relaxation.”
“If I could be a help.” I really hadn’t tried to stand, to get up and leave. I had not made the slightest genuine effort to remove myself.
“You would indeed be a help, yes. Thank you.”
“There’s no reason to thank me, I would only have gone somewhere else and sat down again. I might as well do that here.”
“I can still thank you, even so. You might wake me if I detain you for too long. It is best if I sleep at night, after all, and I seem to have a less than infinite supply of rest. I shouldn’t waste it.”
“No.”
“Thank you again.”
“Yes, well, you sleep now, don’t mind me.”
Don’t mind me sitting and watching you fall into sleep, surrendering until your face smoothes and softens and your body eases into one full movement below your thoughts. Don’t mind me waiting here as you turn and steady yourself on your side while your arms fold round your shoulders, as if you might be cold, or dreaming, or dreaming of cold.
When you were sick, I often saw you unconscious, that is to say absent from yourself. Asleep you are only absent from me, I can feel you are still really very near. Then I smelt your sour, hot sheets and held your skin and this was nothing, it had no particular meaning. I was dealing with an illness which resembled you and not with you. I was never with you. Now this is different.
The sky behind the window is turning lilac and sinking into dusk and I can hear your breathing pulse, a gentle familiar private beat which I will know now always. I can feel the tick of you making up time in my lungs and listen while we turn into each other’s accompaniment.
Don’t mind that the room is shrinking round us, or the air between us thickening. This disturbs me, but need not ever concern you. I know I am unable to move in even the smallest way in case I disturb you. In case I touch you. I think if I move at all, I will touch you and that makes me afraid.
QUITE NATURALLY, you shouldn’t mind me either. Occasionally I think too much, that’s all, when thinking is really not always the best thing for me.
But at the moment, thought is unavoidable. I’m writing a book—I have to think about it from time to time. I even have to think about that lilac-coloured evening and of looking at him. If there is another way, I don’t know it. This would be easier, at least different, if I was dealing in fiction, just making the whole thing up, but I’m not. I sit down here and forcibly run over the little bits of sandpaper and tin-tacks that my mind had softened, grown around, smoothed over. I’m here to make it sore again. Perhaps if I had done this before it would be a smaller strain, equally it might not. I can only report that my mind has seen fit to ambush me at several points in the course of this and I’m sure it is more than keen to do so again. Now and then, pain stops by to ream through the memory root canals with a little taste of gangrene and carbolic soap. I presume I am paying my penalty for the kind of presumption it takes to imagine anyone other than myself would be interested by the story I have to tell. Swings and roundabouts.
But my real presumption is something quite different and more serious. You see, I want to reverse or at least to arrest the passage of time. I am standing in the face of nature which is as pointless as trying to pin back a waterfall. Silly and maybe even harmful. But I want to live again in minutes and hours which are gone and to forgo my present because it is less satisfactory. In writing, I can do this, but very reasonably here is where I also discover the unavoidable price. At the end of a page, a chapter, a day of work, I have to stop. I have to come back. Just when I’m tired, when I’ve allowed myself a certain sensitivity to events, I have to come back and leave everything behind.
Sometimes friends will ask me what I’ve been up to, where I’ve been. Whatever I think of to tell them is nonsense. I generally lie politely, shut down with a smile. The truth is I spend all the best of my days being nowhere with no one. I sit alone in a room, surrounded by events which cannot happen now.
Before I get too morbid I can say that this is a very common problem. As far as I can understand, my entire country spent generations immersed in more and more passionate versions of its own past, balancing its preoccupations with less and less organised activity or even interest in the here and now. Far more recently the whole island of which my country forms a part was swallowed wholesale by the promise of a ravenously brilliant future. For a tiny while, in its transition from past to future, the population balanced, hundreds of thousands of opened minds all alive and possible in the given day. I have the impression that a few years may have passed during which each solitary citizen would be able to at least attempt to know and care about where and how they could be.
I may now be glorifying my own past, but it does seem that once even the really influential human beings (male and female) embraced a degree of innocence, decency, even hope. Other human beings, regarded as quite ordinary, considered themselves to be really influential and almost were. I have the impression that forty, even thirty, years ago, people worked towards what they might all do for each other. This may have been nothing more than the after-shock of two successive and horrifying wars. Or I may simply be idealising a period I never knew but which now appears in my mind as a gently coloured fact, filled with soft hats, earnest and honest voices and comfortable, dun-coloured raincoats striding unimpeded over Sunday afternoon fields of undeveloped green.
Never mind all the pictures I’ve seen of the same soft hats and open, sensible faces watching the tower going up to hold that first Trinity bomb. The same innocent eyes that couldn’t help but watch fire and cancer blooming above the desert, boiling the sand into emerald glass. Only earnest honesty and sensible innocence could ever have invented such a thing, lies and wickedness could not have been clever enough.
I grew and felt my mind shaped by the times they left us. It may be a little harsh to say so, but I feel I came in with the dawning of the Age of Stupid Lies.
My childhood spent a moderate amount of its otherwise unoccupied time watching television when this was still slightly novel, intermittently broadcasting and brightly monochrome. Our regional station was very often unconcerned if it did no more than play “A Hundred Pipers” over its Saltire testcard for hours at a time and, perhaps as a result, I grew to believe myself the resident of a country within but not indistinguishable from Britain. I take this for granted in a way my parents did not. This may well be good, if of dubious benefit. Between testcards, I watched “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” where nobody who was shot ever bled and nobody made a fuss. I also watched the Vietnam War where a great many people bled unbearably and only John Pilger seemed to make a fuss. This seemed quite as reasonable as the perverse advantage my parents took of every available power cut. There were many power cuts. I remember the noises and candles in the dark, the pounce and swing of shadows. I remember knowing that the world was full of inexplicable calamities about which no one would ever make a fuss. Clearly, as children grew into adults, they also became insane.
I knew about The Bomb and The Strikes and Nuclear Waste. I knew about the student up the road who had his head amputated in a car crash and the woman who shot herself because her labrador died and I spent one complete sunny day waiting for myself to die and being curiously surprised when I did not. I had licked my fingers, having forgotten that the grass they’d just touched had been sprayed with weed killer and then, of course, I had remembered. All I got was a bitter tongue. I am sure that wonde
rful things also happened during my early years, but I seem unable to recall them in any detail.
For other news of reality, I went to the pictures. I think this may now be a genetically coded response to times of stress and tribulation. Certainly, nations have survived remarkable hardships, buoyed up almost single-handedly by the cinema. So I went to visit the jolly companion that stuck by us through the Depression and the Blitz.
And I learned never to travel in aeroplanes, boats, lifts, spacecraft, trains, submarines, cars or coaches. All of these would inevitably suffer ghastly incidents involving multiple casualties, deaths and mental anguish. The same could be said of any particularly peaceful or pleasant-looking towns, cities, skyscrapers, apartments, holiday resorts, gardens, woods, streets, beaches, oceans, attics, cellars and national monuments. Cars, birds, puppy dogs, fish and ventriloquist’s dummies would senselessly turn on their keepers in a welter of fins, fur, feathers, Terylene, Sta-prest slacks and embarrassing cardigans.
Nothing was safe. Large assemblies of family members, friends or even perfect strangers would only ever be mustered to perish slowly at the hands of maniacs or plagues, or to vanish in one spectacular conflagration of luminous pain. The natural consequence of calm and security was Disaster—it happened everywhere all the time.
I cannot now surrender myself to any form of organised transport without considering the possibilities of escape. Could I beat out the train windows before icy water engulfed me? Could I beat out the air hostess between me and the nearest exit? Could I fight for my life?
I have exceptional breath control after many early years of regular exercises intended to elongate the amount of time I could survive under water or lost in poisoned smoke. When climbing stairs I consider whether random pyromania will reduce them to uselessly glowing rubble or a terrifying ladder of twisted, boiling metal which represents my only chance for continued, if tentative, existence.
And every one of the cinematic cataclysms found its confirmation in reality. (Except for the flying piranhas, although I had already discovered there were much nastier things lurking and killing in almost every country south of France.) Aeroplanes crashed and Jonestown swallowed poison and train doors opened amiably on fast bends and murderers murdered and public services and secret armies committed obscenities by the hour and people died and people died and people died. Even in the cinema. I was taught for two terms by an elderly unhinged physics master who had escaped as a boy from a terrible local picture-house disaster. Foolish youths had raised a spurious but convincing fire alarm during a Saturday morning matinee, creating a panic that crushed tens of children to death. Singing cowboys galloped over black and white sand while the fire doors jammed with bodies and with the naked sounds of injury and fear—something never accurately re-created in drama, something too large, dark and unlikely for the reality of small boys.
Sometimes we would walk, Savinien and I, for no particular reason. As the spring turned petulant, we made quite a habit of going outside just to spite it. The skies would cycle from snow to sun to rain to hail and back again within an hour and we would make ourselves stroll and talk up and down streets filled with insistently whipping air until they began to develop their own brawling kind of charm.
Savinien’s instinct was to walk away any shadow of returning depression and there were periods when he would be exhaustingly intent on the study of his new time. He would ask and then usually answer a methodical catalogue of questions. He could find no reasonable explanation for the way I and my fellow pedestrians chose to dress. He looked at our reinforced workboots and our combat waterproofs, our despatch cases, flak jackets, double sewn, riveted denims and camouflage fatigues. He considered our leather and metal and canvas and belt-buckled world. After thinking for a little while, I was able to tell him that we were not really very much at war abroad and that my city was not overly given to open combat. We were all of us simply dressing for the disasters we knew must come. We had grown up and learned our lessons. When the buildings fell and the fires started and normality splintered out beneath our feet, we would at least know we had tried to protect ourselves.
“You’re seriously saying this?”
“I think so. As seriously as I say anything.”
“At times I can truly believe humanity has grown. There is a cleanliness and civilisation that can only make me glad.”
We were walking in a hard, still evening. I could look ahead and hear our footsteps shadow, cut across rhythm, then beat in close to each other and disappear in one. I could also hear his voice.
“Then I see beneath . . . I cannot recognise how satisfied you all are with despair until I remember . . . until I remember that there is nothing different here from my old wars. You still have executions and hunger and madness snapping about your streets. You are, in all simplicity, only more private, particularly in your minds.” He nodded at a man, oddly but well dressed, who was pacing on, balanced between two carrier bags, a long stain of urine, dark and new, in his faded jeans.
“His face is the drunk face. It has the shape and the shame and the colour and the eyes and the smell and the sweat of the drunk face. I know this. I have known this three hundred years ago in another country. Nothing is truly changed. Jennifer, I remember the wrong parts of my life.”
“Well, I probably do, too.”
“I think of when we moved through the villages . . . I dreamed of this last night . . . I saw myself with my army, my cadets, moving up to Arras (for the seige) and the women would run away. They would just run away, shouting in a language I could barely understand, and the children would cry, only because we were come. We were intended to be on their side. We were their countrymen and still they expected us to do terrible things always. But you can understand we were only people, young men, and we were not always terrible. We were inconstant. At times we gave people hope to face the next young men who might be less safe and do anything.”
“Did you do terrible things?”
He almost laughed. “Me? No. I was just the Monster of Bravery. I had an agreement with God. I would kill anyone who had an intention to kill me. Other than that, I wrote poems.”
“Poems.”
“Oh yes. I have remarkable . . . I had remarkable powers of concentration, because this was in my best interest. If I thought beyond the noise, pain, hunger and being a small part of a war, then I could write. To write was to go home. No, to be, of myself, my own home.”
“It’s one way to do it.”
“And this is still done. You make pictures of this, an entertainment in your homes. My Paris, my home, it loved to look at ugliness when it chose and there were many picturesque opportunities to observe. I began to think of the Devil as very well disposed towards humanity—a misunderstood gentleman—for providing so many subjects for burning and fresh-air torture. The king and his cardinal were very generous also with his subjects’ flesh and blood. We rose up for a small experiment and we tried The Revolt. And how did it end? How did we celebrate our success over Mazarin? (He was this Italian, ruined our little king, our government, everything.) Well, of course, we painted the streets in blood. Of course.”
“You’re getting upset.”
“I would like to know.”
“Fine.”
“I just want to know why this way to go is the one we choose? Why are there no better ways? Think of it, I see a Gascon, a good fellow with an excellent mind, trying to run into a wood. Now, he is unable for this because he has only one leg. He is trying to run and he cannot properly comprehend that his leg is shot away below the knee. This man does not work properly any more and all of us that morning, we watch and watch him. He is no longer our friend, now he is something interesting.”
“I’m sure not.”
“I was there.”
He moved slightly ahead of me, rubbing at his neck, his shoulders rounding.
“Have you tried to write?” When he didn’t answer, I thought he hadn’t heard. “Have you tried to write?”
“Tried? No, I haven’t tried. What I have done is to fail. I have failed to write.”
“It’ll come back.”
“Why? Why should it? I am made the way I am made. I can’t get out. I am here for no reason and I have no use. Allow me to say so, please. This is black thinking and if I speak it out this makes it, eventually, willing to go from me.”
“Whatever you say.”
The main road led us home in silence and if Savinien temporarily thought he had no use, I felt rather more permanently the same. I wanted to be of use. Savinien could step down into the kitchen in the morning and stretch and scratch his ribs and that would make me happy. This didn’t involve any thought or effort on his part. Part of the way he was did nothing but make me glad that he was the way he was, making me glad that he was, ad infinitum, the way he was. I couldn’t seem to be that way for him.
And that takes me back to the lilac-coloured evening.
I finished watching Savinien when he woke.
“How long?”
“Almost an hour.”
“You should not have left me so long. I must have been very tedious.”
“No.”
“I should have been very tedious.”
“I was thinking. I didn’t notice. Would you like to come outside?”
“It’s been a while.”
“I know, but we’ll take it slowly.”
As it happened, Arthur came with us. I shouldn’t have minded, really. Things were still at a delicate stage, this would be Savinien’s first time out—anything might happen. Two of us should have been with him. It was right.
Yes, but I didn’t like it. I wanted to stay listening on my own with him, stay undisturbed by anyone else. I wanted no change which was odd because our current status quo was hardly long established—only something comfortable. Rather than see this as a sign of a dangerous selfishness, or something a little closer to heart and home—which it was it was it was—I thought it reasonable not to fragment the intimacy we’d formed. This had, after all, enabled him to be well, to speak about being away and what he’d done.
So I Am Glad Page 18