I had begun to read out romantic novels onto tape for the visually impaired. This proved to be as great a disturbance as it was a comfort. On the one hand I was constantly up to the waist in a lukewarm sump of thin, over-scented emotions, constantly reminded of my sentimental shortcomings and constantly distracted by roaring little episodes from my own very recent past which made me want nothing more than to go home and roll through them all over again. On the opposite hand, time turned beautifully clear and soothing when it was locked up with me in a baffled room with nothing but syllables. I was free to be a living bellows drawing and shaping air into fiction, to be a mouth without a brain.
My news-reading treadmill was a kettle of an altogether different type. My scripts became more and more like the products of a demonic Ealing comedy while Steven had decided to take actively against me. This wasn’t a problem, only an inconvenience. During my late-evening stints he would slip into the box and look out at me, accompanied by someone whose name was, I believe, Sonja.
They would fumble and ogle each other in a rather dull and theatrical way, possibly even fuck. I had no urge to discover if actual penetration was taking place. That would have meant paying them both far too much attention. I simply wondered what it was about me that made other people want to have sex with each other. I was unable to decide if I had first drawn out this behaviour in my parents, or if something they once did caused a change in me. It didn’t really matter.
Which I find wonderful, even now. It didn’t really matter. I would do my work and finish and go home to love. My love made many other questions unimportant. I would open the door at home and walk into love. Before I was half way down the hall it would be in my hair like smoke.
So Steven was not a problem at the Station. No. My problem was one of tone.
That was how they put it.
“You seem to be developing a tone, Jennifer.”
A tone.
The way they said it, a tone was something midway between slight catarrh and a Polish accent. An unnecessary colour in the voice, an air of negative comment.
Negative comment. I don’t know where I could have got that from.
Help me out here. Try it for yourself, our late May and early June menu of events. Selected highlights.
Our prime minister wishes to fine the penniless and homeless for being homeless—not to mention shabby and down at heel. Unforthcoming fines will be used to build prisons in which to store those homeless persons unable to pay fines.
Can’t see a thing wrong in that.
A bill to legally defend the rights of those with special needs is talked out of parliament while many of its supporters are attending the funeral of the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition.
Public testimonials prove that the only good leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is a dead one.
I could read that without flinching—flat as a billiard table, smoother than all of the balls.
Then of course we could go on to the broader points. For example, my government continues to smile upon the manufacture and export of manacles and anti-personnel—that is to say anti-people—explosive devices. My government continues to smile upon the manufacture and export of many further types of sophisticated armament to forces engaged in campaigns of systematic genocide. My government continues to smile upon the manufacture and export of ball squeezers, houses of electric fun and other instruments of torture not presently legal in my country.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
A serial killer and torturer of little girls is finally captured and imprisoned. He looks very much like many other human beings. Lack of funding in police information technology delayed his capture by decades.
The Nazi League of gentlemen is happily shafting history all over those parts of Europe not currently at war.
Another in a series of prominent MPs is shown to have been happily shafting in very many of those parts of Europe not currently at war.
And coffee-coloured parachutes bloom in the skies over Normandy. And politicians step—thank God this is only radio and we cannot see—from cars and helicopters to wave and smile along lines of appropriated heroes, knowing we see nothing but their own personal smiles and waves, knowing there will be no sign of any inappropriate response, no memory of what was fought for, no memory of that naughty, naughty post-war election result, no memory of what we needed the peace to win.
Say it loud, say it proud, this is when I finally become certain that only my time, the one I am used to and where I feel at home, has the power to make belief irrelevant, sentimental, banal. For a month I see and hear nothing but women and men willing to die because they thought it would help towards something good, because it was a sad necessity, and I cannot find it in myself to be anything but bored. I am told nothing about these people that might allow me to find them admirable, loving, human, beyond my scope.
And I know that we won the war, we have not been invaded, we have not been shot in our streets, blockaded, bombed. No one seems ever to have made us give up those fought-for things, those odd little old-fashioned things, now sewn close to the born-again Nazis’ hearts and otherwise not heard of at all. The freedom, the decency, the fairness, the public safety, equality, opportunity, peace—they have left us so slowly that even now we cannot see clearly when they first started leaching away.
And don’t forget the whole wild, peaceable world is dying, that innocence is born every day, very literally poisoned in the womb. I used to be secretly happy because my relative youth meant I would most likely outlive all but the most lunatic regime. Now I know I will have to survive in what carelessness, plans and theories I never agreed with have done to my air, my water, my soil, my food.
Sorry to go on, but I found that I cared about these things. Someone I loved was living here and I cared about them. People who cared about each other were out there, beyond the studio, up to their necks in crap. I had to say.
I couldn’t help it.
I had to say. Sit me in front of an open mike often enough. Put me loose in a studio often enough. Give me pages and typed out pages of misery and crap often enough. And probability must be fulfilled and I must, one day, simply say what’s on my mind. Fuck everything and say it.
No.
Only joking.
I never said a word. I only thought. My tone was the only protest I could make. I went into the studio with my mouth tasting of ash and when I stood up to leave it, the taste was worse. That was the only change. When the European election came by in June, I couldn’t even bring myself to vote.
NOW HERE is the fourth day of June. Not bad weather and up and down the street below our house the people who mended bits and pieces of cars were outside with the people who mended bits and pieces of motorbikes. The pavement was happily shining with weak sun and metal. It should have been possible to be there and contented indefinitely. Apart from all the bad things in the world and all the bad things in my head, we were all right.
We. That’s Savinien and I.
Us.
Goodbye me and welcome to we—please remember you now have two front lines to defend from the world of enemy actions and conduct yourself accordingly at all times; this constitutes a friendly warning.
Our dreams even became simultaneous. Or one of our dreams, at any rate, and although the idea of this might have been endearing, the reality was not. I woke very early on the morning of the fourth of June and knew I was afraid.
Because we still had not slept together in that house I had to walk across the landing to Savinien. He was already sitting up, slightly bright in the dim room, something stunned under his smile.
“Uhn . . . pardon . . .”
“What’s wrong?”
“Eh, I . . . forgot how to speak, that’s all. I am not fast at waking myself. Did you . . . why are you here?”
“Well, this will seem silly, but I had. I had an odd dream.”
“Of what kind?” And now that I think, he said this with a sort of care, a wariness.
; “Of the odd kind.” I sat on the edge of his bed, he moved away a little and then back a little. “I saw the sky, a sky . . . total blue and high and hot. I don’t know how I knew it was hot, but there you are, it was.”
“What else?” He knew what I was going to say. I guessed that then, but I think now he’d known for weeks, perhaps months.
“Nothing, really.”
“You didn’t see trees?”
“That was it, yes, the other thing. I must have been lying on the ground and looking up because I could see the tops of these thin, long trees, three or four of them. Would they be poplars? It was almost like looking at a picture, a hot picture.”
“Ah.”
“The stupid thing is, it felt like you. Not like you being there, but you dreaming.”
“This is only natural if I was dreaming also. I have seen this place.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Only asleep, this is where I was waking from, a sky with trees. I didn’t see you there.”
“Maybe we should go again.”
“You mean what?”
“I mean that I’m here and it’s still very early and I could do with a little more sleep. How about moving over. Perhaps this way we can go there together.”
“Should we?”
“If we’re tired we should sleep, yes. That’s just nature.”
And he only shook his head and opened the bed for me and I slipped into his temperature and his tiredness and his hold.
After a while, I felt him settle, sigh.
“Jennifer?” I couldn’t tell if I heard him or only imagined his voice, I couldn’t make any answer. “Jennifer?” I dropped a degree or two further from understanding, began to lose myself. “Tell me, when you saw the trees, did this feel like death?”
He woke and left without my noticing it.
Some little time later I was drinking my breakfast coffee when Savinien ran past the kitchen window and clattered open the door.
“Come and look.”
It wasn’t too bad. Shock made the reality seem incurable at first and then it only took logic to shrink it back again. Still, it was a mess.
“I know who has done this.”
Someone had tramped over the new front garden, torn up plants, thrown bricks out of position, into the street. I could see they had been hurried, not too thorough, but their harm was undeniable.
“I know.” Savinien picked up a brick and threw it into the street, kicked out another. “I have been very stupid. I purely had assumed that because I felt like someone else now, I would look like someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“One of the days when I walked home with my plants, I was very happy and slow. To keep in my humour, indeed to strengthen it, I turned for a tour through the park and came a long way home. This is when I thought I saw a man, I think his name is Charlie and if he is Charlie then he is a friend of James. He is one of the men I knew before. I have brought them here.”
“When did you think you saw him?”
“A few weeks.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense. They would have done something before now.”
“James is similar to me, he likes to wait and move in his own time.”
“This could have been anyone, kids, jealous neighbours, somebody falling down drunk. I mean, if they’d wanted to do damage, they could have done more.”
He began to laugh in a small way and then dipped forward so that I had to step up and let him fall in to me. I hadn’t fully thought how much this must have hurt him.
“It’ll be all right.” He shook his head against my shoulder.
“We’ll sort it all out.”
“No.”
“It isn’t that bad.”
“This is something I do for you. I do for the house. I do.”
“You’ll do it again. Please.”
As he lifted his face, he pulled a hand away to rub it, rearrange the grief. “This is ridiculous. A few plants. This is nothing.”
“Yeah. Why should we worry for nothing?”
“It needn’t be them. It needn’t be James.”
“If it is, we’ll do what we have to do. There are laws.”
“I should not bring you trouble. You have never been anything but good to me. I should bring you good. This is my intention.”
The street that unrolled below us continued to empty and fill with innocent activity, but when I walked along it to work I wondered if any of them had heard our garden being broken up, had seen something they were keeping to themselves. I looked at the little girls squatting at the corner with their plastic cart, building out their states of mind in tiny stones, and tried thinking they might have done it, or their older brothers. I wanted our street to be free from blame, but I did not want to imagine how we might be threatened by a stranger. I hoped we had only been touched by an arbitrary movement of the city, as if it had struck out in its sleep. Nothing personal.
There was hardly any moon when I came back home, no more than a sliver of light, flowering and splitting through cloud, then shrinking to a hard line in the black. I was tired. Steve had been needling me and a woman in a suit had come into the studio at the end of my shift and suggested I might take a break for a week or two; after all, it had been a very long while since I took any kind of holiday. She seemed quite solicitous in a power-dressed kind of way and wondered if I might have anything I wanted to share with her. She mumbled soothingly about life being what happened when we were making other plans, that I should explore my child within and engage in healing play. I got the impression Steve might have told about my excursions into naval fantasy, but maybe it was all about that problem I was having with my tone.
The funny thing was, the woman had enunciation so poor that I felt I should recommend an emergency speech therapist. After all, if you’re going to occupy your time in passing on witless psychobabble to helpless souls you should at least be sure they can pick out, say, one word in three. I said I would certainly bear her suggestions in mind and she warned of the dangers of unexpressed rage. Presumably she was unaware of how personally dangerous she would have found my expressed rage.
Climbing the path to our door I could smell the earth beginning to rest in the garden again and dimly see the order Savinien must have restored while I was away. I was glad he’d had the heart to do it. Perhaps if he was still awake I could look in on him, or perhaps I could have a cup of tea and go to bed. That would have been nice. I had no major demands to make on the remainder of the day—just a need for something small and nice.
Nice word, nice.
“He’s a bastard.”
“Well—”
“A complete fucking bastard. I believed him.”
“You couldn’t help . . . I mean, when I met him—”
Liz started crying again while Arthur floundered and Savinien paced behind them tugging at his hair which was now quite long enough to tug, but noticeably greyer than when he’d first arrived. They filled the sitting-room with visible distress. I could guess what had happened.
Liz stared up at me when I came in, as if she’d been expecting someone else.
“It’s Sandy.”
“Hhnu. I’m, I’m sorry.” I looked sorry.
“No, you don’t understand.”
I looked less sorry. “Well, it’s . . . these things . . .”
Arthur gave Liz a forcible hug and explained over her head. “He wasn’t divorced. Actually I think he wasn’t ever married.” Liz sobbed. “It’s all a fuckup.”
“I’m a fuckup.”
“No, you’re not.”
I could only repeat Arthur. “No, you’re not. He was a bastard, a very convincing bastard.”
“I just, I came back and I looked for my cardigan, the blue one, and he’s still got it. He’s even got my fucking cardigan.”
“Then I shall get it back.” Savinien had stopped pacing.
“What?”
“I shall get it back. I shall get back whatever y
ou wish. I shall bring you his sincere regrets.”
“Savinien.”
“I thought he was called—”
“It’s a long story, Liz. Savinien, you can’t just go about extracting regret from people you don’t know.”
“I can.”
“All right, you can, but you also can’t. I mean, it won’t help. That isn’t how we do things.”
“Listen, he can go round and fucking kill him for all I care.”
“I can do this, if you truly wish it.”
“Seriously?”
“No, he isn’t being serious. Arthur, explain how men behave with each other now. Civilised men.”
“Jennifer, I am a civilised man. I am offering my help to the household. Some points of honour have a natural justice with them and must be attended to. Did you think I would do anything less?”
“No, well, I didn’t mean you weren’t civilised. I mean, I’m not getting at you. I just . . .” faltered off into complete silence. Which is something I should really have stuck to for the rest of the evening.
Arthur finally woke his ideas up and tried to help me out. “No, look, we could both go round to his place and do him over or something—”
“Arthur!”
“We could, I’m saying, we could, but there would be no point because the damage is done and we would both end up arrested. He would win.”
“We would be arrested for doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, you would.”
“Even under these circumstances?”
“Yes.”
“Then how is one to prevent anyone doing precisely what they wish?”
“We just have to hope that they won’t.”
Savinien sat opposite us and talked to the room while he looked at me. “You are defenceless and your world is breaking in half. In all honesty, I believe your world has broken, it has split itself apart. There is such savagery and darkness and then such ridiculous openness.” He was trying his best to be reasonable and calm in his own way, to understand me, and I wanted to answer him well, but then I heard my voice snap out and patronise before I could do anything about it.
So I Am Glad Page 21