365

by James Robertson

  7 November

  The Mushroom

  ‘That mushroom,’ the Gypsy said, ‘is not one I would care to eat. It’s edible, but I wouldn’t eat it.’

  It didn’t look like a mushroom to me. It looked more like a toadstool, but then I wasn’t sure what the difference was, or even if there was a difference. This was why I was with the Gypsy, who knew all about mushrooms.

  Then again I didn’t know if he really was a Gypsy, but that was what he called himself. ‘I’m a real Gypsy,’ he said, ‘not one of those hippy New Age travellers.’ I’d heard this one before. Real Gypsies like to put distance between themselves and New Age travellers. But if you’re not a real Gypsy and want to convince someone you are, what’s the first thing you’re going to do? Disparage the hippies.

  A lot of people think Gypsies are untrustworthy. Not that I trust all the people who don’t trust Gypsies but the doubt lingers. A lot of people don’t trust mushrooms either. As someone once said, for most of us life is too short to know stuff about mushrooms, but someone had told me this Gypsy knew about them and I needed his knowledge.

  So there we were in the woods, inspecting this particular specimen. It was mostly brown, with white gills and a fat stalk, and with thin creamy ridges on the cap that I didn’t trust.

  ‘Is it poisonous?’

  ‘No. Not poisonous. It won’t make you sick. Might give you a sore head though, or a disturbed one anyway.’

  ‘Ah.’ I thought I knew what he was getting at. ‘Magical properties, you mean?’

  ‘You’re all the same,’ he said, ‘you young folk. You say you want to learn about edible mushrooms, but what you really want to know is which are the magic ones. Am I right?’

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  ‘Thought so.’ He wagged a finger at me. ‘Whatever you do, make sure you cook it,’ he said. ‘And don’t blame me if you go mad and throw yourself off a bridge.’

  That was it. I marked the spot. I was definitely coming back for it, but later, after dark, when the Gypsy was in the pub.

  8 November

  The Prisoner X

  Last week, with Dr Z, I went to visit the prisoner X. Dr Z had been appointed the prisoner X’s physician, and I his legal adviser.

  We were shown into an interview room containing four metal chairs. One chair was removed and a guard sat on it outside the door, which was left open.

  The prisoner X was brought in. Dr Z examined him. He had bruising and lacerations to his face and upper body, and the left eye was swollen and half closed. Dr Z cleaned and dressed the wounds. He recommended that the eye be properly examined at the prison hospital.

  The prisoner X said he would rather go blind than attend the prison hospital.

  I asked him how he had received his injuries. He said he had been beaten several times since his arrival nineteen days earlier.

  I asked if other prisoners were responsible. He said he had not recognised his attackers.

  I asked if he thought that the beatings had been sanctioned by the prison authorities. He said that since this would be against the law he did not see how it could be possible.

  I asked if he knew what charges were to be brought against him. He said he did not expect any charges to be brought against him and that he would be released in two days’ time.

  I asked why. He said this was what had happened on three previous occasions. Legally nobody could be held without charge for more than twenty-one days, therefore he expected to be released.

  I asked if his previous legal advisers had complained about this repeated abuse of his rights. He said that of his previous legal advisers one was on holiday abroad, one was seriously ill and one was dead.

  Dr Z said it was time to leave.

  The prisoner X was removed. The fourth chair was returned to the interview room. We were escorted from the prison.

  Dr Z recommended I take a holiday abroad at the earliest opportunity, for the sake of my health.

  Two days later I telephoned Dr Z from the airport to ask whether the prisoner X had been released without charge.

  There was no answer.

  9 November

  The Great Unknown

  You used to wake in the middle of the night, standing in the middle of darkness. You were six, or eight, or ten. The last time you remember it happening you were thirteen. Where had you wandered before you woke? Your feet were cold. The darkness was of one thickness, impenetrable. You did not know which way you were facing. This is the meaning of the word ‘disorientation’. You shuffled round on your cold feet, waiting for your eyes to adjust, for the slightest clue as to where you were. Nothing and nobody came to your rescue.

  At thirteen, once you realised you were awake, the fear went away. You knew this had happened before, that you would get back to your bed. But as to whether it was a few feet away, or in the same room – whether you were even in a room – you could not tell.

  The light did come back, enough to make the darkness only gloomy. Shapes took shape. Other breathers breathed. You reached out, connected with the corner of some piece of furniture, a wall, a doorframe. You began to move, from one vague indication to another. You still weren’t sure which direction you were going in, except that it was forward. You had to keep going forward.

  Years later, you wrote in one of your books, ‘he had to believe that if he kept going forward he would eventually get to a place he recognised’. It was about somebody else in a different time and place but it was also about you, and this. This deep childhood experience. The sense of being utterly alone.

  You know that a time will come again when you stand on your cold feet in total darkness. Only this time you won’t be thirteen. It will be like the first time it happened, yet you won’t remember the first time. There will be no bed waiting for you, no other breathers behind the curtain of the dark. You will shuffle round, waiting for your eyes to adjust, and they will not.

  Eventually you will have to move, to go forward. You will recognise nothing. There will be nothing to recognise except your fear.

  10 November

  The Call of the Royal

  My first instinct on receiving the card was to put it in the bin. Nobody ‘commands’ me to do anything. Then I read it again more carefully. It was the Master of the Household who had been commanded by Her Majesty to ‘invite’ me to the palace, so that was all right. I dug out and pressed the lounge suit, selected a sober tie and clean shirt, and hopped on a flight to Gatwick.

  The occasion was a reception to celebrate contemporary British poetry. I wondered if I would be alone, but Her Majesty had been very inclusive: several hundred poets were in attendance. Not for nothing did the words ‘contemporary’, ‘British’ and ‘poetry’ adorn the invitation. Scattered throughout the queue of more conventional versifiers were many of my friends, the contemporaries – the ‘old contemporaries’ as we styled ourselves when we were writing in the trenches: the working-class monotonists, the radical republican repulsivists, the post-colonial explosionists, the anarchist indecipherabilitists and of course the Scottish nationalist heedrumhodrumists. How lovely it was to see everyone!

  Naturally some had had momentary qualms about coming, but felt they should show face for the good of the poetic school to which they belonged. Quite right too. As Her Majesty wittily remarked to me when I was coming up from my second bow, ‘Show some solidarity, please.’ And so we all did, but by invitation, not by command.

  A few had the bad grace to refuse to attend. One joked – in poor taste, I think – that she couldn’t afford the bus fare. Another complained that he was too busy. Really? Show me a poet whose diary is so full that he can’t cancel a library visit or two to attend a royal reception, and I’ll show you a fraud. A third asked me, to my face, ‘If you’re prepared to accept this invitation, is there anything to which you will not stoop?’ I assume he meant an honour, which is highly unlikely to come my way, so the question is academic. I find the suggestion that I have compromised my principles offens
ive. As I have already said, if I had been ‘commanded’ to attend I certainly would have boycotted the event.

  11 November

  Survivors

  Those stories of men who somehow escape the carnage but are still lost, haunted to their own deaths – there is something about them. False or true, they speak of mortality in some other way than the ranked stories of the dead.

  There was the one Selkirk man, of eighty who marched south with the Scottish army to Flodden, who came back alone. In the clamour and din of the battle he managed to seize an English banner, and carried it from the field. Those long miles of moor, hill, rain and despair. A ragged man and a piece of enemy cloth. Exhausted, he fell at the marketplace, casting the banner from him to the ground. How did he survive – not Flodden, but the years that followed? In what state of mind did he live out the absence of all his comrades?

  There were the mythical ones who by some miracle got away from the Little Bighorn. The Indians said they killed every last soldier with Custer, but in time there were scores of tales from men who each claimed to be the sole survivor. Some said they played dead or unconscious and were scalped as they lay. Liars or delusionists, what stirred them to place themselves on that grassy ridge and say they had seen all the others die? What fortune or fame did they think such survival would bring? Or did they want to say that they bore witness to something else that died that day, a way of life guttering even in its flare of triumph?

  And there is the story from No Man’s Land in some battle of the First World War. Men are advancing through the barbed wire, mud and smoke. Other men are downing them like ducks. A figure walks among the broken lines, going not forward or back but across. He is not hiding, not running: he does not seem afraid. He is leaving. Men stand still, fascinated by the smile on his dirty face: some die watching him go. Others stop firing: or they fire and miss him. Shells explode, machine guns rattle. He is unhelmeted, unarmed, untouched. Men watch him go. They wish him well. They wish.

  12 November

  The Inadequacy of Translation

  I met him only once. He came to do a reading at the university. I knew some of his work but only in translation. I thought the poems I had read were very good. A colleague told me that to hear him read was a unique experience. ‘Nobody sounds like him,’ the colleague said. ‘He does not so much read as intone. You should go if you can.’

  The room was not very big, and neither was the audience – about twenty, no more. When I arrived the poet was already there, speaking to the organiser. I went to the back of the room and sat on a chair that creaked. I sat very still when the poet was reading because I felt that every sound, however small, that did not come from his mouth, was an intrusion and a distraction.

  He read each poem first in English and then in Gaelic. He seemed to resent that he had to bother with the English versions but nobody in the room except himself had Gaelic. I know this because he asked, and none of us put up a hand.

  I recognised several of the poems, and liked them as I had done before, but he kept complaining that the translations were very poor, very poor indeed. They did not convey either the true sense or the true sound of the originals. Somebody asked who had done them. He had done them himself, he said. There was laughter. He said it was no laughing matter. The fact of the matter was that English could not convey what the Gaelic conveyed.

  Afterwards I bought a copy of his book, as did several others. Gaelic was on one page and English on the facing page. I asked him to sign my copy and said that in spite of his reservations I greatly admired the English versions of his poems.

  He looked very mournful. ‘They are inadequate,’ he said as he signed his name. I felt that he knew what he was talking about, and that I too was inadequate. Then he smiled at me, as if to apologise for making me feel that way.

  That smile has stayed with me.

  13 November

  Thursday the Thirteenth

  Getting out of bed he tripped on a stray shoe and twisted his ankle. He limped to the bathroom, stubbing his toe on the doorframe en route. When he flushed the toilet the handle came away in his hand and it took him ten minutes to fish the mechanism from the bottom of the cistern and reconnect it. He was going to be late. He tried to keep calm but cut his face in three places while shaving.

  The milk he poured onto his cornflakes was off. He chucked milky mush into the bin under the kitchen sink and somehow the bowl slipped from his hand and smashed on the tiled floor. He swept up, losing more time. He went back to the bedroom to put on a tie and found that one of the shaving nicks was still bleeding and had stained the collar of his clean shirt. He changed into another and a button came off. He grabbed his briefcase and hurried out. Only as the house door slammed behind him did he realise that he’d left the key on the kitchen table. His neighbours, who kept a spare one, were on holiday for a week.

  He got into the car and switched on the ignition. To his surprise it started first time. But somebody had knocked the offside wing mirror and when he reached out to adjust it the whole thing broke off and smashed on the ground. He thought about cancelling the rest of the day and going back to bed but to do that he’d need to force the door or break a window.

  He drove to the office, taking extra care when changing lanes. He’d have to phone his wife, who had left him a month ago for his best friend, and ask her to come round later with the house key she’d held onto. This prospect worried him: he knew she was beginning to think she’d made a mistake, and he’d got used to having the place to himself.

  A superstitious man might believe he’d just earned himself seven years’ bad luck from the mirror incident but luckily he wasn’t superstitious. Anyway, it wasn’t the day for it.

  14 November

  Gated Communities

  ‘Nobody here can feel satisfied that we have come to this: to a growing need among us to live behind walls and fences, with rising and falling barriers and sometimes even security guards in sentry-boxes beside those barriers. Have we really lost our faith in the idea of a shared humanity, a common society where all, rich and poor, haves and have-nots, can live together? Must the fortunate be so fearful, so protective, so exclusive, that they come and go in cars with the windows firmly shut, the air-conditioning on, and choose not to see or communicate, let alone to touch?

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the answer is yes. I am sorry to have to speak such an unpalatable truth. Yet I do not accept that we should surrender the world to fear. I reject the idea that the protection of our loved ones and of our carefully nurtured assets, and the exclusion of envy, theft and violence, are unnatural. Equally I reject the idea that it is we who must suffer because we make such choices. Why should we relinquish the world? Who are these people who would take it from us? They are, we are told, the poor, the dispossessed. Who made them poor, if indeed they are poor? If they have no possessions, who dispossessed them? It was not I. It was not you. We did only what we believed was right. We worked for our wealth, our homes, our families. Yet we are the ones who are losing the greater part of the Earth.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe that there are good, hard-working, ethically acceptable people out there. They too are oppressed by the so-called dispossessed. Let us make alliance with them. Let us redefine what we mean by a “gated community”. Let the thieves and muggers be gated. Let us reclaim the Earth and fence them in. Let us make them carry passes and papers and let them change their behaviour and their desires, that they may be considered worthy of sharing in that shared humanity, that common society in which we all believe.

  ‘We are the dispossessed. They have dispossessed us of the Earth! We must reclaim it!’

  15 November

  The Conference

  Howard assumed an air of modesty, shuffling papers and checking that the slideshow was ready to go, while the session chairman introduced him. The man made absurdly inflated claims about Howard’s experience and knowledge. Howard himself knew he was about to wing it. A fat man in a double-breasted suit sit
ting in the front row seemed to know this too. He sniffed loudly as each gold star was added to Howard’s improbably lustrous CV.

  The chairman sat down. Howard cleared his throat, glanced down at his notes, and began.

  When he looked up every human in the room had been replaced by a dog. Alsatians, terriers of various kinds, collies, retrievers, mutts – all up on the seats and staring at him intently. The expectation varied from dog to dog. Some seemed to desire food from him, others looked eager for a walk. A substantial minority appeared to want to savage him. The fat man was now a growling, drooling bulldog.

  Howard started to sweat. He struggled on, trotting out the familiar clichés, illustrating them with the usual images. Bullet points: how he loathed them. How he wished he could load them into a gun and blast the assembled dogs with them, saving the last bullet point for himself.

  Every so often he checked the audience again. It was still entirely canine. Even the chairman was a cocker spaniel, scratching behind its ear with a back foot.

  This wasn’t the first time. A fortnight ago he’d delivered a workshop to a colony of seabirds. Kittiwakes, he had reckoned. On another occasion he’d spoken for an hour on organisational-change management to buckets of dead fish.

  He had to remember that, whatever they looked like, they were only people. Ordinary people winging it, like him. They wouldn’t bite or peck or impregnate him with their foul stench. They would go away and he would go away and it would be over. Until the next time.

  It was how it was. They probably thought he was a chimp or a cat or a budgie.

  The thing was not to give in. The thing was not to admit it.

  The thing was to carry on. What else could you do?