Everything You Need

by A. L. Kennedy

  “What the fuck are you on about? Or is this something that only a pastor would understand?”

  “Yes, that was a laugh—they asked what religion I was when they wheeled me in—I told them my own. I think they counted that as Protestant—which isn’t far off. I do only ever contact God to make complaints.”

  “Jack, how many drugs are they giving you?”

  “Far too few, old man, far too bloody few.” He slowed, rocked his neck back and forth for a moment to ease some unspecified ache. His skin had a yellowed tinge with undertones of green and looked slightly more transparent than it should have been. Other than that, he seemed to have put on weight. “It is good to see you, Nate. I’ve had every sodding member of all my families trooping past for the last two days—much more than mortal man can bear. The age range my children cover is truly alarming. It could be worse, obviously. Better than no visitors at all. But what I want is company. Nothing like the family to make you feel alone.”

  Nathan’s brain writhed silently for several seconds, trying to find some cheerful observation. In the end, he could only cough out, “And are you all right?”

  Jack spluttered into a bray of laughter. “Well, obviously bloody not. I’m in hospital.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Just the usual stuff, really. Pancreatitis grumbling, liver not too happy, kidneys whingeing and the heart not one hundred per cent. Very dull. The best bit is the water retention. If you hadn’t been intent on rejecting my advances, I’d have shown you . . .” He winked lugubriously. “Below the waist, I am reaching quite awesome proportions.”

  “Not only your dick, surely?”

  “Sadly no. Not that it wasn’t a fine old thing in the first place . . . No, no, all of me’s depressingly waterlogged, I’m afraid. I’m just hoping the tide won’t rise any further. Queer way to drown, wouldn’t you say? From the inside out.”

  “That isn’t likely, is it?” Nathan tried not to sound alarmed.

  “No, not very. Strange, though . . . At the moment my bollocks look for all the world like a pair of infants’ heads. Viewed from above.”

  “But without the ears.”

  “God, you’re a pedantic shit.”

  “You wouldn’t fancy telling me how you got here.”

  “You mean you haven’t heard the story?”

  “I mean I haven’t heard it from you.”

  “Ah well, then, I suppose . . .” Jack sniffed and settled himself into a more narrative position. “Haven’t got a drink on you, by any chance? Just before I start?” His eyes wheedled just a little too long before he shrugged and cleared his throat. “Uncaring bastard.” He gave Nathan another look, softer this time, and very still. “Then I’ll begin. Once upon a time there was a promising young editor who loved his work and the look of his future and his books . . .” He paused to rub his eyes.

  “Perhaps we might skip a few years, Jack? Till we get to last week.” Nathan felt an absurd urge to pat at Jack’s hand, along with an equally strong and opposing conviction that he didn’t really want to touch Jack, right now, at all—that his flesh might be clammy, or sticky, or something worse.

  Which wouldn’t be his fault. But should still be his own business. No need for me to intrude.

  “What are you thinking, Nate? About me, isn’t it? I can tell. You needn’t worry, you know. I am perfectly all right, really. For a hospital case.” Jack paused, solemnly waiting for Nathan to agree.

  “Fine, OK, I’m convinced.”

  “Good. So stop worrying. You look repulsive when you’re worried.”

  “Just because you’re in bed, that doesn’t mean you can just insult me indefinitely.”

  “Sign of affection, though, isn’t it?” Jack skipped his gaze towards the window and frowned slightly.

  Nathan scratched his ear for no good reason. “Mm. Yes. No doubt.”

  “But back to our hero Jack . . .” J.D. folded his arms, yawned and made a proper start. “Well, as you know, Doctor Dee’s Table did terribly well. My girl and I—surprisingly—won Themiddleclasswankers Thankyoufortrying Award (sponsored by Gubbins and Muggins Electric Shock Batons Inc.). We were both of us rather chuffed.”

  “Yes, congratulations.”

  “And then we were long-listed for the Headfuck.”

  “And then short-listed.”

  “Yes, indeed. Which meant we had to bib and tucker up and go off to the dinner, eat our humble crow and Armageddon pie.” He sighed. “I went once before, a thousand years ago. But it hadn’t been to do with me, then— I’d just been an observer, not taking it personally at all . . .

  “Either way, I’d forgotten what it was like. Everywhere you looked, we were all of us, visibly, shaking apart—nervous ticks and tremors, stumbles and fumbles and defects of speech bursting up out of nowhere. The whole place looked like a psychiatric ward in evening dress—one with inadequate access to Largactil and ECT.

  “And I’m in there, just like the rest, another bundle of mutating superstitions and indecent sweat and I’m fighting to keep the glass full and the smile in place and the hands as they should be and not gripping my own or some other fucker’s throat and above the whole shivering ruck of us there’s a haze of pure alcohol, just roiling up from every inch of skin as the pressure of undiluted professional terror simply fucking evaporates every drop we can manage to drink.

  “Then, when they’ve trotted us round the parade ring for a lifetime or so, we’re herded in to sit up nicely and dine. And eating your own offspring in a floodlit slaughterhouse would be really much more pleasant and entertaining . . .” Jack grinned balefully, wiped his mouth.

  “So I’m holding my author’s hand now under the table—not even attempting the gluey dessert—and Benedict fucking shithead tosser Kemmler is sitting at the table opposite because he’s got a punter up for it, too— God piss on him in purgatory for ever—which means there are two books short-listed from the same infernal house, Christ help us—and he grins, he grins right fucking at me, the poisonous shit. The sleazy, bastard fuck. And, by now, this is not about winning, not even about being taken apart by whoever does fucking win, this is not about my book, or anyone else’s, this is not about trying to keep myself from weeping, or crying out, or just replacing that smug fucker’s eyes with my nicely polished, family heirloom cufflinks—it is simply about not dying, about getting through the next fifty minutes of nationally televised blood sport without dropping down fucking dead.” Jack’s colour was rising, taking on an unusual orange blush. He shook his head, continued.

  “And that is the point, the exact, fucking moment when you understand, very clearly, that what you are watching is the death of language and of truth and of whatever, at one time, might just have felt a little bit like your soul. And you sit, like a hollowed apple, rotting quietly beneath the lights, while the cameras close on another table—that opposite table—that may-you-baste-eternally-in-your-own-fucking-body-fat-right-in-the-heart-of-the-darkest-turd-in-the-arsehole-of-hell table—and you work out the winner before it’s announced—Last Seen Heading Athwart— Kemmler’s book. Kemmler’s fucking punter. Kemmler’s fucking book. The fucking winner is Kemmler’s piss-fucking-poorly presented homage to fucking catatonia, his post-modernist colostomy bag of self-referential pus, his roman-à-no-clef-needed-it’s-about-my-ex-wife wank, squeezed out of possibly the most ungrateful and boring typist to ever have spewed on a waiter at the Groucho Club. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

  “I got annoyed, Nathan. I really did get quite annoyed.

  “And my girl was very brave and then went down to the ladies’ for a cry and came back looking dreadful when she’d been genuinely prettily turned out and had bloody well deserved to win and maybe, if anyone had liked her editor, she might have. It was shitty for her—not what she deserved— and I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to help her. She wrote a good book, Nathan—she broke her heart to write a good, straight book. The way it ought to be done, you know?”

 
“I just about remember.”

  “No. You know. You’re the type that does. And you’re going to do it yourself for me soon.” He winced, breathed, reined himself in a touch. “Sorry. Sounding rather shrill there. I do apologise. Where had I got to . . . Ah,” spiring his hands to his mouth now, obscuring a smile, “my final downfall, yes. Well, of course, the house had hired out that ghastly place in Soho for their aftermath party: Mr. Kemmler borne off to it shoulder-high, with a special wave for me as he was leaving. His charge was off being grilled by the universe’s press, and mine . . . ? What the hell could I do with mine? Couldn’t haul her off to the same bloody party—someone else’s victory party—that would be altogether far too grisly. In the end she told me she just wanted to go home.”

  Nathan couldn’t help but grin mildly.

  “Not at all, Mr. Staples, don’t even think it—she went to her home, by herself, back to her grubby hubby. I won’t say I didn’t consider an offer of serious consolation, but then—surprisingly—I found I didn’t have the heart. So she jumps in a cab and I take another and I did absolutely mean to go to the bash myself, to walk in and face them all—do the sporting thing and fight another day: having lost the battle, try for the war: get up and keep running and be a good boy and so on and so on and so on . . .” He glowered at the bloated shape of his legs under the blankets.

  “But I couldn’t. I caught a cab all right, got to the place, made it almost to the door, but then I heard them laughing. And, of course, it was very probably not laughter aimed at me, not even remotely referring to me, but it felt as if it was and I couldn’t go in, Nathan. I could not go in. They beat me, then. I let them win. That was precisely the point when I let them win.

  “And so I went to see Oscar, Oscar my personal dentist—why not?—to get myself properly, thoroughly loaded, to turn out all of my lights. He has a flat in Frith Street: not far to go.

  “My reception was slightly cantankerous. He wasn’t alone and hadn’t been expecting me and wasn’t in the mood for playing amateur proctologist—not with a straight old drunk, in any case. But I do believe that I may have cried at him and even gone down on my knees. They’re suckers for kneeling, these dominant types, very reminiscent of my second wife.

  “Anyway, Oscar relented and let me come in, packed away his current, unsavoury, little friend and got down to business. Or up to business, one never quite knows with enemas . . . Both, I suppose. I asked him for a stronger solution than we’d used before, because these things always have to escalate: that’s their nature, it can’t be helped. And he obliged me.” Jack swallowed, pursed his lips. “But he wanted an increase in payment—for the general inconvenience and the lateness of the hour.” His eyes widened slightly and, for a moment, he looked almost painfully childlike and, somehow, surprised or disappointed.

  “See?” J.D. opened his mouth, yawned it wide, exposing the naked line of his gums. Barring his incisors, all Jack’s teeth were gone. His multiple extractions had left their mark in ruddy puckers, a black fraying of stitches—Nathan hoped from hospital intervention—and the unpleasant dark of what might be either clots or unhealed sockets, Nathan didn’t wish to guess. His own mouth began to wash with anxious saliva.

  “Christ, Jack. What were you thinking?”

  “That I no longer wished to think. Besides which, it wasn’t bad, didn’t even especially go wrong. I had an entirely satisfactory dip into oblivion and then I was sent on my way. The sending on the way, that was the problem. Old Oscar was a little too anxious to see me go. Which unfortunately left me to provide one of the West End’s more lurid pavement spectacles. I can see the headlines in the Bookseller now— Editor Found Slush-Piled Near Soho Square—‘He was bleeding from the mouth, unconscious, subject to alcoholic seizures and (upon close and expert examination) also had a recently penetrated and Vaseline’d arse. We are currently at a loss to guess what unnatural doings may have been done,’ says baffled Inspector Bollock of the Yard.

  “I have told them I remember nothing, but that I may have been Mickey Finned.”

  “And they believe you?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. Would you?” He gave a faintly shamefaced cough and leaned back. “And that, Best Beloved, is the story of How the Editor Lost His Teeth. And I am a disgrace to my vocation. I do know. Nate?”

  “Yes?”

  “Come here and shake my hand.” An arm was extended, a vague tremble setting in, once it had halted in midair.

  “What?”

  “Shake my hand, Sport—there’s a good man. Be here for me. Tangibly.”

  And Nathan could do nothing but shuffle up and grip Jack’s palm. Then, finding himself held startlingly tight, “Steady, Jack. No need to break my fingers.”

  “Oh, but there might be. If you don’t agree.” Jack fixed Nathan with his firmest hard-bargaining stare.

  “Jack. Don’t fuck about.”

  “You see, we aren’t just being friendly, Nate. We’re shaking on a deal.” Nathan angled his head aslant, so that he didn’t catch Jack’s breath. “You can’t do this, Jack. For one thing, there’s no need for it. Don’t we generally agree?”

  “Just an agreement won’t be enough. This has to be a complete understanding.”

  “We already have a contract, Jack.”

  “Mm hm.” J.D. was breathing faster, beginning to sweat as his fist closed more urgently on Nathan’s already throbbing knuckles. “But that’s business—that’s not us. I want your absolute promise to me, not the company.”

  “Jack, really . . .”

  “Promise.”

  “Promise what?” Nathan’s remaining supplies of calm were seeping lumpily away.

  “All right, I’ll tell you two out of three. They’re not bad things, Nate. They’re for your own good.”

  “Altruism, Jack. That isn’t like you.” The joke didn’t work, didn’t make either one of them smile.

  “They’re all for your own good and one of them’s also for mine. Will you listen?” Jack’s voice shifted a little in his throat, made him halt, blinking at Nathan, eyes asking to be excused any further argument.

  “I’m listening.”

  “About time. I want you to tell your daughter who you are—”

  “I’m going to, I’m going to. For fuck’s sake, just allow me the dignity of picking my own time.” He controlled a glower, relented, met Jack’s continuing gaze. “And the next?”

  “The proper novel. The one that breaks your heart. Do it.”

  “Bearing in mind that nobody can break what’s already broken . . . Yes, OK. I’ve told you, I’m already working on it—I’ll get it done—but if you want a promise, then I promise. I promise. OK? And?”

  “I’ll tell you the last one later. It’s for me. So allow me the dignity of picking my own time.”

  “You want a blind promise?”

  “I want you to trust me.”

  “Jack, I—”

  “I want you to trust me.”

  “I do.”

  They both swallowed while the instant held and folded round them. Neither man had anticipated the contract would be made completely with two words, that it would lock in their intentions, almost before they could recognise its key. Nathan slowly slipped his free hand over Jack’s, then felt Jack fit the last hand moistly over that. They faced each other.

  “Well, Nathan.”

  “Well, Jack.”

  “You’ll be there for me, won’t you?”

  “I, uh—”

  “Mm hm, mm hm. I know.” Jack nodded, leaned his head back and, for a moment, closed his eyes. “That’s good.” And then he looked at Nathan. “That’s us now. Isn’t it?”

  And Nathan looked back at him. “Yes. Yes, that’s us.”

  What are we doing, Jack? What have we done?

  Nathan’s scalp tingled with a soft unease. He thought that he ought to feel foolish, clinging to another grown man like this, but he couldn’t quite break away. Without knowing why, he leaned forward and gently, cleanly,
kissed Jack on the forehead and then withdrew.

  “Bloody hell, Nathan.” Quietly, almost a whisper, “Was that really called for?”

  “Yes, I would say so.” Whispering back.

  “You’re just taking advantage of a dying man.”

  “Don’t say that.” The air seeming to shiver now, making it difficult to see.

  “Well, as it happens, Nate, if I actually had the choice, I would rather not.”

  It really was getting quite ridiculously difficult to see.

  “Don’t worry, Nathan. I’ll write to you. I’ll write.”

  Dear Nate,

  The Christmas decorations are getting nearer. So far, my room can boast everything festive but mistletoe. I don’t think they’re going to offer me any of that.

  First week of December and the decor can only get worse. I blame the staff. I believe that a number of them have been transferred into my orbit from a children’s ward, hence their nervous fiddling with baubles and their air of asexual cheer. I am determined to be out of here before they ring me round with trees. I will not be a party to trimming, I am adamant.

  Which brings me to a rather tricky editorial point. Here I am, writing to you: present and even future tense, first person and all that. But, in fact, if—or rather when—they send you this, I’ll already be past.

  So there it is. Has to be said. Sorry.

  I’ve already written up a respectable stack of letters—too many dependants, you see. You’re the last and then I’ll settle down to dying. They say to keep cheerful, but most things about me aren’t working any more. I think I have two or three days. During which I may be rather busy.

  I think we didn’t do too badly by each other, although you may disagree. By now I obviously won’t care much if you do. But, at the time of writing, I hope you think that I did well by you.

  And I hope that you’ll take my advice when you pick my replacement. I feel, as your former partner, that I may have the right to suggest your next suitable mate. Certainly, I wouldn’t want to think of you pining alone. Although, of course, I am assuming that you will find me to be quite irreplaceable. I’m enclosing the name and address of my choice for you. You should like him, he looks very like that acid bath murderer, Haigh.