A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  Daisy turned to me. “I’m giving you one last chance. Take back what you said.”

  “I forbid it,” I said, frowning. “It’s time you started to understand, Daisy, that there are times when it’s right for a man to say to a woman, ‘No, these are the rules; you are forbidden to step over the line.’ ”

  Daisy stood up. “Are you coming, Oliver?”

  Thirst laughed. “Wait, wait, sit down a minute. Look, I’ll come, but I don’t want to be seen leaving the pub with you. Too many people know me. I’ll meet you up the road. Take the car and give me ten minutes. I’ll see you on Willoughby Road and we’ll have a little fling.”

  When Daisy stood up, Thirst beckoned her to lean over him while he whispered. “When you approach the car have the key in your right hand so you don’t have to fumble. It’s an old car, so treat it with a bit of contempt—swing the door open a bit rough, act like you’ve had it for years. And make sure you don’t spin the tires when you move off. Only amateurs do that, from bad nerves.”

  Daisy nodded, stared at me contemptuously for a moment, then left the pub. She tried to obey Thirst’s instructions, but she was white with fear when she opened the car door. After we had watched her drive away, Thirst telephoned the police.

  By the time we reached Willoughby Road, two police cars had already arrived. Daisy was shaking badly. She looked frail and naked in that skimpy skirt and thin sweater. I could see she’d been crying and was on the verge of hysteria. I waited in the shadows while Thirst went up to the police to explain that there had been a mistake. He’d bought the car a week before. He happened to have the registration documents in his pocket to prove it. Daisy was his friend, and she had his full authority to drive it. He didn’t know who had called the police.

  “Why didn’t you say that?” one of the policemen snapped at her, after examining the papers.

  “You probably never gave her a chance. You blokes scare the shit out of little girls like her,” Thirst said. “Intimidation, it’s called. You all right, luv?” he asked Daisy.

  She nodded, apparently unable to speak.

  —

  It was days before she would talk to me again.

  “I suppose you got a big kick out of making an asshole out of me?”

  “Can’t you take a joke?”

  “Can’t you see what he’s doing?”

  “He just wanted to teach you a lesson.”

  “If you believe that, you really have got your head in the clouds. Can’t you see he’s driving a wedge between us?”

  “Because he wants you?” I sneered.

  “I didn’t say it was me he wanted.”

  29

  When Thirst finally finished his A level exams, he threw a party to celebrate.

  Hogg was there, and so were Eleanor (minus her husband) and other people from the parole board, a social worker who knew Thirst well, a policeman whom I had once cross-examined, some students from the college where Thirst had been studying, and a lot of people I’d never met.

  He had persuaded the college to allow him to use one of its halls for the night, a smallish affair with gray linoleum and, at one end, a stage covered by a curtain. There was beer or cheap wine to drink, served in polystyrene cups by an ex-convict behind a folding table. The ex-convict had taken the alternative route to rehabilitation. His hair was long, he wore an earring in a pierced ear, and he spoke in a phony American accent. “Wine, man?” he asked Daisy.

  Neither Thirst nor Chaz was visible for the first part of the evening, which meant that people who hardly knew each other could open conversations with the question, “Where’s Oliver?”

  “He said he would be a little late,” I told a girl with orange hair.

  “Ooh! You must be one of the toffs,” she said.

  There was a stark division between people from Thirst’s murky past, who were better dressed and spoke in thick cockney accents, and the rest of us. I was immediately ill at ease, which set up a tension between Daisy and me.

  “You’re getting into one of your moods,” she said.

  “No I’m not.”

  “I can feel it, I can feel the paranoia freezing up your guts.”

  I caught sight of Eleanor and James Hogg across the room.

  “Nonsense. You know I love parties—especially this sort.”

  “Try to enjoy it, Jimmy, for me. You know how important it is to Oliver.”

  Daisy often chided me on social occasions for my lack of interest, but when people like the policeman I had once cross-examined came up to speak to me, a look of envy would cross her face.

  “Nice to see you again,” the policeman said.

  “That’s an even bigger lie than the ones you were telling in the box,” I said. He laughed.

  “Who was that?” Daisy said.

  “Just another bent cop.”

  “Oh God, you’re so important these days—everybody knows you.” While she spoke, her eyes searched the room.

  I sensed her restlessness and rebelled inwardly at being identified as a burden to her. I put it down to her American origins that for her a party, any party, was an event of great importance, something like a holiday for which one spends the rest of one’s life waiting. She always seemed to be on her best behavior on such occasions, like a young girl anxious to please. It was hard to explain to her my view that such affairs required an enormous expenditure of wasted energy. No conclusions were reached, no decisions made, no problems solved, no money was earned. One simply woke up the next morning with a hangover and a feeling of guilt for having once again caused unnecessary damage to one’s health. I knew that in expressing this unhip view I would merely confirm her worst fears that I was an old fogy before my time. I looked around the bleak hall with a feeling of dread at the hard work that would be involved in finding enough people to talk to and enough small talk to fill the next four hours. Daisy, I knew, would not want to leave before midnight.

  “Daisy, if I get really bored, would you mind very much if I left early?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “But you don’t need me. I spoil it for you.”

  “I am with you, understand?”

  Anxious to escape from the heavy judgment she was forming at my expense, I encouraged her to join a group of young people I saw sharing a joint. As usual, she seemed reluctant to leave my side. But as the unmistakable smell of her favorite drug wafted over, she found it in her heart to abandon me to the cold interstices between social groups that were my natural habitat.

  I watched her say something cute and fetching to one of the young men in the group to gain acceptance and a share of the joint. She smoked it expertly through cupped hands. I thought, not for the first time, that there was something dirty about the way she smoked grass.

  The young man she had first spoken to watched with approval.

  “Not bad,” Daisy said. “Reminds me of Afghan black.”

  “Exactly right.”

  “Nineteen seventy-one, from the southern end of the slope.” She smirked. I watched his eyes light up.

  I consoled myself with a few polystyrene cups of red wine before indulging a prurient curiosity I felt about Hogg, who was standing in a corner talking to Eleanor. The hall was filling up fast. I shouldered my way between two men standing back-to-back and felt cruel packs of muscle squeezing me. Both men turned to stare as I passed. “So he copped five in Dartmoor,” one of them said to his group, resuming the conversation.

  “The Tories are all fascists,” a girl in jeans and sweater was saying to the next group through which I had to pass. “It really really surprises me that people don’t see that—I mean, why does anybody vote for them? That’s what I really can’t relate to.”

  “People are deceived.”

  “It’s a conspiracy, I mean, d’you think the CIA are behind it?”

  “Definitely, I mean, they control the media, right?”

  Passing Daisy’s group, I noticed that the policeman had joined them and was at that minute about
to smoke the joint. He caught my eye and winked, which affected me oddly. I was sure Daisy was studying me.

  “There goes God,” the policeman said as I passed. Some of the group turned.

  “You could say that,” Daisy said.

  I was finally close enough to manage a wave at Eleanor and Hogg. He held up a fist in a kind of greeting to me over the heads of the crowd. She’d said he had suffered a nervous breakdown, but peering at him between bodies, I thought Hogg had the appearance of a man who had suffered not so much a breakdown as a thoroughly liberating change of identity. His hair was cut short, in a style favored by many gay men; he wore a gold ring in one pierced ear. Instead of embarrassment, there was pride in the power of that wrestler’s body.

  Eleanor and Hogg stopped talking as I approached and watched me without smiling. Eleanor was dressed in tight jeans, which had the effect of emphasizing her belly, but it was the change in Hogg that unnerved me. Eleanor was giggling, presumably at something he had said.

  “Having a good time?” he asked, then exchanged a look with Eleanor as if the question were a great joke. “Doesn’t James Knight look as though he just loves parties?” he said. Eleanor seemed to be trying to swallow a smile. I felt suddenly disoriented, as if I were surrounded by people who only resembled those I had known.

  “Oh yes, I love parties,” I replied, undecided, at the moment of speaking, whether to sound ironic or not. This left my words sounding merely polite. Hogg and Eleanor burst out laughing, and Eleanor put an arm around my shoulders.

  “Poor James! There’s a whole hemisphere of human life he’s never even tapped.” Her voice sounded half malicious, half kindly. The curious use of the word “hemisphere” stuck in my mind like a thorn.

  By now I was feeling strange, and it occurred to me, with a sudden lurch of panic, that the wine had been laced with something. I was about to ask if they thought so, too, when there was a deafening twang of an electric guitar, and the curtains across the stage parted, to reveal Thirst and Chaz dressed in the kind of striped pajamas prisoners were supposed to wear at Alcatraz. A fluorescent sign proclaimed them to be a group called The Underground. There was stunned silence for a moment, then laughter. Eleanor said, “How superb!” and Hogg stared openmouthed at Thirst, whose pajama top was cut away to show off his tattoos.

  “My God, he’s beautiful,” Hogg said.

  “Evening, everybody,” Thirst said into a microphone. His voice, much distorted by the cheap equipment, had a quality I had never noticed before: commanding, metallic, inhuman.

  “I hope you enjoy the Prisoners’ Ball. We’re going to do a few little numbers for you. Before we do, I think you all should know that the agency primarily responsible for law enforcement in this country is represented here tonight in its most benevolent form. In other words, he’s as bent as a two-bob watch.”

  I looked across at the policeman and was astounded when he merely smirked. Somebody cheered.

  “Yeah, let’s hear it for the bent cop,” Thirst said. There was a small hooray. I tried to find a face that was as shocked as I was. Everyone seemed merely amused.

  They played a few songs—with Thirst singing not very well and Chaz playing a huge guitar that dwarfed him—then came off the stage to mix with us. Chaz made a few adjustments to the electrics; recorded rock music began to play, and somebody switched on ultraviolet strobe lights. For the whole of the rest of the evening, the lights flicked on and off, picking out certain colors like white and blue in people’s clothes and making the owners look dazzling for a few seconds. Hogg was wearing a pair of white trousers so tight that his crotch was emphasized whenever the light picked it up.

  Thirst, whose uniform proclaimed him to be Prisoner 666, made his way through the hall like a conquering king, his features radiant with confidence and magnanimity. He looked every bit the man who had finally got the world where he wanted it—and indeed it seemed as if everyone in the hall wanted to be his friend. By now I was convinced that the wine had been laced, probably with lysergic acid or some similar drug.

  As he approached the group Daisy had joined, I winced to see her put her arms around his neck and kiss him full on the mouth.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I thought I heard her say.

  The policeman also embraced him, in the ingratiating manner of an obsequious courtier, whose tribute Thirst accepted condescendingly. I wished to annihilate the repugnance I was feeling and went back across the hall to the Formica table for some more wine—which, I noticed, was being ladled out of a tub rather than poured from a bottle. In a self-destructive impulse I swallowed a cupful and stood by the door, watching Thirst’s progress.

  I heard people saying things like “I feel really weird,” although many appeared unaffected by whatever was in the wine. To my annoyance, Daisy’s group was slowly moving toward me. Its members, who had not been drinking very much, appeared quite normal, which is to say their behavior was typical of people who have been smoking marijuana. Someone would make a joke, which would not strike me as funny. The joke would hang in the air for a long moment, then two or more members of the group would get it at the same time and there would be loud incredulous guffaws that stopped abruptly. They would eye each other affectionately, then suddenly break eye contact, look at the floor, and retreat into smug grins. Daisy had managed to make herself leader of this group.

  “I was so stoned,” she was saying, “I put all their essays in the bath and started to run the hot water. That’s how I got the sack that time.”

  The whole group cracked up.

  I watched her from my solitary position at the door and did not immediately realize the extent to which the drug intensified familiar fears. The suspicion (which increased as I watched to an unshakable conviction) that her narcissism left no room for love and that my passion for her was based on a delusion, or some kind of spell that she cast over me, caused me to break out in a cold sweat just as if I was staring at the incontrovertible evidence of her treachery.

  Paranoia gaped like a void at my feet. I was staring into an internal abyss when Hogg came up to join me, a look of triumph on his face. When he spoke, he might have been reading my thoughts.

  “You look as if you’re just seeing women for the first time. Aren’t they hideous?”

  I had been looking only at Daisy, but now I looked and listened and found that the other women in the room all seemed to be vain, powerful, manipulative. For a moment they struck me as creatures formed from an identical pattern, a perception that did not increase my anxiety but made me laugh. This startled Hogg.

  “Aren’t you leaving something out?” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, look at the men.”

  I was thinking particularly of Thirst—who had not hesitated to drug us all, I was now convinced, in his lust for power and revenge.

  “But the men are beautiful,” Hogg said.

  The word “beautiful” immediately made me think of Daisy, who at that moment caught my eye and made a wry face. I had teased her many times about her ego trips when she got into a group she could dominate. Her expression seemed to say, “Yes, I’m getting a cheap thrill and making silly jokes that everybody laughs at.” My sense of revulsion was immediately replaced by a feeling of boundless love that was rapidly extended to the other women in the room and then to the men.

  “It’s a puzzle,” I said, as if Hogg had been part of my inner dialogue. I then had the startling idea that my abrupt changes of perception were much more rapid than I had supposed and followed the rhythm of the strobe lights: on / off, black / white. The awesome thought that human life amounted to no more than this, a mindless alternation between binary opposites (wasn’t that the way computers were supposed to work?), frightened me so much that I held on to Hogg’s arm, causing him to look uncomfortable.

  The moment passed. I experienced a state of total calm, remembering the panic of the moment before as if it were a vortex which I had traveled through and miraculously survived. I wa
s now entirely possessed by the drug, but the state of inner calm enabled me to think about my condition in a disinterested way.

  I tilted my head back so that I was looking up at a corner of the ceiling. I remembered doing that when I was ill in bed as a child. There on the ceiling I saw Thirst again in his prison costume, with the sleeves cut away. He was pushing a huge boulder uphill, hands worn to stumps with the effort, and bleeding. In the hallucination, he was about to reach the top of the hill, which ended (though he could not know it) in a precipitous cliff. I stretched my neck back still farther, until I was looking at the ceiling directly above me. There he was again, with his rock, about to reach the precipitous edge. Farther back still, he reappeared and so on wherever I looked. Why was he persisting with his rock?

  The vision intrigued me, as if it might provide an answer to some perpetual conundrum of mine, and I tried to sustain it, but it disappeared in a flash.

  I felt another panic attack coming on. I turned to Hogg and saw that by now he, too, was possessed by the drug. Rapture illuminated his face. I sensed that I did not want to know what he was staring at, but I seemed powerless to keep my eyes from following the direction of his.

  “Look at them,” he muttered, apparently in a religious ecstasy, “the king and the queen.”

  I finally turned to see Thirst and Daisy walking toward us, hand in hand. They were, indeed, a handsome couple. Hogg’s rapture proved highly suggestive. Knowing that if I did not escape immediately I would do or say something terrible, I rudely tore myself away from Hogg as they approached. I caught a worried, disappointed look on Daisy’s face as I fairly rushed across the room, bumping into people like some panic-stricken animal, trying to escape them.

  I found Eleanor standing near the stage, holding a polystyrene cup of wine, staring into space. She blinked when she saw me, smiled stupidly.

  “Hello, James Knight,” she said slowly, as if in a dream. But she extended her hand to hold me tightly by the arm. “He’s poisoned us, hasn’t he? The filthy little crook.”