‘Keep the change. Student are you? Not much of a job in this wind. Goodbye.’
Not a bad old boy. Funny how they all think you must be a student as if you wouldn’t be studying if you were at this time of year. Maybe Oxbridge has finished by now, gone down as they call it. Shall I go back in the hut or hang about out here a bit? Jump about. Well that’s the first one over and not bad as a promise for the day, a bob to start with. Soon get rid of me hot pants out here. Good job I’m not a brass monkey. Poor old devil he looked half frozen in the firm’s car. Won’t make retirement if he goes on like that. Somewhere it must be different surely, somewhere I’ve dreamed of men walking tall and upright through spacious streets, not bent and worried through their grey lives. That’s my trouble I suppose, a latter-day Victorian believing in progress at heart, an incipient do-gooder, who’d like to see everyone fulfilled and creative, and won’t accept things as they are in this sad dog-eats-dog old world of our today.
There goes the old lady with the gulls’ breakfast. They know she’s coming, wheeling and mewing high over her head and won’t drop down til she gets back on this side of the road. Goes over there with part of her turkey for them on Christmas day she said. God knows what they mean to her. Wonder if she watches them out of her window. Remind her of something maybe, in her childhood. Can’t be travel. Don’t reckon she’s been farther than the end of Brighton pier all her days. Hallo, here’s someone going to have trouble getting in. Alice’s turn. Stand back and watch. Just made it. Another hairsbreadth and the display stand would have gone for a spin. Knows it too; her face flushed, wondering who saw and what they’re thinking. Are they thinking bloody useless woman driver? Not been driving long and borrowed the old man’s car. Hell of a racket if she puts a dent in its glossy hide. Wonder if she’ll make it out? Nervous now, right rattled. Good girl Alice, flagging her up a bit. Should be easy past that curve in the mounting. There she goes, way up the road, glad to be free. Here comes a joker in a minibox. Mine I think. On guard.
See it in their eyes, the question. What is it? Meaning how should I react, which of my faces’ll cover this situation, can hide myself behind? Whether to be cheerful man-to-man, slightly patronising of course because while he’s got that thing stuck in my car, I’ve hired him so to speak, paid for him, or whether to be what’s a pretty girl like you doing a dirty cold job like this for? Why don’t we get together and work something out? I could show you a thing or two, you don’t want to play around with that thing when you can have a real live warm son of a gun of your own. Not who is this person but what, relating to it not thou as Buber saw. Little men with their fragment of jealously-guarded knowhow, mugged up on the spot and clutched close against all comers, I am a challenge to them, to their assumptions and the life they found on them, on sand.
Wasn’t it always like that? Whenever was the golden age that you can look back on and say then it was different? Illusion. But it exists, is held in the minds of men as they hold galaxies, the universe with only an intimation of what they mean, an apprehension. What happened to our golden age that put a foot over the threshold of the twentieth century? It was swallowed up by greed and disgust, corroded by two wars that nobody won, that spread their poison like mustard gas, blinding and leaving a legacy of old men run down before their time, coughing up their lungs, just about able to cosset themselves in a chimney corner til they die in blood and phlegm. How many of my own family are like that with the fire gone out and their only concern to be comfortable and nurture the little life they walked away with from the battlefields of the world; bringing up children to do the same, to lie quiet and take whatever’s going because your father paid for it and it corrupted him. Conformity, smell of mortality. See it on the face of the man in the minibox as he roars his meccano-size engine into the millrace, rat-race of traffic, uneasy behind his tiger-skinned miniwheel so the first chance or half he has he must tear up the tarmac overtaking on the inside, shouldering other cars into each other’s lanes to reassure himself. Time to get out of the cold, join old Alice in her hut.
‘Funny they should be playing that. Got a cup of coffee Alice?’
‘Thought you’d be in as soon as I made meself one. What’s that then?’
‘That song on the wireless. Listen.’
‘What’s it all about? Folk song isn’t it? What’s a silkie?’
‘It’s about a girl who marries a seal. Listen.’
‘What’s so special?’
‘I heard it on Sunday. A gypsy was singing it in a pub we went to.’
‘You do get to some funny places. She’s very popular that girl, American. I’ve heard her on here before. Sings one called The Streets of Laredo, cowboy song, I remember on the wireless when I was little. My brother used to sing it too. Imagined himself in a stetson and high boots I suppose. Well it makes a change. How could she marry a seal though? I mean what did they do?’
‘Well in those days they believed that seals became men on land. Actually she didn’t marry him, she just had a baby and she didn’t know who the father was, what he was called or where he lived. Then he turns up one night and pays her for looking after the child and says when it’s older he’ll come back and take it down to the sea and teach it to swim. Then, he says, she’ll marry a man who’s a very good shot and the first time he goes hunting he’ll kill both the silkie and his son with one bullet.’
‘Don’t really seem worth it.’
‘He must have thought so.’
‘Yes, but what about her? What did she get out of it?’
‘She was well paid and she got a hunter for a husband in the end. So she wasn’t too badly off, The interesting thing is that it says the father wasn’t good-looking, in fact he was rather ugly but she didn’t seem to mind. Still perhaps she only saw him at night.’
‘Oh well that’s alright then. He left her with the kid though. Just like a man.’
‘He came back to fetch it and paid up.’
‘Then he was better than most. Honest this job is enough to put you off men for life. You’d think me with a great thick wedding ring and a diamond like a lump of glass they’d leave me alone, I’d be safe enough but it don’t make a scrap of difference. There was a bloke come in yesterday wouldn’t take no for an answer til I told him me husband was a bouncer for a gambling den. Always after the same old thing and when you tell them no they think you’re playing hard to get or something. Why don’t they get themselves wives then they can have it legal on tap. Oh I tell you if the hours didn’t suit part time for the kids coming in from school I wouldn’t stick this a minute. I don’t know why you do when there’s other things you could be doing.’
‘You sound like Rae.’
‘And aren’t we both right? Think about it.’
‘There’s the bell. I’ll get it if you like. You finish your coffee.’
A big Wolseley. Have to watch these for air bubbles. Was she right I wonder? Why does that song keep going through my head? Because I’m half and half I suppose like the silkie. Funny how the women don’t seem to mind but he has to be punished in the end for daring to step out of his element. There was a bit more place for the outlandish though on the fringes of society; comes up in a lot of myths and ballads so long as society hadn’t too repressive a hold. Then it just ran wild of course, witch hunting for instance. Oh we wouldn’t have stood a chance in that time; sure sign of a witch to love your own sex and look at Joan of Arc who’s a transvestist with a strong mother fixation. She made herself a place, put heart into a whole nation like Elizabeth or Churchill and they burnt her for it as soon as they could do without her. Oh the motives behind that stake are so complex if you look into them, a moment when a society becomes like one mind complete with all its fears, repressions and neuroses. Hitler did the same with the Germans, made them a reflection of his own psychotic personality until the cold analysis of steel sheared them away bit by bit and he was left with just his own megalomaniac circle. Have we learnt I wonder, that you can’t sink your person
al responsibility in the collective? Or is that what I’ve been trying to do, involved myself so much in the problems of a group that I can’t see straight myself any longer? Is this the suffering Steve’s father means and is there any end to it, meant to be any end to it? Is there a point where you can say, ‘I’ve suffered enough. Now it’s time for a resurrection.’ Death has closed over me. I’ve been in the place of the tomb too long refusing my house among the living until I’ve become like a shade myself, adrift on the dark sea of the underworld. Maybe it’s a mistake to sink down so far. Orpheus never recovered after all. The world of the living tore him to pieces in spite of his music. Wonder if anyone’s ever pointed out that the lyre is shaped like a bull’s head? Graves maybe but I don’t seem to remember it. That would make him another of the young god lovers of the goddess, in fact the most perfect example of the lot when you come to work it all out. That’s something I’ve never seen explained in psychological terms. Graves always said she’d come back of course, the goddess, that we neglected her at our peril, had gone too far the other way with our patriarchal society. He meant in the mind I suppose or perhaps even more than that.
Animus and anima agreed to have a battle, but it’s anima that loses most of the time. Sometimes I wonder how many men really can appreciate a woman or whether the old sex war has gone on too long with too much money invested in it for there ever to be a truce. Yet, they’d say, how can you love women like this and not accept yourself as one. But you don’t love yourself unless you’re Judy, you love what you’re looking for, your opposite, complement. Why should I love me, the mind that can stay detached, ambition, ruthlessness, violence all the things I know are there, see in the faces of men behind their wheels, their calculating eye? What was it Rae said once about feeling friendly towards the masculine, loving it and that’s what I can’t do, can’t feel friendly, warm, towards it because I know it too well from inside. In spite of all the books say-about accepting facts, not living a fantasy, I can’t make myself feel feminine, only other people can do that, and then I feel outraged as if they were insisting I was someone else and must live out my life like that. That’s where we’re different from David and the other boys, at least people like Jonnie and I are. The boys wouldn’t change, wouldn’t like to be women even if you could wave a fairy wand over them but we would because for us it wouldn’t be a real change, only a simplification. Oh it isn’t true for thousands I know. We’re the odd ones out even there but it’s no good everyone falling over backwards to say we don’t exist and that it’s more realistic to say, ‘I’m a woman who loves women.’ That’s fine for many but not all and that’s where even we become intolerant though we ought to know better, to have learnt the pain of isolation and find acceptance for each other whatever the brand and tribe.
Penis envy, the feeling of having been castrated perhaps that’s at the root of it all like those dreams I have where I’ve got one six feet long, a fine big fellar almost too heavy to lift but it’s only the male who thinks there’s no substitute, women don’t mind as long as they get their climax. I’m the one that feels the lack not Rae and neither did Jill, like animals really, happy to be stroked and fondled. Somehow for me though it’s incomplete unless there’s penetration though there are different ways of loving for different moods and situations. Maybe that’s the answer: that there is no one answer and we shouldn’t try to force one on the moment but let the moment dictate its own. How many times you’ve thought about it in the open air, even tried it once or twice, and then suddenly the other morning it was the right moment and you didn’t have to think about how; it just happened. Is that something else a woman has almost by nature, being receptive to the moment, the creative kind of passivity? That’s something you can’t teach yourself either; it’s there or it isn’t. No there’s no way out lad, no point in pretending to be what you’re not. There are dozens of ways of being queer and you have to find what your kind is and then make something of it even if the answer leaves you a kind of little half-chick, a natural eunuch, the stock figure of fiction. You have a choice. David and the boys don’t have a choice because they’re outside the law anyway; a negro doesn’t have a choice because it’s obvious and no hiding the colour of his skin except in very rare cases. But no one need know as far as you’re concerned and yet the only real barrier to their knowing is your pride or fear. The choice is yours whether to side with conformity and pretend that there’s only one way of being a human animal or to stick your neck out and say no, there are millions of ways, all elements in the kaleidoscope, shaken together we make the pattern. The pattern is alive like a living cell seen on a slide, changing, vibrating with colour. Civilisations fall. A hand shakes the tube; the pattern crumbles and reforms. Whose hand? Our own.
That’s one thing about this job of course, you don’t have to give it too much attention, can let the mind run on as long as you remember to say yes sir, no sir, what can I do for you sir, ring up the number, count out the change. They always come in a rush so they’re queueing up for pumps and then, slack, sigh a bit as if you’ve been holding your breath, stand and look out across the road towards the common and those birds. Rest your mind on the dip and sail of wings, gulls’ wide white wings carry the ache away up with them and loose it on a banked turn. Aren’t you hiding though here? Aren’t you doing just what you condemn, fragmenting your existence, refusing your part of the pattern? Here’s a man asking for upper cylinder shots. That means a trip into the repair shop where the mechanics’ll be sitting having their break, the confraternity of oily brethren, and the laughter will ripple as you turn your back. That hurts doesn’t it? You almost hear the joke that sets it flowing as you fill the cylinder. There are too many variations on that theme. It hurts. It hurts because there is no defence, nothing you can say or do. You can’t even hate in return because you know the fault isn’t theirs. They’re only doing what they’ve been told, been taught. Like the time you felt the fists thudding into your body. Even then there was nothing you could do except cover your face with your hands and crouch into the wall. Their own ignorance was a weapon and a shield you couldn’t counter because it left you without anger against them only against the nebulous, faceless shadows behind them which you knew that physical blows wouldn’t harm, would only give greater substance. Yet in play you fight on equal terms. Remember the day you found the secret, the difference between the way men fight and the way women fight. Women fight without conviction even in fun; men fight to win. You were running over the heath, half a dozen together, students out for a romp, the girls already squealing and dodging, the boys catching at their clothes and hands. It began as a walk, a serious peripatetic through the grounds before Sunday lunch at the big house used for weekend seminars on modern poetry and the evaluation of history on scientific principles, and suddenly in the sun, up the long grass slopes, someone gave a little push and it became a Spring rite. You found yourself stranded between two swiftly developing attitudes, not knowing whether to hunt or to run. Every instinct told you to hunt but you knew you were expected to run. The game moved quickly, chasing across the turf like a pack. Then one of the girls was down, crying for pax, mercy, struggling like a kitten held up in the air. The boys hooted and bayed. You tried to shear off but Kevin was coming after you, his long legs covering the heath like the football pitch. When he caught up with you and brought you down with his arms locked round your legs you should have screamed and laughed but no sound would come. No trigger instinct opened your mouth except to grunt and puff a bit and then he began to pin you to the springy grass. You struggled a little as girls do and then as you felt yourself held, the moment come when you should give in, go limp, the muscles refusing to resist anymore, something snapped inside and you twisted with all your strength under him, not caring if it hurt, if the flesh bruised, flung yourself sideways and up until you were free, driven by an instinct to win, to be on top. Now you held him down trusting in your thick muscular legs, knowing your arms were thin and undeveloped, and took his wrist
and twisted it bending the thumb back. You saw the amazement come into his eyes. ‘You fight like a man.’ And you laughed and let him go because you were fond of each other and he had taught you a secret. When one of the other boys approached he said proudly and because he didn’t want them to try and discover what he knew, ‘Don’t touch her. You’ll have taken on more than you bargain for,’ You laughed at each other and ran on and when it turned to horseplay among the boys with Kevin challenging as you understood he must to restore his position among them in the male chain of being, you stood a little way off, watching them, seeing that the moment came for them all when they must either put forth their strength or give in like a girl, and that in that moment they didn’t care if it hurt. They found their bruises later and compared them, complaining cheerfully, all part of the game. But you’d learnt not only the secret of that moment but something about yourself: that the instincts you should have had weren’t there and that you could no longer play the games other children played because the rules that governed them excluded you. From now on you would have to play among your own kind or not at all because that kind of rough and tumble is based on sex.
Is that true of all fighting, except large scale organised warfare of course which is part of power politics and economic pressure? Though, when you think of it, by the time it comes down to individual men fighting each other the propagandists have to introduce a sexual element to really get their blood up, make them feel the other side are sexual rivals, or perverts or effete. Not so much the primary propaganda of ideas, we’re right, they’re wrong, but the underground whispers of rape and mistresses, physical tortures, orgies; all the tales we believed about the Germans as kids while they probably heard about the shocking doings at our public schools, le vice anglais, and our degenerate aristocracy. Even with Rae and Jill it came down to a physical struggle in the end so that, in the last resort, they knew who was boss I suppose, and all the husbands and wives I know go in for some kind of sexual rough play even if it’s only with their tongues. It’s not just that you want to be boss: you get a real excitement out of it so the natural thing to do is to make love after. Carry it too far and you’d end up with rape or necrophilia. De Sade was the boy for all that of course but it’s interesting to see how it works in everyday life to a lesser extent. Suppose I rushed wildly into the hut now and threw poor Alice down on the floor and set about her; that’d make the eyebrows shoot up all round. Oh if she did but know it I’m as bad a lad as all the rest who don’t care whether she’s got a ring on her finger or not except that I keep it to myself, don’t go shouting about what a virile beast I am, what Judy calls the look of the predatory male in my eye.
The Microcosm Page 33