As Far as You Can Go

by Julian Mitchell

  “Hallo,” he said, taking a seat.

  Dennis looked relieved to see him. “Harold, how good to see you. Eddie, I’d like you to meet a typical young Britisher, as you would say, Harold Barlow. Harold, meet Eddie Jackson.”

  “How do you do,” said Harold. “But I’m not typical of anything.”

  At times Dennis’s genius for finding categories and sticking people in them without their permission could get very annoying. In a way, he reflected without rancour, Dennis had made himself a name, if not a living, from thinking up new categories and then turning them into clichés.

  The man called Eddie Jackson looked hard at Harold, said, “I hate everything typical”, and turned back to Dennis to continue a conversation about a girl called Annabel. There was a slight twang in his voice which Harold could not quite place. He sounded basically American, but there were overtones of other places—Australia, perhaps, or South Africa. It was as though, too, he had learnt his accent from a teacher: it did not sound wholly natural. Perhaps he had picked it up from gramophone language lessons, or from the B.B.C. Perhaps he had travelled a good deal, never staying anywhere long enough to get a definite accent.

  He looked like a traveller, with that travellers’ sallow complexion which Harold had noticed in others, as though different climates united to produce not an exciting mixture of colours but a grey colourlessness. He was wearing dark glasses, too, the sort of unnecessary piece of showing-off by which travellers often give themselves away. The Macaroon was lit by several heavily-shaded old carriage-lamps and it was quite difficult to recognize anyone at the other end of the room, so there was no excuse for smoked glass.

  He was wearing a black leather jacket, with the zip open to show a white sweat-shirt. His black trousers were so tight that when he shifted his feet Harold could see the muscles moving in his calves and thighs. He had flame-coloured socks and black suède shoes. In the dimness of the club it would have been impossible to see the colour of his eyes, even if he hadn’t been wearing the glasses, but his hair was fair and cut short. It looked as though it had been a crew-cut a couple of months before, and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it now. He had small ears and eyebrows darker than his hair. When he suddenly took off his glasses, Harold realized that he was more than conventionally good-looking, in an entirely American way. The face was smooth, the nose straight, the eyes widely spaced beneath a broad forehead. When he smiled everything moved in correct proportion. It was the straightest smile Harold had ever seen.

  When Dennis and Eddie Jackson had finished talking about Annabel, whoever she was, there was a pause. Eddie put his dark glasses on again.

  “Eddie here is on his sixth trip round the world,” said Dennis. “And he’s only twenty-eight.”

  “Really?” said Harold. “Where do you start and finish? Or don’t you?”

  “I don’t,” said Eddie. “A home town is simply an emotional indulgence. An excuse to get out of the real world into a nice cosy vacuum.” He lit a cigarette, then said, “Like this goddam country.”

  “The real world?” said Harold.

  Dennis raised his eyebrows at Harold, whether in admonition or sympathy Harold could not tell.

  “Yes,” said Eddie. “The real world. Are you interested?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Harold. “Is it some kind of new political movement? Or are you being metaphysical?”

  “Crap,” said Eddie. “This is what I’m talking about. There’s a game called social life, right? The basic rule of the game is you play as a team, and the basic team is the family. The family is good, right? So is the country. ‘My country right or wrong’, they say, and they feel proud. You have feelings that don’t fit in the family, don’t belong with the national flag, and they take a saw and a hammer and a chisel to you, they make you fit. O.K.? We don’t need individuals on the team, right? They might break open the vacuum, let in some air.”

  “Well,” said Harold, “I’m not sure——”

  “Now wait a minute, do you mind? Let me finish.”

  “All right.”

  “Now you tell me, Harold, you tell me what family life is really like, will you? Is it good? Is it real good?”

  “Sheer unmitigated hell,” said Harold promptly.

  “Right. And the wise guys of our time, the psycho-pseudo boys, they know it. They’ve got it all worked out, they batten on to that hell and take fifty thousand dollars a year out of people who want to be told to adjust. People want to adjust because they believe all the crap about the family being good, right? They’re masochists, maybe, too. Or stupid. But they go on believing it, all that propaganda, in spite of the blatant loathing of children for parents, husbands for wives, brothers for sisters. Most of them, it’s the only thing they do believe, and it’s false. Like God, it’s false. But they go right ahead pretending it’s true. They have elaborate ceremonies to make everyone feel O.K. They announce their engagements in public journals, they exchange rings, they give presents. They call in the priests and wine merchants to make everything nice and holy and drunk and O.K.” He frowned heavily. “But the real world’s not like that at all.”

  “But that is exactly what the real world is like,” said Harold. “Anything else is an illusion.”

  “The real world,” said Eddie, ignoring him, “has no time for the family. Take me. I’m in the real world, I have no family. I had parents, like everyone else. They used to live in Bellingham, Washington, when I last saw them. I used to have a brother and a sister too. They’re all still alive as far as I know. But I recognize no such thing as the family.”

  “It’s all simply a verbal confusion,” said Dennis, who seemed to have listened to the conversation before, and found the same logical mistake. “You choose not to use the word ‘family’ in its accepted meaning, that’s all.”

  “I have at least two children,” said Eddie Jackson. “I have slept with men, women, children, trees—you name it, I’ve fucked it. But I have no family. I’m a free agent. I do what I like. I live in the real world. And I crap on your verbal confusions.”

  He took off his glasses again and sat back as though he had proved something.

  “Eddie,” said Dennis, “is a man who is against. There are always a few around. I wonder if we could make a movement out of it.”

  “Isn’t it called the Beat Generation?” said Harold.

  “Movements,” said Eddie scornfully. “Generations. That’s all shit. Something frightens you, so you give it a name. Then a lot of phonies join in and Life magazine poses a few photographs and everyone thinks an important statement has been made about modern youth. You make me sick, Dennis. Why don’t you live a little, instead of making up names for other people?”

  “Yes, you’re a Beat, obviously,” said Dennis, clearly annoyed.

  “A Beat? You mean the guys with beards who play bongo drums? Not me. I don’t like teams, for Christ sake. I’ve been telling you.”

  “All right,” said Dennis, “then you can be a great individualist. The man who is against.”

  “Abstractions, abstractions,” said Eddie, irritably. “You probably believe in good and bad. People don’t understand. They think that when they say one man is better than another they are saying something important. That’s crap. They’re just applying a set of rules—social shorthand and convenience. They think the rules are absolute, they believe in them, there’s something called ‘goodness’ which you can find somewhere around if only you look hard enough. But ‘goodness’ is an arbitrary idea, and from it follow arbitrary rules. It’s like a game. You should know that, in a games-playing country like England. What about Rugby? Some boys were playing some kind of football one afternoon, and one of them picked up the ball and ran with it, which was against the rules, right? So Rugby was born, God help it. But no one has ever grasped the significance of that boy picking up the ball. You can’t change the rules, the old football remains the old football. But you can change the game, you can start a new game of your own.”
/>   “That’s rather a good idea,” said Dennis. “You mean when you’re fed up with something, you ignore it and start something else?”

  “I’ve told you what I mean. If you don’t understand it’s because you don’t want to understand, you’d rather live in a vacuum, calling things names and thinking you’re living.”

  “You’ve got to have critics,” said Dennis. “Otherwise there’d be no one to appreciate how revolutionary you were.”

  “I don’t want a revolution,” said Eddie. “I get on fine the way things are now. I just have my own game and my own rules and ignore the others.”

  “But doesn’t that get you into trouble with the police sometimes?” said Harold, who rather liked Eddie’s ideas.

  “Yes.”

  “And what about other people, people who don’t know your game?”

  “I teach them. When I’m fed up with them, I change the game. Like with this Annabel we were talking about. She comes crying and weeping about how much she loves me, while I’m in the middle of shaving this morning. There is no such thing as love in my game, ever. I tell her so, but she goes on crying and weeping, so I clear out. She was nice while it lasted, but when they start crying and weeping, you know it’s lasted too long.”

  “Callous,” said Dennis.

  It was about time, thought Harold, that he tried the Eddie Jackson technique on Helen. She didn’t cry and weep, it was true, but she did hint, which was almost worse. That was the trouble with decent English girls. If only they lost their heads and made a mess of themselves crying and weeping, one might be able to feel so disgusted that one could leave them with a clear conscience. But they didn’t, it wasn’t part of the game. Eddie was really rather clever about games. One did stick to the rules, even when one didn’t want to. It was because one hadn’t thought of picking up the ball and running with it.

  Eddie was shifting his feet about under the table and tearing matches in his long thin fingers. He was glancing now and then at a girl with blonde hair who sat at the bar. She was well known at the Macaroon. Her name was Heather Armstrong, and she was notoriously mean with her affections.

  But now there was a frank interest in the way she was looking at Eddie. Her right leg swung selfconsciously at ease, the tip of her tongue kept her lips invitingly moist, she smiled whenever she caught his eye. Finally she came over to their table and said, “May I?”

  “Hallo,” said Dennis, unenthusiastically. She had once thrown a glass at him for having made an ill-timed pass.

  “Hi,” said Eddie. “What’s your name?”

  “Heather.”

  “Eddie.”

  “Hallo, Eddie.”

  He seemed to think further formality unnecessary, taking her hand and saying, “Say, I’m kind of a stranger here in London. How about you showing me around?”

  “I’ll show you anything you want,” she said, smiling.

  Dennis looked at Harold and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Harold was amused. Those who had got to bed with Heather said it was worth waiting for, and he had never seen her offer her services to a total stranger before.

  Eddie did not bother to ask her if she wanted a drink. He simply looked at her as a buyer might have done at a slave-girl in the market and said, “Well, shall we go while there’s still some light left to see by?”

  “Suits me,” said Heather.

  They got up.

  “Nice to have seen you,” said Eddie, nodding at Dennis. “And Harold.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Jackson.”

  Eddie Jackson looked offended.

  “Eddie,” he said.

  He left with Heather.

  “That’s one of the quickest pick-ups I’ve ever seen,” said Harold admiringly, watching them go.

  “It’s always happening,” said Dennis gloomily. “Annabel was mine originally. They take one look at him and ring for a bed. He’s the sort of man before whom women drop instinctively to their knees.”

  “To their knees?”

  “You know what I mean. Their backs, if you prefer it.”

  “Lucky man.”

  “But a bad friend.”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it’s a matter of chromosomes.”

  They sat in silence for a while, pondering the mysterious power some men had over all women.

  Then Dennis said, “I’ve got my bloody Uncle Edward coming to London tomorrow. And I still haven’t found anyone to go to America for him. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t see why not. You’re just the man for the job, you know. At least, you’d do.”

  “Thank you. I have prior commitments, as they say.”

  “Who hasn’t?” said Dennis gloomily. “Freedom depends on a private income, I suppose.”

  “Why not your friend Eddie Jackson?”

  “Good God, no. Eddie is very doubtfully honest, and certainly not reliable. Besides, you heard what he said about the family as a social institution. You can hardly ask a man with his views to find family portraits for you.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “There would be no communication between him and Uncle Edward at all.”

  “He’s rather interesting, isn’t he, though?”

  “Yes, he’s certainly interesting. But he’s also stark raving mad, you know. And basically, he’s a gun-runner.”

  “Really?”

  “No, of course not really. I mean he’s the gun-running type. Adventure without responsibility.”

  “Where on earth did you find him?”

  “At some party,” said Dennis, studiously vague. “None too respectable a place, as I remember. A lot of actors. Not my sort of thing at all.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. I see him, in the given circumstances of modern life, as a born pop-singer. In the old days he would have been a marvellous politician of the Deep Southern kind. He is wholly ignorant of morality, from what I know of him, but he can mesmerize an audience with his crazy ideas. Given the right backing, he could have gone a long way under Huey Long.”

  “Huey who?”

  “Oh, God, don’t you know anything? He was a great leader of poor-white racist-fascism in Louisiana.”

  “I think I’d prefer him as a pop-singer,” said Harold. “And by the way, did you know that maybe your real vocation may be being a pop-singer’s agent? You make people sound so extraordinary.”

  “Eddie is extraordinary,” said Dennis. “But you’re right. He’d be a terrific pop-singer. Think of him in obscene white trousers and a sequin-studded black leather jacket, making love to a portable microphone.”

  “I thought the trousers he had on were pretty tight,” said Harold.

  “He’d slay the Watch Committee of every town in the Western world,” said Dennis.

  “Why not the Eastern?”

  “I don’t think they dig that sort of thing over there, you know. There would have to be one hell of a thaw before the Russians accepted Elvis Presley as the cultural equivalent of the Bolshoi Ballet.”

  “Christ,” said Harold. “Look at the time. I must go. Helen will be furious.”

  “I can’t think what attracts you to that woman. She’s a sort of Little Miss Muffet.”

  “You,” said Harold, slightly nettled, “haven’t seen the tuffet.”

  “Nor the curds and whey,” said Dennis. “But I bet they’re pretty sour.”

  “Dirty talk,” said Harold. “And it’s not as if I’m going to marry her.”

  “Then why, for Christ’s sake? There must be a hundred women you know who are more attractive than Helen. Your mother, for instance. God, even my mother.”

  “That reminds me,” said Harold, “there’s an incestuous couple come to live in Peterham.” He started to tell Dennis about Captain Belsen and Mrs Crawshaw, but the overripe woman behind the bar said, “Anyone here called Harold Barlow?”

  “Yes, me.”

 
“There’s some tart on the phone for you. Doesn’t sound your type at all, dear.”

  “What do you think is my type?” said Harold, going over to the phone.

  “I have my ideas,” said the barmaid.

  “Yes?” said Harold into the telephone.

  “There you are,” said Helen. “I knew you’d be there. Why aren’t you here?”

  “Because I’m here. I can’t be in two places at once, can I?”

  “Well, you’re hours late. We’re going to start without you. You know David has to catch the ten o’clock.”

  “Why can’t he spend a weekend in London for a change?”

  “Don’t be silly, Harold. If you come straight away we may just get to the cinema in time.”

  “Oh, all right. What picture is it tonight?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here. Good-bye.” She rang off.

  “Well, what are your ideas?” said Harold to the barmaid.

  “They’re my own business,” she said.

  “Cheeky,” said Harold. He went over to where Dennis was still sitting and said, “The siren has wailed. I’d better go and have dinner.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Dennis.

  “She cooks rather well. And it’s free.”

  “Well, don’t forget the offer.”

  “What offer?”

  “America. Free travel. Extra pockets to carry all the pocket money.”

  “I wish I could,” said Harold. “But I’m like you, getting established. I’m not young any more.”

  “Think about it, anyway,” said Dennis moodily. “I’m supposed to be doing my best.”

  “Christ,” said Harold, “if you can’t do better than me, you are hard up. See you around.”

  “I promised Uncle Edward I’d make it the highest priority,” said Dennis. “But I dare say I shall think better if I have another drink.” He got slowly up and went to the bar. “Good-bye.”

  When Harold got to Helen’s flat he was greeted with the news that Brenda and David were going to the cinema without him, information which he received with extravagant regret.

  “God, I’m sorry. I had this client to talk to, and you know how it is in the City—no deals without drinking. And then one thing led to another, and I quite forgot about David having to catch the ten o’clock. What’s the film?”