Equivocator

by Stevie Davies

  She scrolls through an immense document freighted with half-page footnotes – and the footnotes have spawned footnotes of their own. There are endnotes to the secondary footnotes. ‘The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret? Oh boy,’ she says and hoots. ‘I am so trembling in secret here, Seb! Hey, what about this: I do not teach truth as such; I do not transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy. Yeah, that’s me, diaphanous, goggling. A whole chapter to the aporia. Do I really want to know what that is? But you’re going to tell me, Seb, I can see that. Do so in no more than three words.’

  ‘It’s a hole,’ I say.

  ‘Right. Shall we drink up and sidle off?’

  *

  The room bucks, a deck in a swell. Now it slowly sinks, for we’re the men who went to sea in a sieve, in spite of all their friends could say. Am I about to throw up? Swallow some water. Glad Jesse isn’t here to see me pissed.

  I find myself in the power-shower. Fuck me if I know how I got here but the hot water is tonic as it hammers the nape of my neck. It possesses thumbs and the thumbs understand the art of massaging deep into your muscles and kneading your scalp in a frankly voluptuous way. How many guys have wanked under this state-of-the-art shower? The pipes bang. No, it’s the door. Fuck off, it’s one in the morning. Or even two. I slick back my hair, shambling from the bathroom with a towel round my waist.

  The rapping again. Jesus Christ, I can hear breathing. Through the door. Is it the old guy with a wooden collar round his neck?

  If I lie down, there’s a distinct danger of throwing up. Tea might help? En route to the kettle, I seem to have detoured in a surprising arc, to find myself at the door. I squint through the peephole.

  There he stands, head bent in an attitude of thoughtful waiting. Panic: I step back. It’s alright: he can’t see you. (Can he?) I plump down on the end of the bed, which tilts.

  I should just go and punch the bugger’s lights out. Obvious answer. A real man would do just that. But I’m not. A real man. Am I? What is a real man? Big conundrum. A bit like logarithms. What is a logarithm, I asked Sir. Where is it? What does it look like? It is not a solid body, Sir informed the mathematical dunce. You won’t find one under your bed, Messenger. There was a braying of classroom mirth.

  Don’t be like your father, Seb, she said: don’t. He’s such a liar, she said. He believes his own narcissistic fantasy of himself. Or was that Salvatore? One of the two and which is which?

  Was Jack a real man or not a real man? There’s no knowing.

  Has my ancient stalker fucked off? There’s no more knocking or perhaps I passed out and slept through it. My head swirls as I totter back to check.

  The eye has vanished. I ease open the door, with a view to knocking the guy down as any real man would. Bilious light falls on nothing but a tray with the remains of a Room Service meal and a figure walking away, away, right at the end of the corridor towards the lift. On he goes, and on, without seeming to make progress. A hangdog fellow walking the wrong way along a moving floor.

  *

  ‘Don’t speak to me, just don’t. Until I’m fuelled.’ Mary’s wearing dark glasses. Setting down her tray, she swigs black coffee. ‘What was that wine? Brontosaur piss?’

  ‘Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth!’ says Jarvis. ‘Keats. Forget which ode.’

  ‘By the way,’ Mary says, between mouthfuls of toast. ‘I’ve just been embraced. In the foyer of the hall. Pass the sugar, would you, Seb? I need a sugar hit. Yes, your pal embraced me like a sister. On an empty stomach. Oh my Lord. I had this strange sense – I don’t think it was the hangover, might have been though – that he’s coming apart from himself. Honestly, I kept seeing him double, as if I’d got a lazy eye. Actually I used to have a lazy eye when I was a kid. You know what I mean, Seb? Look.’

  Mary makes her left eye swivel out of focus so that she can, she says, see both of me. ‘I found this a useful skill when I was a kid. If my parents told me off for bringing dead voles or owl droppings into my bedroom to dissect, I’d just let my eyeball swing out – like – this. See? Kind-of unnerving, right? When they threatened me with an operation, I decided the party trick had outlived its usefulness.’

  ‘Put your eye back, Mary,’ says Jarvis. ‘You’re turning me off my seaweed.’

  How can he stomach that mess of laverbread, cockles and plankton, swimming in a liquor of grease? He will be embarking shortly on a new diet, Jarvis announces, which will reveal to the world the svelte man within. Bara lawr, he explains, is an essential brainfood. Protein, iron, iodine: you name it, your laverbread has it all.

  ‘But what did Rhys say?’ I ask Mary.

  ‘What did he say? Don’t ask me. And what did he mean by what he said? How would I know? Well, let’s see – he talked about his daughter – who I assume is real. Apple of his eye. She’s a polyglot according to him – translator, cosmopolitan, brilliant, beautiful, et cetera. I take what people say about their kids with several pinches of salt, frankly, especially when they start claiming the kid has good genes on both sides. Anyway, what else? He was talking quite ardently about a woman, forgotten her name. Alice? Eloise? Lisa? Ring any bells?’

  Elise, I think. Elise. I say nothing. My mother has never spoken of Rhys, at least as far as I remember.

  ‘This Alice or whatever seems to have been the love of his life but she turned him down flat. Smart lady! Head screwed on. He said his wife – he refers to her as his second wife – died. But who was his first wife? – the Alice-one who refused him? Oh please. Don’t ask! This guy is so deep he has come out of the nether end of himself.’

  She finally asked Salvatore why he didn’t study something substantial – like a newt or a rat? Anything, really, that was not just a sludge of gloopy metaphors. In any case, Mary told him, she’d heard that postmodernism was passé. And he looked quite stricken: apparently the daughter says the same. He finally said, OK, Mary, if you want wildlife, let’s discuss seagulls. They were cruising past the windows with pizza in their beaks. He told Mary about predatory birds he’d seen – the Lammergeier, the bearded vulture, in the Turkish mountains. Like a flying hoover. An angelic vacuum cleaner. Cleans up after us – that substantial enough for you?

  Sure, Mary said. Keep with the vultures. And they laughed.

  ‘Well, he’s off to his seaside retreat, Seb,’ she says. ‘He’ll be back at the end of the conference, to give the final address. Can’t wait. Take that as you wish.’

  3

  Now, Isis was a wise woman. She was more cunning than millions of men; she was more clever than millions of gods; she was more shrewd than millions of akhu-spirits. There was nothing of which she was ignorant in heaven and earth … So-and-so born of so-and-so lives, the poison having died, through the speech of Isis the Great, mistress of the gods.

  Egyptian Spell, found at Deir el-Medina3

  Here at the summit of ‘Colomendy’, the luxury rest home in Cardiff Bay, my mother’s powers are failing. And she knows it. Strange though it seems to seek out truth in the temple of forgetting, this is my one resource. We must speak. Here’s the last vestige of light before the dark. Salvatore’s mystical mumbo-jumbo tells me nothing. It turns my stomach, the prattle of an inveterate fabulist. One thing is sure: he has stalked me all my life.

  Is it too late to turn to Elise? Even before her current withdrawals from memory began, for decades we kept stumm, by mutual consent, about Dad. You might say that his name perished. Or that together we buried it before it was dead. Thus the name Jack Messenger unearthed itself by night, became monstrous and spoke into my dreams. And never left me in peace.

  As we greet one another face to face, an eagle observes me from a crag in Elise’s brain through pale eyes, to me the most arresting in the world. They communicate an intelligence both alarming and alarmed.

  ‘How are y
ou, darling?’

  ‘I’m fine, Sebastian, why shouldn’t I be?’

  Colomendy’s privacy policy has offered Elise the chance of a self-contained, dignified life, with support. She had a horror of being herded into a television room to play skittles with the addled ancientry. I think she felt her mind crumbling. Flakes fell away in episodes of confusion; caves opened up that she sought to prop – and the props quaked. Intermittently, the light must have guttered. Fear enhanced confusion.

  For still the damage remains minor. The great brain keeps its wits about it. It knows how to compensate. Its defensive structure holds.

  ‘Don’t you envy me my view?’ she asks. ‘I’m tempted to watch all day. Cormorants, look. Over there. I chronicle the birds crossing the water. I’m working on my autobiography but the birds will keep making their presence felt.’

  The whole outer wall of her suite is glass, giving on to a balcony where Elise can preside wrapped in a shawl, a red beret on her head. From here she keeps watch on the Marina, a plane of ruffled water with remnants of the old docks, the Norwegian Church, yachts and quays. As the weather changes, so does the light, so does mood, so does memory.

  Don’t put point-blank questions, I remind myself. She’ll clam up. As a diplomat Elise’s razor mind had been honed and she has lost neither her asperity, cloaked in felt, nor her capacity to close down a conversation. I brew coffee and we start on the chocolates. She shoots me a sharp look.

  ‘No offence but a baby is a parasite,’ she says, out of nothing. ‘It will leech every particle of nourishment from a mother, even if it kills her. A baby is your enemy, in that limited sense. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Well, I suppose so – in a strictly scientific sense. But—.’

  ‘Now, where were we? Yes, tell me, what are you doing in Wales, dear?’ Elise asks.

  ‘Oh, a conference. And I didn’t want to lose the chance of seeing you, darling.’

  ‘Another conference? Whatever can be left to confer about? So, tell me, how are those mummies and sphinxes and suchlike faring, Seb? Much as before, I imagine. I can’t think where you got your passion for cadavers – it certainly wasn’t from me. And you have given a learned paper? On?’

  I shift in my seat, embarrassed. ‘A bit of a whimsical-sounding title – “New Light on the Abomination of Monthu”.’

  ‘Dear oh dear!’ She chuckles with relish, a luminous silver-grey figure in her immaculate silk blouse, a cameo at the neck. ‘Sorry,’ she says, choking with giggles like a girl. ‘But – honestly! And who or what is or was this Monthu?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘On second thoughts, don’t tell me! What world do you people live in? Wars and invasions and persecution – these, Sebastian, are abominations. Streams of refugees coming out of Syria and Sudan and Iraq – yes, you see, I do keep up with the news and I trust you do too. Sometimes these poor people seem to be flocking out of the TV into my living room. I can hardly breathe for abominations. If you are interested in the real thing.’

  I want to cheer her on. She still suffers reality to imprint itself on her conscience. My mother remains courageously enrolled on the side of practical ethics. Elise remains Elise, for all her daunted awareness that her brain may betray her. Snaring her hand in both of mine, I rub it with my thumbs. She must have seen the homage in my face, the gratitude. And, moved by it, she asks if there’s anything I need.

  ‘I need to ask you about someone.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A friend of Dad’s. Rhys Salvatore.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Elise says firmly and withdraws her hand. ‘Next question.’

  I deflate, thinking: whatever did I expect? And my quest seems as anachronistic as a fossil hunt.

  I divert Elise by describing a mineshaft I explored in Egypt. My friend and I were checking out Roman mine workings, leaving our equipment at the surface, to try out techniques used by the original amethyst-miners, some of them children. They worked in near-dark, with the most basic of tools. I went first, Aziz puffing along in my wake. We penetrated to the point where the narrowing tunnel fell sheer away. I made out hack-marks on the walls, perhaps left by the children.

  I held my lamp over the drop. And there below me was … something terribly human. A basket. Just an ordinary basket of woven reeds like those used by present-day peasants.

  ‘Two thousand years go by,’ I tell Elise, who’s listening intently, breathing deep. ‘Egypt falls. Rome falls. The British Empire falls. The miner’s lunch box is still there. Never decaying. Down those shafts nothing changes – there’s no humidity. It’s not subject to time. The basket remains exactly as the miner left it. Then my friend and I clap eyes on it.’

  ‘What do you suppose they had for lunch, Seb?’

  ‘Bread, certainly. Figs? Fish? Falafel?’

  ‘Couldn’t you, I don’t know, hook it up or something?’

  ‘I stretched but it was too far down and there was nothing to hold on to. A parlous place to fall – the basket being on a ledge and the shaft pitching way down beyond that. We had nothing we could use to hoist it up. I expect it’s still there.’

  ‘And I suppose Aziz was your lover?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You heard. Yes, of course I know! What kind of ninny do you take me for? Once you asked for a cat,’ she continues, without a pause, leaning forward in her chair as if this was the whole point of the conversation. ‘Remember that?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Of course you can have a cat, your dad said – he was just back from his travels, with bundles of notes to write up and in a sunny mood – and he started play-punching you. Being nice. Of course he was volatile, he could turn. Just like that. In Iran, he told you, every neighbourhood has a laat. A boss-cat who beats the crap out of any other cat. We’ll get you a laat.’

  ‘And what did I say?’

  ‘You said you didn’t want a nasty horrible laat, you just wanted a pussy cat. To cuddle. Jack started to mimic your manner. As if your gentleness was soft and prissy. As if you were not the offspring he’d envisaged. He was doing these limp-wristed gestures and calling you Pansy. He hurt you; he fully intended to hurt you. I was disgusted. I objected. He said, “Oh but pansies are such tewwibly charming flowers!” I thought: it’s something in himself Jack’s parodying. You were cut to the quick. But I thought – and this has just come back to me: one day Seb will be taller and stronger than Jack. He’s already gaining on him. You see? So,’ she asks abruptly, ‘when are you going back to Manchester?’

  ‘No, Elise, I’m not at Manchester any more.’

  ‘Oh, I think you are.’

  ‘No, darling. Really. I live in London now.’

  ‘You’re sure about that? Think about it.’

  *

  It was the Manchester of my first love, Justin Knight. And also of James Anderton, Chief Constable and evangelical Christian, who harried gays, accusing AIDS victims of ‘swirling in a human cesspool of their own making’. For Anderton queers threatened the straight population. They were rats that harboured fleas that spread the plague. Officers on motorboats cruised the locks and bridges of the Ship Canal with spotlights.

  So this is who I am, I thought. Of course I’d always known the nature of my sexuality in a way – but the knowledge had been without substance. I understood not to make undue claims on Justin: they’d scare him off. Amongst Justin’s hangers-on, I’d be low in the pecking order. Still and all, I felt … I was going to say, ‘happy’ – but ‘exalted’ is nearer to it. Nothing had changed in my world; love had not come, only carnal knowledge. By coincidence, I’d also found a vocation: to become a star scholar like the visiting academic, Rhys Salvatore, scattering light.

  Next day police were everywhere and our usual wing of the library was cordoned off. We migrated to Engineering and I sat where I could see Justin, schooling myself to wave and smile only if he did. Which he did. He sauntered past; paused, pushing back a wing of dark blond hair.

  ‘I was
wondering, Sebastian – fancy a night out?’

  God, yes, I thought, mentally punching the air. I wondered vaguely about the Geek, who had become an accidental arsonist. Weird little sod, I thought. Oddball. Which I somehow, suddenly, wasn’t.

  Saturday night though started disappointingly, for Justin’s invitation wasn’t exclusive. The whole world crowded into Justin’s room. Candlelight flickered on punkish lads and made-up girls. Although they might not all be girls. Justin had become Justine for the night. I’d expected him to look stunning. What I couldn’t have foreseen was that he wouldn’t remotely resemble an impersonator.

  My lover was – surely, I thought – the real thing, with subtle lipstick and mascara. His fair wig was understated; the blue dress implied rather than advertised the possibility of breasts. We drank, laughed, and everyone kissed Justin and Justin kissed everyone and we all kissed one another. His Tower room, with cartons of stale milk on the windowsill, became a magic, whirling chamber. Later that night we hit a wall of sound and heat and smoke at the Haçienda. Music throbbed through us, noise annihilated thought.

  On the street when we spilled out in the early hours I was aware of guys clustering round the beautiful Justin-Justine.

  Why wouldn’t they?

  Through the surging crowd of – were they? yes, definitely – straights, I glimpsed part of my lover’s face and his braceleted wrist in motion. First a come-on, then an oh-no, oh please, let me go, don’t, I know you’re only messing around, and I will give value, but for the love of God don’t hurt me.

  His head was dragged back and the wig stripped off. I glimpsed Justin’s terror.

  Huge laughter. Fucking faggot. Poofter. Tranny. Come on, darling, come with us, we’ll show you a good time. Guffawing, braying. Fucking freaking disease-riddled arse-cunting whore.

  No one went to Justin’s aid. I did not. Why did I not? Was it, as I later told myself, that it was all over in one stunning moment? that there were too many people between me and him? or was it that I was crapping myself with fear?