Serious Sweet

by A. L. Kennedy

  For some reason the street had looked a bit off, a bit unkiltered to Jon as he’d first rounded its corner – it had seemed weird. It still did. There was something too bright about it, or else too grey – it had badly adjusted colours … badly adjusted something.

  God. I’m in a strange mood – joy with phases of fury. I’m going feral in my dotage. It’s the kind of thing one might anticipate if I’d been sent out on secondment to the UN. That place breaks you. It’s not old enough, not enough layers and labyrinths and customs to keep you locked away from rogue motivations, to temper your impulses and moral imperatives. But here – here one can be expected to render acceptable counsel, be open to the necessary pressures, lie down beneath them and have faith that all is well.

  Parliament has a long-established mind designed to supersede your own. Its brain has grown into suitably baroque coils and undulations, redundant organs and strange structures of unclear purpose. It dominates – like the will of a grand old beast, like a God set apart from God.

  When I’d get a new team member, I used to tell them the story of the Eastern monastery where a cat was always tied up outside the hall while the monks meditated. Whenever a cat died, they’d find a replacement and tie it up. Across centuries. One novice asked why. He was told the community once owned a playful cat which had troubled the monks as they tried to worship peacefully and perfect themselves. So the animal was tied up when they needed calm. And what was once practical and necessary had become a habit and then a tradition and then a sacred necessity. Now no one would think of meditating in the absence of a tethered cat. At the end of the story I used to say, ‘Beyond the obvious implications – try not to be the cat. Don’t let them tie you.’ I haven’t bothered for a while.

  No one would ever send me to the UN … Why would they? Why would I think of that? Off the leash in New York and looking for blues connections – being ashamed of myself in the corner of no-longer-smoke-filled clubs … Ridiculous.

  He was almost at the office now and could picture the wide and automatically opening doors – two sets, like an airlock. And they’d installed these little gates in the foyer that snapped away and back when you tapped in your key – like gaining access to a provincial railway station.

  The decor inside was more reassuring – not luxurious, but of definite quality and in the neutral tones currently preferred by homebuyers and classy landlords. If you paid attention to the standard of your surroundings, you could be reassured that what went on here was of value. Why else have such charming natural wood features and detailing?

  Like Portcullis House – never mind the misguided artworks and the flyspecked conference-room ceilings, just look at the wonderful doors. Solid. Generous. Borderline baronial in a modern way. Five hinges apiece, they’d withstand a siege.

  His own department looked pretty – it wasn’t all bumpy layers of nicotined gloss white, dangerous gas fires and khaki linoleum. There was no sense of continuity with the nobility of the war effort and a nation in its prime, because you no longer continued to drink rusty civil-service tea from the war effort’s teal-coloured cups.

  Or that could be one theory.

  One can hardly complain that one is comfortably appointed.

  It had to be admitted that Jon was virtually ambling by this point, his thought dragging him back and tangling around his ankles – his thoughts, or his morning’s efforts. As he approached his office, the tribes of the political quarter were out on display. The middle-ranking dads: inelegant, fading, ends of their jacket sleeves compressed by the cheap elastic of their unwise cagoules. They smelt of Badedas and escalating fear. There were only a couple just now, but they’d be out en masse later, collecting the lunches they’d bring back to eat at their desks – a heartening change from the canteen, a breath of air, enough exercise to remind them they don’t get enough exercise.

  I shouldn’t be out of breath, shouldn’t be weary. I try my best – a sort of improvised training programme in the flat: weights that I bought online and a mat for what would be termed floor work, I think. Last week Carter told me he was buying a scooter – we’re about the same vintage. Our age-related panic emerging in different ways. He will zip around on his scooter, fantasising – one shouldn’t say, but even so – about milk bars and seaside violence, or angora sweaters tight over Wonderbras, and cappuccinos in glass cups.

  Which is completely unfair – and making sexual assumptions.

  He most assuredly just thinks that a scooter would be easier to park and soon he won’t have to ferry paperwork about and will be released into the world. More time for the garden, the grandchildren – the bloody scooter.

  I am a greater absurdity. I try to bulk up muscle mass to alleviate the worst of the … slackening, wrinkles, crêping at joints and when I bend … how unappetising I am to myself when naked. How appalling for anyone else to have to see and see and see.

  And no mantel full of grandchild photographs – we had Rebecca late and lonely and after what we’ve taught her about marriage one can’t really expect …

  Becca, please don’t have a baby. Not yet. Not with him.

  Do have a baby. Children are wonderful. They are beyond description. But not with him.

  None of my business and the more I fixate upon them, the more likely my fears all become. This is axiomatic. As I no longer feel it’s my professional duty to point out.

  A woman passed him, talking quietly as she wandered. She was one of Westminster’s distressed, all of whom were impressively, theatrically Other: dirty white hair and long fingernails, coats fastened above further coats, multiple grubby bags in hands and either aimless or passionately darting.

  I have a theory that they offer a physical demonstration of each regime’s health. At some subconscious level they respond to and act out our ambient political tensions. Visible anxiety in the street people seems to coincide with Budget announcements and emergency debates, votes of confidence. Recess leaves them tranquil, while a major tussle with the Lords provokes twitches and random laughter, an increase in the number of bags and other carried belongings.

  That’s only anecdotal – someone should prepare a thorough study, it might be worthwhile.

  There were tradesmen nipping fags outside the café: work trousers, company logos, ignoble and yet indispensable skills on hand. And here were the tourists, stunned with jet lag and epidemic unfamiliarity, hesitant gaggles of them.

  The tour buses park in our street. The drivers rest up here, having released their interested parties to snap photos of Big Ben’s mildly leaning tower, or to queue for access to Westminster Abbey – pay your entrance fee to pray in a place of worship which could lend sophistication to your pleas. No guarantees, but who can say? Or I suppose that I don’t mean the abbey lends sophistication – it now sells it. The abbey is customer-facing. Healing services available. No cats.

  The grasping, the failed, the crazed, the obviously stupid, the sweat-soiled and annoyingly necessary – they were what Westminster saw of the world, of the other ranks bumbling and labouring and muttering through.

  ‘… Immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses …’ That was it. Stephen Crane. I used to read him a lot. ‘… who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet …’ That’s what Parliament sees in the average voter. And it sours us. How could it not? These visible voters’ failures make Westminster fail them, make Whitehall fail them. We are their fault.

  And no children here, nothing beyond adult description, adult use … This is no place for youth unless it’s suited up and toured about in little parties of prematurely middle-aged chaps: being shown the world they can walk into once they’ve got their degrees in Presumption, Prevarication and Economics.

  Here is democracy, children – in its palace, in its unnatural acts. And he looked at the better-informed faces passing with that Westminster Expression, the Estate Expression: a certain gravitas, a pinch of visible intelligence, alert attention and – above all – irritation. Westminster found all that was
not Westminster – and much that was – deeply irritating.

  Here it is.

  But here I am, also.

  The first set of doors opened to gather him inside and away from the street.

  Home.

  And then the next.

  Even more home.

  He nodded to Albert on Reception: nice man, has a daughter going up to St Edmund Hall, of all the colleges to choose. Her future had both delighted and terrified poor Albert. He comes all the way from the Ivory Coast to Tooting and now she’ll end up at Teddy Hall – which is much further.

  He’s right to be scared – he will lose her. She will come back to visit and still be far away.

  Like me.

  When I arrived off the train from university, I shook my father’s hand. I kissed my mother as if I were meeting her for the first time at a party – acting the prematurely middle-aged chap.

  In Mother’s case that was perhaps not altogether a bad thing. I might well have seen it as a repayment for past favours. Dad didn’t deserve what he got, though.

  But being in your teens is about being savage and too savage to notice it. If you’re lucky.

  Or was that whole hand-shaking incident earlier? After I’d gone away to school?

  Jon slipped through the snap of the gates.

  Probably it was both and on any number of other occasions I’d much rather forget. They wanted me to be successful, Mum and Dad, and success was a country they’d never been to and wouldn’t visit. Society Street was a neighbourhood unlikely to harbour it.

  At least the whole nonsense didn’t put them into debt. I was a scholarship boy, me, and then I could round off my future with a grant. Every Good Boy Deserves Funding. The fenny winds and greens of Cambridge, so much softer and bicycle-paced than the Other Place. And enjoying the Wren chapel – lovely plasterwork – that chapel replacing an earlier model, repurposed as a library – from one sacred pursuit to another – knowledge to knowledge, that making sense, that making of sense …

  And one tried to fit in.

  One acted, along with all of the others attempting to be successfully socially mobile. The least bad of the alternatives.

  Behind a book, on paper – then I was at home.

  I was most at home.

  The words, the knowing – they could hold me and let me walk all the way from Old Court to New Court and be safe. And Lord, the relief in the God-awful squalor of seventies’ student fashion – the concomitant lack of expense.

  It was going away to school that did the damage. Years of keeping my secrets from the others, the ones who belonged – not mentioning family holidays taken at Blackpool, Uncle Angus who bred turkeys in his yard and sold dead cars, nothing about my address, my house, the provenance of my Sunday suit, the provenance of my tottering accent, the quiet strain in every possession – and the lying and lying and lying about my life and heart and soul.

  Good practice.

  Not that I wasn’t seen through and found out.

  Not that I wasn’t in danger of being adopted as a pet, an inverse asset. Particularly at college.

  Good practice, all the same …

  I can’t complain.

  It would be ungrateful.

  As Jon had made it to the lift, Findlater joined him – Oh, really … Is that absolutely necessary? Why Findlater now? Any lift containing Findlater felt overfilled. Although he was not a substantial man in any sense.

  Amazing that someone so shallow can be so full of shit.

  ‘Jon.’ Findlater fired off the kind of smile that chaps of libidinous capacities send each other as a confirmation of shared pursuits. He made one feel smeared with something. ‘Jon, how are you? How’s the photography?’

  ‘It’s … I’m in two minds.’

  That’s almost always true.

  ‘Well, if you get any good results, please do … Art photographs … Yes? I suppose digital won’t give you the quality? And anyway, you’d want to develop them yourself. You are an old-school man, aren’t you?’ Another contagion-bearing grin.

  Old school in the sense of old-fashioned. In the sense of who-knows-what imagined scenarios. Not in the sense of ties. That’s ties in the sense of collars and colours and not in the sense of cats. Christ, I have a headache. When did that happen?

  Jon had no interest in photography, but had once bought a drying frame for his post-marital flat in his lunch hour. This was intended to help him escape from complete reliance on a laundry service or, worse still, a launderette. It would mean that he could, as his mother would have put it, rinse out his smalls and leave them to dry on the frame thereafter. He didn’t want the care of his underwear to involve anybody else. He didn’t even have a cleaning woman – why should he? He wasn’t a messy man, he was self-contained. Findlater had misunderstood the frame, caught sight of it as it lounged in a corner, waiting to be taken out to the Junction and the penitential but convenient one-bedroom hutch where Jon now stored himself in workless moments.

  Findlater, ever curious in unconstructive directions, had eyed the frame like a barn owl eyeing a mouse. ‘What’s that, by the way?’

  ‘Drying frame. Our breakdown should be ready by Thursday at the latest. And if yours is ready then, too, we’ll be ahead of the game.’

  ‘Good, good. Drying frame, eh …?’ Findlater had manufactured a louche pause. The man was helplessly married, but enjoyed being discontented, liked the idea of straying while lacking the spine required to try it. He had a habit of driving up round Acton for a not good reason.

  He told me once that Acton was the place for sighting Japanese schoolgirls. ‘You see them in flocks up there. And they look … exactly like Japanese schoolgirls.’The man’s expression one of mingled fear and rapture. The Japanese Ministry of Education does run a school in Acton. It does that in order to aid the Japanese community – rather than with any hopes of aiding Findlater’s masturbatory fantasies.

  And I am sure that Japanese schoolgirls do look exactly like Japanese schoolgirls.

  Christ, the poisonous waters that gather in the shallows of the masculine heart.

  Do people expect that of me? Do they assume I am always panting inwardly for this or that of women, semi-hard thinking set on a constant alert? Are there confidential evaluations that are certain my primary focus is elsewhere?

  If Findlater were genuinely predatory then Jon would have taken pains to do something about him, put a word in – several – called the bloody Met on him, made sure of him, stamped him out, but the man was just pitiable.

  It takes one differently pitiable man to know another.

  I am, at least, not a lonely husband, hunched in a damp car pretending to read the paper, palms in a sweat, or loitering over authentic bento snacks in some Actonese café, hoping for a glimpse of kilts and knee socks, coy laughter, whatever fantasy sustains him through evenings with Mrs Nancy Findlater and her withered Elizabeth David cuisine, Hampstead Bazaar tunics and boxed sets of The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

  The lift’s upward progress seemed cluttered and languid to an unreasonable degree and Jon reflected again that he should really try the trick of pressing the DOOR OPEN button along with his floor of choice in order to whisk himself aloft without stopping.

  Or else you’re meant to hold and press DOOR CLOSE. I’ve heard both offered as short cuts – tiny opportunities to practise selfishness. And the efficacy of the procedure is possibly a myth – like the idea that hitting the button at a pedestrian crossing will make the traffic stop. In a statistically significant number of cases the button is only provided to placate and has no effect. Quite often, your one accessible response to a situation is engineered to simply occupy your time while you wait for what was always going to happen anyway. It’s an enforced displacement activity.

  Like voting.

  Jon realised that he hadn’t spoken for a while and that Findlater had become unpalatably expectant.

  Just as he had when he saw the drying frame. ‘A drying frame …’

>   ‘It’s a drying frame, yes. I need one. Now that I’m settled in.’

  The horror of genuinely leaving a wife had scampered across behind Findlater’s expression and was then replaced by a cut-price sort of glee. ‘Photography?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Photography. To dry the prints.’

  ‘Not photography.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of you.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to think it of me. Thinking it of me would be inaccurate.’

  But people love to be inaccurate.

  Which is why people like me are required. I am pathologically precise and therefore useful. I ought to be seen as useful.

  Jon counted off the floors and sent thoughts in the direction of the fellow-travellers who had diluted the awfulness of Findlater: goodbye, man with water-blemished shoes – goodbye, Palmer, I like you – and goodbye, the woman with the highlighted hair whom I don’t know but see around – goodbye, man with two sticks – goodbye, woman who is markedly overweight and limps, perhaps as a result, or else who cannot exercise because of her limp and is therefore overweight, one shouldn’t judge, but she is really fat – oh, and goodbye Findlater. Yes, Findlater, go, yes. Just leave me be, OK, with one last grin and …

  ‘I’ll see you then, Jon.’

  ‘Yes, yes. You will. You will.’

  Do I echo because I am hollow, or because I am a captive animal under stress and reassured by repetitions?

  And then he was alone. Ascending.

  So why does this all seem to be a fall?

  A girl is balanced on her mother’s shoulders, being gently bounced but also held secure. She is laughing. Her father is there also, strolling along, and an older brother who holds their dad’s hand. The boy is not of an age to find that burdensome and swings their shared grip contentedly. They are walking west together along the King’s Road on a mild autumn day which has been rainy but is now fine and therefore shining, dazzling: azure overhead and sparks underfoot. The family all have the same pleasantly dishevelled corn-coloured hair and a harmonised sense of taste. They look like artist adults of various sizes, people of comfortable wealth but with an access to imagination. Their summer has left them tanned, lean, unified. Everyone’s shoes are supportive without being ugly, unusual without being garish. Nothing is home-made but it could be, it could come from a home in the 1930s with lots of leisure and access to quality materials and craft skills.