Serious Sweet

by A. L. Kennedy

  Which are anachronistic elements to introduce – Rowan always very harsh about that kind of thing. Precision – he insists on it.

  Which is unforgivably anachronistic of him.

  And I feel sometimes – very often – we are besieged, myself and Rowan. We cosset ourselves, peer out at what’s left of our golden hillside palazzo and watch the plague drift in, seed itself. Underneath the phoney scares and distractions there’s plenty of threat – it’s running with the big and clever London rats, all over the Junction. It just hasn’t washed up quite as high as Bishopsgate. Not really – it’s only on its way.

  I’ve never been to Florence … never lifted my eye to the hills surrounding, the purply pink Tuscan hills … never picked out a villa, a palazzo, where the prosperous, the eloquent, the fragile might once have had themselves bolted away to exempt themselves from death.

  Just another bloody conference venue, really.

  Like Davos, but with intelligence and lyricism and no obligation to pretend one might wish to help others.

  Jon had watched Rowan’s smile as it began to seem troubled again and, this time, enquiring.

  Bolter – they used to call me that. Easier to say than Sigurdsson.

  Bolter in the sense of my being a boy who runs.

  Like I run from the idea of human beings succumbing slowly under provocations to fail, the tick of waiting, of daily signing, of the fictitious letters that do not summon them for customer interviews and therefore produce their Failure to Attend. There are a thousand unnatural shocks one can use to produce Closure of Claim.

  I also do not imagine Decision-Makers and Cluster Managers sitting in off-the-peg splendour and hitting their Individual Performance Targets.

  This is all part of the righteous hudud we must not question, or contemplate, the claim of our particular godless god.

  In the lower lands, beneath the hillside, being trapped is the rule and not the exception – you and your stories are held there.

  And it doesn’t matter.

  This would all be terrible if it mattered. So it has to be what doesn’t matter.

  Rowan was a friend – could most likely and truly be named as a friend: first a jarringly young and clever tutor and then a friend – and friends noticed if you seemed off colour and were indulging in fits of interior petulance and snapping instead of explanations.

  My behaviour is unfair. I was always peaceful here. Rowan never shouted, never bullied.

  So I should trust him, should have trusted him earlier and ought to at this point.

  I should communicate.

  But that isn’t what one does, is it? If one intends to be correctly English, one must brood on one’s list of catastrophes and be disgruntled. One must enjoy complaining, but only to those without power to assist, without the will. And, happily, no one does have the power, or the will to assist. Impotent rage: that’s the state to aim for. One must practise self-harm through the forging and hoarding of fears and through the embrace of unfeasible injuries, hotly anticipated. Present wounds should fester and be ignored. This is expected of others as surely as one must expect it of oneself.

  The thing was, Jon didn’t want to communicate. He did just need to hide inside petty complaining – so he simply talked and talked, made noises about nothing: ‘I know – it’s property values … Weren’t we …? Were we? If we referred back to the postcode unreality … The virulent bubble of property values …’ Jon had paused as his thinking swayed inside his skull. ‘That … on which our economy is poised … We need landowners to have power, because otherwise where would we be? We’d be in a land where landowners didn’t have power, which would be disconcerting. So land must be worth something, everything, and the landowners must get richer and swell until they are Borgias … new Borgias … tiny and middle-ranking and towering Borgias … And we can rest sweetly in our beds, no matter what power we don’t have, because our floors and kitchen cabinets and damp courses and gutters and so forth are appreciating in theoretical value, while depreciating in actual value through wear and tear, but nonetheless there is appreciation taking place at fantasy rates in a shinier fantasy world. Unless we bought a council house and it rotted around us, or our neighbourhood fell into hell. Then we’re very screwed. And beyond that …’

  Rowan sipped his tea and let Jon run, let him drag himself towards something like tears.

  Jon had felt his body becoming breathless and starting a sweat. ‘And even if we’re not screwed that way, our precious bricks and repointing are only all very well if we don’t become homeless through some intervention from the catalogue of mischance, or don’t intend ever to move again and won’t then find ourselves forced to purchase somewhere else in London for a price which would buy us a small street in Liverpool. Because only London truly matters, it is where our Borgias live, where everyone’s Borgias live. Other areas and cities misunderstand power and ownership and must be chastised accordingly until they do better. And …’And it no longer seemed important to finish the sentence.

  I sound angry and ridiculous.

  ‘Have some more tea, Jon.’ Rowan’s voice amused, but not mocking. ‘We consider solutions, though, don’t we? Isn’t that the best …? We never allow our description of what might dismay or overwhelm us to dismay and overwhelm us in itself. We assess the available information and generate alternatives … And we are implacable.’ A tired grin after this to acknowledge that he was quoting himself.

  Rowan deals with me well, always has – lets me come here and rant. He was always a good teacher, because he’s interested in learning – in every sense. He listens, does Rowan – even to me. Not that I’m offering him anything real, or worth hearing.

  Rowan spoke to his tea glass, softly, ‘Being angry with no one you can find … No one you can reach …’ Then he looked into the garden’s little pool. ‘Wouldn’t that, in the end, make you ill …’ Rowan’s face took noticeable care to remain disinterested while he said this.

  Yes, naturally it would. It does. But I want to be angry. I want to be it and feel it. I do. I have to – what’s the alternative? If I’m not angry then I’m only scared – that’s all that’s left, beyond the hating.

  I have mislived the whole of my life.

  ‘Yes, thank you, I’ll have more tea. In case of apocalypse, take tea.’

  Jon did offer his glass and Rowan poured for him – civilised – it was excellent, gentle tea, made with fresh sage from the garden, from the raised bed just over there.

  An Arabian garden in Bishopsgate.

  There were joyfully coloured tiles and alcoves and squared flower beds laid out like a prayer with a pool at the centre. The heart is a pool which has to be cleansed. It had been built here for Filya: a present to court her, before she moved in, said yes and got married and did the customary stuff – except that with Rowan and Filya it wasn’t customary. They and their garden along with them were – one had to use the term – enchanting.

  Jon could remember when the finished courtyard had been revealed – Filya crying and setting her hands over her face while a small knot of people suddenly felt superfluous, because they had been invited to a garden-christening party and it had turned without warning into a public proposal and unashamed sentiment and a slender woman being momentarily quite annoyed about having to consent and kiss and so forth before an assembled multitude. But mainly there was happiness. There had been a great deal of happiness.

  Filya, who was Rowan’s first wife.

  His only wife. And it doesn’t seem acceptable to be in Bishopsgate, in the world, when she is not. She would have been about the place, there would have been a knowledge, a sense of her presence, immanent. She’d have left me with Rowan to chat between ourselves, but then joined us for the later evening.

  Not in that silly, sexist way – not a toxic, enforced withdrawal from men’s business … It was just that she liked to cook. After work, it relaxed her. She was a neurologist. She saw awful things happen to people, happen to their minds, the
ir private selves, and had greater than average reasons for wanting to create things and hand over health and … Food’s good, isn’t it? It makes you able to go on. And I would have an appetite when I was with them both. So we might have eaten dowjic in a while, maybe, or lamb kibbeh, pilaf, lots of small dishes. Home-made and expressing affection. And first there would have been sweet peeled almonds in the garden to assist our conversation, and dried apricots the colour of muscovado sugar, perfumed flavour they had, and fresh dates. And we would have sat in the peace by the little fountain and heard her being efficient with knives and equipment and I would have smelled the heat, the spices, the domesticity, the content. Beneath everything would always be the flavour of content.

  Happy households, they have an identical scent. There are variations in the top notes, but the underlying sweetmustysexydrowsy taste that colours your inward breaths is always the same. And without Filya that’s gone.

  It was her absence, in part, the lack of everything she’d added to reality, which had put Jon in such a vile mood.

  And I don’t like to see Rowan hurt and he is now permanently damaged, marked. That’s what happens when you really have someone who’s for you and they love you and they aren’t simply this closed loop in human form: your source of pain and your justification for withdrawing and the increased pain they inflict that calls for your attention and the guard you have to keep to fend them off – round and round.

  Because it’s not that I didn’t understand how a couple falls apart. I did see what we couldn’t help doing, Valerie and I – we weren’t a disaster because we were insufficiently well informed … Just as we weren’t, in some ways, cruel.

  We were simply beyond help.

  I do not personally believe in help.

  It was beautiful with Rowan and Filya, though – they conjured belief, produced it.

  And then a younger wife who should have outlived her husband gets killed by an unforeseeable aortic dissection. Because everything ends.

  She managed just fine being a Kurd and a Sufi and born in Iran and then moving to Gaza when she was a kid … Gaza, of all places … So many things didn’t kill her and then she was over. Stopped.

  I can’t imagine what I would have done: having to be the man who woke beside her that morning and who knew she was in pain and that it was bad and dark and that nothing I could do was fixing it.

  She told Rowan it was like a tearing in her chest. She suspected the cause and was frightened, more than sufficiently well informed. She said goodbye a lot, which was a mercy for later but not at the time. She insisted on saying goodbye. Hands over her face and crying and momentarily furious.

  Is what I was told.

  And I could not have borne it.

  The ambulance taking however long they take now … Nice people when they arrived, Rowan said, and efficient … And too late.

  It wouldn’t have made any difference if they’d been parked up ready outside – the situation was unsurvivable. Nobody’s fault – unless we involve God, believe that He claimed her. Her blood was just flooding away, and the damage impossible to repair – sewing nothing on to nothing being impossible.

  We don’t discuss it, but that is what’s in the garden instead of Filya – an impossibility.

  Jon had crossed his legs, drawn both hands through his hair and bent forwards, hinged himself so that his head was nearly against his own knees. He was doing this more and more often and was sure it must look ungainly and as if he were, to a degree, overwhelmed or else collapsing. ‘The whole city will have been cleansed soon: one huge play park for the upper-middle-and-above classes. And where will they get their tradesmen then? Or their servants? Dear me. One will have to bus one’s staff in from Surrey, Kent. Dorset. Take their passports and make ’em live in …’

  ‘Jon, is this what you wanted to tell me?’

  Of course not. Why the fuck would I care about this? Why the fuck? Why the fuck be nauseous – again and as usual nauseous and should I see a doctor? I get sick. I feel sick too often.

  I feel sick when I walk across Eaton Square – been doing that for decades – and see the new pavement furniture, these men who are dressed as butlers and who have to stand about outside the houses. As if there are not enough ways to spend the so much, so much, too much money available to the householders within, or elsewhere but potentially within, and therefore personnel must be made visible and shown to be under-occupied: whole human beings on call in case a bag needs lifting when anybody steps out from a cab, or a door is found closed and so has to be opened.

  They are mainly there for doors, I suppose – the fake butlers – they’re doormen who can’t look like doormen for fear that passers-by would mistake one’s house for a hotel. And for fear of passers-by in general.

  Probably not even that, it’s probably just an ill-informed costume choice. Or an attempt to look like Manhattan – those long, uptown awnings with cheery doormen underneath them, white gloves and peaked caps.

  For whatever reason, there they are, set out like breathing bollards. And a whole tribe of human beings who cannot alight from any vehicle without offering up their packages, making the faces of tired children, expecting that every dreadful burden will be removed, looking out of their windows and over their shoulders and seeing wilderness.

  ‘Jon? Are you not well?’

  Jon had been aware that the one thing he shouldn’t be here was a bringer of more trouble and that he mustn’t be in any way unwell. That kind of vocabulary should not be allowed.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m … I’m clearing my thinking … It’s …’

  ‘Take your time.’

  And – ridiculously – he’d ended up holding Rowan’s hand. He’d reached out and held the man’s hand and tried not to find himself pathetic, tried and – being truthful – he’d resisted crying, not because he was brave in any way, or still functional, but because Rowan was the only one there who’d had a true cause for crying.

  ‘Take your time.’

  ‘I really am fine, it’s, ah …’

  One’s previous aloneness only absolutely clear when one is holding someone else’s hand and realising that all day, all day, all day, one has been holding the lack of someone’s hand, the awful fact and dreadful burden of exactly that.

  ‘I will, Rowan, take my time … I’ve been stupid, is the thing. I have been …’

  I don’t care about the doormen, sod the doormen, why think of doormen … And I can appreciate the wider benefits in the personal accumulation of significant wealth.

  Keeps the doormen in business, jewellers, shoemakers … tailors …

  It’s not that I don’t possess more than the majority of people do. The statistics on that are clear.

  I have a tailor …

  ‘Rowan, it’s … I see them walking about, these men whose minds have torn away from who they were, away from the world, from facts … The way they think of themselves, the things they expect to see – they move inside that – what they must have been at some point, what must have … Men with consciences flapping out behind them like bloody flags.’

  ‘You’re not one of those men.’

  ‘I try to think and I can’t … If I’d … It would be like … When you have care of a child – and we’re all supposed, I think this is true, to have care of children – and you don’t … When you reach in and … You can’t hurt them. You can’t be permitted to hurt them. You can’t steal what they’re going to be because you have appetites and they warm you and you like them, you can’t … There are so many things that you can’t, but they happen anyway.’

  ‘You’re not one of those men.’

  I’m not a man, I’m an old boy.

  I went to a quietly acceptable school. I attempted to play rugby – run like a bastard or else they’ll catch you – bolting on the terraced playing fields, way up on high, de facto orphans trying to operate sportingly under the gaze of Machu Picchu, or so it seemed. Only we were in Cumbria. Not an especially notable institution, bu
t we had the requisite crests and colours, debates and a cadet corps, traditions and the long, long run and rolls of honour in careful gold leaf under which to eat our meals, a vastly arched war memorial to celebrate our particular and generously given dead and to cover the sneaking of outdoor cigarettes during the rainstorms.

  I never have wanted to smoke since I’ve been allowed to.

  And working hard in lieu of loving and being loved and making it all the way to a decent college – more colours: this strange adoration of clashing candy colours amongst the authoritative classes, this need for babyish discordance – and then knowing that cosy, tidy, end-of-the-day relief when the gates were closed for evening beyond the lawns and honey stone, the nation’s significant thoughts tucked up behind oak, with No Admittance signs to check the tourists. Toast at the gas fire. Cloistered.

  I should have been a monk. Easier all round.

  I was taught to be avid for information, accurate. It was implied this would be a gift and of assistance. I was encouraged to be fastidious.

  I did have a vocation.

  I was—

  ‘Jon?’

  Rowan, don’t make me think of your hand, of holding a hand, and that without it the undertow that’s everywhere will sweep on in and get me.

  ‘Rowan … The letters they caught me writing … The love, sort of love, letter thing …’

  I am an old boy. That’s what they made of me. I am not a man, I am an old boy. Boys can only cope with so much and then no more.

  ‘It was a preposterous thing to do …’

  But I would come here and see you holding happiness and having it stay with you and I would smile as a grown man should.