And I loved the small display on human evolution – our sad forebears posed dimly behind glass: life-sized and naked and unable to suggest any yearning to use tools, cooperate, learn above themselves, stand upright and prosper. They seemed endearingly devoid of any aspiration.
It became a quite innocent habit to go there for lunch breaks. I wasn’t establishing an alibi in advance.
Jon paused in sight of Buckingham Palace and thought once again how disappointing the building was. It always put him in mind of a novelty cake, or somewhere that would have bad room service.
He watched the wide and blue-white delicacy of a spring sky, drifting massively behind the solid pediments of the east façade. He felt the moment when the building came loose from its moorings and seemed to fly, while the high race of clouds locked in place and stood above him, watching him back.
Mustn’t be sick.
He tried smiling at a pair of older women tourists, but his expression must have failed him. They turned tail and walked briskly the way they’d come, rather than pass him.
Jon fumbled at his collar, intending to take off his tie, and then realised he wasn’t wearing one – that sensation of constriction was therefore entirely illusory and should be treated as such.
Like the palace. Like the sky. Like the progress of my evolution.
He started walking again.
Maybe once a month, if I could, I’d rush out at lunchtime, flag a cab and head for the museum, the warm stone façade. All those mad sculptures of animals, reptiles, the living and the extinct: the monstrous swarm of life carved all over the exterior – terracotta gargoyles defending evolution’s temple – I grew fond of it.
I liked walking within work built to last, effort drawn from hope and a need to progress, a joy about it, inspiration drawn from fact … It made me feel furious at certain levels, of course – furious and desperate. But also content.
I would eventually establish a pattern: stroll in past the bony architecture of the diplodocus skeleton, climb the stairs and then call upon the prehistoric humans and their skulls.
They made me wonder. My flat-browed, jut-chinned, hairy ancestors – how did they smell? We progressed to walk erect, but do we still bring with us an animal reek? When did that stop? Or did we already, grunting in huddles, smell like people – like unwashed people who were also beasts? That sweetsharp tang of sweat – yours or another’s – that taint, that seal, that gift which stays on your skin, when did we first travel with that? Or have we always? Do we carry the scent of the beasts we still are? Would that be our clue, when we look at those onward-marching illustrations of humanity straightening up from its stoop and being bettered by natural forces, swelling its brain, busying its fingers, perfecting its tongue – would that tell us how little has changed?
Jon’s balance, his vision billowed and twisted momentarily, slid like a loosened building. He chose to believe this was an effect of exposure to exhaust fumes and central London’s generally pertaining pollution. Probably if Parliament did exile the civil service to the wastes and moorlands of South-east London, it would add years to everyone’s lifespan.
His phone rang and – having checked that it was no one he wanted to hear – he slipped it back down into his coat. It protested as it went.
Too modern for my current frame of mind. While all of the other species keep evolving, we simply invent fresh ways to bill each other for being downcast or enraged – rage and despair being all for which we’re meant to hope …
The museum used to please me.
After comparing myself unfavourably with Australopithecus, I’d slope off to the modern bit, the wing where they keep their material archive: leaves, bodies, wings, drawings, samples. I like it there, because it contains no dinosaur remains and is therefore fairly child-free and peaceful – even, at times, apparently deserted. You ride a lift up to its top floor, as if you are boarding a spacecraft full of whatever’s left of our good, of the earth’s generosity – as if you’ll be able to leave and start again with seeds from climate-controlled vaults. It looks smart, futuristic – in the sense of suggesting that we have a future.
And there are interactive exhibits, film displays – quickly spurned by the scatter of more French teenagers as they pass along. And cabinets have been made with real drawers which can be pulled back to reveal displays. The drawers also provide ledges, edges, gaps. One can, as it were, fill the gaps.
Jon unbuttoned his jacket, although it wasn’t terribly warm, and let the poisoned air attempt to cool him, ease him. He was sweating. Sweating as he walked was not as bad as sweating while he was examined by a malicious superior.
I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction – not one of them.
And I also wouldn’t tell them about the Natural History Museum and my visits. I couldn’t appear to be a man who might make such visits and then sweat about them. Sweat would constitute evidence.
Because …
Because …
Natural history is about evidence. It is supposed to be about evidence, about science, real science. If you want to know the real world and function in it rationally and effectively, if you want to progress, you collect evidence and test it and love it and want more – you have an appetite for it and its intrinsic beauty. Once you have all the information you can currently gather, you collate it and you analyse it and you come to fact-based conclusions. You have used the real world to give you solutions to itself. This is a beautiful thing.
And humans do not thrive without it.
I believe that.
Once upon a time, we won a real war, a world war, with maths: with models and plans and statistics and knowledge underpinning what we did. We weren’t always right, but we were the less-deluded side and therefore the less savage. And we won. So that people would not be crushed, or shut up in hells, so that our peace could be filled with human beings living lives to their fullest extent.
That’s all I wanted.
That isn’t really much to ask.
And it’s why I believe that facts are beautiful things.
And …
Because …
The thing is, I must not sweat when Chalice looks at me, because that will make me seem to be a man who slips away to the Natural History Museum and who has a small roll of fine paper in his pocket and who rests that prepared paper – small and white and simple, typed on one side, the interior side – who rests that in the cradle of his modestly evolved hand, opens a prearranged display drawer and then slips that paper into one of the little gaps inside, as agreed in advance.
I can’t look like a man who walks on while someone behind him opens that drawer and takes that paper and – later, probably later, I bloody well hope later and discreetly – unrolls it and finds it is covered in evidence, figures, raw data, in what have become the most damaging of the leaks which have left the department …
I have transgressed the Civil Service Code: I have disclosed official information without authority.
But I am meant to behave with integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. I am called upon to set out the facts and relevant issues truthfully and correct any errors as soon as possible. I must uphold the administration of justice.
And they won’t fucking let me.
Jon felt that thrill beneath his skin – that sense of being rolled and unrolled himself, reworked, evolved, by each of his attempts at crime, each memory of gathering what his fellow human beings, what the voters ought to know.
It’s what the voters are unsurprised and indeed massively bored by, as it turns out. They are not a powder keg and I am not a match. And it’s what our current media environment finds indigestible, irrelevant, being more concerned with aspirational spending, aspirational violence, aspirational hate, aspirational fucking.
Please, not that.
So it would seem that deeper digging, further research, more transgression, is required to breach the wall of grubby white noise, to provoke public outrage, wakefulness … And so one develop
s strategy. One has that in one’s nature, one is trained for it … It does no good, but one deploys it, nonetheless.
And, of course, strategy shows – it suggests a mind at work, intentions. It could make people start to hunt for a Moriarty. One worries about that. There is an element of stress.
There are days when one is relieved that anything one releases into the public domain simply fizzes slightly and then disappears, leaves not a wrack behind.
Jon swung into Victoria Street and bolstered himself against simply running and not coming back, or forcing a little bit more of a nervous collapse and therefore bolting over the hills and far away, deep and deeper within the privacy of his own mind.
Off to the cloud-topped towers and gorgeous palaces of my own making.
It’s not as if I’m fully operational; I could give minor insanity as my excuse for perceived wrongdoing … But I don’t want to live in a world where concern for others and for the consequences of actions and for safety and reality and … Well, why not …? I don’t want to live in a world where having a concern for true beauty on a wider and wider scale would be regarded as a manifestation of mental illness.
I want people to be proud of me.
Oh, that’s pathetic, though.
But I do, would, do want that.
If they knew, I would like the people whose opinion I care for to be happy when they consider what I have done.
And when they see what I will do.
I am my own department. My own ministry – ministry was always a better and more logical word.
He set his shoulders in the way masters had told him to throughout his school life – an old boy who still undressed and dressed in the order he had been given: socks, pants, vest, shirt, trousers, tie. He walked upright. He could manage that.
I am the Ministry of Natural History. I progress.
15:25
MEG WAS DIFFERENT now.
She was different and currently at work on forcing her life to be different. She felt, for example, that it should involve more happiness.
This was all possible, because of a difference she hadn’t worked on – one which appeared to choose her.
On the 28th of March 2014, Meg had woken at something like lunchtime inside the flat she had inherited from her parents. Waking was not, at that time, a good or a welcome feature of her life. It made her frightened and regretful. Her first experience of herself in any day was one of disappointment.
Not disappointed in who I was. Or that too, but more I was disappointed to feel I was still breathing. I was clinging on. Again. For more of the same.
The flat she was, by then, kind of camping inside contained what was left of her parents’ choice of furniture: 1970s, often brown. The place also contained her mother’s choice of decor – occasionally brown, but also cream and beige, although with a brownness about it. And then there were objects and ornaments of various types which had been somehow made existentially brown by continuing exposure to – she had to admit it – Meg.
Over time, the brown had become more powerful and convincing. It had spread. The brown grew to be this mystical shade of bloody doom that inhabited and rambled – a visible curse.
There was something about persistent drinking – home drinking, house drinking, house everything, locked-in everything – that generated brown. The sweating and fretting and regular visits of minicabs and the bottles handed over at the door by ashamed-for-you drivers – wet hands, crumpled money, no further pretence about parties, of just running a little short on reasonable sociable supplies – there was something about each little blow and cut of damage that made everything you touched or looked at become brown.
Even the air – the not-at-all thin, but unpleasantly thickened air. Like fucking gravy, like oxtail soup with madness in it – the madness of dead spinal columns and roll-eyed livestock. It had, by then, taken a shedload of effort just to peer through the interior – brown air, brown walls, brown carpet, brown remaining furnishings and fittings – or even to find anything in what had once been a passable family home.
No, it wasn’t passable, it was a good home. It was concerned, attentive, generous, with Sunday dinners and Songs of Praise on the telly when the hymns still had tunes and you could like and remember them, even if you didn’t believe in one syllable, and there had been books and unbroken crockery and no tear in the stair carpet. A decent humanity had abounded. No brown.
I never got the hang of it on my own. Didn’t feel I could belong – not until I’d spoiled it, fouled my own nest.
I suppose I was never quite in phase with it once I got beyond thirteen, but I did my best, while probably not meaning well. And I moved out in the way that people used to when children could afford to leave their parents and, fuck me, I was an accountant and that’s a profession and a success story and very appropriate for the daughter of other upwardly inclined people. My parents had bettered themselves, as they say. They did it at a time when that implied you were resourceful, not that you were bad: Mum a secretary in a university geography department and Dad a chemist, in the sense of his owning and running a chemist’s shop. (Maggie was another kind of chemist, I know.) And they didn’t have anything handed to them. The post-war world opened up for them, sure, and showed them possibilities, but they both had to fight themselves free of jobs on production lines, or some other doomed way to earn a living, a place in manufacturing. They didn’t have the hand skills or the mindsset to thrive in a trade – so they went to work clean and came back that way. No industrial illness.
Dad’s shop got squeezed out, eventually, when the street around him died, but he was eager for retirement by then – would have enjoyed it, too, if Mum hadn’t died.
Dad wasn’t why I got the interest in chemicals – and I never involved him or the pharmacy. I didn’t sink that low.
Be honest – I would have tried, but his security was too tight.
After a while, just drinking is too hard – you don’t have the stamina to match your pace of need. So you intervene with other substances. It’s quite logical. It’s not like you’re a junkie. It’s only inadvertent when you find yourself sharing the junkie world, which isn’t nice, isn’t friendly, doesn’t run at a comfortable speed for drunks.
With Mum and Dad gone – when they went … died, that’s the word – when one died and broke the other’s heart … when the other one was murdered by sadness … After that, I slid. Or else, I slid faster. I slid right out of my profession and out of my own home to deal with my debts and into theirs and thank Christ by then I was too disorganised to sell it, liquidate it, liquefy it – probably saw the writing being pissed up the wall.
So there I was defiling everything they’d left me and the air made of poisoned gravy and everything I looked at being wrong … I was wrong.
On that 28th of March, she had reached roughly lunchtime and the curtains were closed because that was how the curtains stayed and nothing was especially remarkable about the terribleness of the day. Nevertheless, she’d hit the point when her existence had become no longer possible.
Her life as she was running it – and life was all about running as fast as she could – that life never had been possible, but now it was, for the first time, truly, really fucking clear that she had no future.
There was this moment.
A golden moment.
Like a door that swings open, some remarkable door and it gapes, pauses, examines you and wants you to give a look back and see and see and see – that’s all you need do – you see how everything is golden, and then the moment’s hingeing round and it’ll shut and you’re going to be caught on the wrong side and you know that you either have to run – when you’re good at running – and you’ll get through now, get out to something new, or else you never will. That’s that.
You don’t know where getting out would take you, or what it might involve.
You do know that your only other choice is dying and that dying might be bad.
Real dying – not the
daydreams – doing that might be hard.
And inside the gold of the moment, Meg became distant to herself in a way that was useful. This let her consider calmly that she would either have to make a phone call and ask for assistance, or else head off and fill the grey-ringed bath with the lime-corroded taps (Mum would have been ashamed) and sit down in the water and finally get around to slitting her wrists as she had often planned to, but never quite had enough time for until today. Killing herself had been like a pleasant holiday she’d not been able to arrange because of her busy schedule, what with the drinking having been a very pressing kind of occupation.
I had two professions. I let the accountancy drop – it lacked glamour. Her realisation had meant she was facing a decision and decisions always required that she should drink.
Only in that moment, that golden moment, she didn’t feel like drinking. She didn’t want to – didn’t fancy it.
This was not usual.
She had an idea that there was, in fact, not anything left available that could be drunk, but this did not diminish the strange reality of no longer being thirsty in her particular way and of being in a state which did not involve the burning and always asking – pleaseGodletmegoawayagain – the begging for drink or some chemist’s replacement for drink. And strangely – bad practice for an addict – she happened to have nothing chemical to hand.
Still … decisions, decisions … They were waiting.
Meg had felt most inclined – calmly, evenly – towards the wrist thing. There had been an idea, long set in place, to make the cuts lengthwise, along the veins, and get it right and never mind the pain and mess and tediousness of putting up with herself while it happened and then finally she’d be posted out to a peaceful country, no stamp required.
Meg truly in her heart had not wanted to face the phoning-for-help thing. Speaking to someone would always be harder than death – this was obvious. And she had attempted such calls at other times, if she was being fastidious about accuracy. She had called many people up over the months and wanted help more and less truthfully and been, meanwhile, messed about by crying and horrors more or less hugely, while she attempted to say she was never sure what. There was no longer anybody who welcomed her calls, who had enough compassion. There was not enough compassion on earth.
Serious Sweet Page 19