by Brian Castro
Yes Da.
Write honestly with it.
Yes Da.
I can understand now, the emotions which must have coursed through my father… the curse of not being able to be alone, always in bars and nightclubs, dreaming the ideal love- affair, always with feral women, his imagination playing ninety-five per cent of the parts, inventing nostalgia, grief and triumph… how he must have suffered, not being able to write these things down, having lost his right arm at Ypres, and always, at the end of it all, the terror of loneliness.
Nobody owes anybody anything.
I taught this to my pupils. For years, in London, I was in Supply. They drew me from a pool and I spent my days calling the roll and counting lunch money, starving kids hanging off me, Sir, Sir, I got no fork’n knife!
Don’t swear, son. It’s not nice.
At London University, attending night-time lectures, I learned about extinction. Unicorns, native Tasmanians, the frenzy of purity and cleansing during nationhood. I was excited. Immortality, I thought, was made of this: perilous nativity, tough titty, no spilt milk, and revenge. I was fascinated by what pioneers called woolly-haired savages.
My Latin tutor thought differently. A kindly man, Julius Jenkins hunched over dusty volumes of Virgil in an ivy-choked room, his pipe challenging newly-installed fire regulations. Jules thought the end was near for all of us. In a murky pub in the East End he put his hand on my knee. We are all unicorns, he whispered. We bring maidens to the world and are slaughtered for our sensitivity.
I ate my stew and drank the lukewarm lager. A callow youth, I was surprised that poetry was all we had. I wasn’t interested in myths and muses. Give me the Tasmanians any day. I grew dizzy with the possibilities; thought of succumbing to the falling-down disease and suddenly, memory fused. In those days my fits went nowhere. I sometimes saw myself dreamt and written by another:
Byron Johnson used to ride his bicycle to the school in which he taught, excited continuously by women: students, teachers, office staff. It was a better reason to keep going than his meagre salary. He was big, nervous; he looked as though he was about to thump you on the back; yet he carried deep within, a massive, debilitating romanticism. It was aching, unmentionable, and he kept it hidden, having learned from experience that in sunlight it was mocked… he was familiar with the agony, with its ability to turn him hard upon himself like a beetle upon its back. Witness a normal day:
He parks his bike, locks it with a chain, climbs upstairs with his rucksack full of books. He pauses near the book-room, a musty cupboard of a room with one cell-like window, jammed with shelves of half-used texts, torn, faulty bits of education delivered daily to bored and needy pupils. Pauses there because he has the only key and listens to the sounds therein, surprised. A woman moans, in the semi-darkness, the unmistakable tones of the new American teacher and her Science Master, both married and illicit, limned in dust-mote, kids staring through the broken pane from above. He goes on upstairs and will return later to sample the frenzied air, juxtapose the bookish spoor with musk and semen.
Always have to test for reality.
He was too delicate for this job. He employed great formality towards the American, inoculating his lust with contempt, holding her chair to receive her toothy charms… Americans appreciate old manners… admiring her capacity for rough passion and the unconscious gentleness it produced, but he didn’t once correct himself to consider the effects of being too ruthless in this search for evidence.
Rode my bike to school one day and the Science Master, great bull of a man who’d done some wrestling in Bromwich, said: I have a car space right? An’ you bloody well go an’ park your bike there. That’s not the way we do fings ‘ere, right?
So the next day I parked my bike on top of his car and at lunch he found out and wanted to fight me then and there, masticated food gushing from his mouth, but others held him down and he calmed, the whole school watching in silence and then in giggles. The incident made me trim some fat, but it did no good because a week later he tried to run me down along High Street and I couldn’t pedal fast enough and ended up through the bamboo blinds of a curry shop. On another day, a friend of his who drove for Cherry’s Meats side-swiped me, the lorry catching one of my pedals and I was dragged sideways up a hill.
I quit teaching. I’d had enough aggravation.
It was then that I met Ainslie.
Coincidentally, in the bank in which I worked.
This was after I had sold all the books in my possession, had made up my mind that the humanities were redundant in an age of debit and credit. There was a terrible weight within my chest, I couldn’t breathe half the time, lugging the weight of failure from room to room, such was the anger and I longed for that day I would hold up a grenade, or a stick of dynamite, pull the pin or light the fuse and sit there for the final absorbing seconds.
For one moment he’d dreamt the past and saw how far down he’d come. To think that the first novel at twenty-five had brought such acclaim he believed he’d go on forever, forgetting what he had so often written about: that fame was the attrition of that isolated world in which the best was always produced. It was the bitter amber of commonality which destroyed him; yes, quite paradoxically it had made him into a type. They took him for granted. He was furniture. Sooner or later, the brief editorship of an unknown magazine and then the fight against poverty; alcoholism. Noblesse oblige. No vulgar daytime jobs. He went under. Begged in pubs. With a final monumental effort, through the help of his old tutor Julius Jenkins, he got the job in School Supply. And now, scrubbed up, a bank Johnny catching the eye of a blonde girl. He was smiling. Had some vague notion of her smart clothes, silk scarf and all the expensive accoutrements.
These attractions passed, more or less rapidly. The eye becomes jaded within the orbit of bitterness. With training and effort, I could have developed contempt, but the defences were down. There was this other side to me. Genius, Einstein said, was energy. E = MC?. I looked busy. Stepped from behind the counter to refill the deposit slip holders. She was close to me, completing a form. Subtle perfume. When she reached across for a pen she said Excuse me, and her breast brushed my arm and then the pressure became firmer, and she said: I seem to know you, perhaps I’ve seen you before? And I said I don’t believe so, running through my list of brazen breasts.
It was only later that they told me this was her father’s bank.
Yes, she insisted, not here. On the BBC. You’re some sort of comedian.
Not bloody likely. I smiled instead at her, with feigned ignorance.
There it was. See how the briefest of dialogues interposed itself and took root, when normally, in the coarse commerce of life these phatic sounds were erased in daily sleep after a second’s scintillation. But there it was. The bloody thing came out like a snake from its hole… the correction, erratum, arrogance, flawed pride and false modesty of the writer. Oh precious little excitement! Another piece of integrity down the drain. Byron Shelley. The writer of a dozen ‘novels', if you believed in the new; you couldn’t call contemporary epistles new; proselytizers, poetasters, panegyrists, who make up the litcrit crowd couldn’t abide the new; old wine in new bottles, they called it, which is always a change. We’re talking quality. Byron Shelley Johnson. Revolutionary. Hard enough as it is to hold my names together in anonymous penury. We Johnsons were good bums. We had an American branch… who came originally from Hammersmith… old winos. They knew how to use their Johnsons.
So that was when it all began. I signed her copy, which she had promptly bought at a nearby store, and then made an entry in my diary:
Enterprise = Mindless romance + Chronic boredom?.
That was what my life was worth. Nothing was beyond its recording. But for now, things were looking up. Ainslie liked slumming. These were the days before art had stock-market cachet. It wasn’t so unusual. From time immemorial the rich had taken genius from the gutters and destroyed it completely. It was more dangerous with writers. Paintings d
idn’t bite back. I didn’t know why she was interested. It could never have been pity.
And yet I was not loveless. If you could have seen me revolve on the dance floor, the shabby halls I frequented, nights of perspiring girls fleetingly beneath, but each, a narrative, the orb in its motion like an angel singing, as the bardic breath whistled it. Living on onions and garlic then. Until one, Priscilla her name, so desperately drug-riddled, her brain almost porous, walked straight through the thin glass door of my bathroom and stood clutching her jugular, unmoving, and collapsed then, in pulsings of arterial blood, and when I carried her to Casualty, to the old Hammersmith Medical Building in which my birth had been registered, she had become cold and heavy in the shrouded night, and I believe things reached me from the other side, each bottle of infused blood, each sputtering of deathly breath, each clank of stainless steel, poured cheap wisdom into me, the sanctity of life found so often in careless harmony with ephemera… a pulse or two, and then infinity… and what had generated it was like a snap of air.
And then there was Linka the Czech, who was escaping a man with no past, Jimmy Jeans, his name. She had him checked out, so to speak, and found a list of crimes so long the police were interested suddenly and didn’t leave her alone until she’d confessed he held a knife to her throat and this gave them cause for an arrest: of a leathery addict who never changed his trousers. But it was always the haunting refrain that he had no past which worried her, as if he would slip out of gaol one day like wind between the bars and she would hear him whistling on the landing, no sex, no sex, as though he were afraid, but in reality making the long association with murder by chastity. He killed prostitutes. And Linka was his only love, provided she was Mother.
I bought a cut-down .22 from the dealer across the street, filed the numbers and honed the stock to a stained haft which neatly fit my hand, but by that time Linka had gone, leaving behind her perfumed loneliness, the same, I’d smelled that second time I met Ainslie Cracklewood, at Stromboli’s, where I was working as a waiter.
She came in with two other women, blonde, you could have said clones, and ordered expensive cocktails. She ignored me at first, and then asked if I had ever been a comedian, for I looked so sad. A good joke. Then, quite drunk, she began to hum tunelessly and on the way to the Ladies’ Room, cornered me by the phone-booth, saying I should resign.
She may need some filling in: you can imagine… dimples, immaculate teeth but flawed blue eyes, drowning peacock-blue eyes, you could have said, but in reality unfocussed, short-sighted, unused perhaps to contact lenses, her cheeks afire. I admired her nerve but not her style, and she was holding herself very straight, royally so, though her words were tumbling about. I told her I had to support my poor old mother. That was when she stuffed ?200 into my apron and kissed me. You write that, she said. And I must admit it was a different kind of kiss from those of the small number of women I’d kissed before, because it was so tentative after her making the running and all that and I thought maybe she hadn’t really done much of this before… that is, pick up a waiter who was really a writer, though it was the same, waiting is what writers do, waiting for something which may never come, the end, the beginning, the truth or nothing… waiting for words which are spent and for which one has nothing to show. No, it was a kiss from a novel, if ever there was one, not like those I’d known from women who had dirty feet and pimply backs, who left saliva on your chin and sought no more than peace with a bloke, the attendant happiness of romances they read in bed, so unlike themselves, books whose plots were written purposefully with planned direction and cunning… women who drifted, and were real.
You have to have peace in order to write, Ainslie said.
Nothing I have heard since has been further from the truth. So after a few drinks, I took myself up to meet the challenge, took her up on it, or rather, she took me up, or I took up with her and what with all this taking up with each other, I didn’t see Stromboli approaching with two heavies, didn’t feel his hot breath behind, but certainly heard his warning: You’re a fuckin’ fool, Byron Johnson, he said.
Be that as it may, Ainslie and I connected in a way that was different from any other relationship I’ve had before or since: we were driven by a common hatred of complacency. We goaded each other on. I reflect now on the strenuousness of that courtship; all that imaginative effort evolving into nothing.
Stromboli tore the apron off me and threatened violence, but Ainslie’s friends intervened and at the mention of a name or two, caused Stromboli to blink. It took a little while, but then we all seemed to be moving in slow motion, until the instinct for corruption took hold. Stromboli became as nice as pie and gave us drinks on the house and we all parted amicably, the clones in Stromboli’s Roller and Ainslie and I to her apartment in Bloomsbury, where she said I could either spend the night in her bed or on the couch, or in the Tube station, if it were that important to preserve decorum. Please yourself, she said, but let it be known she understood excess perfectly.
Ten years in Supply and I’d almost forgotten women’s bodies. In Ainslie’s bed I thought of my mother, arthritic, storing up tinned food for me in case of her passing. She hobbled desperately and fumbled with the tea things at four o’ clock, her once perfect knees nobbled with elastic tights to contain her falling, her mad flights wheeling and skating towards the fire and ice of Ultima Thule, she in her blank year, cast adrift from history. Byron, don’t fall for cat-women, she said, all that piss and smell and perfumed thighs. I’d rather you’d caught a boat for South America.
And at this point never failed to hold out banknotes, scarcely enough for soup.
Ainslie held out for nothing. Her nightdress unruffled, puritanically commissioned, she employed a standard repertoire and then apologised. Sorry, didn’t give you half a chance. You can improve on that in the morning.
Ten years in Supply and I was still a romantic.
Lust repeated led to chaos. Ainslie was confused as to why I had no passion, didn’t pursue her across town, spy on her assignations, drift along icy streets, shoes caked in slush or wait in panting taxis. She half wished, she said in an unguarded moment, I would trap her in an alleyway, lift up her skirt and take liberties, oh fuck, she said, are all writers the same? Words and nothing but words?
I lied to Mother. Said I was going to Stromboli’s each morning, but went to the apartment and hung about till noon, reading, drinking Turkish coffee and listening to Mozart while Ainslie slept, then quietly left when she woke, regularly at two.
Ainslie had other men. Sex is not possession, she said, and I agreed. I wasn’t drawn to her for that. One day, the boyish, foppish Lord _____, who was always appearing in the tabloids and who affected a monocle, hung around with me outside her door. When it became apparent that she wasn’t there, we went and bought each other a pint and didn’t mention Ainslie once. We spoke about football, I about the innate talent of the working class, he about buying a club. He gave me the impression he was confused, and as it turned out, not about the club, but about me. A waiter, he repeated; an accounts clerk; a schoolteacher. As for me, I wondered why he had been lining up outside her door, kicking at the carpet and pressing the lift button like a conscript awaiting a medical. According to Fleet Street, he was a fierce rake.
Ainslie must have affected all of us. She would try one thing and then another. She was full of ideas about changing the world. Most of her friends came from left field. I don’t know where she picked them up. They always ended in business suits, publishing magazines she’d financed. She had an immense talent for seeking out the most important ingredient in people who could further her reputation, something she could learn, appropriate, use as currency. When she finished, she would let you go… but not before you got a taste for champagne, the smell of luxury cars and the feel of silk underwear. Most of the time she demonstrated a particular tenderness for the anonymous and the disadvantaged… she picked them off the streets… because there she was able to hold herself above, remain inta
ct and play with paradoxes. The poor had no such choices. Still, it was philanthropy of a sort.
Lord ____ confided this to me upon our second meeting. We were standing in the rain, in a rather grimy street near Madame Tussaud’s. He’d accosted me and wanted an exchange of confidences, but I made excuses and hurried away. What he said about Ainslie didn’t worry me. Besides, I thought, there was nothing to be gleaned from me. Books came in a flurry of circumstance and words accrued and sooner or later there would be a gentle snowfall of narrative, soft as shit. I fought hard for integrity, and wrote only what I knew. I despised the rococo, the arabesque and other writers, who tomorrow will always become someone else. That was human nature. I hated that too.
Ainslie and I must have loved each other once. It’s difficult now, to recall the emotion. Psychoanalysts used to call it the obscure object of desire, a lack, an invisible little thing. Maybe it was her freckled hands or the way she used her eyes or the ironic shape of her mouth. I can always tell a memory lapse is coming. We must have felt an extended longing, a wish never to be parted. It would have been chemistry at first. Oh, how I have even to now manufacture that first kiss! She must have been masterful in re-defining happiness for me. She must have told me she admired the Herculean battles I fought each day, wrestling with honesty and perfection. Don’t think, she whispered, when we made love. Don’t feel you have to intellectualise. It was terrible flattery and wonderful consolation at the same time.
I must have been a working class boy with startled eyes. I suffered immensely from everything, life welling up like tears, unspoken, strangled. I made the sign of words, with my hands up to my mouth. That’s how it had to be. We must have gone through a horrendous wedding, drunk from morning till night on champagne, her father jealous and irate to see a daughter go, but happy he had five sons to keep titles and fortunes secure. It still pains me a great deal to think about it.