What is it with the dogs and cats? Is this some code? I give it some thought. If it is a code, I can’t figure it out. On a wall, I see a poster. Two white-haired grannies are peering out at me. They are bewildered, as if they are novices in the field of having their picture taken. The caption reads:
“The Fixico Sisters – God’s Dealers.”
G
“It’s a small village in the East of Turkey,” says Gulin of her birthplace. “It’s the sort of place where you either spend your whole life, or you leave and never go back.” She worked for a while as a teacher in a primary school, then left. “The winters are bad. It can get completely snowed in. I worry about my mother a lot. I’d like to bring her here, but, you know, the money and the visa…”
I’m making that dish that no one can mess up: spaghetti bolognese.
You may not make great spag bol, but you can’t make it inedible (unless, perhaps, you’re Napalm). As I watch the water 156
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boil and listen to Gulin, I keep on thinking about the odd memories I’ve been getting.
Really inconsequential memories, things I’ve never remembered once before (as far as I can remember), un-events: walking up stairs, waiting to get served in shops, making my way along deserted corridors, dull, non-essential scenes that have suddenly broken free from the depths of my mind and bobbed to the surface. Extraordinarily vivid dullness. Regurgitated boredom.
Am I dying?
“Sixto says you like feeding people?”
“Me? I hardly ever cook.”
“No, I meant you feed the homeless. You try to help people.”
“It’s rather pointless,” I say with surprising bitterness.
“I know. That’s why it’s charming.”
As we eat, I notice the paper is open at the entertainment page. It occurs to me that I haven’t had a break since I arrived in Miami, an evening off, without plotting, without worrying about miracles: a holiday from myself.
“Why don’t we go and see a film?”
“Sure.”
“You choose,” I say, pushing the paper over. Thankfully, Gulin picks the film I would have. There’s nothing more irritating than spending an hour arguing over which film to see and then someone sulking about being forced to see something they didn’t want.
Getting the company right for a film is very important. One entire relationship I had went down over the choice of film – Carla had the best breasts I had ever got my hands on, but it ended after we went to see a French film. It was a long drive, expensive parking, and a film which I had suspected would be obscenely pretentious and which I found obscenely pretentious and she didn’t – there’s no way back from a disagreement like that.
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As you get older, what you look for is less the film than the chance to forget yourself. It would be useful if there was just a switch at the back of your head you could flick to stop thinking for an afternoon… but there isn’t.
We enjoy the film. “The beginning was a bit slow,” Gulin comments, “but I loved the gag with the table.” I was less enthusiastic about the table gag, but we’re definitely close enough in our assessments for future trips.
As we saunter down Lincoln Road, I see a bearded panhandler.
I recognize him as one of the doyens of the streets – so he is at least destitute, unlike many of the beggars who try it on.
When you’re with a woman, it’s harder to ignore a request for a handout – you don’t want to act callous or stingy. But I never give money. I hate beggars as much as bankers and lawyers, for the same reason – they take advantage of others.
“Drug money, please, I’m suffering from an overdose of reality,”
Beardy asks, in that isn’t-it-funny-I’m-being-frank way.
We walk past, as I concentrate on our conversation about the funniest film ever made. Gulin turns to me and says: “I’m sorry.
I never give. I just work too hard for the money. I’d better get back. My boss likes to start work very early.”
G
Very often I have the conviction that my difficulties stem from my dislike of chocolate. You want to be like everyone else as much as possible. I’ve never met anyone who dislikes chocolate.
I’ve come across several neutrals who can take it or leave it or who don’t eat chocolate because they don’t enjoy it; but no one like me who positively dislikes it. It’s just that chocolate has that chocolate taste.
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Am I the victim of a conspiracy of chocolate lovers? It’d be a subtle thing. No one would ever say: “We’re not going to give you the job because we’ve never seen you eating chocolate.”
And it’s not a subject I’d bring up, because I don’t want to be set apart: but it does keep you at a distance.
It was particularly hard as a kid. As an adult you’re allowed quirks. “I only listen to eighteenth-century opera”, “I won’t eat anything red”, “Monday’s the day I never wear underwear”. But not liking chocolate when you’re a kid is hard.
For Nelson’s sixth birthday treat, a group of us went to the cinema to see a great film with hordes of extras getting blown up. As we went in, we were all given a chocolate ice cream. It was assumed we would all love one. I was sufficiently sensitive to know that this was considered a special gratification, so I couldn’t dump my ice cream in a bin or give it to one of the other kids, because if the supervising adult saw me ditching it that would cause trouble, as the whole point of the exercise was for us to have that famous thing, the “good time”.
Once in the darkness of the auditorium, I considered throwing the ice cream on the ground, but refrained from doing so in case it was spotted when the lights came back on. Even if I’d claimed I’d dropped it, I’d either look like an idiot or worse: I’d be bought another chocolate ice cream.
So I put the ice cream in my pocket.
Instead of enjoying the film, I spent the whole time puzzling how to cope with the melting ice cream. I was wearing my best jacket. This was a jacket that had involved a major shopping trip and a long lecture from my mother about how expensive it was and how carefully it should be treated. Thus I had a premonition of an ugly collision between the melting chocolate and my mother. But instead of being mature enough to act (get 159
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up, dump item in loo), I sat there hoping that the ice cream wouldn’t melt and stain my jacket, in that way we do when, presented with difficult circumstances, we pretend they’re not so difficult.
At the end of the evening I said thank you very much, as I had been taught, and was returned home. I could barely stand up with anxiety, but my mother took my jacket and hung it up without saying a word. Was this a ploy on her part to make me suffer? She made no mention of the ice cream and I welcomed the respite.
The next morning I woke up to an absence of ice-cream harangue, and eventually, unable to believe my luck, I examined my jacket which, to my astonishment, showed no sign of ice-cream seepage. I put my hand into the pocket: no stickiness.
There was no ice cream. There was no wrapper. The whole treat had disappeared. The pocket was dry and snug, everything a superior pocket should be.
Mundaneness has a number of explanations. My neighbour in the cinema snaffled it. I hadn’t put it in my pocket, I only thought I had and it fell onto the floor. My mother swiftly cleaned the pocket overnight and didn’t scold me, as even the most rigorous of disciplinarians has a break every now and then. You could go on.
I, however, have to consider the possibility that it was a miracle which saved me from distress.
The useless miracle.
The small balm. Miracles are always presented as life-shaking events: the dead undeaded, surviving an unsurvivable crash. No one considers the possibility of the micro-miracle, or what I would term the useless miracle, the one that does you no good really.
Let’s say that ice cream had been miracled out of my
pocket, but 160
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in reality I was no better off than if I had never been brainless enough to stuff the ice cream into my pocket in the first place.
I know of another one too.
Nelson had a useless miracle. One of the reasons he behaved so badly was his ridiculously indulgent father. Nelson’s abuses were legion, and for years his father accepted Nelson’s version of events. Nelson sold his father’s collection of rare jazz records and claimed it as a burglary. Nelson, when demonstrating how easy it was to make a Molotov cocktail, had burnt out – unintentionally, because it was brand new and he liked it – the family car. The fire was pinned on a passing mysterious stranger.
Like many ridiculously indulgent people however, there came the moment when Nelson’s father became ridiculously angry, when he realized that what everyone had been telling him was true and what Nelson was saying wasn’t. A mighty backlog of chastisement rained down on Nelson, precisely when Nelson needed to borrow his father’s top-of-the-range camera for a school project.
There was a gruelling lecture on the well-being of the camera.
If it hadn’t been a school project (an area where Nelson had been consistently undistinguished), his father would never have agreed. However, it was decreed that no yarn about muggings, bombings or alien abductions would be acceptable if the camera wasn’t returned in perfect working order.
Nelson took his snaps in town, got off the underground to take the train home and as he did so felt strange.
He felt strange because the camera wasn’t in his hand, and then came the burn of stupidity. He had put the camera down on the seat next to him and, engrossed in the blonde opposite, had got off at his stop automatically, habit-trained.
Nelson wasn’t by nature timorous, but now he was terrified.
He knew, compared with most of the fictions he had concocted, 161
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“I left it on the train” had a gloriously simple and compelling honesty to it.
Compare this to his masterpiece: “Dad, I’m telling you it was a puma that trampled your daffodils”, which even got Nelson his mugshot in the local paper. The article headed “Urban Puma?” was classic schlock use of the question mark. It made it clear the story was nonsense and that Nelson was a liar, but by then you’ve sold your paper.
Nelson’s father wasn’t a big man. The prospect of being assaulted by a skinny music teacher might not be so frightening, but when it becomes a certainty then it is daunting. Look how a lone wasp can cause havoc in a confined space or picnic, and a skinny music teacher is harder to stop.
While we all want to leave home, being kicked out onto the streets wasn’t the way Nelson wanted to leave. Choking with terror, he spent hours zigzagging around, chasing the camera, going to lost property, plotting to get another camera through some desperate act of crime.
Finally he gave up and went home to collect his toothbrush and some clothes before his father returned. As he got off the underground, he glanced at the seat next to him and saw a camera. Not just the same model, but the same camera he had forgotten three hours earlier, with his pictures.
Nelson calmed down a lot after this.
G
I fret over the length of my sermon.
This is what makes your mark. You always make more of an impact if you keep it short, and if your congregation wants more they can come back next week. There were unmistakable signs 162
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of gratitude the first time when I released the worshippers after only ten minutes, as opposed to the Hierophant’s customary half-hour. On the other hand, you don’t want it too stunted: if you get dressed up and go to church you want something for your trouble. “You’re good, Tyndale,” Gert remarked, “but you’re no Hierophant yet.”
“Please give a sign of friendship,” I urge.
Smiling, the congregation shake hands with each other.
The faces are all pretty familiar, so this injunction is less for the purpose of ice-breaking: it’s an injunction for injunction’s sake. You have to get the congregation to stand up, sit down, say hallelujah, partly to keep them awake, but also to bond.
Just as when a crowd responds to a nightclub comedian urging:
“Please pinch the arse of the person on your left.” Once you’ve responded, the hooks are in.
I keep my eyes on the rafters, so I don’t take in too much of the congregation. It’s not a good turnout. Nine, and it can’t be said that they are the most affluent or influential citizens of our metropolis either. I get them to stand up and sit down a few more times, to work their cardiovascular systems, but despite my attempt to stir things up a little, Mrs Shepherd in the front row has her mouth so agape I fear an insect will fly in, and her countenance is so inscrutable I can’t tell whether she’s bored, bewildered or peeved by my words.
Behind her is a young guy, his hair gelled erect. I’ve never seen him before. A newcomer should make me pleased, but he is talking to the Reinholds. When I say talking, I do mean talking.
Severe boredom during talks has often compelled me to make a hushed remark or witticism to my neighbour, but the Gel is actually talking louder than I am.
I halt my sermon.
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The stoniness of the Reinholds makes the Gel switch his outburst to the grinny Luis. If smiling could get you anywhere, Luis would have his own country; you could chainsaw one of Luis’s legs without removing his grin. You have to know Luis well (a junior archivist in a Cuban history project, although Chilean) to perceive that although he’s grinning in a manner which would be overkill for most of us, he’s very unhappy. The Gel blathers on, offering a pair of earbuds to Luis: “You see I’m in a band that’s going places. You should listen to this demo.”
This can’t be true. If you are in a band that’s going places you wouldn’t be parking your arse in a church hall three-quarters empty, struggling to convince one junior archivist that you are.
Most of us, when we’re caught doing something embarrassing
– dick hanging out of trousers, etc. – stop. Not the Gel. He eventually notices everyone is glaring at him and he takes advantage of the attention by reaching into his shoulder bag and unfolding some fanzine. “Here’s a review I wrote about our band, which tells you why we are so good.” He reads it out.
Why isn’t he out on Ocean Drive expounding this to some teenage bunny from Des Moines who might fall for it? I persuade the Gel to leave the hall by promising to listen to his demo and to laud his music to the general populace.
“You’re always welcome here, of course. But you know, the service isn’t the proper time to promote your music,” I say in a gentle, pastor-filled voice that surprises me by its mildness. He gets surprisingly nasty.
“What are you going to do about it, you miserable old man?”
This is the first time I’ve been called an old man.
I’ve long got used to not being a young man, but this is the first time I’ve been pronounced old. Doubtless to a seventeen-year-old like the Gel, I am decomposing. By many standards, 164
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over forty is old. It’s also true that I’m not happy. Miserable is accurate, although not a fair comment, because I work hard to conceal my fundamental despair. This is the curious quality of insults: they can be insulting because they’re not true (“you’re a miserable old man”) or because they are (“you’re a miserable old man”), or even because they’re half true. It’s the contempt that the Gel invests in that description rather than its exactitude that makes it so offensive.
“It’s best if you left,” I say with admirable, pastor-like, calm and compassion. I’m getting good at this. But calm and compassion count for deplorably little on the street.
“Make me,” he shouts, unimaginatively, and waves a fist under my nose. Someone does a bad job of raising a child and the rest of us have to foot the bill. It also astonishes me that teenagers thin
k they invented violence. On top of that, the Gel is so skinny if I sat on him, he’d break into pieces.
I put the holiness on pause. Looking him in the eye, I punch him in the gut and he goes down like an obedient dog. My fist has been hurting since the incident with the corgi, and I’ve resisted the impulse to stick on a black eye. The face has too many bones.
The Gel has lost enough fights to know that it would be unwise to get up. He curls up on the ground, although my blow can’t have been that painful. Giving him a kick in the ribs does occur to me, but that would be ungodly. We’ve clarified matters, and I trust it’s been a teacher blow for him.
I’m a little ashamed of myself, but also a little pleased, which isn’t much use to me. Shame or pleasure you can work with, but not the mix.
“Don’t feel bad about failure,” I add. “You’re in good company.”
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Should you get up or stay down? It’s an engrossing question, and one that you can never answer definitively. I reconsider my behaviour during the Japanese Oak Crisis.
“Think positive,” my wife had told me. Wives tend to be very free with advice. Wives commonly believe they can do a better job of living their husbands’ lives than the husbands. Maybe.
So I was thinking positive. I was so desperate I thought positive as I drove off to sort out the Japanese Oak Crisis. I was cheerful. I wasn’t pretending to be cheerful. I was convinced I could go there and find a solution and everyone would be, if not happy, only slightly disgruntled. We could all go home, get a good night’s sleep, and wake up the next morning with the crisis out of our minds.
I hate bankers, and I’ve always hated bankers, but I’d done a deal with a bank who’d built an enormous new headquarters. I’d been delighted about the deal at first, the biggest I’d ever pulled off. Money had been splashed about because the bank wanted marblier marble than anyone else, and instead of getting some big rubber plants and some high-class goldfish for the building’s atrium, they had imported three Japanese oaks.
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