And maybe you’re sorry for him also, have compassion for his inadvertent and public failing. Perhaps you would find it uncomfortable if your book mentioned the way Beth continues to watch the man until he shakes his head, glances away from his work and – before Beth can stop this – meets her eyes again. He tries to construct a type of smile, but his face is soft suddenly, perhaps ashamed, and he turns away and seems to sink slightly. He drops his book, has to stoop and fumble for it – nervous fingers.
This is unfortunate for him and you can imagine how he feels.
You’re aware of how easy it is to make these minor errors.
There are times when you’ve personally known things to misfire – the sentence that fell badly, the dull gift, slapdash comment, hobbled punchline, tight-fisted tip – trying to be too stupid, trying to be too clever, too silly, too carefree, too caring, too free. You can think back to those long and hollow pauses when you realised that you’d misjudged a mood, weren’t paying attention, had taken the wrong risk.
You don’t worry about these occasions, or not that much. There are a few past humiliations which, yes – if you ponder them, truly enter in – can still raise a significant sting and that queasy and sticky ridiculousness of you being inappropriately yourself. But there’s nothing destructive about your reflections and you can laugh at them with ease. You can enjoy allowing others to laugh, too. You don’t stand on your dignity, you aren’t stuffy or prickly unless you’ve been given good cause and this means you can be relaxing company. Those who know you would say this, if they were asked.
And those you know, the people you care about – mistakes with them can be more serious. Going wrong can hurt so much when you’re only beginning to care, when you’re delicate and don’t know your situation and something extraordinary could be ruined before you reach it. But it’s probably worse when you love, fully love, what you’ve got and yet could still crash in and spoil it. You want to avoid that – anyone would.
You cope, though. In some areas, you excel. For this and many other reasons there’s a good deal about you that others could admire. You’re a survivor, although people might not notice this and you don’t make a fuss.
You’re a good person at heart.
You’re sure of this and your book’s sure of it, too.
There are things good people shouldn’t do. Most of these are well established, codified as precepts, but you can be certain that – with laws or without them, overseen or unobserved – your own nature would prevent you from straying too far into harm.
You wouldn’t consciously injure, wouldn’t murder, wouldn’t steal.
Although stealing can sometimes be difficult to define: more than your fair share of mints in a restaurant, hotel soaps, ashtrays in bars – some objects can seem ownerless, lost, attractive. This doesn’t mean that you would take crockery from the restaurant, or light fittings from the hotel, or fire extinguishers from the bar – any more than you would walk out with the mirror from a changing room, or a coat set down for an unguarded moment on a chair, or drive away with someone else’s car.
You wouldn’t study a person who, in a strict and pedantic sense, belonged to someone not yourself – you wouldn’t slip into wanting them, imagining, overtures. Just as you wouldn’t defraud an insurance company, or falsely claim a benefit, or avoid paying any portion of your taxes.
Not to an unacceptable degree.
You only have these ideas, just very occasionally these quite natural ideas. When, for instance, the person ahead of you in the bank queue is carrying bags of money, just obviously a great weight of unmarked cash, or when security guards stroll past you with simple, tidy boxes of who can say how much – you do very slightly have this impulse to find out how heavy solid wealth could be, to make yourself better informed on that small point – to grab, to snatch and run.
This doesn’t imply that your integrity is tarnished. You have thought a thought, no more than that.
And maybe you have picked up coins, banknotes in the street, or from the floor of a shop, a cab, a bus, in the car park at the back of a rowdy pub – so many people have paused there – rendered careless, eccentric, helpless by their pleasures – and have burrowed into pockets and bags for their keys, have ended by dropping, losing everything as they search. This wasn’t money which was yours and yet you kept it. Like a stranger’s little gift.
But there was no fault involved, not on your part.
And you would never damage an animal or a child. Unless, of course, it was to spare them greater hurts. And perhaps animals are frightened, sacrificed in the production of your food, even though you do everything reasonable to avoid this. You assuredly have good will, but also distractions – it is sometimes hard to apply yourself for others’ sakes and to stay comprehensively informed. Child labour, for instance, can ooze into places you might not suspect and undoubtedly ruins lives, but you may unknowingly support it, buy its fruits. Nevertheless, if you heard of a young individual who was growing without the benefit of an adequate education, who was forced to work, who lost a finger in machinery, or an eye perhaps, then you would act. You would make complaints.
You have defended those weaker than yourself. You were pleased to discover you couldn’t do otherwise.
You have a great capacity for kindness.
That’s why you give to charities – you can’t donate to everyone, wouldn’t be foolish about it, but you still try your best. And there have been times when you have enjoyed doing something for nothing and payment would have been unwelcome, if not insulting.
You like the way it feels when you can help.
It’s clean.
It makes you feel useful and clean.
And you can rest assured that you’re more honest than most people.
Which means you’d prefer to be careful about your employment and it could only seem strange to you, quite terrible, if you slipped into earning your living by doing wrong.
You wouldn’t choose to be associated with an unethical company, or criminal behaviour, deception.
So you wouldn’t do this.
You wouldn’t stand in a moderately spacious civic theatre (with poor acoustics) and address 750 people (the place is full to capacity this evening) having assured them that you have knowledge of their dead. You wouldn’t present yourself as being controllably possessed, rattled by the voices from buried throats, gone flesh. You wouldn’t peer off beyond yourself into what observers might believe to be a stirring but vaguely melancholy space in which you’ll seek out messages of love.
You wouldn’t do this.
But your book has to show you the man who would.
This man: tall, pale, golden-headed, and an ache in him that’s plain when he raises his hands – long fingers, delicate, uneasy – and when he paces, rocks. He offers his audience – mainly female – a pain that’s as bright as his hair, as his skin under the lights. He is alone for them and burning in the bleak space of the stage and any reasonable spectator might want to help him, to touch him, to believe.
And none of this happens by accident. He is not an accidental man. He is prepared. He is never, if he can avoid it, outside in the day – night walks at home and sunscreen with the homburg when he’s on the road. No red meat, not ever – rarely meat in any form – a diet he constrains to thin essentials, minimums, as poor in iron as can be survivable. The anaemia refines him, tunes him, lets him flare.
Because appearances matter. Everyone judges the cover before the book.
The man wears a good suit, elegant, his tastes beginning to turn more and more expensive. A quiet tie which he may loosen but not remove. And the jacket stays on, no matter what. Dark, hard leather shoes with a good shine, an uncompromising impact at each step. Dark socks. Plain cufflinks. Shirts of a definite colour, not distracting, not flamboyant and not white – he needs a firm contrast to his skin, a way of quietly showing he’s almost t
ranslucent, all fragile veins and watered milk. A sense of austerity in his haircut and a hint of service, also the suggestion of precious thinking, perhaps, of heat in the stubble gleaming at his neck.
And his thinking, if not precious, is certainly precise.
Deception is only unforgivable if it is incomplete. Leave any access for doubt, for exposure, bad revelations, and then you’re much more than failing – you’re committing a type of delayed assault. Be utter and undetected and then no forgiveness will ever be required.
The man’s job is to be the perfect liar, because that’s what his audience needs. Blood, words, skin, face, eyes, breath, bone – he must lie in his entirety. The enquirers deserve nothing less. So that when he names out relatives and pets, describes familiar jewellery and clothes, episodes of romance, pleasant outings, birthday parties, misfortunes, habits, griefs, coincidences, arguments, birth signs, jokes, uncommon journeys, illnesses, cars and motorbikes, hospitals, buses, armed intrusions, injuries, scrambled efforts at evasion, running and narrow paths, terminal bewilderments – most particularly when he speaks of the terminal things, of deaths – they will be true. He will give them, most particularly, true deaths.
His job to be the window that lets them see through, the door that will open so they can walk back to the times and the places he’ll resurrect. And when he tells his enquirers worlds, they will seem true worlds. They will be truer and better than the world they have.
Tonight 750 strangers have watched him convincingly let other souls slip into his blue-white self and then speak through him. Over and over, he’s brought loves closer, invited them, called them in. This has been his little gift to everyone.
And he’s the best. No one is like him.
Not sure that anyone would want to be.
And almost done and tired and tired and tired, he’s shaken his head as if freeing himself and let his shoulders drop, he’s sighed and rubbed his cheeks and felt his audience lean their will against him, the broad, warm press of how they still want more, could easily stay here – row on row – and drink him all away. But this is it, show’s over: a nod and a handful of sentences, an appropriately small and quiet bow and he’ll walk to the bland little dressing room and wash his face and sit, lean back and sit.
‘You didn’t let me speak to Billy. When you were here before you let me speak to him.’
Woman right at the front – quite naturally right at the front and in the centre – directly at his feet, in fact, only the height of the stage between them. ‘Why didn’t he want to speak to me?’ She has left her seat, is tensed almost on tiptoe.
Pink sweater – polo neck to deal with slightly ageing skin, overly glamorous jewellery, trying too hard – and she is yelling. The man assumes that she is mentally unable not to yell. The man has met this kind of thing before.
‘Didn’t he want to?’
The theatre stiffening, clinging round him while he remembers his previous visit – it was in the spring – and having made this woman happy about her dead son. This time, for three hours – plus interval – she has been carefully avoided. Too anxious, too bereft.
Female, 35–45, single and childless: difficult, they lack the usual entry points, are all needs and lacks and fretting and last-minute hopes, they suffer cruel and salty lunges of impossibility. So you offer them dreams.
Female, 35–45, divorced after her child was taken: easy. Give her back the boy.
But just because it’s easy that doesn’t mean I should.
The room waiting for a proper remedy, the man’s authoritative resolution.
If I help her now she’ll come to every session when I’m in town, she’ll start to follow me about.
The man can taste her: something sour from her like illness and panicky – the flavour of instability there and obsession. He always understands things partly with his mouth, is currently swallowing bitter metal and earth, something moist and stagnant mixed up with dark earth. Having paid attention, he would know her in great detail if they were ever to meet again.
‘No.’ And a beat while the rest of the audience almost relaxes, prepares for more trust. He pulls in a breath and lets his hand twitch. ‘Last time I was here Billy said his goodbye. He said he loved you.’
She cries at this – happygreedy tears – hands curled and lifting near her lips.
‘He told you what he couldn’t, what he didn’t have the chance to say. That satisfied him and put him at rest.’
Nobody is with her, she came by herself, is pursuing this by herself – arms falling to flutter at her sides: if someone was here for her to hold, they would catch the signal and step in, she would be embracing and embraced. Grief seeping around her, rises in clouds, travelling.
‘He told you.’
She nods, little girl nod, all compliance and listening.
The man straightens his spine, widens his attention to take in the room. ‘We do have to finish.’ He watches this make her tremble. Of course, it would. ‘But if he gives me more for you I will tell you afterwards.’ He’s firm when he looks at her, pauses until her eyes lift, and is firmer still until she sits and the man can roll on into the final phrases, can coil up his performance and tidy it away.
He’s slightly too fast as he walks for the wings.
And he won’t tell her anything afterwards.
He won’t see her.
He’ll use the office exit and be in his car and gone before she gets outside. No stage door rendezvous in the rain.
The man feels this is for the best.
He wants to be a good person. He wants to find the right ways to do wrong.
There are fireworks.
Naturally.
There would have to be fireworks.
Elizabeth stands on her cabin’s balcony.
She has a balcony.
For that matter, she’s in a cabin – and she watches mildly impressive fizzes of rising colour, detonations, splayed fire. Without a crowd to appreciate it, the effort seems slightly peculiar, if not sad. Derek is paying no attention – he’s inside unpacking, stowing their belongings – or actually, now that she looks, he’s sitting on the end of their bed and holding a life jacket, peering at it, as if it is failing to reassure.
Elizabeth knows how he feels.
Passenger Emergency Drill – scare the bloody life out of you, that would. Maundering herds of visibly breakable pensioners and couples with ideological reasons for never consenting to walk – being self-propelled letting their side down in some way – and yet they’re out and tottering about in what amounts to a communal suicide pact – every stairwell just an accident in progress, just a slow-motion invitation to crushing injuries and fractured hips – and nobody getting anywhere, it’s simply this huge release of the bewildered.
And myself amongst them – no use pretending – myself more than confused and liking it that my head’s run to a blur, because then I don’t have to deal with it, don’t have to cope with any part of my fucking brain. I need only be trapped and watch strangers coagulate while the words plunge by.
Distracted.
Exactly what I’m after.
Exactly what I am. Pretty much.
Except for this bit – which is too close to being aware and will need to be stopped.
So.
There I was with Derek and there Derek was with me and both of us having mistaken the unspoken rules of the occasion and not dressed up for a cocktail party with optional death later. Derek, in fact, might have ambled in from weeding, or light DIY, perhaps something electrical and I’m there in my current moderately smart slacks but slovenly jumper, weak blouse peering apologetically out at the collar and garish shoes – plus, the sea air had made my hair frizz. Red shoes and amateur clown hair, accompanied by a passing handyman – we were getting looks – cornered in this area of wall-to-wall piss-elegance and tweed while no doubt other scr
uffy souls were easing along unremarked.
And these guys in their Elegant Casual Dress Code get-ups, they wanted to barge – clearly they wanted to ram their wives softly ahead of them like delightfully scented and tolerant little snowploughs, but they couldn’t – or rather they weren’t sure if they should – they were genuinely conflicted about shoving a way through, because they’re the type who are meant to win at everything and be survivors, but the ship wasn’t actually going down – was still at anchor, in fact – and nothing was at stake and everyone’s status was as yet ill-defined and there was always the risk of causing significant – and later disastrous – offence and meanwhile they’d hoped to appear as sporting, likeable, gallant, which tends to preclude punching out old ladies – life’s so difficult . . .
And all of us, bumbling along together and hugging our orange buoyancy aids as if they were wallets, or kittens, or children and locked in this big, thick, dreamy inability to save ourselves.
Even when we finally dribbled into our Assembly Station – the stylishly appointed theatre: wartime good cheer from the stage and advice from ex-Navy passengers about donning jerseys before immersion and two pairs of socks: you would want to drown comfortably, not be cold – even then, it took half an hour for everyone involved to actually place their life jackets over their heads.
We would die.
We would horribly die and be lost because of our sheer inadequacy.
We would deserve it and good riddance to us. We are clearly of no use.
And there was me trying to remember if it was the forearms or the buttocks of fellow unfortunates that open-boat-drifting and starving mariners are meant to eat.
Although we’d never get as far as that; bobbing and bloating, we’d be, and no one left to fish us out and snack.
Oh, Christ.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
So I won’t.
Would rather not.
Forearms and buttocks of women – I think that’s what’s recommended.
The Blue Book Page 3