Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  +++

  “I liked to think, see, that I was unpredictable. Mike, I thought, was attractive to me because, like me, he was unpredictable. I thought, in that as in so many other things, I’d found a kindred spirit.

  “And then, know what? I started finding a pattern to Mike’s unpredictability. Not a template, you understand. Not quite. But more of a template than I liked. And much more of one than he would have liked, Mike. Whose unpredictability, I realised, had an element in it of being forced. The unpredictability, is what I’m saying, was not as spontaneous as he would’ve liked it to be – not even as spontaneous as he imagined it to be.

  “And know what then? I started finding a pattern also in my unpredictability. And that was really the pits. I started finding out there was around my unpredictability that which was forced – and that which, therefore, was predictable. Man, did that hurt!

  “Ever tried taking advice? Is that hard or what? Ever tried giving it? Easiest thing in the whole frigging world. You don’t have to be a friend to give advice, but – shit – you know your friends if they sit down and take it.

  “See, being predictably now (as it were) unpredictable, I had to do something unpredictably predictable. I went round to see Al.

  “I’d moved out by then. Did I say that? I’d moved to a little summer place we had – very rentable, very utilitarian, very hotel-décor and -feel. An anonymous kind of a place. I’m a lot of things, but an anonymous kind of a gal ain’t one of them. I tried to like that holiday home, that gite. I tried to think it was good for my soul – to be alone and, as the place was, isolated. I tried to think it was strengthening, and that I’d be helped to some pretty crucial decisions.

  “What the hell did I want to do with the rest of my life? That was one. They don’t really come a lot bigger than that.

  “I’d made strict rules. Al did not visit without calling first. And that, ‘course, went for me too. ‘Cept one day I was in town. And I, you know, just had to use the bathroom and I thought, what the hell, the house is just around the corner and Al’s bound to be out – ‘cause it was that time of day when Al was always out – and, like I say, what the hell, I thought.

  “What the hell?

  “Well, it was a hell. A hell of a hell, in fact. In fact, a black hole of Calcutta kind of a hell. It was hard to believe it was the same house. I mean, don’t get me wrong, little Miss Houseproud I ain’t, but this … this was just disgusting. If I said ‘shit-hole’, I’d be being unfair to shit. There were half-eaten meals all over the place, grains of rice trodden into the rugs, the shards of potato chips, pizza boxes like it was a branch or something of Pizza Express. The cats had been sick and he hadn’t cleaned up the vomit. There were streaks of ketchup on the walls. Christ, it was horrible. Disgusting, like I said. But the worst of it, the absolute worst of it, was the bottles. The cans and the bottles, I should say. They were everywhere. I mean everywhere. Beer, wine, that cheap Spanish brandy, pastis … some of it drunk, some of it still seeping into the rugs.

  “Al was never Mr Smart – but he wasn’t Mr Filthy. And, you know what, I’d’ve been okay with it if I’d called ahead and let him know I was coming. I’d have thought it was like set dressing or something. I might have told him he’d gone way over the top, but it wouldn’t have alarmed me. What did alarm me was that this image, this vision of hell, this Dante’s goddamn ‘Inferno’, this was for no-one’s benefit. This was just Al being what Al had become.

  “And I really did almost use the bathroom – ‘cept not to pee in, but to throw up. My stomach was heaving just like a cat’s with a fur ball. And I knew I had to get out of that place. I had to. Right then. Or I would have chucked up. No question.

  “‘Course it was a cry for help. ‘Course it was. You didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know that. But who the hell was he crying to? There was one of those wildlife documentaries I saw. (I’m not really very into them, so this one that I saw, I think I was round at someone’s house. It might’ve been Al’s parents now that I think of it.) An adolescent wolf had gotten separated from the pack. He was lost. The image was stark. The moon crescented silver onto a sequinned snow. And there was this wolf. This lone vulnerable and frightened wolf. And he was baying forlornly to the moon. That was Al, it occurred to me. That was who Al was crying to for help: a silver moon crescenting onto a sequinned snow.

  “And I wanted to howl as well. Howl not for my loneliness but his. For his vulnerability and fear.

  “Except that it wasn’t. It was for mine.”

  Chapter 10

  “I didn’t leave Al for you.”

  “Right.”

  “I did tell you that.”

  “You did, yes, Trove, tell me that.”

  “See, what I’m not saying, Mike, I’m not saying we won’t keep on seeing each other.”

  “Right.”

  “And when I say ‘see each other’ I mean ‘sleep with each other’.”

  “Right.”

  “Though probably there won’t either be a lot of sleeping done.”

  “No.”

  “Right, Mike?”

  “Oh, right.”

  “What I am saying, I guess what I’m saying, I’m saying because, Mike, I left Al, it doesn’t mean I left him for you.”

  “You did, Trove, tell me that.”

  “Did I? Did I tell it enough that you understood?”

  “You did and I do.”

  “Do you, though?”

  “Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, Trove.”

  “Really, I mean? Fundamentally? I mean, I know you understand the words. But do you understand the concept? Fully, I mean? Its implications? Have you, as I think you might say, ‘taken it on board’?”

  “Jesus Christ! I understand, Trove.”

  “Do you prefer your Nottingham Troved, honey, or Troveless?”

  “You’re starting a new sport, I see.”

  “New sport?”

  “Called ‘brazen’ fishing.”

  “What’s a brazen look like? I want you to want me to be there, Mike.”

  “I do want you here.”

  “I need you, Mike, to want me to be there.”

  “I’m experiencing some déjà-vu, here.”

  “Déjà-vu me to bed, then.”

  “You just want me for my body.”

  “Are you complaining?”

  “Not yet.”

  +++

  “Petrova followed him back to England. She wanted to know him, she said, in his environment, wanted to know him in an ambience where he was at home and she was clearly the stranger.

  “Except that, of course, Mike was no longer at home in England. England had moved on, you see, from the England Mike had known. I feel when I’m in England very much the same. It’s like meeting a lover again you haven’t seen in twenty years: She’s so different she’s almost not the same person. The wrinkles are the easy bit. It’s the inside wrinkles that are so difficult to cope with: the wisdom bestowed by life or the damage done by it. The stranger feels more comfortable with this new person considerably sooner than the ex-lover.

  “Those of us who were used to typewriters took a great deal more time learning to work a computer than the two-fingered typists. Sometimes it is the process of unlearning which is the hardest one of all. Thus it was with Petrova and Michael. She became familiar with England far more quickly than he did. And therefore England was clearly not the ambience in which she was clearly the stranger. Indeed, if anything, it was even more clearly he who was.

  “That was, I think, cause of more friction than either of them chose to acknowledge.

  “Mike, now I think about it, he’d moved out of Drew’s by then. He’d rented a broom cupboard somewhere close-by. He couldn’t live any longer ‘en famille’, but he was absolutely determined, so he then insisted (and, yes, I do think he was being sincere), to have a relationship, if not with Drew himself, at least with Franklyn, his grandson. His wife had joked that
his only commitment was to a lack of commitment. I think it was worrying him that he was starting to agree with her. And that hurt him, I think.

  “Do you ever take a rest from work? How long have we been at this now?

  “No, no, no, I have absolutely nothing else to do. Just one thing, though, if I later take you out to dinner, that dinner is a date. As in boy-meets-girl date. We’re not just moving the venue of our conversation.

  “Well, that begs the question, then: Will you have dinner with me?

  “Good. Well, then, that is a date.

  “The other source of friction … You are very lovely, you do know that? … The other source of friction was that Mike simply would not introduce her to Drew. He thought it an unnecessary complication. And he had a point. But she felt rejected. Maybe even cheapened. And, if she did feel that, she had a point as well. But also, as I said earlier, as far as Petrova’s concerned, I have to do a fair amount of brain-reading, so that is only surmise.

  “Another glass of wine?”

  +++

  “He tried not to make this big thing out of something that wasn’t a big thing. I mean, Christ, why would I want to meet his son, or his grandson? They didn’t live with him any longer. I’d meet them when I met them. There was no rush. No big deal either.

  “And then, all the other so-called ‘no big deal’s, they started to become them. They became deals first, and then, cumulatively, that’s what they became: big deals. All the ‘no big deals’ we weren’t talking about, or we were glossing over, or we were putting to one side until we’d talked about the deals that were big deals.

  “You’ve heard about the elephant in the kitchen – the thing that, however obvious, no-one talks about – well, they exist. Of course they exist. Mike called it ‘the galley pachy’, short for ‘galley pachyderm’, nothing to do with Pakistan. It’s not a mythological creature, and certainly not an endangered species. I doubt there’s a kitchen anywhere in the world which doesn’t house at least one. But the elephant isn’t the only thing in the house, is what I’m saying.

  “See, even when there’s a war on, is what I’m saying, the dog still needs to be fed.

  “We concentrate so much on the galley pachy, we forget also there’s cheetahs in the parlour, and conger eels in the bathroom. No, no, it’s not that. Well, it is that, of course it’s that. I mean, like I say, in wars people still get killed by cancer and by cars. And it’s important, ‘course it’s important, that we recognise that.

  “But it’s also important that we recognise that we don’t recognise everything.

  “I mean, the elephant’s easy. It’s big and grey and got a trunk. The cheetahs and the conger eels, they’re easy too. But there are so many creatures in our domestic, let’s say, menagerie that we just don’t see: the dust-bunnies behind the cupboards, for instance. Virtually of no significance at all, except that, by not recognising them, they assume an importance.

  “And then there are the microscopic foes, the viruses and bacteria of the soul. I mean, I doubt even Mao managed to kill more people than the Black Death. There are these microscopic foes too attacking our souls, if you like, the core of our emotions. Those things that are gnawing at you, but you just ignore them – or should that be, you just ‘ig-gnaw’ them? Sorry. You know what I mean, though. You kind of know you’re not up to speed, you’re two degrees under – whatever the expression is – but because you’re not actually running a fever or going through a ream of Kleenex each day, you ignore it. You tell yourself you’re just imagining it.

  “And none of which is to mention the intangible beasts – the sort of poltergeists, if you like, of the house’s aura. The intangibles, the ‘I’m-not-sure-whether-they’re-there-or-not’s, the imponderables, the abstracts, the sensed and the imagined. And – shit – those babies really need to be talked about. Christ, those mothers can wreak so much havoc. ‘Did you just mean what you said?’; ‘You know how mean it was, what you just said?’

  “And suddenly, Mike and me, we weren’t talking about any of those suckers any more. Because we weren’t talking about the elephant, we’d stopped talking too about the mice and the lice. Know what? If you don’t deal with the lice and the mice, there’s no point talking about the elephant.”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 25th May 06

  Dear Mom and Dad:

  It was good to see you today. I know it wasn’t good for you. And for that reason I was doubly grateful. (Is it me, or these days am I always ‘doubly’ grateful?) No, I’m more than doubly grateful. Jetting all the way here, leaving home, all that, dealingwith all the bureaucracies and the embassies, all that as well. All that pressure as well.Dealing with the French, for God’s sake, and in France – and in French. Christ, Congressional Medal of Honor stuff, Mom and Dad. Thank you. Thank you so much.

  I saw on your faces how unspeakable it was, the visit, how hard for you not just to cry, or despair. I’d forgotten. Prisoners become inured to prison. We’re with it the whole time. You on the outside, however, you who visit the watering-hole only from time to time, you haven’t the time to build your shield. And for you therefore it is both shocking and a shock.

  There is always beauty. Even within grimness there is beauty. I vaguely remember Oscar Wilde saying something about there being worse places to end up than prison. I now know what he meant. As I also know you don’t. And can’t.

  It’s written, isn’t it, over the gates of Hell: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’? It’s written over the gates of any hell. And it is the secret of surviving it. If you have no hope you have no future. And the absence of any future means that you have to live in the present. You just have to. And, living in the present, you have to find succour and joy in the present. Anything else leads not to no-hope but to hopelessness. A lack of hope is not hopelessness. Hopelessness leads to lunacy. But a lack of hope leads to a certain focus, even a certain clarity. A clarity both of vision and of sight. A painter’s clarity. Even an abstract painter’s.

  I’m alright. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say. And what I was trying to say when you were here. And couldn’t. No, I’m not all alright. Not: hey! fantastic! how right I am. But alright. I am alright. And I’m alright being alright. I’d be more alright if you were alright too. But I know you aren’t. And can’t be. And my being less alright than I might be because you can’t be alright, that too – finally – I’m alright with. I keep hoping, if you know I’m alright, that may just help you too to find some kind of all-rightness with the situation. Okay, enough.

  I heard again from Trove. Not a long letter, nor a very intimate one. Full of news about the weather, mutual friends. I derive some comfort, though, from her continued correspondence. She’s offered to come and visit, but I don’t think I’m quite ready for that.

  The thing is … the thing I’m not alright with, is what I did. I can’t come to terms with it. I can never forgive myself for it. And that puts me into a minority of one in the prison population. Which is around the 1,000 mark. Of which 999 are innocent. And I am guilty. Probably more guilty than of just those offences I’ve been charged with. Condemned or acquitted, I will remain guilty. And no punishment inflicted on me by the state will ever equal that handed out to me by me and my conscience. Handed out to me with vengeance and with a vengeance.

  Want still to help me? Then teach me how to live with that. I’m more than anxious for your forgiveness. Even – don’t laugh – for Trove’s. Mostly because I know that, from me, I will never get it – forgiveness.

  Thanks again. Take care of yourselves. With my love – Al.

  +++

  “You have to know one thing: I’m doing this for Al.

  “I mean, if I didn’t think this might help Al … sister, you wouldn’t see me for dust.

  “I don’t want to see Al behind bars. Jesus! There’s not too many people, frankly, I would like to see behind them. There’s Bush, of course. And Jane Fonda, maybe. But that’s only ‘cause she ge
ts on my tits.

  “Why did I do that? Will you answer me that? Why the hell did I do that? Do you know how much I hate that expression, ‘get on my tits’? Do you know how much I despise – and vilify – the people who use it? And then, who goes and uses the frigging thing? There are times, Trove, there are times, hon, when I simply do not believe you.

  “What I was trying to say: The last person, I was trying to say, the last person in the whole goddamn world bar none who should be behind bars is Al. Al freaks out if he drops me off in the car on a Sunday where there’s parking restrictions on a weekday; Al slows down if he sees a pedestrian in the same street as a pedestrian crossing. And if you don’t know that, you don’t know him.

  “And he doesn’t do those things, Al, out of fear or anything, out of not wanting to get into trouble. He begged his folks to let him go on freedom marches – aged, what?, six and a bit? He burnt his draft card, emigrated to Canada. He’s not afraid of authority, nor shy of challenging it. But he sees the sense in laws. He obeys laws – to the letter – because he does see the sense in them. Like I say, the last person in the world who should be behind bars.

  “And I’m sure as hell not doing anything to get him put there. I’d rather be behind bars myself.

  “Tell you the truth, I have to convince myself – I sometimes have to convince myself – that I shouldn’t be there anyway. Behind bars. I feel responsible, is what I’m saying. Responsible for so much of it. I mean, I blamed Al for not talking, but I put up with his not talking. I put up, for Christ’s sake, with our not talking. And I forget that sometimes. Just as sometimes I forget it also takes two not to tango.

  “Why do you suppose it was that ‘tango’ was used for that expression? I mean, you can’t waltz alone either, can you? Or foxtrot or quickstep? Foxtrot’s part of the international code, isn’t it, for ‘f’? ‘Foxtrot Oscar’, that’s probably the most frequent combination of words heard over official airwaves, wouldn’t you think? So, why isn’t it that we say ‘it takes two to foxtrot’? Or, in this case, not? Your eyes have glassed over again, honey.