Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  When Lochrie was a communist, Kray had been a slayer of Dhofari communists, who also fought for their autonomy from Oman and, no doubt, for a host of local and international issues, of which Kray could never have had any understanding. According to the article, the insouciant man with a soft smug smile, sitting to his left, was at least a frontline man, an adrenaline junkie. He proudly displays his professional cynicism by stating, “We were fighting for oil and we knew it.” Kray would have been “fighting” for something else: proving himself and impressing others, while enjoying the cries of a beaten man. Lochrie remembers Kray’s vanity well: he used to return to his old prep school in his uniform for the kick of being mobbed by the kids. Lochrie heard later that Kray flew a military helicopter to Middleton and landed it just next to the parade ground at a time when he knew that it would be in use. The cadets abandoned their parade and mobbed him, while teachers and officers happily looked on at an acceptable chaos.

  Chris Cary is physically different from Chris Kray. He is thin and of medium build, and his sharp features and shifting eyes display a keen intelligence. He is capable of cruelty, but not particularly interested in it for its own sake. “Cary, you bastard, you’re fucked,” says Lochrie assertively, and then more quietly, almost with a sigh, “you’re fucked, and perhaps I’ll regret your passing. You were my companion while I tried to work you out.”

  And in Lochrie’s mind, Cary seems to say, “It’s your loss, my friend. With my cunning and self-awareness, I could have taken you very far indeed. I had the makings of a superb character, the sort that people hate to love because, although I break the rules, I do so with disarming honesty about my aims. These cardboard characters who inhabit the real world wrap up their evil deeds in cant. They crudely apply their declared ends to justify their means, when really they want ‘to prove themselves’ and play with guns against the poorly armed who have no air cover. They call the rebels adoo and cannot hide their racist contempt, but at the same time they grovel to the violent despot of the same race who makes war against his own people. My inconsistencies were to be altogether more elegant and literary. Your loss, my friend, you’re letting your emotions get the better of you.”

  Lochrie wanted Cary for a novel on the Christian ethic of forgiveness: Cary beats a fictional version of Lochrie, but this fictional version is a better man than the real Lochrie just as Cary is more intelligent than the real Kray. Fictional Lochrie forgives Cary, who needs to be forgiven because he has acted out of calculation rather than instinct. Cary incessantly plots and follows with some success the impelling force of his ambitions until an entirely random event – a car crash – ends his life and all his carefully constructed plans which have been so costly to others, whilst the fictional Lochrie, who is totally inept, somehow averts the danger of his every fall and ends up if not living in an idyll, at least in an entirely tolerable and pleasant situation for his later years. The book, to be called The Success of Failure, was supposed to be a satire on the obsessions and self-obsessions of our consumer society, but now this photo and this article have destroyed all possibility of the novel being completed. The reality of Kray is too powerful. You can only forgive a “man”, by which Lochrie means a moral agent. A “non-man” is no more responsible for his actions than is an animal trained to react in manners calculated and instilled by others. Kray was an instrument, not an agent. Cary would have become a self-conscious and autonomous agent of power.

  The photo tells him something else – something unconnected to Kray’s empty expression and the Secret War in Oman. It is that memory is imprecise – not over facts, although that is surely possible too. The most common imprecision of memory consists in the way it isolates incidents. His life had already taken a turn away from acceptance of the norm. Security and the numbing kind of supposed happiness it creates are overrated: those who have lived without them have heightened senses; they feel moments of supreme and fleeting rapture engendered by the nuances of light, sound, smell, taste and touch, and the pleasures of ideas, discovery and paradox. Drab staple foods taste delicious to the half-starved and overworked, while for the affluent no food quite manages to set the taste buds dancing: the dish could have always been cooked a little more – less salt, I think – were the ingredients fresh? – are you sure you beat the eggs hard enough? Happiness requires consummation, which simply triggers further desire. The unhappy are free from ambition and desire, and therefore enjoy the greatest freedom of all – the freedom of being honest with themselves.

  Unhappiness attracts the vacuous and the vicious, who circle round like wolves whose bellies have been emptied by a protracted winter, but unlike wolves their hunger is unnatural. The prey can sense the danger but is unable to avert it.

  Because of the power of this memory, Lochrie has mainly thought about its effects but almost never its causes. For many years afterwards fits of trembling would recur, often for no apparent reason, although the presence of a crowd would sometimes appear to be the cause.

  But what can differentiate more than loneliness and freedom? The first requires the subject to invent highly individualistic patterns of behaviour, and the second encourages the individual to implement them almost unthinkingly. Unthinking is the foundation of courage.

  The photo did not just bring back the unpleasant reality of Kray, it brought back those years of stubborn resistance – a schooling in independent thought. In that context, Kray was just an accident that was no accident – and as such should not be afforded greater importance than it deserved, simply because of its abnormal nature. Lochrie’s suffering was a series of public events he could never adequately explain and of which for many years he was intensely ashamed, solely because of the immense and misplaced importance he attached to it. If Kray’s photo told him anything, it was that the time had come to reduce this memory in size and push it to one side. The world is full of Krays who have done much worse, and Kray would have done much worse in Oman.

  Well, you always emulate a little of your enemy and wrap up your justifications in a few of their values: it is undignified and unmanly to seek other people’s compassion or, worse, their pity. And the shame. To tremble, no more able to control your flesh than a tree can stay its quivering leaves against a gentle breeze, is a shaming thing indeed. At the time, he would often wish for a further punishment, not out of any masochistic oddness, but to prove himself. This time, he used to tell himself, he would control his body. His will would prevail. The next punishment was never long in coming and the outcome was disappointingly predictable. All his mind concentrated on not shaking, and for a minute or two it seemed to work. Then a finger trembled. It was probably imperceptible to his panel of persecutors, but he felt its enlarged reality, just as the tongue misjudges the size of a dental cavity. All the time he had to stand still and straight and unable to see his rebellious body. The twitch of a finger seemed to fill the room with monstrous, shameful weakness. From that moment to the one in which his whole body was convulsed was short indeed, and his will had to renounce all further effort. He wished to prove himself primarily to himself, and never could, and this only made him want to prove himself elsewhere: in the ring where his body followed commands, and he could apply the technique he had been taught. Every time he hit a face he hardly knew, he really aimed his fist at Kray’s empty, sullen look that haunted him, even though its lack of character or distinctive features made it a hard one to recall. The system, as usual, trained through violence, and taught its hunting dogs to shift violence received in another direction. In this way you produce a body of empty men whose taut springs of violence can be activated like the levers of a machine. Only after leaving school did he start to understand fully that all violence humiliates the victim and demeans the perpetrator. “Proving yourself” by taking violence is almost as foolish as “proving yourself” by inflicting it.

  The thing he despised – the thing he had learnt to despise in Kray was his unassailable arrogance. And he was indebted to Kray for that lesson for the rest of
his life. He had observed with the passing years that people on the whole accept other people’s own evaluations of themselves. This is why politicians must never communicate anything but total self-belief. This is why military heroes are not the courageous, but those who tell everyone about their courage. This is why saints are never the good, but only the sanctimonious. If nothing else, Lochrie’s persecution had taught him never to give credence to other people’s self-definitions. Every evil teaches us something, whereas every good relaxes us into false securities we should properly call delusions.

  Lochrie has always felt that it would make no sense to write about the real events of his life: autobiography distorts and besides he always believed, at least until his mid-thirties, that he had survived intact. What happened was only a tiny drop in the great flood of human oppression, while only a few islands of peace survive, like so many brightly-painted Noah’s Arks, inward-looking as they bob along merrily on the miseries of others.

  But then the incidents began to prey on him, proving that his victory was only relative and not complete, probably like every other victory there ever was, small or great, heroic or mundane: something had broken in him all those years ago. And he could hear the sound of running footsteps on a wooden floor as a young man gathered speed with the sole intention of hitting him as hard as he could with a cane and for no other reason than the pleasure of inflicting pain. Sadism was accompanied by athleticism, which perhaps explains why Lochrie has little time for sport and the modern cult of the human body. The pain is something he cannot remember with any great clarity, but the humiliation and sense of injustice is written deep into his soul. In his moments of greatest joy, they are still there and both extend that joy and diminish it, and in his moments of greatest depression, they both deepen it and mitigate it, because he rejoices in belonging to the submerged, to those who are constantly struggling in the floodwaters and cannot, by some strange function of our dreamlike existences, drown quite yet. Although modern capitalism’s unacceptable face has launched a thousand Noah’s Arks, it has also deepened the floodwaters, where the submerged, unseen and ignored, live out their aquatic existences and can never communicate with the floating zoos that sail above them.

  There is a knocking at the door, and Lochrie slowly manoeuvres across the room. It is Mrs Haggerty from the flat next door. “I thought I would pop by,” she declares solicitously; “I just thought I would see how you were getting on. You know how it is.” She nods her head as though she has said something weighty, but actually she is just expressing her difficulty in talking to the strange man who has too many books and a drink problem, and with whom she has developed a friendship of sorts based on her kindness and his neediness.

  “Ah, Susan,” he mutters, “nice of you to come,” and then a bit louder he repeats, “nice of you to come,” as though the statement has emptied his supply of conversation.

  “Are you needing anything from the shops?”

  “From the shops? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I need anything from the shops just at the moment,” he says slowly as though struggling with an immensely complex question, and as he does so, he also fumbles around for his glasses as though he needs them, which he doesn’t.

  “You look full of life today.”

  “I got some mail,” he replies making an obscure connection.

  “Oh good. Are they going to publish your book after all?”

  “No,” he is irritated by this reminder of a persistent problem. “It was not a good thing. It was something that made me think.”

  “Really?” she says with what appears to be genuine interest.

  Encouraged, he replies, “Yes, there was a war in Oman…” but he has already lost her attention. “Have you got any washing? I’ll put it in with my own. I haven’t got enough for a wash.” She smiles fondly, almost maternally, but does not hide her hurry to get on with her day. He marvels at his own stupidity; he has forgotten small talk, or perhaps small talk has become something worse than tiresome – something that drains the real substance of existence.

  He edges over to the window, once more sipping a whisky. He looks down on the city: he very rarely leaves the heights of his flat to visit it, so this is how he perceives it – as something out there, toiling incessantly while he slothfully pursues the slothful meanders of his own erratic and unfettered thoughts. What does he know of the city except its integers of traffic darting busily along its roads, the occasional car horn and other miscellaneous noises? How do you know what is going on outside your brain? How do you know what is going on in this world? He has become very good at finding ways to avoid opening the flat door and descending the filthy concrete staircase, the only reliable way down the ten floors that divide him from the formless formality of the geometry of concrete and grass that divides one block of flats from another. But if he were to go down and walk past the overflowing refuse containers and the patches of muddied green to the boarded-up houses ready for demolition where the most desperate hide their broken lives and beyond that circle of hell in any direction, would he understand any more about this cityful of passions, wants and dashed hopes? Or has he learned all he will ever learn from his random and fairly passive trajectory through life? He certainly feels that to engage makes little sense now.

  He swings around the room, and sees his books stuffed into the bookshelves at all angles or in piles on the floor. Books he has read and books he has not. Books he has loved and books he has forgotten. Books that once seemed crucial and now seem mediocre. Books that you can read three or four times and still they yield up more of themselves. All are stuffed with people, real and fictitious. Each one has more density than a crowded street. Because of their static and artificial nature, they cannot fully express the thinness of existence which floats on every passing gust of wind and finds no point as firm as a writer’s momentary beliefs set in print. Lochrie’s tower may not be made of ivory, but it is a tower of reclusion nevertheless.

  The last time Lochrie went past those boarded-up buildings, it was to go to a Chinese restaurant, which was in fact an old-fashioned British greasy spoon. True enough, it augmented its menu of fried food with a few oriental dishes, and it was always full of time-heavy customers who contrasted with the two overworked Chinese waitresses. An old man sat down heavily close to Lochrie and eyed him up warily. One of his nostrils was dribbling clear liquid onto a reddish upper lip stubbled with a few days of deathly grey growth. He wore slippers and was incongruously overdressed for one of Glasgow’s warmer days, but showing no sign of wanting to remove his heavy jacket. He greeted the arrival of his fried-egg roll with a cup of tea like a man settling down to a solitary banquet. Behind this extravagant event, Lochrie felt sure there were a few days of waiting and anticipation.

  A fat middle-aged woman blew in like an overworked manager into her office. She sat down and, immediately flipping open a conspicuously neat mobile phone, she started to shout in a theatrical voice that filled the small restaurant. Lochrie did not feel that he was eavesdropping but rather that he was listening to a carefully constructed script which he could examine with professional interest. Following a tortured conversation with someone called Aiden, she rang someone called Angus. “Aiden’s at home, Angus, and I want you to go there straightaway. D’ye hear me?” So Aiden was the son and Angus the husband or lover. “Angus, are you drunk?” the woman cried, as though this were an unusual occurrence but Lochrie thought it probably wasn’t. “Angus, I’m leaving you. I’m telling you, I’m leaving.”

  Having completed his meal, the old man was now trying to stand up, but it was not easy. He started swinging backwards and forwards in his chair in an attempt to build up sufficient momentum.

  “Angus, if you’re no home when I am, you’ll find the door locked,” she said while showing no signs of panic herself and ordering an abundant meal. “And the lock’ll be changed,” she continued before the waitress had finished scribbling the order down. “Are you listening, Angus? You’d better be bloody list
ening.” By now, Lochrie had created Angus’s character in his brain, and Angus, he felt sure, did not list listening amongst his greatest achievements.

  The old man was still swinging in his chair and Lochrie had not made a move to help him, while he concentrated on the fascinating phone call. The other waitress moved forward and helped the old man to his feet. He rewarded her with a smile of such gratitude that Lochrie felt ashamed, but he thought the gratitude was not only for a helping hand; it was also for a yearned-for female touch – something Lochrie, who, like the old man, is portly and short of breath, would not have been able to provide. The overworked waitress helped the exultant old man to the door.

  Silent and loud poverty had thus recited their parts. The old and the new. And it was for the new that Lochrie felt most sorry. The woman, a child of the television age, could only feel alive by publicising herself. The old man, lonely no doubt, knew how to draw pleasure from the smallest things while living out a private existence.

  Communism was the “common enemy” – but whose? Lochrie wonders. Now we are led to believe that communism was the movement of a few misguided European intellectuals who hung around the universities and had nothing better to do. Kray was presumably talking of the communism that overthrew an empire and fought off at least a couple of others within a few years – and could only rely on the fragile bodies of badly armed men and women who believed in what they fought for. It is undeniable that almost from the very beginning injustices were committed on both sides – on the side of those who promised the peasants the “peace, land and bread” they never got, and on the side of those who promised to return them to a state of total subjugation to the Tsar, the landowner and the priest – a promise they would have undoubtedly fulfilled with bloody zeal had they won. The survivors of the civil war and then many of their persecutors were ground down and killed by a political machine that appeared to make no sense.