As Near as I Can Get

by Paul Ableman

  ‘With who? Who did you say?’

  The greater part of his attention was devoted to watching the street-corners we passed in search of the one he sought, and, consequently, I had to address ear and tonsure rather than face.

  ‘Mike Rea.’

  ‘Yes, but—for God’s sake—who’s Mike Rea?’

  ‘Well——’

  Somewhat nonplussed at the interest he was showing in the identity of my landlord (or rather host, the trifling rent having remained unpaid for nearly two months), I attempted to satisfy him with evasive murmurs but, disconcertingly, he persisted.

  ‘Rea? What’s he look like?’

  ‘Like—like a torpedo——’

  ‘This is it! Driver!’

  He directed the driver along the gentle avenue, overloomed by flats at its further end. A sudden, frail little girl leaped absurdly from a concrete pier and, the feat well beyond her physique, rolled forward to meet stone with her tiny head. She rubbed the bruise and gazed with bewildered pride at us, her audience. Mr Swishki pelted over to her, squatted down and, lifting her arms rather unhelpfully, admonished her.

  ‘Much too high. Where’s your mother? You’ll hurt yourself. Do you understand that? You’ll hurt yourself.’

  Struggling free, the dainty child crossed her arms over her face and began to cough dismally. Soon, abandoning the cause, Swishki returned to the cab.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ he urged impatiently. ‘We won’t be long—only ten minutes or so left. Wait!’ he ordered the driver.

  Inside were women in white and the pregnant hush of disease, that silence conditioned by the click of heels in corridors and (presumably) displaced occasionally by paroxysms of awful sound. In a dim room we found a bandaged skull and an emaciated but youthful face, ashen, intelligent and sympathetic.

  ‘Hello, Bob. This is Alan, Alan Peebles. Do you know you’re looking better?’

  Faint rolled the tides of life. Out there, where chimneys smoked into the charged atmosphere, sounded the roar of the productive world. No insinuating tendril of broadcast sound, scarcely a last reverberation of engine or drill penetrated the window, curtain and screen. The dying man smiled courteously, the flagging smile deliberately revived as the luminous, pain-ringed eyes travelled on to greet the stranger, myself.

  ‘How do you do?’

  I withdrew from the bed to let the two friends talk, wondering slightly at the effortless intimacy revealed. From what was said, I gathered that they had fought together in a hot land. Gentle, well-bred and heroic, Bob talked calmly and, it seemed at first, rationally. Subtle indeed were the indications of the brain’s destruction, a thoughtless repetition, an overlong pause, the loss of an obvious (to them) reference. Suddenly, from accumulated trifles, I realized that the invaded boy was picking his way along the commonplace, cheerful conversation with exquisite deliberation. Surely this was not a man at all but a mere rift of intelligence left in the merging dusk.

  ‘No,’ said Swishki later, gazing at me severely.

  ‘He’s not dying?’

  ‘Of course not. He’ll be back at work in six weeks. Bob is a very brilliant set-designer.’

  The trees were the sallow trees of March, the grass the trodden, sorry vegetable of urban greens. ‘Wines and Spirits’ beckoned.

  ‘Do you feel like a drink?’

  ‘No,’ said Swishki absently, consulting his appointment book.

  When I asked him about the invalid’s apparent mental lapses, Swishki dismissed them impatiently.

  ‘Have you ever seen dying men? Of course, he’s a bit dazed. He’s just had a major cerebral operation. It was completely successful. It wasn’t a malignancy. Oh, don’t be foolish! I was a doctor—at least nearly a doctor.’

  ‘Look,’ said Swishki, ‘I can’t help you. Shall I drop you somewhere?’

  He dropped me under a cold, March sky which gained radiance just before dusk. A wadi of cloud sloped away like an escalator to Venus. Starlings wheeled silently home from the fields. Soviet production leaped, and a thousand motorists sat silhouetted amidst the flickering, weaving, flaunting lights of Oxford Street. The Minister entered his office. He had been wrong but his basic principles were unaffected. The Bishop gazed at his stunned cathedral. He had been wrong. Then the pathway to truth is paved with slabs of error?

  ‘I thought this was the North Road, mate? Then where am I now and which way is North?’

  ‘A pint of bitter, please.’

  The point was—I had thought that boy was dying and Swishki had said he was rapidly recovering and there had been that indifferent conviction in Swishki’s assurance which carries incontestable authority. Then how had I discerned conclusive signs of imminent destruction? And been borne by their impetus into novel channels of speculation on life and death?

  ‘It stands to reason——’

  Never, never, friend, it never does. It derives from a point of view.

  The next day, I saw a lovely tidal stretch, with the sleek, silver, polluted Thames shouldering its banks, a current of denser sky illuminating our buildings, temples, office blocks, warehouses, power houses, pinnacle of government (government by permanent debate). Trains of barges swerve gravely round the shot tower, low enough under sand and timber to seem threatened by their own back-curling bow-wave. Heart! City! No more? Only the planter mechanically fastening hyacinths into the teased earth and encapsulated brothers streaming both ways along the embankment?

  ‘Hello?’

  Arthur Gumm, economist, large, red and Irish greets me with sufficient reserve to neutralize a possible rebuff and I return the caution. Beside us, driftwood, sea-weed and a scum-clogged foetus ride lazily towards the sea. Carrots and onions bob down from Parliament.

  Arthur Gumm waits uneasily. We know each other well enough to preclude a passing nod, not well enough for a ready resumption of intimacy. It is: ‘All right?’ ‘Haven’t seen you for some time——’ ‘What are you doing these days?’ and so forth.

  We linger while square red buses roll across the white, pure spans of the Waterloo Bridge, while the corrosive radiance of great sol eats at the broken clouds and, widening breaches, finally thrusts quickening fingers of light onto the cranes and wharves of Southwark. Gumm offers to help me and my habitual surly refusal to be patronized melts before Gumm’s candid benevolence.

  ‘Anyway, I think she’s looking for someone—as I say, only scissors and paste stuff—you wouldn’t find it very interesting——’

  ‘Does anyone?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Are any jobs interesting?’

  ‘Well—perhaps not—at least, not jobs in that sense.’

  And do you, I gaze in blank silence at him as the words form in my mind, find your job interesting? What is it you do? Produce medical statistics for a ministry? Deeply satisfying? On the rocking earth to juggle figures?

  ‘Do you want——?’

  Suggests Gumm tentatively in polite urging that I write down the address of the prospective employer rather than gaze at him with marked hostility.

  Well, I wrote it down and forgot it, or didn’t get around to going there for nearly two weeks and then a large-bosomed, solicitously-smiling woman in vivid green came through a little door into the lavatory-sized cubicle of wavy glass and mahogany, and confessed that the vacancy had been filled. A poodle followed her, put its paws on the counter and, panting but unaggressive, contemplated me.

  ‘Just thought I’d try,’ I muttered.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I did tell Arthur—Mr Gumm—that I needed someone, but quite by chance—the very same day——’

  Someone came—a suitable applicant, no doubt, to fill the (I now realized) desirable position, to cut with the scissors and stick with the paste and dreamily benefit industry. There would apparently have been just the two of us, this green, plump, pattable, good-natured woman, telephoning industry, and me cutting and pasting. In my developing regard for her, and her pleasant, uninhibited ways, I would have submerged my distast
e for industry and reckless power-lust, the forcing and subduing of a delicate planet by a ruthless species drunk with recent emancipation from muscle. Day by day, she would have leaned with slightly greater familiarity over my cutting desk, to correct my line of cut or application of paste, and my responsive shoulder and arm would have felt a firmer and firmer pressure of belly and breast through the clinging, green dress, until the moment when, the invitation unmistakeable, my enchanted fingers would have made the first tentative, delicate incursion into the dark space beneath her dress. The faint gasp of erotic confirmation as my fingers encountered secret flesh and the slight responsive shudder, communicated to my now frankly nudging shoulder, would have confirmed my daring and a little later, personality and the poodle excluded from the now-curtained office, my blonde, middle-aged, permissive employer and myself would have committed unspeakable (but only too-readily conceivable) obscenities on the soft, carpeted floor. Or on coats, if she had neglected to carpet the floor. Or on newspapers, if shy summer had graced our gruff island with one of her fleeting visits. And in the last case, my eye, staring unseeingly, in paroxysmal dilation, past a plump shoulder, might have registered, without consciously assimilating the message, some line of type:

  ‘—wearing a blue, watered-silk jacket with plaid buttons—’

  or

  ‘—of no significance in view of Iceland’s refusal—’

  or

  ‘—majestic slopes proved to be the habitat of—’

  or something else, a combination of words which, once planted in the brain, would have lain dormant for an unspecified time to flower ultimately in some unrecognizable form as a new thought.

  But, of course, I didn’t get the job and went back through the streets (which, to my unreliable memory, now seem to have been summery, warm with tar and exhaust fumes), suddenly excited by a perception that, isolated and incandescent, seemed to have no application or use, to live only like a flare that goes out forever, to Rodney Street, behind Culverton Square, where I had a little room. The thought that had excited me was, perhaps, a sense of the interaction of man and his works, of how the architect and engineer, for example, stride living onto the scene and, marshalling the activity of their fellows, set up a building or bridge and then die. And then we are born and are burdened with their building or bridge for our whole lives and must, inescapably, have our conceptuality conditioned by those dead brains that have never seen our sun. Trapped, ineluctably trapped, by architects, by ancestors, battered into shape by ancient Greeks, Jews, Italians, Indians and Chinese, formed by currents and tides of thought swirling through the continuum.

  In the grip of such dread—the environment suddenly a prison with a discipline more inexorable than a barracks’—how can one sit and read in a little room? The pretty girls waft down Rodney Street and around the corner into Culverton Square. The hairy men of the remote past, in the mouths of their smoky caves, leaning on their flint-tipped spears, plan giant industrial nations and gaze covetously at the moon. Tiger and mammoth bellow from the swamp below and in the fertile layers of the biosphere production lines take shape. The days wink past. I am born, read, think, too fast….

  ‘Stan?’ I plead into the whispering network, desperation concealed in strenuously casual inquiry, ‘coming out for a drink? Got any money?’

  And on that July evening, I seem to remember, in the baking city, we got good and drunk.

  The young leaves uncurl in the exhilarating spring and grow into flabby, mature leaves to shade the better-class neighbourhoods in high summer. From an opulent, fresh-painted french window in a desirable neighbourhood, groomed age casts an unexhilarated eye on radiant youth and on Stan and me. Peasants make steel and fly planes. Thin, sardonic age returns to broadcast images, to Russell Piper ‘our host’, tense and intelligent, curtly nodding, to ‘probably the only living architect to have designed and built a Byzantine basilica’, Sir Emmelyn Cruft, cordial, voluble and undisciplined, directing brusque humourous challenges to other, as yet concealed from the multi-million viewers, members of the panel, to Paul Lyle ‘the isotope man’ and to the rest. Cool, resourceful age, fingering the soft pile of a Persian cat, watches for some minutes the blue constructs of the dancing electrons before a faint stir deep in congealing veins causes her to shift slightly, stroke back ashen locks with thin, shiny fingers and then rise, with dignity and the semblance of ease, and return to the window.

  ‘—only the guard, or whatever you call him. It was two in the morning!’

  ‘Where’s Tubby gone?’

  The Westering sun twinkles through the plane trees. The traffic in the Fulham Road pounds past forever.

  ‘Two pints of bitter, please.’

  ‘I had to ask the guard. There wasn’t anybody else.’

  ‘I thought it was rather a shrewd speech myself. The alternative would inevitably have been a confession of weakness. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Have you seen Tubby? Ken? He’s got all my money. Where’s the sod got to?’

  Stan Mackay and I, Stan a head shorter than I, flat-headed and nervous, stand against the wall sipping the pungent beer and watching the prettiest girl in the vicinity rise, confessing, by the impulsive start with which she does it, to actual sophistication inferior to that suggested by her trim, provocative dress and immaculately groomed hair and features, in response to the blatant arrival of her boy friend, a short, angry, sullenly-handsome young man whose blue, new, low and powerful sports car has just swerved bellowing round the corner from the main road. With hesitant eagerness, in gauche welcome, the girl trips towards him while he, after sweeping the terrasse with contemptuous eye, tolerantly awaits her. After a brief discussion, during which his dismissive glance rejects our pub as a possible lingering place, she slips into the bucket seat and, its six combustion chambers firing in smooth crescendo, the blue bolt hurls them away.

  Beside the lochs in the Western Highlands are visible, to the shepherd or grid-linesman on the blowy ridges, the lights of cars fingering the borders of those crisp waters. Big animals roar and trample in the thickets away from the metalled roads driven through the African bush. Only the seals, in their watery, finite but unbounded, medium, elude us still. To what purpose? To bark on floes at the vulnerable moon. Viviparous, aquatic vertebrates that suckle their young, they plumb the ancient matrix of sentience, slightly ionized by our pranks.

  ‘One can’t avoid the conclusion,’ gulps Stan, ‘She must like him.’

  And presumably, after that, our drinking pace increasing, Stan and I talked about girls. As night came down. As the cabinet rose stiffly after a five hour inconclusive session during which two ministers became aware of a failure of nerve before the threatening situation and wondered guiltily if there might be comfort in religion, as Jane Paget, at the age of thirty-two, after having explored the satisfactions to be obtained from every variety of physical contact with members of her own and the opposite sex over a period of years, after five abortions and two hopeless marriages, swallowed a lethal dose of barbiturates and lay stiffly on her back, trying not to cry. No, of course, that happened later.

  ‘I once read a book,’ said Stan.

  Horseman in the dusk. Ever more closely entwined couples in the gloaming in the park. Dust.

  ‘It don’t matter,’ rasped the hoarse, penetrating voice. ‘It don’t matter about the truth—when they’re slanging the Communists!’

  We got on a bus.

  ‘Here, what do you do?’ asked Stan.

  We became right pally, Stan and I, after I told him, in a grim, retrospective murmur, of the rural home that had cramped me and he told me, in a shy, self-deprecatory way of the beautiful girl who, just because Stan was moneyless and rather grimey and pretty ugly and deficient in any prospects whatsoever, had preferred to marry a ‘rich, high-class bloke’. But I somewhat spoiled our developing chuminess, in the crowded saloon bar of the ‘Wycliffe’ a little later, by urging him to candour.

  ‘You know there wasn’t any girl. You’ve
never had a girl in your life.’

  ‘All right,’ averred Stan, offended, ‘there wasn’t any girl.’

  ‘Of course, there wasn’t.’

  ‘All right then—there wasn’t.’

  Stan clasped his hands behind his back and gazed at a fat, flat-headed, bespectacled little man, himself, reflected in the mirror behind the bar. The silvered glass also reflected thin, working-class chaps, in decent suits, having a quiet pint in the noisiest pub in England and who would tell us later, if we gave them a chance, about a dog or a motor-bike or the venality of the Council, and the mirror also reflected a group of large, smartly-dressed thugs comparing police records. And some plump women, with tightly-sheathed bellies and full, red lips, and manner at once prim and abandoned, and a policeman glancing in at the door.

  ‘Two pints of bitter, please.’

  A little later I noticed that Stan had disappeared and, without quite succeeding in being puzzled by this, found my glance wandering uneasily from the ‘Gents’ to the door to groups of people to the staircase and to the bar, while the slight, blond, working-class chap went on telling me not about dogs but about jungle warfare.

  ‘After a couple of years you begin to know a place. Right? Well, that’s how I was, after two years there. I was two years in the jungle, with beasts coming out of the trees and dangling down and snakes coming out of the trees. I could watch the monkeys and the frogs hopping. Perhaps you didn’t know they had frogs there? One thing they’ve got there is ghosts I should think. I’ve seen them, prisoners, take one of them swords, swish! cut your rifle barrel in half. Tell me, what do you think of the women round here?’

  ‘There’s Stan.’

  ‘Who?’

  I’d caught sight of Stan, near the staircase, earnestly conversing with an ascetic and discreetly-prosperous looking type, a type, I seemed to remember, called Bowler whose father owned a steelworks, or controlled one (forging the glowing girders from morning to night, trampling out the strip), and who (the son) had few qualities other than an aversion to steel. Or was that someone else, called Porridge, or Bowler or something….