This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  Then things started getting crazy. Jemima had her top off at the breakfast bar. A friend turned up in a taxi with a block of opium. Sidney put on this music, this awful disco music, and Jemima began dancing with Sidney’s sister until the two of them were topless and rubbing their breasts against each other. Then he produced a microphone and an amplifier out of nowhere and the two girls took it in turns gasping into the microphone and singing things like I’m going to take you higher and higher while the other one crouched down on the floor and rose back up again. By this point it was a fully fledged party with strangers coming and going and people shaking the band’s hands and patting them on the back. This is messed up, I said to myself. I found myself a quiet room in the dark and fell asleep.

  In the morning there were bodies everywhere. At first I couldn’t get the door of the bedroom open for a girl who was slumped against it on the floor. It looked like someone had ejaculated in her hair. Remy and Simon Sparkles or whatever his name was were sitting together at the breakfast table and they looked up and sniggered conspiratorially when I walked in. Look what the wind blew in, Remy said. The only thing that’s blowing anything is you and your new boyfriend, I said, and I stuck my fingers in my mouth and pulled my best frog face. They went back to talking rubbish or whatever it was they were doing, nudging each other and making a big deal about grabbing each other by the shoulders and mock wrestling and all the sorts of things that repressed drunks get into. I took a seat at the other side of the table and peeled a tangerine. The remains of the previous day’s breakfast had been used as an ashtray, with a bit of fried egg and some rashers of bacon covered in a mound of ash and butts. Tell you what, Sparkles said. I’ll pay you fifty pence if you eat that. No problem, Remy said, put your money on the table. Sparkles put fifty pence down, two twenty pence pieces and a five and two twos and a one, a real insult, and Remy went at it without a second thought, gagging occasionally, trying to wash it down with water, eating the fag ends and all. It was disgusting and pathetic and really quite sad. This is the big time, I said to myself as Remy let out a huge belch that stank of stale cigarettes.

  I spent the rest of the day by myself. I visited the Jewish Museum in Camden and thought of Richard and what he would make of it all. I smoked a joint in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum then I walked along the South Bank of the river. I’m the princess and the pea, I said to myself, as I sat on a bench next to London Bridge. Here I am, living the life, hanging out with one of my favourite groups, in the inner circle, and yet it all seems so vacuous and pointless and demeaning. Is everyone the same? I asked myself. Is everyone full of it?

  No one was talking when we met up for the night train home. The bar was out of the question. We all had separate cabins and we went to bed without a word. When we arrived in Glasgow the next morning I was dressed and ready to go and I jumped off the train and took a taxi back home without even saying goodbye.

  I wrote to Richard. What you’re doing is a good thing, I said to him. You were right to get out. I put on one of their cassettes, Give Us Sorrow/Give Us Rope, and I lay down on my bed. It sounded so good.

  Things started to get back to normal. I guessed I had been dropped as their archivist but I didn’t want to look for another job, I wanted to take time out to discover my own values and to reorientate myself, you see. My mum and dad, I miss them so much just saying this, but they were so cool and supportive even though they had their own troubles and when I told my dad I had lost my dream job, that the group had gotten rid of me, which wasn’t strictly true, he just hugged me and said, good riddance to bad rubbish, and made me a cup of tea and some toasted scones.

  I started taking long walks; I’m a walker, I always have been, it’s how I cogitate, actually, like the movement of my legs, the happy scanning of my eyes somehow moves the thoughts along and provokes conclusions. I walked to the Botanic Gardens in the West End of Glasgow. It was a beautiful spring day and the daffodils looked ready to explode and the snowdrops were so sad and white and forlorn and hopeful at the same time that it made me think of roses. There was a group of paraplegics picnicking with their carers on the grass. One of the boys, who looked to be in his mid-thirties, was giggling over a sandwich. I want to laugh at sandwiches, I said to myself, I want to cry over leaves and eulogise starlight and write poems about car parks and about ice cream being cold and coffee being hot. Not exactly a career, I know; but maybe I could invent it.

  I received a letter from Richard. He had been involved in a skirmish during a demonstration outside an access point where an old man had collapsed and died after being held by Israelis. They dragged me away, he said. Then they beat the crap out of me. There was a bloody bandage in the envelope and a picture of him being carried away by four guards, his arms and legs extended like a starfish. I’m earning my stripes, he said. What about Lubby? I asked him. I didn’t hear back from him for a few weeks. In the meantime I slept with the bandage under my pillow. I don’t know why; maybe I thought it would make my dreams braver.

  Lubby’s fine, he said, when he wrote back. Busy. She’s working as an assistant to a human rights lawyer. We’re both very busy. I volunteer part-time at a radio station, Radio Free Hebron, it’s a pirate station. I spend most of my time befriending firemen and security guards in order to get access to rooftops where we can set up transmitters. Of course we have to keep moving and if we get caught, what then?

  Lubby was on television, he told me. Very briefly. The lawyer who she works with is representing the family of a man who died in detention. She was on the news, standing next to him as he read a statement from the family. She looked great, he said, she was holding a sheath of folders under her arm and she was wearing sunglasses. She looked formidable, he said, but soft too, like the front would melt behind closed doors. Things are changing, he said, you’ll see. I got a job selling perfume and I sprained my ankle, I told him, that’s all I had to report.

  Memorial Device played a show in Bellshill. I went to see them but I kept out of sight and just mooched around until they came on. They were supporting some dreadful old folkie who had enjoyed a critical rethink because he had combined Eastern tunings and raga guitar with Western folk songs before anyone else. This was the debut of the new line-up with Mary Hanna on bass and Remy playing keyboards. The drum stool is still free, I wrote to Richard. But they have a new member and it’s a girl. I had never heard of Mary but someone told me she had built a stone circle or something like that outside Greengairs and that she was an artist, in secret.

  They sounded so good. It reminded me of standing on a hill, in the dark, with a big industrial plant in the distance and just feeling this roar, this massive unearthly vibration, like the silence had been taken over by something that was even deeper than silence itself, something that silence implied, in a way, like silence was a sound and here was its underpinning, this terrific gridlocked noise that sounded like a complete standstill even as it never stopped moving. They’re going nowhere, I said to myself, and I felt relieved.

  Ever since you left, I wrote to Richard, they’ve lost direction. The music just sits there and vibrates. It’s amazing. It’s like the soundtrack to my life.

  Richard wrote back. I smashed a window, he said. I lay down in the street. I rode on top of a lift to the twenty-first floor. I resisted arrest. Lubby and I got photographed for a newspaper. I headed a campaign. I drove a truck. I stood up for what was right.

  He wrote to me with a new address in Tel Aviv. Keep it vague, he said. I think my mail is being tampered with. It wasn’t hard to be innocuous; that was the story of my life back then. I told him about taking walks, about my dad’s health, which had deteriorated, about my sister’s gymnastic displays, my brother’s financial success. I feel like an ugly troll under a bridge, I said.

  In July my dad died. I don’t want to talk about it too much except to say that everything seemed pointless until one night I came to him in a dream and he was wearing the same sky-blue shirt as in the picture we used for the Ord
er of Service which was taken on holiday in Salou in Spain, his dark skin, his smell, and I reached out and touched him, as in a dream, and I kissed him on the forehead and I asked him if I could always come to him, if we could still share affection in dreams and if he was still alive there and he said yes and he smiled and he held me, caught in that state of double-mindedness that we take for dreams, and I asked him how it was possible and he replied with a word beginning with the letter P that instantly slipped my mind but that at the time I took to mean being omnipresent, like he had given himself to life so completely that he now resided in every part of it, but it was more than his self speaking, it was like his revealed self, and at the same time there was a new sense of calm, or an old sense of calm, more accurately, like he had given up the ghost of being anything but himself. He said it’s because I am prevalent or pervading or permeating, something like that, and it was a great source of comfort and strength to me. I wrote to Richard. I have opted for a career in magic, I told him. I have discovered my true calling.

  The letters stopped for a bit and when they started back up the tone had changed. They were more like anonymous postcards, bog-standard stuff. Occasionally there would be a postmark from Lebanon or Jordan or Egypt. I saw the pyramids, he said. It’s hot here. How’s Lubby? I asked him. I was getting a bad feeling, I admit it, but he never replied. It turned out that he had been sleeping rough, mostly living on the roof of a two-storey building in downtown Jerusalem while taking itinerant work wherever it was available. It all came to a head when his mother had a stroke and the family asked me to get in touch with him and ask him to come back home. I can’t come back home, he said. I’m destitute. That was the word he used, destitute, and of course I began to suspect all kinds of things. I’ve done some things I’m not proud of, he said, things I’d sooner forget. Then he quoted the opening of Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, one of the books that we had studied together. I am a sick man, he wrote. I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. Adios for now, he said, and with that he disappeared from my life.

  By this point I had formulated my idea of walking cures and I published a few booklets and articles on the subject in the New Age press. I had this thing where you would identify points, much like in acupuncture, but instead of linking the organs you’re joining the dots between parts of your life in the past and in the present, realigning things, basically, but the key thing is you have to add somewhere new, you have to extend your walk into the future, symbolically, by wilfully getting lost, by being attracted by signs, by ambiances, by the voice of silence itself, it’s a two-sided thing in that you rewrite your past while embracing the future, and like all of the most efficacious magic, it’s related to the physical processes of the body itself, to physiology, so it’s not just idle thoughts in thrall to themselves. But the point is you create your own alignments. The idea of there being fixed ley lines in the earth that have this undeniable power no matter what is ridiculous to me, it’s like saying there’s one fingerprint that we all share or that our veins all have the same shape as the London tube map. The point is to fix personal correspondences in space and then grow from there, which leads to the kind of magical thinking that proves that you were living in heaven all along, but that’s far away, at first the basic point is that you walk the distance between feelings and memories so that you establish circuits that come alive, as if you are generating language from your movements, like writing a love letter to the specifics of your own life with great gratitude – that’s important, that’s key, in a way – but it’s more like hieroglyphics, really, hieroglyphics that are designed to be read from a great height, from beyond the earth, from beyond our lifetime, really, and so it becomes a page in this book, this book that we get to write, which really is an endless book, or an endless series of books, every one of us, if we’re awake, and sometimes when it snows, when it snows all evening and in the night when you walk out and there are no footprints but your own and in the orange glow of the street lights you look back at yourself and see your movements and look forward and see nothing but fresh snow and for a moment you feel like an artist or a writer and there’s this canvas in front of you, this blank page, and your movements become light and deliberate, which is grace, really, which means being graceful, and that’s why calligraphy matters, to a walker most of all, and why I dream of the snow, the soft white snow falling on my father’s grave, and I want to tread on it gently, purposively, and then light out for wherever the spirit takes me and never look back except to orient myself towards the future, which I think is some kind of cure, I think.

  I did a series of talks. I had a night at the Theosophy Society, a weekend at a festival organised by a company that made soap, a workshop in the basement of a herbalist in the West End. I did a series of walks. I walked a heart shape around the Isle of Man, where I got some vacation work in a cafe on the seafront. I had visited there as a child and I lost myself on the island for a whole summer. On my return I grew particularly fond of the old Monkland Canal, which I would follow from Coatbridge all the way to Calderbank, where my grandparents had lived and where my father had grown up, and on to Gartness and Plains and Caldercruix, where once I was caught in marshy ground behind Easter Moffat Golf Club and reduced to tears about how lost I was, and like anyone, from time to time, I wished that I could go back home, that somewhere there was a jumble sale to attend or dinner to be late for but then I would pull myself together and curse sentiment for what it was or at least I would try to.

  I had few friends at this point. When Richard disappeared from my life it had been like watching a body disappear beneath the water from a tiny raft on an endless sea, a sea without waves, or currents, or birds in the sky, a sea without evenings, even, without night, which is an unbearable thought, really, but which somehow sustained me, don’t ask me how.

  Then Richard wrote. It was almost a year to the day since my dad had died. Something has happened, he told me. I’ve been arrested, he said. I’ve been charged with GBH. Lubby’s husband, the lawyer, helped me out. It means they’re sending me back to Glasgow to serve my sentence. You can call me on this number at a certain time, he said. If you still want to, that is.

  I called him the next day. My dad died, I told him, but I walked my way through it. Your dad was an honourable man, he said. He sounded like a lawyer. Listen, I said to him, where are they sending you? Barlinnie, he said. Lubby’s husband pulled some strings. The prison system here is deplorable, they’re having me deported. Legally I shouldn’t even be here. I didn’t know Lubby got married, I said. Yes, he said. She did. What happened? I asked him. I was attacked on Christmas Day, he said. I was asleep in an alleyway and they tried to rob me. On Christmas Day, can you believe that? I woke up and I went at them and they both ended up in hospital. I got seventeen stitches in my head. They got off scot-free. It’s a travesty, he said.

  I couldn’t think what to say. I stood there in silence and I could hear his breathing, as if he had just run up a flight of stairs, but that seemed unlikely. Where am I calling you? I asked him. A detention centre, he said – well, not really, more of a halfway house. I have my own cell, he said, as if that was something. Have you told the band what happened? I asked him. That world doesn’t exist to me any more, he said. Then why call me? I asked him. I don’t know, he said. I don’t know. Then I heard someone say something in the background and he told me he had to go. I’ll write when I touch down, he said. Tell no one. Come and see me.

  Barely a month later, I set out to walk to Barlinnie. No one walks to jail; they drive there, take a bus, get picked up by a friend. But no one walks there. The streets to the west of the jail are laid out like the sun, a semicircle bisected by the horizon or maybe it’s a wheel, slowly turning, a Ferris wheel. Whether it’s deliberate or not, I don’t know. But on the east side of the Cumbernauld Road, next to the prison, it’s a different story; the streets are more like a spider’s web on caffeine. There is a hairdresser’s, a library, a Jehovah�
�s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall, everything that you might need on your release, and in the air there’s the smell of foul bread and beer, the presiding demons of the east.

  When I walked in, Richard looked like a ghost, sat behind a small wooden desk in a windowless room, a piece of my past that had finally caught up with me. At first neither of us said anything. We sat there, almost unable to look at each other. It isn’t how we thought it would end up, is it, he said, finally breaking the silence. Maybe not, I said, though when I thought back to the drive to the airport it felt more like delivering him and Lubby to the future than seeing them off. Deliverance, he said, is that what you’re thinking? I was taken aback. I don’t know what you mean, I said. Then he shrugged and asked if he could borrow five pounds. I got a job in the kitchens, he said, which means more food for me, but I could do with something to get me started. I felt a sudden pain in my head, like he was shining a torch into my brain. Listen, I said to him. I don’t think I can do this. You mean the whole visiting thing, he said. Yes, I said, it’s too much. This place is too much. Tell me about it, he said. Do you want me to let anyone else know that you’re home? I asked him. You think I’ve come home? he said.