This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  24. Blood and Water Inside Me That Needs an Example: Johnny McLaughlin is in Paris or is it Airdrie with Patty and Valentine years after it all went down.

  I lived with Patty and his girlfriend in Paris for a while (this was long after the end of Memorial Device, long after Lucas had died). I got a letter from Patty out of the blue. No one had heard from him in years (he had pulled off the definitive disappearing act). He wrote to my mum but she was dead too. My sister was living in my mum’s old house (I could never stand to go back to Airdrie, too many memories) and she forwarded me the letter even though we hadn’t spoken in years. Patty was inviting me to come and stay with him in Paris. They had a spare room, he said. They lived near Gare du Nord. Come on over, he said. It would be good to catch up. There was nothing to stop me (no commitments, no relationships, no successes). Patty had never struck me as the nostalgic type but perhaps our relationship ran deeper than I thought. A week later I took the train to London and the ferry from Dover (and the train from Calais). When I arrived he wasn’t in so I walked around Paris for almost ten hours and wore a hole straight through my boots (which were the only pair I had). I walked from Rue Louis Blanc (which is where Patty’s apartment was and where he was supposed to be) right down Boulevard de Strasbourg and Boulevard de Sébastopol (and then over the bridge by Notre-Dame) and I dropped into the bookshop (Shakespeare and Company) and asked the girl behind the till (who was cute but a little boyish for my tastes, perhaps) if they had a guide to literary Paris (you know) where Rimbaud was and where Verlaine died, but she said no, she didn’t have anything like that except maybe about Hemingway, fuck that I thought, but I didn’t say anything and instead I bought the complete works of Rimbaud (which I already owned but which I had always dreamed of buying in Paris) and I was going to buy a book by Kenneth Rexroth (some imaginary biography or something) but then I read on the jacket some comment about him thinking that sometimes even Poe and Melville were just trash and I couldn’t stomach having it on my person. I asked the girl, who was a tomboy for sure, but still alluring, or maybe it was just because she worked in a bookshop (maybe she was unattractive and dull at home, out of context), either way I asked her if there was a place she could recommend where I could eat something good, something French (I was on a budget, but I had only just arrived and wanted to mark the occasion), and she told me that it was a really touristy area and that most of the restaurants were expensive (and poor quality) but then she mentioned one (and it had a name like The Burned Earwig, The Charred Twig, something like that) and she said it would be closed now, that they had strange hours, but that I should come back later and try it (that it was worth it). I couldn’t tell, I thought she might have been asking me out for a date (maybe Paris was going to my head already), but I decided to come back and find her later and take her out to dinner (at The Blackened Rod or whatever it was). In the meantime I went to a bar and sat at a table outside on the pavement and had three drinks (one after the other). Next to me there was a Chinese man with a trim grey beard and a grey hat and across from him there was a fat woman who seemed mesmerised by him. At one point the woman pulled what looked like a Bible from her bag (only the cover was wrapped in cellophane and it was falling apart) and the Chinese man took it from her and kissed it and then read from it and she was mesmerised and afterwards he gave her a small laminated card (that had Jewish letters on it) and he seemed to be explaining what it meant to her and she was rapt and emotional (it was like she had been given the key to her own life) and when they upped and left I wondered if I hadn’t projected the whole thing on the inside of my skull or something (you know, like wish fulfilment or serendipity or something like that). Afterwards I made my way over to the Bibliothèque Nationale (by this point I was quite drunk, the beer was strong) and I climbed up the wooden steps towards the building (it was like scaling the pyramids) and I thought to myself I’m closer to the stars with every step and by the time I got to the top it was so warm (the sun was beating down) that I ended up just lying there and falling asleep, only for twenty minutes but still enough time to dream that I was attending a surrealist conference (I think William Burroughs might have been there) and that everyone was introducing themselves with strange titles, like First Hegemony of the Pussying Father, Procured Spirit of the Maelstrom, Mentis Notion of the Heaven Electric, Thought of the End Phrase, Prank of Pure Volition (I wrote them down on a piece of paper as soon as I woke up), Condition of the Non-Form, Meat of the Remains, Shield of Sublimity, one by one, standing up and announcing themselves and sitting back down again, sometimes with no face or sometimes with a beard or a hat, or a long robe or a bad suit, Suicider of the Four Thousand, Dungheap of the Living Flesh, Rememberer of the Undivided.

  It’s Paris, I told myself. I must be getting transmissions (no wonder people come here to write). There was an exhibition on at the Bibliothèque (something to do with geography and history and space) and I went inside and there was a series of photographs, I remember one clearly, of a mountaintop village (somewhere in France or maybe it was Switzerland) where a group of artists had met for a conference and the buildings seemed as if they were rising up from the clouds (which were beneath them) and there seemed no possible way in or out (although there were roads snaking around the buildings but tellingly no cars, although it might have been taken before cars were invented) and I wondered if the conference had been a dare (like a midnight assignation) and I imagined the artists making their way there any way they could (like walking along the spine of the mountains with this huge drop on either side or parachuting in) and I thought of my own journey to Paris, on a whim (after a promise). On the way back I stopped at a bar near Gare de Lyon (where there was a lot of betting going on, a lot of gambling) and I got into a conversation with the manager who asked me my name. I was starting to feel like a local. It takes me ten hours to get a feel for a place (then the city is basically mine). I walked back to the bookshop but the girl who had served me was gone (replaced by a stern older woman) so I went to the restaurant on my own where I had some kind of meat stew with turnips and potatoes and onions (some kind of French country dish), this is the real deal, I told myself, complete with a bone marrow in the middle of the bowl. It’s now or never (I said to myself) and I sucked the marrow out of the bone, which was actually gross, it was like a kind of soft fleshy liquorice. What the hell (I was in Paris). Afterwards I walked along the Seine in the early evening where groups of friends and lovers were drinking wine and picnicking on coats spread out on the grass (as the sun was going down). I sat on the grass (a couple with bare feet were sleeping on a blanket right next to me) until nearly ten o’clock when I guessed my friend would probably be home by now (either that or I would be sleeping on the grass next to them for the night, which actually appealed to me, in a way) but even so I went to one more bar but looking at all the unattainable women drinking on the pavement (with beautiful heels on and nylons and with handbags overflowing with personal stuff and their own lives that had nothing to do with mine) made me melancholy for the first time and I felt old, somehow (or too young), and wanted to go home.

  When I went back and knocked on Patty’s door he buzzed me in without saying a word. The door (this great wooden door that looked like it once belonged to a castle with big metal studs in it) opened onto a cobblestoned tunnel that led to a square courtyard with plants in broken plant pots (and lit-up windows with washing hanging out to dry). I heard a voice from somewhere up above. Fourth floor, it said, and I followed a winding stone staircase (past old stained-glass windows that were cracked and had pieces missing) up to the landing which was covered in shoes, piles of dirty boots and training shoes (and even some high heels). It’s like a fucking Holocaust memorial up here, I thought to myself (but I also thought that maybe I could borrow a pair to replace my own).

  When he opened the door I barely recognised him. He had lost weight (a lot of weight) and somehow he seemed younger, not gaunt, just naturally skinny (like young people are). What’s up, brother? he said
. Things have changed, I said to myself (this is going to be interesting). We went inside and the flat was amazing (weird), piled high with obscure stuff. The hallway was set up like a dining room, with a dinner table right next to the front door and across from the toilet, which I thought was particularly weird, as the toilet had no door and the entrance was only covered with an old curtain (I’m in France, I told myself, anything goes). I spotted a portable record player in the corner of the hall balanced on top of a pile of old encyclopaedias (maybe that was to drown out the noise from the toilet) and around it there were a few choice LPs, Can, Philippe Doray, the Red Noise LP on Futura and the Rob Jo Star Band album (which I’d never heard of at the time but which became the soundtrack to my trip). But it proves he was still listening to music (even if all of it was old).