World's End

SIMON HOWARD

World's End

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World's End

A Novel by Simon Howard

For families, lovers, humans, mathematicians, debauchees, people who can or can’t work it out, and religious maniacs, bless ‘em all.

And in memory of Maggie, who had faith.

****

FIRST PART

‘And Eros the most beautiful,
breaking gods and men;
stronger than the heart’s thoughts
than the wisdom of our dreams…’

Hesiod, The Theogony.

*****

ONE
THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE

What can I say about my life at that point – except that it was going wrong?
What can you do about a life that’s going wrong? What are the things you can change? The measures you can take? How do you reverse out of a blind alley in a car with no wheels? In a car with a comatose driver? In a car with no driver? How do you? Tell me that, and I’ll tell you how I came to be in this mess.
I’ll tell you anyway…

***

At the time I started asking myself these questions I had painted myself into a corner. Quite literally. I was starting a new life in a new flat in World’s End, London, along the King’s Road, where it turns a corner. Just below one of my windows was this bloody great clock with hands whizzing backwards at what seemed like five hundred miles an hour. That’s anti-clockwise and fast. You wouldn’t believe that time could move so quickly in any direction; but every day when I came home I’d have to look at these hands flying past the moments I’d just used up. They undid the last hour in about five seconds. I reckoned that the whole of my life rushed by in the time it took me to walk from the bus stop to my front door. Anyway, this was the setting for my new existence, so I decided to spruce up the place. I’d painted the walls and ceilings and woodwork, and now I was doing the floor: everything in white, the way that bloke did his room in the film The Knack, which I saw when I was fourteen. (Irish bloke: Donal Donnelly.) Ever since then I’d longed for a completely white room. I wanted to feel like I was living inside a blizzard. I delayed deciding whether or not to paint the mirrors, because that was a very existential decision.
I was just finishing off the floor, listening to a lovely piece of music on my paint-speckled radio, when I got up to open the French windows behind me. I’d started painting the floor at the doorway leading from the hall and I was planning to exit via the French windows onto the balcony at the back, entering my bedroom through more French windows which also opened onto the balcony. Simple. Good plan. No. The trouble was, as I suddenly discovered, standing on the tiny remaining patch of unpainted floor, that the French windows wouldn’t open. I’d painted them the day before, and now they were stuck together with dried white gloss.
Fuck, I thought. Oh, fuck.

***

Now because this is an English story, set in England – even if the main location is World’s End in London – you’ll probably want to know what class I come from. Or even what tiny sub-class. Boring, but true. It would be a suitably claustrophobic pigeon-hole to stick me in, to provide a reason for my being so fucked-up. Well, I’m not going to tell you because it’s been done in thousands of other English novels yawn yawn since novel-writing began. (Though some of you may be wondering whether mirrors was a clue: a word used instead of looking-glasses, perhaps.) Will an English reader be comfortable understanding a character whose class he or she doesn’t know? (They can manage it in other cultures. Once a play was staged in London, acted in English one night and French the next: in English it became a play about class, in French about love.) All English stories seem to come down to class, even when they appear to be about gender because this is apparently a way of obscuring but perpetuating the same issue. And as for accents: I reckon English accents change noticeably every five miles. But that’s only on the regional, geographical level. Call it a vertical delineation. Then draw horizontal lines across these verticals to represent the class element. There’ll be so many lines going up and down and across that you’ll end up seeing nothing but a black blob. Exhausting idea.
I’ll tell you about the music I was listening to on my white-speckled radio, though some of you might relate my choice of music to class. The clock hands are whizzing back, and I’m almost there again.

***

Oh, fuck! How did I do that? It’s going to take hours to dry. Before I get out of here the clock will have ticked its way back to the birth of the dinosaurs. Tick tick tick. I could spell it backwards to use up time. Kcit kcit kcit. I’ll soon be fantasising about H. G. Wells and The Time Machine.
The music. What is it? It’s Mir ist so wunderbar from Fidelio, and it’s the loveliest sound in the world. There are hundreds of prisoners chained in the dungeons, and the four of them upstairs – Leonora and the others – are singing about love.
Love love love – wouldn’t you just die for it?

***

‘Darling, I do love you but you’re such a silly cunt.’
This is my old school-friend Valentine Summers speaking. He lives upstairs and he’s standing in the doorway, looking at me across the wet painted floor. He speaks to everyone like this: men, women, children, nuns. And most of them seem to grant him a special licence to do so. Once a psychiatrist told me that having Summers in my life meant I would never need psychiatric help. (When I passed this on to Summers, he said: ‘Do you think I should be available on the National Health?’, and I thought yes.) Occasionally in bars or at parties people are rattled by him – rugby players, for example: at one party I had to talk to a whole team of them about seven-a-sides to stop them beating the living daylights out of Summers. In fact, someone always seems to step in and save him before the first blow has been struck, while Summers looks on, amazed that anyone should have been offended by him.
‘Darling, what have you done? You’ve painted yourself into the corner. You’re a silly old wanker!’
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ I reply, indicating the jammed-up French windows and the vast sea of paint between us.
Then he vanishes from the doorway, goes into my kitchen and helps himself to a couple of cans of beer from my fridge. He throws one of them at me, and I just manage to catch it in my outstretched hand before it can crash onto the painted floor.

***

Is writing a form of madness, or merely an escape from it? Or…
Is writing an escape from madness, or merely a form of it? I have pondered these things at length. Or…
I have pondered this thing at length. Sometimes I find it hard to tell whether a thing or things is or are a single issue, or several. But I have a need to talk about sex, and I have no idea whether this or these is or are a single issue or several. The hands of the clock have taken me back…

***

‘What the fuck do you want to do about them?’ she rasps at me.
Yes, she rasps. It is a rasping sound she makes. She is rasping. At me. She tells me she hates me, and she has joined the Communist Party to prove the point. Most people are leaving the Communist Party at this moment in history – the early Nineties – but she is joining it.
‘Communism is not dead,’ she has informed me, and she celebrated becoming a member of the party by having ruby and diamond ear-rings struck in the form of the hammer and sickle.
Since she hates me, I wonder if the hands of the clock could move forward, just for once?
To Gaby, my rather boy-like new young girlfriend who seems to love only me and who came half an hour later. Who comes half an hour later. She will come half an hour later. Now I’m unsure of tense because I am confused about time.

***

She stands in the doorway, all eyes. A pair of enormous, loving eyes. And a firm, shimmering body.
‘I want to cross this floor and be in your arms,’ she says. ‘I want to make love all afternoon. There, on the wet, wet paint.’
And I gaze first at this wonderful young woman, then at the shimmering white coat of stickiness between us. She takes off her shirt and sheds her short skirt, all the time staring into my eyes. I look at her mouth, her nose, her ears. I have known them all intimately. I think of her other orifices. I have entered each one, in thought and possibly deed. Her contours are shimmying, her slender fingers stroking the outline of her gorgeous breasts. Do her breasts become a single issue? Off comes the bra to reveal her jutting nipples. It seems important that there are two of them, as I give equal importance to both. She turns around and her perfect, rather boy-like bum arches, hovering a couple of feet above the paint, as she removes her knickers and moons at me while I burst. At that moment I hate the white-painted floor more than I hate the death or deaths of innocent children. ‘Mir ist so wunderbar,’ they sing on the white-speckled radio.
Wet, wet, wet. A few feet away, on the other side of my hollow bricks and mortar, the hands of a clock are spinning back towards the Stone Age. And I am trapped in the unpainted corner of a whitened room beside a door that will not open.

***

‘My name is Murphy and I’ve come to serve a writ on you.’
He appears to be deaf, and I have great trouble dissuading him from stepping onto the painted floor. So I wave at him in a kind of semaphoric way, and he stops at the edge of the paint.
‘I could take away all your chattels,’ he announces.
‘There aren’t many left to take,’ I reply, but he doesn’t hear.
He has arrived before the angry one’s visit. What is her name? What was her name? It’s so easy to forget. Yet I lived with her for years.

***

‘Why don’t you answer the phone?’ she asks, rasping.
Some people would see a clue about class in phone rather than telephone. Others wouldn’t. I wave my hand at the painted floor.
‘How could I?’
‘You never do.’ I’ll give her a name from time to time. ‘You never do,’ said Beatrice in the past tense, though what she said was and is in the present, implying both past and future.
‘I’ve so little left to say,’ I replied. ‘I’ve run out of small talk.’
It was the time of the Bosnian War, or was it the first Gulf one (which was really the second because the Iraqis and Iranians had already fought what we’d called the Gulf War)? Anyway, there was so much death in the air that I couldn’t think of anything useful to say.
‘I’ve come to see what you want me to do with the rest of your things,’ she said.
‘No, you haven’t,’ I replied ungraciously.
‘Oh yes I have.’
‘Oh no you haven’t!’
It was a grown-up relationship, ours.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Laura. ‘I have to get on with my own plans, and you’ve been here for several days.’
‘You’ve come to see if I’m really setting up home here.’
Juliet eyed the floor with a smirk.
‘I see you’ve made an appropriate start,’ she said.
‘You’re smirking at the floor.’
‘I’m smirking at you. You’ve painted yourself into the corner and you’ll be there for hours.’ She smiled her ice smile, and I knew she was thinking about sex.

***

One day, while we were living together, I came home and found her dressed in my clothes. She looked at me with my expression on her face. The love she felt for me was so bad and guilt-laden that she had to kill me off. And so she became me.

***

‘Ah goot mornink, Mister Murphy. Take away all his chattels. I insist!’
This is Vladimir Bartok, a mish-mash of Central European races and what-not who delights in obfuscation.
‘Obfus-vot?’ he once asked me. I explained its meaning. ‘Oh, that sounds too straightforward for me,’ he said.
A political refugee, he came to London in 1976. Deciding that England must be a sunny country during that long hot summer, he cancelled his application to live in his first choice, Australia. The Communists had sensibly locked him up as a dissident threat but Amnesty, in their kindliness, got him out. Arrived in London, he lived in a South Kensington hostel full of penniless White Russian dowagers on their last legs. Then he moved to a flat near mine in Notting Hill and resumed his career as a filmmaker. His UN refugee passport was exchanged for a British one.
Bartok has never seen the need for articles – either definite or indefinite – in spoken or written English. And he has insisted on correcting the proofs of all my writing for several years. Every word I have written. Therefore we are both perverse.
‘No, no, you are more perverse!’ he will say when he reads this. Sometimes, though, he will drop an article into a spoken sentence in order to create confusion. ‘What use is article unless it is for the confusion?’
Soon after he arrived in Britain, Granada Television gave him a job directing a few episodes of Coronation Street.
‘How did it go?’ I asked him.
‘Great success. They loved me. I could not understand word they said and they could not understand me, so they treat me as genius. It was best episodes ever.’
He is standing in the doorway now, munching a huge sandwich made of ingredients stolen from my fridge. Handing another sandwich to Murphy the bailiff, Bartok settles himself down in a comfortable sofa in the hall and, looking defiantly in my direction, dangles his foot provocatively over the edge of the painted floor.
‘I have been studying my passport,’ he announces. ‘Nowhere does it say that I must be English. Therefore I have decided to be Scottish. Goot mornink.’
He uses ‘Goot mornink’ as a kind of mantra at any time of the day or night, along with another, ‘Happy Birthday!’, and through the inappropriate use of both has managed to confuse people from all over the world. Another favourite is: ‘God will repay you with many unwanted children,’ which has caused offence on many occasions and in several countries where English is considered a logical, straightforward language. He himself has been repaid – literally – many times over, thanks to his over-developed libido which may or may not have resulted from the castrating effects of political restriction.
‘Ah goot mornink, Mr Murphy,’ he declares while tearing off another piece of his sandwich. ‘Happy birthday and many, many unwanted children.’
It is lucky for Murphy that he’s deaf and cannot be confused by this.
‘Look at this fool who has painted himself into corner. Did you ever see such idiot? Please take away his chattels.’
Seated in an adjoining armchair, Murphy fancies himself a philosopher. His mouth full of what was going to be my lunch, he expounds.
‘I believe that people’s misdemeanours always catch up with them. You cannot foul up the world without paying a hefty price for your deeds.’
‘Happy birthday and och aye!’ interjects Bartok.
‘One day all the toilets of the universe will explode at precisely the same moment.’
‘Meine gōōtè,’ mumbles Bartok in no recognisable language.
‘I’m speaking metaphorically, of course,’ concludes the philosopher bailiff, shovelling the last bit of sandwich into his mouth.
And then the angry one arrives.
‘Oh la la. Many, many children,’ mutters Bartok, eyeing her with desire, though they have met dozens of times before. Now that a woman has arrived he feels it incumbent upon him, being a Central European, to betray another man, and the honour falls to me. ‘Oh shut up,’ he barks. ‘What fool you are.’
He makes for the kitchen to rob me of the last of my provisions. The angry one looks me in the eye.
‘What do you want to do about them?’ she asks. Rasping.

***

‘Drub drub blood-guttedness, drub their blood-gruntedness. Grunt their drub-bluntedness…’
It is the most ghastly sound I have ever heard and it has been authored and recited by a literary pillock called Mottram Duckworth.
‘What a load of crap,’ I opine.
‘How dare you!’ bleats its awful author. ‘This is true poetry.’
‘It’s bollocks.’
Needless to say, the conversation didn’t go quite like this, nor the verse, possibly. But I wish it had. My response might actually have been something like: ‘Very original, excellent. Would you like a cuppa splash?’ (This being my version of Alan Bennett’s dressing room mantra, ‘Marvellous, darling, marvellous,’ which he offers actor friends every time he has loathed a performance.) The trouble with Mottram Duckworth is that, despite calling himself a poet, he has no trace of poetry within him. None. He has a dreadful eye for things, and a terrible ear – two huge minuses in a would-be poet. He possesses no sensitivity to nature, nor feeling for people, in addition to which he is both linguistically rhythmless and physically gnomic. Artistically – if that is the word – he has been influenced by Tony Harrison’s Northern Anglo-Saxon version of The Oresteia. That was quite bad enough, but this is truly awful. Ironically, it was Harrison who wrote the line ‘How you became a poet’s a mystery!’
‘And so I have drubbed the Satanist weaklings,’ he continues, ‘with their feebleness and despair and their tub-thump, blood-grunt bluntedness…’
Ugh. In my unpainted corner of the room, I have turned into the tiniest ball possible, arms wrapped around my rib-cage, fingers of both hands straining to meet one another at my back. I have become the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, my fingers representing both Adam’s and God the Father’s straining to touch at their tips. On my paint-speckled radio Florestan cries from his dungeon: ‘Gott’ welch’ Dunkel hier!’ ‘God, how dark it is!’
Duckworth drones on. With a horrible intensity I reflect that he is my country’s most famous poet. ‘Drub drub blood-guttedness,’ it thrums along. ‘…feculent caryopses…glut their pitted ire…drub drub…’
For some reason I look up from my ball-like position and see that I am to be saved. Summers is standing behind Duckworth in the doorway, his expression a triumphant sneer.
‘Tub-thump…’ he mutters, unnerving Duckworth.
‘It’s an interesting poetic experiment,’ the bard bleats gnomically.
‘On your way, Fuckworth. This may be an impossible age, but one day we’ll move on to something better.’
Duckworth moves on himself, to the kitchen, where a groan goes up from Bartok at his arrival. Summers looks pleased with himself.
‘Darling, did I save you from a fate worse than death? I’d rather become a Trappist monk than speak to that man again.’ He lights up. ‘Have I shown you my Trappist routine?’
A complex mime ensues, involving a Trappist monk trying to communicate with a deaf-mute nun during a snowstorm in the middle of the night. At its climax the telephone rings in the hall behind Summers, who stares at the offending phone with its terrible ring destroying his mime show. Then he looks at me before eventually picking up the receiver and mouthing silently into it. Again he looks at me and holds the telephone towards me over the wet white floor. We stare at one another and then at the telephone, black against all this whiteness, as a voice calls out plaintively from the receiver.
‘Hello. Hello…’
‘We’re on a sinking ship,’ I say quietly to Summers, ‘but no-one’s getting into the lifeboats.’
‘Hello, are you there?’
‘Shut up Duckworth, you idiot!’ shouts Bartok from the kitchen. Then: ‘Oh, you lovely woman…many many children…let me take you in the gloaming.’ He has found a definite article for a special occasion.
‘Hello…’ wails the voice.
Summers and I continue to stare at one another across the whitened room, as once we did at school when trapped by Jesuits in their prison up North. An epic white distance separates us while deep drum beats accompany Florestan’s plaintive aria on the radio. Outside, the hands of the clock are hurtling towards the Big Bang.

*****

TWO
THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

‘A friend of mine, a homosexual, went to see his doctor. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m experiencing great discomfort around the entrance to my anus.” The doctor looked at him. “I don’t want to be over-medical about this,” he said, “but most of us would describe that as an exit.”’
Summers roars with laughter at his own anecdote. Dressed as a Roman centurion, his plumed helmet askew, he is sitting in a dishevelled state on the other side of the glossed-up French windows. He has nearly managed to fall drunkenly off the balcony after lowering himself onto it by rope from his flat above. Why he didn’t simply walk onto the balcony from my bedroom is a mystery only to those people who don’t know Valentine Summers. By this point he has failed to rattle the French windows free of their dried paint. The reason for the Roman costume is that he’s been preparing himself for a fancy dress party later.
‘I so wanted to get you out of there!’ he shouts through the glass. ‘I do love you. All your life you’ve been master of your own universe, whereas I’ve tried to be the mistress of mine.’
‘Friendship’s a fragile thing,’ I reply philosophically.
‘It needs water, like plants. You’re like a great garden that needs watering. I could squirt you with my hose.’
We lapse into silence for a while, since it’s a bit of a strain talking through the panes of glass. Summers even snoozes for a few moments, before speaking again.
‘Never tell your lovers about your fantasies,’ he advises me. ‘They won’t forgive you for creating a dream that’s bigger than them.’ Another silence, during which Summers stares over the balcony into the garden below. ‘With some women you have to be very direct and suggest sex straight away – oral stuff, anything. Others you must take out to dinner – candles, romance. Or lunch – get them drunk in the afternoon – very sexy. But some you have to take out to tea – you must remove sex from the situation –‘
‘Never remove sex from anything!’ proclaims a foreign voice. ‘Adolf Mucha said nothing is more important than sex.’ Bartok has materialised in the doorway. ‘Goot mornink! Will you get rid of that ghastly Mottram Duckworth and his dreadful poetry! He thinks to be artist you must have one problem only – like being gnome. It is very English idea. English think you must be just gay or divorced. But to be great Scottish artist like me, you should have many problems. Kick him out! Perhaps Mr Murphy can take him away with all your chattels.’
Bartok returns to the kitchen to shout at Duckworth while Summers staggers to his feet and prepares to ascend to his flat by rope. Balanced precariously on the balcony wall, he decides to moon at me before hoisting off. As he does it – and this is the first time I have ever been mooned at by a drunken Roman centurion – Duckworth appears in the hall doorway. Summers is outraged.
‘I do not choose to expose myself to the likes of you, Mottram Duckworth!’ he shouts, pulling down the flap of his tunic.
I have no idea what stage of human or animal history the clock hands have reached outside the flat. Even the music seems to be playing backwards, because the prisoners are only now blasting out their pitiful chorus of gratitude for a bit of light. ‘O welche lust…’ ‘What joy…’
What joy indeed to breathe fresh air. And she was coming next.

***

I cannot take my eyes off her perfect shimmying, shimmering bum. All warmth and human kindness is or are contained within that pair of boy-bum globes. Bronze against the whiteness. A breath of fresh air. The scent I breathe.
Scent is a class-bound word because most people say perfume. The English lay traps everywhere. Class invades everything, including the bedroom. Sometimes it invades by accident, disguising itself as the North-South divide. Occasionally the North-South divide masquerades as class. Once a Northern girl talked to me about the bathroom, and I misheard the consonant, rather than the vowel, thinking she might have said maths room. (We were making love in a school at the time.) Perfectly logical: history room, maths room…
Trying to clear it up, I asked: ‘Maths room or barthroom?’, and she was offended.
‘We call it bathroom,’ she complained, ‘not barthroom.’
‘No, no, it was the consonant I didn’t hear –‘
Oh, what’s the point?
Gazing at the crack between her undulating cheeks, and the rear-view of the junction of her thighs, the accumulation of her holes, I realise that I am looking at the centre of the universe, the location of heaven, the axis of the paradigm of sexual union. I’m a man obsessed, and she’s all women to me – and all boys and men too, should I ever want or need them. On the speckled radio, Leonora sings an aria to hope. ‘Komm, Hoffnung…’
She has become my best friend too, though I am surrounded by friends, even if I feel I am being eaten by some of them. As long as she and I continue to do one thing for each other, we will never mutually consume. We will be safe if we give one another pleasure and keep our orgasms generous.
As I said, a man obsessed.

***

‘Life is about levels of shame,’ announces Bartok.
It is a little earlier. Consuming my wine, he has left the angry one with Murphy and the gnomic Duckworth, whom he has failed to evict.
‘It is all about levels of shame. Nobody has escaped humiliation, so we are all dangerous. Happy birthday!’
While the prisoners sing their chorus in the background, Bartok drinks my wine.
‘O welche Lust, in freier Luft
Den atem leicht zu heben!’
‘Oh, what joy to breathe freely
In the open air!’
To a man in my predicament, it rings untrue.
‘Film is extraordinary medium,’ continues Bartok. ‘It can cheat time like nothing else can. Because it does it visually. Basic film grammar is magic. You cut from close-up to long shot and see someone pretending they did it in continuous action. Basic, but magic.’
‘Sometimes I think about all the other lives I could have led,’ I muse, ignoring him and gazing at the whiteness of the room. ‘Not just one other life, but lots of them. I think about them all the time. They live alongside the life I live, just below the surface, between the cracks – my shadow-lives. I was master of my destiny and a thousand times I made choices: tiny choices, sometimes, that seemed important. It’s easy to prostitute yourself.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Bartok, ‘most people do. Prostitutes are not the only whores.’ A definite article to maximize the effect, though his stress of it ruins the rhythm.
‘Funny to think that my whole existence came about because my father slipped and broke his leg boarding an aeroplane, so he never got where he was going and met my mother instead.’
‘And they both met you! Happy birthday.’ He drinks more wine. ‘History is like seasons. It doesn’t go away forever. Always it comes back. But on television you can change channels. Do you know, I find myself turning off people’s terrible suffering. I switch from ghastly unhappiness to adverts for fish fingers. Goot mornink!.’ He drains his glass and turns towards the kitchen. ‘By the way, you’re not allowed to call them adverts. You must say commercials or even films.’
‘And they’ve become,’ I add gloomily, ‘our greatest cultural achievement.’
Weaving, Murphy appears beside Bartok, with a full glass of wine in his hand which Bartok relieves him of.
‘How kind, Mr Murphy,’ he says, redirecting him to the kitchen.
‘I believe that drink is evil,’ intones Murphy as he goes. ‘I’ll just wet my lips a moment and then I’ll make a list of your chattels, if you don’t mind.’
‘I knew men like that in days of Communism,’ says Bartok, drinking from the new glass. ‘It’s amazing how satisfied bureaucratic mind can be made by simply writing down things. Half my family were in gas ovens, other half in SS. In Dachau you could be given fifty lashes for spilling one drop of ersatz coffee on table. Very precise. It was all written down. “One drop of coffee, fifty lashes.” Many things written down. Books with crimes and punishments written down. But if you go through books today, you find many mistakes.’
‘Perhaps that was done to protect the inmates.’
‘No, I think it was bureaucratic blindness. People who live so close to rules cannot see straight. Bureaucratic blindness welcomes any dark. To think like them is to bluff true thought.’
‘Why are you being so profound today?’
‘That is magnificent woman in kitchen. Why did she ever live with you?’ He drains the glass. ‘And I have asked her many, many times.’
He exits the exit, and I stare across the white wet landscape, my mind discovering that the clock hands must have raced past the Holocaust over half an hour ago.
I was becoming confused about time. All this hurtling about had to stop. I wanted to get out of there, and now I have. Now I am here, yet this should be told in the past, since I am no longer in the white room waiting for the paint to dry. I need the past tense. Why else would I say: ‘I was becoming confused about time.’? Why did I start this story by asking ‘What can I say about my life at that point – except that it was going wrong?”? Am I supposed to tell you about my life before it started going wrong? I couldn’t bear to. The clock has confused me. I realise now that my life was quite bad enough during the time I spent waiting for the paint to dry. Enough to say I’d made some terrible errors before moving into the flat at World’s End and deciding to paint it white.

***

‘Give film students two examples of anything,’ Bartok said to me once, holding up his right hand. ‘Tell them these are good reasons for doing job this way.’ He held up his left hand. ‘And all my experience tells me don’t do it this way. Which one do you think film students choose?’
‘The wrong one.’
‘Exactly. Happy birthday!’
Well, I’d spent years doing what the film students do, finding out for myself and getting it wrong. And so had Vladimir Bartok and everyone else I knew. I wanted to live inside a blizzard. It was a human blizzard. And that’s why I started a new life in World’s End, surrounded by whiteness, with a clock outside undoing time.
The trouble was, my past was everywhere. Any fool could have seen that. Even me.

***

My past is everywhere. The angry one – let’s call her Myra – is glaring at me from the doorway.
‘I hate you!’ she spits. A groan sounds deep within me. ‘You quarrel with everyone.’
‘I’m just making a list of your chattels,’ says Murphy passing by, writing them down.
‘What exactly is the problem with you?’ she rasps.
I imagine Gaby’s bum smiling at me, vertically. The angry one mustn’t see my hard-on, as she’ll know it’s not for her. I’ve never seen such loveliness: it’s like gazing at the sun or the moon. If she farted, I’d hear the sound of angels’ trumpets. ‘Ein Engel, Leonoren…’ sings Florestan of his angel, Leonora.
‘I said what is your problem?’
Myra Hindley.
‘If you need to ask the question…’ I begin, dicing with death.
‘You creep!’ And a biscuit hits me.
‘You’ve always got to be the victim, haven’t you?’ I ask. Or state.
‘It’s not hard.’
‘Do you really believe you know me?’ (The sensitive approach.)
‘Yes, unfortunately!’
‘You never tried to find out much.’
‘You were too opinionated. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’
This is called rewriting history.
‘You wouldn’t discuss anything,’ I tell her. ‘Every time I tried to talk about anything with you, you told me I was bullying you. You turned me into a stereotype. You turned yourself into a stereotype. You destroyed it.’
‘You destroyed it!’ A last word freak, as you can see.
‘You left me at the mercy of my imagination. That was a cruel thing to do.’ (I wish I could remember her name. How could I forget a thing like that?) ‘You see people as it, not you. I was really only an it to you, not a you. And the awful thing is, you made me start to think of you as an it. You destroyed your own magic, and I may never be able to forgive you for that. You were so damaged that you had to reject me before I could reject you. Every time you did, you regretted it and pretended nothing had happened, so of course we never talked about it. You never had the self-respect to play life by your own rules, only other people’s – mostly your parents’. Why be here at all if you’re not prepared to seize your own life? Anything else is a kind of whoring.’
That went down well, as you can imagine, and she glared at me across the paint. I had become truthful, but cruel. And foolhardy. I took a deep breath.
‘Prostitutes are not the only whores, you know.’
I realised that in the time it had taken me to say the last few sentences, Freud’s entire life had whizzed by on the clock.

***

‘Well?’ asked Mottram Duckworth, poet, looking like a gnome standing in the snow. I am writing about him in the past tense because I am trying to forget. I was trying to forget. ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ I’m stalling for time. I was.
‘What do you think?’
‘About what?’ Forgetting doesn’t last long.
‘About my poem, of course.’
I suppose some people might be honoured to have their country’s most celebrated and least talented poet asking their opinion of his work.
‘Well…’
‘Yes?’
Marvellous, darling, marvellous. Not even Alan Bennett could pull off this one.
‘Er…’
‘I’m waiting.’
I look him in his gnomic eye, mustering an air of authority.
‘Are you sure you want this?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think the addition of a few blood-gub-drub sounds makes it a poem.’
The tiny bard stares at me in amazement. It is the amazement of a man who has filled in application forms and won several grants, awards and bursaries, not to mention honours, since he is the bureaucrats’ dream poet – the kind of poet who can fit into any category and flutter no heart.
‘You don’t think it’s a poem?’ he says slowly.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘What would you call it, then?’
Don’t tempt me, Duckworth.
‘Er…’
‘What?’
‘Well… A very interesting experiment.’ This is only a white lie because everything in the room is white.
‘Yes…?’
Oh, what the fuck.
‘Actually, I think it’s a complete load of crap, Mottram.’
He has become a very still little gnome. All he needs now is the fishing rod.
‘I see…’
‘And I don’t really consider you much of a poet.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because you can’t love.’
‘And what has love got to do with poetry?’
I think that Summers might have a point about this being an impossible age, but the only sound I can manage is a long groan. My chin sinks onto my chest for extra dramatic effect.
‘Explain yourself!’ shouts the most celebrated poet of our time.
Like Lazarus, I slowly raise my sunken head.
‘You’re dull. And you’re bourgeois, although your writing is designed to hide this.’
‘I’m dull and bourgeois?’
‘Yes. Petit bourgeois.’
‘I’m petit bourgeois?’
‘And you don’t resonate.’
‘I don’t resonate?’
‘No.’
His facial expression turns to one of immense pity. I have never seen him show so much emotion.
‘Have you read my sales figures?’
As a matter of fact, he has always hated me. Possibly for reasons of art, class and the North-South divide, though he doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. We are a pigeon-holing society, and he is good at the victim game. Funnily enough, around the corner from my new flat there’s a small art gallery called The Pigeon Hole, whose owner once drilled a hole in her head with a Black & Decker. She’s even stood for Parliament as the Trepanation On The National Health candidate. I might vote for her next time. I’d like to take a Black & Decker drill to Mottram Duckworth.
‘You’ve got all the answers. All the definitions. There are no question marks in your life, or in your poetry. You know exactly what your poems mean, you’re articulate about them on the radio and telly, you tell us exactly what they’re about. Why the hell do you write them, then?’
Well done, me. I’ve been meaning to say this for some time – and here, inside my blizzard, I’ve done it. All it needed was to have my identity nicked by friends, my chattels nicked by Murphy, my time nicked by Duckworth, and to sit in a white-out. I must have become a Buddhist.
When I collect my thoughts, they inform me with chilling clarity that the clock hands are travelling through one of the earth’s several ice ages. Impossible to say which.

***

‘I went to check out the gym yesterday,’ says Summers. ‘There was so much equipment I thought I’d walked into an S & M clinic.’
He’s standing in the doorway, dressed for tennis.
‘Sport is very unhealthy,’ says Bartok. ‘Are you going to tennis or party?’
‘I’m playing ten at twelve. At the club the other day I told a woman I needed to wash my headband, and she asked if I had smelly feet. When I said no, she gave me her telephone number, so I said I’d like to shampoo her all over and do you know what? Her eyes watered. Do you think she fancied me?’
‘Indubitably.’
‘Vladimir, do you like a girl with smelly armpits?’
‘No!’
‘Neither do I. Unless it’s a special feature I’ve asked for.’
‘It’s not something I would ask for.’
They turn to me.
‘Would you ask for it?’
‘No.’
‘Darling, I think your imagination runs out where mine begins, but I do love you. Do you know, Vlad, I’ve known him most of my life and he’s my dearest friend.’ He seizes a soda siphon from the hall table and brandishes it at me. ‘You must be thirsty by now. You haven’t drunk your beer. I’m going to squirt this into your mouth, so get ready!’
He takes aim.
‘Don’t!’ I shout, fearing for the paint.
‘Then say you love me.’
‘All right.’
‘Say it!’
‘I love you.’
‘And I’m your oldest friend.’
‘You’re my oldest friend.’
‘And closest.’
‘And my closest.’
‘And dearest.’
‘And dearest.’
‘Dearer than Raymond Rivers,’ (another ex-inmate of the Jesuit prison we attended up North – and several other institutions too).
‘Dearer than Raymond Rivers.’
He puts down the soda siphon.
‘I forgive you, but you’re a silly old wank.’
‘And happy birth,’ adds Bartok.
‘Time for ten at twelve.’
He exits the exit, doing a jock-strap moon as he goes. Bartok settles into an armchair.
‘Those bloody bastard television commissioning editors with their all-day lunches. They leave office at eleven-thirty and come back at four, but only on busy day – usually they take longer. I am only talking about Wednesdays because weekend lasts from Thursday till Tuesday. They would have made very good Communists during régime.’ He becomes reflective. ‘I used to make so many films. Now, because of those commissioning editors, I have to let films cook longer, like my goulash. Minimum of eight hours now I cook my goulash. I make less films, more teaching. Number of students I have breaks down into number in theory, number in practice and number in reality.’
‘I don’t understand that at all,’ I mumble, and Bartok dangles his foot provocatively over the paint, making me scowl. Thinking of Central Europe, I ask: ‘Are you going to move back?’
‘Where?’
‘Home.’
‘Scotland?’
‘Home home.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Why?’
‘I am here too long, and I’m Scottish now. I hate it here sometimes, but I can’t live back there. My ex-exile friends all over Europe have same problem as me: they don’t like France, Germany, Switzerland – but they don’t want to go home.’
‘You were never just a political exile.’
‘One never is. Exile and politics are never entirely political. Happy birthday!’
‘You actually like it here because no-one expects you to discuss your emotions.’
‘Goot mornink! I am losing my cachet as refugee. I will have to be black one-legged lesbian next.’
‘The cachet’s moved on from them. You’ll have to find a new cliché.’
‘You say cliché, I say cachet. I think I will try to become commissioning editor and make myself completely unavailable to filmmakers, as work is very unhealthy. I will take all-day lunches and all-week weekends. No films will be made, and no adverts. Goulash will cook forever. Now I will make myself a sandwich.’
He returns to the kitchen to woo the angry one whose name I can’t recall, and to castigate Mottram Duckworth, whose name is all too well known throughout our unfortunate isle as his loathsome poems continue to record the minutiae of its fossil changes and other gripping developments which the clock hands whizzed past long ago.

*****

THREE
THE NAKED DUKE

This is a story about Valentine Summers’ brother Jasper, a painter who also drinks heavily and attended the Jesuit prison up North, though he was already a drunk by the time he got there, aged thirteen, and a whore. It’s also about Jennifer (the older woman he visits on a regular basis), a naked young duke, and me.

***

At 2 am I was lying in bed, reading, when the telephone rang.
‘Hello. Stephen?’ says a drunken voice.
‘Yes?’
‘Stephen. It’s Jasper.’
‘How are you, Jasper?’
‘I’m very well.’
A drunken pause, which I fill with:
‘Are you at Jennifer’s or at home?’
‘The former.’ Another pause. ‘Why don’t you come over for a drink?’
‘That’s kind, but –‘
‘Oh come on!’
‘No, I was just nodding off.’
‘Come on, come on!’ wails Jasper.
‘No, no, I’ve got to read some more.’
‘But I’m going away East…’ His voice drifts from the receiver towards Jennifer. ‘Oh shut up!’ he shouts at her. ‘Oh God, Stephen, this fucking woman really buggers up my life. She’s a monster! Put on that music, you bloody old whore!’
‘Where are you going?’
‘East.’
‘Where?’
‘Turkey.’
‘I haven’t been there for years.’
‘Well, come over and talk about it!’
‘No, it’s too late.’
‘Oh don’t be so bloody fucking boring. Come on over!’
Suddenly a part of a Mendelssohn symphony blasts down the line. I raise my voice to be heard.
‘HOW LONG WILL YOU STAY IN TURKEY?’
‘Forever.’ Another drunken pause. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘With my life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Writing.’
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Oh, she’s shouting.’
‘Put her on.’
Her unmistakable drawl comes on the line:
‘Stephen, darling…’
‘Hello. You’re both drunk.’
‘Jasper is, I’m not.’
‘He says he’s going to Turkey forever.’
‘Two months – but he’ll probably be home by the weekend –‘ A shriek. ‘Jasper, get off! Oh, my back’s broken! I’m being suffocated! Oh! Oh, that’s better… Oh, the music – I’ll have to turn down the MendelssOhn,’ she says, stressing the O in Mendelssohn.
Jasper’s voice comes back on the line, sounding even drunker.
‘Hello…? Come over for a drink.’
‘I’ll telephone you tomorrow.’
‘I’ll be gone.’
‘I’ll call before you leave.’
‘Have a drink!’
‘I’ll ring.’
‘Come over!’
‘Tomorrow.’

***

The next afternoon I called round at Jennifer’s house, knowing that Jasper had flown East already. (When I’m in writing mode I can’t handle that level of drunkenness around me.) A divorcee of forty-four, Jennifer was a house warden at an international school in Oxford, where I was living and writing at the time. ‘A dustbin for spoilt rich foreign brats and arseholes’ was how Jasper described it, frequently to the students themselves – especially the ones he was trying to shag.
Jennifer was lying in her huge bed which filled most of her ground floor bedroom, watching tennis on the telly. French windows were open onto the garden, filling the room with the smell of wet grass from the recent rain. I leant forward to kiss her.
‘Did you know you’re not allowed to play the piahno in the music faculty?’ she said. ‘I’ve just had Jasper’s cousin on the tellyphOne and he told me. He’s a postgrad and he’s doing music and he’s not allowed to play the piahno in the music faculty common room. Now isn’t that interesting?’
‘Yes. Did Jasper get off all right?’
‘Yes, he did. Isn’t it sad?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Doesn’t the garden smell simply lovely?’
‘Lovely.’
‘Well you’re very lucky it does. Half an hour ago it smelled like a chemical works. A man came and sprayed it. Here I was, lying in my great big double bed, talking to Jasper’s cousin on the tellyphOne about how they wouldn’t let him play the piahno in the music faculty, when suddenly there was a dramatic eruption of bearded tits from the flower bed – just over there – and lo and bloody fucking behold, I saw a tiny thing with a great big tank on its back, squirting, and little legs underneath. The bursar had sent him. The greenfly’s been terrible. So’s the bursar. I think he’s trying to keep me sweet because he knows I know he likes them black and he likes them in twos…’ She stretches out in her great big double bed. ‘Do you know, he found one of his pretty Italian boys doing something unspeakable to himself in the shower the other day. The bursar told him off, and the Italian boy was furious. He’s a duke or something, from Tuscany. He went quiet for a bit, then came running out absolutely naked and terribly beautiful and wet and seventeen and olive-skinned. “Look here,” he said, “It’s mine and I’ll wash it as fast as I like!” Then he went back behind the shower curtain and continued doing unspeakable things to himself. It was a joke he’d picked up from the Australian students. Apparently the Italians joke in anger.’
‘That’s not the Italian Jasper painted last week?’
‘Well, he meant to. It should have been a six-by-four nude for a Texan millionairess.’
‘What happened?’
‘They got drunk and both ended up running naked around the studio, and Jasper never put brush to canvas. Very shaming. He’s a very naughty Italian duke. I tried telling him off afterwards, and do you know what he said?’
‘No?’
‘He said: “I know it’s wrong but I like it.” And then he made a pass at me. The bursar’s wife’s always darting out of his way. Big girl. Midwife at the John Radcliffe. But she dives out of his way.’ An intense look comes into Jennifer’s eye. ‘Now that’s a strong job. Midwifery. It’s one of the strongest jobs you can do in nursing, next to a theatre sister. Stronger, in some ways…’ Jennifer’s husband was an obstetrician who had run off with one of his patients. ‘You have to get that woman to push and push. To fight. You have to have the baby for her. Christ, you have to work. You’re absolutely finished afterwards.’ She pauses. ‘Interesting that she can’t handle the responsibility of the students. Still, she’s only twenty-five. That might come. Provided she’s not chased around by too many naked seventeen-year-old Italian dukes…’
‘Washing themselves too fast.’
‘Exactly.’
‘When does he go home?’
‘Who?’
‘The naked duke.’
‘Not for some time, I’m afraid. He’s run off to Turkey with Jasper.’
‘Oops.’
‘Isn’t it an absolutely cuntish thing to do to me, darling?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be a great relief for the bursar’s wife, though. She’s hasn’t dared take a shower for days.’
‘What’ll he do in a Turkish bath?’
‘I dread to think. But the heat might slow him down.’

***

Twenty minutes later, as I walked to my car, I looked across the road to the bursar’s house. Behind the glazed window of the first floor bathroom I could see the outline of a large young woman slowly drying herself. She was singing in Italian. Swaying gently, she punctured the stillness of the Oxford afternoon with the sadness of her Tuscan lament.

***

‘Editing note from Vladimir Bartok:
This story is absolute rubbish. What is Tuscan lament? And it is not nearly perverse enough. Why are there no naked girls washing themselves too fast in shower? And why you have not written scene with me holding soap for them? Write again.
V. B.’

*****

FOUR
SHADOW-LIVES

‘Why do you work for this ghastly idiot?’ asks Bartok of Edna, my half-blind cleaning woman who has broken the last of my possessions since I arrived at World’s End. ‘Why?’
‘It’s the references,’ says Edna, looking at me affectionately in her half-blind way across the painted floor. ‘He gives me lovely references.’
It’s true. I have recently given her a lovely reference so that she can break the vases of an antique dealer living along the King’s Road. An antique dealer wants a cleaner, so you oblige. A cleaner needs more work, so you help out. What could be simpler? The trouble is, the cleaner breaks more than she cleans, and the broken vases turn out to be fakes because the antique dealer’s a crook. This is an impossible age. Nobody can concentrate on anything for more than two seconds. Look at me: I keep raising points about class and gender, and I don’t follow through. Nobody’s expected to do anything well. You don’t have to be a Renaissance man or woman any longer. You need only one skill, but don’t develop it too highly. All Edna has to do is clean. Dust and wipe. Occasionally scrub. That’s it. Nothing else is required of her. She isn’t expected to analyse Wittgenstein or recite Koranic texts, or talk about thermo-nuclear dynamics – whatever they or that is or are. No: dust, clean, wipe, occasionally scrub, nothing more. But she can’t. What she does is break, smash, shatter. And I give her a reference so that she can do it over a larger radius, making me into a perverse post-modern reworking of the old boy network.
An impossible age, and a stupid one. I’ve adapted R. D. Laing’s theory about the wrong people being in the lunatic asylums. I believe the wrong people are in everything, and every job. Everyone is inappropriately placed. And Gaby has taught me that most people are trapped inside an inappropriate sexuality too. An impossible age. Cleaners don’t clean, poets have no poetry in them, plumbers can’t plumb, teachers can’t teach or even learn, students know nothing, doctors kill, nurses are cruel, soldiers betray, lovers hate… Leonora knows how to love and be faithful. She’s saved Florestan’s life.
‘Liebe fϋhrte mein Bestreben,
Wahre Liebe fϋhrchtet nicht…’
‘Love it is that guided me,
True love that knows no fear…’
They could be Gaby’s words. I’d like to get up and walk over to her, leaving footsteps of love in the paint. I’d like to stop making stupid calculations about how long it will take the hands of this insane clock to travel through the Black Death or anything else. ‘O welche Lust…’ Lust lust lust. I am in love. And, to answer an earlier question: yes, I would die for it. I nearly did.

***

I told you about the time I came home to find the angry one had become me. What I didn’t mention was that I had started to become her. While travelling back that day I noticed myself walking with her swinging gait. I stopped and talked to somebody and when I laughed, it was her laugh that came out. Soon an alienating element worked its way into my life. It was very Brechtian. I could observe and comment upon all that I did and thought, giving me a parallel existence running alongside the role I was playing, or living. I’ve no idea whether I was playing or living it. None. Was my life the parallel existence of the role? What the hell does a question like that mean? In the end, thoughts become rubbish, or at least some thoughts do. In World’s End.

***

I have become like Hamlet, trapped by concern. I am even holding Yorick’s skull, thrown to me from the doorway by Summers, who is trying out a Prince of Denmark costume for the party. He has a large wardrobe in his flat above. I have caught the skull by the skinlessness of its teeth, and the floor has remained intact.
‘Darling, I do love you – I just wish you’d slide out of that corner and come over here so we can try on costumes together.’
The angry one is standing next to him, smirking. Not at the floor, but at me. She can never be Ophelia, I decide, except through madness. But she is very beautiful. Summers addresses her.
‘Darling, speaking as one sexy beast to another, shall we go to the party together?’
A shattering sound from the kitchen confirms that Edna is in there.
‘Will you give Edna a cup of tea and make her sit down for two hours without doing any work at all, then pay her – please!’
Exeunt the exit.

***

I wore her clothes while she was out, I sat on the sofa like her, I read her books, I imagined making love to me. This was no camp drag act: it was a real, organic becoming. Very Stanislavskian. Funnily enough, it made me feel more masculine and appropriately placed at last, because I’ve always believed that Englishwomen do a better job of being men than the men. (Certainly they believe it, and seem perpetually bitter and cheated at having been born female.) Then I became confused, as I couldn’t tell whether I was more in love with her or myself. I longed for my own company. I missed me. I waited for me to come home, which I did when she arrived.
And who am I now? What am I in space and time? As I gaze at the skull I consider how grey it looks against the white. Shall I cross the floor, or shall I wait for the paint to dry? Do I or don’t I? Inadvertently, I have discovered the crux of Hamlet’s problem.

***

Summers has tossed me a pill, and I have taken it to speed up the waiting time – or will it slow down? At least my thoughts have altered, convincing me the skull is Hitler’s and making me want to ask him a lot of questions. Without his funny hair he looks strange, though I can just imagine the outline of his moustache if I try very hard. ‘Did you really believe all that?’ I want to say, cheating by shaking the skull in denial. Then I remember seeing on television the skeleton of a man murdered twenty-five thousand years ago. The report was a light-hearted piece whose spirit I found hard to enter into – as though time had healed the agony of his lonely death. Another time they did a story about gang-raping ducks – ‘Ducks gangbang!’ – said the announcer, smiling. The duck I saw being raped looked desperate. An actress friend once lectured me about the horror of rape, then forced her Labrador bitch to mate with a fearsome dog: it broke my heart to watch. These are the thoughts which Summers’ pill have produced. Not all thought or thoughts is or are rubbish, but most of what is spoken is. Ask Hitler.

***

‘Darling, I’d like to put your thoughts onto floppy software and play them back over the years. Then I might be able to understand your genius because I think you could disturb the sleep of the world. I’ve only managed to disturb the sleep of World’s End.’
The pill is having an odd effect, making the door look strange. ‘The truth comes in a strange door,’ said the painter Francis Bacon. At the moment its handle is being gripped by Summers.
‘You have a labyrinthine mind,’ he says.
Roll up, roll up and see my labyrinthine mind. Come in and meet the Greeks, the Gauls, the Norsemen, the horsemen of the Steppes, the Indian gods and goddesses, the plains warriors, the priests, the shamans, the cobblers, the doctors who kill, the lovers who hate, the razored charlatans of mirth… Who the hell are the razored charlatans of mirth? What is this pill?
‘If I were a policeman,’ says Summers, ‘I’d strip-search you!’
‘If you were a policeman, you’d strip-search yourself.’
‘Let’s go to the party as hand-cuffed prisoners. You can be my ball and chain and stick the key in my lock.’
I turn up the volume and the room fills with the sound of many voices.
‘Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben!’ they roar gently in Hitler’s tongue.
‘Der Kerker eine Gruft…’
‘Up here alone is life!
‘The dungeon is a tomb…’

***

‘You seem like a very interesting person,’ says Murphy the philosophical bailiff.
‘Just think of me as a human sacrifice,’ I reply, but he doesn’t hear.
‘You have some odd friends, though. I’d say that Mr Summers is hyperactive: he tells me he’s going to party all weekend.’
This bailiff who has come to steal my chattels drinks my wine and eats my food. Perhaps he’s appropriately placed after all. Maybe at last I’ve found someone in the right job.
‘Myself now, I don’t like weekends,’ he drones. ‘I enjoy my work and look forward to Monday morning. I’ve written down the details of your chattels, but I’ve lost the bit of paper. Oh, thank you very much, Mr Bartok.’ (Bartok is filling his glass again.) ‘I might have to start again. There’s not many chattels to list, and I notice several of them are broken. Have you thought of mending them?’
‘Too expensive. I’m destitute.’
‘Prostitute?’ he says excitedly, the deafness diminishing a tad.
‘Destitute! It takes away choice, like being a prostitute does, but the pay’s worse.’
‘I’ll get a piece of paper and write it down,’ he says, scurrying off.
Prostitutes are not the only bores, I tell myself as I contemplate this writing-things-down business. I never write lists, but I think them up. I make strange inventories, like how many grains of sand are there in Africa? How many paper clips in America? How many worms in Kent? How many people still awake at 4 am in Delhi? Maximum number of orgasms taking place at the same time worldwide? How many murderers asleep in Shepherd’s Bush? I’m aware of all the lives I do not lead, of my parallel existences, and think about the parallel lives of paper clips, the orgasms which fall between the cracks.

***

She appears before me now, like a hologram, mooning, while the half-blind Edna passes, dusting unrestrained, breaking things, mistaking that heavenly bum for the globe of the sun.
‘Oh, what a lovely sunny day,’ she says, smashing broken vases as she goes.
‘My greatest fear is that one day I’ll wake up and find that not one person in the world fancies me, that I’ve become repulsive to everyone on the planet. It’s more scary than reading The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, in which you experience at death every thought you’ve ever had.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ says Gaby, turning around.
Mottram Duckworth’s greatest fear would be failing to win an award. For Summers, not finding a girl in leather and prepared for anything. Edna, no vase to break. Murphy, no chattels to list. The angry one, no me to blame. Bartok, no people to confuse.
Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by people’s sexual generosity. Just occasionally, gods and goddesses pass this way, creating a paradise here on earth. (All seven divisions of it.) Tell them how generous they are, and they reply: ‘You’ll never know how much I enjoy doing this.’ They fool you into believing they’re mere mortals, but they’re not. Mortals would use their beauty to inspire envy, not love. Gaby, twenty, all-knowing, wise as the centuries, innocent as a child, flawed in her past, splendid in the present, smiles at me.
‘When I came to terms with the gay side of my nature,’ she informs me frankly, ‘I felt much more complete as a woman…’ (Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Would you? Christ, this pill’s still doing funny things to me. Pay attention.) ‘I stopped playing a role and dealt with people as human beings. My love for you is the love of one human being for another.’
‘Absolutely,’ I mutter, gazing at her gorgeous body and wondering what the hell this pill is. I want to cry from love.
‘Sex is wonderful between us because it’s sex.’
Sex is wonderful between us because it’s sex? Now what the fuck does that mean? But I don’t want to interrupt her flow, so I nod my head and smile encouragingly.
‘Nobody’s going to tell me what to do with my body…’ (I nod and smile again.) ‘I don’t just love you and make love to you because you’re a man…’
‘Exactly.’ Nod, smile.
‘My mother thinks we exist only to produce babies, that we’re nothing if we’re infertile or have hysterectomies, that love isn’t creative enough by itself.’ She spreads her thighs and bends over backwards. ‘There are only bisexuals and liars,’ she says across the white void of my room. ‘And the sexually dull.’
‘Bravo!’
‘Absolute heterosexuality and homosexuality are both extremes and therefore suspect, maybe pathological conditions, not natural.’
‘They sound like diseases.’
She stands up straight again.
‘How long till this paint dries?’
The pill encourages me to believe that we could probably make love from opposite ends of the room.
‘My mother believes she’s become worthless since she had a hysterectomy. Any man would value her life more than she does. She’s volunteered to be in chains. It’s a bit primitive.’
I wonder where the clock hands are. Which came first, man or woman? When was the first hysterectomy carried out? How many have been performed worldwide since? And mastectomies, castrations, vasectomies?
‘I suppose democracy wasn’t thought up by everyone. It was probably imposed on the masses by a few.’
‘Cruel to be kind,’ I murmur.
‘Life can’t be about everyone having to do the same thing. If someone wants to be in love with a walrus, that’s up to them.’
‘Perhaps we’ve come full cycle and we’re turning into Plato’s unisexual being.’
‘Or is it double-sexed?’
Oh, there’s a thought. It’s so easy to forget, to become muddled.
‘I wonder what’s waiting for us out there,’ I ruminate. ‘Probably some bloody great horror that we can’t begin to imagine. Do you think anyone predicted the Black Death before it happened, or the Great War, or the Holocaust? There might be something extra-special just for us.’ (I’m aware that this could sound a little gloomy and discouraging to the young.)
‘The Buddhists say we’re heading for a period of great peace.’
‘I think they’ve got that wrong.’
Perhaps we could just watch the horror on holograms. I could move back in time and make a hologram of the angry one before she became angry. Keep her with me all the time, and she’d be perpetually happy. She’d be Gaby. I loved her so much. And that’s what it is, of course. That’s why I can’t remember her name. She’s my Gaby, before she became me. Where are the clock hands now? Which came first – the lover or the beloved?

***

I said that I nearly died of love. That I have nearly died of love. One thing is certain. Love precedes the murder of love, unless time is moving backwards, in which case the murder of love precedes love. Another thing is uncertain, in either of these cases. The lover may die as a result.
When I looked at her in the mirror (looking glass?), whom did I see? Whom were we really trying to kill, each other or ourselves, or the unacceptable face of love? Did I know where I ended and she began? Am I rewriting history? Was it purer than that? Were we like Layla and Majnun, who never killed their love, however much the world attacked it? Did I wander in the desert, dressed in rags, my legs adorned by sores? Did we rid ourselves of sex? Could I say, as the story’s Persian author, Nizami, did: ‘My love is purified from the darkness of my lust, my longing purged of low desire, my mind freed from shame. I have broken up the teeming bazaar of the senses of my body. Love is the essence of my being. Love is fire and I am wood burned by the flame. Love has moved in and adorned the house, my self has tied its bundle and left. You imagine that you see me, but I no longer exist: what remains is the beloved…’ ? Could I say that about myself, or her, or the situation? Was I purged? Am I purged? Shall I wear my trousers purged? Like a patient etherised upon a table? I like to shag upon a table, because it reminds me of food. I love it when she spreads herself across a chequered table-cloth, upwards or downwards, and writhes with desire, scrutable. Nothing moves me more than the human hip in motion, the motional loin.

***

‘I used to wank into a sock every night,’ says Summers.
‘Oh, please.’
‘That fooled the Jesuits. Then I’d go to Communion next morning.’
He’s reminiscing about our schooldays, spent in the Jesuit prison in the North of England during the Sixties, far from anywhere. Bartok interjects.
‘I also was taught by Jesuits, even though I was half-Jewish. It made me very wily for Communists because I had to outwit Jesuits at age of fourteen.’
‘I outwitted them too,’ says Summers, ‘because I didn’t go to Confession first, like all the other boys. Everybody thought I was very holy.’
‘I didn’t.’
He frowns at me.
‘Darling, are you going to stay there forever?’
‘Until it dries.’
‘You might starve.’
‘Ich hab’ auf Gott und Recht Vertrauen…’ sings Leonora. ‘I put my faith in God and justice…’
‘Wouldn’t you like me to throw you some food?’
‘No, thanks.’
He’s still dressed for tennis, and his energy levels are high, since his partner never showed up. ‘I could have sworn we said ten at twelve.’ He drinks my beer and moons at me again.
‘My God!’ shrieks Bartok at the sight, running back to the kitchen for more of my wine.
The telephone rings, and Summers hurls the portable receiver at me across the room. The bodily movement required to catch it makes me look like the hands of the demented clock for a moment.

***

‘I was giving this girl a portion on the front room floor…’ (Front room, sitting room, drawing room, living room – or lounge room, as the Aussies say.) ‘I was giving this girl a portion on the front room floor with a bloody Mary Poppins video playing because that was all I had to mask the noise…’ This is Gary speaking, through the portable telephone, from Brixton, where he lives. He likes to update me on his sexual exploits with nineteen-year-old black girls. Only fairly recently – a couple of years ago – has he stopped being a nineteen-year-old black boy, and is now practically a man. Sitting hunched in my corner, I am grateful for his call. ‘…when suddenly she freezes underneath me and goes all rigid, like a board. Her tits jut into the air and she wallops me on the shoulder, her big eyes bulging. “What’s up, mate?” I ask her with my bum sticking up bollock-naked in the air and my dick ten inches inside her. Suddenly I think she’s dead, then realise she’s staring at something behind me, and it ain’t my fucking bum. Do you know what it is? It’s my mum standing in the doorway, in her nursing sister’s uniform, with her hands on her hips. She’s glaring, right?’ He launches into his impression of his mother’s high-pitched Jamaican voice: ‘“What the hell’s going on here, for the sake of poor Baby Jesus!? You disgusting dirty beasts, get out of my house!” And she boots her out of the house stark naked, with all the neighbours lined up outside, watching and clapping. Then my mum starts posting her clothes through the letterbox, starting with the ear-rings and the high-heeled shoes. I was trying to put my clothes on, but it was difficult because I had a carpet burn on my left knee, and she was calling me “Filthy scoundrel!” I don’t know where she got that from. I grabbed all my records because I didn’t want her playing frisbee with them, and we ran laps around the coffee table. She was chasing me with the vase Dad brought back from Kuwait. “You’re just like your father!” she yells at me. “Dirty filthy child! No respect for women!” “I do have respect for women,” I shout back. “I’m not like Dad. We’ve been going out for years.” I met her last week. Poor girl’s had to change her uni course and leave the borough. My mum’s had the house re-blessed and made me wash all the walls down with lemon. She’s changed the carpet and made me pay for it. She didn’t go to Cheap Carpets of Brixton: we’re talking Allied here. I had to go to church and sit at the back like It. Everybody said: “I heard about your bit of trouble.” My haircut didn’t go down a treat, either. I’ve been trying out a flat-top. It was the vase that shocked me. She was really getting round the coffee table, and I never knew she could move like that. Or lift things. When I go shopping with her, she’ll usually make me carry the two cans of Lilt.’
Writing is like talking, listening, having therapy, making love. More than anything, it’s like dreaming. It takes the tritest elements of the day and gives them significance. It can be frightening. It lends beauty like a pawnbroker. It speaks of loneliness like a priest, a victim. It ties up loose ends with threads of varying thickness. I have the distinct impression he’s wanking down the telephone.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why are you breathing funny?’
‘I was just bending down to water the plant.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Sort of. I was bending over your photograph.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Susan Sontag called photography a sort of soft murder.’
‘There’s nothing soft here.’
‘Which way were you bending?’
‘Over.’
Now that’s what I call a hidden agenda.

***

Some writing is a comfort because it makes you feel a part of your society. The Americans understand it well, because it gives them a warm glow, like the one they get from listening to Bing Crosby sing. Then there’s writing which makes you feel part of the human race, however strange you are, and it invites in all the other strangers too, offering a very different sort of comfort. French meals versus hamburgers.
‘She can’t work you out at all, my mum. She calls you the hecksecutive. “How come you mixing with these hecksecutives?” she says. “He ain’t no executive, mum,” I say to her. “It’s the church upbringing puts you in touch with all kinds of people,” she says. “All right, mum,” I tell her.’
Mum’s the word. A famous writer – French, I think – once said that no mother ever understands her son, however much she thinks she does. ‘I know my son well,’ she may say. ‘He is not gay.’ Oh, yes, you think, then why did he ask me to go to bed with him last night, when I was minding my own business?

***

‘With a grenade in one hand,’ said Sir Roger Casement, ‘and in the other, the cock of a Belfast boy…’ No wonder some of his own side were pleased to see him hanged by the British.
Is sex about escaping the persona? Or… Do we have a sexual persona? If so, is it different from our other persona? Or personas? What persona would be on offer from someone holding the cock of a Belfast boy? Or a hand grenade? Do we come closer to ourselves through sexual union, or travel away? Do we attain union through sex? Denial is everything. Once, I was crossing the Severn Bridge with the angry one whose name I’ve forgotten and she said something to irritate me, so I turned furiously to her, rasping: ‘What did you say?’ We were driving at sixty miles an hour, and the wind was blowing both the bridge and the car as we glared at one another over the gorge. Or is it a gap? She smiled innocently at me and said quietly: ‘I never said that.’
Denial is all. Gary once told me that a pretty friend of his said: ‘I wouldn’t let no batty man bugger my arse for a million quid, man.’ Half an hour later he’d come down to ten thousand. Somewhere in the universe one day a country will introduce compulsory homosexuality. Nothing to do with human rights, of course, the reason will be entirely financial: bonking a member of your own sex will be declared the most effective form of birth control. Already actors are being replaced by holograms and computer images, so before long humanity could be represented entirely by non-humans. With computers designing the problems they face, who’s to say this is worse than leaving Mottram Duckworth to write poems? Losing sight of the human soul is like being inside my room. White-out. Blizzard.
I’m glad I left the mirrors unpainted, although from this angle they reflect only more white.

*****

FIVE
THE TWILIGHT ZONE

Red, red, red. Everything was red in every direction, even the bloody kangaroos. I was in The Red Centre of Australia, working as a penniless cook in the travelling circus, because I’d been let down back in England and gone broke out there in Oz, unable to reach home. The Red Centre. The centre of what, I’d like to know? It’s in the middle of nowhere and it’s all red. The earth, the sky, the air I breathed, the water I drank and the fire I’d like to have torched it with. I met a girl there. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Scarlett.’ Oh, for fuck’s sake. Nevil Shute might have found something to write about it, but I can’t. ‘Welcome to the twilight zone,’ said the tent boys when I arrived. ‘It’s not like the real world in here.’ And it wasn’t. It was like a red prison in which people come and go: one of them even talked of Michelangelo. The bush children giggled with delight at the fornicating lions. But I loved the life, however hard the work, and for a very short time it was home.
‘May I ask why you started painting at this end of the room,’ asks Murphy, interrupting my reminiscences, ’and finished, or didn’t quite finish, over there?’
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time!’ I shout, in order to be heard.
‘Oh.’
‘But now I realise that my life would be far better if I’d done it the other way round!’
‘Myself now,’ he mumbles drunkenly, ‘I would have done it the other way round.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I would have started over there and finished here.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d have worked it out on paper first.’
‘Of course.’
Suddenly Mottram Duckworth storms into the hall from the kitchen, holding aloft a soggy notebook and glowering in the doorway, outraged.
‘Look what your cleaner has done!’ he shrieks. ‘She threw it in the dustbin!’ (And showed more sense than all the leading critics of the day.) ‘It’s ruined!’
‘Oh dear.’
‘They’d have paid a fortune for this in Austen!’
‘Perhaps Oxford could buy it cheap.’
‘Is that a chattel I haven’t listed?’ asks Murphy, seizing the soggy pulp.
‘No!’ roar Duckworth and I simultaneously, agreeing on something for the first time ever.
‘Wie kalt ist es in diesem unterirdischen Gewölbe!’ shouts Leonora. ‘How cold it is in this underground vault!’
‘Das ist natürlich,es ist ja so tief,’ replies the gaoler, Rocco, ‘Of course it is; it’s so deep down.’
They stuck Casement in a basement, as I recall, before they hanged him.
‘Never mind,’ declares Duckworth, attempting an air of triumph, ‘I shall do what Carlyle did when his maid burned the manuscript of his History Of The French Revolution. I shall start again and make it even better.’
‘Oh God,’ I moan.
‘I shall apply for a grant to finance it.’
Groan.
‘I’ll make it twice as long.’
‘Aagh!’ (Well, that’s how they spell it in boys’ comics.)
‘I’ll buy a computer and put it on disk.’
Sob. (Boys don’t sob.)
Hitherto, one of Duckworth’s affectations has been to abhor the new technology. Once he’s computerised, we’ll never be able to lose his stuff, unless I can introduce a virus. But it’s no good: his poems are everywhere, translated into dozens of cheapened languages. Civilisation mourns the lost plays of Sophocles, so why the hell can’t we lose the poems of Mottram Duckworth? We must lose them, because beings might arrive from another planet one day and discover them. We could all be judged by the poems of Mottram Duckworth, and our development compared with that of the inhabitants of other galaxies. They’ll wage war on us…

***

‘Darling, if I develop Alzheimer’s, please knock me on the head with a mallet. I may have my faults, but I’m not the vegetable type.’ He’s eating what must be very nearly the last of my food, and drinking my beer. ‘We’re a lost civilisation. Everything’s breaking down. All our toys are breaking.’ He is dressed as Bluebeard. ‘Every major theory that I grew up believing has been disproved or overturned – every single one. It’s very dispiriting, and hard to know what to believe.’ Beer and philosophy have slowed him down, making him almost slur his words. ‘Did you know that in the Fifteenth Century the world’s largest city wasn’t even heard of by people in Europe? They didn’t know it was there. It was in South America, and we only discovered it after it was gone. Think about that – you’re living in the biggest bloody city on earth, and nobody else knows you’re there. Or…’ He takes another gulp of beer. ‘You’re living in London and you think you’re living in the biggest bloody city on earth, but you’re not. It makes you think, doesn’t it?’
I can’t stop thinking about the lost plays of Sophocles. They’re like lost lives. Parallel lives. Parallel plays. The plays between the cracks. Like acoustic shadows, which are the lost sounds of battle from certain perspectives. And the lost plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, the lost and found plays of Menander. It makes you wonder.
‘Of course, most murderers are the least dangerous members of society,’ continues Summers, stroking his false beard, ‘because people usually murder someone they’ve loved. Once they’ve done it, all their passion’s spent and they’re no longer a threat.’
‘They’ve had their royal moment,’ says Bartok behind him. ‘Goot mornink.’ He drains his glass. ‘I knew one in prison. He was very serene.’
How many murderers live on this planet? What percentage know they’ve committed murder? The Shona people of Zimbabwe have no word for murder. Or is it the Ndebele? How many murders have I been a party to?
‘…party to?’ echoes Summers, making me nervous that he can read my mind, until I work out that he is saying ‘…party too?’ to Bartok. ‘Why don’t you come to the party too?’ he has asked.
‘O Gott! Wech ein Augenblich!’ sings Leonora. ‘God, what happiness!’ ‘O unaussprechlich süβes Glück!’ adds Florestan. ’Oh, inexpressible joy!’
‘Perhaps I’ll go as Hitler,’ announces Summers. ‘Sometimes he wore a big leather overcoat, though it looked like PVC. Do you think your lovely ex would like to come along as Eva Braun? I’ll go and ask her.’
Staring at the props he has thrown me – the unopened can of beer, the telephone, the skull – again I ask myself: Do I or don’t I? It would be so easy to cross the floor, smear the paint, and start again. Or would it? I don’t think it would be at all easy.
‘Would you like me to wheel television into doorway?’ asks Bartok.
‘Why?’
‘You could watch news.’
‘No. It changes too fast.’
Suddenly the entryphone buzzes beside him. Which is odd, because everyone so far has wandered in from the street without buzzing anything. Bartok picks up the receiver and speaks into it.
‘Hello and goot mornink! And happy birthday! Oh…’ He looks at me. ‘It is Jehovah’s Witness. She is asking if I think world is in state of crisis. What do you think?’
‘Say yes.’
‘Yes.’ A long pause while he listens to the response. ‘She asks what we should do about it.’
‘Tell her I’m having a think.’
‘We are thinking about it. And many, many children! What? No, no, that is just expression – why be so literal? Goot mornink!’ He replaces the entryphone receiver. ‘She was going to become very technical. All that talking.’
All that talking… I imagine the white walls covered in words. The human mind swamped by language, creating a blizzard. All that confusion. Like the inside of a skull covered in graffiti.
‘Talking gets you in and it gets you out,’ says Bartok.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s like war. You reach point where you owe it to your dead to go on. If you ruin relationship through talking, try to heal it same way.’
‘I’m not at all sure that’s a good idea.’
‘After all, love is disease.’
‘Maybe only when diseased people fall in love.’
At which point Mottram Duckworth enters the exit, announcing: ‘I am thinking great thoughts.’
‘Don’t forget to share them with Edna.’
‘I don’t know why you employ her, as it’s difficult to see what purpose she serves.’
And he heads for the lavatory, leaving me to wonder why societies value the people who dirty lavatories more than those who clean them. And why a useless human is more valued than animals. If a man points a rifle at the last member of a threatened species, should we kill the man and save the animal? At that moment is the human life devalued, and the animal’s more sacred?
‘Bestrafet sei der Bösewicht,’ sing or sings the chorus.
‘Der Unschuld unterdrückt.’
‘Let Nemesis fall on the villain
‘Who oppressed the innocent.’
‘Gerechtigkeit hält zum Gericht
‘Der Rache Schwert gezücht…’
‘Let justice draw her avenging sword
‘In retribution…’

***

How many paving stones are there in Manhattan, how many bricks in Europe? How many window panes in the world, how many doors in India? How many lions in the South of France? How many men were killed by sharks during World War Two? How many erections are currently being experienced in the western hemisphere? How many skeletons are there in the British Isles?
‘England is funny place,’ announces Bartok. ‘I will never really understand why Romans came here. I’m surprised they considered it fit for human habitation. I would have expected it to be used as prison island for criminally insane.’
‘The right place for you then,’ I say ungraciously. ‘I used to think that immigration and the blending of races might jig it up a bit, but people seem to become miserable as soon as they get here. Or do miserable people choose to come to England? Do jollier people go to France and Italy?’
‘No.’
‘Are the skies above Heathrow full with planeloads of miserable people waiting to land here, knowing they can find true unhappiness in England?’
‘Human goulash. English hospitality is curious thing. English people often surround themselves with chairs which they never ask you to sit on. And parties are designed to make you feel uncomfortable and awkward, like victim of three-camera set-up. Subtext of their thoughts can be very boring – often more boring than text. Life they find demeaning. And sex is so upsetting for them, age of consent should be raised to eighty.’
‘The North is more civilised,’ I insist.
‘Not when it produces Mottram Duckworth.’
‘And the Moors Murderers.’
‘And Duckworth. But I won’t hear one word against Scotland. Happy birthday!’

***

‘I think Mum’s been getting a portion,’ says Gary, who has rung back. ‘I was going through her holiday snaps – you know she went to Jamaica with Les from down the road? – well, I’m looking at this picture and she’s in the water, smiling at the camera, all alone, right? There’s no Uncle Maurice, Aunt Bibs, Auntie Lucille: just Mum, smiling. “That’s a nice bikini you’ve got on, Mum,” I tell her. ‘That isn’t a bikini, it’s a swim-suit!” and the final syllable soars up towards the Caribbean sky. “Well it looks like a bikini to me, Mum. And where’s Les?” “He’s taking the pho-toh!” “Where’s all the family then, Mum?” “They were all busy that day!” “All the family here, and everyone from the church, they’re thinking ‘allo, it’s a bit odd, because Les’s wife didn’t go with them, you see…’
‘Why not?’
‘She said she didn’t want to travel all the way to the West Indies but she made it to the Seychelles last year, didn’t she?’
‘Is Les white?’
‘Yes. It gets worse. The three of them used to go shopping together. Now it’s just Mum and Les.’
‘And he carries the Lilt?’
‘He carries the Lilt. Tropical sunshine taste.’
Human goulash, I wonder, or human blizzard?
How many goulashes have been cooked since the discovery of fire? How many blizzards have blown since the last Ice Age? When will the next one blow past the clock outside, and will it become impossible to see which way the hands are hurtling? Will they still hurtle?

***

‘”Friendship’s full of dregs,” said Apemantus in Timon Of Athens.’ I’m addressing Summers who’s dressed as Hitler in PVC.
‘That’s only because we’ve drunk from your fountain.’
‘You’ve drunk from my fridge.’
‘And you shall drink from ours.’ A pause. ‘Who’s Apemantus?’
‘A churlish, misanthropic philosopher.’
A flushing sound heralds Duckworth’s emergence from the lavatory.
‘I now know how I’ll make my poem better,’ he announces.
‘You’ll write it in invisible ink,’ says Summers, almost collapsing at his own joke. Duckworth scowls at the laughing Führer but is distracted by Murphy waving a piece of paper.
‘I’m ready to serve a writ on you now,’ he informs me.
‘No, stay where you are!’ I shout as he is about to step onto the painted floor. I’ve become semaphoric again, waving my arms frantically.
‘Ah, thank you,’ says Bartok, taking the writ and replacing it with a glass of wine.’
A crash sounds from the kitchen, and the angry one appears holding aloft another broken vase.
‘One fewer for you, Mr Murphy,’ I say philosophically.
‘Darling,’ says Hitler, ‘how long are you going to stay there?’
‘As long as it takes.’
‘You may need to write letters.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I‘ll write them for you, then fold them into darts and throw them over. You could stamp them.’ He starts banging out a stamping rhythm on his PVC overcoat. ‘That must be how music got invented!’ He whips off his trousers and moons at everyone through the crack in the overcoat.
If the hands of the clock would stop in the 1920s or 30s I could photograph him now and ruin Hitler’s chances of taking over the world. One soft murder to prevent all the hard ones to come.
‘Fuck you, Adolf,’ I mutter.
‘Der Unmensch wollt’ in dieser Stunde,’ sings the gaoler, Rocco.
‘Vollziehn an Florestan den Mord…’
‘This monster at this very moment
‘Intended Florestan’s murder…’
At which point the mooning Hitler farts loudly into the room.
‘”He that will have peace, God gives him war,”’ I say, quoting George Herbert.
But nobody hears me, because Summers has whipped them into a frenzy and the din is too loud to let them hear. However, I notice Bartok returning the writ to Murphy’s paper-filled pocket and think about what the cynical Apemantus said in Timon:
‘What a coil’s here!
Serving of becks and jutting-out of bums!
I doubt whether their legs be worth the sums
That are given for ‘em. Friendship’s full of dregs:
Methinks false hearts should never have sound legs.
Thus honest fools lay out their wealth on curtsies…’
And that might not even have been written by Shakespeare. It’s part of the lost and found of literature.

*****

SIX
SEVEN SIDES OF A TRIANGLE

I’m serving, Arabella’s receiving. The first ball crashes into the net. Arabella stares straight ahead. On my second service I strike the ball more forcefully. It hops cleanly into the box and sails past Arabella who makes no attempt whatever to return it. She remains rooted to the same spot centre court to receive my next delivery. Again it flies past her unchallenged. Soon the score has reached 40-love. I call out.
‘It’s okay to hit it back, Arabella!’
‘Yes, I know that, Stephen – but I don’t want to!’
It was obviously time for her appointment at the Warneford, Oxford’s celebrated loony bin.

***

Arabella had suffered many breakdowns over the years and had a weekly meeting with a psychiatrist at the Warneford. (As a child I had a horror of Oxford University because all the undergraduates my family knew took their degrees from the Warneford, which had a reputation for getting more Firsts than any of the colleges. In fact, it was known as ‘Oxford’s best college’.)
‘What’s the quickest way?’ I ask, starting my car.
She directs me onto the by-pass and is soon talking about her late husband, the poet Nevil Hunt.
‘He wasn’t quite gay, Stephen, but very nearly. He got awfully passionate about people. He was wild about the poems of that bloody Rufus Locke. Do you know, he had me in tears the day before yesterday on the telephone…’
‘Rufus Locke?’
‘Yes. Now I’m planning my own poem about a violent murder, and the victim seems to be a mixture of Nevil and Rufus Locke.’
She gives me some complicated instructions which take us onto many side roads, and before long we seem to be travelling on the by-pass again, back in the opposite direction.
‘Lately I’ve started to feel very high again. Higher than I’ve felt since my last breakdown. I can’t blame it on that bloody Locke, unfortunately. It started a week before I talked to him.’
More complicated instructions follow, which seem to be taking us further and further from the Warneford, but I don’t want to interrupt her.
‘Do you know, I’m taking on Nevil’s personality and trying to kill him at the same time. I’m trying to get some of his poems published posthumously and I don’t even like them. That’s what I had the row about with Locke.’
I look at the mileometer and see that we’ve travelled twenty-eight miles already, trying to get from one side of Oxford to the other. Eventually, several miles later, we arrive at the hospital.
‘This seems a very roundabout route, Arabella. Circuitous. We’ve done about seven sides of a triangle.’
‘Well, it’s the way I always come.’
That’s why you’re coming here once a week, I thought.

***

When she comes back to the car after her session with the psychiatrist, Arabella looks crestfallen.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘She says I’ve got to cut down to half a bottle of wine a day.’
‘Oh.’
A long, thoughtful pause.
‘But half bottles are so difficult to buy nowadays!’
She falls silent as I start the car and decide to drive back to Summertown straight through the centre of the city, avoiding even the Marston Ferry Road.
‘So many decisions to make about things, Stephen. Nevil used to control my reading, you know.’ (She had a First in English from Oxford.) ‘He never let me see much theatre. Once we went to a couple of short Pinters. One was about a woman sitting in her kitchen, and I can’t remember anything at all about the other. After his death I started going a bit more. Not long ago I saw Children Of A Lesser God.’ (This was the Eighties.) ‘I hated it. My sister took me, and we had a row about it. I told her that if the girl in the play had behaved like that in a mental hospital, they’d have given her five hundred milligrammes of chlorpromazine and that would have shut her up.’
We drive down Morrell Avenue towards London Place and St Clement’s.
‘How did your session go?’ I ask her.
‘Do you know, this is my tenth psychiatrist. They’ve given me a woman now because I kept falling in love with all the others. Well, not all…’ A dark look comes into her eye. ‘There was one I hated.’ She brightens a little. ‘Now I write to this woman before the session, outlining the things I’d like to discuss. I used to write to Number Nine too – I was madly in love with him – suggesting we run away together and sort out British psychiatry. He declined and passed me onto this woman. Number Eight went a bit funny himself.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, we had similar experiences. I’d been going through a massive dive and was just coming up again when I read in the paper that the Belgrano and the Sheffield had been sunk. I didn’t know anything about the Falklands War. I hadn’t heard it was on. Nobody told me. So I decided I wasn’t getting better and had a relapse.’
‘Christ!’
‘Now psychiatrist Number Eight had just finished a hard day’s shift at the Warneford – it was my appointment day – and he went home and watched the news on television. The Russians had shot down a Korean aeroplane and killed two hundred people. He switched off the telly and never saw the news again for two years…’
‘And…?’
‘One evening he put it on and saw that the Sikhs had blown up an Air India Jumbo and killed four hundred.’
‘Good God.’
We’re driving along the High Street.
‘Next day he had to go to Cork to deliver a paper on Humour In Psychotherapy…’
‘Yes…?’
‘And they brought all the bodies ashore there – right into Cork City.’
‘That must have finished him off.’
‘Not at all! He had such a good time at the symposium and at Jury’s Hotel that he never even knew it was happening. They look very wounded in Ireland if you say no to anything less than triples. He’d switched off the telly before they showed the bodies being brought in – and nobody mentioned it in the bar.’
We drive on in silence along the Banbury Road until I draw up outside Arabella’s house. A man is sitting in a car parked in front of her front door.
‘Oh look,’ says Arabella, ‘there’s the medical insurance man! I went to see him about a job, but I was absolutely sure I wouldn’t pass the medical. I refused to even tell him my doctor’s name. He’s been begging me to take the job ever since. Selling medical insurance. I think he wants to spend the working day discussing Eng Lit. Do you play squash?’
‘No,’ I lie.
‘Oh, by the way… Those poems of yours you gave me to read…’
I’d been waiting for this.
‘Yes?’
‘I hated them. Drop it. Not your medium. They were awful. Especially the one about death.’
‘That was mostly by Shakespeare. I just played about with it a bit.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have. Hated it. Very depressing. I threw it away. I know what you should do…’
‘What?’
‘Turn my murder poem into a film script when I’ve finished it.’
‘Yes, Arabella.’
‘Okay, Stephen, thanks for everything. Hope we didn’t use up too much petrol. Now I must go and see what this man wants to discuss with me. Bye.’
‘Goodbye, Arabella.’
She slams the passenger door and sticks her head in through the open window.
‘Badminton?’
‘No!’

***

The following week, as a result of the discussion topic Arabella proposed in her letter, the Warneford gave her psychiatrist Number Eleven. A man.
And the medical insurance man, a keen motorist who knows most of Oxfordshire’s lanes and by-passes by now, drives her up there every Wednesday, their half-day at work. All afternoon he discusses the finer points of Augustan poetry with a defrocked Christian Brother who’s convinced that Dr Johnson would have made a really good neurologist if only he’d stayed in Lichfield in 1737.
I gave up racquet sports and sold my car.

*****

SEVEN
ACOUSTIC SHADOWS

Once I was nearly hacked to death for using the word fucking as an adjective. Murphy has evoked this memory.
‘I’m shocked by the use of swear words,’ he informs me. ‘I’ve noticed that much swearing takes place in this flat.’ Which is interesting, considering that he’s supposed to be deaf. I predict his next sentence. ‘I always say that swearing is the result of a poor and unimaginative vocabulary.’
‘No it fucking well isn’t.’
My nearly being hacked to death happened in the North of Thailand. ‘I’ve missed my appointment at the Indian Consulate because you took so long to fill in that fucking form,’ I told a tour operator in Chiang Mai, stressing the noun. Next moment he’s brandishing a machete in my face. ‘Don’t you tell me fucking!’ he screams through glittering teeth. Now, I’ve always considered myself rather calm in a crisis, finding the nine-to-five things in life make me panic the most. ‘It’s my language and I’ll use it as I like,’ I replied, looking at the whites of my eyes in his fifteen-inch blade.
As I say, I’m calm in a crisis. At school once, Summers accidentally shot me in the face with an air-pistol, and nobody was aware of it because I was so insouciant. Another time, Raymond Rivers dropped a one-ton swing-bridge onto my foot, crushing the bones of my big toe audibly. (I heard them crunch.) I merely said in a chillingly calm voice: ‘Would you mind raising the bridge, please?’ Now, in that travel office in Chiang Mai I was looking at myself in the shiny steel of a fifteen-inch machete blade wielded by a furious safari entrepreneur. Ten seconds earlier he’d been perfectly placid, and his wife had just used the machete to cut a mango, offering me a slice. And the question I found myself asking was, Whose language is it anyway? I say it’s mine, but is it his too? Do foreigners who distort it for the tourist trade have a valid share? How many Englishes are there? Does everyone who uses Shakespeare’s tongue as a lingua franca own a piece of it? Why do people who can hardly speak English at all get so upset about a word like fuck?
I hold two contrary views simultaneously. Firstly, I don’t believe in the existence of swear words as something morally unacceptable. (Therefore nothing is wrong about using fucking as an adjective or a verb.) Secondly, I believe we need hard words like fuck for special occasions, to add crunch. (These are especially handy for men and women of letters.)
Noël Coward and Ken Tynan knew a thing or two about language. One evening in New York, after Tynan had given the Master a bad review, they ran into one another at Sardi’s. Coward said simply: ‘You are a cunt,’ before sitting down and regaling him for hours with his enormous theatrical knowledge. One crunching swear word was all it took: anything else would have been excessive. At this moment in history, as the world embarks on a series of wars, the word cunt is unacceptable to many people. (‘Mostly pricks talking balls,’ says Summers.) Yet the Wife of Bath has never been blamed for talking about her queynte.
‘If Michelangelo had been a bus driver,’ claims Summers, ‘the traffic would have flowed much more beautifully. Some people make the word fuck sound very beautiful.’
My Gaby makes the act very beautiful.

***

As I gaze into the whiteness of the paint, I can almost see the machete blade again. I’ll write about this later, I told myself as I looked into my eyeballs. The pen is mightier than the sword, and the writer always has the last word. Knowing this teaches him or her patience. ‘Writers are always most dangerous when silent,’ said the writer Charles Causley. ‘The last full-stop’s yours,’ an Australian woman told me once in Kathmandu. But that question comes back: how many Englishes are there? A lot, I think, and I’ve encountered several of them on my travels: Indian English, Irish English, American, Caribbean, Australian, African, Binglish, Hinglish, Pinglish, Singlish… And tourism English. Once I arrived at a shop in Khartoum, only to find it closed, which I thought mildly irritating. ‘Oh, how rotten,’ I said casually. ‘It is not rotten!’ a neighbouring shopkeeper screamed at me. ‘Why you say it is rotten? It is not! Don’t you say is rotten! It is you – you are rotten!’ Lucky I hadn’t said ‘fucking rotten’.
Murphy would never have understood Brendan Behan’s mother. On the day of his funeral, people complained she was drunk. ‘Sure, you can sing your sorrow as well as speak it,’ she said. A wise woman. Perhaps she was the one mother who understood her son.

***

When I was six and seven I was in love with the number two. Being stuck in this corner has made me remember the past, and all sorts of things are flooding back. I am a child again, thinking about the mathematics of love.
Everything had to be in twos. One had to be two. Everything. I didn’t like any other number: if I had to answer a question with another number, secretly I would say two to myself. Maybe it meant I was gay or I’d lost a twin nobody had told me about. Then I became obsessed with three and seven and I began to hate two. Soon I couldn’t bear the sound of the word. Twoooo. It made me shudder. It was like a horrible white-out, and I couldn’t bear to say it. I would mutter one or three in order to bypass it. Three was my number. Threeee. Everything had to be three, and sometimes seven which rhymed with heaven. Eeeee versus Ooooo. Odd versus even. Two was a pair of parallel lines, but you could make a triangle out of three. Perhaps I was bisexual and wanted one of each. Or perhaps I was heterosexual and wanted two women, yet I couldn’t want that because I didn’t want two of anything. Maybe I wanted three of them. But what did I want seven of? Perhaps I was monosexual and greedy. Or polysexual. Or the sole survivor of septuplets.
(If I am a child again, why am I having such pornographic visions of Gaby doing wonderful things to me, and my doing wonderful things to her? I see the jutting-out of bums.)
That was my introduction to the mathematics of love, and I didn’t know that it, or they, would lead me into such paroxysms of passion. Paroxysms which could and would never add up. I flirted with other numbers, but never with the same intensity. They hardly counted.

***

What is it about human beings that makes us fall in love with them? Why do some of them seem so complete? What are the minute subliminal calculations we make about them? Tell me that… Why do we sometimes feel so satisfied when looking at two halves of the same face? Is this mirroring effect, this looking-glass effect, part of the appeal? Why did I find one lover so much more beautiful when I looked at her in the mirror? Do we fall in love with the parts or the whole? Which parts, and what is the whole? Why do I memorise faces like I used to memorise my times tables?
Generally speaking, we fall in love with people who possess the following: two eyebrows, made up of many individual components; dozens of eyelashes, always a plus; two eyes, though once I had a very beautiful lover who had been blinded in one of them at the age of fourteen; one chin, though this can multiply with the increasing number of years; two ears, though frequently these have been mutilated by fashion or custom and can contain multiples of holes; one nose, which usually looks like the number four in profile if you’re looking from the right side; one mouth, capable of any number of things; two lips, able to form a zero but rarely scoring one. That is, or those are, the mathematics of the human face.
Two legs, two arms, elbows, knees, hands, wrists, etc. These need not all be present but a full house gives you more to hang onto while working out the sexual equation: two feet comprising ten toes, though when I broke my big one some years ago, thanks to Raymond Rivers dropping the bridge on it, my lovemaking was seriously affected as I had underestimated the importance of one decimal digit; two thumbs and eight fingers which can divide other parts of the body for closer inspection. I am inspecting her now: she is the sun and the moon. The mathematics of the body.
Two tits, though mastectomised women can be hugely attractive, and having one never inhibited the Amazons (ditto hysterectomised people, whatever Gaby’s mother thinks); two balls, though once I handled a plastic implant, and one plus one still comes out two (the mathematics of castration and vasectomies is or are harder to calculate); two buttocks: I have never been to bed with anybody who was minus one; one cunt, which at first looks like a vertical minus sign but seldom is; one cock, though these can be mutilated: plus or minus foreskin, or ringed. A boy from Bolton once told me: ‘Me boyfriend’s got an earring through his willēh.’ ‘Isn’t that rather uncomfortable for you?’ I asked, trying to sound considerate and imagining the perils of earring-rubbing buggery. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘he takes it off before he does that to mēh.’ For him this was clearly a plus as the divide was not North-South but the East and West of his buttock cheeks. Which leads me onto the next item (for an item it certainly is). One arsehole: depending on your proclivities, as Summers’ friend learned from his doctor, this can be defined as an entrance or an exit – one way, two ways, a sort of sexual cat-flap.
In fact, the number of holes varies, depending on how you want to categorise them. If you’ve got imagination, there are many vaults in which to deposit the millions which make up an average male emission, and there is or are an infinite number of erogenous nerve endings for both sexes. This is, or these are, what we call the mathematics of the in-between.
I want to be in between her now, between the East and West of her South.
Then there is or are the number of lovers we have had, made up or denied, and the number of lies we have told: the number of lovers in a night, the number of orgasms within a twenty-four hour period, the number of hours, minutes or seconds each intercourse has lasted, the number of other people’s spouses shagged, the number of closet encounters which supposedly straight people have had, and the amount of shame their joy has brought them. The mathematics of betrayal.
Yes, the numbers game. Nobody ever tells the full sexual truth. Not one hundred per cent. Never. This or these is or are known as the mathematics of mathematics.
The mathematics of love is or are as simple as one, two, three – yet I feel that somewhere out there is a hidden number waiting to be discovered. A completely new number which could make us feel complete. A super bingo number, a mega-twinning number which would be like several towns twinning at the same time and attaining unity, or plurality. Like sides of the human face twinning and winning and making us fall in love with them, or it. A sublime sexual calculus: a number that can be added up, subtracted from, multiplied, divided, caressed and loved. A number that’s pansexual: one that will help us to survive, make us feel whole, and truly satisfy the mathematician within us.
In my case it is the number which unites Gaby with me and alters the sum of our parts. A number to die for.

***

Summers once told me that I should be more understanding about sado-masochism. He said it was all about trust and therefore emotionally moving. I said this was a load of crap and that it was the thin end of the wedge of fascism.
‘Oh darling,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t be so against it. After all, I only took it up because you bullied me at school.’
‘When did I bully you at school?’
‘You stuck your finger in my eye in the swimming pool and called me a poof. You and Raymond Rivers.’
‘You shot me in the face!’
‘Did I? I don’t remember that.’ (I couldn’t show him the scar because it had vanished years earlier.) ‘I think you seriously affected my development.’
‘There were other reasons.’
‘You were trying to show me up.’
‘I don’t think I was.’
‘You made me what I am.’
‘I did not.’
‘You did, but I’ll forgive you if you promise to be more understanding about dominance.’
I believe that the goal of a relationship should be equality, but I didn’t bother to tell him. Nor did I quote the Greek adage buzzing inside my head: ‘A bitter end awaits pleasure that lies beyond what is right.’ Who of sense would bother to predict anything in this confused, impossible age of ours? Prophecy has become ridiculous.
Once I sailed up Lake Tanganyika to Burundi and was nearly murdered on the way, but that’s not the point. The important thing is that on my arrival a Verona Father told me about a recent massacre while we sat in a dainty Belgian patisserie. The population was made up of two tribes: a short fat one and a tall thin one. The short fat people were said to be stupid and numerous, while the tall thin ones were clever but outnumbered, so they’d wisely gained control of the army. But just before I got there, a number of them had been butchered by the short fat ones. Reprisals followed, of course, and each side repeatedly avenged the murders of their people. Back and forth went a sense of outrage, as did the moral high ground, until one day the charred remains of fifty children were found by a roadside. And no-one could tell whether they’d been short fat stupid children or tall thin clever ones.
I can see them now, the burnt bones charred from white. We are truly strangers to ourselves at times… But Gaby has taught me to see new parts of myself. ‘You cannot give faces to all people who are oppressed,’ Bartok told me once, ‘or you would be overcome.’
When will this paint ever dry? I have to get out of here: perhaps I could touch it and see… I lightly dab my finger on the floor, and it comes up whitened. Maybe it will never dry.
The scientific achievements are becoming greater, the literary awards larger, but I could swear our intellectual life is diminishing. I’m sure I can see it growing smaller in front of me.

***

‘Darling, couldn’t we get rid of that ghastly Mottram Duckworth? Let me throw him out.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘He’s holding forth but he doesn’t know anything. He’s full of fear and that’s why he needs answers to everything. Fear is the enemy of experimentation.’
‘And answers kill art!’ shouts Bartok, who has appeared beside him. ‘I have confession to make.’
‘What?’
‘I have been asked to make commercial.’
‘Can I be in it?’ asks Summers.
‘But I can’t make adverts. I am not prostitute. I am major Scottish artist.’
‘What will you do?’ I ask.
‘I will be in studio at seven-fifteen tomorrow morning.’

***

This is an age in which students who have never read Brecht are taught Brecht on Shakespeare by lecturers who have never read Shakespeare. You’d be lucky to find two people in England sharing the same culture. Here is the text of an academic proposal I was sent once:
‘The module will provide a selective study of the formative encounter between Cultural Studies and Media Studies, outlining the theoretical frameworks (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, post-modernist) developed to examine and explain media practices in their historical, cultural and ideological specificity. The module will focus on the foregrounding of media institutions as key sites in the production of consciousness, investigating the problematic of the relationship between media texts and media users. It will interrogate the processes governing the generation of meaning, paying particular attention to formulations of readership and reception. The module will be concerned to question the extent to which media practices are reflective and/or constitutive of power relations and ideological formations, centring on representations of gender, race, sexuality and class. It will be taught through a sustained, elaborated case-study (eg: “Britain and Britishness”; “HIV and the Body Politic”) which introduces critical theories in the context of empirical investigation…’
‘Language is emotion,’ Gaby once told me.
‘It’s a barrier, a wall, a fort, an attack,’ I countered, showing her the proposal. (The thing that really scared me was that I had understood it.)
‘Language is emotion,’ she said, stroking my hair.

*****

EIGHT
PROSTITUTES ARE NOT THE ONLY WHORES

‘They’re building a house!’
‘Boo!’
‘A public house!’
‘Whey!’
‘It’s only got one bar!’
‘Boo!’
‘Eighty feet long!’
‘Whey!’
‘There are no barmen in the pub!’
‘Boo!’
‘Only barmaids!’
‘Whey!’
‘They haven’t got any glasses!’
‘Boo!’
‘Only buckets!’
‘Whey!’
‘There’s a hole in each bucket!’
‘Boo!’
‘At the top!’
‘Whey!’
‘They’re not selling any beer!’
‘Boo!’
‘They’re giving it away!
‘Whey!’
This is the refrain of Gary’s mates as they ride the bus to watch their team play. It has been reclaimed from the Sixties, when it was in the domain of moto-cross enthusiasts in Cowley, among others. ‘Sometimes I’d mix it up a bit about the barmen and the barmaids,’ he told me once, ‘but they’d still Boo! and Whey! in the same order. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ It was on one of these coach journeys that his pretty friend lowered his price again and said he ‘wouldn’t do it with no batty man for fifty quid, man.’ Boo! ‘A fiver.’ Boo! All right, he’s giving it away! I really know my son, thinks his Trinidadian mum. He wouldn’t have sex with no-one.
Oh yes he would.

***

In my unpainted corner I’m visited by visions.
‘One day I was lying on a beach in the South of Thailand, a bit stoned, gazing at the water which had a brilliant light playing on it, dazzling my eyes, nearly white…’
‘Spume,’ adds Summers helpfully.
‘When I saw this woman emerging from the sea.’
Whey!
‘Her slender hips caught the sunlight.’
‘Oh la la.’ Bartok has joined us.
‘Still she comes, step by step…’
Whey!
‘Wonderful breasts.’
Whey!
‘Then I see she’s got a dick hanging between her legs.’
Boo!
‘She’s a Lady Boy.’
Boo! Whey!
‘Have I told you about my homosexual friend who went to the doctor?’
‘Yes! Was it really your brother Jasper?’
‘Don’t mention that name in my presence!’
I imagine Gaby naked in front of me. Whey! Her bum is jutting out. Whey! The paint won’t dry. Boo! Leonora sings to Florestan:
‘Liebend ist es mir gelungen,
‘Dich aus Ketten zu befrein…’
‘Love it was that gave me strength
‘To free you from your chains…’
Whey!

***

‘Sometimes prostitution has nothing to do with whoring,’ says Summers.
‘What A pity,’ says Bartok.
‘Accepting payment alleviates guilt.’
‘Even for the poor?’
‘Denial is everything,’ I add.
‘Fear of consequences.’
‘A bitter end awaits pleasure that lies beyond what is right.’
‘Oh dear.’
The angry one could never express her passion in words: it all came through the body. Very powerfully. The rest was denial. ‘I never said that,’ she said. In bed her passion knew no bounds, and I never knew greater happiness. Later she’d scream ‘I don’t love you!’ and go into paroxysms of remorse about her family, her ex-boyfriend or Catholicism or Protestantism or something. I can’t remember which. It was something that shut me out. But having shut me out, she’d try and pull me back in. Confusing. And damaging.
And so she killed me and became me instead, making everything my fault. Saying ‘I never said that’ does not unsay a thing, and some things must be unsaid if there is to be any hope. Denial is not enough. Saying it with the body isn’t quite enough, and lying through the body is too much.
And now I have Gaby who is the angry one in the first flush of love, without guilt or remorse or hate. She has not tried to become me.
‘And yet my love is eternal,’ the poet wrote, ‘if I can fight off disillusion.’
By the time I left Thailand I was convinced that all women were really boys. More than once I was fooled by Lady Boys, including the one who told me she had a car which turned out to be a cock.

***

‘Some people can express passion only through the body,’ says Gary down the telephone. ‘They’re incapable of doing it in words because they’re terrified. Fear of intimacy. It’s an illness, and they’re in hospital. Nil by mouth, they think to themselves, unless they’re taking in a portion of the body.’
‘Rude boy.’
‘Now the human erection’s an interesting thing. Big difference there between boys and girls, men and women.’
‘It has an absolute certainty about it.’
‘Some men’s eyes see an absolute beauty in violence. They try to make love with guns and knives.’
‘The battle of sex. How many sexes are there?’
‘God knows, mate. My uncle tried to beat up my cousin the other day.’
‘Why?’
‘For being gay. And only a few days earlier I’d spotted my uncle coming out of a gay bar himself.’
‘Oops.’
‘I tried to comfort my cousin – I was being the liberal, you see – “You seem very sympathetic,” he said. I think he wanted a portion. He told my family how understanding I’d been, and they all said to me, “Why you being so friendly to him?”’
‘Do we owe it to our dead to go on fighting the war? Should we send more young men over the top?’
‘And young women.’
The absolute beauty of sex, and the absolute panic it causes. And the absolute violence of the bitter end that awaits us…

***

My chattels are going West. Murphy is arranging them for an easy evacuation when the time comes because a time is coming, though most of time is going – and in this place, going fast. And backwards. But with time hurrying backwards, the sun is travelling East. And if my chattels are going West, then I am heading East with the sun.
We used to make love to the sound of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter. ‘Let’s do it…’ she sang. ‘I love the North, South, East and the West of you…’ And she did. She wrote it down in a letter to me. The most romantic letter I’ve ever had.
I’m staring at her. Gaby. At the South of her. Naked. Heaven. Heaven on earth.
‘Liebend sei es hoch besungen:’ sings Leonora,
‘Florestan ist wieder mein.’
‘Lovingly let it be sung:
‘Florestan is mine again.’
When I came home from Thailand and kissed her, I was afraid she’d turn out to be a boy. I was still confused. She kisses like a woman, I thought. That’s a woman’s tongue. It feels like a woman’s breast, without a hard silicone bullet for a nipple. There’s no Adam’s apple protruding from her long beautiful neck. Still, you never know, I told myself, they have all sorts of tricks. I was clinically mad by this point, my mind warped by the angry one and the Lady Boys of Thailand. Nip and tuck. Her clothes fell to the floor, and I looked at her South.
‘I feel a panic attack coming,’ I tell Bartok.
‘Don’t worry. It’s all in your mind.’
‘The worst place for it,’ says Summers.
‘Do you think it would be better if it was in my foot?’
‘At least you have foot,’ says Bartok.
‘He has a marvellous foot, and a wonderful mind.’
North by North-West. What part of the room am I in? I am confused about space now, as I was about time. ‘Let’s do it, let’s fall in love…’ The entire cast of Fidelio sing a rousing chorus.
‘Nie wird es zu hoch besungen,
Retterin des Gatten sein.’
‘Never can we overpraise
‘A wife who saves her husband.’
And so the broadcast ends, having travelled from the East of Europe to London via satellite. Beneath the satellite’s beam and blinded by blizzards within their whitened landscape, no doubt, Letts are doing it.

*****