That was it. Definitely. It was enough that one had to bear oneself in a single frame, but to add to that a bunch of undergraduates who were playing holiday games with broken and empty houses was more than any person could stand without going berserk. A genocidal mood gripped me. I got my bundle together and stormed upstairs. The house was in a far worse state of devastation than I imagined. The banisters had all been knocked down and attempts had been made to wreck the stairs. The rooms were bad. I banged around up into the higher reaches of the house and eventually found the students.
The door to their room had been broken down. There were about six of them. Group desolation. Indeed, they were all variations of a type: their hair dyed red or blue or purple; they wore tight-fitting trousers, the girls wore desperate short dresses, and their eyelids were painted with iridescent sheen. I found it impossible to see one for the other; they seemed so interchangeable. The room had been cleared up, it was almost – a room. There were mirrors all over the place and their interchangeability, reflecting back and forth, compounded my confusion. When I banged in they were lying down, coupled, women to women, men to men, women to men. They jerked their heads, responding awkwardly to the reggae music.
For a long moment words escaped me. One of them said something about going home and returning shortly; another replied, saying that this was a good ‘scene’ and forget home and ‘check it out, yeh.’ Another said: ‘Yeh, pass the joint’ – and for some group reason they all laughed. Two things happened inside me: I was angry; and I instantly became aware of a low point in my season. I didn’t want to eat or anything like that; I was simply possessed with the desire to retch. Instead, I kicked one of their mirrors. They laughed. One of them said: ‘Hey, man, are you the landlord?’ And another said: ‘Pass the joint.’ And another: ‘Join the party.’ And another one (laughingly): ‘I tell you, right: we are landlords.’ The voices merged and became cluttered: ‘We are Communists. Anarcho-Communists.’ My toes felt squashed. ‘Get it, right: we are Comfemists.’ My throat began a curious process of strangling me and my head grew livid with twitches, ‘WE ARE WHITE, BUT WE ARE FUCKTOGETHERNESS, RIGHT.’ There was a diminutive black girl with them. She was cradled by a white girl with a pinched face and elaborate gestures. They were giggling. The music stopped. The girl with the pinched face stood up: ‘WE STAND FOR FREEDOM.’ I turned around, tripped over some stupid fitting and fumbled my way down the beautiful death trap that was the stairs. When I came out into the street I could still hear them laughing.
Well. So. I was yet again unhoused. Landlords have the queerest ways. Anyway. That was that. And who denies that the system (monster invisible) has the capacity to absorb all its blighted offshoots? And so I took to the streets. The long, endless streets. Plane trees growing from cement. I walked and walked and I inspected the houses as I went along. Houses. I avoided taking in the eye-sores that were human beings and stuck my gaze to the pavement in front of me. This was highly rewarding for I was entertained with the shapes of dogshit. This is the height of civilization. This is what to look out for when everything else seems a nightmare. Following these patterns, and where they seemed to lead, I came to a park.
The park was all right, as parks in this place go. All the usual greenery and undulations and grey statues and rundown cafés and playgrounds. And, of course, there were people. I saw old men and women with dogs. Children playing about in all the sorts of games in which they are for ever trapped as children. They ran about, shouted, cried, called names, laughed, were sweet; they formed little groups and kept the brutality intact; they pretended they were adults, calling the different names of animals and birds and flowers. The older people were no different: they trundled around, looked wistfully at the sky, pretended to enjoy their isolation, called to their dogs, looked on fondly and complacently when their dogs urinated: they smiled at the children, sat stiffly on benches. When the children’s football rolled towards them they sometimes kicked it back with a crotchety grace. I saw the young couples nestled together near a tree or in the open fields; they, too, looked complacent – the whole of nature as a lover’s dream. They laughed, nice little laughs without any depth and without any pain. Insipid love; cultured laughter. Or they threw balls at one another, stiffly mimicking the children; or they walked slowly along, hair fingered by the wind, their faces pale pink on blue-white. They, too, must enjoy their isolation.
So I followed my compass. Away from the wreckful siege. It pointed north, to the furthest part where there were no landscaped undulations and no lovers and no children of any sort; where only nobbled and ugly trees consorted and where the earth was slashed in the beginnings of some building project recently liberated from red-tape. I first of all eased myself comfortably on one of these trees and then I searched for an area of unattractive grass. Not far from where I was going to sit there was a bird. Maggots crawled out of its beak. I stared at it for a while, all sorts of temptations going through my mind. It was upturned in a grotesque enchantment and for a while I experienced a cluttered remembrance of all those fairy-tales that were bludgeoned into us when young. The memories irritated me. I spat, generously, and then I lay down. There seemed no distance between me and the sky. I hate skies. They seemed to me a sentimental creation. Skies are something else that has been bludgeoned into us. They are everywhere: in adverts, on window-panes, reflected in patches of dog piss. Hardly a conversation takes place without someone mentioning the sky: hardly you open a novel without the author attempting some sort of description. Honestly. Skies are quite boring. Anyway. I entertained the thought, and I am ashamed of it, and my shame is my business, of how it would be like to be able to leave this body and become part of the sky. The relentless visitations! The upending of myths and the tremendous reversals and the creating of new myths to enable people to become complacent again!
I was about to explore the true foulness of the fantasy when, of all visitations, a bunch of children led by a schoolteacher went past. If they had just tramped past and gone on, and on, it would have been fine. But no. Every sweet solitude had to be destroyed. And they lingered. The teacher told them the names of trees (elm, plane, horsechestnut, etc.), asked them the names of the cloud formations, told them not to fight, asked them to pay attention, and so on. If it had been just a little educational trip it would have been fine. Horrors – the children began to prowl around. They brought back mushrooms, worms skewered on twigs, butterflies cupped in hands; they had a picnic. Then at one point the most annoying thing happened: they saw the enchanted bird If there is anything more annoying than the self-conscious giggles of lovers it is the sound of inquisitive children. This is what happened. Three of the kids were running about, chasing one another. They saw me and stopped. They looked at me and looked at each other and then they laughed. They whispered among themselves. Their interest soon vanished. They had seen the bird.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a bird.’
They stood around the bird. One of them kicked it over and ran away. The others ran with her. They soon came back.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a dead pigeon.’
‘It’s a dead pigeon – ooooooh.’
They ran away again and came back.
‘What is it?’
‘I thought it was a dead duck.’
‘A dead duck!’
‘It’s a dead pigeon. Can’t you see?’
They poked at the bird again. One of them lifted it up delicately with the tip of her fingers as though it were the most diseased thing imaginable. Then she dropped it.
‘Uuuuuuhhhh. It’s got maggots all over it.’
They regarded the bird for a moment. There was a morbid fascination in their eyes. I had seen adult mutations of that look several times. It is a look that is perched between the power for terror and the possibility of inflicting that terror. I have seen it highly concentrated, and hidden, when a policeman regards me at night, a moment before he grabs me by the collar and shoves me out of the Tube station where he knows I have to spend the night. I have seen it frustrated and sly when I encounter bands of youths. I have seen it in the men when they think I am more than eyeing their women. And when I saw it then in the eyes of those children I could not restrain myself from yelling. They looked at me. Shocked. I looked at them.
Their teacher, eyeing me with metallic severity, said: ‘Jane, leave the bird alone. Come on, come along, girls.’
The girls regarded me with utmost suspicion. They stared at me and stared at the bird. I think they must have ascertained the most intriguing relationship between me and that bird. Fear trembled in their eyes. Fear and eternal curiosity. They waited for one of them to make the first movement. One of them did and the next minute they all fled. I watched them. The teacher moved them on. They talked among themselves and kept looking back at me. Maybe they expected me to turn into a huge black bird and take off into the air.
Anyway, I tried to recover my reverie about some sort of room in the sky where lies and illusions and self-deceptions are made naked; and where humanity can recover its very basic sense of terror and compassion. But nothing is allowed me. A dog came towards me from across the fields. It stopped at the tree where I had earlier on eased myself; it raised a hind leg and urinated. Then it too saw me. Sniffed me out. Barked and barked; and then it discovered the bird. It sniffed the bird, carried it off in its mouth, and brought it back again. The dog’s owner, an old man with an absurd sense of self-dignity, trundled past me, saw me, but, thanks to decorum, pretended not to see me.
He stopped, whistled, and said as if to a child: ‘Come on, Jimmy.’ The dog raced off, and the old man followed. Dogs and their owners always make such a pair. That, again, was that. I got up, made my way through the park and hugged the streets again.
It really does pay to avoid the sight of human beings. I had a windfall; I found a pound note. There it was wet and stuck to the ground among the leaves that had fallen from the plane trees. Plane trees grow from cement. That was that. And it called for a celebration of another minor season. I decided to make my way to a favourite pub in town. When I arrived, pushing aggressively through the door, the barman instantly recognized me and that morbid fascination leapt into his eyes. He licked his lips. He had a bullying face with a wild growth of beard. He was tall. He had that angry and grumpy air of one who had kicked himself out of a rebellious and idealistic generation. I suspected that running the pub was for him an act of masochistically gutting the dreams that had abandoned him. The pub stank thoroughly. It had for its clientele the very cream of leftovers, kicked-outs, eternal trendies, hoboes, weirdos, addicts and pedlars. The foulest exhalations of humanity were nowhere so pungent. The pub and its depressing decor, having soaked in the infinitely varied stinks of its customers, recycled its pollutions free of charge with the drinks. And this is precisely what the pub celebrates. I didn’t mind: I had been entangled in enough fights and had uttered enough that was blasphemous to enable me to buy drinks on credit. After all, having a credit is one of the finer things of life.
So the barman watched me. His face twitched. He moved towards me: ‘What will it be? Paying up? Or more credit?’
Before I could make up my mind, an old man rushed at me. The wheels grind: and one has to take the grindings as they come. The old man offered to buy me a drink. We had an unstated pact that had been going on for weeks. Whenever I came in he would rush to buy me a drink and then I was supposed to listen to the accumulation of his problems. He told me everything. He told me about how he had hated going to the war. He told me of his first wife, who had made several attempts to kill him; and his second wife, who didn’t like sex; and how he gave up wives and discovered prostitutes. He told about his overdrafts, how he contracted VD, his suicide attempts, his varicose veins and how they throbbed and about the cat he bought and was forced to kill one wintry night. It was the way it purred, he said, the way it shivered. He simply inundated me with the grimiest details of his condition. I didn’t mind; I had my drinks paid for; and besides, his account of his own suffering had a bracing effect on me. Whenever I saw him I knew that my dose of participation in humanity was assured. Then I could go away, search for a place for the night, and dream about varicose veins and strangled kittens.
He was holding a newspaper. He trembled as if in the grip of a curious sexual fever. His fingers twitched. The barman looked on, his mouth twisted in a peculiar dream of sadism. I ordered two drinks: a half for the old man and a pint for me. The barman licked his lips. The old man stuttered and brought out his crinkled wallet. I fingered my windfall; I laughed. Someone put a coin into the jukebox and plunged that human cesspit into perfect unmelodious gloom. The barman plonked the drinks on the counter, and scowled. I plonked my windfall on the counter, hugged the drinks, and edged the old man into one of the grimy seats.
I tasted my drink and then took a mouthful. The old man smiled. He put his newspaper down on the table and then struggled with his pocket. He was always doing things like that. Grey with decrepit mystery, he brought out a packet of razorblades from the side pocket of his coat.
‘I am going to have a shave,’ he smiled.
‘Here?’
‘No. Later.’
I drank some more. The bar filled up, became crowded, and all the groups that fought for supremacy made their loud noises in the dull lights of the pub. He drank as well. He looked around, from one group to the next, from one spaced-out hippy to another hash-pedlar. He was uncertain. He struggled with his pockets again and brought out a handkerchief. It was stained beyond description.
‘You should be a magician,’ I said.
He smiled, but his face made it into a mask of anguish. That bilious face! He coughed, looked at me, coughed again. He scraped his throat with the cough, out flew his phlegm. The phlegm – thick, green and sludgy – was trapped between his mouth and the handkerchief. Then it dribbled down his chin. He rescued it with the handkerchief. I could see how the handkerchief got its colour. He smiled again, a perfect mask. He was not satisfied: with another deep-grinding cough he dragged up more phlegm; the same thing happened. I caught myself watching. I could no longer taste my drink; everything soon seemed to be composed of the old man’s phlegm. Then he began to talk. Uncertain. He did not know if the pact was still operative; he rambled. He told me of the foxes he saw along the desolate railway tracks at night. He told me of the old woman who had died downstairs. At some point when my disgust had begun to turn upon itself, I told him to stop.
‘What’s the matter?’
That bilious face!
‘I want you to listen to me.’
He nodded. Then without knowing why I began to talk. That’s how we do it sometimes. We talk ourselves into the inescapable heart of our predicament. I told him about the number of times I had been beaten up outside Tube stations at night. I told him where I had to sleep, unmentionable places that leave a dampness in the soul. I told him how I wander around the city inspecting the houses with only a tubful of yoghurt in my stomach. I am on hunger-strike, I said. I can’t strike and I’m hungry. When I had a fever, only the streets saw me through it. I just went on and on till I got so confused in the heart of what I was saying that all I wanted to do was fall asleep. I was tired; I had drained myself; I stopped. When I looked up, the old man was crying. He sobbed and puckered his lips and scratched his hands. I was irritated. I picked up the newspaper and read the story of a Nigerian who had left a quarter of a million pounds in the back of a taxi-cab. The old man still wept and kicked on the seat. Everyone looked at us; they didn’t really care; it was the common run of the place. The old man suddenly stopped crying. He picked up the packet of razorblades and made for the toilet. It occurred to me, as he stumbled against the table and spilled some of our drink, that I needed razorblades. I followed him and after a scuffle disarmed the decrepit magician of the packet. He went back to his chair and I got fed up with the whole farce. I felt dizzy. I recognized the dizziness: it was the mark of a low season. When it first happened to me I thought it was an early sign that I was going mad. Then I learned that all I really needed was a pint of some idiot’s milk and a can of baked beans.
