Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  Pauline Melville

  EATING AIR

  A Novel

  TELEGRAM

  First published by Telegram, 2009

  This eBook edition published 2012

  eISBN: 978-1-84659-112-9

  Copyright © Pauline Melville, 2009, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  TELEGRAM

  www.telegrambooks.com

  I eat the air, promise-cramm’d …

  William Shakespeare

  I rise with my red hair

  And I eat men like air.

  Sylvia Plath

  For Angus

  Note from the Narrator

  I want to tell the story of these extraordinary events without drawing attention to myself or implicating myself in any way. I was involved only in the most tangential way, I can assure you – more by association than anything else. These days it is possible to be locked up for even hinting that terrorism can be glorious or for having the wrong friends and courts don’t take into account the law of unintended consequences. So it’s sotto voce for me. To be on the safe side I have to present truth as fiction.

  I prefer to write in cafés. I move around. The Head in the Sand café in Camden Town is my current haunt. Every morning the proprietor brings me a glass of rum steeped in hot peppers, a black coffee, two dishes of grilled peanuts and my newspaper. I wear dark glasses with the right, coffin-shaped lens knocked out to make sure, in these lean times, that no-one steals my food. The place is a little down-at-heel but I like the sludge-olive décor and those trendily scuffed wooden floors, bentwood chairs and the menu chalked on a blackboard behind the counter. Who am I? I come from Surinam. My complexion is cinnamon. I am as slim as Barack Obama. My style is that of a graveyard dandy; black hat, black coat and a silver cane – it’s possible to dress like this in London without attracting undue attention. Oh … and I think highly of myself which is always good for one’s health. I write in the daytime. At night I play piano in an upstairs bar at Mambo Racine’s, a casino, dance hall and brothel in Brewer Street just behind Piccadilly Circus. I play bland intertwining melodies as background music. The manager makes sure that there is a glass of rum on the piano top and a small wooden box of Cuban cigarillos which I smoke at the back during breaks.

  As for the rest of my biography, skip the details and take my word for it. I’m a marvellous person.

  The Head in the Sand café is well placed for me. It’s at a crossroads. From an early age I have been an observer of the human race. (Nothing is more likely to dry up the heart.) Daily I watch the tame mass of unresisting citizenry, forming itself into a self-regulated slinking creature, shopping with its eye, endlessly acquisitive, nosing through the streets. Recently the sight has made me restless and impatient. Whenever I come to a set of automatically opening doors I want to rush and throw myself through them before they have a chance to open. People need a little exhilaration, don’t they? Some excitement outside the warmth of the family circle? Something to induce that endorphin spike; a few meteoric moments in the cause of an idea; some extremism to clear the pethidine from the veins? Some danger? Every narrator worth his salt likes a good war. It’s the peaceful existence which is the cause of my terror. I ask myself the question that philosophers must always ask themselves: Will my bum ever forgive me for sitting around all day like this?

  I am in two minds. Should I write a sprawling, nineteenth-century, bag-of-bones novel with all the energy of vulgarity or stick to the clear austere prose style that takes its key from the dead?

  There’s such a thing as too much good taste.

  It is a photo of my fellow-countrywoman, Ella de Vries – taken before the catastrophe – that prompts me to write. There are few enough of us Surinamese who are famous. I cut the photo from the front cover of a magazine. Taken at night, it shows her standing on the balcony of one of Rio de Janeiro’s old colonial palaces. Her head is half turned towards the camera. She is laughing and leaning back against the stone balustrade between two dwarf palm trees. Her black hair is pulled back tightly and shines like the painted hair of a Russian doll. Her face is vital and radiant. Behind her left ear she wears the huge moon like a white carnation.

  Before she returned to Surinam for good she would drop into Mambo Racine’s when she wanted a break from the formal world of ballet. We became close after exchanging intimate confessions one drunken night. Did she have any skeletons in her cupboard? Of course. A whole cemetery of them. Untold stories rustling and groaning in their coffins. Luckily the dead tell no tales or there would be a lot of bad news.

  I first met her in Paramaribo in the eighties. I had gone there to consult my grandfather Papa Bones after becoming involved in yet another of my disreputable incidents.

  Papa Bones used to ply his trade in the corner of a rum shop off Gravenstraat. He was a tall gangly black man with a long neck who wore a white Aertex shirt, open at the collar, and whose skin glistened permanently in the heat. His trade was to buy the spirits of the dying. He collected the names from hospitals or homes or street corners and added them to his list. What he did with them no-one knew. He had been known to rub people’s names out or add them if there were problems with payment. He was also rumoured to own a copy of Skrekibuku, the Shriek Book or the Book of Terror, an ancient book of Dutch creole spells from the seventeenth century. So no-one messed with Papa Bones.

  I found him sitting in a corner with his usual glass of rum. His eyes were bloodshot. There were three people with him, a couple and their niece. He introduced me. Pa Tem and Tanta Marti were in a merry mood. They were migrating to Amsterdam for a better life. Pa Tem was an affable, bulky creole. He was accompanied by his big ebony-complexioned wife who wore a slightly mad ill-fitting straightened wig. Papa Bones then introduced me to their niece Elissa. They called her Ella. Her skin was the colour of crème de cacao. She was sitting on a high stool in an off-the-shoulder dress printed with allamanda flowers and she wore yellow sling-backs on feet that were disproportionately, almost comically long. She acknowledged me with a smile and a nod. For my part, one look at her brought about an extinction of the mind and all rational thought and induced a buzzing in my ears.

  Papa Bones was drunk.

  ‘Elissa dances with the Ballet Rio.’ He gave her a lascivious once-over and placed his gnarled hand on his crotch. ‘She has come over from Brazil to say goodbye to her uncle and aunt.’

  ‘Yes. Our Ella can surely dance.’ Tanta Marti beamed with pride as she moved her hips in affirmation of the dancing spirit. Her enormous bottom was articulated in such a way that it seemed to move separately from her top like the understructure of a crinoline. Pa Tem patted his wife’s bottom.

  ‘We Surinamese ain’t got much.’ He chuckled. ‘But bottoms we got. Bottoms we got in abundance.’

  The three of them said their affectionate goodbyes to Papa Bones and made their way out. I watched Elissa go. She left behind her a trace of the scent of fresh lemons. There was a casual artistry in her walk. As soon as they had gone I told Papa Bones about my troubles.

 
He frowned and shook his head as he poured himself more rum.

  ‘You must leave. Go to Europe. Don’t go to Holland. Holland has too much connection with us here in Surinam. Our old colonial masters. England is your best bet. There is a place called Mambo Racine’s in London. They have plenty of Surinamese and Guyanese and folk from the Caribbean. Plenty of illegal immigrants.’ Papa Bones’s face cracked open into a broad grin. ‘People who just pitch up in England for a holi-stay. They will give you work.’

  Which is how I came to be living in cold-arsed England. But let me return to Camden Town and the café.

  I had just settled down to write and was tossing up which of two visions of the world to adopt for my fiction, the one that celebrates the marvels of reality or the other that doesn’t, when into the café walked Victor Skynnard – a well-meaning man who makes your heart sink whenever he appears. In his usual state of despair and despite the expression on my face indicating I did not wish to be interrupted, he dragged a chair over and started his outburst without even pausing to say good morning.

  ‘You can’t imagine the government’s ingratitude towards me. I’ve spent months devising a way to pay off the national debt. For god’s sake, it’s into the trillions now. You’d think that in the present economic climate they would listen. I had the perfect idea which I offered to them for a reasonable fee. Hair. Hair and nails. They’re growing all the time. They grow even after you’re dead. Surely someone could harness that power and link it to the national grid. Or take electric cars! Stop income tax and give everyone an electric car. I can’t remember the details of the plan now but it would have worked. The Chancellor of the Exchequer didn’t so much as acknowledge my letter. Now look at me. Skulking in this café. Can’t even afford to pay for my toast. Could you lend me a couple of quid for one of those chocolate muffins?’

  He went and hovered by the plastic display cabinet of stale croissants and pastries. I was barely listening. I realised that Victor Skynnard might be the random thread with which I could begin to unravel the whole fabric of the tale. I ordered myself another black coffee and started to write straight away. What is someone to do who has neither a conscience nor a heart? Order breakfast, of course. Then write a book. It’s one way of getting up the world’s nose.

  Baron S.

  Part One

  I am drawn to peoples in revolt … because I myself have the need to call the whole of society into question.

  Jean Genet

  Chapter One

  Let me introduce you to Victor Skynnard, the mixed-ability parasite, radical socio-irritant and spiritual bomb-thrower who came into the café that day.

  After leaving the Head in the Sand café Victor headed straight home and sat in front of the computer in his study. The thin academic and scribbler leaned back and picked up the cheque that his father-in-law had given him, examined it and placed it back on the desk. The cheque was for less than he had hoped.

  The house where he lived in Camden Town was part of a terrace of down-at-heel, white-painted houses with steps leading up to the front door and paint flaking off the portico pillars of the porch. Enter almost any such dwelling and you are likely to come across one of those pale utopian spectres from the mausoleum of seventies radicals. Enormous uncurtained windows let in the baleful light of morning. Skynnard’s complexion in the pitiless daylight was tallow. His greying hair formed a cobweb of light frizz so pale as to be almost colourless, like a dandelion puff-ball. His forehead, high enough to have been elongated by a distorting mirror, puckered with concentration on nothing in particular. The room was high-ceilinged and draughty. A sepulchral white marble mantelpiece overhung the gaping black square of an empty grate and an old sofa stood in the centre of the room covered with a damson chenille rug. Around the room, on the wooden floor and sofa, enough books were strewn to make you think a library had vomited. In the midst of it all reposed Victor Skynnard in the full bloom of his obscurity. In a city teeming with venture capitalists, business magnates and hedge-fund managers there he sat, a communist wrong-footed by history. The world had not gone the way he had planned for it.

  What is a revolutionary to do when there are no revolutions? How to overthrow the state when nobody else is inclined to do so? Victor continued to wrestle with a complicated mass of ideological problems which most of the world had long given up trying to solve. He picked up the cheque again and stared at it for a while, his pen twitching faintly but uselessly between his fingers like a divining-rod.

  ‘Oh, what’s the use?’

  He groaned and shoved the cheque back in the desk drawer. Then he threw himself full length on the sofa, put his feet up on the arm and grabbed a bag of crisps from the small table at his side. He shut his eyes and munched half-heartedly. The current plan, from his hatchery of bad ideas, was to take the medieval legend of Parzival and rework it into a modern play. Until such time as revolution was in the air again, Victor had decided that theatre was the fashionable powerhouse of radical ideas and creativity. Some years back he had written his PhD on Parzival, tracing the legend through Cuchulain and Adonis all the way back to that radiant stranger Dionysus himself. He would transform the material into a biting comment and social satire on the state of society today. It was settled. He would become a political playwright of great savagery and international renown.

  The gods thought otherwise.

  However, beneath Victor’s high-domed brain-pan there did exist a rich interior life. Victor settled down to the comfort of one of his daily reveries. He would join the Labour Party. He would join it solely in order to undermine it from within or to resign from it in a blaze of publicity. He imagined himself rising to his feet to address the local members in some room or other – he had no idea where these people met.

  ‘You stupid, hypocritical and murderous shites,’ he would begin. ‘The Labour Party has embroiled us in tragic wars and drowned us in debt.’ He could see before him the startled faces of the local activists and held up his hand to show that he would brook no interruption. At that moment a potent mixture of real indignation and hatred for the government lifted Victor off the sofa and on to his feet. He put down the packet of crisps and started to pace around the room. He was not sure how he would continue his speech but he had the advantage of infinite rehearsal in these one-sided flights of oratory. When he got stuck he rewound the fantasy back to the beginning. He needed to make sure of his facts. Victor’s memory was an area where the real, the half-remembered and the totally imagined all shuffled around together.

  He had not progressed much further than ‘hypocritical and murderous shites’ before the fantasy ground to a halt. He repeated the phrase several times and assured himself that he would work out the rest later, outlining in painstaking detail the follies, past mistakes and hopeless future of the Labour Party. Not that he wanted any of the other parties either. They were all as bad as each other. He saw himself returning to his place at the meeting amidst the awed silence of the audience. Or perhaps cheers would be better. No. He plumped for silence. Gradually, people would rise to their feet and confess to their short-sightedness and their mistaken commitment to whichever policy he happened to be attacking. Somehow, in his imagination, the occasion became confused with the sort of meeting held by Alcoholics Anonymous or the Quakers.

  Having single-handedly destroyed his local branch of the Labour Party, Victor got to his feet and went down to the kitchen to look for a plum. He took one from the bowl of fruit on the dark wooden kitchen table and returned to his study to stare with morose irresolution out of the window. There had been a downpour earlier and a ghost rain hung in the air. A few orange leaves from last winter lay like sodden cornflakes against the railings of the small park opposite. He watched a squirrel move across the wet grass with the jerky arthritic movements of an old 16 mm film. Victor frowned. He was in debt. The bills had been mounting up since the collapse of his last venture which was to set up a desktop publishing house on the internet called Dot Communism. It was the most r
ecent in the motorway pile-up of his hopes. It occurred to him that should capitalism collapse it might sweep him away with it, dependent as he was on his well-heeled father-in-law.

  Just then his wife Mavis, a thin woman whose every variety of smile managed to express anguish, popped her head round the door.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she cringed slightly as she enquired.

  ‘Fine.’ He continued staring out of the window as if she had interrupted him at a crucial point of creation. Mavis waited for a few respectful moments and then discreetly withdrew.

  *

  As soon as Mavis left the room Victor turned away from the window and went to study his father-in-law’s cheque once more as if the amount might have increased. It had not. For a few minutes the master-builder of imaginary solutions was stumped. He spent a while hoping that Vera Scobie, his close friend and a woman for whom he had much affection, would die suddenly leaving him a shed-load of money. Vera was his political mentor, advisor and co-activist.

  Since his youth Victor had moved in and out of various political groupings, all of them radical in one way or another. Rumour had it that in the seventies he had been a member of that mysterious cadre in Bradford which everyone had heard about but nobody could find and which always produced the most astute revolutionary analyses of current events. At a time of strikes, mass unrest, police raids and urban bombings their manifestos were published in a highly prized but irregularly produced newsletter. In fact, Victor had never been a member of that group, but had assiduously promoted it and had greatly admired it without really knowing anything about it – although he had been quietly gratified once when a young woman, a complete stranger, accosted him, assuming he was one of the founding editors, and screamed accusations at him that the same newsletter had ruined her life.