"Alcestis?"
"Yes. Is she joining us?"
Geoffrey frowned and shook his head. "No," he said with an upward inflection. "Where did you get that idea from?"
"I didn't get—"
"I mean why should she be joining us?"
"Well, Brenda's here, and I thought—"
"I know, Jake, I know Brenda's here, I've just this moment spoken to her," said Geoffrey, gently enough but with some triumph at having so readily diagnosed the acute senile dementia that must have caused Jake to be brought to this place.
To distract himself from restraining himself from kicking Geoffrey in the balls Jake said, "What's whatsisname like, Ed, the fellow who runs these do's?"
First Geoffrey dilated his eyes. Then he drew in his breath in a long hiss, slowly pouting his lips as he did so. Next he clenched his fists, raised them slowly again to shoulder level, lowered his head until it was between them and pounded his cheekbones rhythmically, meanwhile slowly once more expelling his breath. After that he unclenched his hands, indeed made them quite flat, pushed them out horizontally in front of him to the length of his arms and cut the air with them a number of times. Finally he dropped them to his sides and gave Jake a nod that showed he had finished.
"Oh 'I see,'" said Jake. "My goodness, he does sound an interesting sort of chap."
When the facilitator arrived a few minutes afterwards he was at once distinguishable as such from the two or three other men who turned up at about the same time. Jake didn't quite know what he had expected beyond somebody designed to be as offensive in his sight as possible: hairiness, uncleanliness, youthfulness, jeans, beads, hat etc. The reality was the opposite of all that without being in consequence the least bit more encouraging. Ed turned out to be in his late thirties, heavily built, dark after a Spanish or Italian fashion, wearing an oddly cut oatmeal-coloured suit that was none the less a suit, moving in a way that put you in mind of a cross between an experienced actor and a man well used to responsibility. He soon showed he had a trick of stroking his face in detail while he peered at you. When he spoke it was in a deep slightly wheedling voice.
"All right everybody, let's get to work," he said. "We have a couple of new participants today, Brenda and Jake. Hi Brenda, hi Jake."
Salutations of differing amplitude came from the rest of the company, now seated in a rough square with Ed on his feet in the middle. Counting him and Rosenberg there were twelve persons present, seven men and five women.
"Now let's just introduce you around. This is Lionel, who steals things out of stores and says he can't help it, and this is Winnie, who's so shy she can't stand to talk to anybody even although she comes here every week, and this is Ivor, who's afraid of the dark and being alone and a whole raft of other things, and I have word you know Geoffrey, who gets worried because he's figured out he's an asshole, and this is Ruth, who doesn't have anything to do except cry all the time, and this is Chris, who doesn't like the human race, and this is Kelly, who can't run her life, and this is Martha, who has to look after her mother and says her mother is mean to her."
It wasn't that Ed recited this in a lifeless or even a neutral tone, it was simply that Jake couldn't tell whether he was amused or compassionate or bored or contemptuous or generously indignant. Those so briskly characterised showed no signs of surprise or resentment: Lionel, who stole things, even blinked and pursed his lips in a self-deprecatory fashion as if he thought Ed had in his case been somewhat over-gracious.
After a moment, Ed went smoothly on. "What's with Jake is that he can't get it up any more, and what's with Brenda is she thinks it's her fault for having gotten middle-aged and fat, so she feels bad." (Jake knew they were all looking at him but he didn't look back at any of them.) "Now since we have our two new participants we'll make today a salad. For openers, scanning pairs. Jake, Brenda, that means each of you looks another
person over and they do the same with you but no intimate physical contact. You start with the eyes—the others'll show you. All right—Ivor, Winnie...."
In due course Jake found himself standing near the window and facing Martha, the one with the mother. Her eyes were fixed on him in an unbroken stare. He stared back for quite a long time on the view that this must be what was required but in the end got fed up with it and shifted his gaze. Ed appeared at that very juncture and caught the tiny movement.
"No no no," he said, and again he might have been feeling impatient or sympathetic or anything else. "Hold it at eye to eye until I give you the word to break."
It went on for a period that could have contained without substantial cuts the whole of an evening's viewing from Batman to Closedown, or strictly speaking that was how it seemed to Jake. Strange things happened to his vision: at one stage Martha's face went two-dimensional, became a rough disc floating against a background of dark clouds or water, at another it receded a whole mile but grew in size proportionately so that the space it occupied was unchanged. His mind could do nothing but announce its distress to itself: silent recitation of Catullus or poems from the Anthology was about as useful an idea as thinking about sex. When, hardly looked for any longer, the word came to break it suggested at short notice a breaking wave of relief, but as waves do this one quite soon receded. He felt shaken up, uncoupled from the outside world. If Ed had wanted to do that thoroughly but without resorting to shock tactics he had succeeded to the full.
He had also, perhaps without meaning to, stated a major theme of the Workshop's activities, namely that every single one of them without any exception whatsoever lasted for very much longer than you would ever have thought possible. The next stage was a first-rate case in point. It was called free scanning, which meant in practice that you and your yoke-fellow inspected each other's faces with a thoroughness that would have made it possible to count the pores on them if required. Martha's was the face of a woman of forty or so, neither pretty nor ugly. Subjecting it to this kind of scrutiny meant that conventional details of general shape of nose or mouth went unregarded; if Jake were to pass Martha in the street the next day he would have been less not more likely to recognise her as a result of this experience.
The face business was not of course the end of it: Martha took and examined each of Jake's hands in turn, and he hers. Then she walked very slowly round him like an exalted tailor. He looked out of the window on to a patch of knee-high grass with things like discarded clothes—horses and oil-stoves showing here and there and said quietly,
"What does your mother—"
"No talking," said Ed, "there'll be plenty of time for talking in a little while."
There was, though the bit about the little while turned out to be relative. At last Ed clapped his hands above his head and called on Chris to make the rounds.
"Make the rounds?" It came out high-pitched and querulous. "Yeah, you know. Start with Winnie and end with Jake and Brenda."
Chris was the one who didn't like the human race, young, pale and (happily) on the small side. He went and stood in front of Winnie, swaying backwards and forwards slightly in apparent thought. Then he got off the mark, telling her she was a bloody bitch and Christ he'd be shy if he was her and much more of the same. It was a full six minutes by Jake's watch before Chris moved on. At that rate it would be close to an hour before the rounds were finally made, and at 'that' rate, not allowing for intervals, it would be close to ten hours before everybody had had or done his (or her) turn, but long before then one participant at least would have suffered irreversible brain-damage from rage and boredom. Chris's tirades were repetitive in the extreme, but of course it was the tune that mattered, not the words. By the time Chris had moved on again Jake had spotted a periodic element in that tune, a repeated decline from the expression of apparent fury to a mere ill-natured jeering. But was it jeering? More significant, was it fury? Would Ed know?
Jake's interest perked up when Chris turned his attention to Geoffrey, on the basis that even the unobservant couldn't fail to observe a few things about
him that would be just right for a truculent harangue, if only his witty clothing, but there was nothing worth attention apart from an all-too-short passage of Joycean word-play about assholes towards the end. Geoffrey appeared dumbfounded at most of it, but then he would have found your visiting card a pretty tough nut to crack. Kelly was next and Jake's interest perked back up for a different reason—what reason? Oh, just interest. She stood perfectly still with her arms folded and stared Chris in the face throughout his speech to her. The folded arms brought her bosom into prominence. It was good all right. There was something about her, perhaps starting with the clothes, that separated her from others of her age, made her the opposite of Miss Calvert, helped him to see that she was attractive. He went on looking at her after Chris had shifted to Lionel, had his eye caught and looked away. When he looked again, sidelong this time, she was giving Ivor one of the cautious bits of appraisal he had earlier noticed her sending him and Brenda. Kelly wanted to know what Ivor felt about what was taking place between Chris and Lionel. Ah.
Chris finished with Lionel and started on Ruth, who was the oldest person there and was sobbing within seconds. Jake wanted to stop it and went on wanting more and more. So did Brenda, he could see. Kelly he thought did, but wasn't sure. Nobody else showed the smallest sign. Rosenberg didn't look up from the journal he was reading; Ed was peering and squeezing his chin. Suddenly he looked at his watch and said in his usual tone.
"All right, cut it, Chris. Go to Jake."
Chris did as he was told at once. He said nothing for much longer than he had said nothing to any of his previous victims, his small features working their way through a limited range of expressions of loathing.
"Who do you think you are, you old bastard?" he inquired finally. "Who gave you the bloody right to be so fucking superior? You think I'm dirt, don't 'you?' Bloody dirt. Don't you? Come on, don't you?"
Jake thought it was rather clever of Chris, considering Chris, to have worked that out but kept the view to himself. "I haven't any particular—"
"Not talk-back, Jake," said Ed.
Without turning round Chris made a shushing gesture that told of ingratitude or preoccupation. "Eh haven't ennair pahtierkyawlah ballocks. You know what you are, don't you? You want to know what you are, what you really are? You're just one big lump of shit." After that he descended to personal abuse. So far from waning in vigour as before his displeasure mounted. Then he fell abruptly silent. When he went on it was a tone he hadn't used before, one unmistakably (to Jake) indicating real anger and so reducing all his earlier behaviour to some kind of charade. "If you don't take that look off your face right away," he said slowly and quietly, "I'm going to..."
It helped Jake that he had once been quite a good tennis player and was still pretty nimble for his age, also that he had noticed Chris glance over towards Ed for an instant; anyway, when the punch came he was almost ready for it, just managed to deflect it past his ear. Ed was there in no time and gave Chris a tremendous slap across the face so that he cried out and nearly fell. That was about when Jake saw what a good thing it was that Chris was undersized. He felt a sudden sharp twinge of total lack of pity for him.
"Bad boy," said the facilitator blandly. "Around here we don't play it that way, okay?"
"You didn't see the look on his face." Chris was close to tears. "He was looking at me as if he thought I was a lump of shit—you should have seen him, honestly."
"Well, you called him one." (The feat of memory, for Chris had used quite a number of other expressions, impressed Jake. He realised he hadn't seen Ed take a single note.) "Maybe he does think you're a lump of shit. Maybe you 'are' a lump of shit. Now get yourself together and go to Brenda."
Not going to. Not fair." (Twenty-five if he's a day, thought Jake.)
"You are going to. In my Workshop people do as they're told." That was believable. Chris's resistance crumbled within ten seconds. In ten more he had gone to Brenda and rather perfunctorily set about calling her old, fat etc. She faced him with a look of open contempt; Jake's contempt had not been open, or so he believed.
The next ingredient of the salad was called Winnie in the cool seat. Each participant participated in making her feel better, more relaxed, more 'wanted.' One by one they told her nice things and were allowed to stroke or hug her but not to enter the sexual area. Chris mildly surprised Jake by being no worse at this than anyone else, telling Winnie first that she was great and then that she was, you know, great. When it was Jake's turn he took her hands and said.
"The thing to remember is that a good half of the people you meet are shy too, it's just that they don't show it, or rather don't show it in front of you. There was a famous—"
"Hold it right there Jake," said Ed. "That's thought bullshit. You have to get away from reason and logic. No because or although or if. The only good conjunction is and."
So Jake reproached himself for forgetting Rosenberg's warning and told Winnie a lot of things he didn't mean much because they didn't mean much and everybody else seemed satisfied. When she finally vacated the cool seat Ruth replaced her as the centre of attention, though Jake missed the official title of what she was doing or being. Not that that could have mattered: she told them in the simplest terms that she had nothing to live for and went on to explain just as simply the circumstances that had brought about this state of mind. She was seventy-one and her husband was dead and her son had been killed in an industrial accident and her daughter was in a home for the feeble-minded and she lived in one room and nobody came to see her and she couldn't afford to go out or to have television and she'd never taken to reading (Jake took this to mean she was illiterate or near enough). She wept frequently during this recital and so in varying degrees did all the other women and Lionel and Ivor. Jake found that this time he could turn his mind to Catullus and the Anthology. When Ruth had apparently got to the end Ed made her start again. This he did twice more. Then he put Ivor in the hot seat. Ivor gave an unannotated list of the things that frightened him, which besides the dark and being alone included underground railways and any other form of tunnel, lifts, buses and large buildings, and after that the others took it in turns to reprehend him as severely as they could for being cowardly, spineless, ridiculous and babyish. When Jake started on him he gave him as many furious Ernie-sized winks as he could before Ed, warned perhaps by something in Ivor's expression, moved round so that he could see Jake's. Ivor, who had looked pretty hangdog at the outset, was showing healthy signs of boredom before the end.
To limit the danger of cardiac arrest from indignation and incredulity Jake had made an agreement with himself not to look at his watch, but while Brenda was gamely trying to sound as if she despised Ivor he (Jake) looked out of the window and saw, not the Queen-Moon on her throne, but bright or brightish daylight. Soon after that Mr Shyster came in with a tray of food and Jake relaxed his rule: two minutes past one. Night must have come and gone unnoticed. A queue formed. It was soon established that Mr Shyster was supplying sardine or cheese sandwiches at Sop each Jesus Christ, cardboard cups of coffee at 25p each Jesus Christ, and a lot of whisky-vapour free. Jake and Brenda had one of each sort of sandwich each-she contriving to leave most of the bread—and agreed in due time that the sardine ones were better or less bad than the cheese ones because the nasty sardine still eluded modern science for the moment. But that agreement was not yet, for Ed accosted Jake, Ed with Rosenberg at his side, both chewing savagely as if they were a couple of those Third-Worlders you read about who earn $15 a year.
"Well, Jake, what do you think of our work so far?"
"I think it's interesting."
"Interesting. I do like that word, don't you, Frank? It's a great word. Yes, Jake, your hostility was very evident. That happens."
After a stage of wondering who Ed thought Rosenberg was Jake remembered that poxing stuff about Proinsias/Francis and was able to answer fairly normally.
"What happens?"
"Hostility. Happens a lot. Don't worry a
bout it."
"I'm not," said Jake. It was all that training with Miss Calvert and some of his other pupils, all that not going for them with the sitting-room poker at each new display of serene apathy, which restrained him now, he would have alleged, from jumping feet first at End's face.
"Well anyway don't worry about it. Now I expect you've got a few questions you'd like to ask, Jake."
"Yes, I have, but I'm not sure this is the right time and place."
"It is. I say it is."
"Very well. Except right at the end that fellow Chris didn't seem to me to be really .... cross at all"
"Hey, he got that, Frank, how about that? Very good, Jake, you're coming on. Chris is just frightened. He's small and he's not a raving beauty and he's afraid he doesn't count, so he gets his blow in first. The more I make him act aggressive the more he sees he doesn't feel it. I'm just showing him to himself. Oh and he wasn't really what you called cross at the end either. What it was, Jake, you got him a little annoyed and he tried harder, which was useful."
All this, at any rate on immediate hearing, sounded so appallingly reasonable that when Jake spoke next it was with something less than the perfect self-possession he had been trying for. "I suppose you were showing Ruth to herself too."
"That's right. This is only the third time she's been along and it's going to be pretty painful for everybody for a while yet, but they're a nice gang and they'll take it. You see, Ruth is all eaten up with self-pity-okay, she has plenty to be unhappy about, though not everything she says is true, right Frank?"
"That's quite correct. People in the same house visit her now and then and Lionel has called on two occasions. The second time he found she'd been invited in to watch her landlady's TV."
"Which isn't a hell of a lot, but..... She needs to be shaken up and made to do things, Jake, go out and find friends, it's possible, there's plenty going on in a neighbourhood you don't have to pay for, nothing wrong with her physically, she rides free on the buses—and so on. I'm going to wait until everybody knows her story by heart and then put her in the hot seat and have the group tell her she bores the balls off them. And if you're worried about Ivor, Jake, he's ashamed of his fears, thinks he ought to face up to them like a man, pull himself together. Which is impossible. You don't know how his psychiatrist had to work on him to come here at all. He has to learn he has a troublesome but not very serious sickness which he acquired through no fault of his and which can be cured, and he can't learn that until he sees how fucking stupid it is to call him a coward or whatever. Which we just made some progress in showing him."
Jake's Thing Page 16
