A Very Persistent Illusion

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Fatima,’ I say, ‘am I just a lecherous, balding, middle-aged bastard?’

  For a second she is too shocked to reply. ‘Sorry?’ she says. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I mean, is that the sort of thing that Lucy said about me?’

  ‘Her skirts were far too short,’ says Fatima with some feeling. ‘She should not have worn things like that at work. Sometimes she did not wear . . . all of her underclothing. That is not good.’

  It occurs to me that if she had not worn skirts like that, or had worn a bra, life might have been a bit easier. Or then again, maybe not. I’m learning about myself all the time.

  ‘Ethics and Rights Committee?’ says Fatima.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘You’re supposed to be there now.’

  ‘Excellent. An opiate to numb the pain,’ I say.

  Fatima looks blank.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ I say.

  * * *

  The committee room looks out over the park. The sun is shining. Somewhere outside children are yelling at each other, kicking each other, having fun.

  ‘. . . Chris?’ the Chairman has just said to me.

  I look up. ‘Yes, of course,’ I say.

  This seems to be the right answer because he nods and continues: ‘Since that is also Chris’s view, we have no choice but to re-submit the terms of reference for the working party to Council, which will not be for two months . . .’ He looks at me again and I nod. I have no idea when Council will be, nor do I care, but nodding is the line of least resistance.

  ‘Mr Chairman, I really must protest,’ a (bearded) committee member responds from the far end of the table. ‘This is an important working party. A delay of two months is unacceptable.’

  ‘I deplore Society bureaucracy as much as you do, but these things have to be properly approved if we want funding. I shall, however, talk to the President,’ says the Chairman, ‘and see if we can somehow short-circuit this. In the meantime, Chris, did you get a note of that action point?’

  I look at the sheet of paper in front of me and see that I have written:

  d

  e

  s

  the mind slides

  into emptiness

  p

  a

  i

  r

  ‘Absolutely,’ I say.

  ‘Moving on,’ says the Chairman, with a strange sideways glance at me. ‘Item three. Now, I’d like to give a bit of time to this one.’

  I look round the table and think: None of you exists. Not one. All I have to do is to call your bluff and you’ll all vanish in a puff of smoke.

  ‘. . . Chris?’ says the Chairman. My attention has clearly wandered again.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  This time, I have not got the right answer. There is a pause, then a sort of collective nervous laugh.

  ‘It can’t be both,’ smiles the Chairman, ‘however much the President would like to sit on the fence.’ He seems to like me and is trying to pretend that I have been intentionally funny. ‘So, Chris, do we go with the proposed government standard or stick with the UN Convention?’

  I look at my agenda to see what on earth this can be about, but fortunately a number of committee members have strong views and take advantage of my silence to make them known. So I put my head in my hands and I think about Hugh and Virginia and Niels and Dave and how old I am, and I groan. Then I notice that the room has gone silent again.

  ‘Chris clearly does not agree with that,’ says the Chairman. He implies, however, that if I did not agree then I should have said it when invited to speak rather than moaned it later. He turns back to the previous speaker, but then somebody else says: ‘No, Chris is right. We’re making a meal of something that is actually very simple.’

  The Chairman frowns. ‘Is that what you think, Chris?’

  I look from one to the other, and realize that I could very easily still get out of this with most of the committee still believing that I am sane and reasonably normal, but I also realize that I am in fact about to go for broke.

  ‘This is,’ I say, ‘utterly pointless.’

  They are all listening. The Chairman is looking at me very oddly, but several committee members nod in apparent agreement.

  ‘What,’ I ask them, ‘is the point of it all? What are we all doing here?’

  ‘As a committee, you mean?’ interrupts somebody.

  ‘He’s right,’ says somebody else. ‘I’ve said over and over: all committees need proper work plans or they just drift. And that’s just what this committee is doing.’

  ‘Is that what you mean, Chris?’ asks the Chairman. He’s worried, though not as worried as he should be.

  ‘What I mean,’ I say, ‘what I mean . . .’

  At some point I have stood up – possibly with an idea of making a break for it, maybe just to get a better view of the proceedings. I am not too sure. There is a low rumble, which may be the noise of traffic outside in the street or may just be coming from inside my head. Possibly they are both the same place.

  ‘What I mean,’ I say for a third time, ‘is that none of you exists.’

  There, I’ve said it. I look round the room again, but strangely everyone is still there. I snap my fingers at them to see if that will do the trick, but it doesn’t. Everyone is looking at me, some seem quite anxious, others merely curious to see what I will say next. I feel a bit like a car crash, with everyone standing around watching me, helpless. I think that my legs may be about to give way, but if that’s what they want to do, then that’s fine by me. I won’t be needing them for a while.

  There is the longest silence that I can ever recall, then I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I am being led from the room. As I am being gently pushed and guided through the doorway I glance back at the view of the park and think what a beautiful day it is. The intense blue of the sky, the intense green of the grass, the gentle motion of the tree branches. I don’t think I’ve ever looked properly at any of this stuff before and it’s all really, really beautiful.

  28

  A Nice Place, June Or Possibly July this Year

  Everyone has been very kind to me.

  The place that they sent me to is more like a hotel than a hospital. It is a large old house with simply acres of trees and lawns and flowers. I have a nice room with a comfortable bed, in which I get Plenty of Rest. They have told me: I can leave any time I wish. They have told me: if I want to, I could walk straight out between the big wrought-iron gates and down the dusty road to the nearest town – whatever it is. I am a voluntary patient. I don’t have to stay here any more than you do. I really don’t.

  The doctors agree now that it is overwork. At first we talked a lot about the death of my parents and Niels, and how everything since then was my attempt to regain, not my childhood exactly, but that strange day when everything suddenly fell apart. But that didn’t seem to lead anywhere much (as far as I was concerned anyway) so eventually we settled on overwork as the cause of my problems, which is obviously more straightforward to deal with. It’s affecting lots of people, these days – loads – so it’s an easy way to go. All I really need is Rest and a Chance to Sort Myself Out. And, as they point out to me, not everyone gets to come to somewhere like this.

  Ironically, I am the first to benefit from the Society’s new private healthcare insurance (rather than the gym membership I voted for). That’s why I am in such a nice place. There are all sorts of famous people around – you’d have heard of them. Some like me are suffering from overwork and stress, others from drugs or alcohol in addition to (or more often in place of) work. There’s an actor who was in one of the soaps until they killed him off, which is sort of why he is here now, trying to get over the death of his other self. There’s somebody who was in a rock band back in the eighties (but not any more) and somebody who came fourth or fifth in Big Brother a while back and couldn’t handle the success. Sometimes I sit with them in the garden and we talk about why we are here and
what we are going to do when we leave here – which, as I say, we could all do at any time, though it might frighten the people in the next town (whatever it is) if we all did it at once.

  Sometimes people come to see me. Narinder comes quite often and tells me what is happening at the Society. He’s getting married soon to a girl from Amritsar. He’s very happy about it. They’ve given Jon my old job but they haven’t bothered to fill Lucy’s post because nobody can work out what it was that she did, except wear short skirts and tight sweaters. They’ve appointed an external candidate to replace Roger when he leaves. Brindley Passmore threatened to resign when he didn’t become Secretary, but he’s still there. Brindley has never been in to see me, but he did write, HR being one of his responsibilities. He says they’ll try to find me another job when I leave here – not my old one, obviously, but something less stressful, and possibly part-time to begin with. It’s called a Phased Return to Work. The Society have even sent somebody in to check my flat from time to time and make sure that the bills are picked up and paid. They tell me everything is OK, but they were worried that somebody had tried to vandalize one of the wing mirrors of my car.

  Virginia hasn’t been to see me either. She’s probably busy. Of course, I never did get to Hugh’s funeral, any more than Malcolm did.

  I don’t think I’ll go to David and Megan’s wedding either, though they have kindly sent me a beautifully printed invitation with gold edging and said that they very much hope I will be well enough to come. David had slipped in a note saying, ‘Hope you’re feeling better, mate. See you soon. My round!’ That was nice of him.

  I think that the doctors stopped talking to me about my childhood, and started talking about stress management, mainly because they saw that I had come to terms with the way Niels had died and no longer needed to question reality. All of which shows you can fool anyone if you try hard enough and, deep down, they want to be fooled. If they think I am happy, then from their perspective I am happy. And if I am happy then they’ve done their job. Esse est percipi, as somebody once said. Within their own reality, I am well on my way to recovery.

  And – do you know? – I really am happy. I know now that I should be pleased to be alive rather than guilty not to have been in a car smash twenty years ago. I am looking forward to accepting responsibility and acting my age. I shall most certainly buy socks.

  So, thank you for your concern, and don’t think I’m ungrateful, but actually I’m fine. I hope you never have to go through the sort of stuff I’ve been through, but if you do, then I hope you come out the other side, just as I have.

  If you exist, of course. If you exist.

  A VERY PERSISTENT ILLUSION

  L. C. Tyler was born in Essex and educated in Southend and at Oxford University. He has worked in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Sudan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. He currently lives in Islington with his wife, children and border terrier.

  Also by L.C.Tyler

  The Elsie and Ethelred Mysteries

  The Herring Seller’s Apprentice

  Ten Little Herrings

  Disclaimer

  All characters and institutions in this book are fictitious. The tedium of committee work is drawn from life.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to everyone at Macmillan, but especially Will, Sophie, Maria, Caitriona, Ellen and Mary (not to mention O’Hara) for their help, for their collective faith in me and for making this a much better book.

  My thanks for support and encouragement on the way to (amongst others) Helen, Krish, Susan-the-Archivist, Rhian, Dave and Daniel at Goldsboro Books, Martin and Angela (who own a real and highly recommended guest house on the site of my fictitious one) and all of my fellow writers at MNW.

  Above all I am grateful to Ann, Tom and Catrin for their patience while I was working on this (and other books). And finally my thanks to Thistle for total devotion and the occasional dead rabbit.

  The quotation from Think by Simon Blackburn (OUP 1999) appears by permission of the Oxford University Press.

  First published 2009 by Macmillan New Writing

  This edition published 2010 by Pan Books

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-73983-3 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-230-73982-6 EPUB

  Copyright © L. C. Tyler 2009

  The right of L. C. Tyler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  This book is a work of fiction and is the product of the author’s imagination. Any relationship with real events, places or people is entirely coincidental.

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

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