by James Hawes
To: [email protected].
Subject: Oxford Conference Plenary Paper Withdrawal
Dear Bill,
I am extremely sorry, but I am going to have to withdraw my paper from the Oxford conference. I fully appreciate the unexpected honour of being invited to address a plenary session, but I have no choice in the matter.
I am in Dresden (having also done a little research in Prague, just for the record) visiting Heiner Panke. As you know (this being frankly the only reason you invited me to speak at all!), his DEBB party seems likely to make a considerable electoral impact in the upcoming emergency German general election. To many liberal observers, who will of course swallow almost anything provided it is laced with anti-Americanism (how impotently and uncleanly we loathe the Yanks!), Panke’s party has seemed to be a radical pro-European attempt to re-enfranchise a neglected and underprivileged sector of the former East Germany, whose communities have suffered greatly from reunification and globalisation. It fact, I can now reveal that it is a bunch of neo-Stalinist, and indeed neo-Nazi, bastards.
Of course, Bill, many colleagues (I name no names) seem to find no difficulty whatever in performing the most extraordinary mental gymnastics to avoid making admissions of this kind. I know it’s insane for me to even hope that these people (they will know who they are) would for a moment show me any respect for my decision. OK, then. You, for example. Yes, you. Christ, come on, Bill, can we have a little bit of honesty in an academic forum, for once? You made your career peddling Jacques le Coque’s so-called déconstructualisme to wide-eyed British campuses in the eighties, but when it was revealed that le Coque got his first university job by collaborating with the Germans in 1943 and that just maybe this was why he said that ‘history is an illusion’ did you confess he’d fooled you? Did you hell. You’d made it on to various panels and committees by then, and you made bloody sure you stayed on them, didn’t you, Billyboy? And now you jump through the post-Thatcher hoops and push the New Labour buttons as neatly as any of Brezhnev’s functionaries toeing the party line. So no doubt you think I’m just a plain old sucker for turning down a slot that could easily have made my career. That could maybe even have got me into The Paper and maybe even on the box. Meaning that unless a dozen or so of you smug bloody so-called colleagues all happen to suddenly drop dead some time soon, I am now for ever doomed to being no one and will never make Professor and …
It was all so bloody unfair.
Did I really have to back out?
I walked round a corner and was suddenly out in the vast, cobbled square of the Frauenkirche.
Of course, I must call Father Eamon again!
Surely he would know of some clever postmodern sidestep I could yet make. Some sprightly play on words that would get around the small detail of that hooked finger.
I phoned from the cold old darkness of the haunted Dresden night, and the mere sound of his voice spread clean, green, guiltless, Irish light.
—Hoi. Johnnyboy! How’s the man? So, did I cure you of your adolescent yearning for meaning? Is your paper now lit up with merry postmodern freeplay?
—Absolutely, Eamon! I mean, like you said, it’s all just play, isn’t it? There’s just one little glitch left, nothing really, I’m sure it’ll be easy for you to solve.
—You need a cute little drop shot to leave them flat-footed?
—Exactly, Eamon!
—Well, fire away and make sure you cite me.
I quickly outlined the situation to him (minus the gun, of course). When I had finished, there was only an ominous silence.
—Eamon?
—Jaysus, Johnnyboy, I pride myself on my court coverage but I don’t think even I can get to that one.
—What?
—This German actually did the ould finger-down-the-nose thing? Shite and onions!
—Oh come on, Eamon. We lived in fantasy worlds about the Russians and the IRA for years.
—We did, we did. And you jumped through seriously tricky fucking mental hoops to justify marching alongside medieval theocrats. When it comes to evasion, no better men than us. All we need is a teeny-weeny crack of equivocation and there we are, lining up a clean passing shot. Someone else to blame. If the USofA would only stop being imperialist, the poor old USSR would embrace peace and love. If the evil Britz would only piss off, the IRA would just sing romantic ballads. If the Anglo-Saxons only stopped supporting Israel, the Arabs would stop wanting to wipe it from the face of the earth. If only …
—Exactly, Eamon! So if we found ways round all that, surely, I mean … ?
—Holocaust denial? C’mon, JG, get real, no can do. That’s a one-hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour serve straight down the line. Can’t even touch it. Auschwitz is game, set and match.
—But I’ve hung my whole career on Panke!
—Mmm, yeah. Bad call. Johnny, listen to me good. I, who am not famed for sticking overly to principles, tell you straight: dump those Nazi fuckers, and fast. In fact, for the avoidance of doubt, don’t call me again until you’ve done it.
—What? Eamon!
—You heard correctly. Right now, you, my old comrade, are in grave danger of stinking by association, and I don’t even want your name on my phone record again till you go public on this. Byeee!
—Eamon? Eamon?
I stood alone in the white-bright floodlights. Impossibly, I heard the distant sound of a vast, droning fleet of bombers nearing in the black Dresden sky. I staggered back and found myself clutching the flame-grilled stones of the Frauenkirche, holding on to those baroque rocks for dear life as vast squadrons of plastic Flying Fortresses rained vengeance.
From out of the firestorm arose the unleashed demons of a lifetime’s self-delusion. And for the second time in twenty-four hours, I heaved up my guts in terror and despair, spraying the authentic German cobblestones with several quarts of authentic German beer.
70: Low Overheads
If I hadn’t been so horribly ill the next day, I might well never have made it back.
My shattered body demanded my complete attention, leaving no space for the suicide-spawning horrors of self-loathing. Every step of my journey had to be completed according to conscious and precise instructions from my mind to my limbs. These orders often involved the swift enlisting of whatever rail, handle or wall I could find within reach. I was just an old, ill animal creeping back to its cold and lonely lair, to lie down, curl up and breathe its last in pain and peace. My sole high-order mental activity during the day was a permanent, fearful care for exactly where, and how far away, the nearest lavatory was to be found. At any given moment I would have welcomed the Gestapo man who, finding my papers to be out of order, marched me smartly off to be shot in the back of the head without further ado.
And, since I was done for, everything was simple now.
I was going to move my family after all.
But not to north London.
No, I would take them deeper, ever deeper into south London.
I was going to find us an ordinary brick-and-Artex-and-uPVC house on a normal suburban estate somewhere no one has ever heard of, full of regular hard-working folk near a reasonably good school.
We would be normal people, like everyone else.
I had wanted to bring my kids up with some insight, some culture, some alternative from all the crap, just so they didn’t buy into it all without thinking. But exactly what timeless wisdom and culture was I planning to impart to them? I had been wrong about everything and it was time to make sure that I paid the price, not my kids. So that was that. I would no longer try to equip my children for a life they would never have. Playing the piano to at least grade five? Discussing Kafka and Marx round the dinner table? What help would that be to them when they were twenty-one and fighting for jobs against the whole of Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent with huge student debts that I wouldn’t remotely be able to pay off for them?
Decision made. We were moving to nowhere. If any bloody estate agent
talked about a house packed with original features I would just say, —So what? Features are cheap on eBay. Now tell me about the catchment area. If they mentioned conservation area, I’d say, —Conservation shmonzervation, talk to me about catchment. If they said period property, I’d say, —Why should I pay more for old crap? What’s the catchment? If they said high ceilings, I’d ask about high exam scores.
And if the local good school was run by some church, so be it. Shit, that all used to be just a handy way of selecting without saying so, but that maniac Blair positively encouraged the bastards to actually bloody mean it. So now, if you want your kids not to get kicked, you have to smile inanely as you listen to some old queen in a nightie spouting metaphysical lunacy. Whatever. We can’t afford to go private, so tough. My stupid bloody leftie parents didn’t have me baptised or confirmed, because they thought things were actually going to change, ha ha! But I could set that right. I was clever. Within a month I could easily be talking theology with the vicar or the father or whoever it took. I would quote Martin bloody Luther at them if they wanted, for or against, depending – who cared? In German! Lying? Certainly not. I would merely be adjusting the modes of my discourse to correspond to the prevailing zeitgeist, and who could blame me for that?
No more Schumann, my darlings. No more little lectures on art history. No limits on watching crap TV. We’ll have fine eazi-2-kleen uPVC windows and a small mortgage. Our ceilings and our overheads will both be low. You’ll have Playstations and Sky coming out of your ears, boys! We’ll bother your little heads no more with useless knowledge that was really only ever meant for the posh and just trickled down slightly for that brief period after the Second World War when there was a curious phenomenon called Social Mobility. Bring you up as weirdos with tastes too sophisticated for your place in life but too poor to ever indulge them? Not us.
How simple and lager-filled things were all going to be. How dreamless. And soon I would be just archaeology:
Ah yes, observe. A fine example, Homo londonensis from the Early Chinese Plastic Crap Age.An individual of no great rank, almost certainly, since he was unearthed in what was then to the south of the river, which (as we saw in last week’s lecture) seems to have represented a clear and distinct watershed, possibly tribal in nature. A troubled culture, it is certain. The records are scanty because the socio-environmental disaster which overwhelmed their society was, once the unseen tipping-point had been reached, so sudden and so overwhelming. It appears, however, that they had access to virtually limitless amounts of plastic-electronic artefacts, many of which have no discernible function and must therefore be regarded as totemic objects. They seem to have worshipped a now entirely mysterious pantheon of demigods called TV celebs, whilst living in superstitious dread of an undescribed but evidently hostile entity known as the mortgage rate …
I stumbled at last out of the cab and into our street without even thinking seriously about the Armalite lying there in the Mercedes before our door.
So what? Let it stay there!
What difference did it make now? The VIP, and with it my career, was about to be cancelled in any case. The police could do nothing more to me. I might as well just leave the gun in the car, call them, as soon as I felt well enough to face them, and tell them absolutely everything.
Problem solved.
In fact, it would save me even having to confess to that bastard Bill Adams. Yes, indeed: now that would be an easier email to send altogether. The message leaped clear to my mind as I fumbled for the keys to the front door.
Dear Bill,
I’m afraid that having spent the last five days (!) under police interrogation for no other reason than that in New Labour’s police state anyone who, perfectly innocently, as is of course the case with me, happens to find an assault rifle in their back garden, university lecturer or not, is immediately suspected of being a terrorist, I am in no position to deliver my paper on Heiner Panke at the conference. Please accept my bitterest regrets. If any senior committee members feel, as I hope they do, so outraged at this new evidence of the disastrous consequences for Britain that flow from our poodle-like support for Bush’s so-called War on Terror that they wish to contact the media, and thus maybe even get me an interview in The Paper after all …
Yes, well, something like that.
I slid shivering through the door of our house and was greeted by the grey emptiness of a cold house at sunset in winter.
I am aweary, aweary.
The sight of my little Edwardian writing desk under our stairs and of my beloved Victorian captain’s chair waiting before it felt like a sentence of death. They would never make it to north London now. No more of that. They were wholly inappropriate to our coming new life in SEgodknowswhat. Flog them off in the free ads or on eBay. IKEA for us from here on in.
Unable to bear the sheer silence of the house, I lowered my head very carefully under the staircase, sat at the laptop and logged on. At least in cyberspace there would be some evidence of my existence (I have email, therefore I am), even if it was only more demands from the Quality Delivery Unit.
There were indeed many new messages from them. Oh well. I was going to have another fifteen years or so of this, so better stop carping and get on with it. More whining students. For God’s sake, yet another petition from that idiot against the ban on Israeli academics. What chance does he think he’s got of getting that through the union AGM? Another automatic non-answer from The Paper, bunch of snooty bloody …
What?
Wait!
Oh my God. It was not automatic and it was not a no.
Dear Dr Goode,
Thanks for yours. If Panke’s DEF going to be there himself (can you reconfirm this pls if poss from his own office, no offence!) the Asst Acting European Editor will send me along re: piece on New European Left/Anti-Globalisation. That wd be fun. I haven’t been back to Oxon since I left last year! I see you were there too. What coll when? Maybe you left before I came up. Anyway it wd be fun, wouldn’t it? Cd you email asap BRIEF notes on Heiner Panke/aims of the DEBB/recent electoral stats/yr CV? Sadly no cab funds here for me yet (boo!) so cd u meet me @ Oxon station?
kr
Alex
(Alexandra Hesmondhalgh)
I leapt to my feet with a cry of despair that was cut short as my head rammed into the underside of the stairs. The stunning crunch threw me to me knees and set off a new tsunami in my head and bowels, to match the one raging in my soul. After all these years those bastards on The Paper had finally recognised me, just when it was too late to do me any good!
Retching yet again, I now knew that the sheer injustice of the world was finally proven.
71: Saved
I sat on the bottom stair, my head sunk deep between my shoulders. If only I had never found the bloody gun! What had I done to deserve this?
I wanted to call Sarah, very badly.
I tried to rehearse how I would inform her of our new and somewhat more modestly conceived future. But as I began to construct my well-argued explanation to her, something happened.
I lost the power of mental speech.
The words would not come out, they would not even begin to form. I was trying to talk to her but I could not begin to see her face: my mind’s eye simply failed to conjure her up. As soon as I even began to think about what I might say, the person I was addressing stopped existing.
Myself I could quite easily see, standing by the gasfired barbecue on our little tarmac drive, stubby bottle in hand, swapping opinions about the relative merits of Chelsea and Manchester United, Ford and Toyota, The X Factor and Big Brother. No longer haunted by lonely dreams but happily sharing the bright, blatant wish-world of millions. After the odd night in the local pub (opened in 1990), my male neighbours and I would watch Hubby Huck. So much for me. I would adapt, not die. As for Will and Jack, I could, without too much trouble, almost joyously reimagine our boys as regular teenage lumps untortured by bullying or insecurity, headed seamlessly for banks or IT
companies, and why the hell not? They would soon be out-earning me, and I would be glad. Even my beautiful Mariana I found little difficulty seeing as an unthinking little princess of suburbia, utterly fitted for the modern world. I would happily greet her accountant husband-to-be.
But not Sarah.
When I tried to imagine Sarah in the little low-ceilinged lounge of our identikit home, or in our small and eazi-2-kleen kitchen, or going up the narrow, slow-rising stairs towards the flat-faced modern door of our uPVC-silenced little bedroom in the arse-end of nowhere, or talking about what happened last night on BB with our neighbours, there was just nothing there. Sarah plus that life was simply an equation that could never work out, the square root of minus one, matter and anti-matter occupying the same place.
I knew right then that whatever I said, however much I argued that it was all for the benefit of our children, Sarah would never agree to live like this, not because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t, because if she did, she would, in that instant, cease to be herself.
The woman I loved and had always loved and will always love could never, ever be that.
And so, you see, it was my love for her that pulled me through.
I had weakened, yes.
Lost in the mapless new world, I had been about to abandon everything I believed in.
I had been ready for re-education.
I was prepared for malls, muzak and Sky. To love even Big Brother and The X Factor.
But she, my angel, was my salvation.
The physical impossibility of Sarah and BB/TXF co-existing in the same space made her my eternal and indestructible truth, my mighty fortress, the rock on which my cowardice shipwrecked and my selfhood clung.
She gave me back all the hopes of the seventies.
Only the best is good enough for the workers.
She flung open the tall sash windows of my dreams again, taking me back to a lost age when uPVC and market discipline had not even been invented, let alone conquered the world.
