by Tim Lott
There were Christians outside the cinema, carrying placards reading ‘Satan’s Work’ and ‘Stop This Evil Filth’. I had purchased two tickets and I clasped them in my increasingly sweaty palm. (One thing I did understand about women then, as now, is that on a first date I had to cough up for the tickets.)
Then a chant went up from the protesters – I heard it as ‘Close this town’, but I think it was probably ‘Close it down’ – and I looked at them and thought how pathetic they were, how completely they were prepared to deny reality, how absolutely they were determined to impose their version of the truth upon others. I found myself chanting back, God is dead, God is dead, God is dead.
The protesters seemed to hear what I was saying. They turned towards me and then it was as if they were chanting at me, not about the film: Close it down!
I was chanting back, a one-man ranter stood up on a date and turning his rage on the Lord and his band of fuck-wit believers: God is dead, God is dead.
It dawned on me that these Christians didn’t look as meek and mild as was customary. One or two were the standard-issue little old ladies, but there were several large, middle-aged men, one of them enormous, with a head like a genetically modified tomato. I had heard that in America fundamentalist Christians sometimes attacked abortionists, but I hadn’t realized the Anglicans could get so worked up. However, Tomato Head was moving towards me in a very threatening fashion. I kept chanting, God is dead, God is dead, in a voice that was beginning to falter. I didn’t like the look of Tomato Head one bit.
A few seconds later, he was three or four feet from me, bellowing, Close it down, almost into my face. It was clear that he was furious.
Then he stopped, sneered at me, and moved a step closer. When he spoke, it was in a voice far grimmer and rougher than I could have imagined issuing from a disciple of the Lord: Do you have a problem with Jaysus, boy? Because if you hate the Lawd, then you hate me. Yea, you have offended me and my friends. Where I come from, we believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
The voice, sure enough, was American. By the sound of it he was one of those nutty Midwest fundamentalists. He took a step closer, so that I could smell his breath, which reminded me of luncheon meat and stewed tea. I looked into his eyes. Suddenly I could see that whoever this man was, and whatever his religious persuasion, he was insane, and poised to do me harm. I blinked once, twice. I considered the plausibility of a rapid Pauline conversion. Then I heard a voice behind me.
Are you a Christian?
It was soft, but rough at the edges, stippled already with the effects of cigarette smoke. I smelt the aroma of Marlboro, mixed with some perfume that I would soon come to know very well. Tomato Head looked puzzled as Helen came and stood between us.
Are you a Christian? she repeated, slightly louder this time.
The fat man looked at her. Missy, I think you should keep out of this.
Could you answer my question, sir? Are you a Christian?
Missy, that’s a pretty dumb question.
Humour me by answering it.
Am I a Christian? You bet, missy. Jaysus be praised.
And Helen gave an innocent smile, shrugged her shoulders, and said, plainly, Then forgive him.
With this, she grabbed my elbow, and steered me away. I glanced behind me. Tomato Head was standing there, glaring. I felt Helen’s hand on my elbow, pushing me towards the cinema entrance. Then we were inside, safe in Satan’s lair.
It was a quarter past eight. I’ll always remember that as the exact time I fell in love with Helen. I have always fallen in love quite easily. This, introspection is beginning to show me, is not very clever. This may be the first step in making sense of my high failure rate with women.
Yet it’s also, in a way… right. Although I fall in love quite easily, I haven’t fallen in love very often, and when I have, it has always been obvious to me, with the benefit of hindsight, that the love was real.
What is real love? Here language fails me. Here my thinking erodes into the vernacular of advertising: a young couple consuming Häagen Dazs in front of a flickering hearth/TV, hooded looks concealed behind steaming Gold Blend. Love is the central association behind a vast array of products. Meat is love. Ice-cream is love. Perfume is love. Diamonds are love. My understanding of it, therefore, is ersatz. But, like failure, I know it when I see it. And at that moment I was in love with Helen.
When Helen next spoke, she seemed simultaneously motherly, piqued, slightly cross and sexy as hell.
What did you do?
I don’t know. They were annoying me. It’s only a film.
They just started threatening you?
No. I started shouting at them.
What were you saying?
‘God is dead.’ I thought it was safe. I thought they were Christians.
Christians invented the Crusades and the Inquisition. Don’t underestimate the violence of belief.
Want some popcorn?
I changed the subject, because although I had fallen in love with Helen, I felt humiliated. Helen had saved me. In my mind men saved women, certainly in situations that involved the threat of physical violence. I knew this because I watched Hollywood films and English TV. From my earliest days, before I carved out a career in advertising, I confused media messages with life.
The template of men saving women was pretty much invariable, if you didn’t count Emma Peel in The Avengers. I should have stuffed that God-botherer’s tomato head up what his countrymen would have called his ass. Instead Helen, with her smoke-stained voice, had defused the situation.
No popcorn, thanks.
Ice-cream? Everton mints?
No, really.
Smarties?
By the time we sat down to watch the film, I was still desperate for my equilibrium to be restored.
Although at the time The Exorcist was widely derided as a ludicrous work of exploitative schlock, it was plain from the start of the film that it was going to be frightening, rather than simply horrific. It was all the quietness before anything happened: the long stretch of build-up before the devil finally revealed himself in the child’s body. By the time the famous head-swivelling scene took place, half of the women in the audience had been having a fine old scream, and Helen was no exception. She might have been a match for a bulky Christian redneck, but when it came to a thirteen-year-old girl puking pea soup she turned to jelly. Half-way through, and thereafter every time the Exorcist approached Regan’s bedroom, she clutched my arm, and on three occasions she let out a considerable shriek. Although I suspect I was at least as terrified as her, I sat stony, unmoved, nonchalant, occasionally letting out an ironic laugh. Some order had been restored in the gender universe. I was the brave one now, and she the delicate soul who needed protection. It felt good.
I wanted her to be brave, and yet I wanted her to be afraid.
Introspection – it’s quite a product: it really does what it says on the tin. Suddenly, one of the most important secret places in my hinterland of doomed relationships heaves into view. The epicentre, perhaps.
At that epicentre is the double standard: the ability of the human creature to both desire and believe simultaneously things that are, in fact, mutually exclusive.
This is interesting. Sitting back, mulling it over like this –it illuminates things. I had previously believed that it was a particularly female failing to want two virtually opposite things at the same time: a man who is tough – but vulnerable; a man who is powerful – but helpless; a man who is handsome – but uninterested in appearances; a man who is wealthy – but indifferent to wealth; a man who allows his partner freedom – but who can dominate on cue; a man who is serious-minded – with a sense of humour; a man with a six-pack – who isn’t vain; a man who is thoughtful –but never melancholy; a man who is dynamic – but who knows how to relax.
And I wanted a woman who was brave, but fearful.
What else do I want and not want at the same time? What other things does
my right hand know that the left hand does not?
I have to find out, and soon: this weekend, I’ve my first date since Juliet Fry.
5
This time I’m going to take the middle position. I’m going to be myself – but I’m also not going to be myself. A little bit of spin, perhaps, but not enough to invalidate my inauthenticity.
I should have learned all this a long time ago. Only I haven’t been that kind of person. Now I am. I have to get this right.
The woman’s name is Talia Corke. I got her from the same place I got Juliet Fry, the personal columns. The date is tonight. And I have barely started my flip-chart, barely compiled my Love Secrets. I have not learned my lessons. I have not yet begun to introspect.
This is how the flip-chart reads so far.
THE LOVE SECRETS OF DON JUAN
Problem: Mother – withheld affection. Result: Fall in love too quickly. Constant disappointment. Anger. Solution: Be cooler – less needy. Abandon search for unconditional love.
Problem: Sex = power (The Sharon Smith Principle). Result: Helpless, infantile rage. Solution: Saltpetre, self-blinding, castration. Otherwise, none.
Problem: Women full of impossible paradoxes. Result: Bewilderment. Misunderstanding. Anger. Solution: Not known. Complicated by fact that you are also full of contradictions. Solution: Also not known.
Problem: More than two people in relationship. Shadow/ doppelgänger theory. Women symbolic, men literal. Result: B, M, A. Solution: Learn to speak chick. Watch behaviour as well as listening to words. Get to know shadows. Plus: words don’t mean what they mean anyway. But listen for clues.
Problem: Women flock to indifference (Martin’s Law). Result: Women don’t flock to me very much. Solution: Fake it.
It’s not much to go on. My eye dallies on the first love secret. Problem: Mother – withheld affection. This starts a train of thought on which I catch a ride.
There’s something odd about my parents. Odd, that is, if I’m working on the presumption that the reason I mess up all my relationships is not down to luck or women but down to some distortion of me, some blind spot, some fundamental lack of perception inherited from a family that in turn inherited it from their family and so on down the centuries.
The odd thing is this: my parents had, and still have, a happy marriage.
Terence doesn’t believe this. He hasn’t actually said he doesn’t believe it, but he doesn’t have to. In fact, Terence hardly ever says anything. Sometimes we have sat together for close on an hour and barely exchanged a word, other than my parting shot: ‘For this I’m paying seventy-five pounds an hour?’
I can read his face, which I find smug and irritating. I expect this is ‘displacement’ or ‘projection’, but displaced and projected smugness and irritation still look pretty bad. Anyway, when I’m talking about my parents’ happy marriage, a little part of his right eyebrow elevates by half a degree, his mouth curls very slightly and he shifts about a millimetre in his seat. I know what he’s thinking – I may be an extrovert, but I’m not a fool.
He’s thinking, There’s no such thing as a happy marriage.
He’s right, in a limited way: every marriage involves pain, anger, frustration, confusion and conflict. But neither my brother nor I can remember hearing a cross word between my parents, or them showing anything other than consideration and respect for each other. That’s enough evidence for me that they had a happy marriage, regardless of the ideology of a therapist who often looks as if his own life is so dried up (he’s pale, weedy and nervous) that he wants there to be no such thing as a happy marriage. Because then the unhappy marriage that undoubtedly produced him will seem less distressing.
Of course, I’m not the therapist. Nevertheless, this insight is occurring to me. If I am right, and my parents had a happy marriage, then happy marriages have their downside too – from the point of view of the progeny.
Many imagine that people like me (damaged people? emotionally unsuccessful people?) come from dysfunctional backgrounds. And, yes, Iris froze me out – although she never hit me, locked me in a wardrobe, chained me to a radiator or made me do a paper round. On the whole, I imagine my childhood was much like most – except for the happy marriage.
On casual inspection, it seems terrific never to have seen your parents argue, or scowl across the breakfast table or lob sarcastic barbs from their easy chairs. But there is something agonizing about it from a child’s perspective.
The main disadvantage is that your parents come to seem, after a fashion, godlike. Not like two gods, but one god with two heads. One god, because those heads never disagree, never take a different point of view on anything. When you do something that is deemed wrong or unacceptable, there is no question that you are wrong or unacceptable. It is simply incontrovertible. There is never any division in the ranks to qualify the verdict. You are in the wrong. It is a fact of reality.
That’s what it feels like to be me. It feels like being in the wrong even when my mind, conscience and instinct tell me that I’m in the right. If someone confronts me and challenges me, especially if they’re angry (my parents never got angry – not in an overt way anyhow), my first instinct is, I’m in the wrong.
The second instinct that is umbilically attached to this is, How dare you try to make me feel I’m in the wrong? Like Mum and Dad always did. It is always associated with an emotion: anger. And the conversation always deteriorates from that point.
I remember when I was a child walking on a mountain somewhere, on holiday with my family, and there was a fence up protecting some sheep. (Bear with me: this has got something to do with me and women.) I don’t know why I remember it, but I can see the sign in my mind, etched in black into a silver grey plaque. It read, ‘Electric Fence’.
This excited me. I had visions of touching it and being frazzled to a cinder there and then. However, I was old enough to realize that if an electric fence really did that, they wouldn’t put it close to a public footpath where children like me went walking with their mother, father and brother.
Or maybe they did. Certainly, my older brother, Sam, was trying hard to convince me they did. I said it wasn’t possible. So he dared me to touch the fence while my parents weren’t looking. I battled between competing impulses: to show my brother I was brave, to demonstrate that the fence was safe, and to do something forbidden because it was forbidden. I was in a sweat about it – literally. My hands dripped. I was afraid, excited. I just had to touch that fence.
Go on, then, scaredy cat. Fry yourself if you want, said Sam.
It’s probably not switched on. And if it is on, it’s probably about as strong as a torch or something.
Scaredy cat, scaredy cat.
If you’re so brave, you touch it.
I’m not going to touch it because then I’ll blow up. You think it’s safe. Not me.
Well, it is safe.
Isn’t.
Is.
Touch it then.
All right, I will.
All right, then.
All right.
Go on then.
ALL RIGHT!
I clamped my hand around the wire.
The sensation that followed was rather hard to describe. It was certainly unpleasant enough to knock me backwards on to the ground. It was hard, like a thin baton being rammed along my tibia, but also soft-ish, like a hard slap from a fleshy hand. It was unquestionably an electric shock, but too mild to harm me. Nevertheless, it gave me a hell of a surprise. I yelled in alarm. Sam crumpled up with laughter. My parents turned simultaneously. Iris spoke first, in her normal quiet, firm voice, as recommended by the childcare manuals of the day.
What are you doing, Danny?
I got a ‘lectric shock, I said, rubbing my arm, fighting back the tears that I had been told by my father not to shed if I was to grow up into a man.
Now my father spoke.
Don’t be silly.
I did, Dad. I got a ‘lectric shock. From the ‘lectric fence.
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They wouldn’t switch an electric fence on so close to a walkway.
It hurt me.
My father grasped the electric fence, then released it. Stop fibbing, Danny. Get up.
I wasn’t old enough to think of it then, but now I suppose a little boy with a wet hand would experience a mild electric shock differently from a grown man with a dry hand. As far as my father was concerned there had been no shock, I was just making a nuisance of myself.
At that moment I saw a flickering of recognition on my mother’s face that it was unlikely I would be lying in the mud, rubbing my arm and making up stories about shocks from electric fences. It had certainly occurred to her that a child would experience an electric shock differently from a man. That I was probably telling the truth. But then marital loyalty meshed gears. My mother said, in a cold, distant voice, Do what your father says, Danny. It’s wrong to lie. Get up this minute.
The pain in my arm diminished, nearly extinguished by the pain of the truth being denied. Although I was right, I was in the wrong. I’m still always in the wrong, in my heart.
What use is this perception going to be to me on this date with Talia, at eight thirty tonight, in the bar at the Lanes-borough Hotel, Hyde Park Corner? The answer must be: almost certainly none. But if the date with Talia developed into a relationship, and if it went from a relationship to a serious relationship, and if it went from there to marriage…
Christ, I haven’t even met the woman yet. That’s how much I want to put it all right. That’s how much I want to obliterate the mistakes of the past with the Snopake of the future. That’s how eager I am to change.
The Lanesborough Hotel is on the fringes of Knightsbridge. I don’t know why I suggested it, except that Talia lives on the other side of town from me, and it is central, intimate and luxurious, yet relaxed. Also, I’d just got another piece of work, this time quite a decent contract to develop a campaign for Stiffy, a soft drink that allegedly increases your sexual power. It was all a bit post-modern, a bit jokey, a bit ‘we don’t really know if this works or not but it’ll be worth a pop anyway’. I tried the stuff and it certainly didn’t work on me but, then, very little would nowadays, short of a ten-megawatt current shot into my pubis. Anyway, I’d got a nice fat cheque from the Stiffy Corporation burning a hole in my bank account.
