by Trevor Hoyle
Now, this moment, looking back, he saw nothing but the huge incomprehensibility of it all. The real and imagined slights had festered in his brain; they had made him perceive the universe in strange and wondrous ways. And far from alleviating the condition had had the effect of exacerbating it to the point where even this mystical, magical nightmare (the past) seemed in retrospect to have been a happy time. The misty golden future had been transformed into the leaden ever-present Now. Things were not going to get better, only worse. Not so long ago he had thought himself on the brink of understanding: safe and sound in his pocket were the rules of how to behave, how to react, how to navigate sanely towards death. But with the advance of time and the addition of several billion electro-chemical connections in the brain he found himself staring out of empty eye-sockets at a future without alternatives. The path was downward all the way, culminating in a dark skyline of spewing jets, in the lost galleries of a paper mill, or, even more terribly, in an empty back room upon whose walls through the slats of a Venetian blind the sun imprinted a blood-red grid. He was trapped inside his own head.
What exactly had happened on ‘that certain Friday evening last summer’? And what had happened since? Had anything happened since? Apparently not, outside of his own head. He was a character in a novel in which nothing ever happened. The people sat and talked about nothing; they travelled back and forth to no purpose; they didn’t develop or progress in thought or in action; their lives were not lives in the accepted sense of the word but resembled particles whose main characteristic was that of non-volition. Neither did they exhibit an awareness of themselves as imaginary beings: they were transfixed in the stasis of perpetual motion; yet whenever he had encountered them they had presumed to be doing something and going somewhere. He too tried to behave in this way, but to no avail. He thought of himself as a man whose spirit was unclothed, perfectly transparent and naked, and that to enter into any kind of intercourse with these people they would first of all require him to decently cover his bareness and muffle himself in warm, constricting, woolly comforters.
His one great talent lay, and had always lain, in antagonising the largest number of people imaginable. Indeed, it was quite possible, given the opportunity, for him to antagonise the world. Whereas others had the innate gift of identifying with, relating, to, etc, etc, ever-widening circles of people he found himself in the ludicrous and paradoxical position of deliberately seeking their antipathy. Paradoxical because on the one hand (like every human being) he sought and required the approval, liking and friendship of others, while on the other he had come to regard that approval, liking and friendship as misplaced – as, in fact, the expression of a sentiment towards himself that was undeserved; and that once they knew him fully would inevitably and rightfully be replaced by aloof withdrawal. Thus, in order to remain truthful to himself and to achieve the correct state of affairs as quickly as possible, he circumnavigated the social pleasantries by abrupt, boorish behaviour. To such an extent did this philosophy engage his thoughts and actions that he came to dislike and distrust instantly anyone who showed him the slightest courtesy or displayed signs of approval. And he carried forward this attitude with such expert conviction that before long his facial expressions, his manner of speaking, his physical presence – in short, his entire personality – became immediately abhorrent to the vast majority of people. This was a situation developed to a nice degree, for it drove him deeper into the closed, airless shell of melancholia and had the net result of strengthening his resolve to excite open and active hostility – which he achieved with unequivocal success.
The simple truth was – having reasoned it out through many a sleepless night and many a nightdrive – that he knew himself very well: every insipid impulse, base motive and selfish deed; and how, knowing himself for what he was, could be foist this spurious product onto gullible mankind? How could he look into other people’s eyes when he flinched from gazing into a mirror?
Yet ‘that certain Friday evening last summer’ continued to haunt him. He could not rid his thoughts of all its stark significance. (That he did not know quite what the significance was did not lessen the terror.) What he did know was that it had broken him in two; his spirit had been smashed and his personality destroyed. The sun, he recalled, had been a flat red disc low in the sky: an omen. The shadows of the people had stretched thinly along the pavements and into the gutters; the perspiring tar road had exuded a heavy heated odour. Everywhere he looked he saw normality and strangeness intertwined and inseparable, residing in the same objects and in the very fabric of the air. At the first pub he came to he drank a double brandy straight down, attracting the stares of the landlord and the lone customer on the bench seat. The unreal evening daylight made the three of them seem like pale, silent, motionless fish in a tank of antiseptic fluid.
The newspaper crackled in his hand. He bent his head to look at it, avoiding their gazes. The print sharpened, swam away, sharpened again, disappeared. He drank another brandy and as he drank it it occurred to him that he was living his life. He was existing. So – again the shock, again the sudden lurch in the chest – he wasn’t play-acting after all. He was a real man with causes and actions and consequences. Sweat appeared on several parts of his body at once. Why, he thought stupidly, he had been alive all the time he had been alive: his life was not a dream: Tee, Val, Marl, Shirl, Pat, Ryl and Jay were existing at this moment. This was a truly dreadful thought because it meant that he had invented none of them.
Setting off from the pub (having consumed the brandy and deserted my wife and children) I drove light-headedly to Manchester. Blue fumes rose from the cars. The city was abashed in the unaccustomed evening sunlight, nervous and jumpy at being caught unawares; usually by this time she was decently clothed, the ugly details of night hidden in darkness. I passed by the Corn Exchange, a sooty-black edifice of impressive size and bulk, little windows glinting high up in the turrets and towers. People worked behind those windows for most of the days of the year, slogging away their lives in offices with, dusty parquet floors and cheap wooden desks. The plumbing clanked and in winter rainwater and cold melting snow dripped from the ceilings.
After driving round aimlessly for some time I stopped at a pub which by the look of it was due to be demolished. It stood amidst acres of rubble – piles of reddish-brown bricks crumbled at the corners and broken in two – arranged in symmetrical rows as though at one time they had been houses containing people and separated by streets. Holes had been worn here and there through several layers of lino, like converging concentric ripples, and the bars were several-inch-thick solid wood rounded and smoothed at the edges with the faint tracery of grain showing beautifully. Each room was divided by frosted glass panels bearing scrolls and legends; the wall benches were of buttoned leather, dried and cracked.
I sat with my black cone-shaped Guinness and felt the world slide about my ears. It was a slurring noise, like a slowed-down gramophone, and the end-of-week laughter on this Friday night sounded maniacal as though the few hours’ pleasure alloted them had to be compressed into hysteria.
As for me, the one vision that preoccupied my mind was of the down on my little boy’s back. His miniature shoulder blades merged into the narrow upper torso: the hollow of the back, prior to the buttocks, covered in soft blond fleece. Was there anything in the world so precious? Yet I had gone out of my way, deliberately and with malice aforethought, to smash and destroy that very thing – the culmination of a series of capricious and irresponsible whims that on the evolutionary scale placed me no higher than a blind burrowing creature in the grip of driving instinctive forces and selfish greed. Perhaps (a consoling thought) we have to become bad in order to distinguish it from good. For how can a person be ‘good’ if he has no knowledge of what it is to be bad? I had willingly committed an entire catalogue of sins despite the fact that my intention was to lead a good, decent, fruitful life. Not in spite of but because of my good inner self I had wilfully indulged in many bad
things; yes, for only in this way do we acquire the beginnings of a moral conscience and learn to weigh the difference between right and wrong. A person who never seeks to do evil is neither morally ‘good’ nor morally ‘bad’; he is merely amoral, and probably a dolt into the bargain.
By the end of the evening I had drunk myself into a maudlin semi-stupor. Of the alternatives before me none seemed viable save that of locating a resting-place for my weary head and body. There are occasions when all we can do is lie down and sink exhausted through time and space into embryonic slumber. The roads were awash with moonlight; in both directions drunken cars zoomed and sped, rocking on their springs like wild animals and squealing with fury when stopped by traffic lights. Inside was as though there was a great silence throughout the in ritual mating manoeuvres, a kind of stately symbolic dance of skulls. I knew, or could guess, what was going on beneath the eye-line where glass gave way to metal. In my own compartment things were vastly different: I had only my trusty right hand, the left one being fully occupied with steering and the changing of gears.
The Guinness had begun to affect my head, which was aching and bursting. Where would I find a bed at this time of night? The bloated sun had, of course, by now disappeared. Nothing remained of it but a memory to add to the many others. And that was partly the trouble: my mind was choc-a-bloc with memories, spilling over with them. Man can never aspire to eternal life; the weight of remembrances would send him mad. The night took on a kind of screaming-like intensity – me alone in it with only the sounds of my heartbeat and respiration and the crackling wax in my ears for company. I was sure that if I listened carefully I would hear the exudation of sweat. It was as though there was a great silence throughout the world and that my bodily functions were filling that silence with gurgling trickles and thuds and softly weeping seepage. What it meant was that my eyes and ears had turned inward, forsaking the dark outer void and alerting themselves – standing on tip-toe as it were – for the phenomena which evinced a warm, living, breathing being. They were looking and listening, in fact, for the only reality left: the incessant drone-like beat of the body. It is at such moments, in the dead still of night, that we must face ourselves and scrutinise our fingernails, know the shape of the callouses on our feet, recall which teeth are crooked and which are straight, recognise the fatty swell circling our waist and the rough, pimpled flesh on our lower buttocks and thighs, acknowledge that we are ugly and ignoble people (every last one) and deserve all that we get.
I would have to stop soon. The world was going to sleep and I remained at the wheel. I needed a woman exceedingly badly but I knew that all the women were gone. Pat was married, Val was diseased, Tee was in Reading, Jay was … etc, etc, etc.
It was then that I realised I was going to die. It was an immediate seizure at the back of the throat, an instantaneous convulsion of the pharynx at the thought that my life would not go on for evermore. I was finite and – something even more terrifying – ageing by the second. This instant, this very instant, would remorselessly vanish, never to return. Death as a cold-blooded fact did not worry me: it was the impact of non-being, of not existing, of not experiencing an infinite series of alternative futures that made the breath solidify in my lungs and the blood rush and swirl through my body. We are all headed on a disaster course, fragments of a dream in search of a miracle.
On a road fringed by trees I stopped and looked at the houses set back behind stone walls and unkempt undergrowth. Surely the damned must live in these many-roomed blocks of dingy brick, the vagrants and strays each in their separate boxroom abodes, uniquely and yet collectively living out their senseless lives – of whose number I was soon to become one, a digit, a cypher, a zero. And yes, as if to confirm the prophecy, several of them had cards in their shabby windows advertising vacancies, and it will come as no surprise when I tell you that I found myself on the gravelled path approaching a door above which a suitable epitaph might have been, but wasn’t, engraved. The looming, curtained house awaited my knock, smug, silent, anticipatory. I knocked, and the ensuing silence was followed by a muffled shuffling of feet and an occasional flip-flap of tired and workworn slippers. The woman stood there, not old but old-looking, wiping her greasy hands on a dishevelled pinny and staring somewhat fearfully into the darkness. I must have seemed to her as nothing other than a bulky silhouette, faceless, without identity, and no doubt frightening too. She led me along the passageway and into a room festooned with washing, and her husband, a Geordie, rose up out of his fireside chair and turned his back on the TV set. The screen showed the retrieval of a capsule. The man was pleasant enough: brisk and to-the-point but friendly and humane also. He rummaged in a drawer for a rent book and a key tied to a large wooden block and waited patiently as I signed my name to the cheque. The fact that he was a denizen of hell didn’t seem to phase him in the least – nor that a new inmate should appear in the night out of nowhere. Had he studied my face closely matters might have been different, but he didn’t. And besides, the room was heavily-shadowed, with the limp hanging sheets and damp flaccid woollens dissecting the air above our heads and chopping the room up into areas of light and dark so that it was difficult to make out features, or, indeed, the lack of them.
The little Geordie woman stood obsequiously by, hands and arms of wrinkled and sagging flesh wrapped in her apron. She was looking at me and yet not looking at me at one and the same time; studying me by default, as it were. My only hope was that her eyesight was not in good repair or that the obtruding sheets sufficiently masked my head or even that she was accustomed to receiving such specimens as myself at all odd hours of the night.
Still woozy from the Guinness I misheard something the Geordie said but gathered from his expression and general manner that the transaction was completed and that I was now signed, sealed and as good as delivered. All that remained was the purely mechanical ritual of installing me in the room they had chosen to be my new home. This was not in the same building: it was, in fact, in the next block along, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Geordie and his wife were the custodians of the row – handers-out of rent books and keys to an entire streetfull of lost causes, hopeless cases and soulless wonders. In any event we picked our way from one building to the next through the sooty rubber shrubbery, him unlocking the front door with a Yale key which he then silently handed to me while giving me to understand that henceforth this was to be one of the accoutrements of the office, a privilege and responsibility both. I put the key in my pocket and staggered as the weight of it dragged me down.
The passageway along which we stumbled (it being impossible, or very nearly so, to walk, what with various anonymous objects underfoot) I need hardly describe. It was the passageway to hell. On the way we passed by an open door and through it I caught the fraction of a glimpse of a cheerful, flickering fireside, easy chairs, a table in the recess of a bow window, bright prints and pictures on the walls, a lamp casting a cosy circular glow in one corner, a shelf of books, and on the floor a clean, richly-coloured carpet. There was no one to be seen but I deduced that it was a young lady’s room and one that (it being at the front of the house) would receive the full splendid glory and dazzling benevolence of the morning sun. Naturally the rooms at the back received no such thing.
However, as I’ve said, it was the merest glimpse, and we quickly passed on to a door that in the dim yellow light might have been any one of a number of colours – brown, green, black – or a mixture of all three. The Geordie led the way, pushing the door with his shoulder to force it over the uneven floor and torn lino, switching on the bulb hanging from its bare dangling wire, and literally having to peer through the 60-watt gloom to establish that this shit-hole was, as he knew it very well to be, vacant. As for me, my head was splitting at the sight of it: the dust, the debris, the discoloured wallpaper, the inch-thick grease-covered stove in the alcove, the scarred grey sink that had once been white, the rubbish-littered table and single crooked chair, the Venetian blind with its buc
kled and broken slats, and the bed, a folding one, at this moment upright against the wall with its springs showing and caught in them the accumulated detritus of a slovenly, damned life: cigarette packets, old adhesive plasters, a squashed tube of toothpaste, elastic bands with tufts of hair in them, a sock, a crumpled newspaper, the torn-off strap of a bra, bits of string, beer bottle caps, used tissues, and everywhere dust.
This was to be my new home and a suitable place it was. Here I could live out my life out of sight of humanity, lost to the world, a furry subterranean creature (the transmutation being almost complete) existing in deaf, dumb and blind obedience to the terrors at work inside the monstrous growth of my head. That the Geordie had not reacted to my appearance I could only attribute to the weakness of his eyesight or the poorness of the light. Not that it mattered: he would never again see me and I would never again see him. The future stopped here; there was to be no future, only the timeless Now in this cave, this hole, this burrow of a back room. Here I could mull and paw over my wretched heap of memories, snuffle amongst the remains of real and imagined slights, stick my snout between my legs and knaw away uninterrupted at my own pathetic vitals. The Geordie could not have received the slightest intimation of this, for he pottered about turning the taps on and off, stamping on the lino with his heels, rocking the chair back and forth, and tugging at the cord which operated the Venetian blind. It didn’t work of course. Then he put the rent book and the key attached to its block of wood on the table and turned to face me, from his expression seeing nothing of my head and shoulders other than a vaguely defined bulkiness covered by a fur-like material. I said nothing, waiting for this final contact with a human to be brought to its conclusion.
‘You’ll be wanting other things,’ said the Geordie, as though suddenly aware that I had not brought with me any of the items necessary to maintain the minimum standard of existence. ‘Cutlery, cups, plates, bedding – a bit of food – and cooking utensils such as saucepans, a frying pan and so on. Do you have any of these things with you?’
