Juggling the Stars

by Tim Parks

  He was working late tomorrow, Morris said. Clearly that was the right impression to give. Hard-working man.

  'The next night then, or Friday?’

  Morris thought quickly. He was going to have to charm the pants off the old battle-axe, obviously. And he could do it. He really could. He was feeling very confident in that department these days. The only thing was, to go when he felt up to it. Not when they wanted.

  'The thing is Mamma says I’m not to go to any more lessons untill she’s approved of you!’ Massimina wailed, and was clearly upset. Morris was really beginning to like the girl. She wasn’t at all like those tweed-skirted, toffee-nosed types one had felt obliged to court in one’s student days, always ready to air some opinionated opinion on any and every subject, the spirit of contradiction prompt and bristling under their powdered Oxbridge skins should.you try to do the same. He’d be over there Wednesday, he promised, voice as soft as it could go. Or absolute maximum, Thursday.

  2

  Morris’s large blue Moroccan leather diary was dated 1977, but the days of the week were the same as for 1983. He had found the thing in his little flat along with various other papers left by the late last tenant. After marking off lessons done and earnings taken, Morris sat in the bath and considered tomorrow. The same rush around town. The school twice, then Alberto, then the school again, Matilde, the school again. In the morning he must do something about the zip on his best trousers., get some cream for the document case, get some food, cheese, bread, some more dish-washing liquid, something for his dandruff (him, Morris, with dandruff!) and some more tickets for the bus of course. He soaped shaved armpits, tracing time-saving itineraries across an imaginary map of the city.

  No, it was awful. He was living from hand to mouth, from one day to the next, one month to another, week in week out. From the point of view of career, social advances, financial gain, the last two and a half years had been completely wasted. More than that, they had left him physically exhausted and mentally addled by all these stupid lessons, besieged by boredom and mediocrity. Did he have one bright student? Even one? Was there any of them recognized Morris’s uncommon talents (the way he could make up exercises on the spot, invent the wildest stories for listening comprehension)? Did any of them have any idea of his calibre? No, the only thing he had truly gained these last two years was the ability to speak a foreign language near perfectly and the curious freedom that ability now appeared to give him in the way he thought. As if he had shifted off rails. His mind seemed to roam free now over any and every possibility. He must make a big effort always to think in Italian as well as speak it, Morris thought. It could be a way out of himself and out of the trap they had all and always wanted him to fall into.

  Twisting the wax out of his ear with a Q tip, Morris considered himself in the mirror. Yes, perhaps it was precisely the change of language that had slowly been altering his way of thinking. (Had he been thinking in Italian when he stole the document case?) His blue eyes glared at themselves in a mirror that was misting. ‘Dr-r-rarudge!' he said, but with a smile about the corner of his lips now, a slight baring of long teeth. It seemed a new smile to Morris. He really couldn’t remember having seen that particular smile there before. So much inside oneself one didn’t know about. ‘Cara Massimina,’ he mouthed, ‘cara, cara, Massimina,' and he felt rather pleased with himself.

  ‘Dear Dad, you remember you always used to go on at me about having my eyes on the ground? You used to put a fist in my back, cup your hand under my chin and force me upright. You said studying would turn me into a worm.’

  Morris paused, clicking off the dictaphone and using it to scratch an itch behind his ear. What was he trying to get at?

  ‘You said I looked like a spina bifida case the way I was always bent over reading. I said you were hardly bloody Adonis yourself. You didn’t know who Adonis was but you belted me for swearing all the same. As if you never did.’

  This was tedious: infant-trauma-equals-adult-misbehaviour stuff. Never been convinced of that. And yet at the same time he did feel vaguely excited. Explaining yourself was always exciting. Especially when there was some new evidence to hand.

  That new smile, this new idea.

  ‘And then when I was about fifteen and did start taking care of myself and using aftershave (like Gregorio!) and combing and trying to walk with my chest out and bum held in, you said I was a pansy. (Why was that particular word so wounding?) So that I couldn’t win either way.’

  In the end, of course it was quite simply a question of identity. Morris the good boy, the greaser, mother’s helper, the bumsucker, the social climber, the masterly filler-in-of-forms, struggling from terraced Acton and dumb unionized dad to Cambridge lawns - champers and prawns - or Morris the rejected, the despised, the hard-done-by, miss is as good as a mile, irretrievably alienated (at least the ILEA had given you the words), determined to take revenge.

  ‘Revenge, Dad. Because …’

  One was both of course, both Morrises, and yet the two personalities were not easy to combine.

  I … because you were right about having my eyes on the ground. At least metaphorically. (I think I stand up a great deal straighter than you, actually.) I’d swallowed the English society.is-a-meritocracy line. I was studying to get out, to get up. To get out of our crappy mediocre house, our ugly street. Away from your beer-drinking, farting, darts friends. And instead if I'd looked around I'd’ve seen I could study till doomsday and never lift my head an inch out of the shit.’

  Morris stared. The sheets he lay in were so gritty they were almost sandpaper, and yet the idea of washing them seemed quite insurmountably tiring and tiresome. What he really needed in the end of course was a maid. Or a wife? He smiled wryly and wondered if it was that new smile he had come out with in the bathroom. Or even a mother.

  'You remember when Mother died you said I should go right out and work and not fart about studying pansy things like …’

  No, that was wrong. That was the wrong tone altogether. And he’d let himself be driven off course. He was supposed to be developing this looking-down idea. He wasn’t concentrating. Morris wound the tape back a little and rolled over. He felt warm and comfortable on his stomach in green cotton pyjamas.

  ‘I was ashamed of you. I …’

  Oh God.

  ‘Mother understood. Mother …’

  No, keep off Mother. Anyway, she hadn’t understood. So damned religious. Mother, Morris appreciated this now, had only sided with him over studying because she somehow felt it was virtuous (probably because it seemed to involve mortification of the flesh) and hence associated with religion, which was the weapon she opposed to Dad’s drinking. When you got down to it, both of them had tussled over his future the same way they’d argue what colour to paint the walls in the loo. Or whether to have sex or not.

  ‘Anyway the point is there’s been a change of heart. I’m going to look up, look sharp. Italy’s a funny place and it’s taught me a lot of things. But most of all it’s brought me round to your form of socialism, though not in the way you understand it. The rich deserve everything we can hit them with and I’m going to start hitting just as soon as I can.’

  No, that was awfully shrill. That wasn’t right at all. It didn’t say why he had stolen the document case, or started this strange courtship with Massimina. After all, he really rather admired the taste of the Italian upper classes. It was joining them, not beating them was the problem, living artistically as they lived, with style, with flair. Whereas Dad hated the rich because he didn’t want to be like them. He hadn’t explained himself at all.

  Start again then.

  ‘You do realize that I admire you Dad. I admire you and hate you. And here’s another interesting contradiction, if you will. My desire to humiliate is curiously mixed up with a desire to be in the right. I see that quite …’

  But the whole thing had lost all sense of direction now. He’d noticed the same problem whenever he’d tried to write a letter to the new
spapers. You began with a very clear idea - the change of heart, the looking up - and then halfway through you realized it wasn’t clear at all. It was a mess in fact.

  The dog started barking at two. Morris woke to a howl, long and bloodcurdling as a werewolf's. Then came repeated barks only a yard or two from his window. His jaws, as always when he woke, were clamped together tight, his tongue sore down one side and swollen. He lay listening to the dog, brain pounding with the most profound black anger, anger that seemed to bulge out from between his tired eyes. It wasn’t enough to have your mother die on you then, the only person who’d cared for you, who’d encouraged you. It wasn’t enough to have been born poor, to have a peasant of a beer swilling, stinking, pork-scraping father, to have fought upstream every moment of your life, to have been kicked out of university and rejected for more jobs than appeared in the Guardian in a month - no, to add to it all you had to have a dog next door shatter your sleep in the middle of every night, so that you could lie there rigid and horribly awake, going over and over everything again, the sense of frustration, of failure, of being taken for a ride, of having made the wrong decisions, been ignored, of having nothing, but nothing to look forward to, ever, nothing to show for all that effort.

  The dog’s tireless barking rang between courtyard walls and seemed to hack at his tired brain like a pick sinking into mud. Lying on his back, Morris began to cry, miserable tears of self pity. His cheeks ran. He was damned, merely. Damned. Nothing less. What gave it away was that nobody else seemed to worry about the animal. They were immune. The barking didn’t wake them. But he was cursed with some terrible disease that brought these troubles to him. And he didn’t deserve it. He really didn’t deserve it.

  Next morning, in Piazza Erbe, Morris bought a postcard and wrote the following polite and pleasant message to his father.

  ‘Dear Dad, hope all is well your end. You’ll be working hard in the allotment to get things ready for spring I suppose. Everything fine here. Never rains. Splendid sunshine. Work going extremely well. Maybe if I find the time I’ll book a flight for a week in summer. All the best. Dad. MORRIS.’

  That sounded all very enviable. (Why was it that life seemed a constant conversation with Dad sometimes?) He scribbled the address: 68 Sunbeam Road, North Acton, London NW10, Gran Bretagna, bought a stamp in the tobacconist’s and posted the thing at the bottom of the square. Then off in search of a new shirt and trousers.

  Dash or simplicity was the question. Modern or classic? What they wanted of course was basic business dress. A serious lad who could offer a girl something stable (even if they already had enough money to look after the both of them handsomely till kingdom come). It would be nice, Morris thoughts to go in something different and shock them into appreciation even admiration, of a different kind of person altogether not the man they had wanted but something they would see at once was even better. That was what a real artist would do. But he was feeling rather doubtful of his ability to pull it off just at the moment. Probably it would be better to keep the dress simple and then leave any inspiration to the moment itself, the conversation, the gestures.

  In the end he settled for a very faint and tightly checked greeny shirt to go with his dark tweed jacket (an Englishy touch, along with the college tie, so dark against his blond skin), and then brushed wool Italian trousers that would be presentable anywhere. He was overspending of course and it did make him wonder briefly quite how the gas bill would be paid. But then the winter was over. Who cared if they cut him off? Anyway, Morris had a curious feeling that very soon he wouldn’t have to be worrying about the odd thousand lire here and there, or whether he managed to find himself twenty lessons a week or not. He had reached the end of his tether was the point, surely, he had played the game their way too long, without success, too hard, too earnestly, too honestly. Either he strangled himself now, or the tether broke.

  Shelling out a hundred thousand lire, Morris felt as one who is spending recklessly to be rid of a currency that will soon no longer be of use to him, and he was rather pleased with this metaphor and smiled generously at a dark young shop assistant.

  Next to Standa to hunt out a cream for the document case. He liked taking care of beautiful things and chose his product carefully, reading all the instructions on all the tubes and tins there were. Normal things he was rather careless about (his scuffed shoes for example) but with beautiful things it was different (and that was the mystery in the end, to have opened one’s eyes in North Acton and yearned for class and style before he even knew they existed). And Morris thought that when one day he had finally got a good number of beautiful possessions together he would spend a long time looking after them and get a great deal of pleasure from it. (He could train Massimina if it came to that. She seemed trainable enough.)

  The main thing about the document case, though, Morris thought, rubbing in the cream with his fingertips at the school before lessons, was the aplomb with which he had taken it; precisely the kind of aplomb with which he would have liked to live his entire life, precisely the aplomb that was so miserably absent when you spent most days scuttling about in the street from one lesson to the next, grubbing together a few lire.

  Morris had been on the train from Milan where he’d gone to renew his passport and there was only one other person in his compartment. Late at night this was. He had been feeling particularly buoyant after a day off work in a different town and when the other fellow insisted on striking up a conversation he had felt loath to admit he was a mere language teacher. What was a language teacher in the end? A nobody. A mere failed somebody else. Who would ever be a language teacher by choice? Morris said he was American (why not?), a member of the diplomatic service based at the American Consulate in Venice; he had been in Italy only six months so far but … His Italian was exceptional for such a short period the other man interrupted politely, and Morris had smiled and nodded pleasantly.

  His fellow traveller introduced himself as a representative for Gucci’s, and it was at this point that he had lifted the soft leather document case onto his fat knees and tapped the thing with such broad and chuckling satisfaction that Morris was rankled and almost told the man directly that he would have no truck at all with a lashy bunch of tricksters producing super-useless products that depended entirely on the name and sold at exorbitant prices to stupid fawning Americans who had to have everything preselected for them by this farce of legendary trademarks (so easily forged) that in reality meant nothing at all (while millions starved! - himself potentially amongst them, come to think of it). But the document case was extremely elegant, Morris couldn’t help noticing, so he kept himself to himself and spoke politely about the leathergoods market and the admiration of his countrymen for Italian designers.

  The conversation turned to politics and the man from Gucci’s said how much the Italians were grateful to the Americans for having helped to keep the Communists out of government and Morris warmed to the subject and came out with an extraordinarily powerful invective against the red menace, even though he’d recently been seriously considering going to live in the Eastern bloc. (LONDON LAD SEEKS BETTER LIFE IN Moscow! banner headlines in the Morning Star.) He would work for Radio Moscow jamming the BBC since they’d always refused him a job. Why not? Who needed Brain of Britain., Radio Newspuke?

  After about half an hour of this friendly conversation,the man got up to go to the lavatory and by pure chance his absence coincided with a very brief halt at the small station of Desenzano. Morris didn’t think about it at all. Or if he did, he thought in Italian and so barely recognized it was himself doing the thinking. He placed one hand on the doorhandle and waited calmly till the train made its first slow lurch into motion again. Then, with quite perfect aplomb, he lifted the document case from the seat opposite and leapt out onto the platform. He had never felt less like a drudge in his entire life.

  The train he had stepped off was the last one that evening; he was obliged to pass the night in a pensione near the station. But
Morris didn’t mind. He felt jubilant, exhilarated., surprised at himself. He should have started doing this kind of thing years ago.

  Sitting on the narrow bed he went through the contents of the case, which were less attractive, frankly, than the thing itself - a sheaf of brochures with photographs of Gucci products, a copy of Penthouse (dirty bastard, with his polite conservative small talk), a bag of peppermints, various business letters and memos identifying the representative as a certain Amintore Cartuccio, based in Trieste, and finally, a big brown leather diary full of scribblings of appointments and their results.

  Morris sucked the peppermints one after another and studied the diary entries for upwards of an hour, finding a variety of figures written by the names of what must be shops he supposed, and then occasionally the name ‘Luigina’, followed by an exclamation mark. This name, he discovered, always coincided with that of a certain store in Bologna and appeared at intervals of around ten to twenty days. Two visits to Milan were also accompanied by the name ‘Monica’, in the margin of the page, and this time the definite hour of an appointment.

  It had occurred to Morris once or twice since that night in the pensione that there might be some mileage to be had out of Cartuccio for anyone with a modicum of courage. He couldn’t actually remember seeing a ring on the man’s fingers, but he was just the type to be married. It was curious how all the piggish, salacious, conventional types would quite certainly be married, whereas a gentleman like himself was forced in that direction only by extreme poverty.

  ‘ ‘ello Meester Morees!'

  His first student had arrived, a small nervous fellow with the inevitable, grey-black, sad Italian moustache. Morris started. Caught in the act of rubbing cream into the stitched seams of thirsty leather, he felt almost as if he’d been found out in some kind of lewd activity, caught with his hand in his pants.