Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  TOY FINALE

  but more like an imperial scribe or defendant

  I have come to know a vast pity for the scribes on the edges of dark empires. I can understand how that schmuck might feel, the functionary out there among the swamps and reeds, not concentrating on the work at hand but devoting himself instead to pointless exercises in calligraphy … That’s just one of the undignified poses time will conspire to force you into, and I do mean you as well, not only as you read this account but in your private and public life. It’s impossible to describe how mistaken we always are, it’s more like air or food which is why all time is wasted time, it can’t be otherwise. For one thing I had never imagined, no not ever, was that in my quest to make this world a better place I would not have Candy by my side. I could not picture that at all – not, I think, because in my arrogance I did not think that it was possible for her to leave, but only because she was simply always a condition of my thinking, which was also why it had always been so difficult for me to live with the various consequences of my behaviour. If you had ever asked me nevertheless to picture what it would be like, for Candy and me to break up, I suppose I would have said that it was only imaginable after months of conversation, a period replete with reprieves and future possibilities, and no setting was ever possible, or adequate: it existed in some high and abstract state. So that if now it did seem to be occurring, on returning home from this demonstration, here in our kitchen in the outer suburbs, with the room next to us destroyed, it also felt like there was some extra backdrop, like an echo – like we were in the midst of some vast courtroom out of the ancient revolutions, and behind Candy were serried ranks of other judges and executioners, the gleeful voyeuristic public.

  — I just keep thinking, she said, — what choices were the wrong choices?

  — What does that mean? I said.

  For it really did seem as if I was being sentenced or condemned.

  — I don’t know. I don’t know, she said.

  — OK, I said.

  — No I do know, she said. — I think we should break up. I’m done.

  — Really? I said. — I mean –

  — I think we should, she said.

  Then she started to cry, but without doing anything about this – she just sat there crying and letting the tears emerge and disappear very slowly, and it was the fact of not doing anything about these tears, not wiping them away, not smearing them across her cheeks, that seemed most delicate and bereft. So I decided that I should at the very least look after her and not be the one to cry myself. If to be noble was my ideal, then to maintain some self-possession was the best course I had at my disposal.

  confronted with his fate very unexpectedly

  For if she wanted to leave me, I could understand this desire. Probably I had made life very difficult for Candy, if I thought about it from a certain perspective. And I began to wonder if perhaps I had therefore deep down wanted this, yes wanted our marriage to founder and my happiness to be destroyed, yet even as I thought that I also knew that if this was finishing, and even if I had wanted it to finish, now that it was finishing I certainly wanted it to begin again, and the possibility that I might be logically inconsistent in this way pained me very much. It was like the way in your remote childhood when you are going out to some party to drop acid or methadone, and you have lied to your parents for a long while to bring this situation about, but then as you are about to leave, in the early evening the house suddenly seems so comforting, so happy, with your parents consulting the takeaway menu and a selection from the video store, and you do not know why you are going to leave it for the dark large windswept night.

  ME

  Don’t you think every first marriage needs to end? I mean, no, that’s not what I meant. I mean: can’t you be my second wife?

  Furiously I was trying to argue with myself. I was trying to maintain that the liberation I had just been envisaging could still exist, and I did believe this, since why should it not be possible on my own? And yet I was sadly realising that all my liberations occurred with Candy as the background, and the prospect of having this backdrop torn away, like the end of the studio system, seemed to render everything inexplicable. Like for instance now Candy did not however smile at my small witticism and attempt at lightness; she was only in her own careful world where she said exactly as much as she could, like tell me how bad she felt about my parents. And I wondered if I could seize on this as some concession, and change the subject to the possibility of us seeing professionals for help, if that would change her mind, but brutally she shook her head softly no.

  CANDY

  I want to leave now.

  ME

  I want to talk to you. You’re who I always talk to –

  And then I could not continue. Regrettably and despite my best intentions I started to cry. Then she started to cry again, too.

  ME

  This doesn’t feel real.

  CANDY

  I’m sorry.

  ME

  Are you really leaving?

  CANDY

  Yes –

  ME

  I feel like I’m dying. Like totally –

  but also very definitely

  I wished I could escape it in some way, this fate of mine – that I could just stop off in some desert diner and stuff myself on jalapeño poppers and ranch wings, or at some hill station cafeteria, with pickles and chapatis, but overall I realised that this vision like most visions was sadly unattainable. I had to carry on. From now on, I would have to carry on and I would have to do so on my own. The prospect was so painful that I really did feel that I was dying, it was no exaggeration, even if as I said it I also knew that it would only sound like an exaggeration and melodramatic, but still, I had to say what I felt. It was as if I could feel inside me all the molecules of my body close themelves gently down. While at the same time it surprised me to realise that, painful as this was, it could have been even more painful, if I had suddenly confessed to Candy everything that I had been doing without her knowledge, or if not without her knowledge then without her acknowledgement, which is a slightly different situation. Whereas instead for ever we would continue in this small enclosure, where not everything would ever be said.

  CANDY

  We needed to do this for so long. You’ve wanted this, too.

  ME

  How long?

  CANDY

  Well, months –

  ME

  This is horrible.

  CANDY

  Look, we were dying here. You know this. This shouldn’t make you so sad.

  ME

  Hold me.

  It was very strange. I was making these sad noises like I was groaning or keening, because definitely I was feeling like everything was dissolving beneath me, the way the floors dissolve in horror films when you are trying to escape, yet as I did this I was also thinking how I needed to preserve a pleasant cheerful tone. If this was going to be the finale, then it at least needed to be treated with as much lightness as was possible. For everything can be made into a toy, if you only choose the correct viewing position. Or at least I hoped so.

  in one more of time’s catastrophes

  From this position therefore I tried to create a small stalling of Fate, however miniature – the way a cartoon genie might raise his hand to trap a malevolent spirit in a freeze frame eternally.

  ME

  I thought you were going to be there when we were old. I thought that we’d have children.

  CANDY

  Really? Did you really?

  There was a long pause.

  CANDY

  Maybe we should just try again when we’re sixty.

  I was grateful to her, because it was surely a way of showing that perhaps this was not for ever, that always there exist other possibilities and byways. The fact that it might not be true or only gentle was too sad for me to contemplate. And I know that people think that if you’re young, or recently young, then the tricks of time are not av
ailable to you, not really – but I was discovering that the fact of being young or almost young simply means that these tricks are just more compressed into a smaller span, like computer models of constellations. All of time’s disasters can occur at any moment, and nostalgia for instance is no different, it can just graze you in its gentle flight – as for instance at this moment when I was losing Candy for ever, but also when you find yourself calling every film you watch a video, even though it is only digital on a screen, or, to give you a larger example, when I had recently been with Hiro, passing a cinema, a multiplex of which I wasn’t even fond, and it occurred to me that it was in this cinema that I had first seen the foreign and stylish movies, almost exactly half my life ago. Back then, I thought there would be many such great works that I would see or read and that they would have a major impact on me, and I would of course become an artist myself. But in the event there were rather few. And the only art form I achieved was this swarming account, all bright and sincere like the paintings people hang on the park railings. As nostalgia, I understand, it’s perhaps smaller than a man about to die seeing a vision of his first love, but so what? The feeling is the same. And I was having another such moment now, as I felt the entire future disappear. Suddenly it seemed very important to memorise as much as possible, of Candy’s face and everything she said, just as often I found myself remembering aspects of my past – like for instance the room we slept in had its window over the drive. Although by drive this doesn’t mean it was some hacienda in which we lived, no this drive was the length of a car, and it had gravel in it, poured out by my father. When I was a child I used to stay in that room if I was sick, as a treat, and I heard the milkman coming down the drive. And now I woke up in the dawns and realised that there were no more milkmen. The only keeper of the sound was me.

  ME

  Could we start again?

  CANDY

  I can’t –

  ME

  Why not?

  CANDY

  Let’s not do that –

  And suddenly I had nothing else to say. For obviously, she was right. She was the noblest person I knew.

  — Go, I said. — It’s OK.

  It was really very sad, to think that there would be no second chance, and to suddenly see the entire recent history of my life, as if from a great height: to realise, in other words, that the judgement of time was now definitively against me. It’s like those history paintings which up close are all swarm or splurge, with gouts and gross enlargements, but when you move back far enough you see the grand coronation, or liberty at the barricades. Or like one of those blurry crowds where only if you get back far enough do you see they’re holding up those electronic flip cards spelling out the name of the immortal and only leader. For a long while after Candy had left, I sat in the kitchen, looking at this room. I had nowhere else to go. I was like a pond or pool, where all of time was eddying and stilled. Then finally I went upstairs to bed, and for a moment was confused, because something else was missing but I could not name this extra absence – and then I remembered that, of course, the dog was gone.

  9. NOIR

  THE LURID

  from which he wakes up transformed

  When I woke up the next morning it was very peaceful. Life was just immobile, like a field. It had no ZOOM! or WHAAM! My mother and father were still away. Candy had left for Tiffany’s apartment in the hot polluted city. I did not think that I would talk to Romy again, or certainly not soon. And the dog was an absence, too, but in some way the absence of the dog was worse because he was gone for ever, so that no longer was he breathing on my face in the night, or moving pensively around the bedroom. His paws were not at my nose, with their warm milky smell. Our dog smelled of rice, or toast, or sometimes vanilla frosting. Our dog smelled supersweet. Only Hiro was still here, snoozing in the spare room – and I was pleased that at least I had that company in the world. Always I was used to the attention of other people – and so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to wake up Hiro and together have a larger narcotic breakfast than was usual even for us, with white powder to make things seem more electronica and carefree, then the white pills to even the sensations out. It did seem to make things better and I could reason much more clearly. Even if traumatised and terrified and alone, that’s no reason to give up on one’s ongoing projects. Very obviously we needed to return the money – and even if I was not entirely sure where exactly this money was due, it seemed most likely that the nail salon was where we should go, since it was from the nail salon that we had taken the most money, and it was the nail salon that seemed to me the most likely to have sinister violence hidden behind it. I had no idea if that was in any way a correct line of thinking. To make things right was such a burden! It was such a bundle of decisions. And yet also it was delightful if I could think of doing this so that everyone else could live carefree, while I alone knew no rest from morning to night bearing other people’s burdens. And one further task, I realised, in trying to continue to make things right, was to give our dog a burial. The previous day, we had put him outside in the garden, and the thought of him lying out there overnight, while Candy and I argued and cajoled each other and separated for ever, this was a melancholy thought and left me ill at ease. And so in my pyjamas I went down to the garden, and that did feel good, I mean to be at last taking control and doing the right thing. It was one step at least towards a better life. I wanted to bury our dog in the fields far out, on the edge of the city, in the woods, among the breadfruit trees and oaks, where he so liked to roam. But when I walked down into the garden and stood there, with the backdrop of one plum tree and one chirimoya tree, and in the distance the noise of the autostrada, I could not help a sort of terror. I had forgotten the violence that had been done to our dog, the violence and its effects, so that his skull had this depression in it, the way a button might jam on some ancient tape deck and never return to its right position, and his jaw was awry so that his teeth did not match up, like he was grimacing, or smiling very clownishly. Blood was now brown and biscuity all over his muzzle and fur. And it was as I looked at this blood on his muzzle and also on his paws, because some had dripped from his head to his front paws when we had lain him down, that my feelings in some way changed – because our dog was always very clean, he liked to lick the mud off him or any other dirt, in the manner of a very houseproud person. Never would he have allowed such staining to his paws, no never, and it was this staining that suddenly made me feel enraged, and I paused there, in this bright stain of my own fury, and was only woken from this daze by the sound of my phone.

  rejecting all guilt

  Once again, I had a message from this number I did not recognise. I sent a furious reply, and received no answer. And while I understand that once again such a message could have a very innocent explanation, it seemed to represent a major problem that I needed to confront. It was as if the world would never leave me be. Always, I was thinking, I must be the one who goes in fear. And while I was willing to accept that there was a case to be made against me, I also did feel that there was much to be said in my defence. And I still do not think that perhaps it was so wrong, to want to question this assumption of my guilt, since this is surely very intricate and infinite to answer. So that if now as my historian I was looking for reasons to explain this whole catastrophe, then I would have to begin very slowly, like it would need to include also other people around me in the background, like the man who walked his Rottweiler in the local parks and did not like my letting my dog off-leash at the same time as his because my dog annoyed him, because he was too quick and upset his slower beast, and also the woman who used to tell me not to let my dog mess her dog around like that, He doesn’t like being messed around with, she would say, as if my dog were a paedophile or delinquent. And then also there could well be other causes, like the way the first girl I ever kissed never spoke to me again, which did make me very sad, or perhaps I was sad already, and therefore in this picture of those to blame I w
ould have to include also my dead and absent grandparents, yes, I would have to go back very far, perhaps as far as my swimming instructors at the municipal pool, who let me leave school without ever learning how to swim, and my dentist who removed a milk tooth and then never replaced it, so I had this wonky gap in my teeth, then the teachers at my school who would not give me the magic mark which would allow me to use a fountain pen, which meant that technically I am still forbidden from using anything other than pencil or biro. And then the other children at my under-fourteen county athletics trial who upset me with their speed. In fact the more I think about my entrance to the adult world I am amazed at the handicaps I was born with, including the chance procedures that had gone into the makeup of my body, and especially my skin. Ever since birth, my skin has been inadequate, luminous with rashes and little weeping cuts. And this means, I’m just saying, that most things associated with pleasure become a problem – like beaches, for instance. I go to the beach and I develop heat rashes and my skin is finely speckled. In the children’s hospital, they swaddled me in bandages, to try to stop my scratching, and later I learned to bathe my hands in chemicals, so that they might harden. Or also we would try the various mixtures of twig and bark provided by the Chinatown apothecaries, even though neither my mother nor I believed that they would work – and they tasted very disgusting, and did not work. Yes, you really could continue very minutely, when you started thinking in this way. It was like two facing mirrors. Or like the way once a muezzin begins it starts off all the other muezzins pre-recorded muezzining.