Love Your Enemies

by Nicola Barker

  He owned lots of things. He had many suits, records, books, bits of sculpture and ornamentation dotted liberally around on the tables and shelves in his front room at home. A beautiful three-piece suite. He even had a dishwasher.

  As he walked along Charing Cross Road, thinking about buying some books as a distraction, placing his hand in his pocket to feel the money, various coins and notes pressed next to his thigh, the thought popped into his head that he had done nothing with his life. The things he had bought would stay in the house when he died. They would either be sold or left. Who would want them? All the things he had bought, all those hours spent searching and queuing and working and earning and buying. All for nothing.

  He veered a sharp left into Boots and picked up some shaving cream – made with coconut and honey – and stood by the counter with a five-pound-note in his hand. The girl behind the till had a badge on her lapel which read,

  I am Sandra.

  May I help you?

  She took the shaving cream, put it into a bag and said, ‘That’s three pounds twenty please.’

  She looked into the man’s eyes. He was young, early thirties, with brown hair and a thin face. High cheekbones. His hand was shaking. She put out her hand to receive his money and he said, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this. I have so many kinds of shaving cream at home. I’ve just been told that I’m dying, and my immediate reaction is to go out and buy shaving cream.’

  He put his hand to his chin which was well shaven. Sandra watched him as his eyes filled with tears. She pulled her hand back and said, ‘Don’t buy this then. Go home and rest. You’re probably still in a state of shock.’

  The man wiped his eyes and smiled shakily. He offered her the money and said, ‘I can’t change the habits of a lifetime.’

  She gave him his change and he thanked her.

  When John got home he thought about telephoning his mother, who lived in Blackpool, to tell her his news. But each time he reached for the telephone his mouth went dry and he began to shake and sweat. It wasn’t so much the idea of actually physically telling her that was so upsetting as the idea of how the news might affect her. He didn’t want to interrupt whatever she was doing with the sharp ring of the phone and then to stutter some words at her about him, her son, dying. He couldn’t do it. After some thought he resolved to write her a letter instead. There was something very complete and formal in the act of writing and receiving a letter. He also decided to write to his ex-girlfriend who had emigrated to Australia three years before. They were the only two people that he could think of to inform. The letters took an age to compose, but eventually it was done and he sat in front of the television and fell asleep with the remote control still in his hand.

  There is a shop in west Soho patronized by the fashion-conscious, a glossy, gaudy bauble of a shop full of bright one-off designs, flamboyant jewellery and T-shirts with slogans on them that cost half a week’s wages each. Melissa worked in this shop, and she loved it. Two of them worked there; Melissa and Steve. Steve was gay, funny, sharp and always wore imported Nike tracksuits. Melissa wore whatever she could afford with red lipstick and her short hair greased back, slicked back like a seal.

  Melissa had studied fashion at college for a couple of years and Steve had been at art school. They were great friends. As with all high-fashion establishments, a certain amount of ironic exchange between the staff members concerning various customers was the order of the day. Melissa and Steve were about as bitchy and intimidating a team as it was possible to be. Much of their day was consumed by tasks like tea- and coffee-making, selecting and changing music tapes and trying on any of the new clothes that came into the shop before hanging them up in the designated way.

  Steve would often be seen lolling on the till reading The Age of Reason, Nausea, or anything else by Sartre that took his fancy. Melissa read Vogue and Elle.

  When they were especially bored they played games. One of the games was called ‘Power Sell’. Steve had invented this game. The rules were that you had to sell a previously selected item – usually whatever was either the most expensive or the most gaudy and outrageous item in the shop – to the very next person that walked in after a selected time. No matter how small, large, fat, thin, tall, the person was, it had to be a particular item in a particular size. If after Power Selling an item they managed to secure a deal, then the other person bought lunch that day.

  Another game they played that Melissa had invented was called ‘Guess or Gush’. This game involved one of them agreeing to attempt to guess the profession of the next customer that came into the shop. After speaking to the person for a few seconds – ‘May I help you? We have these in yellow and brown’ – they would then walk to the till and write their ideas down on a scrap of paper. Next, the person who wasn’t guessing would read the slip and approach the customer saying something like, ‘Excuse me for being nosy, but don’t you work (for example) in a hardware shop?’ If the answer was affirmative then the person who had made the correct choice didn’t have to make any tea or coffee for the next few days. If they were wrong, however, a penalty had to be paid, a kind of forfeit, and they were obliged to be degradingly obsequious to the customer, to gush and flatter. This forfeit was perceived as being highly humiliating by both of them. Steve always became extremely camp and hilarious under this sort of obligatory social pressure. Melissa would blush and rub the end of her nose self-consciously; a habit she had developed in her early teens.

  In many ways this vulnerability made her much more endearing than she otherwise might be. She idealized some of the other hard-faced women that she knew who worked (in whatever capacity) in the fashion industry. At heart however she was just a big softy. Steve would often say this to her and would make it sound just about as complimentary as if she’d had bad breath. He’d put on a false Northern accent and say, ‘Oooh! Our Lisa, you’re a right big softy, you are,’ and chuck her on the chin ever so gently.

  At the heart of Melissa’s character was a fundamental conflict, a paradox. Although she loved her life and what she had hitherto made of it – going to clubs with friends, knowing people who wrote for The Face, dropping names, spending money on clothes and, as Steve put it, ‘Having a laff’ – she felt as though at the centre of her life something very important was missing. There was a void, a space where her heart worked, a feeling of emptiness that she felt incapable of changing. She could be happy but never replete. The happiness came and went. It always depended on so much, and so much was random. She regularly wondered whether unhappiness – perhaps that is too strong a word for it – indifference, was simply a part of the human condition, the human make-up.

  When she was fourteen she had tried to become a Catholic, wearing a crucifix and going to Mass. Eventually though, her fervour had faded and she’d laughed at herself and had felt foolish for wanting to belong. It was as though God, in his Catholic incarnation, had momentarily been an excuse, an alternative to sincerity or self awareness. God had not been Love, he had been a make-believe figure synonymous with passion and yet not passion. A cypher.

  Whenever she concentrated too hard or too long on these dissatisfied thoughts – her inner sense of frustration and bewilderment – and became overwhelmingly maudlin as a consequence, Steve would take her out for a special lunch and have what he called ‘One of Our Serious Chats’.

  Although he was fond of Melissa he firmly believed that she was misguidedly intense. To him she seemed like a person caught in some sort of moral breakdown; as if there had been a kind of mental short circuit between her desires and her will. It was a complex idea but he endeavoured to explain it to her. He’d say, ‘Think of it this way, Melissa. It’s as though you are guided by a very strict and orthodox moral scheme, well, not so much guided because you don’t act on it. I mean, it’s as if your personality has been formed in a very precise way – you have a clear, lucid idea of right and wrong – yet nothing in your behaviour exhibits this belief. You are sincere, but your life isn’t.’<
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  Invariably Melissa would pick at her side salad and look confused. Eventually Steve would talk himself into circles and by the end of the meal he’d be saying, ‘God, my life’s such a mess. I’m so frivolous, just a bundle of pretentions and intentions. Ignore everything I’ve said. Have fun!’

  At the mention of fun Melissa’s heart would sink and she’d wonder if she could ever be happy. Steve would pay the bill and wonder whether he’d end up joining the Moonies.

  The morning after his appointment at the hospital was a Tuesday. John resolved to phone in sick and take the day off work to sort himself out. He panicked at the idea of leaving work altogether though, because the days and weeks ahead of him were like an empty beach and his tide was coming in ever so surely but ever so slowly.

  After telephoning he put on a jacket and picked up his letters. He wanted to post them straight away. He’d decided over breakfast that it must be easier to die if a selected number of people knew about it in advance. He hated the idea of keeping the knowledge of his illness inside him like an internal bruise, invisible but painful. He wanted a talking cure, or at least a talking cessation.

  Because the weather was relatively fine he decided to walk a longer route to the post office. On his way he passed a school and two churches. As he passed by them he thought, ‘I’ll never be able to have children of my own. I’ll not know God before I die. I won’t come to terms with my life. I won’t grow older and wiser and resigned.’

  By the time he’d reached the Post Office he had listed fifty-seven things that he would never be able to do. He stood in the queue and touched the partition rope with the tips of his fingers, deep in thought. In front of him were several old women and a couple of old men. It was pension day. He thought, ‘I’ll never collect my pension.’

  He tried to cheer himself up by thinking, ‘Maybe everyone has lists of things they’ll never do with their lives. In my case I just have a shorter time to compile my list. Some people have long, empty lives and all they ever do is to think about what it is that they haven’t done.’

  Even so, his eyes felt wet. The line was gradually getting shorter. In front of him most people were watching the larger television advertising screen at the front of the queue which spouted out adverts for life insurance and special stamp collecting deals. John watched the screen and tried not to think.

  After a few minutes the screen went blank and the words DEATH WITH DIGNITY appeared in bold, square, white letters. The image of a sad old woman emerged out of the blackness; she stared out at the queue with a desperate expression. She had dying eyes. John thought, ‘I wonder if my eyes look like that now.’

  A disembodied voice came out of the television. It said, ‘Do you want to be a burden on your friends, family and loved ones when you die? No? Well then, why not prepare in advance?’ Again DEATH WITH DIGNITY emerged over the image of the old woman. The letters sucked all colour from the screen and shrouded themselves in a funeral black backdrop.

  John said the words to himself and they sounded so corny when he said them, like some silly, rhyming cliché coined to encapsulate the situation he now faced. They made him feel cheap and stupid.

  The words faded again and the old woman’s face reappeared. As her face came into focus this time, however, it broke into a smile. The camera moved to concentrate on her hand. In it she held a document. At the top of the document were the words DEATH WITH DIGNITY. Again the disembodied voice said, ‘Why not prepare in advance? Pay for your funeral now, make your own choices, and we will deal with it in the future. Pick up a leaflet at the counter.’

  A shutter came down inside John’s head. He felt a sense of enormous negative power, an annihilating vigour. The next thing he knew he was out in the sunshine again and the letters were in his pocket, unstamped, unposted.

  He stood still awhile, his head tilted towards the watery sun which shone on to his face and felt almost as though it had ironed out all the creases in his expression, all the lines and tiny crinkles. His first comprehensible thoughts were, ‘It’s not going to be like that for me. I’m not going to invest in my death as though it were simply another item, another purchase to be mulled over and paid for. It has to mean more than that.’

  In the back of his mind he knew that his reaction was incoherent, almost hypocritical. A tiny mental shiver, an impulse, pumped in the rear of his brain which said, ‘You’ve lived your thirty-four years this way, why not die this way too? Buy something, feel happy. Look at the options, make a decision, complete the deal. It’s that simple.’

  He turned his face from the sunlight and looked down at his hands which were clean and smooth with oval nails, pinky-brown and still strong. As he moved his fingers they tingled and he wondered how long he would be able to move them completely. He didn’t know. He placed his hand in his pocket and felt the letters inside, then he felt for his wallet and got it out. Slowly an idea gelled together in his mind which made his stomach convulse and quiver with unease and excitement. He thought, ‘That’s it! I’m going to do it myself this time, I’m going to cut out the middleman just this once and create something that is truly individual.’

  He opened his wallet, and as he did so he wondered where he could buy some wood locally. He felt like a kid again.

  Steve had bought a copy of the American magazine Vanity Fair on his way to work that morning and had been reading it with great intensity for several hours. It was Tuesday. Melissa slunk around the shop, rearranging clothes, straightening clothes hangers, occasionally standing in the doorway and staring down the street in the intermittent sunlight. She felt distracted and miserable, not depressed though, it wasn’t a physical thing beyond her control, it was more a conscious state of mind, a decision. She felt distracted and despondent, but didn’t want to disturb Steve’s reading with her melancholy.

  Steve was reading an article about how Richard Gere was a Buddhist. Occasionally he would pass on a comment about what he was reading. As she stood in the doorway he said, ‘I’d never have thought Gere would be a Buddhist. He doesn’t seem very serene or sincere. Apparently he spent quite a bit of time in a sort of monastery place in Tibet or somewhere.’ Melissa sighed and said, ‘Lots of stars are Buddhists. It involves chanting and candles and shit, doesn’t it? I think Tina Turner was one. Maybe it was someone else, though.’

  Steve looked up again. ‘I think it was Tina. It changed her life after Ike.’

  Melissa shrugged disinterestedly. Steve flicked through the pages again and then said, ‘I read a really interesting thing in here this morning on the tube, about an American psychiatrist called Dr Death who travels around the country getting first-time killers the death penalty by saying that he knows and can guarantee that someone is going to kill again.’

  Melissa carried on staring down the road. She said, ‘That’s weird. Surely it’s impossible to tell whether someone is going to kill again, unless, I suppose, the person is mentally unbalanced.’

  Steve stood up and rearranged the changing-room curtain. He said, ‘No, it doesn’t work like that. The whole point of him is that he testifies against first-time offenders, people who are apparently sane and have only murdered once. He uses strange moral arguments, as far as I can understand. If a killer has been very cool and calculating and mercenary about the murder and doesn’t really feel bad about what he has done, then he says that they are a sort of type, a kind of person who will have no qualms about killing again because they have a warped moral code; they aren’t insane, though. It’s really interesting. I haven’t done the article much justice.’

  Melissa bit her lip. She was feeling uptight and sensitive. In her mind’s eye every arrow pointed at her. It was as though she was wearing a luminous dress and the world was all black. She said, ‘Are you getting at me, Steve?’

  Steve stopped his tidying and stared at her incredulously. ‘We’re a bit sensitive today, aren’t we Melissa?’

  She frowned. ‘Sod off.’

  Steve sat down on the swivel chair by the
till and moved around on it so that he faced Melissa directly. She was still staring out at the road with her back to him. He paused a while then said, ‘I don’t understand what’s upset you so much all of a sudden, would you mind explaining?’

  Melissa remained silent for a moment and then said, ‘I feel like you’re getting at me in some way. Like you’re trying to make some kind of point. You’ve criticized me before for feeling and not acting, for not expressing myself and what I believe in with concrete acts. Maybe you think I’m a calculating person capable of really horrible things …’

  Steve interrupted her, ‘I’ve not said or implied anything of the sort. For God’s sake Melissa, in your next breath you’ll be accusing me of comparing you to Richard Gere.’

  Melissa grunted and crossed her arms. ‘Weren’t you?’

  Steve paused a moment and then said, ‘Is something wrong with you today? Are you feeling ill?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Well, what is it then?’

  After a few seconds she turned from the doorway and faced him. Her eyes were tearful, ‘I can’t explain it. It’s just that I feel so helpless and so furious inside at the same time.’

  Steve frowned. ‘Like frustrated?’

  She shrugged again, ‘I don’t think so. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s like I care about things so much and yet I don’t seem to be able to do anything, like I’m frozen. Everything around me affects me so much, sad things cloud me up inside, I feel so terrible about homelessness and sadness and AIDS, loads of things, but I feel as though I can make no difference, I can’t do anything to make things better. Nothing real, anyway.’

  Steve looked mystified. He said, ‘I just don’t understand why it is that you feel compelled to feel bad about things all the time. It’s so bland and aimless. It’s like you’ve decided to feel bad just for the sake of it, just to look saintly and worthy. But you can’t even be specific about your so-called sympathies. Just caring about things doesn’t amount to much at the end of the day, it isn’t enough.’