With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  3

  He reads about gods having sexual congress with human beings, and falling in love, and changing their loved ones into whatever comes to hand. A tree, a bird, a gust of wind, a flower. Never a house, he thinks, or a fireguard or a garden fork. Never a boat or a bicycle saddle or a mirror. He wonders what it must be like to be transformed into a bird or a flower, a flower so small it might never be noticed unless someone seeks it out. And the gods do it too, they change themselves into birds and beasts. It’s as though the whole of nature were spread out before them, like a sample sheet, for the purposes of love.

  4

  The hens are kept in cages, in rows, stacked three or four high, with corridors between the rows for them to pass. The eggs they lay roll down to a rack along the edge, to be collected. His father has designed the cages so that each hen has more than twice the usual space, but they don’t seem to know this. They make a noise you can hear from the house, until you grow used to it. His father says music would make them lay more, but who can hear music above the noise they make. The eggs are striped with shit and sometimes soft, like pouches. He hates the place. The soft-shelled eggs are the ones they eat themselves.

  5

  He’s known what he wants for as long as he can remember wanting. He is eight when the builders next door catch his eye. He stands, dry-mouthed, behind his bedroom curtains, watching the muscles move beneath their skin, praying for sun. At the zoo, he sees a keeper in green shorts and a singlet and falls in love, there is no other word for it, he can see him still. His childhood is starred by the bodies of boys and men, starred and illuminated. His cousin, thin as a rake, adored. A boy in the village, his shirt tied round his waist as he walks ahead, still there. None of it forced, or learned. All of it natural as breath.

  6

  His tutor calls him in to talk about his lack of drive. He listens to the man tick off a list of absences, unwritten essays, skipped supervisions, his failure to show at lectures. In a fit of calculated madness, he tells his tutor he has unnatural desires. A friend of his had tried this and marvelled as his tutor locked a framed portrait of wife and child into a drawer and stroked him encouragingly on the thigh. This isn’t quite what he wants, but neither does he want to work. His tutor, though, backs off. You must talk to your doctor, he says, his face snapped shut. His doctor’s name is Strangeways. He thinks about going, but decides against it.

  7

  His first Italian garden, poised above a lake, he breathes out. He loves box hedges for what they are and for what they say they are. Gardens as boxes of human ingenuity. The nature of who we are and what we want as we work on that other nature, the one that bends to our will, or lets us think so. Because every garden is a war against nature as well, the more natural the more bitterly fought. A formal garden is the concession that other, perhaps more generous, nature makes to our need for order. It’s like a hand that pats our head. A knot, a posy, a wreath, a garland. Nature contracting itself into something we can bear.

  8

  He’s looking at photographs of a holiday taken by friends in the Himalayas. They travel along a road carved into a cliff, and there are lorries and danger and he’s gripped by what they must have felt. After that there are mountains, and more mountains, and of course he’s appreciative, how vast it all is, how white, but at heart he’s wearied by such inhuman majesty. He’s quickly bored by the sublime, by its indifference, its general blandness. His interest is only quickened when he sees, in the distance, a string of coloured flags, or pennants. They seem to be moving in the wind and that’s what the wind is for. Finally. He’s been missing the point of it all.

  9

  His students love what they call la natura. They all live in flats in the suburbs of the capital, most of them drive to class, one in each car, but that’s OK, la natura is out there, waiting beyond the petty, polluting details of their daily lives, the nature is green and blue and sun-kissed above all, with amenities to hand, and beautiful, as they are, because to be beautiful is to be natural and those who aren’t are somehow, well, unnatural, and no one likes that. The other big thing they adore is sincerità, otherwise known as the failure to see complication. Nature is shit, he wants to tell them, and cancer, and it’s staring you in the face.

  10

  He is watching the body dissolve, his own body, the body of those he loves. When his father was dying he watched the man’s blood pulse blue in his hands, his eyes turn from brown to blue, as though blue were the default to which all bodies returned, the colour of sky and of water. Does the world ache, he wonders, as these parts of it ache, with age and illness. The natural world. Lying in bed beside his mother he watches a heron settle on the uppermost branches of a nearby tree, impossibly large, blue sky behind. It is early morning and she will die within days. Look, he says, reaching across to take her hand, there’s a heron.

  1

  He’s holding the kitten up to the mirror, but the kitten is restless and wants to be put down. The kitten can’t see itself, but he can see them both, and behind them both his cowboy wallpaper, with all the horses pointing the wrong way. His father chose it to please him, but it doesn’t, not really; he would have chosen Red Indians, and tepees, and pipes of peace. At school, he’d rather be a robber than a cop, but that’s when he’s playing with the boys. The girls’ playground is better fun, just as long as no one sees him and tells him to leave. His world is coterminous with the cat’s. It’s a new word, but it works.

  2

  When the school goes to France he doesn’t go because his parents can’t afford to send him. He stays at home and reads about men who use their single feet as parasols to protect themselves from the sun and sees how the meaning of the word Parasol is contained within it. Years earlier he’d thought that languages were codes and could be deciphered by a simple transposition of the letters, but that must mean I and je are playing some game he can’t understand, where one letter stands for two. How strange it must be in France, he’d thought, where I is other. He learns the word Parapluie. He stands unsheltered in the English rain and wonders where they are.

  3

  He’d like a penfriend but can’t find anyone he wants to write to. There is the problem of language first of all, and then of knowing what to say. People in other countries must think differently, he supposes, if people think in words. His first real penfriend is someone called Dawn, who goes to boarding school with a girl he knows. She wanted to write to a boy and he’s been volunteered. She writes to him about other boys and what she wants them to do to her, and he knows exactly how she feels, and about her first period, and he has no idea. When his mother finds the letter, and tells him he mustn’t reply, he’s immediately relieved.

  4

  The woman he worked with writes to him from her new home in another country, and he writes a letter back the following day, filled with his new life. He tells her he should have been honest with her about himself, and how much easier it is in letters, and here is the proof of it, he thinks. As he writes all sense of her, her face, her voice, is lost in the rush of listening to himself confess. He reads the letter through once, then posts it before he can change his mind. He’s exposed, but happy. She could ignore him, but she doesn’t. She understands. He reads the letter through once, then twice. He wishes she’d never answered.

  5

  How much of what we say is heard, he wonders. And by whom? He’s been talking about his favourite books and mentions Wuthering Heights and the woman he’s with says, how lovely. What’s lovely? he says. The way you say wuthering, she says, it really ought to rhyme with smother, you just make it sound so northern, she says. But it is, he says, it is northern. And then there’s the way you always sound the final ‘g’, she says, in words like loving. They look at each other, you haven’t heard a word of what I’ve said, he thinks, but she’s moved on to talk with someone else in a language she shares, leaving him speechless in his own.

  6

  He’s fascinated by parallel universes, for
king paths, the Borges thing, but also event horizons, those places where time is stopped and flattened out like cartoon cats splayed helplessly across the sides of houses, always there, and yet nowhere. It’s how the world looks to him at times, as though what’s here and what isn’t here can simply be swapped around. He’s ripe for structuralism when it arrives, in its knowing double-edged way, like palindromes or mirror-writing, to tell him about the way power works, only recognisable after a certain effort and then immediately as familiar as Life. A User’s Manual. But if what counts is what isn’t here, he wonders, the smear on the surface of the world is what?

  7

  He knows he should write but there is always some distraction. He has a life to create as a foreigner in a foreign land. His language is no longer the one in which he lives, but contingent, a marketable asset, the stuff of dreams. He talks to himself in this new language, walking along the tramlines towards the factory, where he will teach a blind girl in an office with a view of a thousand parked cars. He’s angry, sad, he’s testing the limits of this person he both is and isn’t. What’s lost might not be ephemeral, but the heart of him. He’s changed, but no mirror shows it. It’s no wonder he finds it hard to write. Home.

  8

  The last thing he wants to do is read about himself. He can’t understand these people who talk about identification with characters, as though books were some sort of police line-up in which the culprit, oneself, is concealed among the rest, who have nothing to do with this crime, whatever else they might have done, and the game is to worm oneself out and say, yes, that’s who I am. He’d like to know more about the rest of the ill-assorted crew, the short one in the ragged jacket, the man with the harelip, the girl whose heart and head lines form a single furrow across her palm, the weeping boy, the woman he will never be, no matter what.

  9

  I’ll tell you when I see you, he writes. But telling and writing are different and what he says when he sees her is not what he wanted to say at all. There’s a slippage between the written and the spoken word, a lack of correspondence. He tells her he’s sorry, but she doesn’t seem to hear. A chimp’s DNA is 98 per cent the same as a human being’s, he reads, but what if the difference is as great as that between pain and paint, or father and farther, or as small? All we can hear is what we want to hear, is that what all the noise is saying? Of people calling out names as though they counted.

  10

  The letters are the hardest thing to deal with. They are squeezed into shoeboxes, or chocolate boxes, or have holes punched into their margins to be organised into lever arch files recycled from his father’s office. Handwritten letters with lies in them, and half-lies, letters he remembers writing and letters penned by someone else, surely, and given to him to sign, his own deceitful, conniving secretary. Himself, his grudging confidant. Postcards scribbled in foreign bars, their stamps steamed off and saved elsewhere, pictures of flowers and sepia castles like small sawtooth-edged tokens of love. And then there are those that meant everything, the truthful ones, the heartfelt ones, bundled in with the rest, indistinguishable in all ways from the rest.

  1

  Saturday morning cinema with schoolfriends because his sister is still too young. He has just enough money for his ticket and a choc ice, which he eats with care from its striped paper wrapper, afraid the brittle laminate of chocolate will slide from the vanilla heart, fall to the floor, and melt into the carpet beneath his feet. He’s less excited than his friends as the faithful dog hurtles over the cliff-edge. He knows there will be a saving ledge or a passing truck of hay. This isn’t the world as he sees it. He is cynical for his age. He watches South Pacific there with his parents, his first adult film, and falls unexpectedly in love with a sailor.

  2

  His favourite film as a child is Ben Hur, which he sees with his aunt in the Odeon in Wolverhampton. She’s anxious he might be upset by the chariot race and the mangled body of Ben Hur’s friend and rival, whose name he no longer remembers, but he tells her not to worry. He holds her hand. It’s only a film, he says, and she’s both reassured and startled that a six-year-old should say this. What she doesn’t know, what no one will ever know, until now, is that he will close his eyes that night and he will think of the scene of the body, broken by horses, and when he opens his eyes it will still be there.

  3

  It’s the dancing he loves, and the patterns the dancers make. Their legs become petals, then spokes, then lips. They open and close, they rise and fall. The world of the dance is the theatre and it is black and white, and people sing there, but not only there. They sing in houses and streets and bars, and sometimes they are at war, but the singing and dancing continue as though there were no other way to be understood. They sing out their hearts, staring straight into his eyes through the glittering screen. Love is important, and fame, but mostly love, and when there is conflict it is love that wins out. Later, with colour, everything will become more difficult.

  4

  He’s too young for Psycho but that doesn’t stop him sending up to the box office a taller friend, who buys a single adult ticket, then opens the exit door to let him in. They sit in the front row, just the two of them in a cinema that’s almost empty, watching the first performance of the day. He keeps his head down below the level of the seat back. They smoke cigarettes. In the first scene, he marvels at the marble-like gleam of the shirtless man’s chest. They both spot Hitchcock pass in front of the car. The stuffed birds are wonderful, but scary. They smoke cigarettes. There is blood in the bath. The money is in the newspaper.

  5

  Years later, as a student, he sees O Lucky Man! There is a scene in a hospital, a long corridor, doctors and nurses, white coats, a sense of research being carried out, the details escape him. His mother wanted to be a doctor, would have liked him to be a doctor, and it is true, it would be wonderful to heal the sick, to assist the dying, but at night he can no longer sleep on his side, his legs curled up, one arm beneath him, because what he sees is himself from above, with the head of a young man, eyes red with weeping, and beneath the sheet, but please don’t touch the sheet, the body of a pig.

  6

  The woman is plump, poor, a cleaner in an office. She lives in a small grey flat, stops in a nearby bar for a glass of something on her way home. She has children, grown-up children, with their own lives to lead. There is a man. They dance. The poetry is in the pity. The man treats her well, she can barely believe it. She never imagined she’d fall in love again, and with someone so beautiful, so strong. She’s been afraid so long, she thinks, without even knowing. She is not understood and then she is part of that not understanding. Fear Eats the Soul. He would have been brave, he thinks. He would have known what to do.

  7

  He had no idea. He’d read the books, after all, he knew whose daughter he was watching. He waited until the last minute before going in. He sat alone, to avoid distraction. He was Brian Roberts, and then he was Sally Bowles, and then he was jumping on a running board and turning to wave and not knowing how to confess his love. Because they’re bound to love you, aren’t they? Because blue is your colour. Because for every life there is one film that counts, and all the others are makeweights and his film is Cabaret. He stands in the street outside the cinema and waits for the storm his heart has become to take him where it will.

  8

  Outside the Arts Cinema with a cluster of disciples, George Steiner is turning his nose up at the programme, but he isn’t put off. Inside the cinema, he sits between friends, wondering how much he will understand. It is his first Italian film, unless Sophia Loren counts in El Cid. There is a slightly absurd centaur, who says, When nature seems natural everything will be over. Tibetan chanting, some troglodyte dwellings, a beautiful laughing boy whose neck is snapped, whose body is broken into small bowls. All at once, he’s lost in a place he knows well but has never dared visit alone. Years later, he watches Salò in Milan and understands for the first time what the centaur mean
t.

  9

  The only cinema in town had wooden seats the first time they went, and table fans along the stage to keep the first few rows cool in August. Most of the films they show are cartoons, Italian sex comedies of the cheapest sort, but occasionally there’s a horror film. He’s always had a taste for shock, and schlock. At the second showing, they’re alone, the two of them in their favourite seats, where circle meets stalls. They’re watching a man transform into a beast in a wolf-infested wood when behind them in the aisle they hear a shuffle of feet that almost coincides with the clip of the creature’s hooves. She screams, he holds her hand. You forgot your change.