by Jenny Diski
Unconcerned by her lack of sleep, the yellowbird summoned Christina as usual, early the next morning. She only glanced at the nest in passing—for all its hard work, the creature still had a long way to go. Christina didn’t sit at the table, but took the float mat and went straight down to the water’s edge. The idea of floating on the sea before Michael and Thomas woke was pleasing enough to take the edge off last night’s despair. She dropped the mat onto the surface of the water and waded in after it, but then heard someone whistling and footsteps on the gravel path behind her. She knew it wasn’t Michael: the whistle was a tuneful, lazy rendition of “Summertime,” not for show, but just a relaxed private expression of contentment by someone unselfconsciously at ease with himself. It couldn’t be Michael. It would never be Michael.
Christina turned and squinted up the beach. A man in his thirties was walking along the path with a tray in his hands. As he came towards the spot below which Christina stood, ankle deep in the sea, she watched his slow, sun-drenched, bare-footed gait, the small curve of wellbeing on his lips, the openness of his bare, tanned torso to the delicious rays of the sun. It was not that there was anything spectacular about him—he was no better built than average, and not exceptionally handsome. What struck Christina as she stood and watched him, was how at ease he seemed with himself and how solidly he existed. She noticed, as he came to the part of the path by Christina’s cabin, the coffee pot and two cups and saucers on the tray. A flash of pain streaked across Christina’s forehead as she imagined the sleeping woman who would come awake with fresh coffee seeping into her consciousness. A smile from him as he set down the tray and sat on the edge of the bed, pouring coffee for the two of them. A “Good morning” between them that picked up the warmth of falling asleep in each other’s arms last night. They wouldn’t have to kiss, not immediately, only to sip coffee and feel drenched in their pleasure at waking up to another day of being together. Christina saw all this in a second of pain, anguished by the knowledge that the woman who would be woken in a few moments was not her.
The man saw her then, stopped whistling, and smiled amiably at her.
“Lovely morning,” he called. “Enjoy your float.”
Christina managed a smile, but already he had passed by and forgotten her existence. The melody of “Summertime” drifted through the air again and in a moment he had disappeared into his cabin a few doors down from her own.
Christina lay face down on the blue float mat, her arms folded under her chin. If she opened her eyes, she could look down into the water, but for a while she kept them closed so that there was only the sensation of the warm sun along her body and the movement of the waves undulating beneath her, rolling under her body from head to toe, rocking her in a gentle, regular rhythm.
She opened her eyes and stared along the surface of the water. Her head was facing away from the shore, her eyes virtually level with the sea which spread out in front of her, a dense carpet of aquamarine as far as she could see. She floated, nothing more than a pair of eyes, in the centre of this uninterrupted vista, watching small waves make hummocks that rolled towards her lazily, over and over, the sea repeating itself tirelessly, endlessly. She dropped her arms and let them float in the water at either side of her and looked down. The sea was perfectly clear and landscaped beneath the surface in breathtaking colour. She took a deep breath and dipped her face into the water, keeping her eyes open. The coral waved amoebic arms and delicate fernlike fronds at her, their pinks, greens and yellows so outrageously vivid that they might have been painted; neon-bright fish, mostly tiny, fleeting shapes like streaks of lightning, but some surprisingly large and languorous, wove in and out of the swaying forest of coral.
Christina lifted her head and, smiling utter contentment to herself, let her eyes close again. She allowed the sea and warmth to drift her into daydream. The man with the tray of coffee was beside her, bobbing on the water next to her. He let his arms fall into the water and their hands met below the surface. They belonged to each other, easily and safely. She thought of the next twenty years and more of being together and it was as if the sun had seeped through her skin and was shining inside her.
Christina began to feel her shoulders burning and carefully rolled herself over on the mat to lie on her back. The mat bounced for a moment and then settled back into its regular, gentle movement. Enough water had slopped onto it to relieve and cool her overheated skin. She had to shade her eyes with her hand against the brightness of the sun before opening them. The blinding disc of light and heat blazed down at her from an unbroken blue sky, as continuous and horizonless as the sea had been when she had lain face down. The sun was almost directly above her now, she noticed, turning her head to one side to rest her eyes. The sea and sky met far off into the distance. She turned her head to look in the other direction and saw the same panorama stretching away. After a moment, she lifted her head a little and looked along the length of her body. Again, there was only sea and sky. She did not have to turn around to know that the same view would meet her eyes if she looked behind her. She lay back and splashed some water onto her belly, watching through the screen of her lashes as the last iridescent drops of water fell from her dangling fingers. When she felt pleasantly cool again, she closed her eyes and relaxed, leaving her arms to drag weightily in the sea. This was, she thought, the most complete pleasure she had ever experienced. She wondered why she’d never done it before.
On the Existence of Mount Rushmore and Other Improbabilities
The thought came to Ellen in the middle of one night. First she was asleep and then she was awake with a single question in her head, as if it was asking itself so urgently it couldn’t wait until morning to have itself thought about. The question was this: Does Mount Rushmore exist? And then, in answer to her weary: Well, of course it exists, a supplementary question: How do you know?
Got her! That was the end of the night’s sleep. It didn’t matter how much she told herself that she couldn’t care less about Mount Rushmore, had never given Mount Rushmore more than a passing thought, and firmly turned on her side to get back to sleep, it just wouldn’t go away. She sat up, lit a cigarette and the bedside lamp, and gave it a passing thought.
All she could think about Mount Rushmore was that Cary Grant and whatwashername—Eva Marie Saint—had crawled all over it trying to get away from . . . James Mason, she thought, in North By Northwest. They had clambered across the faces of American presidents carved into the mountainside in—she didn’t know where. Which presidents? Lincoln, she was sure, but who else? She didn’t remember, if she’d ever known. Why should she? She lived and worked in London, England. She didn’t have to know about Mount Rushmore. Except that she’d been woken up, and her night’s sleep ruined worrying about it.
She wished Martin hadn’t taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him. Tomorrow she promised herself, she would go to the library at school and check it out. Now, could she please go to sleep?
The trouble is, once you’ve turned on the light and smoked a cigarette, you have to watch the dawn come in through the venetian blinds. It was a law of some kind. She stared grimly at the blackness seeping through the cracks in the slats.
Until last year, she had been a history teacher. She worked, still worked, though now in the English department, at a comprehensive school of the kind the local middle-class parents managed not to send their children to. Since everyone had to stay at school until sixteen, and it was not permissible to tell children they didn’t have a hope of getting decent grades at GCSE and they’d be better off going out and earning a living, she had been in charge of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds who were supposed to be studying for the exam. None of them was very bright, but Tracy was the least able of them all. Her dimly-lit face never seemed illuminated with thought, but she was pleasant and worked heartbreakingly hard. It always surprised Ellen how much effort Tracy put into her work, in spite of never achieving anything more than
a pat on the back for trying.
Everybody had to do a project for history, which counted for twenty per cent of the final exam. Tracy was doing the project Ellen always suggested to the least academic kids: Costume in the Eighteenth Century. They liked going to the library, and, with the help of the librarian, finding books with plenty of pictures. For over six months Tracy had been copying dresses, shoes, hats, coats and underwear from books and colouring them in, her tongue poked concentratedly between her lips. The folder was quite thick now. There were dozens of drawings, each labelled as neatly as she could manage in her tentative, round handwriting. Every time Ellen passed her desk, she would stop and make admiring noises about Tracy’s use of colour, which was all she could find to make an honestly positive comment about.
Then, one day, Tracy had lifted her head from her work while Ellen was across the other side of the room.
“Miss,” she called out. This was the usual long drawn out “Mi . . . isss” which signified a problem. Ellen went to Tracy’s desk.
“Mi . . iss,” Tracy repeated when Ellen bent down to look at the work. “You know the eighteenth century . . . ?”
This was the usual form of words for all the pupils. All queries or statements began with “You know . . .” and then the subject of the forthcoming discussion. Ellen had long since stopped making a point about this, and these days, answered, “Miss, you know my mum . . . ?” or even, on occasion, “Miss, you know God . . . ?” in the affirmative. It was the only way to get on with it. They would not continue until she had said yes, so she said yes.
“Yes,” Ellen said, with a little more truth than usual. She was a history teacher, and she did know something about the eighteenth century. “What about the eighteenth century, Tracy?”
“Well, was it before or after the war, Miss?”
Ellen stayed very still while she took in Tracy’s question. For a moment she was going to ask, “Which war?” but decided against it. She knew, in the kind of rush in which revelation arrives, that for Tracy there would be only two wars: the first and the second. And since there was nothing before one, those would be the only two she knew about. Or rather, not about, but knew of their existence. Tracy continued to look up at her teacher, waiting expectantly for an answer.
A thought struck Ellen.
“Why do you want to know?”
Why did she want to know? If she didn’t know when the eighteenth century was, what difference did it make which war it was before or after?
“I dunno,” Tracy said, sorry now that she’d asked and been obliged therefore to answer a question herself. “I just wondered.”
Late that night, Ellen sat at her kitchen table and forced herself to be inside the mind of Tracy. It seemed very important to get an inkling of what it might be like to have no concept of chronology beyond one’s own birthdays. That it had never crossed her mind that Tracy (and others, certainly) did not know where the eighteenth century was in relation to the present day, seemed to Ellen a level of ignorance close to Tracy’s. So she set about trying to imagine how the world was for her pupil.
She was surprised to find that inside Tracy’s mind, it was not, as she’d imagined, all empty space and fog. On the contrary, it was extraordinarily crammed in there. There were countless tiny doors inside Tracy’s mind, so many it would be impossible to investigate them all in a single session. But it wouldn’t have been feasible anyway, because each of the doors Ellen tried was locked, and there were no corridors leading from one to another. She began to get a picture of how it worked.
Tracy, like all the kids, watched countless hours of television, preferably American imports, but sometimes she would see something set in a different historical period. At first, Ellen wondered how she would understand the nature of the drama she was watching. But then she realised that what happened was that Tracy watched the historical drama from one of the rooms in her mind, and when, say, Baywatch was on, she viewed it from a different room. She could only be in one room at a time, and had no access to what was behind the other doors. So she would watch an episode of Sherlock Holmes, more or less following the story, but without any context, because each piece of information on the Victorian period which had made its way into her mind during the course of her life lived separate and alone in one of the rooms behind a locked door. There was nothing but pure narrative, or disembodied detail in Tracy’s worldview.
Presumably, some circuit had shorted, and briefly connected one room with another, which had caused her to ask about the relationship between the eighteenth century and the war. And this was why she had been so confused when Ellen asked her why she wanted to know. Tracy had no idea why she wanted to know. It was just that a door had swung open, and a question popped out.
Tracy would not get her GCSE history. But she would get a job, marry, have children and take care of a home; and she’d do most, if not all, of those things as well as Ellen would. Tracy would be perfectly able to enjoy and manage her life. It was only that she wasn’t suited to learning things she had no need to know about.
That was when Ellen changed from the History to the English department. In the English department then there was no syllabus to be got through. The year she had spent explaining about the Industrial Revolution would be replaced by the entertainment of reading stories (knowing them to be contextless for many, but stories nevertheless) and doing practical exercises which young people who are about to manage life on their own would find useful. Writing applications for job interviews; filling in forms; keeping diaries . . .
When Ellen had told the story of Tracy to Martin—who was still living with her at the time—he told her the story about one of his history classes; a group of fourteen-year-old boys. He’d been about to start teaching the voyages of discovery, and was setting the pre-Columbian scene, explaining to them how people believed that the world was flat. He’d noticed a funny look in several of the boys’ eyes, and something cold had run down his spine, he said. So he pointed round the room and asked each boy whether the world was flat or round.
The first boy looked panic-stricken.
“Round, Sir . . . No, flat, Sir . . . Um . . .”
Thirteen of the twenty-seven boys were uncertain.
“Uncertain,” Martin emphasised. “None of them positively believed the world was flat, but only because they didn’t believe anything at all about the planet. They simply never thought about it. And, you know what? They’re right. It doesn’t matter one way or the other to them. Or to us. Everything works just fine. They and we get on with our lives. They climb aboard aeroplanes and fly to sunny parts of Europe, even to America, some of them. But they don’t think about falling off the edge because planes fly from airport to airport. The shape of the earth is irrelevant. It could be hexagonal, for all they care, as long as they get where they want to go.”
And when she came to think about it, knowing that the earth was spherical and that the eighteenth century came before the nineteenth century wasn’t information she actually used much in her life. She could have got on perfectly well without it. She tried to remember the moment when she had been taught those facts, but she couldn’t because there wasn’t a moment. It was as if she’d always known them. And so what? Had the world really turned upside down when Columbus didn’t fall off the edge of the earth, or did most people simply shrug when they heard the news? And so what? In fact, most people wouldn’t have heard about it. They would have lived through the discovery, got on with their business, and died without ever knowing the cataclysmic news.
Ellen saw the first dim glow of light coming through the gaps in the venetian blinds. Mount Rushmore, she thought again. What an extraordinary thing to do to a mountain. And how, in God’s name, had they done it? How could a team of stonemasons, or sculptors, or explosives experts, or whatever they were, have made the mountainside Abraham Lincoln look anything like Lincoln on such a scale? And why? To celebrate America and democracy, she supposed. Or some such idealistic motive. Probably not unlike the
idealistic motives she’d had in the seventies that made her go into teaching.
Now she came to think of it, Mount Rushmore was the silliest thing she could imagine. Odd, really, that she’d never thought of it before. Not in all her life, not even during the several times she’d seen North By Northwest, had it crossed her mind to wonder about it. For all she knew, it didn’t actually exist. After all, Hitchcock would have mocked the thing up in a studio to shoot the final scenes. Its appearance in a film didn’t prove its existence. Tomorrow, she’d go (sleepily, for sure) to the library during lunchbreak and find out about it. And what if it didn’t really exist? What if Mount Rushmore was nothing more than a Hollywood set: just an idea? What if I dreamed it up, she thought with sleep grasping at her mind; what then?
Sex and Drugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: Part II
Time, Constance decided, was not cyclical, but more like a spiral. It was not so much that time repeated itself, round and round, and over and over again, but that it almost did. Which suggested to her that there probably was a God, or at any rate an omnipotent Critic.
The nature of the spiral is that it very nearly comes full circle, but stops short of the absolute circumference, and creates another near circle that doesn’t make it. It was the gap between the end of one almost-circle and the next which convinced her that she was inhabiting a more than physical universe. At the place where the circles didn’t meet up, where the cycle refused to complete itself, was the commentary: the chiming laughter that could be harsh or indulgent, but, in either case, rang in her ears like the toll of a ghostly clock.
The trouble was that there was more than one cycle and their numbers grew as she got older, so that it seemed to her that, these days, there was hardly a gap between the periods of laughter bouncing off the walls. No time to rest from noticing. Sometimes she thought she would have liked to inhabit a linear planet where what was done was done for good or bad and then it was on to the next thing. But it seemed that by the time life was officially halfway through it was so clogged with near repetition there was hardly any possibility of just getting on with whatever was next. Lately, she had come to suspect that nothing was next; only a rolling retrospective. Life wound up, and then it wound down.
