by Brian Aldiss
‘And what like was your imprisonment in prison?’ asked Helge of you. ‘Was it very hard?’
‘Not quite as bad as public school,’ you said. She sniggered, unsure whether you were joking or not, hiding her mouth behind her hand. ‘Now I’m looking for a room somewhere.’
Gerard struck his fist on the table so that the wine slopped over the rim of his glass.
‘There, my dear valued friend, G. and H. Geldstein can certainly be of assistance!’
The room in Blackall Square had a shallow bay window which looked out on the street, and across it to the playground of a primary school. At some time in the past, the room had been painted light blue. It contained a bed, a cupboard, a gas fire and a small, solid table which fitted neatly into the bay. The chair that accompanied it was painted the same blue as the table.
This was the room Gerard Geldstein was letting you have for twelve shillings per week. It was in Number 12 Blackall Square.
‘For Number 12, you pay me twelve shillings,’ Gerard had told you. ‘Aren’t you lucky I don’t put you in Number 35?’
Number 12 was a three-storey house with a cellar, which had been converted into a laundry for the soiled linen of Gerard’s Indian restaurant in the street adjoining the square. Most of the other rooms stood empty.
Gerard installed a small television set in your room. You watched its flickering images rarely; you had to study. You were entering a new phase of life.
Now you were alone, your thoughts returned to Briony Coates, that quiet academic lady. Now, you reflected, you would be a better companion for her. You wrote to her.
Eventually a reply came. She had married a very quiet (underlined) American, who was going to take her to live in Boston. She said her mother was well and wished to be remembered to you. Briony sent you love.
You found later that the Geldsteins had leased Number 12 from the local council in order to accommodate the Hindus who worked in two of Gerard’s restaurants: the Cobra and the Madarchod. The Indians had assured him that ‘madarchod’ meant ‘ray of sunshine’. The staff had left Number 12 in protest at the squalid conditions.
You began to understand their point of view. Every Saturday, Pief, the Geldsteins’ son, brought the soiled linen from the restaurants to launder it in the basement, whereupon brownish steam percolated through the floorboards into your room. Pief said that the Madarchod was doing good business because Indians in the neighbourhood seemed to be amused by its name.
‘I tell my father he should name the Cobra also Madarchod, so that it can prosper as well,’ Pief told me on an early visit.
There was no bathroom in Number 12. However, a bath had been installed in the lower rear hall. It was too awful to bath in, but you could wash under its running tap.
You had washed yourself by this rudimentary means one morning, when a voice spoke nearby. You were surprised. You had been told there was another occupant of the house, who lived upstairs, but in your first week you had seen no one.
The voice asked a question. ‘What was Schopenhauer doing at this time on the morning of March 2nd, in the year 1811?’
Wrapping your towel around your neck, you went and took a look up the stairs. Half-way down, all but hidden in the gloom, stood a lanky figure. It was barefoot and wore a torn pair of jeans and a soiled T-shirt. You formed no very favourable impression of it.
‘What are you talking about?’ you asked.
‘I asked you, what was Schopenhauer, the German philosopher as possibly you know, or don’t know, doing at this time on the morning of March 2nd, 1811?’
Annoyed, you said, ‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘Well, considering,’ said the voice, spinning out its sentence as its owner took a step lower on the stair, ‘considering that it’s getting on for eight in the morning, I should reckon that Schopenhauer was getting out of bed!’ He gave a laugh resembling a dog’s bark.
‘Very funny.’
The bare feet reached the bottom step but one. ‘I was making a philosophical point. Poor bastard, you have no sense of humour, I see.’
So began your acquaintance with Arturo Blake, the not particularly distinguished author of ‘Guernica’ and other pamphlets.
He went under the name ‘Caleb’. He was a scruffy character in his forties, who worked in Hounslow Park as a groundsman. His skull was shaven, he had two large protruding ears like bat’s wings, and a sharp nose in his blue-jowled face. He claimed that his mother was Spanish, and that he intended to return to Barcelona as soon as he had the money for the fare.
You became friends, or at least drinking companions. Most nights the two of you began to visit the Gardeners Arms behind the square, drinking beer with an occasional whisky chaser. But before you scarcely knew him, before you scarcely liked him, you heard him hectoring an old working man. The old man, whose name was Bert Sparrow, had been talking to a friend about coinage withdrawn from circulation. He claimed he had a farthing somewhere in his pockets.
‘They was useful, was farthings, in my young day,’ he declared.
Bert Sparrow proceeded to turn out various objects from his right hand jacket pocket. Out came a tangle of string, a folder of matches, a safety pin, a small penknife and other miscellaneous articles.
Observing this, Caleb pitched in with a sneer.
‘You see, you’re choked with objects! Useless objects. You’re a hoarder, Sparrow! It’s like your damned English drawers. Open any drawer in this country, I don’t care whatever, try any piece of furniture, and what do you find? What’s hidden in those stinking drawers? Endless things! Clutter! Scissors, thimbles, stamps, sealing wax, a missing playing card, tickets, old theatre programmes, boxes of tin tacks, postcards, pencils, tin whistles, yo-yos – all sorts of junk!
‘Do you see it’s like your minds? Your minds are full of clutter; empty of real thought. So, old currency? Throw it away! It’s no damned good! If it’s not current, it’s not currency, entiende?’
The old labourer was visibly taken aback, as much by the eloquence as by the reproof. He managed to ask, ‘What about the drawers in where you comes from? Are them any different?’
Proudly, Caleb declared, ‘In Spain, drawers are empty. We have clear minds.’
At this you intervened. ‘But that’s because you had a civil war. So much was destroyed; houses were looted. Here we’ve been more fortunate; no civil wars for centuries. The country has remained intact.’
‘Who asked you?’ Caleb enquired, swivelling round on his chair to confront you. ‘Intact, you say? Stagnant, I’d say.’
Old Sparrow’s friend said, mildly enough, ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you comes from?’
It happened that next morning, a beautiful sunny morning. You were walking to work when you met Caleb, strolling, hands in pockets, in the opposite direction.
Not wishing to appear unfriendly, you bid him good morning.
‘It’s splendid!’ he said in return, jerking his face with its sharp nose sharply upwards, perhaps to indicate the blue sky.
‘Not too bad,’ you agreed.
He stopped abruptly, in dramatic pose, hands out of pockets and extended with fingers wide before him.
‘Not too bad? Not too damned bad? Oh, you English people! How I despair of you! You are so negative! It’s a wonderful morning for once and all you can say is, it’s “Not too bad”.’
You forced a laugh. ‘It’s just a figure of speech.’ But you were annoyed, not only with Caleb, but with yourself. The man had a point.
The garden of Number 12, long neglected, had turned into primal swamp. Still you liked to walk there. Two gardens away, over three garden fences, you could see tall cages. The cages were where old Bert Sparrow kept his flight of pigeons. Every morning he went in his soiled cap down the garden to let the pigeons out.
As soon as the doors were open, up the birds flew with a great clatter, to wheel above Blackall Square. Their wings seemed to beat in unison. Up they went! It was a sigh
t to lift the spirit. You watched and wondered how the birds managed all to wheel to left or right in unison. How did they arrive at that perfect synchronicity? If only you could solve that one problem …
Round and round went the pigeons in the bright air, over the square, to return at last to Bert Sparrow, who had their food waiting for them.
Nearby were less splendid sights; pavements were cracked and broken, the roadway had potholes, the houses themselves were uniformly shabby. Weeds or bushes grew in what had been tiny front gardens, where old bicycles rusted. You observed that as inhabitants died or moved away, their houses, all owned by the council, were shuttered up with corrugated iron panels over their windows, and the house left to decay.
‘The place is a shitheap,’ Caleb said, with his usual brand of malicious glee.
‘My belief is that those who are practically down-and-out,’ you told him, ‘find this ruination more congenial than they would an array of modern, glass-faced offices with everything spick and span.’
‘Is that how you feel about it?’
‘Well, how do you feel, Caleb?’
He gave his bark. ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t change a thing.’
The poor old square had been built in Victorian times for a respectable lower-middle class of clerk. With the disappearance, or at least the winnowing, of that class after World War Two, the square was neglected, the council allowing it to go downhill. The old lived here; the old and the shabby.
Various assets had been installed to assist the luckless who arrived to live out their tumble-down days in the square. You went rather hesitantly, pursuing your own downward path, to a bathhouse which had been established in a flat-roofed prefab building at the top of the square. The bathhouse was run by an ex-army sergeant you heard people call Colin. Colin ran the bathhouse with military precision.
You paid sixpence and were given a clean towel and a new sliver of soap. You were shown into a cubicle where you climbed into a spotlessly clean bath. There was plenty of hot water. You liked it and went there often.
‘Yes, it’s worth twopence,’ Caleb said.
‘Sixpence. Colin charges sixpence.’
‘Colin, as you call him, charges me twopence.’
‘Sorry, sixpence.’
Caleb jeered. ‘He charges you sixpence because he thinks you’re posh. He can see I’m the scum of the earth.’
Other amenities included a small Co-op in Willow Street. Willow Street led into the square. It had begun, and continued to be, poorer than the square – its terraced houses lower, their front doors and window fittings cheaper. The Co-op was a bare little shop, with wooden floorboards and dim lighting. Two women served there. They understood poverty; they would cut you half of a small white loaf of bread, or a half of the traditional quarter-pound pack of butter. You shopped there frequently, guiltily enjoying the novelty of being broke.
If you went there when rain was coming on, or there was a strike on the buses, the two women would trot out a number of familiar phrases.
‘That’s how it goes.’
‘It never rains but it pours.’
‘No use complaining, is it?’
‘What do you expect?’
‘Typical!’
You were, in a sense, only visiting. You had a hidden knowledge that your life would lead elsewhere; you were educated, you had been somewhere. The permanent denizens of Blackall Square were genuinely ‘broke’. Old ladies, seeing you going frequently to the pillar box in Willow Street, deduced that you owned a bottle of ink; they would come knocking at your door and beg for a fill of ink for their fountain pens.
‘Why don’t you tell them to clear off?’ asked Caleb. ‘Oh, I see it now – you like to do good in your small way.’
‘Any harm in that?’
He grunted. ‘You shouldn’t encourage them. Damned spongers.’
Another asset was the small TV set Gerard had given you. On it you fell to watching a strange, continuing, series of dramas entitled The Prisoner. A man with a political background was imprisoned on a fantastic island from which he tried to escape. Every week, his attempt was foiled. Within this negative structure, an extraordinary story was unfolded.
On the nights when The Prisoner was showing, you would not drink at the Gardeners Arms with Caleb, for fear of missing an instalment.
Caleb came to watch one instalment with you. He was baffled.
‘It doesn’t make the sense,’ he said.
‘It’s surrealism. It doesn’t have to make sense, not in a literal way.’
He smote his forehead with the heel of his right hand. ‘Now I see the meaning you tell me! It doesn’t make sense because it is an imitation of life, yes?’
‘Something like that.’ You laughed. Then he also laughed. Most fictions were designed to make sense, those that did not were most true to the way people lived through their existences, so The Prisoner was a masterpiece. You particularly identified with the hero, imprisoned on his island just as you had been imprisoned. He raised his fist to the heavens to cry, ‘I am not a number. I am a free man!’ While you were watching one episode, a knock came at your front door. Irritated, you went to see who it was. A lad of possibly fifteen stood there, holding two books.
He spoke politely. ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir. My dad bought two books off of a stall in the market. He don’t want them, says like they’re above his head. He thought as you would like ’em, seeing you’re, well, you’re educated, like.’
‘What are they?’ you asked, snappishly.
‘See, they’re about time, and dad’s a watch-repairer, like, so he thought they’d be up his street.’
‘All right. Thanks. Thanks very much.’ You took the books, hardly giving them a glance, eager to return to Prisoner. ‘I’m busy, engaged in something.’
The lad, blank-faced, said without emphasis, ‘Dad reckoned they would be worth a quid to you.’
It happened you had a pound note in your pocket. You paid him with it and then shut the door in his face.
The books were both by a Dr Fraser. You remembered your earlier love of strange titles. One of the books was called Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge – a large book, necessarily so to contain three such challenging qualities. The other was more slender, Time As a Series of Irreconcilable Conflicts. You began to read the latter volume as soon as the episode of The Prisoner was over.
You read, ‘Personal identity has been recognized as a troublesome and elusive idea, even a mysterious one. This elusiveness is hardly surprising if we recall that the Self, like all identities, is said to function in the external world; although, unlike any other kind of identity, it registers only partly on the external landscape …’
You were astonished. Personal identity was exactly your problem. You began to read the taxing, but illuminating, Dr Fraser.
You often ate in the Madarchod, where food was cheap. If it happened that Gerard came into his restaurant when you were there, he would greet you warmly and sign your bill so that you did not have to pay. Sometimes, when he came round with his rent book to collect the rent, he would unfailingly extract the money from Caleb, but would often enough say to you, with a sad smile, ‘Let us pretend we are yet in the French forest, where no money is needed.’
Sometimes, when you and Caleb went into the Gardeners Arms, you would meet old women coming out of the public bar with jugs of porter in their fists; you were a long way from Swinging London now. In that pub, Caleb liked to drink heavily, and talk.
‘Among philosophers, I like best Schopenhauer. He’s such a miserable bastard! He sees how our will distorts our lives. We will our own disasters. Like, why did I come to Britain?’
‘You had to escape from Franco’s Spain, didn’t you? You found Spain an even worse place than England. Why come here if you were going to hate it? Why run it down all the time? Why not try France?’
He showed his teeth at you – already the drink was beginning to tell. ‘I hate the French. They ruin a nice country. I don’t hate the peo
ple of this country. I love the awfulness, its dilapidation, its attitudes far from modern here. I wouldn’t change a thing.’
‘You hate everything, Caleb. You’re a destroyer at heart.’
He thumped his fist on the table, so that your glasses rattled in shock. ‘Let’s get another damned drink! I’m not a destroyer. I’m a Steppenwolf. Can’t you understand that? You are meant to be intelligent, you damned jailbird, don’t you understand the pain of being a Steppenwolf? Didn’t you never read the German Hesse’s novel? A part of society but always an Outsider … Christ, but this beer is piss. I swear they water it.’
‘Yes, I did read Steppenwolf, you stuck-up prat! Hesse says a Steppenwolf has in him conflicting impulses of saint and profligate; that’s what’s tearing you apart.’
‘So what? A Steppenwolf must once in a while take a good look at himself. When did you ever do that thing?’
‘Oh yes, Caleb, you may not have done that but I certainly have. When were you ever in prison, tell me that!’
‘I was in Franco’s Spain. Does that count as a prison?’
You received a letter from Birdlip Hill, forwarded by your solicitors. It was from Abby. She made no mention of your daughter, she simply said that she was beginning her life anew. She wished you well, but hoped not to hear from you again.
A dismal letter, you thought, although her attitude was understandable enough.
Your father came to see you. Martin looked with contempt about your room before insisting you showed him the bath which served as bathroom, and the toilet. The toilet, having been tacked on to the rear of the house at a late date, was semi-outdoors; large black slugs slid about the concrete floor like animated turds.
‘You’ve not made much of your life, old feller-me-lad,’ he said. ‘This is not the way we brought you up. Rotten luck! I’m sorry about it.’
He would not sit down. Instead he stood, hands on hips, gazing out of the window at the primary school across the street. ‘The world’s progressing, but you don’t seem to be managing to do the same.’
‘I’m studying with Open University, Dad, doing an advanced course in Earth Sciences.’
