Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  Morris turned to look at her. He felt like he was a child and she was a grown-up bigger, sterner, more knowing than he. It occurred to Morris that he had never taken the serious parts of life very seriously at all, and now he was paying for it.

  ‘That’s not quite fair. It’s the opposite of what I meant,’ he said.

  ‘But it’s exactly what I meant.’

  ‘You’re just being clever.’

  ‘I thought you liked that.’

  When the afternoon was over they walked back with him to the Tube. Morris felt unexpectedly, dreadfully tired, as though the day had been a sucking swamp through which he had had to trudge. After a joyous hour, Molly had slumped into a trough of anger when she had learned he was leaving. She coiled around Morris’s leg and bored her head rather uncomfortably into his groin. E hugged him. Her smell – coffee, breast milk, gum – gave him vertigo. He had to blink.

  ‘When will you visit again?’ she asked.

  ‘When I’m released. A month or so.’

  ‘Released,’ she shook her head and laughed. ‘Bloody hell, Morris.’

  He laughed too, and it seemed for a moment that all of it, all of it, might just be a joke between them.

  ‘Call us first, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. Yes.’

  She nodded and rubbed his cheek-bone with her thumb as if wiping away a tear. With difficulty, Morris undamped Molly from his leg. Her wails filled the ticket hall. As he descended the escalator, towards the Bakerloo line, he felt as though he were fleeing the scene of yet another crime.

  Back at Flat Hill Open Prison, Morris polished floors. The polisher wowed and span in front of him like a UFO. Behind him the pink composite flooring switched suddenly from matt to gloss. People tap-danced round him, winked. He was offered gardening but he turned it down – he liked to polish, polishing was his thing.

  ‘What will you do next?’ asked his psychologist.

  Morris looked at him.

  ‘It’s not a trick question.’

  ‘I like to polish,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘But realistically, I’ll teach. There’s an offer on the table.’

  ‘What about your marriage?’

  ‘There’s Nick Kidney.’

  ‘The pickled-penis guy?’

  ‘Exactly. They’re involved, the two of them. That was the term she used.’

  ‘Involved?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about the children, Molly and …?’

  ‘Hedda. Yes, my visitation rights are open-ended. I have to call in advance, make an appointment, but apart from that.’

  The psychologist nodded eagerly. He was wearing an Arran sweater with little white knobs hanging off it like woolly gooseberries.

  ‘And how is baby Hedda?’

  ‘Well,’ Morris crossed his legs. ‘She has that retarded look, she drools, she squints, she whinnies.’ He flailed his arms briefly. ‘There’s no motor control. At this point it’s all hypothetical isn’t it? She’s something waiting to happen.’

  ‘How exciting.’

  Morris didn’t feel excited. He felt dull and frightened. In his recent dreams, Hedda had come to him as an angry purple piglet.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’

  It was summer once again when Morris was released. The air was warm and soft with occasional currents of coolness. The wet, green fields seemed unnaturally clean and broad. The wheels of the euphemistically named Transpennine Express made a slithery shush, the carriage smelled dusty and domestic. It was like coming back from a long trip abroad – the shock of recognition followed by the reassuring cuddle of the everyday. The world is all before me, he thought, looking out of the window at the half-built valleys, the weirs and war memorials, or perhaps it’s all behind me.

  Morris had never smelled anything like his bedsit. It was as though, left alone, the smell had evolved an intelligence, a personality, an attitude. It nudged and heckled him, it sat down next to him and farted like a tramp. Cleaning it was like conducting a post mortem – curiosity blended with violation and death.

  He bought bin bags, bleach, Brillo pads and rubber gloves from the Chaudhary brothers. They asked him about his foot.

  ‘You look good,’ they said. ‘You look fat.’

  After a week, Bernard came round.

  ‘I heard you were out,’ he said.

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘Well then, maybe I’m here on the off chance. Fancy a pint?’

  ‘You’ve still got a job with old Tong,’ Bernard explained a little later. They were in the snug of the Cro-Magnon Arms. ‘If you want it.’

  ‘Doesn’t he know?’

  ‘I explained it was a crime passionnel. A moment of madness.’

  ‘It was the sanest thing I ever did.’

  ‘Well, that’s just between you and me then.’

  Bernard was ageing unevenly – part of him was still boyish, while other areas looked already dead. His lips were full and rosy, but the skin round his eyes looked stiff and greenish.

  ‘How’s retirement?’ Morris asked.

  ‘Much like jail, I would imagine – tedious beyond belief. I am all for the examined life, Morris, but Christ, week after week of stewing in your own bloody juice. It’s like sucking at the same dried-up tit, it really is.’

  ‘Jail’s not so bad.’

  ‘Well, I imagine not. Open prison! It’s like Pontins by all accounts – satellite TV, counselling, en-suite toilets, gym – all at the taxpayer’s expense. And I have to beg for a bus pass. It’s bloody scandalous.’ Looking up he saw Morris and stopped himself. ‘Not in your case, of course. You should never have been in there in the first place. That was a miscarriage of justice, if ever I saw one. Nutting Underseel – you deserve a Chair, not three months in clink.’

  ‘It was open and shut, Bernard; there were twenty-three eye witnesses.’

  ‘Of course there were, but I’m talking intention, provocation, history. There’s no sense of history these days, Morris. If it happened more than a fortnight ago it’s not worth knowing. The reasons for your attack on Underseel were historical, but did they listen to that?’

  ‘I tried to explain the reference issue of course, but the jury…’

  ‘Well that’s your problem, the jury system. Twelve thick bastards and true. They’re raised on Eastenders and egg and chips. Why should they understand? Bring back the property restriction, I say. Jury of your peers, my arse. I won’t be judged by someone who lives in a council flat. Present company excluded, of course.’

  Bernard had become red-faced and shouty. Morris had the impression that he had not spoken to anyone for a long time. As for himself, he was surprised to notice that the dull, nerveless, upholstered feeling which he had assumed was exclusive to prison was still with him. His experience of the Cro-Magnon Arms, of Bernard, was muffled, neutralised as though he were covered in a layer of hard, dead skin, as though reality, the world, had become hobbled and sleepy.

  ‘Anyway, I am doing some work for Rupert too. It’s a piece of piss and I need the money to supplement that poxy pension scheme. I’m sure the Crocodile screwed me with that – I don’t know how but I’m sure that bastard had a hand in it. Plus my IS As are a laughing stock. Are you OK Morris? You look a bit vague.’

  Morris smiled and burped. After three dry months, the first pint of Postlethwaite had gone immediately to his head.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, mate,’ Bernard said. Morris blinked. He had, even through his befuddlement, a strong sense that in his absence his friendship with Bernard had grown into something rather larger than it was.

  ‘OK,’ he said after a pause.

  This seemed, surprisingly, to be quite enough for Bernard who stood up with a grin, and went to buy a round.

  Morris lit a cigarette. He had not had a drink since the day of the Underseel attack when, in the five minutes between the nutting and the arrival of security, he had sucked dow
n a bottle and a half of the Tasmanian red. At Shepherd’s Bush police station, he remembered, they had relieved him of his belt and shoelaces, given him a hairy brown blanket and a cup of machine-made coffee and put him in a holding cell to sleep it off. Morris had drunk the coffee, thrown up on the blanket and slept fitfully until 3 a.m. when he was woken for questioning.

  ‘So, Morris, you agree that your assault on Professor Underseel was unprovoked?’

  ‘I said it was irrational. That’s not quite the same thing.’

  The constable tightened his jaw and wobbled his ballpoint.

  ‘OK, let’s try again. Why did you nut him, Morris?’

  ‘In a word?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Scholarship.’

  Released into the grey, windless roar of Uxbridge Road six hours later, Morris had experienced a second of liberation and lightness before reality kicked in. Magistrate’s court the next day, then a trial. The nutting of Underseel was one of the few truly exuberant, truly real acts of his life, but now he would pay for it. He was in the system, and the system, like a monstrous dough-faced baker, would pat him and prick him and mark him with an F: F for fucked, utterly, utterly fucked. If only, Morris had thought, he could bury himself somewhere hilly and remote, if only he could dig a deep, dark pit, fall into it and sleep.

  Back at the Balmoral Hotel, he had been presented with a bill he could not possibly pay and a note informing him that his daughter, Hedda Melinda Gutman, had been born at 2.48 a.m.

  Bernard came back with drinks. ‘You look flushed,’ he said.

  Morris tried to shake it off. The memory was like a needle pushed through his upholstery and into his core. He had a flash of utter worthlessness.

  ‘I’ve made some terrible mistakes,’ he said.

  ‘Oh we all have, Christ.’ Bernard shook his head. ‘If I had to do it again I’d be a stockbroker. You can stick the life of the mind up your jacksie. It’s too late now though, I’ve got a dick like cannelloni, but you could play ping-pong with my prostate. Old age is a terrible thing, you know. The days last for ever, but the months fly past.’

  ‘I worry sometimes that I’ve done it all to myself, that it’s my fault.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. You’re a man of principle. That’s our problem, we’re both men of principle, but evidently it’s the arse-lickers who inherit the earth. Zoe Cable, Dirck van Camper, Nick Kidney, they’re all empty vessels, they’re all pigs’ bladders. I’ve got no money, my house is falling down, there’s nothing to look forward to, but I can hold my head up. I can look those wankers in the eye.’

  At these heroic and ungainly words, Morris felt an answering chill of righteousness shudder across his arms and neck. Perhaps Bernard was right, there was only anger and pride and beyond that, nothing at all.

  ‘They’re not interested in your shame, Morris,’ Bernard went on. ‘Do you think E really cares whether you’re sorry or not? Really?’

  Morris’s body felt like a poorly pitched tent – baggy in places, painfully tight in others.

  ‘I’ll tell you: she doesn’t. You’re doing that to yourself. Just forget it.’

  ‘And then what?’

  Bernard shrugged. His eyes looked suddenly murky and half-dissolved, like something you might come upon unexpectedly in a bowl of hotel soup.

  ‘I’m buggered if I know: Mahler, foie gras? It’s matches struck in the fucking darkness Morris. I’ve never been one for hope.’

  Rising from the carpets of the Cro-Magnon, Morris could smell the dusty, stubbed-out, ale soak of decay. The fruit machine in the corner pinged then rattled. The room, the windows, the world beyond them seemed to him to have the false depth of poorly painted scenery. He could see through it; he knew what it was, and it wasn’t much.

  Morris moved into Bernard’s lopsided house on Dauphin Street.

  ‘Why pay rent?’ Bernard reasoned. ‘The house of the lord has many rooms – several of which contain double beds and hand basins.’

  They split the bills and shared the cooking. When Tong phoned they took turns to lecture. On Saturday mornings they shopped together at Sir Savalot – Morris pushed the trolley, Bernard ticked off the items on their list: ratatouille, Ribena, tinned peas, oxtail, lamb neck. In the evenings they drank Peruvian claret and railed. The arrangement pleased Morris. Since his release he’d lost all curiosity, all will to be anything he already wasn’t, so Bernard, whose capacity for hope had years ago collapsed in upon itself like an ageing sun, and who was as a consequence quite brutally and unremittingly himself, felt suitable. There was a comfort, Morris found, in Bernard’s bitterness, a centripetal promise that things were already so bad that realistically there was nothing further to worry about. If Bernard was failing, fading, so (his logic continually went) were everything and everyone else, Morris included. If only they knew it. Literature was dead, morality was crocked, they were all just soap suds swirling on the lip of a vast inhuman plug hole. And in the face of this grim metaphysics the efforts they made together of eating, shopping, lecturing even, were, they both silently yet certainly believed, a kind of heroism – an endeavour for which they deserved, but would never get, tremendous unbridled applause.

  One chill September morning Morris raised himself from his soft, almost springless mattress, drew water from the spluttering tap and shaved and dressed himself in preparation for catching the early train to Cirencester: a sixth-form conference on King Lear. They had tossed for it and Morris had lost. Bernard was already up; he was wearing a plush-velvet dressing gown and espadrilles. It had taken a while for Morris to get used to this sight – the stringy, hairless stretch of Bernard’s skin across his collar bones, the venous bobby socks of flesh between robe and espadrille – but now he was immune to it.

  ‘What have they given you?’ Bernard asked. He was poaching an egg.

  Morris looked again at the letter.

  ‘“Tragedy – Its Meaning.”’

  ‘“Tragedy – Its Meaning?”’ Bernard spooned out the ragged white sphere and plopped it on to his toast.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a load of bollocks. I mean, what’s the point?’

  ‘They’re seventeen,’ agreed Morris. ‘I’m talking to them about death, and they’re sitting there squeezing their blackheads and getting spontaneous hard-ons.’

  ‘Is it at the college?’ Bernard asked.

  ‘Cirencester College.’

  ‘That’s a shithole.’

  It was. The lecture theatre was littered and dusty, the central heating banged, the fluorescent lights flickered and fizzed. He was introduced as Professor Morris Gutman of Coketown University. He spoke for fifty minutes on hubris. At the beginning the audience seemed unsettled: they shuffled and coughed, they winked and giggled, sent text messages and swapped pens. He looked up at them. The brightness of their blazer badges, the unfocused eagerness of their eyes, struck him as forming a grotesque contrast to the truths he was giving them – the truths of failure, morbidity and death. The pause lasted rather longer than he meant it to; they were looking back at him now, all of them. They looked eager, he thought, inquisitive, alive, like hatchlings waiting to be fed. He continued: the Aristotelian categories, the Faustian pact. After twenty minutes they stopped talking and shuffling; after forty, they stopped writing and just stared: stares of empty amazement as if he had touched something raw and yet unformed. He ended the lecture with Lear’s words on the death of Cordelia: ‘Never, never, never, never.’

  He stepped down from the podium in silence; the only noise as he left the hall was the slight crinkle of crisp packets under foot.

  Afterwards, as Morris stood in line at the coffee urn, he overheard one of the teachers describing his lecture as the dullest thing she had ever heard in her life. Another teacher nodded in agreement.

  ‘I know,’ she whispered back. ‘Wasn’t it painful? I thought he was going to dry up completely at one point. Talk about “Tragedy – Its Meaning”. I was expecting an analysis not a bloody de
monstration.’

  They laughed. Morris filled his cup, took his complimentary bourbon biscuit from the open tin and went outside for a cigarette. It made no difference. Shame was with him all the time now, like a plastic hip or a pacemaker; he didn’t feel it anymore but he knew it was there. And in a strange way it kept him going; buried within him the deadness reminded him of who he was, who he wasn’t.

  It was past seven by the time Morris got back to Glodshaw. The evening had turned windy and crepuscular, and the autumnal air was heavy with the smell of decomposition and cut-price fireworks. He crossed Dauphin Street amidst a roiling flak of unswept leaves. Bernard’s house was warm with the aroma of boil-in-the-bag coq au vin and the soft warblings of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. As he dropped his briefcase in the hallway and hung up his rain-streaked mackintosh, Morris was already thinking with some excitement of the opportunities for bitching that his day would afford: Professor Gutman of Coketown University, Bernard would love that.

  ‘Littlejohn!’ he yelled. ‘You idle bugger. Where’s my aperitif?’

  Instead of the usual snuffle of invective from the kitchen there was silence. Then, after a moment, the living room door squeaked open and Bernard’s bog-brush face peered out. It was wearing, absurdly Morris thought, a look of mild disapproval.

  ‘Morris,’ he whispered. ‘We have a guest.’

  ‘What? Why on earth are you whispering?’ Morris looked impatiently past Bernard’s shoulder and was taken aback to see, seated near the gas fire, lightless and multiplanar like a peculiar postmodern extension to Bernard’s beige settee, an actual nun. She was fronted by an empty sherry glass and an untouched plate of gingernuts. The issue of fancy dress occurred immediately to Morris but he dismissed it – there were too many woolly layers, too many dangly gee-gaws and specialised buttonholes. Plus the smell – communal, pre-war, faintly soapless – it couldn’t be faked. Was she here for money then, Morris wondered? Did nuns do that sort of thing? And if they did, why had Bernard not given her the same unceremonious heave-ho he gave all other attempts to tickle his untickleable conscience?