by Sonia Paige
‘So why you making your body numb with dope, caralho?’ asked Vicente.
Freddie carried on playing as if he hadn’t heard. Then he said, ‘It helps with the loneliness. It helps you forget.’
‘Forget her?’ asked Vicente.
Freddie’s hand stopped on the strings.
‘Forget who?’ asked Ashik.
‘Fred only loved one woman,’ said Vicente. ‘But she loved some other bastard. Wasn’t he the one passed on that hash cake?’
Freddie nodded.
‘How long you known her, Fred?’ asked Vicente.
Freddie shrugged. ‘About twenty years.’
‘So what happen to her?’ asked Ashik.
‘How should I know? Haven’t set eyes on her for ages.’ Freddie forced a smile, ‘Blow is the opium of the people.’ He started playing and singing with a touch of selfmockery:
‘All around my hat I will wear the green willow
‘All around my hat for a year and a day
‘And if anyone should question me the reason for my wearing it
‘I’ll tell them that my own true love is a thousand miles away.’
When he finished the room was silent.
Then Ashik said, ‘You’re the one turned me on to folk music, you know that? I’m the only Asian person my age on the estate who’s into folk music. It’s like “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” instead of, right, “Kick the motherfuckers in the teeth.” You’re the one did that to me.’
The room was silent again.
‘So where is she now?’ asked Ashik.
‘Leave it.’ Freddie tugged at his earring, ‘Just leave it.’
Tuesday 18th December 7.10 am
I’m woken up by Mandy crying.
‘You OK, woman?’ asks Beverly.
‘Oh fuck. Oh fuck,’ says Mandy. ‘I always forget. When you come off it your feelings come back. Oh fuck. Every single fucking thing that ever happened to you in your life. You think, why did that have to happen? Fuck this.’
‘I know what you saying,’ says Beverly, and turns away to face the wall.
‘Let it out,’ says Debs.
‘Fuck off,’ says Mandy, ‘Leave me alone, I’ll be OK in a minute.’
‘Fuck off yourself then,’ says Debs and disappears under the covers.
Mandy wobbles from her bed to the toilet and there are sounds of her throwing up.
On her way back she half falls on to my bed. ‘What kind of a grin is that?’ she asks me with disgust.
I didn’t even realize I was grinning. I’m in a world of my own. I sit up. ‘A grin and bear it grin.’ It’s one of those mornings when you wake up feeling as if you’ve been blessed in the night.
Mandy picks up the blue felt tip pen where it’s lying on the floor, and above the graffito ‘Sweet dreams are made of this’, she writes a big number three on the wall. She chucks the pen down again without bothering to add the circle. ‘Welcome to Day fucking Three,’ she spits out, ‘What you got to grin about?’
‘I had a fantastic dream,’ I say. ‘I still feel like I’m flying.’ My headache’s gone.
‘What was you flying on?’ asks Mandy, ‘Been at the plonk again?’
‘A griffin,’ I tell her.
‘At least it kept you off that wall, look at the state of it.’ The lower part of the wall is covered with the pale blue spiders’ webs I’ve been drawing. They are wobbly and scrawly and the whole thing looks a mess. ‘The screws gonna love you when they see that,’ she says.
‘It’s always behind them when they walk in the door.’
‘You wanna watch it,’ she replies, ‘some of them see out their arses. Anyway, what the fuck’s a griffin?’
‘A mythical animal. Well, a cross between an animal and a bird. Magical. It’s got wings about four or five feet long. It’s hard to tell, when you’re riding on top. The muscles are moving very strong under my legs, the wings are feathered, flapping up and down slowly and we’re flying over the countryside.’ As I tell her, I can still feel it.
‘Some people get all the luck,’ says Mandy. ‘Comes from being upper class, init. Even in the nick, you get luxury dreams. There’s me, rolling in shit all night long, and you get to ride on some cock and bull fairy tale thing with hairy wings.’
‘Feathers,’ I say. ‘And its neck was scaly, cold like metal, but its body was warm and fleshy and covered with fine soft fur like a lioness.’
‘Ever seen a lioness close up?’ asks Mandy. ‘How d’ya know the fur’s soft?’
‘Only in the zoo. Well, it was soft in the dream. The wind was blowing in my hair. The creature flew into the sun, golden sinews carrying me to another world.’ I shut my eyes to re-enter the dream. ‘It eats sunbeams and it lands in the sand. I got off. It had one eye on either side of its head, each eye looking at different worlds. The beak was sharp. Then it flew away. It disappeared. I saw it sleeping on the clouds. It folded its wings and rolled over and over. Then I was rolling over in bed and I woke up.’
‘And I was effing and blinding and cussing out the world…’ Mandy puts her hands over the lower part of her face. ‘I could do with something like that feathers thing to carry me off. I’d do anything to get out of here. Anything. I don’t know what’s going down with Dave. He ain’t been in to visit and I think he’s got some heavy shit on. I don’t know about my kids. My head’s all messed up with stuff that’s happened years ago, right. And all these bloody bastards do is turn down the methadone and let you out for an hour a day like a caged animal and bring you food you wouldn’t give to a dog…’
I hear the hatch slide back. ‘Breakfast, girls!’
Tuesday 18th December 8.30 am
‘Breakfast!’ said Anthea, filling the bedroom doorway in her pink spotty nightie. She smiled at Morton, ‘Bert’s gone to school. He nearly forgot his reading homework, accidentally on purpose. But I stuck it in his bag as he went out the door. Hungry?’ On her hand she balanced a tin tea tray with a cup of coffee and two jam doughnuts.
Morton was sitting in bed holding some neatly typed sheets of paper. When he saw the tray his green eyes widened: ‘Wow!’ He lifted his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. ‘I’ve added a reference to Mary Douglas in the first bit of the lecture, like you suggested.’ He took the coffee. The mattress sagged as Anthea climbed in, and the cup wobbled in his thin hand.
‘Sleep OK?’ he asked. ‘Any of those irksome dreams, nightmares, psychic attacks, psychotic interludes, talking bones, past life intrusions or hallucinogenic episodes?’
‘It was OK. Don’t take the piss.’ She pushed her mass of frizzy hair back from her face and took a large bite of the doughnut, leaving sugar round her lips. ‘Go on reading your lecture,’ she said with her mouth full, ‘I’m listening.’
‘Wait. You need some help,’ He put his coffee down beside the bed and gave her a big kiss. Then he licked his lips. ‘I didn’t get any jam.’ He fielded a stray tendril of red hair that had fallen over her face. ‘Where did I get up to last night?’
‘You did the introductory bit. You were on to Homer as oral literature. Homer licking his lips. Homer singing for his doughnuts.’ She put what was left of the jammy dough into her mouth and wiped it with the back of her hand.
In his sing-song mid-Atlantic accent Morton started to read aloud from his typed sheets:
‘Although they have near-Eastern affinities, Homer’s are the earliest stories set clearly within European tradition…’
‘Past that bit,’ said Anthea.
‘OK. Bla bla. Have my doughnut too, love. Here goes:
‘In the earliest European tradition, the medium of narrative was the voice…’
‘You did read that bit.’
‘OK, try from here’. Morton took a gulp of coffee then began again:
‘Like his Odyssey, Homer’s Iliad also starts in mid-action. We go straight in on the monumental squabble between King Agamemnon and his warrior Achilles in front of the assembled Greek armies besieging Tro
y. The background to this epic row is told through flashback, through conversation and allusion. It might seem to be principally Achilles’ story but actually the battlefield scenes offer a series of vignettes showing the diverse experiences of various warriors as they meet their doom – or their victim – in the thick of the fighting.’
‘So it’s not about Achilles?’ Anthea interrupted.
‘What?’
‘You’re going to stand up and tell them that the Iliad isn’t about Achilles?’
‘Not only about Achilles. There are a lot of little guys too. Who may have had a local following when the poems were performed.’
‘What have you got against Achilles?’
‘Apart from having a short fuse, he’s a great guy. But there are other different stories going on. Western individualism is obsessed with the one important person at the expense of the many.’
‘So you always say. I put it down to you having a Catholic family. Multiple siblings.’
‘Touché,’ he turned and smiled at her. ‘Now, if you’ve quite finished… Where was I?… OK:
‘These combatants have seminal conversations…’
‘How do you mean, seminal?’ Anthea asked.
‘When they meet on the battlefield to duel, the warriors tell each other their histories. And they sum up the achievements of their short lives. In each duel the two men are on the cusp of life and death. It sharpens the mind.’
‘OK.’
Morton took a gulp of coffee, rolled his eyes upwards as he recovered from the interruption, and started again:
‘Sometimes the warrior’s brief encounter will not be with a mortal but with a goddess or god who has descended from the divine world of Mount Olympus to join the fray.
‘We see here how Homer’s text diverges from the norms of the narrative texts we are most used to, i.e. the Western novel – which has been iconic and triumphant since its first flowering in England in the 18th century. It remains a current medium despite predictions of its demise since the advent of film, radio and TV. And the genre has adhered to certain conventions…’
‘Are you going to give an example?’ asked Anthea.
Morton stopped in full flow. ‘What?’
‘An example. This last bit is very general with lots of long words. Why not give a concrete example?’
He put his papers down with a sigh. ‘Such as?’
‘Someone on the bus yesterday was reading Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree. Does that follow the conventions of the novel?’
‘I guess so. One author, a hero, a linear narrative… And it has strong roots in the life of the period where it’s set…’
‘It was an imagined past even for Hardy.’ Anthea pulled on the duvet and Morton’s pile of papers went flying. ‘A vision of rural England decades before Hardy himself lived.’
‘Very bitter-sweet and lyrical.’ Morton was writing notes on the page in his hand. ‘But that’s not the point. What’s relevant is that its world is limited to the confines of the material and social life of that period. That’s typical of the novel. It’s at its core a human story. Whereas Homer’s is set on a cosmic stage. OK, it’s a good example, I’ll put it in. Shall I go on…?’
He gathered his papers off the duvet, patiently shuffled them back into order and started to read again:
‘In contrast Homer’s action takes place on a number of different metaphysical levels. There is the world of mortals, but also that of the Olympian goddesses and gods, who may be prompted by affection or anger to involve themselves in the human plot. Or sometimes we meet other beings, the sentient and animate spirits of the natural world. For example, the River-god Scamander who is both personified and is also the river itself which diverts its course to attack Achilles with its waters. There are also wind-gods, sacred trees and nymphs. There are Furies, Titans and a Gorgon. There are ghosts of the known dead, like the sad visitation of Patroclus, and there are anonymous phantoms like the one which slips in through a bolt-hole in Penelope’s bedroom door to visit her in her dreams. Odysseus famously sails to the land of the dead, speaks to ghosts, and returns to tell the tale.’
‘He wasn’t the only one,’ said Anthea. ‘What about Core? I’m going to a seminar today on visits to the underworld.’
‘I’ll stick to the Odysseus example. This is a lecture on Homer. Or perhaps you should be writing it?’ He smiled and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.
‘Sorry, read on…’
‘River-spirits, nymphs and ghosts: all such non-human beings are excluded from the 19th century tradition of “realism” associated with the novel. Although factually untrue, the traditional novel creates its fiction within unspoken but rigidly determined limits of “believable” possibility. The reader will give their imaginative consent to fictitious characters and places as long as they fit within broadly agreed terms of verisimilitude.
‘Those terms generally exclude the divine and the supernatural. The supernatural is reduced to ghostly fingers tapping on the window outside, refused admittance to the action. The novel may show religious characters, but God himself is not an acceptable character. In ancient Greek literature the gods provided a structure to replace the haphazard contingency of human life; but in the Western novel the power to control the fate of the characters rests in the hands of the author. If anyone, the novelist is God.’
Morton stopped and kissed Anthea on her forehead. ‘OK so far? What’s going on in that brain inside there?’
‘It’s all a bit dense, but it’s OK. Go on. I’ve got that appointment at quarter past ten.’ She was finishing the second doughnut.
‘What appointment?’
‘That lady who’s going to help me about the nightmares. And the bones.’
‘The shrink.’
‘She’s not actually a shrink. She’s a counsellor. I think she does massage too. Anyway, I’ve got time. She’s local. Go on.’
Morton cleared his throat. ‘Now, of course, things are changing. E V Rieu’s racy prose translation pulled Homer out of the realm of stilted Victoriana and showed its novelistic possibilities; and there have also been changes in what we think of as the novel.
‘Take the issue of authorship. Since Michel Foucault pointed out that authorship is not a universal concept but a historical construct which can have various meanings, the many authors of the Homeric poems no longer seem so anomalous. Perhaps all works of art are more collective creations and less the work of individual “talent” than we imagine, whether the pooling of ideas and experiences is conscious or unconscious. Roland Barthes’ “death of the author” kills nothing in Homer.’
Morton stopped reading and looked at Anthea, whose riot of red hair was resting on his shoulder. ‘Asleep?’ he asked.
‘No. Even though you’re on to French semiologists.’ She yawned, ‘Go on.’
‘There will be some of them nodding off in the audience,’ he said. ‘There always are. Some old gents come in just to have a nap. Where was I?…
‘Another change is that nowadays people see the novel less as a classic form, an inevitable pinnacle of literary achievement, and more as a composite genre, a historically-shaped hodge-podge. Julia Kristeva has described it as a ragbag woven from other verbal practices such as carnivalesque writing, courtly lyrics, hawkers’ cries and scholastic treatises. Such perceptions also allow the composite Homeric poems – stitched together from a medley of shorter elements – to move closer to the novel in form.
‘Again, on “realism,” the storyteller’s contract with the reader has changed in recent years. Non-verisimilitude is acceptable. Magical realism has woven the fantastic into the texture of novels which are otherwise traditional in form. Gone, in some works, is the reassuring continuity of consciousness propagated by Victorian novels. Whatever the passions and torments suffered by the characters of such novels, there is something cosy about a genre whose world view is limited to emotions and society: middle-of-theroad, middle-of-the-body, human-centred preoccupa
tions.
‘Recent novels offer a more variegated and irregular vision encompassing dissonance, rupture, the unknown, the absurd, discontinuity, lacunae, tricks of perception.’
Anthea lifted her head. ‘That’s what I’m having,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Tricks of perception.’
‘Can you specify?’
Anthea shook her head. ‘It’s all unclear. But every time I think about getting on that plane to Greece in February, there’s a feeling of dread. Something’s going to go wrong.’
Morton snorted quietly, ‘Come on, Ant… Like what? We miss the plane? The taverna’s out of moussaka?’
She pretended to smack his hand. ‘Worse than that. Don’t laugh. And I keep wanting to look at those bones. I have a feeling they’re trying to tell me something.’
‘Come on, honey,’ said Morton. ‘You know the bones make you morbid. Keep off the dope and you won’t get paranoid. Let the bones rest in peace in their little box. You have to go to Greece to finish your fieldwork.’
‘You’re right,’ said Anthea, putting the breakfast tray down onto the floor as if disposing of the topic. ‘Perhaps the worst has already happened and I’m remembering it backwards into the future. Take no notice. Read on.’
‘I’ve got onto the contemporary novel, right?’ said Morton. He found his place on the page: ‘We have become aware that the “naturalism” of traditional novels is not an adequate description of human social experience. Any more than Victorian paintings, or 20th century photographs or film, offer an adequate representation of visual experience. All are partial, fictionalized, and illusory. Whether with words or pictures, the attention-focussing device of framing determines everything: it selects the arena of interest, excludes others, and manipulates how we see what it has selected.
‘Homer’s poems never set out to provide the regularity and realism, or “naturalism”, that we have expected from the novel. His narrative has a random, wayward quality. It includes discontinuities, monologues, lectures and long set pieces…’
