A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  We were naked in bed, a frequent state of affairs, and she was fondling me after lovemaking.

  “Jimmy, d’you really love me?”

  “You can see as well as the rest of the world that I’m totally, hopelessly, insanely nuts about you.”

  “Then if I asked you real nice, you’d do something that’s important to me?”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “I want you to help me kill my father.”

  Her hand left my penis to hold my jaw and turn my face to her. My laugh, I suspect, was hollow.

  “Of course, I don’t mean it like that. I may be fucked up, but I’m not stupid.” She turned in the bed, knelt to face me, her breasts hanging loose. She was fired by enthusiasm, causing them to wobble. “See, I intend to do exactly what he and every other shrink would advise against doing. I intend to suppress him, cut out every bit of him, the half of me that is him—amputate, make out he was never there. Psychologists would see that as surrogate murder. They’d be right.”

  “What’ll you put in the void?”

  “You. Not just your heart and your cock, but your whole culture. Because he’s American I want you to help me be English. I want to be the woman I would have been if I was brought up here with Mom, if he’d never existed.”

  I scratched my head. “Where would I start?”

  “With the accent. It’s so important to you people. I want to talk like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Haven’t you noticed I’m trying to stop talking like me? Every word I utter betrays my class, my background.”

  “Damn it, I like your class, I like your background.” She hit me with her fists. “Do it, Jimmy, it’s what I want.”

  I thought for a moment. “Say tomato.”

  “Say tomato?”

  “Not ter-may-doe; tom-ah-toe.”

  “Tom-ah-toe?”

  “Well, it’ll need work, but you have a good ear.”

  She lay back on the bed. “Toe-mah-toe? Sounds faggy, but I can live with it. So, are we doing the Queen’s English or cockney?”

  “We’ll start off with the Queen. Cockney’s for the advanced course.”

  —

  It was my last year and Daisy’s first, though no one seeing us together would have guessed that I was her senior. She had taken two years off between school and university and possessed the exotic quality of undergraduates who had done a spell as real people. As for me, being neither sporty nor sexy, and suffering from a mind-numbing class complex, I had devoted my first two years to study intensive enough to retard my development in other areas.

  Not that I was entirely without my charms, within the special context of that distant epoch. The other day Daisy took out some rare photographs of me as a student: jeans, thick sweater, long hair, and a wispy brown beard; gaunt cheeks with eyes haunted by ambition; a long possessive arm around Daisy. I was and am fairly tall: slightly under six foot, with a stoop more of the gorilla than the scholar. But my God, we were so young! In the picture Daisy is as innocent as a doll, and in my case the facial hair and primate posturing are all too obviously reflexes of a vulnerable child within.

  “People say you’re brilliant,” Daisy said without approval.

  “I work at it.”

  I had worked at it so much that my final year was not quite the endurance test it was for everyone else. I’d set myself a heavy but achievable schedule of work and devoted every spare minute to Daisy. I had moved back onto campus that year to be near the library, but Daisy soon changed my mind. The obvious strategy to escape Brenda was to move into a student house in one of the towns within a ten-mile radius of the campus. We took a huge room with a shared kitchen in a large Victorian mansion. We had known each other by then for three months and were making love as often as most couples who have just met.

  Sometimes when she was clowning Daisy would get onto the bed, roll down her panties, pull her skirt up, and twiddle her thumbs. If I took too long to join her she would start whistling. I was a fastidious fellow in those days and a bit of a prig. I don’t think I would have found such behavior amusing in anyone else, but the truly beautiful have a superior magic. Their jokes can break your heart.

  There were moments, though, when I had to suppress what I supposed was my innate British squeamishness. I had a working-class weakness for big breakfasts: fried eggs, beans, sausage, fried white bread, large mug of tea. Daisy liked to eat her cornflakes wearing a T-shirt and nothing else, sitting on a bench in the kitchen with her legs apart.

  “I think it’s important that we demystify cunts—you agree? Most of the time it’s a pretty unattractive organ. We should never have romanticized it. Disillusionment is what causes misunderstanding, hatred of women. We program men to think of women as pure mythic creatures. Then you see a cunt menstruating or a baby and afterbirth popping out of one, and the illusion’s shattered. The poor guy’s switched from doting sucker to misogynist. Know what I mean?”

  I looked down at my fried eggs, which I preferred underdone. Nodded.

  —

  I had plenty of work to do—at least five legal topics called “heads of law” by June—and Daisy did not. She had opted to study English and American Literature, a subject generally regarded as a cop-out. While the rest of us wrestled with disciplines that were never intended to entertain, Daisy and her colleagues in the English Department sat around absorbed by the chronicles of Jay Gatsby or Mr. Pickwick. Daisy believed she had acquired enough of labor’s honor by spending nearly two years selling advertising space in New York, before her flight to England. She’d earned enough to pay for her first year at Warwick, after which her connection with the English welfare system, through her mother, enabled her to obtain a grant.

  “Are you going to be studying tonight?” was a question bursting with charm. She meant that if I was not studying she would, of course, stay to make love with me. On the other hand, if I needed to work she would amuse herself. She possessed, indeed, a social talent I would have found intimidating had she not been so attentive to me. She had the capacity to pick up friends and make a party apparently out of the air. She quickly won over the other students in the house, a rather lugubrious group of literature scholars who supplied her with hashish and LSD—free of charge, as far as I could gather. When I was studying she would disappear into the rooms downstairs for a few hours, then reappear with a smirk on her face. In addition, there was a rather more select group, with perfect vowels and golden futures, who rode horses, drove around the countryside in MGs with the tops down, went to London for weekend parties in Knightsbridge, and lived relentlessly extrovert lives. This group loved Daisy and believed her to be the right sort of American (I doubt that she shared with them her mission to demystify the human vagina). They seemed to revel in the capriciousness with which she treated them. If she was bored with her dope-smoking friends downstairs, she could pick up the phone and within minutes be driven along country lanes by some young gentleman out of the thirties, complete with cravat and sports jacket and a group of jolly song-singing types in the back. She knew very well how threatening to me such jaunts could be and handled me perfectly. I don’t believe I have ever seen a woman deflect jealousy in her lover with such grace. She did it by letting me feel the strength of her commitment below the belt, where it counts.

  Little by little she picked up English idioms and her accent changed. She was a good mimic; by the end of the year I was envying her ability to slide up and down the social scale simply by modifying vowels. Better, she developed the persona of a demure English girl, like a second skin to be adopted as it suited her. When expressing intimacies, though, she reverted to American mode. Even this seemed to have a number of facets.

  I said: “Sometimes even your American accent changes. It can sound like New York to me, then like something else.”

  “Yeah? You notice that? I’m New England, but that time I spent selling advertising in Manhattan kind of molded me. New York
, for me, is a mood. So is England, come to think of it.”

  “I envy your fluidity. I’m straining every nerve to move up a couple of strata in British society.”

  “Don’t strain, babe. Let it flow.”

  Despite this good advice, a deeply lodged insecurity caused me to brace myself against the moment when she would fully realize what a lowlife I was in the context of the British class system.

  10

  But the shock, when it came, was not at all what I might have expected.

  It was in early June of that year, dangerously close to my finals. All lectures and seminars had ceased, and all of us in our last year were cramming our skulls to capacity with the kind of knowledge that is used only to pass exams. I heard Daisy’s voice outside the room say “It’s here,” followed by a heavy knocking. A man in his early forties with a clipped mustache and a light check suit was standing there. Daisy, trying to look nonchalant, succeeded only in looking sullen.

  “You’d better let him in.”

  “Do you want to tell him, Miss Smith, or shall I?” he said when he’d entered the room.

  “He caught me stealing a box of tampons, he’s the manager of the supermarket, his name is Mr. Brown. He’s involving you to make a point and to humiliate me and to show how weak and inferior women are.”

  He looked away from her as from a delinquent child. “I wonder if you and I could have a little talk.”

  “Can I go, then?” Daisy asked him.

  “Yes, you can go.”

  I’d never before seen a man address Daisy with contempt. He sat down on a sofa we mostly used to make love on.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked him.

  “That sort of depends on you. I want you to keep her out of my shop, I don’t want her anywhere near it; I don’t even want her looking through the window. I especially don’t want her walking in drugged up to the eyeballs, pinching things.”

  “You’re making a big meal out of a box of tampons, aren’t you? She clearly isn’t drugged.”

  “No, not today. And today it was only a box of tampons. She didn’t know, but the time before was her last chance.” He took out a piece of paper. “I’m fed up with her. Okay, let’s face it, half of you students have got sticky fingers, but she’s different, a bit twisted. I know, I can always tell. You want the list? This is it.”

  He read from his piece of paper. It was an unexceptional list of household items, sweets, groceries. It was also disturbingly long, with dates and times against each item. Many of them were things Daisy usually bought out of our common fund.

  He took out another piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a confession to theft not merely of the tampons but to the whole list, signed by Daisy. Brown had taken the statement himself. It was meticulous and professional—a man, clearly, who had made a study of shoplifting.

  “I’m surprised you let it go on for so long,” I said.

  “I have my methods. And now I would like to know how you propose to pay.”

  “For the tampons?”

  “Not just the tampons, the lot. I’ll give you an itemized receipt.”

  So that was the method. “Fair enough, but I want that statement.”

  He shook his head. “Oh no, I keep the statement as security, to make sure she never sets foot in my shop again.”

  I went to the bedroom, where we kept a biscuit tin for the kitty. Brown’s price tag just about cleaned us out for that month.

  He stood up to go. “If you want my advice—”

  “I don’t.”

  “If you want my advice, I’d be careful. I know she’s stunning, but she’s got a problem. Maybe it’s drugs, maybe it’s something else, I’ve watched her. It’s like watching two different people, bright and gay one day, utterly depressed the next—and usually alone.”

  “Alone? Ridiculous; she has dozens of friends.”

  Brown shook his head. “She’s a performer. That’s my impression. Puts on an act. Underneath, there’s a problem. And a lot of loneliness. Well, you won’t take any notice of anything I say, so I’ll be going. Just keep her out of the shop, that’s all.”

  As soon as he left I began composing a lecture to give Daisy. Something about the difference between crimes of flamboyant self-indulgence like drug taking and crimes of dishonesty, which always have a squalid dimension. Unlike her, I was brought up on mean streets. I knew what happened to thieves in the end. It wasn’t pretty.

  I had to go look for her. I found her in our local pub, sitting alone with a pint of beer. She was staring sullenly straight ahead and seemed not to have noticed my arrival. I pulled up a chair.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t give me the lecture you’ve been preparing. If you do, I’m out of here. You’ll never see me again. I’m sorry about two things. I’m sorry I got caught, and I’m sorry you were dragged into it. That’s all.”

  I ordered a beer and sat with her in silence for a while. I tried touching her on her arms and neck several times, but she seemed almost insensate. Her flesh was devoid of its usual electric glow, as if her spirit had fled. Then, after another pint, she nodded without smiling.

  “Let’s go, James.”

  In bed that night she said, “Do you know who he reminded me of?”

  “Your father?”

  “Correct.”

  “But why? Your father is a sophisticated American professor. Brown’s just a manager of a small supermarket.”

  She sighed. “The fanaticism. Didn’t you see the look in his eye? He didn’t care about the money. He cared that I was wrong and he was right.”

  “Your father’s like that?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s a thousand times more sophisticated than Brown, but see, ultimately psychologists have to believe in the rules of society. They’re our priests. Society’s rules shape our minds, and the shrinks are a big part of the shaping process. According to them, if you’re at war with society, you’re at war with yourself. A sociopath, a psycho.”

  “To a lawyer, that doesn’t sound all wrong.”

  She turned to face me. “Did I ever tell you my Montezuma story?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “When Cortés first conquered Mexico, he kept Montezuma under house arrest. One night Montezuma heard one of Cortés’s soldiers urinating near his bedroom. The next day he complained strongly to Cortés, who was very sympathetic and had the man reprimanded and removed.”

  I waited. “So?”

  “Montezuma was a cannibal. Every morning he ate the flesh of children who had been freshly slaughtered. See, in his kingdom there was a rule against pissing within the hearing of the king, but no rule against eating children.”

  “So there’s a difference between law and morality?”

  “You got it.”

  “In a different time and place, Brown and your father would have been cannibals?”

  “Or Gestapo.”

  I scratched my head. “But does theft become right, just because you don’t approve of the society in which you live?”

  She lay on her back again, stared at the ceiling. She seemed to be quoting from a book. “In some Hindu cults, deliberately breaking sacred laws was a magical act that liberated the soul and opened the mind to a greater reality. Never wanted to escape, Jimmy? I mean from all of it, even the body itself? Just fucking take off and fly without looking back, forever?”

  I waited until the next evening to probe further.

  “Don’t psychologists believe that one’s relationship with society is determined by the relationship with the stronger parent?”

  “Sure.”

  “So your view of society is really your view of your father?”

  She yawned. “Don’t get polluted too soon, Natural Man; I might go off you.” She glanced at me. “Okay, you really want to get into this? Look at it from the macro point of view. American society produced my father, right? He’s just a microcosm of those values. It’s not irrational to
treat America with the contempt he deserves.”

  “But this is England.”

  “You really think there’s such a big difference? Far as I can see, this is the States in a kind of grub state. You know, the full metamorphosis into the air-conditioned nightmare hasn’t happened yet, but it’s just a matter of time.”

  I felt like an amateur who’d stepped into the ring with a world heavyweight.

  “So tell me, what was so very bad about your father? Did he beat you?”

  “Ah! Natural Man! What I wouldn’t have given for an old-fashioned thrashing, followed by a cathartic hug. A good beating would have been charmingly naive compared to what my mother and I had to go through.”

  “Like what?”

  She thought for a moment. “It’s not easy to explain, it works on such a subtle level. See, psychologists are known to be extremely controlling parents. They have a paranoia about their kids’ developing deviant behavior. So parental control goes right down to the wire. Nothing escapes examination, every gesture is charged with symbolic value. Peeing in your pants, picking your nose, blinking—”