The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by Various

  ‘I want you to get the feel of it, the insanity of its size.’

  ‘What’s that building?’ I would say to him as we sped past an illuminated Third Reichian colossus mounted on a manicured green hill. George would glance out of his window.

  ‘I dunno, a bank or temple or something.’ We went to bars, bars for starlets, bars for ‘intellectuals’ where screenwriters drank, lesbian bars and a bar where the waiters, little, smooth-faced young men, dressed as Victorian serving-maids. We ate in a diner founded in 1947 which served only hamburgers and apple pie, a renowned and fashionable place where waiting customers stood like hungry ghosts at the backs of those seated.

  We went to a club where singers and stand-up comedians performed in the hope of being discovered. A thin girl with bright red hair and sequined T-shirt reached the end of her passionately murmured song on a sudden shrill, impossible top note. All conversation ceased. Someone, perhaps maliciously, dropped a glass. Halfway through, the note became a warbling vibrato and the singer collapsed on the stage in an abject curtsy, arms held stiffly in front of her, fists clenched. Then she sprang to her tiptoes and held her arms high above her head with the palms flat as if to forestall the sporadic and indifferent applause.

  ‘They all want to be Barbra Streisand or Liza Minnelli,’ George explained as he sucked a giant cocktail through a pink plastic straw. ‘But no one’s looking for that kind of stuff any more.’

  A man with stooped shoulders and wild curly hair shuffled on to the stage. He took the microphone out of its rest, held it close to his lips and said nothing. He seemed to be stuck for words. He wore a torn, muddied denim jacket over bare skin, his eyes were swollen almost to the point of closing and under the right there ran a long scratch which ended at the corner of his mouth and gave him the look of a partly made-up clown. His lower lip trembled and I thought he was going to weep. The hand that was not holding the microphone worried a coin and looking at that I noticed the stains down his jeans, yes, fresh wet vomit clung there. His lips parted but no sounds came out. The audience waited patiently. Somewhere at the back of the room a wine bottle was opened. When he spoke finally it was to his fingernails, a low, cracked murmur.

  ‘I’m such a goddamn mess!’

  The audience broke into fallabout laughter and cheering, which after a minute gave way to footstamping and rhythmic clapping. George and I, perhaps constrained by each other’s company, smiled. The man reappeared by the microphone the moment the last clapping died away. Now he spoke rapidly, his eyes still fixed on his fingers. Sometimes he glanced worriedly to the back of the room and we caught the flash of the whites of his eyes. He told us he had just broken up with his girl-friend, and how, as he was driving away from her house, he had started to weep, so much so that he could not see to drive and had to stop his car. He thought he might kill himself but first he wanted to say goodbye to her. He drove to a call box but it was out of order and this made him cry again. Here the audience, silent till now, laughed a little. He reached his girl-friend from a drug store. As soon as she picked up the phone and heard his voice she began to cry too. But she didn’t want to see him. She told him, ‘It’s useless, there’s nothing we can do.’ He put the phone down and howled with grief. An assistant in the drug store told him to leave because he was upsetting the other customers. He walked along the street thinking about life and death, it started to rain, he popped some amyl nitrate, he tried to sell his watch. The audience was growing restless, a lot of people had stopped listening. He bummed fifty cents off a bum. Through his tears he thought he saw a woman aborting a foetus in the gutter and when he got closer he saw it was cardboard boxes and a lot of old rags. By now the man was talking over a steady drone of conversation. Waitresses with silver trays circulated the tables. Suddenly the speaker raised his hand and said, ‘Well, see you,’ and he was gone. A few people clapped but most did not notice him leave.

  Not long before I was due to leave Los Angeles George invited me to spend Saturday evening at his house. I would be flying to New York late the following day. He wanted me to bring along a couple of friends to make a small farewell party, and he wanted me to bring along my flute.

  ‘I really want to sit,’ said George, ‘in my own home with a glass of wine in my hand and hear you play that thing.’ I phoned Mary first. We had been meeting intermittently since our weekend. Occasionally she had come and spent the afternoon at my apartment. She had another lover she more or less lived with, but she hardly mentioned him and it was never an issue between us. After agreeing to come, Mary wanted to know if Terence was going to be there. I had recounted to her Terence’s adventure with Sylvie, and described my own ambivalent feelings about him. Terence had not returned to San Francisco as he had intended. He had met someone who had a friend ‘in screenwriting’ and now he was waiting for an introduction. When I phoned him he responded with an unconvincing parody of Semitic peevishness. ‘Five weeks in this town and I’m invited out already?’ I decided to take seriously George’s wish to hear me play the flute. I practised my scales and arpeggios, I worked hard at those places in the Sonata No. 1 where I always faltered and as I played I fantasized about Mary, George and Terence listening spellbound and a little drunk, and my heart raced.

  Mary arrived in the early evening and before driving to pick up Terence we sat around on my balcony watching the sun and smoked a small joint. It had been on my mind before she came that we might be going to bed for one last time. But now that she was here and we were dressed for an evening elsewhere, it seemed more appropriate to talk. Mary asked me what I had been doing and I told her about the night club act. I was not sure whether to present the man as a performer with an act so clever it was not funny, or as someone who had come in off the street and taken over the stage.

  ‘I’ve seen acts like that here,’ said Mary. ‘The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat. What was funny suddenly gets nasty.’ I asked Mary if she thought there was any truth in my man’s story. She shook her head.

  ‘Everyone here,’ she said, gesturing towards the setting sun, ‘has got some kind of act going like that.’

  ‘You seem to say that with some pride,’ I said as we stood up. She smiled and we held hands for an empty moment in which there came to me from nowhere a vivid image of the parallel bars on the beach; then we turned and went inside.

  Terence was waiting for us on the pavement outside the house where he was staying. He wore a white suit and as we pulled up he was fixing a pink carnation into his lapel. Mary’s car had only two doors. I had to get out to let Terence in, but through a combination of sly manoeuvring on his part and obtuse politeness on my own, I found myself introducing my two friends from the back seat. As we turned on to the freeway Terence began to ask Mary a series of polite, insistent questions and it was clear from where I sat, directly behind Mary, that as she was answering one question he was formulating the next, or falling over himself to agree with everything she said.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he was saying, leaning forwards eagerly, clasping together his long, pale fingers, ‘That’s a really good way of putting it.’ Such condescension, I thought, such ingratiation. Why does Mary put up with it? Mary said she thought Los Angeles was the most exciting city in the USA. Before she had even finished Terence was outdoing her with extravagant praise.

  ‘I thought you hated it,’ I interjected sourly. But Terence was adjusting his seat belt and asking Mary another question. I sat back and stared out the window, attempting to control my irritation. A little later Mary was craning her neck trying to find me in her mirror.

  ‘You’re very quiet back there,’ she said gaily. I fell into sudden, furious mimicry.

  ‘That’s a really good way of putting it, yes, yes.’ Neither Terence nor Mary made any reply. My words hung over us as though they were being uttered over and over again. I opened my window. We arrived at George’s house with twenty-five minutes of unbroken silence behind us.

  The introductions over, the three
of us held the centre of George’s huge living room while he fixed our drinks at the bar. I held my flute case and music stand under my arm like weapons. Apart from the bar the only other furniture was two yellow, plastic sag chairs, very bright against the desert expanse of brown carpet. Sliding doors took up the length of one wall and gave on to a small back yard of sand and stones in the centre of which, set in concrete, stood one of those tree-like contraptions for drying clothes on. In the corner of the yard was a scrappy sagebrush plant, survivor of the real desert that was here a year ago. Terence, Mary and I addressed remarks to George and said nothing to each other.

  ‘Well,’ said George when the four of us stood looking at each other with drinks in our hands, ‘Follow me and I’ll show you the kids.’ Obediently we padded behind George in single file along a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor. We peered through a bedroom doorway at two small boys in a bunk bed reading comics. They glanced at us without interest and went on reading.

  Back in the living room I said, ‘They’re very subdued, George. What do you do, beat them up?’ George took my question seriously and there followed a conversation about corporal punishment. George said he occasionally gave the boys a slap on the back of the legs if things got really out of hand. But it was not meant to hurt them, he said, so much as to show them he meant business. Mary said she was dead against striking children at all, and Terence, largely to cut a figure I thought, or perhaps to demonstrate to me that he could disagree with Mary, said that he thought a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. Mary laughed, but George, who obviously was not taking to this faintly foppish, languid guest sprawled across his carpet, seemed ready to move into the attack. George worked hard. He kept his back straight even when he sat in the sag chair.

  ‘You were thrashed when you were a kid?’ he asked as he handed round the scotch.

  Terence hesitated and said, ‘Yes.’ This surprised me. Terence’s father died before he was born and he had grown up with his mother in Vermont.

  ‘Your mother beat you?’ I said before he had time to invent a swaggering bully of a father.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you don’t think it did you any harm?’ said George. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  Terence stretched his legs. ‘No harm done at all.’ He spoke through a yawn that might have been a fake. He gestured towards his pink carnation. ‘After all, here I am.’

  There was a moment’s pause then George said, ‘For example, you never had any problem making out with women?’ I could not help smiling.

  Terence sat up. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Our English friend here will verify that.’ By this Terence referred to my outburst in the car. But I said to George, ‘Terence likes to tell funny stories about his own sexual failures.’

  George leaned forwards to catch Terence’s full attention. ‘How can you be sure they’re not caused by being thrashed by your mother?’

  Terence spoke very quickly. I was not sure whether he was very exicted or very angry. ‘There will always be problems between men and women and everyone suffers in some way. I conceal less about myself than other people do. I guess you never had your backside tanned by your mother when you were a kid, but does that mean you never have any hang-ups with women? I mean, where’s your wife… ?’

  Mary’s interruption had the precision of a surgeon’s knife.

  ‘I was only ever hit once as a kid, by my father, and do you know why that was? I was twelve. We were all sitting round the table at suppertime, all the family, and I told everyone I was bleeding from between my legs. I put some blood on the end of my finger and held it up for them all to see. My father leaned across the table and slapped my face. He told me not to be dirty and sent me up to my room.’

  George got up to fetch more ice for our glasses and muttered ‘Simply grotesque’ as he went. Terence stretched out on the floor, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like a dead man’s. From the bedroom came the sound of the boys singing, or rather chanting, for the song was all on one note. I said to Mary something to the effect that between people who had just met, such a conversation could not have taken place in England.

  ‘Is that a good thing do you think?’ Mary asked.

  Terence said, ‘The English tell each other nothing.’

  I said, ‘Between telling nothing and telling everything there is very little to choose.’

  ‘Did you hear the boys?’ George said as he came back.

  ‘We heard some kind of singing,’ Mary told him. George was pouring more Scotch and spooning ice into the glasses.

  ‘That wasn’t singing. That was praying. I’ve been teaching them the Lord’s Prayer.’ On the floor Terence groaned and George looked round sharply.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a Christian, George,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, you know…’ George sank into his chair. There was a pause, as if all four of us were gathering our strength for another round of fragmentary dissent.

  Mary was now in the second sag chair facing George. Terence lay like a low wall between them, and I sat cross-legged about a yard from Terence’s feet. It was George who spoke first, across Terence to Mary.

  ‘I’ve never been interested in church-going much but…’ He trailed off, a little drunkenly, I thought. ‘But I always wanted the boys to have as much of it as possible while they’re young. They can reject it later, I guess. But at least for now they have a coherent set of values that are as good as any other, and they have this whole set of stories, really good stories, exotic stories, believable stories.’

  No one spoke so George went on. ‘They like the idea of God. And heaven and hell, and angels and the Devil. They talk about that stuff a whole lot and I’m never sure quite what it means to them. I guess it’s a bit like Santa Claus, they believe it and they don’t believe it. They like the business of praying, even if they ask for the craziest things. Praying for them is a kind of extension of their… their inner lives. They pray about what they want and what they’re afraid of. They go to church every week, it’s about the only thing Jean and I agree on.’

  George addressed all this to Mary who nodded as he spoke and stared back at him solemnly. Terence had closed his eyes. Now that he had finished, George looked at each of us in turn, waiting to be challenged. We stirred. Terence lifted himself on to his elbow. No one spoke.

  ‘I don’t see it’s going to hurt them, a bit of the old religion,’ George reiterated.

  Mary spoke into the ground. ‘Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things you could object to in Christianity. And since you don’t really believe in it yourself we should talk about that.’

  ‘OK,’ said George. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Mary spoke with deliberation at first. ‘Well, for a start, the Bible is a book written by men, addressed to men and features a very male God who even looks like a man because he made man in his own image. That sounds pretty suspicious to me, a real male fantasy…’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said George.

  ‘Next,’ Mary went on, ‘women come off pretty badly in Christianity. Through Original Sin they are held responsible for everything in the world since the Garden of Eden. Women are weak, unclean, condemned to bear children in pain as punishment for the failures of Eve, they are the temptresses who turn the minds of men away from God; as if women were more responsible for men’s sexual feelings than the men themselves! Like Simone de Beauvoir says, women are always the “other”, the real business is between a man in the sky and the men on the ground. In fact women only exist at all as a kind of divine afterthought, put together out of a spare rib to keep men company and iron their shirts, and the biggest favour they can do Christianity is not to get dirtied up with sex, stay chaste, and if they can manage to have a baby at the same time then they’re measuring up to the Christian Church’s ideal of womanhood – the Virgin Mary.’ Now Mary was angry, she glared at George.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he was saying, ‘you can’t impose all that Women’s Lib stuff on to the societies of thousands of yea
rs ago. Christianity expressed itself through available…’

  At roughly the same time Terence said, ‘Another objection to Christianity is that it leads to passive acceptance of social inequalities because the real rewards are in…’

  And Mary cut in across George in protest. ‘Christianity has provided an ideology for sexism now, and capitalism…’

  ‘Are you a communist?’ George demanded angrily, although I was not sure who he was talking to. Terence was pressing on loudly with his own speech. I heard him mention the Crusades and the Inquisition.

  ‘This has nothing to do with Christianity.’ George was almost shouting. His face was flushed.

  ‘More evil perpetrated in the name of Christ than… this has nothing to do with… to the persecution of women herbalists as witches… Bullshit. It’s irrelevant… corruption, graft, propping up tyrants, accumulating wealth at the altars… fertility goddess… bullshit… phallic worship… look at Galileo… this has nothing to…’ I heard little else because now I was shouting my own piece about Christianity. It was impossible to stay quiet. George was jabbing his finger furiously in Terence’s direction. Mary was leaning forwards trying to catch George by the sleeve and tell him something. The whisky bottle lay on its side empty, someone had upset the ice. For the first time in my life I found myself with urgent views on Christianity, on violence, on America, on everything, and I demanded priority before my thoughts slipped away.

  ‘… and starting to think objectively about this… their pulpits to put down the workers and their strikes so… objective? You mean male. All reality now is male rea… always a violent God… the great capitalist in the sky… protective ideology of the dominant class denies the conflict between men and women… bullshit, total bullshit…’