Goodbye, Mr Dixon

by Iain Crichton Smith

  19

  Dixon couldn’t make up his mind whether Sheila was what he wanted after all. Most of the time since he had come to the flat he felt suspended in space, and he wasn’t making much headway with the book. It was disquieting that the barbarians were beginning to appear more real than his heroine who was supposed to represent the values of culture and elitism. They haunted his dreams with their hairy bodies, their terrifying energies, their monstrous and broken urgent speech. They emerged out of the forest circling the White City with its white vulnerable spires. They sang strange seductive songs. Their skins were black as if they had come from Hades with their strange swaying music.

  Sometimes he seemed to be wholly seduced by their songs, their innocent, childlike, brutal ways. But Sheila did not belong to their world. She belonged to a well-mannered, moral world. His heroine had changed a lot since he had started on the book. At first she had been energetic and barbaric herself, but now she was becoming purer and more helplessly female. And as this happened so there were arising in his own breast solitary beastlike feelings as if he wished to destroy the world which had reared him, in which he had once believed, so that he wished to appear at the White City with banners on which were scrawled not Latin mottoes of noble aspirations but obscenities such as one might find scrawled on lavatory walls.

  Was it that he was missing his wife with her harsh bitter ways? Was it that she was needed for a certain tension that his work required? Had he made a mistake in leaving her? Sometimes he would pace up and down his room at night staring despairingly at his typewriter, its rows of teeth. What challenge did he need? He felt as if he were hurling himself against space and not solidity. Could he exist without his wife’s ignorant asperities? He didn’t know. Could he exist at all? Did he exist at all?

  The City with the White Spires became more and more unreal, the barbarians approached closer and closer. One night he had a terrible dream. It was of an animal that looked like a cat. As it lay on a carpet in a strange house which he didn’t recognise, it slowly ate a snake which was lying in front of it. Its body rippled with the effort of swallowing, and then it voided the snake through its back passage and began to eat it again. He watched the endless process with fascination and fear. He knew it had something to do with his book and his life. The white towers were becoming more and more corpselike and dim. Their museums and libraries were fading away into the darkness and he did not have enough energy in himself to keep them standing solidly and meaningfully. He even stopped reading books. At first he had gone to the bookshops to browse about when he wasn’t writing but he had ceased to do that. He studied his own work and found it inadequate. He was growing bored with his book. It didn’t seem to mesh with the machinery of reality. It was like a diseased plant that was growing in an air of its own. The book belonged to the doomed City of the White Spires. He had impulses at night to leave his room and plunge into the destructive darkness where the illuminated sharks cruised, and the lost people stared dully down at the pavement. He wanted to forget himself, his mind, its tortures and terrors. The mind was becoming too much of a responsibility.

  He wondered what was happening out in the city at night. Did he want to save himself or go out into its darkness to be destroyed? Did he want to feel the teeth in his throat for the last time? He had never felt such contradictions before. Perhaps they were a sign of failing powers? On the other hand perhaps they might be the beginnings of a new creative pain and excitement? Should he return to his wife, to her sharp, silly, biting ways? Would that save him or was he too late for that? He had hidden himself away and he didn’t know where he was. What darkness was creeping over him, what eclipse was steadily covering the distant whiteness of his mind? A pure high note was singing somewhere, steadily coming closer like the sound of the siren of a fire engine. But where was the fire? And where were the busy people with their red helmets making for?

  Sometimes he had nightmares as if he himself were on fire in the darkness where the blaze of the sun had gone out. Sometimes he was even drawn to the works of Nietzsche which he had in his bookcase, but he couldn’t summon up enough energy to read them.

  One day he took Sheila to the zoo as they had arranged. In any case there weren’t many places he could think of to take her to.

  They had looked into the cages where the chimpanzees, wearing their muddy gloves, had scratched themselves for fleas. They had seen the lions and tigers pacing up and down, the ugly, busy wolverines, the pumas with their contented deadly gaze. They had seen the tropical birds, and the pheasants in their glowing stained glass colours. The baboons swung from bar to bar with an agility faster than the eye could follow. The crocodile slept like a log, scarcely breathing.

  In one cage a black vulture stared downwards at its mess of meat. The deer and the antelope grazed peacefully, the llamas looked huge against the sky and the penguins waddled up and down in their white and red.

  She had walked beside him in her brown coat, looking, as usual, quiet and composed.

  Once he had stood as if in a dream studying a tiger which paced to and fro without ceasing, attracted by the power and compactness of its body. Its eyes glanced at him indifferently. He had a sudden impulse to open all the cages and let all the animals out into the breezy chilly day. Let them destroy, let them redeem.

  He said this aloud and she looked at him, horror-stricken. “That would be a terrible thing,” she said. But he had a vision of the animals clawing, leaping, diving, springing lithely and elegantly at the people with their bags of crisps, their vacant eyes, across which the animals moved in a cinema which had come to life.

  And as he looked at her he was filled with an overpowering sadness whose source he could not locate.

  His own writing didn’t have any animal power, he realised, it was merely a phantasm, a reflection casting shadows behind it and not ahead. He felt a vast hot alien sun at the back of his head and was terrified for a moment lest his head itself might be that sun.

  She put her hand into his as if she had felt some of that piercing perplexity. Above them in the breezy sky the nameless clouds endlessly passed. He looked down at her protectively. She looked like a small timid animal in her brown coat.

  “I’m all right,” he said at last, watching the restaurant ahead of him with its advertisements for Coca Cola. I need to be saved, he thought. There is some place that I need to get to.

  The animals at which they had gazed—even the wildcats—looked so playful and so innocent. How could one believe in their destructive power, their undeviating remorseless chasing of the wounded and the helpless, the lion’s jaw sunk in the striped zebra? Yet how amiably the lion blinked as he drowsed in the sun.

  The eagle brooding on its perch, the hawk, how could one understand their instant unperplexed power? Sheila stared at him in bewilderment as if she did not understand him either. And yet he was no eagle, no panther, no tiger.

  They left the zoo and went for tea in a large draughty restaurant. He looked at her for a long time across the table with its cracked marble surface, without being able to say anything. Once he put his hand to his head as if he had a headache. But it was his whole being that was aching, his whole soul.

  “Drink your tea,” he said at last. But he was thinking of the animals in their cages pacing up and down, endless caged storms. He was imagining what the storms would be like if they were released …

  20

  TOM COULDN’T FIX an exact time at which he had begun to hate Dixon. It seemed to have grown on him slowly, the feeling of hate and disgust. At first he had admired him for his aristocratic ease, his air of aloof confident hauteur, his expertise. He envied his vast study with its marble busts, his resources of learning, knowledge of music. He admired him for his mind, its white cold light, its knowledge of Europe and the past. He associated him with wit and grace and leisure. He associated him with music and flowers and paintings. And gradually he began to hate him.

  He hated him really because he was inhuman and brittle. He
realised that there was nothing that Dixon had ever really loved, not with any depth, not for itself alone. At the beginning he had thought that Dixon had never felt anger or envy or jealousy. He was an Olympian. And because he had begun to hate him he set out to destroy him. He resolved that Dixon had been given enough of unearned light. Now he must be punished. He must be smashed into little bits and if possible reassembled. He wanted to destroy Dixon before Dixon destroyed him.

  At first he didn’t realise that he was involved in a life and death struggle with Dixon. After all Dixon was only a fictitious character. But as time passed he sensed, instinctively as a cobra confronted by a mongoose does, that this was a fight to the finish, that one of them must die. Art was not a matter of looking at Parozone bottles.

  And he began to grow afraid of Dixon. He began to grow afraid that Dixon was getting out of control. Something terrible was entering his own writing, as for instance in the chapter he had written about the zoo. His writing had not frightened him before. It was something that he did which he remained detached from. It was something that he sat down to as he might sit down to tea. But it was becoming different. It was becoming stained and distorted by life, it was releasing a devil. It was as if the acid in the bottle of Parozone had been released and was burning his hand. Dixon had become a Mephistopheles in bow tie and dancing suit, a question mark posed by a witty con-man, an enigma, a desperate joke. One of them would have to be killed as in a Western. One of them would have to fall on the street on both sides of which stood the gimcrack brittle houses. But which one? And where would the bullet come from? He saw the two of them walking slowly towards each other down a street while the crooked judge and the frightened proles ran for cover, peeping out between the curtains of wooden houses. But he didn’t know which one of them would drop. Which would succumb to the reality of the bullet on the flimsy set?

  He hatred of Dixon grew. He thought of sending him back to his wife but it was too late for that. He thought he should send him out from his flat on to the streets late at night to die in a knife fight, coming across the bridge at night, at a time when an umbrella would turn into a sword. Dixon was dangerous, he knew that now. But then the more dangerous Dixon grew the better, perhaps, might grow his own writing. That was the paradox. Dixon was pushing him into a corner. Did he want to go into that corner?

  Should he let the animals out of their cages? But if they attacked Dixon would they attack him as well? The man in the white suit must die, the piranha must eat the flesh from his bones in the stormy river into which he would be pitched. The man dedicated to the marble and the green leaf must die. There was no way out. But if Dixon were to die what would happen to himself, that is, Tom Spence? That was the question and the paradox. For perhaps he himself was dependent on Dixon in a weird symbiosis. Still, he was determined that he would die, that he would suffer …

  21

  THEY WALKED TOGETHER in the wood, while, along the main road, not far away, cars whizzed past and Tom wished for a moment that one or other of them had a car. They had come by bus to where they were. Tom liked being back among “nature” again and so did she, though neither of them had much detailed knowledge of it and did not know the names of the trees. Tom looked about to see if there were any live animals anywhere but could only see some sheep higher up among some stony hills. The only sound to be heard was made by a stream which flowed along among logs and through marshy ground.

  “You know of course,” he said suddenly, his lips pouting like a child’s, “that I don’t have any money.”

  She didn’t say anything but smiled. Looking at her he knew that they were together, that some intimacy had grown between the two of them, and that there was a possibility of their being together always. He felt relaxed and happy and jumped across the stream instead of looking for an easy crossing. He had completely forgotten about his book—all books—feeling that he was among real things.

  “I used to work cutting down trees,” he boasted.

  “Oh?” she said without surprise. She too looked happy, gazing up at the bare trees and down at the ground as if she were expecting to see some interesting vegetation or animals. He wondered whether she was thinking about another project.

  “And I did other jobs as well. I used to work at the post office.” He felt that he could tell her the story about the wheelbarrow, and this surprised him since he was rather ashamed of it and hadn’t spoken about it to anyone before. But he didn’t actually tell her.

  “I think you should go in for teaching,” she said casually. “I think you would be very good. You could get a grant.”

  Surprisingly he heard himself saying in a light tone, “I’ll think about it.”

  “I think you would be quite good,” she said again. A bird passed overhead, a small bird with a golden breast, but he didn’t know its name. He felt at home among the trees, they appealed to something secretive in his nature, and yet he was irritated that he knew so little. Why did he know so little about the world, he wondered.

  “Funny,” he said, stopping and looking at her. “I don’t know anything about anything. All I’ve ever done is labouring and delivering letters. I don’t know the names of anything here. I can type but not much else. Other people can do so many things. I’m really an ignorant sod. What can you do?”

  She laughed. “I can cook,” she said. “I teach. And that’s about all. Oh, I can decorate a house. I’ve done that.”

  “I’ve never done that,” he said resentfully. “I’ve never done anything. Still, I’ve got over fifty pounds left. It’ll last me a while yet, and then I’ll have to find a job again.”

  “I’ve got some money,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t touch it. Look here.” He was gazing at a beetle which was crawling along a log. It shone bluely in the daylight and moved very slowly.

  “I think that’s a beetle,” he said, glad to have recognised something in the wood.

  But he felt that sometimes they weren’t talking to each other at all, they were disguising themselves from each other. She was standing there in her brown coat and he in his khaki coat because the day was cold, but they weren’t really two people talking to each other. He would have to find a way to talk to her, he would have to become desperate enough. There was a part of him, he knew, that he was holding back, and this holding back came from pride. He had never really talked to women, not even to his mother who had ordered him about and who was continually asking him, “Have you passed your exams?” She wasn’t interested in him at all, she was only concerned with him in so far as he was a projection of her own desires.

  In the far distance he could see some hills with snow on them. He remembered once passing a farm and seeing a farmer feeding hens. Among them was a large goose which suddenly raised its towering neck and cackled furiously at the ring of white hills. Among the warm domestic hens and the farmer in his muddy wellingtons it looked remote and cold and almost eerie.

  He helped her across another small stream and found that her hand remained in his. For a moment he was astonished, it had remained there with such confidence and ease. It was like receiving an electric shock or touching frosted steel. He fell silent and she didn’t speak either. They walked on, picking their steps carefully. The wood darkened about them and then lightened again. They came out on to a field and saw some cows grazing. A single horse stood by itself staring out at nothing, its back against a rusty fence. Far beyond he could see a black bull standing perfectly still as if made of marble.

  He stopped when he saw a snail below him. It was black and its horns jutted out. He knelt down and placed his hand on the ground in front of it to see what it would do. Would it be conscious of him? He said playfully to Ann, “If it turns aside I will go in for a proper job.” She smiled mildly down at him. She knew that they wouldn’t be parted now. It was something childlike in him that attracted her, an echo of her teaching. She saw him as a little boy, playing in the wide world. She thought, I can change him and there won’t be anyone else bu
t us. Suddenly he shouted, “It turned away. It must have sensed me. Isn’t that odd?”

  “What will we do if it rains?” she said. “We’re out in the wilderness here.” There was nothing but roots, shapeless roots, and tall trees, bare and smooth.

  But she felt secure simply because there was another person there. She hadn’t realised how lonely she had been. She didn’t think that Tom was greatly talented, she didn’t think of him at all in that way. Perhaps he thought he was talented but she thought of him as a small boy who needed to be looked after. Her mind wasn’t stormy. She wasn’t really interested in literature. She was content with what she saw around her.

  He was standing facing her pointing a branch at her. She was startled to see his imitation of a soldier with a gun. “Get a move on,” he shouted joyfully in a German voice. “Ve hav vays of making you talk.” And then he burst out laughing. He imagined the wood as dangerous, and himself a commando or something like that. And she thought, the wood is dangerous. Only we haven’t suffered enough. We haven’t suffered at all. We have been privileged in spite of everything. We can walk about without guns being pointed at us, without being under surveillance.

  “Don’t be so silly,” she said tolerantly.

  “Do you think I should give up my writing?” he said, still pointing the bare leafless branch at her.

  “Of course not,” she said. “What a silly thing to say. Only you can say that.”

  In fact she would like him to carry on with his writing. But he should also get a job. One could do both. Surely that was possible.

  “I wonder if there are any weasels in the wood,” he said suddenly. “Or rats.” He went on, “I’ve never seen a weasel. It’s supposed to be very dangerous, ruthless. It’s supposed to kill for the sake of killing.” He brought out this scrap of natural knowledge with a certain pride.