Drift

by Brian Castro

  Mother didn’t show. She had a turn and re-occupied her hospital room. When I visited the next day, she asked me if I knew that people’s noses continued growing until they died.

  That Cracklewood girl’s got a terrible snoz, she said. Tilts upwards. You can’t trust toffs.

  One night, a few months into our marriage, Ainslie confessed that men simply didn’t satisfy her. At least Englishmen. It came out in the course of our conversation, my post-coital distraction prompting such barbs, perhaps my leafing through anthropological texts while she worked at herself, when she revealed that men were a marauding species who had their place, but who were unable to understand the immense, oceanic largesse manifested purely by womankind. She breathed audibly. Her golden curls trembled.

  Women communicated with each other, she said. Problems were talked out. Women… expressed. Men simply sulked. How could she put up with it? It was clearly a critical moment. Premature. Out of control. Even your death will be premature, she said. Oh, no, she was not disillusioned. She merely wanted to cut some slack.

  When she said that, I knew she had really rehearsed this well. Ainslie had twice failed on the stage. Once when she broke a leg in an amateur production, falling into the prompter’s box because of her poor eyesight, and then with poor foresight, had married a critic, Humphrey Eglington, who presided over the Booker committee. Divorce soon followed. Cutting some slack was one of her lines. I was next. The amazing thing was that it happened so reasonably. Love could be so strange. The end of it even stranger.

  I care about you, she said, propping herself on an elbow, but I cannot stay in love with you. I’ve given you… us… the best chance possible. The colour rose in her cheeks… but you’ve turned to stone, Byron. Even your work is lapidary. Time has passed you by, yet you want to get the present out of the way so you can get on with your work. I’m sorry. Perhaps I’ve been too equivocal. I just don’t like being disappointed. Men are all the same.

  It was a terrible Dear Johnson, especially for a writer. I thought of the tabloid headlines: Royal thespian turned lesbian throws out B.S.. In the sheets I dug out a monocle which had been aggravating my back. Affixing it to my right eye, the one weak from imagining Sapphic delights, I noticed that she had a map tacked to the wall. Some sort of island shaped like a codpiece. I knew that Ainslie was a good liar, one of the very best, but this time she was really going to the ends of the earth to find an excuse. There was an issue here. Oh, I admit, things were never wonderful with me. I wasn’t as exciting as she may have wished; didn’t write a best-seller, take drugs or run after other women to make her jealous; ate peas off my knife before threatening her with it, that sort of thing. I believed in traditional ways and I couldn’t behave differently with her. It must have been a class thing. I liked to roll my sleeves up; dismantled diesel motors in order to write about mechanics; built an indoor toilet for my mother to save on the plumbing… wrote a novel about that too; still grieved for my father though he had never been good to any of us (spun that out for three novels); sat in pubs enjoying the dialect of seedy eastenders (turned that into a monologue for the BBC). But I still respected wealth and power. Not to reproduce but to experience. Furthermore, I wasn’t as famous as Ainslie had believed. I was devastated. But I moved out the next day.

  You really need to get out of Hammersmith, she said to me a few weeks later, after we had parted amicably and when we allowed old habits to half swell up again.

  I was there collecting my privately printed poems, reading from: First Works: The Mangrove Mind, by Shelley Johnson. It could still be exciting.

  I can’t leave my old mother.

  She has you by the balls, Byron.

  My time hasn’t come.

  Jesus, darling, they’ve got to fuckin drop sometime.

  I yawned, pretended to study the map again, but my heart had already shipped anchor, my early training standing by me, telling me to keep my distance. Then a kind of vertigo overtook me, I don’t know why, perhaps from so much repression… when there was so little time.

  8

  The brig rode at anchor. When the whaleboats turned upon the stroke of midnight… although no one but the Captain knew it was midnight, he alone being in charge of time in these southern latitudes… it was 1824 and it was damp and cold and frightening… you can imagine: black water sweeping in from the south, antarctic winds whistling with the cold, fish washed up, the death-smell mouth of winter, and if your eyes were adjusted to the darkness you would’ve seen McGann and his men draw alongside, the three captured women whimpering at the bottom of the whaleboat, prodded up the swaying rope ladder, while at the rail McGann would’ve turned towards the others saying: Let no one o’ you touch this creature, grasping the girl’s hair and giving her head a shake, the men looking away and smirking, some farting in acknowledgment, all back-handed compliments to McGann’s skilful woman-handling because the others wouldn’t like this, the women back on the Great Island who had seen him come out of a whale’s belly, had seen him standing in the blubber floating just off-shore covered in blood and oil, an iron paddle in his hand, and who had held to this vision of him as the Great Provider and had made him their common husband.

  In the master-cabin, beside a candelabra supporting pots of smoking oil, Captain Orville Pennington-James sits depressed. A large man with a pigtail, he looks like a brooding hog except for the pallor and the wire spectacles and the smelly longjohns and the terrible sensitivity sitting heavy in his chest which had dogged him all these sailing days since he missed his calling to Harvard.

  Pennington-James loves the sea. He is obsessed with navigation. He loves to pass his hand over wood, testing the chine of a single-beam cutter, setting his eye along the teak of a racing-class yawl. In the Massachussets Yacht Club, of which his father was President, Indian maids served hot toddies on foggy evenings, and when the horn moaned at midnight, he was often found swooning between pages in the quilted amber light of the stuffy library, a brahman before his time, while his father, aboard a moored schooner, burrowed between the legs of Pocahontas. The waitresses were all called Pocahontas and they charged mightily for simple favours. Pennington-James knew about the rough desires of men of a certain age. There was a lot to prove when the old bull faltered, and his father became increasingly irritable.

  You know nothing of the world, he said to his son. You won’t survive, even amongst the feeble-wristed.

  But despite this, and a knowledge of the sea’s indifference, he asked to be commissioned, and set about proving that a marriage between practicality and sensitivity was possible. But all he had proved since was that his father was right: he was a danger to himself. Take that fellow McGann, a natural boatswain, not officer material, no decency there, but a natural leader just the same. He had the cunning look of a diviner. Yes, McGann’s half-smile was going to be a bother to Pennington-James; he remarked on this the first time he set eyes on him, when the latter signed aboard. And now he has let this smart Billy, as they say in these waters (BIL.LI; Aboriginal; buttock), talk him into letting the men try sealing on these rocky coasts and windswept islets off Van Diemen’s Land.

  It was true that they had only caught one whale between Valparaiso and Sydney, but it was out of season. In Sydney, Pennington-James had picked up a dubious crew when his own men signed aboard a vessel bound for China. Their lay had come to very little. All the way from Nantucket, the Chief Mate had only managed eighteen dollars and he wasted no time urging the others to transfer. McGann and his group were a scurvied lot, given to drink, but they looked, for all that, able to catch a whale or two.

  It had been a mistake from the very beginning.

  Feckin terrible, wrote Pennington-James in the log.

  The watches were lazy, asleep, insolent when wakened, and every time a whale broached, looked the other way… can you imagine? A feckin five tonner slapping down beside the Nora so close you could taste krill in your mouth and these boneheads look at one another and say: Jaysus, was that a creature f
rom the deep? And they scratch their bums and I withhold their provisions… no whale no quail, which I have, in three barrels, preserved in rum, shot by my daddy hisself, then of a sudden, covering the wind off New Zealand we launched a boat and McGann, son-of-a-gun, stuck it and it sounded fifty fathoms, running the line out between my feet… yes, I wanted action that bad… and I came for’ard to pierce its heart but had a coughing fit from all that water in the lungs, my feet tripped by the line and then the water grew black and the boat lurched and the beast came up behind, black and shiny and stove the boat, flukes catching the steerer and I heard his bones crack, this fine crackling above the roar and the tumult of the churning water and suddenly I found myself kicking at barnacled blubber, the cetacean slewing, rolling, diving, making off for another attack and my spectacles were gone, I was swallowing water now, nothing beneath, so cold, the water in those latitudes, when I saw McGann hacking at the heavy rope with a spade, hacking at the blocks and he cut through finally and the boat wallowed and sucked and soon, upturned, the waves were breaking over all of us clinging onto the keel until the Second Mate’s boat came to our assistance.

  Well, that was the last time I made it out in a whaleboat. They brought the injured man aboard, bones out through his flesh. The men refused all duty after the steerer died, did nothing until three days later I thought up the brilliant tactical manoeuvre of making McGann whalemaster.

  Well, the old brig lumbered on. Her bottom oozed and needed coppering. She stank, was too small for sperm whaling and could only melt down one or two whales at a time. As a foreign vessel she was forbidden in the bays. The men, ex-convict rabble-rousers sank back into their old ways; parochial bullying, corn-holing and drunken stupidity, of which they were inordinately proud… all except McGann, who I could see was standing apart, scrutinising the main brace and watching for the main chance. He came in one morning and suggested leasing the ship as a sealer.

  She would turn more profit in a season, he said, and you could sit counting the pelts.

  He had that feckin leer on his face. On paper it sounded good, the brig running up to Canton and Shanghai, where pelts were in high demand, but I couldn’t put pen to paper then, having lost my spectacles in the previous mêlée. Besides, it had been a challenge, and I wanted yet to master this whaling thing. I wrote my father. I wanted to get it right, I told him. He knew a lot about this game. But my father had no time. His energies were then absorbed in running a string of brothels.

  Pennington-James sits depressed. His father had taught him how to chase whale. Sealing’s fer losers, his daddy had said, an’ if you think that small you end up feckin sardines.

  His father’s hairy forearm around his neck.

  For one irrational moment he longs for milk; warm, creamy, straight-from-the-cow milk.

  In the sweltering hold, McGann baptises his new beauty with stinking bilge water. Hush, he coos, running his wet hands over her startled eyes. Thou’rt a wondrous face indeed.

  Though she was quite naked, save for some small private fetish of plaited vine, he didn’t touch her further. He locked her in the lazaret, flicked his thumb at the sailor idling by the pumps and shut the connecting door. Then he went into his cabin and plunged his hand into a cauldron of hot rubbery wax, drinking in its odour. Presently rain pattered on the deck and this brought him to himself, pain inscribed on his arm. There was only the work, he was saying, as he peeled off the wax… the work that I have yet to do, he said, some divinity caught in his memory. For he was going to record the evanescent faces of these strange and wily creatures.

  9

  So now for the six o’clock train to London. This, of course, will be a test… the classic existential case of mother-indifference; treason perhaps, a weaning with no meaning, Mersault sans mercy. I can foresee the remorse of hindsight. I’ll pay for casting off the Motherland, for weighing anchor, becoming unhinged, taking my chances on the open sea.

  Mother has cancer. When she finds out I’ve gone for good, she’ll probably kill herself in that Welsh guest-house. Nothing very dramatic, or quick. Simple malnutrition with complications. Or overdose by oversight. There’s the huge bottle of morphine I’ve left in the fridge. My usual forgetfulness. I could have informed the doctor of her condition, perhaps left notes telling her where the next metered dose was hidden, like chocolate eggs in an Easter round up. My guilt prevents all this. They’ll find her when it’s far too late. It’s too late already. I cannot love, though I can grieve; except for some residue of affection brought about by fate or chance, some fortune sweeping into sympathy or laughter, I’m totally impassive. I wear the pathetic cardigan she’s knitted for me; too small, it feels like a singlet or waistcoat. I shiver on the platform in the drizzle looking like a grass seed on the wind, smell coal-smoke drifting like a fart across the sordid valley; no, there is nothing in the future, but I won’t die yet. Sustained by anger, I suppose. The sheer unwillingness to pour wax over a dead life, refusing to reap joy from straining an artifice.

  Take that last party with Ainslie. Such a thing difficult to imagine now… a last supper intended for the immortality of sentiment or the ridding of old friends. She invited past lovers to her new penthouse, and we all began soberly enough, drinking, dividing into classes, angling for laughter with threadbare wit, worms of anxiety in the gut. It was a tense evening, an electrical storm theatrically grazing the banks of the Thames and diplomacy was sovereign for the first half-hour. Then things got complicated and people started arguing, or going into corners, as I did with Janice, who wanted so much to tell me of her life with her sixty-five year old artist, Randy something or other, an American, who lost it at fifty and has been painting flaccidly ever since, I mean, what the hell, Janice said, one thing I taught myself… life never gives you much, but the best thing you can do for someone else is to nurture their fantasy. I admired Janice for her insight. Then Ainslie came by and I thought yes, I was doing that to her, nurturing a fantasy which she enjoyed, when suddenly a remarkable thing happened, for Janice began to expose one, then the other, of her perfumed charms to me, so marvellous, these undressings of the psyche and in less than no time Ainslie and Janice began a ritual coupling, almost a monastic discipline of protracted kissing and baring and the others were all so embarrassed, tethered in the tensions of their own jealousies and loyalties and teasings, (yes, Janice and Ainslie now entwined like serpents), they slunk away with formal excuses, spinning in the spell of confusion. I watched it, excluded until the end when Ainslie turned and said to me: You really ought to get out of Hammersmith.

  Life then was full of such vicariousness, but I’d learned the art of dispossession and if anything was going to stand me in good stead, it was this… the notion of wonder, perhaps of wandering, entailed the lightness of never imposing, never straining form; an old nomadic custom.

  About six months later, Ainslie disappeared. There was an article in a London paper, the usual Fleet Street beat-up about white slavery or something similarly predictable. But there was an advertisement which looked authentic, placed by her father, asking her to contact home, from wherever she was.

  I remember that just months before she’d generously offered me her apartment in Russell Square. I’d work there, usually from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon, then I’d pack what I’d written in an old briefcase and took the Tube home. The next morning I’d find the place cleaned, the waste-basket emptied, and the fridge full of food and wine. My mother said I was looking well, for my cheeks were flushed and my shirts grew tight. Stromboli’s been good to you, she said. But I wasn’t writing well. I knew deep in my heart that Ainslie’s motives were never clear; if she gave, she also took away. Her gifts obligated the recipient, and such expenditure by the wealthy was really a need to destroy, to squander, to subjugate everyone who came in contact with her. This suspicion of gifts was also a nomadic instinct. The first confirmation of it was when she bought the apartment opposite. On long, lonely afternoons I’d watch her through the spy-ho
le bringing back new friends and I observed her, when I met her on the landing or in the lift, growing old, her hair at times rain-flecked, matted, her clothes more and more shabby, her eyes pouched. Her friends were always young and though she looked less and less like herself, they resembled her in the way that she was, before she let herself go… young men and women, usually blonde, with a fey quality which may have been drug-induced. I remember the day she danced out of the lift with three or four of them, draped in a red, yellow and black sheet.

  After Ainslie’s disappearance, it took a long time for me to summon up the courage to visit her family home in Devon. The butler refused to admit me, thinking I was a reporter. When I stopped speaking and then shuffled around and asked if at least he could call a taxi for me because these estates were out in the middle of absolutely nowhere and I needed to get to a train station and that I’d walked the last five miles and was so tired and enraged I could and really wanted to set fire to a barn or two, he finally asked me to wait. I waited for about an hour expecting the police to drive up; at least I’d get a ride into town.

  It was always the same with me. I’d say one wrong thing and then another would follow and sooner or later I would be in trouble. Yet the wrong moves were a genuine impatience with diplomacy and convention and when that had me by the throat, I’d get on my bicycle and turn and turn about looking for trouble, for motion invested itself in me then and I became the emissary of destruction. It was up to me to make the correction, find the drift, the current of change, to remedy that condition. But all too often I grew impatient, as I was now, having come down to Devon, wanting to find out anything at all about Ainslie’s disappearance, still feeling a duty there, a responsibility for those moments of tender honesty we once shared, when in the very act she would tell me how deep I had gone, so deep as to have touched the hand of the Holy Ghost. Yet even then, with that tremulous and sacred promise there had been no children, but another counterfeit of life… a lie; a joke, once again; a handshake with metaphysics when biologically there had only been a series of purposefully sabotaged connections. I went down because she had once been family, not because of tutored sophistication or unquenched prurience.