Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  He’d paid good money and he wasn’t being allowed to play. It was fucking crap. The third ball died on him only 200 points short of a replay and he swore at the machine and gave it a good kicking, stubbing his toe in the process.

  A big guy in a T-shirt that said ‘AMUSEMENTS’ walked through the door from the front and came up to him.

  ‘Who d’you think you are, Roger fucking Daltrey?’

  ‘It’s set wrong,’ said Alan.

  ‘It’s set fine,’ said the guy. ‘You’re supposed to play it with your hands, not your boots.’

  ‘Don’t fucking get on at me,’ said Alan. ‘You just have to touch the machine and it tilts, you should get it fucking sorted.’

  ‘I’ll fucking sort you if you don’t get the fuck out of here,’ said the guy.

  ‘It’s your fucking machines, man, they’re all fucked,’ Alan shouted.

  The guy belted him in the mouth. Before he could hit back Alan found himself being bundled out past the fancy machines in the front, another guy coming to help and sticking a couple of punches on his kidneys to prevent any retaliation. Through the mist Alan saw a man half-turning to watch him go, but the rest kept their eyes trained on the screens and dials in front of them. In a moment he was lying on the pavement, gasping for breath and tasting the blood in his mouth.

  The guy in the ‘AMUSEMENTS’T-shirt stared down at him. ‘If you’ve got a problem, pal,’ he said, ‘don’t bring it in here, okay?’

  ‘Just come over,’ said Mike. ‘Mona’s a nurse, remember? She has to deal with the likes of you every weekend in casualty.’ He laughed. ‘Well, every weekend she’s on. The one weekend she’s not you turn up to keep her hand in.’

  Mike was out in the garage when he arrived, working on an enormous engine that looked as though it could have come out of the builders’ bulldozer over the fence. Alan had a swollen mouth, aching back and sore foot, and as he brought the car to a halt he wondered about himself again. What was he doing, disturbing Mike on a Saturday afternoon just because he’d got a beating he’d asked for? All over the country the other young men were well occupied: Mike was sorting something broken and he probably wasn’t the exception Alan thought he was; others were at the football (including Mike’s dad, and he wasn’t even a young man), watching it or playing it, or waiting for the results to come up on the television; others were climbing mountains, painting houses, washing cars, building boats, looking after the kids, fishing, walking the dog, shopping even. Not Alan. He was keeping Mike from his work and looking for something. Company, answers, a laugh, a plan for the night. He was bored and lonely. He was looking for answers.

  Mona was Mike’s sister. She didn’t live at home anymore, she was just back from Glasgow for the weekend. She cleaned up his face while Mike made the tea. How useful they all were, these people. Here was Mike making things work so they wouldn’t be thrown away, and his sister making people work so they wouldn’t be thrown away, and their dad used to be a miner till British Coal threw away the pit, and their mum had been a gem, producing and nurturing this really useful family (until she died because she wouldn’t stop smoking) – and then there was Alan! Not for the first time he felt inadequate. And it wasn’t just the incident in the amusements place. That was nothing. It was everything else – his job, his house, his life, everything. Packaging was a bad scene. It was not environmentally a friendly way to behave, not with the packaging his company produced – full of CFCs and other time-bombs. I am not a useful person at this moment, he thought. I am out of kilter with the scheme of things.

  Mike went back out to the garage after he’d heard about the fight – he had a good laugh about it – but Alan stayed for another cup with Mona. They’d met once before at somebody’s wedding and she’d seemed all right but she was with some guy with sculptured features who didn’t like her talking to other guys so they’d not had a chance to speak.

  ‘What are you doing getting into fights?’ she said. ‘You don’t seem like – I mean, from what Mike’s told me about you – you don’t sound like that at all.’

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what got into me. I think I’m having some kind of crisis.’

  ‘What, about pinball?’ she said.

  ‘Aye, I’m hooked on it,’ he said. ‘I’m selling the furniture in the search for that elusive triple replay.’

  ‘So what’s it about?’

  ‘Christ, you sound just like your brother,’ he said. But she kept staring at him, expecting an answer.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m getting to that stage of wondering what I’m doing. I mean, I’m comfortably off, my job’s pretty secure, but it doesn’t seem good enough. I know, I know, that sounds like I’ve reached my thirties and can afford the luxury of gazing at my navel, but that’s how I feel. The trouble is, it’s not really anything new. I’ve been like this all my life. I’m the world’s worst worrier, but not about wee things – about muckle great big things. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the next Messiah but somebody’s forgotten to tell me. It’s a cliché but there’s got to be more to life than this.’

  ‘A relationship, maybe?’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose it might take my mind off it.’ Then he asked her, ‘You still seeing that guy?’ It might have been a leading question but it wasn’t.

  ‘Which guy?’ she asked. Then she laughed. She knew fine. ‘No, he chucked me. I’m giving it a rest just now. It’s hellish trying to have a serious relationship when you do the shifts I do.’

  ‘Well, have a non-serious one,’ he said. So maybe it had been a leading question after all. ‘With me.’

  She laughed again. ‘For a guy with a burst lip you’re not backward in being forward anyway.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ he said, ‘don’t mind me. But honestly, what do you think? I mean, what do you think it’s about?’

  ‘Your crisis, or life in general?’ she asked. ‘Or can we apply the same question to both?’

  ‘Aye, definitely,’ he said. ‘I think I’m having a crisis because I feel I should know by now what it’s about. I mean, what are we here for, if not to know why? Or to wonder why? If we don’t even wonder, what’s the point of anything?’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘What did you study at uni?’

  ‘Business studies and management,’ he said. ‘Probably a mistake.’

  ‘Probably just as well. Imagine what you’d be like if you’d done metaphysics and moral philosophy.’ Mona reached behind where she was sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa, and pulled a carrier bag towards her. She said, ‘I know just the thing for you. I was reading about it earlier. Pelmanism.’

  ‘Eh?’

  She pulled out a handful of paperbacks from the bag. ‘I collect these,’ she said. ‘The old green-covered crime books. Penguins mostly, but also the Collins Crime Club ones, Crime Book Society – look.’ He flicked through them. 6d or 1/6 a time, they were mostly from the thirties and forties. Some of the earlier ones had the dust-jackets still on them. ‘Do you read them all?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, ‘I like a good thriller. But it’s the editions really – they seem to be so much of a period. I don’t go beyond 1960 – well, you have to draw the line somewhere. Everybody seemed to do them in green until about then. And after that the jacket designs aren’t uniform. I’ve picked up hundreds for virtually nothing. I just got these today – there’s a second-hand bookshop up Spittal Street.’

  ‘I know where you are,’ he said. He looked again at the books. Rex Stout, Seldon Truss, Hulbert Footner, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Dickson Carr. ‘Great names,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘the books are irrelevant to what I was going to say.’ She picked up The Broken Vase by Rex Stout and turned to the inside front cover. ‘ “The Grasshopper Mind”,’ she read.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘ “You know the man with a ‘Grasshopper Mind’ as well as you know yourself. His mind nibbles at everything and masters nothin
g.”’ She broke off. ‘This is an advert, not the plot. Isn’t it great? Do you recognise yourself? I tell you, I’m convinced and I’ve not even got to the bit where you send off for further details.

  ‘ “At home in the evening he tunes in the wireless – tires of it – then glances through a magazine – can’t get interested. Finally, unable to concentrate on anything, he either goes to the pictures or falls asleep in his chair. At his work he always takes up the easiest job first, puts it down when it gets hard, and starts something else. Jumps from one thing to another all the time.

  ‘ “There are thousands of these people with ‘Grasshopper Minds’ in the world. In fact they are the very people who do the world’s most tiresome tasks – and get but a pittance for their work. They do the world’s clerical work, and the routine drudgery. Day after day, year after year – endlessly – they hang on to the jobs that are smallest-salaried, longest-houred, least interesting, and poorest-futured!”’

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ he said.

  ‘Me more than you,’ she said. ‘I’m a nurse, remember?’

  He put his hand to his jaw. ‘How could I forget?’

  ‘ “What Is Holding You Back?”’ she said. ‘ “If you have a ‘Grasshopper Mind’ you know that this is true. And you know why it is true. Even the blazing sun can’t burn a hole in a piece of tissue paper unless its rays are focused and concentrated on one spot! A mind that balks at sticking to one thing for more than a few minutes surely cannot be depended on to get you anywhere in your years of life!”’

  ‘This is depressing,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘it gets better. “The tragedy of it all is this: you know that you have within you the intelligence, the earnestness, and the ability that can take you right to the high place you want to reach in life! What is wrong? What is holding you back? Just one fact – one scientific fact! That is all. Because, as Science says” – that’s Science with a capital ‘S’ by the way – “you are using only one-tenth of your real brain-power!”’

  ‘If that, this afternoon at any rate,’ he said.

  ‘ “What Can You Do About It?”’ she demanded. ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ “Take up Pelmanism now!”’

  ‘The card game?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘though I think this must be where the name came from. Something called the Pelman Institute, Norfolk Mansions, Wigmore Steet, London. Established over fifty years, callers welcome. “A course of Pelmanism brings out the mind’s latent powers and develops them to the highest point of efficiency. It banishes Mind Wandering, Inferiority, and Indecision, and in their place develops Optimism, Concentration, and Reliability, all qualities of the utmost value in any walk of life.”’ She closed the book. ‘Alan, this is for you. God, that was as good as a novel itself.’

  ‘It’s uncanny,’ he said. ‘You hardly know me, nurse, and yet you’ve described me to the very roots of my being. Are you some kind of witch?’

  ‘That’s what my dad thinks. He thinks Mike and me are both witches because we’re into things like aromatherapy and yoga and meditation.’

  ‘What about astrology?’ Alan asked. ‘Or tarot?’

  ‘Naw,’ she said, ‘that’s all shite. I’m a practical down-to-earth kind of witch.’

  ‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ he said. He picked up the book and looked at the ad. He turned to the inside back cover. ‘Hmm, I think I prefer the other solution to life’s problems: “Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate – I WANT CADBURY’S!”’

  ‘That’s just a temporary fix,’ she said. ‘I think we should try this Pelmanism thing out.’

  ‘Och,’ he said, ‘even if they’re still going they’ll not still be at that address.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I think we should have a game of Pelmanism. Sharpen your senses up a bit.’

  ‘All right.’ She had a very persuasive manner. He was forgetting she was Mike’s sister and thinking of her more as a nurse skilled in the ways of the black arts, which was an appealing combination.

  Mona stood up and fetched a pack of playing cards from a drawer. She shuffled them, then laid them out on the floor face down in eight rows of six and one row of four.

  ‘I haven’t done this for years,’ she said. ‘Do you know how to play?’

  ‘Aye, it’s just memory, isn’t it? Collecting the cards in pairs?’

  ‘Well, you start then,’ she said. ‘Your need’s greater than mine.’

  ‘I don’t really see how this is going to help,’ he said. But he picked up a card from the top row, then one from the bottom. The ten of diamonds and the ten of spades.

  ‘Wow!’ he said. ‘Do they have to be the same colour?’

  ‘No, not this time,’ she said. ‘Any pair will do.’

  He wasn’t so lucky with his second shot. Mona had her turn without success. That meant there were four cards to remember. They both began to concentrate.

  The door opened and a grey-haired man in a camouflage jacket came in.

  ‘Hello, Alan. Been in a fight, Mike’s telling me.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Aitken. Aye, nothing serious but. How was the football?’

  ‘Ach, terrible! Two-nothing. That’s them back down to the Second Division next season. I don’t know why I bother going.’

  ‘Because you enjoy it,’ said Mona.

  ‘Must be a masochist then,’ said Mr Aitken. ‘Anyway, looks like I’m interrupting. Anyone wanting a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Alan. ‘I’ve tea coming out my lugs.’

  ‘Right you are. Mona?’

  ‘Not for me. Right, Alan. On you go.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Can we start this again?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, we ought to be doing it right. Matching the colours, I mean – hearts with diamonds, spades with clubs.’

  ‘If you want,’ she said. ‘You feeling lucky?’

  ‘I’m feeling something,’ he said. It was true. Something was building up in him. Maybe it was the house – Mike and Mona and their dad – it felt very good. He thought of his work, and how he had to get out of it. His heartbeat quickened.

  Mona swept up the cards, shuffled them again, and laid them out.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Strictly by colour.’

  Mr Aitken came back in with a cup of tea and sat down in an armchair. ‘Is it going to bother you if I put the results on?’

  ‘Course not,’ said Mona. ‘Alan’s staying for his tea, if that’s okay.’ She smiled across at him.

  ‘Fine,’ said Mr Aitken. ‘What are you two up to anyway?’

  ‘We’re sorting out the universe,’ Alan explained.

  ‘We’re sorting out Alan,’ said Mona.

  ‘You want to watch her,’ said Mr Aitken. ‘She’s a witch.’

  The results were being read out on the television. The volume was down low, and there was something very soothing about the rise and fall of the familiar voice, down for a home win, slightly up for an away win, level but up for a no-score draw, up on both sides for a score-draw. Alan felt himself slipping into it, even though he wasn’t taking in the actual information. He began to turn up cards to the rhythm of the voice.

  After about half a minute he heard Mona say quietly, ‘Dad, take a look at this.’

  He was turning them up now, one after the other, his hand moving across the spread of cards smoothly and easily. It was as if his hand knew which card to go for. His mind watched his hand doing it with amazement, then with growing confidence. Suddenly he knew he was going to do the whole lot in a oner.

  He was aware that Mr Aitken had turned in his chair and was watching what was happening. Mona was resting back on her heels, one hand held to her mouth as if she was frightened to breathe. All that was needed was for Mike to come in and see it. But he couldn’t stop now, he couldn’t wait for Mike. There were the three of them in the room, all concentrati
ng on the cards on the carpet, all watching his hand glide across them, turning up the two red queens, the two black fours, the two black aces, putting them to one side, going back for the next pair, on and on without hesitation, so that soon there were only a dozen cards left. And he knew it was going to be all right, that nothing could stop him now, that he would go on turning up the pairs and never make a mistake, not one, until he could pause, with only one pair left face downward on the floor, and look at them both, Mona and her dad, and they could all breathe again, knowing that the last two had to match, they had to, and nothing could possibly come between him and their matching, no matter how long he waited.

  Republic of the Mind

  He was beyond the politicians. Way beyond them. If they couldn’t get their act together when it was so obvious, he wasn’t wasting his time waiting for them. He was off already – gone. To the republic of the mind. That’s where he was.

  It wasn’t Robert, however, but Kate who threw the bottle through the TV set on election night. The Stirling result was what did it.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ she screamed. ‘If they can’t get it right there!’ The opinion polls had been like huge signposts pointing at the one opposition candidate who could capture the seat, but the good folk of Stirling appeared not to have taken the hint. Kate launched the empty Frascati bottle at the smiling face of the Government Minister, and his expression – happy or smug, depending on one’s political viewpoint – exploded from the tip of the nose outwards into nothing. Everybody else in the room stared in awe at the dead screen. It was the kind of thing they’d always wanted to do – to politicians, princes, weather forecasters, game show hosts, footballers, sitcom characters – but their anger had never quite overcome their reluctance to pay the price.