Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  I wish I had known this poem when I last saw Ricky. I would have asked him where his sympathies lay. Maybe the next time I see him I will ask him. But I doubt it somehow. The habit we share is one I really don’t like discussing with anybody.

  Like me – like Stevenson – Ricky writes poetry. This is amazing really. A less poetic man – than Ricky, of course, not Stevenson – is hard to imagine. The fact that he likes to write was a revelation. Even to Sue, his wife, I expect. You can tell whenever the subject comes up that it still takes her by surprise, this knowledge of the man she is with.

  We were round at theirs for dinner. Ricky and Sue, Elaine and me. We’ve been friends maybe seven years. Or rather, Sue and Elaine have been friends that long. They teach at the same school, and Ricky and I have got to know each other through them. His wife, my partner. We say ‘partner’ because ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’ are words that jar when you’re both well into your thirties. Sometimes I see Ricky looking at Elaine, and then at me, with what is maybe jealousy. I think what he envies is that we’re not married. The fact that somehow we don’t seem one hundred per cent committed.

  Although of course we are. One hundred per cent. No question. We’ve been together for years. Nearly a decade, in fact. So really he’s jealous of nothing.

  I write poetry, but not for a living. Does anybody? I’ve had a couple of books published and they created a bit of a stir in literary circles. At least, the critics liked them. I didn’t understand the reviews, or what they claimed to admire. So I went back and read the books again in the light of what the critics had said and then I didn’t understand my own poems anymore. But what the hell, if I was getting the reviews, I wasn’t complaining.

  Not that critical acclaim has led to riches. Far from it. Fortunately my lecturer’s salary means that this is not important. I calculate that over four years I’ve made maybe £1, 000 off the two books, and that includes £500 for a prize I didn’t even know existed until the second book won it. (These, by the way, are untold riches for most poets.) My publisher submitted the book without telling me: the first I heard about the prize was this ecstatic phone call from him. My publisher doesn’t make money off poetry either, or so he’s always saying, but having inherited a large fortune from his father he doesn’t need to. For him it’s a hobby, although he prefers the term ‘labour of love’. ‘If you want to be rich,’ he once told me, ‘do anything but this. But you know as well as I do, Adam, it’s not about money, is it? It’s about love. We do it for love.’ That’s the way he talks. He can afford to.

  We were staying the night. Ricky and Sue bought a house out of town when their son Stevie was born, so he could grow up with a garden to play in, and we’d driven out for the evening. But then we couldn’t decide who’d drive back. Probably it was my turn, but I knocked back a beer as soon as we arrived and that made me want another. So Sue suggested that we just stay.

  Elaine, true to form, spilt some red wine on her dress about eight o’clock, not long after Stevie finally went down, just before Ricky served up the food. She went to soak it and Sue lent her something of hers to wear, a black strappy dress that was quite glamorous. It was pre-Stevie, she said, and she couldn’t get into it anymore. But the truth is, even before Stevie Sue was on the wrong side of curvy, while Elaine’s just a bit more than skinny.

  ‘Hey,’ Ricky said, ‘I haven’t seen that number in a while. That looks good on you, Elaine.’

  Sue said, ‘It does, doesn’t it?’ There was an edge to her voice that sounded to me like envy. Well, you didn’t have to give her that one, I thought, if it makes you feel fat. I could see Ricky glancing at Elaine, then stopping himself, then having to look again. I caught his eye, grinned at him. Go on yourself, I was thinking, see if I care, you’re paying me a compliment. Then I thought, that’s what you think you’re doing; you don’t know the half of it.

  Later we sat around the table, the plates pushed away from us, all scraped clean. I’ll say this for Ricky, he knows how to cook.

  We’d been talking about opportunities – knowing when was the right moment to make a change, strike out. ‘Life enhancement’, ‘self-fulfilment’, ‘quality time’, these were the kind of junk phrases that were in the air. We put on earnest voices to show when we were joking. We were getting drunk. And Sue said it wasn’t so much recognising the opportunities as recognising yourself for what you were. There was this programme she’d seen the other week, late at night. Long after the watershed, she said knowingly.

  Elaine said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The watershed,’ said Sue. ‘You know, that mythical moment after nine o’clock when all bairns are in their beds and the sex and swearie words can start.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Elaine. She was looking even paler than usual. There was a bottle of port on the table, which spelt trouble as far as Elaine was concerned.

  ‘So what was it?’ I asked. ‘What’s it got to do with …’

  ‘It was totally weird,’ said Sue. ‘It was about people with these weird sexual interests. And I mean really weird.’

  ‘Perverts,’ said Ricky.

  ‘Actually I don’t think that word was used once in the entire programme,’ said Sue. ‘The term they were using, Elaine, Adam, was para-something. I can’t remember. It means if you have a deviant sexual desire.’

  ‘Paratroopers?’ suggested Elaine, giggling.

  ‘Parallelograms? Paramilitary uniforms? Paracetamol?’ Rick added.

  She tolerated them with a thin smile. ‘Paraphilias,’ she said suddenly. ‘If you’re into something weird it’s called a paraphilia. Like there was this woman who was into corpses. I’m not kidding, it was bizarre. She used to sneak into funeral parlours and, you know, do stuff with the bodies.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Elaine. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘America of course,’ said Sue. ‘But anyway, what I was going to say was, it just got me thinking, you know, there but for the grace of God et cetera?’

  ‘What ever do you mean?’ said Ricky. He reached out and touched Sue’s wrist. It was the only sign of affection, if that’s what it was, I saw between them all evening.

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ said Sue. ‘I mean, this woman explained it all, how it started from stuff in her childhood and so on, and it just makes you think, what makes someone be like that? What makes one person normal and another person weird?’

  ‘What’s normal?’ said Ricky. It was a most un-Rickylike thing to come out with, and I was astonished. For him, normal is what he is, what he understands, and weird is everything he isn’t and doesn’t. That’s why I was surprised to hear him say that. But then again, there was the poetry thing with Ricky too.

  ‘How did we get on to this anyway?’ he said.

  ‘We were talking about opportunities,’ I said, ‘and then Sue started talking about sex.’

  We all laughed, except Elaine, who was getting paler by the minute.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ricky asked her.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Fine.’ I stared at her. She wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  ‘How’s the writing going?’ Sue asked. ‘Are you having anything else published?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m still writing, there’s stuff in the pipeline, but I haven’t got enough for another book.’ I don’t like talking about it, and that’s the truth. You know, some folk go on and on about how private they are, how shy, how afraid of opening out. Some writers do this: they go on and on about writing, on radio, television, in the papers. I wish they would just shut up and write.

  ‘You send stuff off to magazines though, don’t you?’ said Elaine. This is something else I detest – Elaine prompting me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve had the odd thing accepted here and there.’

  Sue fell silent. Probably she wasn’t really interested. Probably she just asked out of politeness. Which was a shame, because I wouldn’t have minded talking to her about it. Her on her own, I mean. But it
struck me at the same time that we really didn’t have much in common.

  Then Ricky said, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? I mean, there’s me writing poems, and you writing poems, and you’re the one that gets them published in a book.’

  ‘Two books,’ said Elaine. She got up suddenly. ‘Must pee,’ she said, and lurched out of the room.

  ‘Is she all right?’ Ricky asked me.

  I shrugged. ‘She’s just a bit drunk. She’ll be fine.’

  ‘You take care of her,’ Sue said. I wasn’t sure if this was a statement of opinion or an instruction, it wasn’t clear from Sue’s tone. ‘That’s a good woman you’ve got there,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Believe me, I know it.’

  ‘Have some more whisky,’ Rick said, pushing the bottle towards me. He and I had moved on to the whisky a while back. There’d been beer, then wine, then port, now whisky. It was shaping up to be another bad Sunday.

  Elaine was in the bathroom a long time. Sue went to check on her and when she came back she said, ‘She’s sleeping.’

  ‘What, on the bog?’ Ricky asked. Sue clipped him sharply on the head as she went to the fridge and brought out another bottle of wine. ‘No, stupid. She’s gone to her bed.’ She looked at me. ‘I think she threw up.’

  ‘Maybe I should go and see her,’ I said.

  Sue shrugged. ‘Not much point,’ she said.

  ‘Christ,’ said Ricky. He was rubbing the back of his head. ‘Are you cracking open another?’

  Sue stripped the foil off the bottle with the tip of the corkscrew. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘You’re not going to drink that all by yourself?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sue. ‘Maybe not.’

  Ricky gave me a look. ‘Oh God, it’s going to be one of these nights.’

  Sue poured herself a glass and left the bottle sitting in front of her.

  ‘One of these nights,’ she said. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  She raised her glass and I raised mine. It was an automatic reflex. When someone proposes a toast I drink to it. But Ricky’s glass stayed put. ‘Stop sulking, darling,’ said Sue.

  ‘I’m not sulking,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking what a state you’re going to be in in the morning. And who’s going to deal with Stevie.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Two pints of water and I’ll be right as rain.’

  ‘That never works for me,’ I said. ‘It just makes me want to puke.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Ricky.

  ‘I’ll deal with Stevie,’ said Sue. ‘For a change, like,’ she said.

  ‘So?’ I said, to Ricky. ‘What about it?’ I wasn’t being defensive, just wondering.

  ‘What about what?’

  ‘About me getting published and that. You started to say something a while back.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Aye it does,’ I said.

  ‘All right,’ said Ricky. ‘All right. Supposing it was the other way round. I mean, I’ve sent stuff off to the magazines. I’ve tried to get publishers to read my collection. But you’re the one they thought whose poems were any good.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Sue.

  ‘What?’ said Ricky back at her.

  ‘Is that grammatical, what you just said? It sounded wrong.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’re not marking fucking jotters now. You know what I’m saying, Adam. Supposing my poems were the good ones?’

  ‘Maybe your poems are good,’ I said. ‘But you never show them to me so how can I tell?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe your poems are good,’ said Sue.

  Rick looked at her. ‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘She’s read them,’ he told me. ‘She’s like this supportive wife person, she’s read them, and she says maybe, maybe they’re good.’

  ‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ said Sue.

  ‘Well, are they?’ I asked Ricky.

  ‘I happen to think so,’ he said. ‘Aye, I do. I happen to think they are good. You have to be your own judge, at the end of the day.’ He swilled his whisky around in the glass. ‘As a matter of fact, I happen to think my poems are better than yours.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t say.’

  At this point if Elaine had still been conscious she’d have said something pacifying: ‘You’re not comparing like with like, I’m sure both your poems are good in different ways.’ And then Sue might have said, ‘Is that grammatical?’ or ‘Isn’t that ambiguous?’ – something along those lines. But Elaine wasn’t at the feast anymore, and Sue, draining her glass, said, ‘Oh God, Ricky, let’s not have a competition about it.’

  ‘Maybe you should go to bed,’ Ricky said. ‘I mean, if you haven’t got anything constructive to contribute.’

  ‘Oh, maybe I should.’ She poured herself another glass of wine and drank from it. ‘To bed.’

  Ricky shook his head and drank some whisky himself.

  ‘That was a toast, by the way,’ said Sue.

  ‘We heard,’ he said.

  I didn’t raise my glass this time. I wasn’t enjoying whatever was going on between them, although it was better than the poetry conversation, which seemed more dangerous. As I said, I don’t like talking about my writing. Let the poems do the talking, has always been my philosophy. And the one thing I never write about is writing. None of my poems is about poetry. I make a point of that.

  Disappearing up your own arsehole is not my idea of entertainment, for me or anyone watching.

  Ricky headed off to the bog. While he was away, Sue knocked back the rest of her glass and refilled it, spilling some wine on the table in the process. I reached over and mopped it up with the paper napkin she’d provided way back at the start of the evening, and I said:

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this pissed before, Sue.’

  ‘No?’ she said. She smiled. ‘Well, Alan, there’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Adam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Adam. You said Alan.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I meant Adam. Did I really say Alan?’

  ‘You did,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t prove it,’ she said. ‘You have no witnesses.’ There was a pause. ‘Adam. Loaded with significance, that name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. I was trying to remember exactly how long she’d known me. To call me by the wrong name, I mean. It seemed she just didn’t care enough. But then again … I don’t know, I was looking at her, wee dumpy Sue I had nothing in common with, and wondering about her and Ricky together.

  Something entered my head that I didn’t really want in there. What if I got off with her? What would that do to us? To each one of the four of us. To Ricky. Who appeared at the door briefly, waved at us and said, ‘See yous in the morning. Don’t drink all my whisky.’ As if he was talking about whisky.

  It was ridiculous of course. Why should I think there was a chance of getting off with her? Why should he? I didn’t even fancy her that much. To be honest, I wouldn’t really like her if it wasn’t that she was Elaine’s pal. So what was that all about, that thought? Getting off with someone you don’t like. Okay, we were drunk, we were all drunk, and you do things when you’re drunk that wouldn’t even be on the agenda in the cold light of day. That’s what stops this kind of thing, normally. The cold light of day. Something triggers a warning about how guilty you’ll feel in that cold light. So you go to bed drunk and wake up with a hangover.

  It was about two o’clock. I said, ‘Are you and Ricky, you know, are you all right?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t we be?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just wondered. I mean, you seemed a bit short with each other back there.’

  ‘Oh. Did we?’ She considered this for a moment. Her face was in profile to me.

  Suddenly I felt horribly lonely. I felt alone in the world. And I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing in it. It
was a sick, nasty, cold feeling. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like myself for what it made me do next.

  I kind of reached out. Or maybe it was more of a lean. Anyway, it was in her direction. ‘Sue,’ I said.

  But just as she was on the point of turning to look at me, of maybe reaching or leaning back, if that was what she was going to do, there was a movement at the doorway. Everything froze.

  There was a figure standing in the door in pyjamas. A small figure, with a dark tousle of hair and a thumb in its mouth.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sue. Somehow in a moment she was over there gathering her child up, wrapping him into her. ‘Stevie, sweetie, what’s wrong? Did you have a bad dream?’

  Stevie was crying quietly. He looked very sleepy but his eyes were wide open, startled by the brightness. ‘My ears hurt,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, baby, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ She was stroking her child’s hair, holding his head against her body, gently cupping her hand over one ear. ‘It’s okay.’

  She started to walk up and down the room, between the window and the door, hushing her child, whispering to him. It was as if I had disappeared. It was as if all the furniture in the room had shifted slightly. I wanted to get up and go to bed, because everything had suddenly changed back to the way it was. I wanted to go through to the spare bedroom where Elaine was because that was the only place for me to go, but then again I didn’t want to go there. And I didn’t want to disturb Sue and her wee boy, remind them that I was there. So I sank back into the sofa cushions and closed my eyes. That way I wouldn’t see them and it would be as though they couldn’t see me anymore, and I could wait there for as long as it took for the child’s sobbing and his mother’s soothing to come to an end.

  The Shelf

  They needed a wardrobe. All the second-hand ones they saw were either too big, too small or too dear. In the end they went to the DIY superstore and got a kit in a flatpack that you fitted together yourself. It was a lot cheaper but not well made like the old ones. Louise said, ‘Well, you get what you pay for.’