Darke

by Rick Gekoski

  ‘Book, Tony, what book?’ I called him ‘Tony’ when I wanted to irritate him, for he much preferred ‘Anthony’ or, better yet, ‘Headmaster’.

  ‘Apparently you have a book that you use to write insults about the boys, and you left it for them to see. I must say – ’

  ‘You are referring, I presume, to my desk diary, and to the unpleasant incident in which the boys opened it in my absence?’

  ‘And uncovered the most appalling descriptions of themselves! I have two sets of parents threatening not merely to remove their boys, but to sue for damages. For trauma, humiliation in front of their peers. It’s just dreadful.’ He pulled at one of the few strands of what was left of his hair, which resides largely on the lower left side of his bald pate, somewhat further down than anatomically plausible.

  ‘Guilty, Tony. And innocent.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘I do keep such a diary, and at the start of term it helps me to remember which new boy is which. To do this, you fasten on the single defining characteristic: curly hair, very tall, that sort of thing.’

  He looked down at some notes jotted on a pad next to his telephone: ‘Acne, cross-eyed . . .’

  ‘Very defining characteristics, wouldn’t you say? I learned their names in only one lesson. Most of them I still can’t remember. I’m always grateful for ugliness, or better yet disfigurement.’

  He was sufficiently agitated that he could not be further provoked. ‘But what,’ he asked plaintively, ‘am I to say to the parents?’

  ‘Tell them the truth. Tell them that one of the boys, wholly without permission and entirely dishonestly, contravening every law of privacy and good behaviour, opened my diary, and – what is worse – read the contents to his fellows. I have some idea of who that was, and I suggest that he be expelled, and that the angry parents assault him with sticks and rocks.’

  ‘I really don’t think your levity appropriate here.’

  I have no time for the schoolmaster’s pastoral role, which most use as a way of cosying up to the gentry and currying advance favour with the soon-to-be celebrated, rich and powerful. I will not do this. ‘I’m a teacher, not a damn curate.’ In spite of my insouciance, I never managed to say ‘fucking’ to the Head. ‘Let them move on to pastors new.’

  The headmaster winced. ‘Must you, James?’

  I was dismissed. Not from my position, but from the study. The Head would no more fire me than rusticate the culprit. I’d have respected him more if he’d done both. But, as often happens in schools, the matter blazed merrily for a few days, and then was forgotten, though attendance in my class diminished somewhat.

  Only a couple of years later, to the not entirely secret pleasure of his staff, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, rather than the emphysema he had courted so assiduously. He should have drowned in his own Latakia-infested sputum, lungs burbling like a hookah. Instead, he was found slumped over his desk, looking rather peaceful (according to the school secretary, who found him), that smirk of wimpish sanctimony wiped finally from his features. Lucky bastard.

  Spikedog, sadly, was more reliable in his attendance than my former pupils, and I don’t need any mnemonics to remember him. He had a thick black collar with fearsome nails sticking out, which, had he aimed properly and generated the right momentum, might have crucified a toddler. I didn’t know his owner’s name. Spike too, probably. Ugly enough, though without the muscles, but equally dangerous. He bore more than a passing resemblance to his brutal pet, and if he lacked the neck-nails, he had various bits of steel protruding from his ears, nose and lips. I suspect many other bits of him were also highly metallic. God knows how they got him through security at airports. Though proud of his doggie – he tended to simper at the mutt – he never did anything as normal or desirable as taking him for a walk. Instead, every evening he would let the dog loose in the garden for a crap, and leave him there for an hour or so, while he retreated to his flat to receive his conjugals from his visiting girlfriend. I never heard her name. She was a Gothic, dark, black-clothed, steely, pale, skinny, silent, miserable.

  Spikedog hated being excluded from the fun, and would first yap, then whine, and finally howl at the back door, demanding to be let in. He never was, and he never learned. He knew enough to do his business on what passed for a lawn – a bit of uncut scrubby grass – before returning to demand readmittance. Every now and again Spikeman would open the bedroom window, which overlooked the garden, and shout ‘Shut the fuck up!’ First asked to stifle the mutt, then begged, then severely admonished by neighbours leaning out of the windows of the adjoining flats, he soon said the same to them.

  Considered as an exile, it might have been possible to see something representative in Spikedog’s abject misery. Had he merely whimpered, I might have pitied him, felt some fellow creaturely feeling. But he had no restraint, no consideration for the feelings of others, sunk in his howling canine narcissism. I could do that too, I recognised in him a shadow self, mon semblable, mon doggy frère. But I am not a brute, I howl not, though I’ve been known to whimper.

  From my first-floor window I had a perfect view of the scene. By the end of the week the garden would be replete with piles of dog shit, until at the weekend a resentful crop-headed teenager – a gristly leftover on the plate of divorce – would appear with a handful of plastic bags to clean up the mess. The first time he was required to do this, he vomited copiously, and was ordered to clean that up as well, which is less easy. He didn’t do that again.

  There is no use arguing with such a dog, or such an owner – both more anxious to bite than to placate. No, to influence the behaviour of such animals, you have to attack before they do, get in the first blow. But I am a pacific fellow by nature, most distinctly unmartial. When I was ten, the class bully punched me on the nose, I daresay not very powerfully, but I recurrently find myself feeling it to make sure it isn’t bent out of shape.

  But what I lack in courage I more than make up for in cunning. If the dratted hound would not shut up, I needed him to develop a fear of the garden, to associate it so thoroughly with pain that he would refuse – whatever the punishment – ever to go there again.

  In my next Waitrose order I included three bottles of tabasco sauce, and a pound of Aberdeen Angus aged fillet steak, an extravagance I justified on the grounds that its tenderness might make it sop up more of its lethal marinade. On its arrival, I cut a piece an inch and a half square (saving the rest for a celebratory dinner), pierced it with a knife and hollowed out the centre, which I filled with half of the bottle of sauce. The tabasco had a pungent aroma that teased the nostrils, and would have brought tears to the eye if I’d got too close. But I never cry. I do not approve of it. Once you start, it would be impossible to know when, or how, to finish. I have observed this in infants and women. There is nothing agreeable about the process, which is largely used to wound or to manipulate.

  That evening I waited until Spikedog ascended to his highest pitch of declamatory desolation, so that he would associate that noisome activity with the punishment to come, and tossed the meat into the garden next door, hoping he wouldn’t be put off by the smell. The dog saw it land, not so many feet away from him – I was rather proud of my aim, it’s not that easy from a half-opened window – and sniffed it expectantly. As I had hoped, he ate the piece in one slobbery bite, leaving no trace of my malign intervention in his life.

  A few moments of blessed quiet followed, as he stood stock still and interrogated the new sensation burning his mouth. He whined a little, but exhibited no signs of the extreme distress I had anticipated. The tabasco did quieten him for a few moments, during which he paced the garden, returned to the patch where the steak had landed, and sniffed it with what seemed – could this be possible? – a sort of longing.

  He wanted more. When I repeated the trick the next day, he couldn’t eat the meat fast enough, and the following day I could swear that his howling was directed not at his copulating owner, but at my window, demanding
some hot stuff of his own.

  I’d made a friend.

  We oldies are almost without exception narcissists and bores, until the blessed lapse into silence in the corner armchair in the old folks’ home, unvisited by relatives and ignored by staff. If you asked the elderly what they really want to talk about – after all of the stuff about the weather, what’s been on telly, how rotten the food is, and by the way how are the grandchildren? – what were their names? – most pressingly what the old want to talk about is the state of their bowels. Dutiful daughters will listen sympathetically, but not for long; their husbands will find a reason, screaming silently and metaphorically plugging their ears, to get a coffee, talk on the mobile, or even visit the WC, which is a bit hostile really.

  The sad irony is that, if a human (like a Spikedog) is a machine for producing shit, it is not a reliable long-term mechanism for expelling it. I’ve gone three days without a visit this week, which is my normal pattern. Eaten the statutory fruits and vegetables, ingested my revolting mixed seeds, like a parakeet, for my breakfast. Indulged my favourite ritual, more delicious than efficacious: the making of the morning coffee.

  One of my little treats, a few years back, was the purchase (almost £5,000, I didn’t let Suzy know) of a restaurant quality – and size – Gaggia espresso-maker. And, also essential if I was going to get the best out of my new machine, a Super Caimano burr grinder. Coffee beans arrive once a month, made to my own recipe (two thirds dark roast Ethiopian and one third Blue Mountain beans) by Higgins and Co. of Mayfair, labelled Special Dark Blend, which rather tickles me, though they always forget to add the final ‘e’ to my name.

  Suzy did not begrudge me the foolish indulgence, and grew used to the diminished space, but what she couldn’t tolerate was the fuss. The grinding of the beans, just so, the full but delicate pressure as you put the coffee in the professional filter holder, the heating and frothing (by hand) of the milk – press the plunger one hundred and twenty times at a steady and regular pressure – the gentle stirring of the resulting liquid with a spoon, the slow and even pouring onto the one-third full cup of crema-rich espresso. The unhurried process is soothing, though the resulting coffee is anything but.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Suzy would say, ‘it’s like a religious ritual.’

  ‘Better. If Jesus had blood like this, I’d go to church.’

  In the mornings Suzy drank hot water with a slice of lemon. I was so in love with her, I forgave her the sheer insipidity of this, for she was distinctly sipid in many other ways. During the day she would drink some herbal tea or other – boysenberry with extra digitalis – the kind of tasteless stuff imbibed by vegetarians, Buddhists, neurasthenics, homeopaths, organic food faddists, faith healers and members of the Green Party. Stupid tea for stupid people.

  And this is the worst part: her bowels were as reliable as a clock. Hot water with lemon, piece of sourdough toast with her home-made Seville orange marmalade, off to the loo. And I would drink my double-shot flat white (the only great invention to issue from the southern hemisphere), eat my seeds, and continue to swell inwardly, discomforted and discomfited, morose.

  The poor old body can hardly keep running. Sooner or later there will be a Tube strike: the tunnels get blocked and the trains can hardly get through. And when they do, they’re more and more likely to have suicide bombers within: tumours, viruses, bacterial infections of every sort, so intent on mayhem that they willingly kill themselves too.

  It’s not just the bowel that is a reluctant worker. Arteries fur up, the large intestine grows polyps and muddy protuberances, the throat will not disgorge, the nose ceases to release its blockages. Even my penis, such a reliable ejaculator for so many decades – I once got sperm in my eye – can hardly be bothered to release its pitiful discharge. Having indulged myself with a very occasional wank – Think! Reminisce! Fantasise! Pray for Rain! – I am aware of having come, however mildly, only to notice that the tip of my penis bears no sign of the release of the (previously) essential body fluid. If I give it a post-orgasmic squeeze, upwards and firm, sure enough a little trickle of semen will appear at the tip, hardly enough to wipe off with my finger.

  I can accept that. It’s in the natural course of things. Ejaculations are for the young and pious. But I can’t even piss any more. Unless I constantly top myself up with water, making sure my kidneys have something to work with, charged like a tank of petrol, all I can release, however urgent the imperative, is a series of effortful dribbles.

  It’s not just my pants and trousers that I stain. I bleed. I get blood on my socks, the cuffs of my shirt, my pants, the insides of my trousers. My face bleeds, and I put tiny swathes of tissues to mop and staunch it. It comes from my scratching. I bleed less but more frequently than a woman, and I scratch more often than a baboon. I have eczema on my psoriasis, my skin itches as if infested by insects. I scratch and scratch, apply ointments and then scratch in the wetness, humid furrows plough my skin, and when they dry, patches of red sores mature into tiny scab fields, which I pick, which then bleed, and itch.

  But my scratching of my multiple itches is also recreational. The satisfaction of this has to be experienced to be credited. I moan, I prance, I gibber – though I am not entirely sure what gibbering entails.

  My pants, my shirts, and most of all my sheets bear the brown – again! – residue of this frantic activity, and the stains are hard to shift. Though she was in charge of laundry matters, Suzy finally refused to clean up after me somatically: if I was going to ooze into the sheets and shirts, she said, I’d have to deal with the consequences myself.

  I cannot send the sheets to the laundry, for they come back still stained. When the laundry lady returned the ironing and washing, I could feel her regarding me peculiarly. That bleeding man . . . No, I need to put stain remover onto the offended garment before putting it in the wash myself. I’ve never done this before. I’d say it was therapeutic, creating cleanliness where there was dirt and disorder, but it’s not. It’s just another choreful humiliation.

  It’s enough to break your heart, life. It breaks it, the sheer ghastliness of decline, best not to speak of it, as women do not tell expectant first-time mothers of the pains of child-birth. What’s the point? Which brings me back to Mr Eliot, doesn’t it? Youth, fleshiness, emptiness, loss. Waste:

  Electric summons of the busy bell

  Brings brisk Amanda to destroy the spell . . .

  Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,

  Fresca slips softly to the needful stool . . .

  Needful? Shit will out. Consider Spikedog, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  I’ll be damned. Is there a book lurking in this? The Needful Stool: Sitting at the Feet of the Master.

  I had begun our first session for this select group of boys – before they sailed through their A levels and Scholarship exams – begun by making a plea. I enjoined them like a vicar intent on saving souls, only employing an unpriestly lightness of touch (I hope) and mild irony designed to penetrate the carapace of their cynicism, begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open – it takes an effort of will – the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better – a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet – and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould.

  Boys are not unregenerate monsters of solipsism. There is hope for them – some of them at least. I could sense at first some interest, then a sort of attention, however grudging. I am not sure, recovering this now, whether they were listening because they were moved by my ideas, or because I was. Why would someone feel so passionately about books, and the act of reading?

  Otherwise, I would observe tartly (a number of them rather resented this), you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner – a product of a good Lo
ndon address or of an estate in the West Country, nothing more than a function of your upbringing – a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.

  It is literature and only literature that can do this. The Church can’t help us, not any more. (I got a visit from our rather aggrieved chaplain the first time I said this, when one of the boys snitched on me.) But good reading of good literature, I insisted, both to him and to my boys, interprets life for us, sustains and consoles us.

  Whatever even the most cynical of those boys might have felt, none could deny that I said so with a full heart. I might have appeared a zealot, a wanker even – I rather hope not, even all these decades later – but I was not being teacherly, this was not by rote, it was sufficiently real to be embarrassing, rightly, to many of them, and year after year, to myself.

  We met once a week, my chosen group of boys, slouching to Oxbridge to be born. I gave them their head, which was dangerous, for a couple of them loved showing off their literary wiles, trying to amuse and to subvert. But any form of engagement, I counselled myself – and them – is better than sitting there looking bored.

  ‘Next week, choose one of Yeats’s poems,’ I suggested, ‘and then read it aloud, and we can discuss it.’

  The first couple of boys, biddable and unimaginative, wanting to please by a demonstration of sensibility, came up with the usual suspects, and I made the usual responses:

  ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’? Boring! Sentimental. Stupid. Sounds like a yokel.

  ‘The Second Coming’? There was some sniggering from the rough beasts, which I expected, and ignored.

  Which led us to Golde, who had been lying in wait with ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, which he read ponderously, until he got to the final lines, which he smothered in lascivious relish.