by Rick Gekoski
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I . . .
‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
There was a silence that I would hesitate to call pregnant.
‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I find this very intriguing, but I’m not sure I understand entirely. Could you guide us through it?’ The class closed ranks in quiet expectation and for a moment I had their full attention.
‘What exactly is the nature of your problem, Golde?’
‘Well, sir, I’m not sure whose problem it is. It might be that Jane is just crazy, like it says, and bishops are only bishops, aren’t they? But perhaps Yeats was a little confused about such matters? Wasn’t there a bit of a problem with that woman he fancied?’
‘Maud Gonne.’
‘Ah, sir: Maud today, and Gonne tomorrow. It’s no wonder she ran a mile if he told her he wanted her in the – ’ He pretended to consult the poem. ‘Oh yes, sir, “the place of excrement”.’
‘Wanted? I see no mention of desire.’
‘What do you see, sir?’
‘I see a reference – perhaps you might think about this – to pitching a mansion.’
He was ready and waiting. ‘Oh I have thought and thought, sir. It seems a very uncongenial place to build a house.’
There was a mass guffaw, which I allowed to peak and settle down.
He wasn’t finished. ‘After all, sir, there’s plenty of arseholes in mansions, but there can’t be many mansions in – ’
By this time I had joined in the laughter. For a schoolboy, it was a masterful act of deconstruction, and his comic timing could hardly have been improved.
‘I must admit, Golde,’ I said, ‘that I’ve always had my doubts about that line. There seems something unparsable about it, something personal perhaps. But I agree with you – ’
‘In what way, sir?’
‘It’s crap.’
He looked proud, but humble.
‘But Golde, perhaps you and Jane have something in common?’
‘Are we both crazy, sir?’
‘No, you are both fools. But she is a wise fool, like the one we studied in King Lear, if your memory stretches back to last term. Whereas you are just as foolish, and not at all wise.’
‘Tell me why she is wise, sir, and I am not.’
‘Because she is trying, in her way, to assimilate the tragedy of getting old, and inhabiting a body that was once luxuriant and is now decaying. Whereas you are just being a smart arse.’
It was a bit unfair. He’d done very well, and the exchange had left me with an increased respect for him, and a diminished admiration for Yeats. Funny old Willie.
Respect for Golde was rare, and unlikely to abide. He was physically unprepossessing – small, weak, whey-faced, curdled as a bowl of yoghurt left in the sun – and his fellows tend to turn on such creatures with a ferocity that makes you think William Golding underplayed his account. But my description makes him appear insignificant, whereas Golde was as memorably repellent as Tolkien’s Gollum, given over to obsessional nocturnal habits, stroking his Precious, fingering and fondling his ring. You could imagine him trailing a spool of viscous liquid behind him, like a snail.
It was reprehensibly easy to turn against such a boy, who was universally despised, teased and diminished. If there had been keystrokes to do it, the boys would have reformatted his disc. I ought not to have colluded in this, but the temptation was irresistible. I consoled myself that, like many boys who are relentlessly bullied, the poor chap found an identity in his victimhood: being the butt of jokes and worse was presumably better than not being noticed at all.
I carried on with my evangelical enterprise for years, too many years, indulged the recurrent Goldes, allowing Crazy Jane her yearly pilgrimage into instructive madness. The premise was clear, obvious, and unchallenged by man or boy: reading exposes us to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.
It was an inspiring notion, and I tried to live by it, and to teach my boys to do so as well.
Unfortunately it was wrong.
I cannot go on, like this. I cannot go on. Passing the dying days. Remembering, thinking, justifying. Assembling bits of stories, making stupid jokes – logical, scatological. For what? Nothing assuages the pain of being. Faced squarely, it unmans and unmasks; evaded, it undermines and casts a shadow.
Sitting in my study, thinking. I think, therefore I am not.
All you can truthfully say, anyway, is that thinking is going on. But who is doing it? I’m the last person to say, or to know. Silly old fool, gorged on the saturated fatheads of philosophy, putting Descartes before des horse.
Thinking is the opposite of being. And it is so boring. Thoughts are the dullest things, they leave a funny taste in the mouth.
It is impossible to say just what I mean. There is nothing to be done. I shall do nothing. Nothing will come of nothing, it lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm. Nothing is what I am used to, what I have, what I choose.
Nothing is better than love.
Do not go gentle into that good night . . .
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dark, doubly dark.
The boys did not understand this. Understandably. Everyone gets this wrong. This is not a poem about death, though that blubbery piss-artist’s father is old now. That’s a metaphor, and this is literal – his father is going blind. That’s worse. Bang! God curses him with blindness, but he is going to die soon anyway.
When I imagine being blind, a groan involuntarily escapes me and I shudder. Not figuratively. I am a claustrophobe, the sort who begins to claw at the door if the Tube gets stuck – pauses even – in a tunnel for more than fifteen seconds. In a foolish desire to see if I could train myself into slowly increasing tolerances of discomfort, I once asked Suzy to lock me in a darkened closet, and to stand outside and count to twenty, loudly. By the time she reached seven I was banging desperately on the door. She knew better than to tease me, even for the extra thirteen seconds. When I emerged, I had somehow managed to cover myself in sweat.
I cannot bear movies or novels in which someone is buried alive, perhaps by a sadistic kidnapper who entombs his prey underground in a coffin, with only a tiny duct of air to breathe. Or perhaps she – it’s always a she, isn’t it? – is locked in the boot of a car for hours, or days. Annihilated in the dark, helpless, stripped of air and movement and light. I wouldn’t rather be dead – I would be, soon. A heart attack perhaps? Or merely a fright paralysis so crippling as to stifle life. The triumph of the darkness.
He is the Prince of Darkness. Not Satan, who has been given rather a bad name in this respect. He is a man of integrity, the Devil: if he promises your bowels will boil, get ready to burble. What you see is what you get. Yet his is merely High Octane Badness. Evil is not so simple. To do evil you have sometimes to promise good, and willy-nilly keep your promise, but sometimes break it: build up expectations and satisfy them, or outrageously deflate that which was confidently expected. To be genuinely, heart-breakingly wicked, you have sometimes to do good, both satisfy and disappoint, and you have to ensure that your anxious subjects – your Abrahams and Jobs – can hardly tell what sort of being they are engaged with.
He is supposed to protect us.
The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil:
He shall preserve thy soul
Either He can’t, or He can but He won’t. Or perhaps the evil from which He is supposed to protect us is integral to His nature, unruly and ill-controlled? I need Him. He is the focus for my indignation, a bull’s-eye for the rage that our poor sad predicament – lonely, desperate and perilous – causes in me. I need someone to blame.
> FUCK GOD
Fuck Him and His angels and archangels, fuck the Heavenly hosts and hostesses, fuck the saints and the sainted, fuck their priests, and most of all, and at long last, fuck the Virgin Mary.
My eyesight is deteriorating. Particles float across my field of vision, when I read, the print gets blurry and my head begins to ache, I get shooting pains in my eyeballs, and itching around my eye sockets. My glasses no longer clarify or magnify, and sometimes I abandon them and press the book close to my face, anxiously scanning the text until the pain gets too bad, and I put my book down, full of dread.
I summon my visiting optician, who arrives reluctantly, bemoaning the absence of his most treasured and necessary instruments, which are too large and too delicate to make home visits. We begin, like Vladimir and Estragon, with him moaning and me telling him to shut up. Then I moan, and he tells me to relax.
I call him Dr Karlovic, though I suspect he has no such qualification. But he has never corrected me, and the glint of pleasure when I proffer the D-word is presumably a sign not so much that he has hoodwinked me (his business card has no mention of a medical qualification or PhD), but because he takes it as a form of respect.
He changes my prescription, and next visit brings me my new glasses. They work. I should email him to say thanks. It’s a blessing to see clearly again.
Hand in hand, we walked round the corner to Khan’s, the local newsagent’s, which was one of Lucy’s favourite places. Better than the park, the swimming baths, or even the beach. From her earliest months she’d had a craving for sour things, and Mr Khan stocked a particularly mouth-puckering lemon super-sour ball, for which Lucy was, I suspect, his only customer. Not that she was allowed to buy one. Nor was I. As we entered the shop most days, in search of the newspaper and perhaps a magazine, he would open the large plastic jar of lemon sours that sat on the shelf behind him, and pick one out.
‘Goodness me,’ he would say, looking at the ceiling, where the fan was circling lazily, ‘I wonder if anyone likes these nasty sour things?’
‘I do! I want one!’
‘Now who could that be?’ he would enquire, for her head didn’t reach above the counter, and he would pretend to look around the shop to see who was talking. ‘There is nobody here, is there? Except you, Dr Darke. Good morning, sir!’
‘No, no! It’s me! I’m down here! I want one!’
Mr Khan loved this game, but Lucy had only a limited toleration for it, before her desire for the sweet became overwhelming and she would start to cry.
‘I’m down here!’
‘Where is that voice coming from?’
‘Me! Here! I want it!’
With practised timing, he looked down to spot her head, inclined backwards as she tried to look over the edge of the counter to catch his eye.
‘Oh,’ Mr Khan would say, ‘it is you, is it not?’
‘It’s me! It’s me!’
He would have gone on for another few minutes – he loved it – but the ritual ended here, with the transfer of the sweet. Lucy grabbed it and stuffed it into her mouth, her fingers already sticky with the white sugar covering.
‘Ooooh,’ she said, puckering and slurping, ‘it’s sourlicious!’
‘Shall I have it back?’
‘No! No! It’s mine!’
‘What do you say?’ I enquired from my news rack, unable to choose between the stodgy London Review of Books and the high-falutin’ New York Review of Books, neither of them likely to occasion a smile, much less any laughter. Perhaps I should buy Private Eye, and have a good sneer, but I cannot abide that sanctimonious midget, its editor.
I occasionally buy one of the literary magazines, prey to the stale fantasy that they represent a view of the world, of reading and writing, that can still move me. But they don’t. If I find even one article or review that amuses me, I feel blessed. Why is literature become so dull?
The magazines are curatorial. Run by curates, marching off to war: improve the unimproved, wash the unwashed, enlighten the heathens. Literature improves you. I believed that for God knows how long, ever since being brainwashed by Dr Leavis and his gang of Cambridge acolytes. The improved! Poor fucking Frank and his ghastly and appropriately named wife Queenie. I wonder if they thought of him as Kingie?
‘Thank you, Mr Khan!’ said my slurping girl, her face a rictus of received sourness, her attention now on a young African who had selected an ice lolly from the freezer, and was approaching the counter.
Lucy stared at him intently. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘why is that man so dirty?’
I think it is American cowboys – or perhaps Bugs Bunny? – who skedaddle, a word I’ve always fancied using, though actually doing it is not all that different from the (weaker) English locution ‘beat a hasty retreat’. You turn as fast as you can, passing the enemy (who glared not at tiny Lucy, but at her reprehensible father) and head for them thar hills.
As we made our way home, she sucking away industriously, I tried to explain. It’s not easy. To her innocent eye the poor African had looked distinctly odd, and other. ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you hurt that poor man’s feelings.’
She looked up at me, bemused, sour-mouthed, puckered. We lived in a largely white, middle-class neighbourhood, and I’m not sure she’d ever noticed the few West Indians or Africans who occasionally drifted by.
‘You see, darling, the man is not dirty. He just has brown skin. You have white skin, he has brown. But both of you are people.’
She looked up at me quizzically.
‘You both have faces, and noses and eyes and arms and legs, don’t you?’
I expected some response, some acknowledgement that there was, if not a problem, at least a mystery to be explored. But she wasn’t interested.
‘You know Amarjit and Sanjay at the crèche? They have brown skin too. And you know they’re not dirty.’
She laughed. ‘That’s silly. They’re the same as me.’
‘Everybody is the same, but sometimes we just look different.’
Poor. And untrue – or true in a way that it would take her many years to assimilate. How to explain things to a three-year-old, who was now staring at me with the wide-eyed fixity of a barn owl?
‘I have a good idea,’ I said, in what was intended to be a breezy and assured tone, ‘let’s go back to Mr Khan’s. Shall we say we’re sorry?’
‘No.’
Relieved, I took her hand once again, and we walked home, quickly.
The new cleaner will come on Thursdays. I couriered the agency a key so that she could let herself in, and the first week I left detailed instructions on the kitchen table – not detailed enough, as it turned out, for she was curiously selective about which she chose to follow – telling her where the cleaning materials and Hoover were. On the first day she arrived, as promised, at nine in the morning and I heard the front door close as I sat upstairs in my study, with the door locked and a yellow Post-it sticker on its door (and the one across the hall), saying ‘Do not clean this room’.
For the first couple of hours she busied herself emptying the dishwasher, putting the clothes in the washing machine, and doing the ironing. I heard her hoovering the drawing-room and dining-room carpets. But what I also heard, sometime just before noon – she must have brought a wireless with her – was the sound of music, blaring, inane, peace-destroying. Pop music, accompanied by the grating voice of an adenoidal presenter whose every utterance required an exclamation mark.
I had every intention of hiding away. I had no desire to meet, only to evade her. I did not even, at this point, know her name. Or perhaps I had forgotten it. But she had been sent to try me and I rebelled. I unlocked the door and shouted down the stairs. ‘Will you turn off that bloody wireless!’
This may have been a bit loud, and sounded, well, demented, perhaps. I needed to be heard above the din of both Hoover and music, and perhaps I bellowed. It must have given her a considerable fright.
Both of the offending objects we
re soon silenced. She started up the stairs, determined to meet and presumably to pacify her new employer. Her footsteps sounded sturdy.
She soon appeared on the landing, flushed and unembarrassed, martial, facing the enemy. I must have frightened her, and I had spoken to her rudely. She had every right to be cross. I didn’t care.
‘I cannot abide loud music in my house. There is to be no wireless playing.’
‘I did not know. They say no one is here.’
‘Well, you know now.’
‘I return now to cleaning.’
Her face had the oval quality of the Slavs, without defining planes, with a pronounced forehead that did not suggest extra brains – a face that in repose looked vacuous, but animated when lit by feeling, as it was now, simmering with irritation. She was probably in her mid-forties, tall and slim, her bare arms wiry with sinewy muscle that ran from her shoulders down to her wrists. Some sort of athlete, perhaps, or a gym rat, or perhaps just designed that way. She turned to descend the stairs, with an oddly graceful whirl, as if she were about to throw a discus, and made a quickstep retreat. Her smock, vulgar but not unclean, swished around her waist, and her too-tight jeans, quite inappropriate for cleaning duties, showed off a bottom crisp as an apple as she descended.
Anxious to re-establish my supremacy, which had slipped alarmingly, I followed her downstairs into the drawing room, to be met by another horror. The curtains and windows had been opened wide. There was a soft breeze blowing, and outside the sun was shining as brightly as ever it can in this godforsaken country, the skies were pretty well unclouded, pretty much blue.
I’ve never been a great admirer of weather. It has no integrity, it teases and promises and disappoints. You can’t count on it in England, and in those places where you can, it’s even more irritating and oppressive. I have exiled weather, and the relief is palpable. Fuck it. I don’t much like natural light either. Give me 150 watts any day.
Which is to say I hate nature? Not at all. I couldn’t do without it. I just don’t want to be plunged into its unregulated midst. I commend my fish and my fowl, praise my beans, leaves and grapes, transformed by human ingenuity into a well-cooked Dover sole or roast pheasant, a demitasse of dark roast espresso, a Montecristo No. 2, a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet or glass of Krug: nature still and sparkling, nature methodised.
