Darke

by Rick Gekoski

  If you must express your feelings, I used to counsel my boys, much better to keep a diary than to write a poem. Write poetry as a last resort, and only if you have independent confirmation that you are reasonably good at it. People should need a licence merely to write poems, and to pass an advanced test before they take them on the road.

  This goes for Bulgarians as well. Why shouldn’t it? I am offered the following, by one Ivan Borislavov – perhaps he is one of the - ovs she first mentioned? – who, like Bronya, is from Sofia and is about my age, so we share him across space and time:

  Odyssey

  We are the illegitimate children of freedom,

  we are the fallen angels with broken wings.

  We were the boatswains of the cursed frigate

  damned to sail in the impenetrable fog . . .

  If there were a contest for how many risible metaphors you can squash into four lines, we have a possible winner here. Saying so – even in the privacy of this journal – makes me feel guilty, though I am not clear, even, who I might be offending. Not Mr Borislavov. Bronya? I will never mention Mr B to her, under pain of death by a thousand clichés.

  I feel no compunction about belittling these verses. That’s often what criticism is for, and much pleasure is to be had from caustic exercise, sharpening one’s discriminations, learning ruthlessly to distinguish between the good, the less good and the excremental. And this is a pile of the latter unless: (a) Might it be badly translated? Or perhaps (b) Maybe it is too foreign? Maybe a Bulgarian might swoon on reading it, as metaphor piles on metaphor and thickens the goulash?

  I don’t have enough to do, and my control over my thoughts and feelings has slackened – since Bronya came into my home. I will not say my life. She is not in my life. And she is rarely in my home. And even that, it is becoming clear, is too often.

  When you feel a lump developing, cut it out. It may hurt a bit, but it prevents the spread of something potentially deathly.

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I have, for the last months, employed a weekly cleaner from your agency, who comes every Thursday. Except for last week, when she was apparently ill. I believe her name is Bronya.

  I write to say that I no longer have need of her services.

  Might I add that she has been reliable, and I have no complaint to make of her services?

  Yours sincerely,

  Dr James Darke

  I had developed an irreversible antipathy to Golde, as his fellows had, but I did not indulge and refine it as a boy might, instead reminded myself, again and again, without any diminution in my dislike – no, dislike is wrong, what I felt was a kind of exasperated abhorrence for this boy who was so wilfully and so cleverly resistant, and undermining – of everything that I had been trying to do for – and with – him and his Friday afternoon set.

  There was a rumour that he was Jewish, though my enquiries suggested a more conventional upbringing, distinctly unHebraic. Anyway Golde, as I remarked to one of my colleagues, is hardly a Jewish name.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Goldberg, originally, I’d bet. They used to change it to Gold, but now people see through that one. Trying to pass. They often do.’

  I was mildly irritated by this. Just because a boy is clever, attention-seeking and physically uncoordinated doesn’t necessarily make him a Jew.

  Golde was not a member of the tribe. He was descended from rather a grand Catholic family. The English – the Church of England, white, proper English – have a proud tradition of hostility towards both Jews and Catholics. But Jews, though recognisable and easily parodied, are more a danger to themselves than to others. Catholics, on the other hand, are a murderous lot. Inquisitors and torturers, to this day they would deny the starving poor the benefits of contraception.

  Golde was one of us, almost. Not merely because he was some sort of a Christian, bless his soggy socks. It was impossible, if you made some effort of sympathy – and making efforts of sympathy is, after all, supposed to be what reading is about – not to see that he represented, in some extreme form, a regression to our common human ground, to our childish ways. After all, what is this creature of Tolkien’s, this Gollum, but the figure of the inner child, twisted and distorted – defined, really – by greed and need, an embodiment of something universally repellent about us all?

  It was only when I had a child of my own – the dear, the often very dear Lucy – that I understood for the first time what those Catholics mean by original sin. For the very dear Lucy was, often, too often, a hellion of demandingness. That’s what little ones are like. If God had not graced them with the smiles and beguiles, we’d throw them out the window, and nobody who’d had a child would fail to understand.

  Stinker and Slinker – two of Gollum’s many names. All babies are stinkers and slinkers, nappy-fillers and self-interested seducers, ready with a smile to get their ways, or a howl in case that doesn’t work. What a piece of work is a child, these Gollums of the night, somatic baskets of need and ruthless manipulation.

  Many of the boys knew their Tolkien, though unlike the boys of my own generation, they had outgrown him by their teenage years and looked back on their former enthusiasm with amused disdain. They cared no more for him, in their mature schoolboy incarnations, than they cared for Winnie the Pooh or Ratty and Mole. When that awful trio of films came out a few years ago, done by that bushy Australian chap, one of the boys remarked to me that it was basically just like a video game, only too long and boring.

  ‘All it consists of, sir, is the same battle over and over again, with the volume increased each time.’

  I wasn’t clear, not having seen these movies, what he meant.

  ‘Well, you start with a small group of apparently peaceful little creatures, and all of a sudden they face a threat. Surprise! They overcome it. And then they face even bigger threats. And they overcome them! End of first film. Two more films, loads more threats. Orcs in their tens of thousands! And the Hobbits win again!’

  ‘It sounds a bit stupid, like most epics.’

  ‘By the end, sir, I felt really sorry: it was a slaughter. Orcacide! Those Hobbits are killing machines!’

  ‘A useful lesson about the English, do you think? Our mild exterior is only a mask. Provoke him sufficiently and your average Englishman is a cauldron of darkness, with unsuspected depths of aggression and audacity.’

  He was too young to recognise the truth of this, but nodded wisely, thinking, I suppose, of drunken yobs and football hooligans.

  Most old people can’t sleep, they wake in the night, get up and eat toast and marmalade, go back to bed, sleep fitfully, dream a little. In fact, we sleep more than we know, for Suzy often shook me to stop my snoring, when I was perfectly clear that I was wide awake, and thinking.

  ‘Snoring!’ she said. ‘Out like a light. Would you turn the other way? That might help.’

  I also have an analogous problem, a sort of shadow sleeplessness. I can’t stand being awake. I pace the house, read a bit, but hardly remember any of it, drink another glass of claret, and begin to feel the wrong side of agitated, though still the right side of panicky. In this middle ground, as my anxiety thermometer rises, I get into bed at tea-time, more able to nap than to sleep in the evening, even when that damn dog starts barking.

  The bedroom was hot, stifling, humid. Dust filled the air, or perhaps it was those floaters on my retina? I could hardly distinguish what was actually out there from what I projected into it. It was impossible to sleep. Perhaps that was to be expected, I brought it on myself. I eat too little, and sometimes vomit when I do, now smoke three Montecristo No. 2s a day, which make me dizzy and toxic, drink coffee rather than water before going to bed. Add a bottle of Berry Brothers best ordinary claret with (often instead of) dinner, and you perfect the insomniac mix.

  I turned out my bedside lamp. Not in anticipation of sleep – fat chance – but in order to feel, however futile the gesture, that I was orchestrating the proceedings. I turned onto my right side, pu
lled the Egyptian cotton sheet up to my chest, scrunched up my goose-down pillow, adjusted and readjusted it until comfort was perfect, and there was no tension in my neck. Breathed deeply and slowly, trying to clear my mind. And then I lay there, with my curtains closed, no light whatsoever penetrating the darkness, and tried not to will myself to sleep. That wouldn’t work. Neither meditation nor masturbation would get me off. I would have turned onto my other side, but if I did I would hear my heart beating, and I get enough trouble from that sad recalcitrant organ anyway. I preferred to pretend it wasn’t there. Sometimes it’s not.

  I was feverish, nauseous with the smell of six-day-old red lilies, their water stinking of death, a begloomed ruminant of the entropics. I longed for even the briefest of naps, even dreams, distressing though they are, were still preferable to this roiling agony. I took ten milligrams of Valium, usually enough to guarantee an hour of rest, if you could call it that.

  Once I begin to think, I am full of sorrow, and I can do nothing but think. In these desperate hours, re-reading works best. I worked my way through the Sherlock Holmes stories once again. If someone were to quiz me by reading aloud a single paragraph, I could have named the story from which it was taken.

  The tales have a lovable simplicity, and like Dr Watson I was impressed by Holmes, though not by his ratiocinative powers, which are shallow and showy, but by his self-confidence, his capacity to invent himself. But I knew the stories too well, the Valium began to work and the book dropped from my hand.

  But a drug-induced nap is also a watchful one, and I woke with a start. Something was wrong. I wondered if I might have had a nightmare. But that wasn’t it – it wasn’t a dream, someone was inside the house. I was quite unable to move, struck down with terror, I looked about the room for possible implements of self-defence. In my wardrobe there were shoe trees – though they had shoes in them – and wooden hangers . . . No golf clubs. Or shotguns. I was defenceless.

  It was hard to say how many minutes had passed. The intruder – please God there was only one – must have been aware there were people in the house, and been anxious not to stir them. I lay like a corpse, rigormortised with fright, my breathing harsh and strained, my heart scrabbling in my chest, desperate as a hamster in a handbag.

  And that third step on the stairs made its tell-tale creak.

  My wallet was on the bedside table, and thank God had over a hundred pounds in it. I had my vintage Cartier Tonneau watch, some gold Dunhill cufflinks. Bargaining chips perhaps, assuming that my intruder was a mere burglar and not also a lunatic.

  I wanted to shout – I tried to shout – ‘I know you are there! I am calling the police!’ but my voice was a strangulated croak, like a frog singing Wagner. Even if I could have summoned a human voice to make my complaint, I had no phone at the bedside.

  I tried to sit up, to look less a victim, and tucked the sheet around me. I had an absurd desire to comb my hair. My eyes were fixed on the doorknob. Time passed, seconds perhaps, even minutes. I thought I could hear tiny footsteps, but the carpets in the hallway were thick wool, installed to muffle any sound. The doorknob began to turn.

  Summoning my will and freeing the paralysis of my vocal chords, I managed to murmur a protest. ‘I have money. Don’t hurt me!’

  The door opened fully. ‘You shush yourself,’ said her voice. ‘Is only me. Is surprise!’

  I sat up abruptly as she entered the room. It astonished me how quickly my fear transformed to rage.

  ‘You stupid fucking woman!’ I tore off the sheets off and shook myself, as if the residual terror could slip away like raindrops from a tin roof. ‘You break into my house, you scare me to death, and you call that a surprise? Are you totally insane?’

  ‘I rang bell, no answer. Is not middle of night, is only six o’clock. I call you from hallway, but no answer, so I come upstairs . . .’

  I glared at her.

  ‘Sorry, am very sorry.’ She waved her hand in the air as if conducting the orchestra of regret. Tears formed in her eyes. ‘I know,’ she said, backing away slowly. ‘I make tea.’ She turned and went out of the doorway, descending the steps quickly, trying to put an end to our frightful, inappropriate, embarrassing episode.

  I pulled myself together, straightened the bedclothes and joined her in the kitchen, where she was pouring the boiling water into the teapot.

  ‘Stop that right now! I want you to leave my house. How dare you break in like this?’

  She had the temerity, or self-confidence, to laugh. She was no longer apologetic, nor even sheepish, entirely self-composed, and infuriatingly, inexplicably proud of herself. ‘Not broken in. Is impossible for me. I made copy of key after you fire me.’

  ‘Go!’

  ‘No,’ she said, carrying the pot and a jug of milk to the table. ‘Sit down. We talk.’

  It was quite impossible to persist in my indignation. And I owed her, I thought, as I sipped the restorative tea – how sad and predictable we English are – both an apology and an explanation.

  ‘Bronya,’ I said hesitantly, suppressing an impulse to take her hand, ‘I am so sorry to have treated you so badly.’

  ‘No worry, worked out good. Now on Thursday I do tutoring, got pupils from Bulgarian Embassy.’

  ‘Tutoring? Surely you don’t . . .’

  She laughed. ‘Not English, stupid. A level Chemistry and Biology. Pay is good. I like very much, maybe soon no more cleaning. Maybe I give thanks to you!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t. Not at all. But I need to tell you some things . . .’

  ‘Shush!’ She stood up from the table, walked behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders, massaging them gently. The firm feel of the silk against my skin was indescribably nostalgic, and though not aroused, I felt as if I might swoon.

  ‘But I know.’

  ‘What? What do you know?’

  ‘Everything. For smart man you very stupid,’ said Bronya. ‘Maybe you go back to bed now?’

  She paused for a moment.

  It was my own bloody fault. I should’ve known better. It’s built into the structure, irresistible. We teachers experience it all the time. You offer yourself modestly as an example of high intelligence and refined sensibility: urbane, knowledgeable, cultured. Is it any wonder they want to be like you? And with you?

  But teaching eventually left a bad taste, and the efforts of the boys – now grown men, bless them – to keep in touch felt regressive to me. Both for them – give it up, for pity’s sake! – and for me. I was no longer their schoolmaster, nor did I wish to garner their belated gratitude for having subjected them to a regime that may have done them more harm than good. All that reading and listening and second-hand seeing, storing up and deploying the voices of others, whose life-experiences – if you can have such things in literature – are different to their own. A widening of sympathy was supposed to ensue and accumulate. It didn’t. Not for me.

  Of course I answered their letters, but I soon weaned them off the fantasy that I might become their friend. After a time the clipped quality of my responses ensured that no correspondence, much less meeting, was likely to ensue. I don’t have many friends, thank God, and plan to have even fewer as I get even older. And they will not include ex-pupils, though every now and again they crop up, as boys from a great public school are likely to. I sometimes wish I had taught at a comprehensive: you are unlikely to encounter the successful career of your former charges in quite the same numbers.

  Yet I have to admit there was something fascinating about it, having known the child, to map him onto the public figure that he was to become. One boy – I never taught him – did A level Art, plus two other subjects just to fill in the blanks, for he was relentlessly set on a career in the vanguard of contemporary painting – and he made it. I vaguely remember him, dressed according to some laughable sixteen-year-old idea of what an artist is supposed to look like: baggy trousers, filthy cravatty scarf, leather jacket and boots, wild hair. Lots of black. Cigarette (hand-r
olled). He had decided to call himself S. Rimington, instead of the Oxbridge norm of a double initial, or his full name, which was Sebastian.

  For his A-level project he created a ‘construction’ made entirely of tobacco rolled into various coloured papers, and then assembled into buildings based on the School Hall and Library. The idea was that they should be set on fire in public, but the Head was unwilling to sanction such a conflagration. No reasons were given, but they would certainly have included the dangers of passive smoking and insurance problems, as well as critical acumen. It was rumoured that a generous amount of the tobacco was wacky baccy. The idea was symbolically to burn us down while getting the whole school stoned. Even without the public conflagration of his construction, though, S. was given an A by the examiners, who were not required to justify their decision.

  He later made his reputation with an installation, as I think they are now called, at the Whitechapel Gallery, which was entitled Jigsaw: Puzzle, and consisted of a room with boxes full of variously coloured ‘pieces’ which the visitors to the exhibition were invited to arrange into one of the frames set on tables around the gallery. Like Mondrian, only even stupider. The key to this – according to The Guardian it was a ‘brilliant and ironic conceit’ – was that all the pieces were square, but of different sizes. Consequently there was not – as art properly insists – some overall pattern, some authorial or artistic control. There was simply a multiplicity of possible shapes and combinations of colours. No inevitable shape, which is what artists impose, just a bunch of interchangeable pieces. Put them together like this, or that, or the other! It doesn’t matter – each to his own, every arrangement a new form of art, every arranger his own artist. No form. No content. Just whatever pattern of colour the individual ‘artist’ might choose.

  The result of this risible rubbish, this unwillingness to take seriously the role and function of the maker, is that S. Rimington (having made his name) made his name, and was quickly annexed to that category of Young British Artist, that brainless bunch who have abandoned entirely the imperative to make something coherent, organic and satisfying in itself (never mind beautiful), rather than the enactment of some half-arsed idea. Or ‘concept’ as it is called. They are, all of them, the products of art colleges in which eighteen-year-olds were encouraged – indeed obliged, drawing and painting having been abandoned as hopelessly outdated crafts – to express themselves, develop their ideas, explore new concepts. But teenagers are callow and self-important, cannot tell a concept from a condom, and have no skills whatsoever in the transmission of ideas (if they had any) onto paper (not) or canvas (certainly not) – but onto some floor, or open space, or treetop, or boudoir. Tracey Emin’s bed! Did her mother never teach her to make it, and to straighten up after a night of debauchery? Are there no well-brought-up artists any more?