Stephen just happens to have a DVD of Werckmeister Harmonies in his bag. As soon as Charlie and Janina have retired for the night, we put it on. Ellen lasts less than an hour: it’s the most boring thing she’s seen in her entire life, she says. ‘But a dose of boredom is good for the soul,’ says Stephen. ‘It clears the brain,’ he tells her. ‘Not this brain it doesn’t,’ says Ellen, reaching for Janina’s stack of magazines. A few minutes later, after an exchange of glances with Ellen, he proposes that we put it on pause and go for a walk. Evidently there has been some collusion between them. I tell him it’s a bit too early for me, but Stephen is insistent. He has to leave early in the morning, so it’s now or never.
Stephen is on my right hand, Ellen on the left. It’s like our cinema formation, he tells her: Stephen on the right side, Celia on the left, tickets bought in advance, get to our seats before anyone else, get out the instant the credits start to roll, straight into a taxi. At this point a car comes down the lane, and I almost fall over, twisting away from the lights.
Moon minimal, clouds sparse, stars profuse. It would be a good idea, Ellen suggests, if streetlights were shut off at midnight, or if we had a special day or two when all the streetlights are shut down, so we townies could all have a chance to see what the night is really like. Stephen says that on some of the Scottish islands, before they had electricity, they used oil from seabirds to light their houses, and that the stormy petrel was so oily a bird that all that had to be done to make a lamp was to take a dead petrel and shove a wick down its gullet.
We see no wildlife. Despondent, I feel as if I weigh thirty stone.
‘I’ll be back,’ says Stephen, grasping my hand, like a Roman swearing an oath. When he returns, will I be able to talk to him? At the gate, he has a conversation with Ellen. ‘What was that all about?’ I ask her. ‘What do you think? she replies, and we change the subject.
6
A pleasant afternoon. Charlie has fashioned a canopy from an old tent and rigged it up at the end of the garden, by the bushes. Through a gap in the leaves I can see the stream; a heron comes and goes; no kingfishers. One person sighted in three hours; Ellen proposes that we walk to the water one afternoon – she’s taken a stroll along the banks and it’s really lovely, she says. There are plenty of places to take cover, she assures me. ‘Not in a million years,’ I answer. Her mobile rings – it’s Roy, wanting to see her. She’s too busy, she says, and gives me a wink. I read and doze, and at one point, as I’m closing down, I see Zoë’s face: it’s a shock, an image so precise it makes me realise how far my memory of her has decayed. When I think about Zoë nowadays, what do I see, usually? Glimpses, as if into a room through an almost-closed door. Mostly, words are what come to mind: descriptions of her, stories about her, propositions. She could almost be someone I’ve only read about.
I look at the Tat2 website: rear-view of a pink-haired woman, who has a meteor on the nape of her neck. It may be Zoë; it may not be.
During the first decade of disfigurement, my father would from time to time take me aside for a pep-talk. It was understood that these words of encouragement were spoken on behalf of both himself and my mother, who never said anything to me that I might have taken as criticism, but who occasionally betrayed – by a doleful glance or some other momentary motion – a forlorn wish that I might find it in myself to take life more robustly. (When my father urged me to get out into the world and face it down, he was of course acting partly from concern for the well-being of his wife, whose anguish at my condition might have been to a degree diminished if I could have ceased sulking in my cell.) One of these paternal homilies took as its inspiration the wounded servicemen of the two World Wars. Many of these soldiers had suffered the most terrible injuries and subsequently been obliged to endure operations that were barely less agonising than their wounds. Hundreds and hundreds of these men were in a considerably worse state than I was in, and yet they were able to confront the world. They’d been dealt a very bad hand in life, but they just got on with making the best of it. There was no point in worrying about what other people were thinking, my father would say. If we worried about that all the time we’d never get anything done. I should simply ignore them, he urged me. Determined to emulate the heroic wounded, I conducted some research. In Westminster Library I found photos of heads so misshapen they appeared to have been pounded with a sledgehammer. Glass eyes stared out of faces that had been burned as flat as a drum skin. I looked at men who might have been stitched together from lumps of assorted corpses. It was inconceivable that anyone could survive such injuries, and inconceivable that, having survived, they could show themselves in the world. I owed them a greater resolve than I had so far shown.
Sometimes I managed to carry on as if I had successfully achieved an indifference to being observed. My father, watching me march along the street with the purposefulness of a boy with a point to prove, was proud of me. Charlie too was pleased. My brother’s stance on the question of my life in public was a modified version of my father’s. Ignoring the attentions of bypassers was, he understood, hard enough now, but in future, if the condition were to continue to flourish, it would be all but impossible. A different strategy was desirable: ‘If they stare, you stare back.’ That was Charlie’s advice. ‘Throw it back at them. If they can’t take it, it’s their problem.’ I had to do this, not solely for my own sake, but for the good of society as a whole. Through my refusal to meekly accept their attention, I would oblige people to rethink their attitudes. This new strategy, Charlie acknowledged, might at first be difficult, more difficult perhaps than the strategy of indifference, but in time it would become easier. I tried it. I tried to return curiosity with curiosity. Charlie was fifty percent correct – I found it difficult at first. But it never did become easier. In fact, it quickly became impossible. Afraid of provoking more of a reaction than I could cope with (in Dulwich park I returned a look; ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ the starer demanded), I preferred – in the periods when I was feeling bold – the approach recommended by my father. I would charge about the city at weekends as if I’d enclosed my eyes in blinkers. Ploughing a path through the crowds, I could convince myself, for an hour or two, that these people were focused on their destinations as intently as I was on mine. But I could never make the illusion last long. Exhausted by the effort of it, I’d allow my gaze to snag on the gaze of someone whose face I had sensed turning in my direction, and soon I’d once again be conscious of every passing glance. My father told me that I shouldn’t concern myself with what these people were thinking, and I wasn’t much concerned. (I knew what they were thinking – they were thinking what I’d be thinking in their position: ‘Christ, look at that!’) It was the simple act of looking that was the essence of the problem, the awareness of perpetual surveillance, the friction of being seen. When you look at the world you project yourself into it, you possess it, you subject it to your vision, to your mind. But I was an object, not a subject. I glanced at a face and I saw my appearance reflected back at me. Most people are fundamentally decent, decent Charlie would tell me, and I had no reason to take issue with him, but the squirm of sympathy could be as intolerable as the flinch of disgust. And I did provoke some extravagant reactions: the girl who yelped after colliding with me in a department store; the young woman who came across me in an alleyway off Oxford Street, and froze as if she thought I might murder her; or the woman who, in Kensington Gardens, put her hands over her child’s eyes, and departed at speed, whimpering.
To minimise the hazards of venturing outdoors I required company. Fixing my attention on a companion made it easier to disregard the attentions of others, and this companion, more often than not, was of course Celia. With Celia I went to many an event or exhibition that I could not have attended alone. Seeing me hesitate on the threshold of a busy room, she would hook an arm to steer me through the crowd. ‘Just pretend we’re famous,’ I remember her saying as she dragged me along, and ‘We’re not going to be bullied by
the stupid.’ But my sister espoused a more militant version of Charlie’s philosophy, that the starers should be made to pay, and there was always the risk, despite my telling her that her counter-offensives didn’t make things any easier for me, that she would take it upon herself to fight back as my proxy. Sometimes her retaliation was mild: a scowl; an eyebrow raised questioningly; a shame-inducing smile. Occasionally, however, she couldn’t control herself, and she’d turn on the gawper in a fury. ‘You want to know what’s up?’ she’d yell. ‘They’re cutaneous neurofibromas. Wanna touch?’ Or: ‘It’s an autosomal genetic disorder. Shall I write it down for you, fuckwit?’
After Celia had gone to university I didn’t often go up into town – once a month, perhaps, and nearly always with Stephen. When Stephen left home the excursions became rarer. The experience of being among so many people had by then become almost unbearable – not solely because of my aversion to being seen (though this had certainly deepened), but because of the din and the crush of it too. I was well on the way to becoming a hermit of the suburbs. But I remember very clearly a later evening, an autumn evening during the year between Barcelona Part I and Barcelona Part II. Celia, Stephen and I had been to a cinema in the West End, and we’d climbed into a taxi on Shaftesbury Avenue, taxis now being the only form of public transport that I could bear. Somewhere near Trafalgar Square we were trapped in traffic, on a pedestrian crossing. People were massing on the pavement on both sides of us, and Celia was looking steadily at the cluster on my side. The affair with Fontenoy had recently disintegrated, so she was in a thoughtful mood. ‘Look at them,’ she said, in a wistful tone that was very unusual for Celia. ‘Who knows what’s going on there?’ Randomly she pointed out half a dozen faces in the crowd, and tallied their imaginary woes: ‘That one’s going home to drink herself unconscious; that one is so bored with her life she can barely move; that boy’s broken-hearted; that man hasn’t seen his family for a year; that woman has lost a husband.’ If we knew what everyone around us was feeling we’d go mad, she said. ‘Marks of weakness, marks of woe,’ murmured Stephen, and when I surveyed that morass of faces they did indeed seem burdened, every one of them. But as I looked at that huge group of individuals, every one of whom seemed oblivious of everyone around them, a different thought presented itself: that in all likelihood this moment was of no significance to any of them, and that experiences that mean nothing, that have no weight, are more important to a good life than any of them realised.
But let’s finish on a note of amusement. On the staircase of a subterranean West End cinema Stephen is hailed by someone he’d worked with a year or so earlier. I am well swaddled in my customary gear – voluminous scarf, long coat, dark glasses, the big floppy beret brought back from the Basque country by Stephen. I step out of the way, to lurk beside the drinks machine. Nodding in my direction, Stephen explains that his shy companion is Doctor Bleb, a scholar from Brno, visiting to assist with a forthcoming show at the V&A. Doctor Bleb is a shy man, and very self-conscious about his defective English, but a brilliant figure in his field. ‘He’s forgotten more about Renaissance majolica than I’ll ever know,’ Stephen informs his erstwhile colleague, his voice grave with respect.
‘What do you think of this, El?’ I ask her. On the screen we have a picture of a woman’s chest: not her breasts, but the area above, covered with a tattoo of a wide necklace of seaweed. ‘A chest plate, they call it,’ I tell her. She thinks it looks horrible. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ I announce, scrolling down the page for pictures of the woman’s back. Every square inch is covered with tattoos: a bear, a fox, a snake and a leopard peer through swirls of leaves and vines. Pointing to a capuchin monkey, I tell her that two months ago this was an empty space, the last one. ‘She’ll regret it when she’s older,’ says Ellen. ‘Her name is Trix,’ I go on, ‘and these are messages from the tattoo-loving public.’ Love your ink. U R soooooooo cool, writes Billee. Pause, to maximise the impact of revelation: ‘That’s me. I’m Billee.’ Ellen perplexed, but makes no comment. Another couple of clicks and there I am again, taking issue with some halfwit’s opinion of the last James Bond film: LOL OMFG that is so hilarious, remarks BBBitch. Elsewhere, Blebby commends a girl’s glove-puppet video for an Eminem track: Your so amazing. Barbz is greatly impressed by a sculpture constructed from magnets: Shit man that fucken thing is aliiiive. Bozza finds he cannot agree with DaYak’s point of view on Tony Blair: You take the cake of ignorence. It’s a game I play every now and then, I explain. Frowning deeply, Ellen reads a few more postings before giving up in dismay. ‘It’s like dogs barking,’ she says.
Celia took me to Matt’s place half a dozen times – this was the final flourish of my extra-domiciliary social life. Perhaps Matt invited me primarily in the hope that one day I’d agree to be photographed. Perhaps not – but it was the high possibility of being regarded as a potential subject that had made me even more uncomfortable about meeting Matt than I’d been about meeting Celia’s previous boyfriends. (I had always been conscious (with no good reason, Celia insisted) that the boyfriends were being introduced to me as some sort of trial of their character: if they balked at the sight of the brother, they were not made of the right stuff. One was so keen to get his hand up Celia’s skirt that he feigned finding me as engrossing a conversationalist as Gore Vidal; another, however, looked as though he’d swallowed a pint of cod liver oil a few seconds before being led into my room.) ‘If Matt suggests it,’ Celia had said, ‘all you have to do is say No and that’ll be the end of it.’ This was disingenuous, as she knew that he’d suggest it sooner or later (‘He’s always looking; he sees a picture wherever he looks,’ she’d said in the first flush of admiration), and whether or not Matt would try to persuade me to face the lens was beside the point – the prospect of simply being observed by a professional observer was unappealing in itself. Also, from what Celia had told me about him, I’d imagined Matt as a man somewhat in thrall to his own mystique, and in this respect I was of a similar mind to Charlie, who was predisposed to be suspicious of any boyfriend of Celia’s, and had initially pictured the latest one as the preening golden boy of what sounded like a family of insufferable preeners. But Charlie met Matt several weeks before I did, and reported that, though he took himself a bit too seriously (Celia’s view is that Charlie, had he been introduced to Michelangelo, would have concluded that Mr Buonarroti took himself too seriously), Matt was an interesting chap, and Janina thought so too. (Matt, by the way, took a snap of Janina that has remained one of Charlie’s favourites; he likes it because it reveals, if you look carefully, a vulnerability that people tend not to see; Janina hates it because it makes her look so old.)
Of course Matt asked how I’d feel about being photographed (not right away – on the third or fourth visit), to which the answer was that I’d rather take a bath in toxic waste, but saying No wasn’t quite the end of it. A portrait, he assured me, wasn’t what he had in mind. ‘Can I show you something?’ he asked (though Matt had no doubt that what he was doing was of merit, he did not presume that everyone must find it of interest), before going into the next room to fetch a batch of photographs, all of them large, in vivid colour and very crisply focused. I can recite the images from memory: a water glass mottled with water-stains and greasy fingerprints; a fur of dust on a wooden surface; a scar (Vanessa’s appendectomy scar, I later learned) like a trench in a bank of pale clay; a crumb of pottery magnified to the dimensions of a breeze-block; the nub of an amputated finger, which at first glance I mistook for a tree stump.
The idea for the series had come to him, he explained, one morning on Ludgate Hill. He was waiting for the street to clear when he became mesmerised by the paving stone on which he’d set the tripod. In the centre of the slab there was the oily impression of a boot sole, and around the boot-print were the flattened remnants of perhaps fifty pieces of chewing-gum. The gum blobs made shapes as intricate as a slide of cells seen under a microscope, and that’s what suggested the new direction. ‘But
I’m not sure where I’m going with it,’ he said (he was going nowhere, it would seem – none of the close-ups appears on his website), and at this moment Celia came into the room and exchanged with Matt a look which proved to me that she had known he would raise the subject this evening. So his idea, I put it to him, would be to exhibit a portion of my skin alongside, say, the finger-stump, maybe with a caption: Can You Guess What This Is? (A cat’s tongue magnified one hundred times? A floor of young stalagmites? A ruminant’s stomach lining?) ‘I don’t have an idea in mind,’ he replied, which could not have been true. He was at pains to impress upon me that his interest was not in any way prurient, which I would never have thought it was. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, in the face of his earnestness, but I never did. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t,’ I told him the next time we met. ‘That’s fine. I understand,’ he said, and this – to his credit – was the last word that was said on the matter.
Telescope Page 19
