Worlds from the Word's End

by Joanna Walsh

  A scattering of the more successful words was put into circulation and, for a while, we tried to popularise them by using them at every opportunity. Despite sponsored ‘word placement’ in the movies (which were no longer talkies), the new words slipped off the screen: our eyes glazed over. The problem, as it always had been in our country, was one of individualism. By this stage no one expected words to facilitate communication. The experiment resulted not in a common language, but in pockets of parallel neologisms. Being able to name our own things to ourselves gave us comfort. I suspect some people still silently practice this, though of course I cannot tell. I have a feeling their numbers are declining. Even I have stopped. It proved too difficult to keep a bag of words in my head for personal use and to have to reach down into its corners for terms that didn’t come out very often. They grew musty. Frankly it was unhygienic.

  It was sad to see the last of the signs coming down, but it was also liberating. In the shop that was no longer called COFFEE, you couldn’t ask for a coffee any more, but that was OK. You could point, and the coffee tasted better, being only ‘that’ and not the same thing as everyone else had. It was never the same as the guy behind you’s coffee, or the coffee belonging to the guy in front of you. No one had a better cup than you, or a worse. For the first time, whatever it was, was your particular experience and yours alone. The removal of publicly visible words accelerated. Shop windows were smashed, libraries were burned. We may have got carried away. As the number of billboards and street signs dwindled, we realised we had been reading way too much into everything. What did we do with the space in our minds that was constantly processing what we read? Well… I guess we processed other things, but what they were, we could no longer say.

  Some of us suspected that new things had begun to arrive, things there had never been names for. They caused irritation, as a new word does to an old person, but because there was nothing to call these new things, there was no way to point them out or even to say that they hadn’t been there before. People either accommodated them or didn’t. We’re still not sure whether these things continue to live with us, or if we imagined them all along.

  Those people who prefer the new silence are frightened that one day the word will turn. It’s a feeling I share, if warily. Words, we had thought, were the opposite of actions but, delving deeper, we found they were also opposed to themselves. Whatever we said, we knew implied its opposite. It’s fine today, I respect you, Will you take out the trash? … It had become so difficult to say anything. Our awkwardness got to us. In the republic of words, I love you induced anxiety. How was your day? would elicit merely a sigh. I think people just got tired, tired of explaining things they’d already said to one another, exhausted by the process of excavating words with words. We were oversensitive perhaps. Do you think we have dumbed ourselves down?

  …

  The last time I saw you we spent days walking around my city. The only voices we heard were foreign: tourists or immigrant workers. You spoke their language but only I could understand the silent natives.

  We walked the streets in no direction, following no signs. ‘What’s that billboard for?’ you asked, pointing to the wordless yellow one that was all over town. I told you, ‘That’s an advert for the billboard company.’ You were – temporarily – lost for words. We took photos of the sky disturbed by silent exhalations from the city’s rigid gills: air vents linked to air con, to the underground system, but they were all lungs and no voicebox. They couldn’t breathe a word. It was cold, so cold I could see my breath next to yours, solid in the frozen air, mingling with the steam of restaurant dinners, of laundries, with warm gusts of metro dust.

  The night you left, we went to a shabby pub by the station where we drank bad wine. You talked with the people who worked there: an underclass still allowed to speak because they spoke a different language. They could effect the business we despised, butter us with the courtesies we could no longer practice. Their jobs involved asking for our orders (we would point to the desired item on the illustrated menu), telephoning abroad for crates of imported beer and vodka, telling us to have a nice day. Inside the pub was red as a liver. We worked a little on ours. As we parted we held each other for a little too long and only almost failed to air-kiss.

  I am interested in failure, as are we all, because I think it’s where we’re at. Words failed us a while ago. What will fail us next?

  You like women who are quiet? In the end it was not so difficult to let you go: you were only interested in the sound of your own voice. Pretty soon we had nothing left to say to one another. I listened: you looped the same old tape. I tried things that were wordless: I took your hand and pressed it, but feelings meant nothing to you. We were always words apart.

  Don’t tell me I’m being unreasonable.

  Don’t talk to me about your girlfriends in the speaking world. Don’t repeat the sweet nothings you whisper to them. Don’t talk to me about the ones you have yet to meet, who are no doubt wishing aloud for some such coincidence. Don’t write back. It is no good calling me: I won’t pick up. It’s no good texting me, or sending me emails. There’s no need to tell me anything. I know it all already. And nothing you could say to me would help.

  We’re in different places. I’m dead to the word, and you don’t have a care in it. You’re on top of it: it weighs heavy on my shoulders. So I won’t go on. I love you and I’m not aloud, won’t allow myself to say it any more. There’s no future in it. You wouldn’t want a wife who didn’t understand you, whose eventual resort could only be dumb insolence – just saying. Love’s a word that makes the word go round right enough. It wheels and spins like a coin unsure where to land: heads or tails. Wherever it fell, I would have gone right on to that word’s end – for want of a better word – and, like other temporary Miss Words, a better word is what I want most sincerely, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of one.

  When I see they’re still using words in your country I feel only half-envious, a quarter… I also feel a strong swinge (is that even a word?) of embarrassment and pity. Don’t be offended: I’m trying to tell it like it is.

  You probably think we’ve all gone quiet over here, that you’ll never hear from us again. Yes it is quiet, but we are still thinking. In ways you can no longer describe.

  ‌

  ‌Like a Fish Needs a…

  ‘Always carry a repair outfit.

  Take left turns as much as possible.

  Never apply your front brake first.’

  FLANN O’BRIEN

  The Third Policeman

  It’s something to do with my cycle. That’s what I’ll tell the doctor. I’ll say I think there’s something wrong with my mind. I’ve read it, about women, didn’t want to believe it, but I guess there’s some truth in every cliche. Didn’t T, who I’d met on a non-date at the Tate, say ‘There’s a week every month when women go crazy’?

  I didn’t want to contradict him at the time: I was interested. Yes, I was offended, but, unchallenged, what he’d told me turned over in my mind. He’d arrived on his bike. I’d taken the Tube. The doctor has given me forms to fill. The date led to… nothing.

  T had a Minotaur physique, spare as the iron seat and handlebars of Picasso’s Bull’s Head (we saw it in a touring exhibition along with Duchamp’s readymade bike-wheel, spinning singly in mid-air). I saw T’s chest once: two round hard plates with… cleavage! A definite gap. That’s what you get from all that cycling. I usually go for scholarly types, had never felt anything like it on a man before.

  The next time he arrived panting, having cycled up Haverstock Hill to meet me at the Freud Museum. I didn’t see his bike. He said he’d parked it round the corner. I showed him mine once. A BSO he called it, a Bike-Shaped Object: looks like a bike, but isn’t. ‘Suppose I see a bicycle,’ said T, quoting philosopher John Searle. ‘In such a perceptual situation there is a distinction between the object perceived and the act of perception. If I take away the perception, I am left with a bike
; if I take away the bike, I am left with a perception that has no object, for example, a hallucination.’

  My bike is far away, in a different city, though I rode it to the station, as I did every day. It’s a man’s bike. Once I had a woman’s cycle but only briefly, in the last months of pregnancy, to triangulate my round scoop of belly. I’m over that now, stepped over it, stepped through. As soon as I stopped bearing, I gave it up, gave it away, can’t remember what I did with it. A man’s bike – if I can’t ride it pregnant, I won’t get pregnant. Now there’s logic for you.

  Many of the objects in the Freud Museum were labelled: quite ordinary objects with extraordinary labels. The violets in the toilets were labelled ‘rape’, which, in French, is ‘viol’, and, leant against their pot, a card saying how a mention of the flowers in French had led Freud down a byway into someone’s unconscious. Bike words are often French, because of the Tour de France I guess. When someone mentions a bike, said Freud, there must really be a bike, or the idea of a bike, acting on the person’s neurones, which are purely physical. Consciousness is physical, and even the idea of a bike is a thing: perception cannot have no object. The violets were displayed in the women’s lavatory.

  A bicycle is double: two wheels for balance, bipedal, mirrored handlebars, one light in front and one behind, suggesting that wholeness is a co-joined two. But no one kisses in the Freud Museum. No one is coupled. It’s a place for groups: schoolkids giggle, earnest friends tour in threes and fives; there are families, even. Only never what makes them.

  And, in his study, there’s a picture of Freud riding a bicycle. No not riding, but posing with, as though about to leave, and not at the start of a journey – stopped somewhere likely midway. Who are the others he is with? And where, in Hampstead, did Freud park his bike?

  …

  If a fish needs a bicycle, don’t drink like one: that’s sound advice. If you do, you’ll end up outside the station late at night, drunk, cold, fumbling the lock with numb fingers, then, next morning, wrecked, frame stripped down to derailleurs and jockey wheels. It won’t be good. For either of you.

  Still it’s inviting: the bicycle seat, warm negative of a… negative. The leather saddle nub’s white-stitched ridge, polished and brown, slips neatly between. A good feeling. It can lead you to let go of the brakes. That thing men do that I could never: ride a bike on the level with hands free, hips thrust forward to steer. I’ve tried, but I don’t have the balance, the centre of gravity. This time once again the cogs turned over like bones in their sockets, crunched – dislocated – the gears’ vertebrae. When you fall off, get straight back on, they say. But too much freewheeling leads only downhill. It’s a vicious cycle.

  Next morning I noticed my saddle’s leather was split, and from its gash spilled tiny white beads suspended in a sort of gel, white patches on my skirt, brushed absently; more patches, dried, on my inner thighs. Otherwise, trailing my left arm to the elbow, a bacon of road rash – tyre tracks got I don’t remember how.

  So, ticking the boxes here in the surgery, my bike lashed to a lamp post outside, I’m trying to be more balanced – as to the questions, and also as to the World-Shaped Object which may exist entirely as I don’t perceive it. It seems wrong, despite what I’ve perceived as correspondent to physical reality, to tick every extreme. It seems wrong not to balance one answer with another, when it might just be an imbalance in my cycle.

  Through the doctor’s window, set high in the wall as much to exclude thoughts of outside as to shield passers-by from the unwell, I glimpse a man, crouched over a hybrid, with the spine of a rabbit, a danseur, dancing on the pedals. It must have been T, cycling away.

  ‌

  ‌Exes

  Some people are prolific with xs. Some use a single x, some several small xxxs. Some of them put a number of xs before their names, which are sometimes initials, so that there are more xs than anything else. Some of them put the xs after their names, which are longer than the xs: these people are more likely to use a single x. Some of the xs are unexpected, like the single x from someone who flirted with me, but who withdrew his attentions so that the persistent x seemed insincere, impertinent. Some of them are from people who use too many xxxxxs and oblige me to use too many in return. Most are from friends. Few are from lovers, who tend to drop the xs when they are interested, resume them when they are serious, then drop them again when they no longer feel involved. Only one is from a person whose name is x, whom I slept with once, and who decided not to see me again, which is confusing as I no longer know whether the x is his initial or a term of endearment.

  ‌

  ‌Travelling Light

  I am writing in advance of our meeting so you will know the progress of your shipment. Too bulky to carry on the Eurostar, I had it transported to France from London by lorry then ferry in shipping containers. I travelled in the cab of the second truck, encountering no difficulty at French or British customs.

  The first container did not arrive in Paris (I’m sure you saw the headlines). When, in the suburb of Ivry-sur-Seine, the second truck, which had given us trouble since Calais, finally broke down, Omar of Bodyshop Carrossier-Quik had the idea of fitting the shipment with wheels. He used industrial castors and welded, rather than drilled, so as not to cause damage. I was able to hire a pickup to tow it to the Gare du Nord where we were mobbed by reporters who were, thankfully, unable to pass the ticket barriers.

  On the Paris–Munich train your shipment took up two luggage cars. Difficult to load, as it was all of a piece, I was alarmed to see porters use crowbars, and a circular saw. I protested loudly, but was restrained and was distressed to be unable to prevent its partial dismantling. The container and wheels were discarded, but the inner protective layers remained intact.

  In Munich we changed trains without too much difficulty, though there were many papers to complete, and, due to leakage and noise, several fines to pay. I was delayed for two days by these problems. I spent as much time as possible waiting on the platform with the shipment, returning to my hotel only to sleep. We drew stares, some comments, and one (thankfully inconclusive) visit from the transport police. After bribing two railway officials, we were allowed to leave the city by train.

  By the time we got to Prague, I could find no one willing to transport it further. I spent most of Tuesday on the pavement outside the station where the shipment had been dumped. It came on to rain and I fretted for the waterproofing so, faute de mieux, began to drag it through the streets myself. Without pallet or wheels its base became dirty, the protective cardboard dissolving into rags. As we crossed the Karlovy Bridge pigeons showered upwards, causing crowds to gather, many of whom thought this was an artistic performance so that, when the shipment became stuck between the posts of the bridge’s final tower, though I begged them, no one was willing to lend a hand. One man, seeing me in such distress, kindly dislodged it, but wanted to accompany me to my hotel. I was able to put him off because the shipment occupied most of my suite. Its principal part took the bed while I slept between two suitcase stands. How could I go on? The next morning I was able to leave by truck, overpaying a driver from out of town who had not yet heard of the shipment, or of me.

  It was possible to reach Belgrade from Budapest only by bus (the rail network, like the shipment, having deteriorated). By now I was able to fit it into a backpack and two suitcases. I crossed Belgrade by tram to the station. Discovering that the train was, again, cancelled, I returned by taxi to the coach stop where I found myself minus a case (the less important one, thank god!). I waited all night at the at the taxi hut where, despite imprecations – tears even – the drivers would not, or could not produce the suitcase. As time was of the essence, and violence promised if I did not leave, I pressed on. On the overnight bus to Sofia, I paid for an extra seat, belted it in beside me, and woke to find it, warm and now only slightly damp, resting against my shoulder. It had loosened and swelled in the southern heat, and gave off a sour smell I found in no way unpleasant,
though other passengers moved down the bus. By noon, in the coach’s greenhouse atmosphere, it burst its bands, expanded in all directions. Sorry, Sir! Excuse me, Madam! I mewed to it, made chirping noises, coaxed it with thumb and index finger from the floor, the ceiling, chided it into several bags, stuffed excess parts of it into my pockets. While the driver called the police from a service station I said I needed the bathroom and, escaping through a small back window, we evaded arrest.

  Running low on money, we hitchhiked from Sofia to Thessaloniki. When they saw what I was carrying, most drivers refused to pick me up but we were given lifts in a removals van and a cattle truck. Between hitches I walked and sometimes ran by the side of the motorway, the larger part of the shipment tied to my back, the rest in two carrier bags. I was grateful for its shade and decreased weight, and only occasionally stopped, sweat dripping from the straps that bit my shoulders, to ask, why me? What gave you the right to award me so heavy, so difficult a burden? I threatened, pleaded – with what? Fate? God? You? No, you’re only human, and wasn’t I being paid? But never enough! There was no mobile signal. If I had found a payphone I’d have called. Do what you like, you’d have said, as usual. As if I’d any choice. If I’d given up, where would you be and, going on, where would that leave me? Not here… Why waste my breath, knowing I would go on? Doesn’t everything in the world keep on going?

  A labour of love, then? And what better than to be allowed to experience love, whatever its price?

  On the train from Thessaloniki to Athens, I cradled it in my lap, wrapped in my scarf, rocking with the swaying train. We had been through so much together. Fellow passengers mistook it for a baby, or a dog.