Some memories I was not so desperate to suppress. On one of my pilgrimages of ill grace with Dad on the Stray, when he was laying down the moral law like Polonius, I’d decided to take him on and his homespun philosophy. I’d said, Hypothetically, aren’t secret societies pledged to privilege their members’ interests over other people’s manifestly unfair? He twitched as if I’d suggested he was a paid-up member of Spearmint Rhino. I mean, I went on, Doesn’t that sort of, you know, ghettoize the comfortable just at the time our Government is calling on everybody to be more integrated?
As he wriggled on my line, I moved in: I’m sure everybody would like to integrate more with the well-off, but that isn’t made too easy for them, especially when you think about organisations like, O, I don’t know, the Masons. Isn’t that a bit like those American country clubs barring Jews or Blacks? Now he was spluttering like an old tap. I knew the implied slighting of his sense of English fair play, that scandalous comparison with American practices, not to mention to equation with Romish or Muslim religious intolerance would have him on his back foot. In truth, as usual I didn’t listen closely to what he was saying because I knew what that would be; I had driven him onto the killing-ground of the argument he would advance. In ‘Sun and Steel’, Mishima describes the blow, how you manoeuvre your foe into your chosen space for him in the air, the space you want him to occupy because that is where you have prepared yourself to strike. While Dad wittered on, I was oiling my blade, son and steel, eyeing up the hole he had no choice but to get himself into, and as I tuned in again to his hackneyed, predictable defence at the point where he was indignantly declaring that Masonic ‘Volume of the Sacred Law’ could equally be a Qur’an or Torah or an Adi Granth as a Bible, and how Masons could believe in their individual ideas of a God, and how all were welcome on this basis blah blah. I paused, a little theatrically. It was the first time my silence silenced him, wasn’t just talked over by him. Then I asked gently, And atheists? Can they become Masons though they don’t believe in any God?
It was a rhetorical question. Of course they couldn’t. It wasn’t an Oedipal moment: I was more like the Sphinx, foxing the ignorant, protecting the Plague that fed on them. Why does Plague get such a bad press? Aren’t they just a life form like any other? If we release kites or beavers or wolves back into the British countryside, shouldn’t we release some Black Death too? In that lousy Costner film where he’s the first white man among these misfortunate Native Americans, isn’t he a harbinger of Plague? Hard to imagine a film with Typhoid Mary or Bubo Baggins as the star, though I’d go to see it. Anyway, Dad was speechless, choked. ‘Sphinx’ means ‘strangler’, after all.
NOTE TO SELF: Avoid cliches like the Plague...
er...
00111001
By now I was getting to suspect the extent to which I, too, was under surveillance. Not just the sluggish net connections working through their security programmes but the sluggish locals, the other students and tutors, looking at me sideways, even canteen staff, porters, car park security staff on my way to the Priestley Library. Sometimes, as I passed, I’m sure I heard a scrabble of whispered acronyms: CID (‘El Cid’ to locals), CPS, CIA, FBI, KFR. I was getting messages from everywhere – my tutor said I was ‘semiotically aroused’ in his last e-mail. Wanker.
Later I noticed that in our anthology, the translator of ‘Brut’ rendered its author ‘Layamon’, but in her own separate American edition, he becomes ‘Lawman’. It seemed to suggest Rome tolerating regional variations under its Law. How could you fight it? Take up arms against a sea and all that, as goth Hamlet said. Which side was black and which white? I asked myself the question over and over again, day after day. Fight or flight? With us or against us? Halal or haram? A Turing Machine would have succeeded where I was failing, going around in circles, Turing and Turing in a widening gyre. The Turing of the key. Unlike Turing, I was straight but couldn’t act it, drinking Night Nurse by the pint, Covonia cocoa, Benilyn and Buckie cocktails. Insomniac goths count black sheep, but they’re hard to see in the dark, so it doesn’t work. I wasn’t working, either.
01011001
You could write ‘Layabout’s Brut’, sneered Tyr when I shared my discoveries about the Brut’s translator. Traduttore tradittore, he went on, ‘the translator is a traitor’. It goes with the turf. Better than silence and doing nothing. Better or worse? I was as yellow as my wallpaper, not facing up to the necessity for sacrifice. All he had done for me. In this world, look round, sacrifice the only option. Now, he looked like my father, like Gil Martin. Then he chanted a poem, appropriately for our new lookingglass world, by Kipling:
Tyr thought hard till he hammered out a plan,
For he knew it was not right
(And it is not right) that the Beast should master Man;
So he went to the Children of the Night.
He begged a Magic Knife of their make for our sake,
When he begged for the Knife they said:
‘The price of the Knife you would buy is an eye!’
And that was the price he paid!
A scanner, though scanning a bit wobbly, but I knew he was trying to freak me out with this exoculation song. Thank God I don’t need pencils to write anymore. He looked me in the eye with his one eye and said, You will never see me again. Fantastic, I laughed, I’ll have no reflection. Like a vampire. How goth is that?
10010110
I think I’m turning into Dad. I’ve started taking walks, partly to spread the circuit of chemists I hit for Night Nurse, I must admit. Only in Bradford is this a way of avoiding people. Recently, I went to Little Germany because I’d heard that some TV programme about Kafka had been filmed there. It would certainly have been appropriate. Kafka is more in tune with the City than Alsop. I feel like telling the asylum seekers selling the Big Issue they’re looking for it in the wrong kind of asylum. Bradford in metamorphosis, says the T & A newsstand. So why doesn’t it get on with it then, for a start filling in that bloody great hole which was the first thing here that caught my eye? On an etymological level, why bugs? I mean, I know now they are trying to implant brain-control devices into cockroaches, but that couldn’t have been the reason they started using the word for a concealed mic. A bug in a computer system. Maybe from bug-eyed? Or bugaboo? It bugs me.
There’s a big wheel (the Bradford Bug Eye?) in front of the Town Hall which looks like something out of Renaissance Florence. Town Hall and big wheel make me think of Harry Lime, when he talks about how little these insect-lives mean. I’m with him there; eggs, omelettes etc. And if you’re an insect, who would not prefer to be a bug in the machine, bug up the clockwork of the state, to just being crushed in this shit-hole? Yet, when I shared this insight with my controller, he didn’t want to know. The first real insight I’d had into all this and nobody wanted to know.
01011001
On my way to the chemists yesterday, I met this woman from the course. She said hello to me, last of them still doing that. I pretended to be nice and talked about my projects, plots and plans, all the while secretly raising my Teflon shielding, sacrificial armour I could abandon without exposing too much. Wrong-footing me, she seemed interested. She said she used to be a nurse and that the way I’m so obsessively interested in words and etymology, was something (she paused) autistic people demonstrate. I said that didn’t sound like me as I couldn’t even draw. She laughed and I burst into tears. I’d made a spectacle of myself or rather, half-following in Dad’s footsteps, I should say I made a monocle of myself.
I surprised even myself by letting her take me for a coffee. She talked about her past, working in the NHS and I let her drone on, resisting the temptation to ask her if she’d been a night nurse. Pong. Ping. After a while I realised she was asking me about my family. From someone I had found reassuring and attractive, the mask slipped. Her eyes froze over like winter ponds and the words I thought I understood I saw were just a trick, a magician pulling endless vowel-bubbles of ping pong balls from some voluntee
r from the audience’s mouth. But it was a good trick and I laughed and clapped my hands till she got startled, made her excuses and left. The full Monty. A pair of spectacles.
10110011
Last night, the children were even louder than usual, like they had concealed mics with reverb set to 11. I would have liked to hand out scissors and sharpened pencils to them, encouraging them to run around faster and faster. Something about their music reminded me of the children in ‘Lost Hearts’. Tell-tale hearts. It wasn’t innocent-sounding, though: loud feral games, rhymes, chants, Just-Another-Brick-in-the-Wall-type dirges - I found out a local word for them is ‘nominies’. I think this is cod-Latin, taking the piss out of Catholics. I’ve read that Bradford used to have lots of Orange lodges. Catholics were not supposed to be keen on Masons, till P2 anyway, though both have resurrection rituals. Quite a trick, resurrection. A magician, ‘the world’s finest escapologist,’ comes from Bradford, I saw in the Atrium exhibition – Shahid Malik, I think he was called. And Fr John O’ Connor, who was the model for Chesterton’s Father Brown. And Onions, the horror writer. City skins, wheels within wheels, mouths within mouths
oooo000OOOO...
time for more Night Nurse and Buckie.
00101001
I got a letter from the Dean this morning, a warning about downloading material from the net that might be of use to terrorists, bearing in mind what happened to the five students. Thanks, wanker. Almost anything could be useful to terrorists, when you think enough about it. Dad told me in the last World War they took down country signposts in case the Germans invaded – I’ve got an A-Z of Leeds, a place with more terrorists per square foot than Bradford. And good ones, not just those useless Londoners who couldn’t blow up a balloon. If I could be bothered to panic more I would.
If they’ve got a file on me, they’ll know I used to go to Leeds all the time before Mum died, back when I was still a goth on top (pre-mufti). I’d go with Lucy on the 36, past Harewood House, down the Chapeltown Road into Leeds that Metcalfe laid, passing the Lithuanian sex-slave traders then into the bus station with a plaque up to Tom Maguire, great socialist political organiser, writer of terrible poems, though he had a jokey one about typhoid called ‘The Song of the Microbe’ which was truly goth. I’d try it to different tunes for Lucy while we hung about outside the Corn Exchange with the rest of our brethren. That’s where I was introduced to Buckfast Abbey – ‘Killfast’ was the nickname for it I heard then. Certainly beat the usual goth cocktail of cider ‘n’ blackcurrant. We got our old black clothes from the Oxfam across the street, and Lucy’s make-up style was also part of the Look – insomniac-panda eyes countersunk into plaster of Paris Noh mask. Black on white, writers’ colours, melancholy goth livery. The spectrum is for squares. She was my one and only – my none and only, to be honest: I struck out, 0-0. I wanted ‘The Story of O’ but the story I got was No. Eye oh. Maybe I’m destined to die a virgin like Isaac Newton. Tyr didn’t like her anyway. She was a looker but she just wanted to be looked at. I used to read her Poe. Nevermore.
Anyway, it was goth to be miserable, to have ‘the monk on’, in a local expression I liked. Ours was the most despised youth culture in history. We were like Dirty, Dirty Leeds United FC – no one loves us we don’t care; hated nearly as much as the English abroad. Although I no longer wear the livery, my veins still run black with goth blood, my paperwhite skin is still undimmed by overexposure to vulgar sunlight. Black and white, them and uz, saints and sinners. We had goth martyrs too, that woman beaten to death for just looking goth; this boy with his ear cut off for the same reason. I was terrified I’d get caught and my eye put out. I didn’t want to be an exoculated martyr. That’s when I started going under cover. Mufti = plain clothes and a Muslim legal expert. How did they get connected?
01100111
A bombshell! Apocalyptic disappointment! The Bradford Five have their sentences quashed! Only guilty of thought-crime! Prosecution too creative with the evidence. I was gobsmacked. Where did that leave me?
‘All my walls are lost in mirrors, whereupon I trace/
Self to right hand, self to left hand, self in every place,/
Self-same solitary figure, self-same seeking face.’
I’d try and walk off the nightmare, a Monk’s Trod. Posters everywhere on campus: a genuflecting African in chains, Am I not a man and brother? Wilberforce anniversary. Apparently now there are still 27,000,000 slaves left in the world. Somebody’s taken their eye off the ball since Abolition. Eye-service, a good expression that: only working when the boss comes into eyeshot. I found it in Berkeley’s sermon to the American colonists, explaining why the slaves should be Christianised. Then they’d work all the time because God would be watching them. I see therefore I am, said Berkeley, see?
Once, testing an invisibility spell, Crowley walked naked through a roomful of the breakfasting clientele at the French hotel where he was staying. Broad-minded, indulgent of the eccentric Englishman, they ignored him, whereupon the Beast rushed off to tell his acolytes of his success. By now I had achieved a kind of invisibility in the Atrium, no longer attracting suspicious glances as I sat with my strange flask and smell. In fact, I’d got a wide berth everywhere, more or less, since I began forgetting to eat, wash, shave or change. Yet, I became more aware of other people, even felt affection for them, in a distant way. People even smiled at me, sometimes. All kinds of people. I thought, maybe I could do this. The human thing. Love even, perhaps. I emailed my controller and said I was resigning. I didn’t want to keep an eye out on these people anymore and be on Big Brother’s side, but on the side of brothers’ keepers. He asked if a fsh could resign from water. Fsh! He monitored my thoughts!
10011101
I meditated on the number five instead of writing now, or even reading. Five months without decent sleep, no dreams at all never mind my dream. Five months of milk of amnesia that didn’t work. Five senses addled, five wits astray, fish alive, beans, a bunch of, the locked-up students, the Virgin’s Joys, Soviet economic plans. The Five Points of Calvinism for old Calvinist Bradford, Gil Martin’s new home. Five is the number on which the square stands up to be counted, rising to get a point like a pyramid, then unfolding into a cube like the Ka’aba, its stone white until blackened by the sinful breath of men, words of confession. The Arabic sin is called ‘shirk’, and I have shirked my duty, sacrifice. I have witnessed, but not as a martyr. I have not risen like the Northern rebels whose banner was The Five Wounds of Christ. Gawain’s pentagram glossed by Stone: ‘It is worth emphasising the ‘fiveness’ of the multiple concept of “truth”...’ Truth. Confession. Maybe it would help. Absolution. Sacrifice. I had lost my grip, needed to take the situation and myself in hand, in all five fingers of my hand. IOU an I for an I. OK. Shake on it. I shook, went home and prepared for midnight.
01100110
I’m back to help you see this through, said Tyr; I can’t just sit back and watch any more. A tear came to my eye, and not just because of Tyr’s return: in honour of my father, who I choked, croaked with his own tie, tied and buried deep in a hole for a new building in Bradford city centre to stall over, a foundation sacrifice for my foundation course; whose writing I had forged on cheques so I could forge my writing and uncreated conscience; to wake him who gave me the chance for my dream, I return to his science of the eye, his Newton the Masonic alchemist, whose experiment I will take even further. For the Joycean lancet of my art, I use a rusty old pen knife, for true pen knives only have one blade. And this is about one, symbol and sign. Capital I for its blade? No, more a 1 with the pointy bit on top, like a weak fishhook straightened by taking on something too big. Like a monk’s knife cut errors from a page of vellum, so will mine: si f/(ph)allor sum. I will keep an eye out for my brother. I will be my brother’s keeper. I will learn to write for other people. Serviam.
Time for one last big push, a surge, squeaky bum time. I wonder if ‘sphinx’ is related to ‘sphincter’? What was it that Oedipus’ dad did to
bring on the Plague? In denial, I digress. The more I get to the point on either side, the closer I get to a real breakthrough, the more the pen knife runs with blood, oyster-water and aqueous humour dribbling down onto its handle and under my fingers. I thought this would make it sticky, help my grip, but it’s slippery like ice melting or a poem. Just do it. A Swiss army knife would have an attachment for this. How come a neutral country ended up making the world’s most famous army knife? Get on with it. Should I name my pen knife something magnificent, like Excalibur? Swords have great names – but Arthur’s spear was called ‘Ron’ in Geoffrey of Monmouth, a name so working class it was instantly erased from the legend. Get back to the point. I name the knife Tyr. Tyr smiles his fatherly smile, his controller smile, his Gil Martin smile.
Lining up my broken mirror for this operation is a performance in its own right, never mind this late. But this is what it’s all about, guts not sex. Sometimes a knife is only a knife. Better or worse? This is about the meaning of sacrifice, the mechanics of the dream, the vision. No one said becoming a writer would be easy. Time for the last big push to come to shove and open up that inkwell in my left socket and get right to the point. My right socket, left point. The one that feels or the one that sees? The clock strikes one. Which one?
Long Ago, Yesterday
Hanif Kureishi
ONE EVENING JUST after my fiftieth birthday, I pushed against the door of a pub not far from my childhood home. My father, on the way back from his office in London, was inside, standing at the bar. He didn’t recognize me but I was delighted, almost ecstatic, to see the old man again, particularly as he’d been dead for ten years, and my mother for five.
The New Uncanny Page 19
