by Paul Ableman
The cat consumed one tin of slimy and perversely inviting meat per day. Every few days I conveyed a tray-full of synthetic litter, designed to receive the animal’s excrement, down to the rubbish bin and refilled the receptacle with pure grains. Unhappily the beast was imperfectly reconciled to its hygienic tray and finally my pledge to Dorothy to keep the flat in order triumphed over my revulsion. Entering the living room one morning and finding the nasal onslaught markedly worse I strode to the suspect sofa and, savouring the buoyancy of conscience that rewards the ultimate facing of a disagreeable reality, I shoved it to one side.
My olfactory instinct had been true. I set to work. The relatively fresh deposits, while offensive to handle, immediately clogging the soft-haired brush I unwisely used, were disposed of rapidly but the ancient crusts, testimony to feline diarrhoea and the remarkable bonding properties of its product with bare wood floors, actually required chiselling off and I crouched, breathing reluctantly, for nearly half an hour with my instrument. I then chivvied the cat out of the front door and ignored its plaintive whining for readmission. I suffered only faint twinges of remorse and after a few days the cat disappeared entirely.
— O. Hi.
Here in this big, bright city, that’s where you’ve been living? You’ve been living all this time?
— Baby, desolation is the gift I bear you.
Take my hand, mummy. I wish I could fly. He has—jaunty. A cascade of neon letters. As I crossed the road, he swung jauntily out of a cavity in the night, under the blaring red. Wears very jaunty clothing.
— Desolation is the gift I bear you.
Are you learning to live without love?
— I ain’t got no home.
A coil of rooms.
Living in the boot of my car. Shirts get oily. Pitching up Thames Street the other day, saw wheel come off this lorry. Under the sooty brick towers of the gas-works—
— We’re separated. You knew that.
— Baby, in this brand new world I can only give you desolation.
— In this brand new—
— Baby.
Under the sooty brick tower of the gas-works, along a poetic street, came this big spinning wheel. Made straight for this woman. No one else on a half-mile of pavement and the wheel chased her down. Just saw her crumple as the traffic carried me on.
— Baby, it’s clothes—that’s what it’s all about.
— I ain’t got no home.
— Stay here if you want.
So I moved into the basement flat in Mortimer Road. I soon noticed, with mild excitement, that the writer was never at home. He had papered his lavatory with a collage of nudes. The flat was bare and sad but opened at back on to a little garden under a brewery. One day the sun shone hard on the garden and I went out and sat on the grass. Before very long, however, I felt self-conscious, sitting alone on that square of grass and I went back inside to the shallow living room. In that room I slept, reluctantly leading a celibate life. Why wouldn’t Fay come to my bed at nights? The writer was never at home. He was in other beds in other parts of London. He was standing in the door of a club, fingering his lavender cuffs. I felt despised. Fay never got drunk any more. When we first knew her, three hundred parties ago, she was always falling.
— How’s Fay?
— Fell out of a car.
Downstairs, flat on the pavement, always falling when a drop of alcohol ran amuck in her brain.
Fay wanted a writer.
In order to fit herself for so precious an acquisition she read difficult books. Out of her handbag rose collections of plays by avant-garde Catalonian dramatists, commentaries on Finnegans Wake, volumes of poetry. She often toiled through these works but for all the discernible enlargement of understanding that resulted she might have restricted her reading to the labels on bottles.
She finally got her writer.
Her childhood years had been sad and sordid. There had been an orphanage, an abandoned mother, a traumatic rape on a vacant lot, or at least she said there had. Whatever the truth, it was clear that somehow, during those years, the figure of the writer had arisen in her thoughts as the antithesis to everything she disliked in experience.
Roy, whom she lived with when we first knew her, was not really a writer. He was an accountant but he had literary aspirations. Yorkshire had endowed him with the faint, harsh accent which clashed a little with his delicate, slightly decadent good looks. Roy observed Fay with intent but dispassionate interest, as if he considered her fascinating but not really his subject. It is possible that in private he was capable of being provoked but in public his detachment was impressive. Fay screamed:
— He can’t fuck! He can’t satisfy anyone! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
The opulent car eased through the nocturnal traffic. The youngish couple, inscrutable and rich, sat in front with Roy. We shared the back seat with a drunken Fay. Against the smoky rose and sapphire of the signs the profiles of Roy and the young woman turned to each other for long, appraising looks. Fay screamed:
— You’re wasting your time. He can’t fuck! He can’t fuck! He can’t fuck!
Smoky fires, shore, rime in the morning. They’re rattling my cage. A steep street diving to the bay. Couldn’t we live on a hillside, red berries in the hedge? They’re rattling my cage. Burn the papers. The papers float in the oily swell by the jetty. The fishermen are snug in their cottages. We once had a cottage. They’re rattling my cage.
— Desolation is the gift I bear you.
— What are the symptoms of cancer of the penis?
— Oh leave me alone!
— But why? Here we are together in this flat. Why not?
— Because you don’t attract me. Go back to your wife.
Many rooms.
I kept moving.
At Mickey’s there was a knot of writhing pink worms. In the bleak hive was a mad old Jewess from Ravensbruck moaning as she ran the bath. In the bare room above the shop was an Indian girl in a sari. This I unwound. She span slowly away from me to disclose a girdle and bra beneath it. I held her luscious brown body crouched above my head. An exultant gesture. But later I wondered if that was what had forced the loop of gut through my abdominal musculature. My lips brushed her shy yet provocative ones but before I could consolidate my ascendancy over her, prudence reclaimed the Goan girl and she repackaged her clever self in the bright filament of her sari.
— I ain’t got no home.
Lost a thought. Cold on the greasy floor. A web of flesh in the syrup of time. Parting thighs. Dull red glow from the fire. Nelly on the huge bed, asleep. Her skirt disarranged at the back and her little white bottom peeping out. A single life-web. Parting thighs.
— I ain’t got no home.
Many rooms.
I sat, half-dressed, smoking on the bed and watched Fay grooming her little son. Savaging the rowdy image of the past she was impeccably maternal. A wistful tale spilled from her lips.
— My mother wanted me to marry this painter—just an ordinary house painter. And I wouldn’t have him. My mother said: ‘he’s your sort. He’s the natural one for you’, but I wouldn’t listen. Well, here I am—and John’s getting famous and—you know—just recently—I keep thinking about that painter.
I found this touching. I interpreted it as nostalgia for a lost, and now irrecoverable, simplicity. But this interpretation, it seemed, was faulty:
— John’s just waiting for me to put a foot wrong. So that he can show me the door. My sister married someone like that painter. When I think about it—it’s so easy for her. She can deceive him right, left and centre and he never notices!
Many rooms.
I found little trophies in each, of fleeting erotic thrill, insight into other life-paths, new perspectives on how we live now in the West. In some I opened tins and gulped their contents. In some I tuned in briefly on the cathode world. I flicked through magazines and books. In none could I bear to establish myself to the extent of linking words with effort or being solitary i
n the evening. I acknowledged no home but my forsaken one. Opening hours of the pubs inevitably lured me out to the ersatz home of thick camaraderie. There must have been the odd occasion when virus or exhaustion chained me but, combing as thoroughly as I can that first year of our separation, I cannot retrieve a single evening when I went sober to bed.
11
The First Dream
YOU CRIED IN that dream but not violently, not with the passionate misery of a repulsed child, as you often did. You cried gently, almost smiling, but tears forming and falling. I struggled to get near you, to comfort you and erase every source of grief. My darling, my love, my heart and life, don’t —oh don’t be sad! Then, although you were still weeping, your smile brightened a little and, with a little sigh, you murmured:
— Oh, Billy, you’ve hurt me so deeply I don’t think I’ll ever get over it!
12
NELLY’S HUSBAND WAS in Africa, making films and having heart attacks. On the balcony over the deep well of his London studio was a large bed. I lay naked on my back on this bed. Also naked, Nelly sat on the edge of the bed, talking into the telephone. Her free hand affectionately pressed my genitals. She removed it from my genitals and clapped it over the mouthpiece.
— She says I sound different!
Then into the telephone:
— In what way? How different?
If I had known you as well then, Nelly, as I did later, I might have received the flattering implications a little more warily. Not that I leapt to my feet and cheered. I just lay in post-coital drowsiness and felt that it was agreeable to think that I had fucked a change into you.
Nelly finished telephoning, stood up and, in a practical and dainty gesture, placed a folded paper tissue in her crotch to absorb squandered life. She turned her pert smile on where I observed what she was doing.
— I’m not really used to being watched when I’m naked.
Deceit, Nelly! Oriental deception—not hypocrisy. Your Byzantine sexual politics in fact came from China. And the scholarly Chinese Don Juan who instructed you was only one of the men who had long ago accustomed you to being watched when you were naked. In fact, you adored it. I asked:
— Who was that?
— Liz Davis. She’s invited me to a dinner party. Isn’t it amazing, her saying I sounded changed?
The call had been courteously timed. We’d just finished. Fucking Nelly was like fucking a stream. She rippled beneath you. Her body, like her voice, rushed up in little trills of wonder. She reached round as if trying to cram my whole bulky body into her taut little hole. Often, in later days, when I tried to leave her she would groan and tug me back. One drunken night I lay pinned to her from when the pubs closed until five in the morning, periodically shuddering awake only to thrust myself back into oblivion.
Nelly tripped daintily off down the gallery steps to have a bath. I lay still, glad that she had gone so that I could fart and relieve the pressure that had been building up inside me. Our intimacy was only beginning at that time.
When, still nude, I went downstairs to the kitchen/bathroom Nelly giggled at me over the edge of the tub as if she were just learning to appreciate being watched while naked.
I signified my need and, with another naughty giggle, Nelly gently and deftly washed my clammy parts as I stood by the bath.
— Shall we go away together?
We were back in the gallery. Nelly was nearly dressed, I admiring her pretty frock and prettiness. I was nevertheless glum. The evening was starting and she was going off to a dinner party and I had nowhere to go. She asked:
— Shall we go away together?
— How do you mean?
— You’ve got the car.
— Well, I mean—where? Anyway, I’m broke.
— I’ve got forty pounds saved up.
We discussed possible destinations but most of them were too far for the available funds. Just drive out of London and find an enchanted village. Swig ale amongst gruff farmers, walk in woods—
— And fuck a lot.
— Oh a lot!
We left the studio for the London night: electricity and motion and expatriate trees. I was taking Nelly to her dinner party. I couldn’t take her quite to the door. We must be discreet. She reached for my hand. I felt reserved and fraudulent. We stopped for a drink. I stood beside her bar-stool, pressing, as if impulsively, against her but I felt reserved and fraudulent.
— Won’t it be marvellous?
— Yes.
— Here are the keys. I won’t be very late.
After I dropped Nelly, I lost my way. I reached an area where the four-lane highway, bordered by flood-lit hoardings, curved up as if approaching a stilted motorway. I ransacked mental maps but I couldn’t orientate myself. Was that orange-section block, diffusing phantom green, the air terminal? I u-turned dangerously amongst flashing cars. Rail networks were slotted behind the hoardings. I hurtled left amongst twenty-storey crystal cubes. Finally I hit the Fulham Road and dove into the first pub. Numb hypocrisy ached in my nerves.
Nelly thought I was a freebooting sexual pirate and I wasn’t. I was only the cabin-boy, from a pious home, scared of the rough men and ashore in my first foreign port.
Go away with her?
Sacrilege!
What? Oh sure, we did it. Impulsive, the lust of the moment—but drive out of London with another girl!
Orange light leaked through parchment shades. It was an old-fashioned pub with wooden screens, frosted glass and an old-fashioned, lecherous, timid husband wretchedly gulping whisky. I went back to the fine rain in the Fulham Road.
There were lonely ghouls everywhere. Seven-hundred dawn-fresh typists in a plastic office—these do not resemble my haggard friends. I saw lonely ghouls in the pubs. Embittered Denise, trying to con Scotch and forget love. Lonely ghouls prowling the years.
I was sick with need for you. I could live only in your arms and heart. Deprived, oh self-deprived, of you I would soon be another ghoul of the streets and saloon bars. From pub to pub I descended the rungs of romantic self-abasement until I stood once more in the nocturnal pit of the studio waiting for Nelly to return.
I filled a glass from her flask of wine and examined the curios. I hefted marble eggs and felt perfectly disciplined. My conscious mind, the conscious mind of alphabetic, Western man, was rigidly intact. The monsters and molecules were locked in engendered history. Only deep anaesthesia or terror could breach the integrity of my synthetic self.
The phone rang. Insert a greeting and a jest will be dispensed. And yet I cannot move.
Where was Nelly? It was a great bore waiting for her. She knew I was waiting. Waiting to sail off down the unchartered main of the motorways as we had agreed.
I knew who was ringing.
Nelly was still being a success at table and I was locked in immobile convulsions—and now he was ringing.
I wished he would stop and knew that he wouldn’t. Tenacious he probably was. That was doubtless a quality he had—tenacity. So the phone went on ringing. I poured some more wine.
What did we say? What were the words and ideas? I remember talking to you about this, about human intersexual relations. I think you were singing in the kitchen and I came in and made you cry. No that was another time. I had this idea, a certain notion I wished to explain. It was before I kicked a hole through the cupboard. You say we had rows for a nightmare year? The point is we won’t always be young. No, that’s not really the point. Where’s the fucking wine?
Look, darling, I know, I mean, I know, I mean, I—yes, but it’s not possible. I mean, fidelity—I’ve said this before. It’s just as irrational to base marriage on sexual fidelity as on conversational or social or—or professional fidelity. I mean one can’t do it. That bastard’s still ringing! Willy-nilly or hocus-pocus, no—you see, I conceive it, marriage, as durable, as sharing and thus multiplying all experience, as perpetually enriching—I’ll put it like this, the attempt is vain and doomed to get all from each other but one
can get the most and the best. You see what I mean? Yeah, I see that you get jealous. Fuck it! I never believed in monogamous marriage!
Still ringing.
Maybe it’s Nelly ringing. Maybe she’s ringing to say her husband’s come home and is on his way round here with a Smith-Wesson .45, if Smith and Wesson ever dabbled in that calibre. Met people before who seemed gentle and suddenly beamed a killer glare.
Better find out. Just lift receiver and—
— Hello—hello—hell—
Bad mistake. Now he’ll know there’s something dodgy. Arch-ghoul that he is. Clout him with a marble egg if he glides round here. There! He’s ringing again and this time he won’t stop.
Three fingers of wine left.
In the numb deep of the night Nelly came back to the studio. All trains and flights were being watched and lust was dying under a canal bridge. One needs to be liked, Nelly. Do you think we should strangle each other? I have named this studio: the citadel of the tocsin. A boy friend of yours, in the avatar of an electric bell, has been visiting me but I kept the wine to myself.
— Oh, poor George!
He needs you, Nelly. And I need space, in order to let the vileness escape. I’ll drive you to him, Nelly. Come, Nelly, let’s get back to velocity and glare.
