by Paul Ableman
— Now home. Through Normandy.
Away. Through Normandy. Pass his grave. Reach Dieppe.
— Been bombing up these French roads.
A lively young chap wearing a blue sports car. Slick girl with him. Dieppe and night, light-streaked roads. Bawling Cockney songs in a resentful cafe. Hotel. Car ferry. England. Not only you, my heart. The orphanage for me too.
I bumped the car up on to the pavement where there was a deep forecourt. I mounted again to Rachel’s squalid flat.
The larger little girl was now propped on Steve’s lap. When her legs flopped apart I saw the smooth slot of her baby cunt. Steve was earnestly reading to her from a comic:
— It’s one of them, ugh! Help, Jetman! Parzoom! Keep still, Roda. It can only detect you if you move! My God, a space-bug! Wharroosh! Chack-chack-chack. It’s gnawing straight through that five-foot thick steel bulkhead! Chack-chack—Blomp! You see, Nick, my dyna-ray disintegrated its molecular structure by means of dimensional warp. Whew—hey, Jetman, those devils are heading straight for Roda, listen! Wheeewa-wa-wa. It’s okay, Nick! Hang on, Roda, I’ll obliterate them with this pulse gun. Fwump! Fwump! Fwump!
Rachel sat on the bed, adjusting her party shoes. I noted that beneath the silver flow of her metallic gown she wore scarlet pants.
Won’t score tonight. Haven’t a grain of seduction in me. Rarely do at parties anyway. Not handsome enough. Have to dig the claws of my personality into them to force open their legs. Be lonely at the party with everyone dancing stoned with sex. Wish you—oh, easy that. Low spells, lonely spells—long for you.
— You want it all ways.
— True.
We hummed North and then East, six in the car. Steve had flailed off alone for more pills. London. Singing lights. The vehicles and power incommensurate with the people. Clean, slim and vibratory, whose fathers wallowed in squalor, the nocturnal proletariat winked past like signs. They never built this city but are by-products of its relentless beat. Somewhere there is a chute through which, at measured intervals, new pedestrians are deposited on the streets.
— Oh! Fight.
The others turned. We were stopped at lights. Now the human scale. A burly but aged man struck aimlessly while the broad brute, his assailant, ape-faced and ruddy in the light from the pub door, smashed a fist into his face. Through the open door shot another labourer, rushed to the fallen man and kicked him. My male passengers touched their door-handles but two hastened out of the pub to preserve the fallen. The one who had felled him menaced the new arrivals with balled fist, then suddenly turned and bolted round the corner into the pub’s other bar. The two began hoisting the bloody man up. The traffic lights changed and we slid away.
— Irish. See he was an old man?
— Sure and it’s a thin Saturday night if you can’t find a punch-up.
— It’s true. They’re only really happy when they’re thumping each other.
It was a bad party.
A binnacle. A slim, modish Negro haughtily conversing with a doll-perfect girl packaged in a brief slip of shining stuff. A telescope. An astrolabe. No windows. Like a luxury cabin in a submarine.
— Well what are you doing these days?
— Computers.
The girl and Negro, faces impassive, now confronted each other with loins jerking in symbolic copulation. Envious, I edged into the kitchen and ate olives.
— Liver blown up like a balloon.
— Is that—you know—cirrhosis? Oh no, I’m thinking of—
Liver? Drunk again. Bowels, brutal pipes of cartilage. Dance of the bronchi—‘une veritable danse des bronches’. Prose description—account of a man—anything—walking through door, shitting, murdering—account of—amalgamation, concert, no, interaction, collaboration—shit! Account of each—each organ, each cell, each molecule within cell, each atom within molecule, each electron within atom, each—so! Impossible—so—conventionalize at social level. But! But—but—but—but—but— But? Inevitable distortion of reality. Wheue! Hot, flushed alcohol. But! But—o—no thing is—false—know too much—thing is mustn’t conflict with exact, statistically or empirically determined knowledge. Must derive from actual, incontrovertible—hollow, no pimento—experience— But! No the modes—modes—modes—way in which twentieth century consciousness structures experience—go home soon—home!—inherited, hypostasis, hypostasize, crystallized—form. Form remains rigid—shit! Brain battered. Mistreated. Good brain it was. Keats. Can’t remember what the pancreas does—well—go—
— Anyone want a lift?
Vic and Jean did. We forced our way down the steep, thronged stairs. We emerged from the front door into the bleak, bright street. Cars arrowed past. Someone familiar stood on the opposite kerb, scanning the houses on our side. He saw us. Bald, bare-armed, infirm with drugs, Steve came plunging across the glowing road.
— Where—hargh!—where’s the scene?
They started talking. Soon I eased away and went to the car. I got in and sat toying with the wheel, wondering, slightly resentfully, if now that Steve had arrived the other two would return to the party. No. In the rear-view mirror I saw them stretch the link with him and then turn and trot towards me. They both got in the back.
I started the car and drove away. After a while I asked Vic:
— That chap, with Rachel, he burned down a house?
— Er yes.
— Deliberately?
— Oh yes. Quite deliberately. It was—of course—an empty, derelict house.
— Why did he do that?
— Er—he wanted to have the direct experience.
— Of arson?
— No. Er—not necessarily. He believes in the necessity to experience directly. Er—rather than to be the passive recipient.
Quick, courteous, assured, Vic instructed me. He treated me with just discernible deference and again I felt old. Deftly he parried my clumsy attempts at ridicule. His polite attention, when I expostulated, itself buttressed his authority. Clearly this vivacious young man had already traversed, and moved well beyond, the territory of my argument. So that was it. The mass media were the worst but all media were wicked. We had called it art and literature for a long time but it was just another bourgeois dart in the quiver of alienation. Nothing must impede the relationship of man to man and when man is at last free the vigour of his spontaneous invention will render pathetically obsolete the productions of isolated, groping artists. Making me a musty anachronism, a venal purveyor of dreams. But I thought I saw suddenly, in the turbulence he had bred in my mind, the gleam of a bright shield and I grasped it:
— You realize you’re sacrificing the past? And, as a corollary, time?
The shield proved painted cardboard and his spear plunged through:
— Oh yes. Er—Marx himself said: ‘history is the nightmare from which I am seeking to awake’.
— Then—you’re a Marxist?
— Er yes—we draw our inspiration from the early Marx.
— But without time it will be impossible to sustain civilization.
— Er—we don’t know. Since there has never been a society of free men, it’s impossible to know what it would be like.
We hummed on in our metal capsule through night in a great city of the West. My thoughts began acclimatizing themselves. I offered tentatively:
— De Sade, I suppose—?
— Oh yes—We’re very interested in de Sade.
Wave upon wave. The drum of the new was thundering in the world. The Sumerians, the Egyptians had gestated ideas for centuries. An ancient Egyptian could have slept for a thousand years and awakened to find little significant change. Wave upon wave. Now we pack each decade with explosive novelty. Wave upon wave. Had we passed the crisis? Was the line still zooming up the graph? Wave upon wave. How does one live in a rocket on an unknown trajectory? Could perpetual novelty itself become a principle of stability? Wave upon wave.
— Here we are.
Vic and Jean got out
near the tube station. Vic smiled candidly. I smiled my first middle-aged smile. I said:
— See you. Let’s have—another chat—sometime—
28
The Second Dream
I AM WANDERING ABOUT aimlessly, feeling generally uneasy. Suddenly I see you sitting nearby and I immediately understand why I have been feeling disconsolate. It is because I have been missing you. In the dream, as in life, we are separated, but it does not seem an important factor. I approach you gladly and say:
— Lucy, how marvellous to see you! It’s such a long time since I last saw you. I get so depressed when I don’t see you.
I then approach closer and observe that you are smiling. Your arms are on the sides of a chair and you look very relaxed. You are still some distance away, smiling steadily, but you do not reply to me. I again approach closer and my professions become warmer:
— My dear, how are you? Listen, I made a terrible mistake. I’m weak and greedy but the one real thing about me is my love for you. Darling, can you forgive me?
You continue to smile and my unease begins to return. I am dismayed by the quality of your smile. I now notice that it is hardly a smile at all, but more of a leer and I also discern something about your manner, your posture, which seems wanton. I ask anxiously:
— What is it? You seem to have changed. What’s happened to you? You haven’t gone off me, have you?
You don’t reply, at least with words, but I begin to grasp the message of your appearance and the dreadful leer on your face. These things are saying:
— I’m not concerned about you any more. Now I’ve become a disciple of yours. You believe in having a good time and not accepting responsibility and that’s what I’m doing now. I tried to live for love and you killed that so now I’m going to have a good time too.
This makes me feel sick. I can’t believe it is you. I cannot believe that this can have happened to you. However wretchedly I may have behaved you could never have lapsed into cynical, leering decadence. I cannot bear it. I cannot bear your look of nerveless profligacy. I plead with you:
— But all our years together! You can’t just ignore them! It’s impossible that you feel nothing for me any longer. Think of everything we did and said and how we rejoiced! Think of all the good things—so many good things. You can’t just feel nothing for me any more? How can you feel just nothing?
But you are not moved and merely lounge there leering stupidly in response to my pathetic pleas which become more and more tearful, more and more desperate, until, squirming and weeping in my lumpy bed, I awake!
The relief!
There! That fabric on the back of the battered dresser—you hung it there. You are still you—not far away. I can go in search of you this morning and gaze—gaze at—drink your lovely, candid face! The sun, the sycamore trees, the drone of the excellent cars crawling into town—how excellent, quite excellent, is reality!
Such the response to escape from nightmare, from the awful power of the mind to condense and symbolize. Such had been my response when, a few months before, I had awakened in this same little room from:
The First Dream
In the first dream, you also sat but that time you were weeping. Your tears fell steadily and you smiled weakly. Then finally, in response to my pleading, you explained why you were crying. With a little sigh you murmured:
— Oh, Billy, you’ve hurt me so badly I don’t think I’ll ever get over it!
The Two Dreams
I think I can analyse some of the constituents of these two dreams and relate them to their counterparts in reality.
They express egotistical aspects of my own nature: in all guilt there is an element of complacency at being potent enough to generate the culpable situation. There is an implication of gloating in these two dreams at my authority over you.
They also express the polarity of my attitude to women. This is the common one between the pure mother and the depraved whore. I was never impotent with you but I idealized you and often fucked another woman mentally while my body was sealed to yours. In the first dream I have etherialized you into a model of pure, selfless devotion. In the second dream I have revenged myself on the non-voluptuous quality I have myself engendered by degrading you into a whore.
In both, I perceive you as being remarkable. I thus express my own vanity. Bill Soodernim’s woman is of a different order from other men’s. She is qualitatively superior as befits the wife of such an extraordinary man.
There is evidence of emotional masochism. I derive sweetness from being hurt. I wallow in my own misery.
There is complementary sadism. I inflict suffering on you. I wallow in your tears. I hurt you for the power-pleasure of comforting you again.
Nevertheless, the basic significance of these two dreams seems to me to reside in the accuracy of their superficial symbolism. Each of them exposed a new idea, one which must have been germinating in my mind but which I had not consciously apprehended before.
I did hurt you so badly that you will never get over it. Of course I knew for a long time that I had made you very unhappy. God knows enough tears had irrigated our final harvest of rows. I can still barely recall without nausea that wretched occasion when, after a cycle of conflict leading to yet another inconclusive resolve to separate, an unexpected convulsion of terror at this prospect suddenly gripped you and, rearing up rigidly and unnaturally from the divan on which you had been lying while I raved at you, your face ugly with hysteria, you suddenly begged in a voice that was half-gasp, half-shriek:
— Don’t leave me!
Oh I knew I’d hurt you all right, but the true extent of that hurt, and its implications for any future we might have, only became clear to me with calm analysis of your calm despair in that dream I myself synthesized. For then I realized that the hurt was absolute. It would be possible for you to forgive me. You have, in fact, long since forgiven me. We meet on terms of confidence and affection. And yet the hurt was absolute. The dream taught me what I had not consciously been able to fathom: that the total commitment which was your love would never be able to comprehend its betrayal. No matter what the carnal pressures that I never concealed from you, no matter what the metaphysical or sociological or any other kind of rationalization, the tendering of a categorical rebuff to your magnanimous love had carried me beyond the area of your understanding. I had turned myself, by enforcing a breach between us, into an alien. You could never again wholly commit yourself to me, for some part of me must henceforth remain a stranger.
That was the message of the first dream.
I taught you to drink. You loved pubs. Even in your mid-thirties you retained a guilty, child’s thrill at being on forbidden premises. We had three nights a week off, when the boy was with my mother and aunt. We were lucky that way. When we had a night off almost invariably we went drinking. Formerly we had gone to the theatre, the cinema, to dinner with friends. Latterly we hardly went anywhere but to a pub. Which was fine. We talked to people. We got mildly drunk—sometimes rather more than mildly. But it was fine. What I didn’t like, however, was when you showed signs of being a little high. I hated it when your speech got slurred and you blinked unnaturally. I hated to have to associate you in the slightest in my thoughts with permanently unsteady, two-bottle-a-day women. Contradiction: I both wanted you to retain your freshness and unworldliness and also to be a drinking companion. And, essentially, this was how it was. Very occasionally you got a little unsteady but you were never to the slightest degree dependent on alcohol. If I had said, one day:
— Right, no more booze for us from now on.
You would have been neither pleased nor sorry. It would just have been a slight alteration in the rhythm of our life together.
The second dream taught me that this had changed.
I don’t mean that you had become a drunkard, not that, necessarily, you drank a drop more than when we were together. I am using alcohol in this context to symbolize the things of this world.
; Deprived by me of that which had rendered you immune to the charms of matter and revelry, our life and love together, you became susceptible to them. You didn’t go mad. You didn’t riot and crave possessions. You remained gentle and good but, as a result of what I had done, you now belonged to the world. And, belonging to the world, you had acquired the world’s disenchanted eyes. You could now readily discern that I was not a God, a being of unearthly wisdom and princely stature, but just a rather comic-looking little endomorph with certain good qualities and sickening flaws.
Both of us, as a result of my betrayal of our love, had joined the ranks. We were in the infantry now like everyone else.
That was the message of the second dream.
And the statement they made between them was that the past could never be revived.
Our second childhood, too lovely a phrase to be devoted exclusively to senile dementia, when everything had glowed fresh and rich and true, because it had been energized by the power of our constant delight in each other, was over.
Gone.
Like a dream.
29
SO NOW WE don’t live together.
I know where you are. You are over there, along a few streets, across a few house-tops. When the jets resound in the pearly sky, your ear-drums quiver at about the same moment as mine. The sphere of outward pulsing sound unites us both in the same experience.
I lie and observe the mountains of the sky. A luminous dinosaur of cloud paws at a great lobe of light. An alien dart of metal slides into the radiant tumulus. Its roar fills the world.
