The Paper Men

by William Golding

  I found to my surprise that I was gripping my side of the table the way he was gripping his.

  “That was most unwise of you, Rick, if you’ll forgive my elaborate Limey way of putting things. You let yourself go, didn’t you? Now we know, don’t we?”

  The fire began to die down in him. He was deflating, returning to that state which I now saw not to be vacant, ignorant or servile but inscrutable. We were learning.

  “You’ve shot your bolt, son. Wine in the saucer if you would be so kind.”

  He still waited.

  Tucker. Tucker the fucker.

  “No wine in the saucer, no authorized biography. No letters from MacNeice, Charley Snow, Pamela, oh a whole chest full of goodies! Variant readings. The original MS of All We Like Sheep which differs so radically from the published version. Photographs, journals dating right back to Wilf’s schooldays, the happiest days of your life, Tucker, when you get your claws into it—a placated Halliday. You will be able to get off your knees. The pearly gates will open. A modest fame.”

  “Scholarship—”

  “Balls.”

  Heavily he reached out his hand, heavily poured Dôle into one of the little saucers.

  “Put it on the floor.”

  For the first time in my life I saw eyes literally fill with blood. There were blood vessels in the corners and they engorged. I thought for a moment that they might burst. Then he laughed with a kind of crack and I laughed with him. I shouted yap yap at him and he shouted it back and we laughed and he put the saucer down on the floor laughing and he got on his knees having caught on and understood what was required of him. I could hear him lap it up.

  “Good dog, Rick, good dog!”

  He leapt to his feet and hurled the saucer in my face but I knew Who I was and the saucer passed by my ear. It hit a curtain and fell to the floor. The pile of the carpet was thick enough to receive it gently. The saucer didn’t even break but rolled round in diminishing circles then fell over the right way up. Tucker collapsed in the chair. He deflated further than I have ever seen, seeming to come in on every side so that his very clothes hung on him like sails that have lost the wind. He put his face in his hands. Only then could I see that he had begun to shudder like a man in deep shock. A dog. He sat there, leaning forward, face in hands, elbows on the polished table.

  I turned my attention back to the intolerance and insolently interrogated it.

  How’s that?

  Water was coming through between his fingers. Sometimes single drops fell straight down on the polish but sometimes they would be included in the sobbing and through a shake they would be flicked out into the air and thus come halfway across to my side. His weeping became noisy. I have never heard a sound from as deep down and as hard to get out, like bone breaking up. It took the will of his body away so that he slumped, his elbows sliding back off the table, hands open on either side, cheek flat.

  “Can you hear me in there?”

  His hands slid off the table too. I could imagine his arms hanging straight down, knuckles perhaps on the floor, like an ape’s.

  “I said, ‘Can you hear me in there?’”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Right. Let’s get round to business.”

  He heaved himself up so that he was sitting, hunched. He didn’t look at me. All the same I could look at him. His face was streaming wet, eyes red, but no longer with engorgement. It was more like smears.

  “Must we now? I guess I want to sleep or something.”

  “Have another drink.”

  He shuddered.

  “No, no!”

  I looked at my paper again.

  “I shall make you my literary executor, probably in association with my agent and either Liz or Emmy—Emmy, perhaps. I shall authorize you to write my biography while I am still alive but with reservations I have not yet detailed.”

  Rick yawned. He really did!

  “Pay attention, son!”

  “Sorry.”

  “After I have taken legal advice on the proper form of the document you will sign, I shall communicate with you again, appointing a place for us to meet. Is that all clear?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, there we are then. Remember me to Helen if and when you see her again. Give Halliday my best wishes as from one banker to another. I imagine he has a bank.”

  “Quite a few.”

  “Tell him to keep up the good work. A wit, your Mr Halliday. Or have I said that before?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Total recall, Rick. Well. I imagine that’s all. Unless of course, you have any queries?”

  “Yes, sir—Wilf. How long do you estimate? Time is—”

  “Precious. Not mine, it isn’t. However, in your case I suppose— Well. It might be a week or two or a month—or two. Not longer. What difference can it make to you? You have no settled employment, ex-professor.”

  “And you did say, Wilf, you mentioned reservations.”

  “Ah yes. They only refer to the biography, you know. Nothing to worry about.”

  He looked at me, miserably and warily.

  “I’d like to know, Wilf, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “That’s reasonable, Rick, and I thought that perhaps you would want to know them before you committed yourself. I’ll mention the principal one so that you can think it over. I shall give you a full and free account of my life without concealment and you can write what you like about that. But you will also give a clear account of the time you offered me Mary Lou and of the time you offered Halliday Mary Lou and had the offer accepted. In fact the biography will be a duet, Rick. We’ll show the world what we are—paper men, you can call us. How about that for a title? Think Rick—all the people who get lice like you in their hair, all the people spied on, followed, lied about, all the people offered up to the great public—we’ll be revenged, Rick, I’ll be revenged on the whole lot of them, ha et cetera. In this very room, my son—Mary Lou and me and you off to sleep, seduce the old sod, ‘Rick Tucker, who I am sure will entertain you’, did you forge that too, from the old poet whose boots you probably licked just to say you knew him? It’s a trade, my son. Me for you. My life for yours. Don’t say you won’t do it. You have to do it there’s nothing else you can do you have to lick the platter clean like the saucer down there the flying saucer Christ you can’t even throw straight. Now you know. Sod off and come when I call you. I’ll whistle.”

  So we were silent again. I had time to reflect that a really manly man of Rick’s size would pick me up and chuck me over the balcony down to smash. But Rick was a paper man. There was no strength in him. I was safe, had been deceived. He wasn’t strong or hot or warm. He wasn’t a murderer. He was a suicide if anything but I doubted even that. Suicide is a sickness in health and Rick was wholly sane. It was his one—no, he had a crack. Marrakesh.

  But the man was standing up. He was inflating I saw. Was he going to be what Johnny would call “cruel” and do me a mischief? I found to my surprise that I did not care. I watched him, eye to eye, perhaps for the last time I thought. I held him with the power of the human eye over a beast. So at last he looked down and turned to the door. Then when he had reached it instead of going straight out as I had thought he would, he turned suddenly, swelled. He clenched his fists and yelled at me.

  “You mother-fucking bastard!”

  Then he was gone.

  Well, well, I thought! There are moments when one’s pets surprise one. Sometimes they are almost human. You’d swear they know what you’re talking about. Dear Fido! Of course they never bite. They merely growl in fun and seize master’s hand with hurtless jaws. Besides, it’s company.

  I sat back and looked round the sitting-room in which we had held our kind of joust with paper lances, or at most old-fashioned biros. The saucer still lay on the carpet. I let it lie with a feeling that it had ceased to be just a saucer. It was now like all those objects which have received mana, power. Probably it was a flying saucer, visit
ing. What the hell. Then again what about the drops of water on the table? Some of them were smeared I saw and the rest drying with a tiny line of whatever salts they contained already showing round each. Probably in magic there was great virtue in such drops. Virgin tears? If you can find the tears of a grown man, my son, gather them up at the full moon and they are a sovran remedy against boredom, flatulence, world-weariness: and are one in the eye for old intolerance who thereby is getting its own back.

  I poured myself some Dôle. I looked at it and somehow seemed not to want to drink it which was absurd. The moment he had disappeared I had become more aware of the steel string and now it seemed to be not merely tight but cutting into my chest. I forgot Rick and concentrated on the string which by magic now ceased to be length with little breadth but widened into a band, then into a strap. I felt as if it were tightening all over me, even my head, my head. Then I was shuddering and yelling and fingering my flies like a kid in a kindergarten.

  Chapter XIII

  This bit can’t be connected. I cannot, simply cannot remember the succession of events that followed our second meeting in the Weisswald. The wire came in too close, was too tight. I have to remember in scenes as if I had reels of film with great gaps. One scene is in Zurich where I found a lawyer though I can’t remember how. He was a she and when she found what the agreement contained she looked at me more as if she was going to buy me rather than do me a service. She was small and wrinkled and one of those women who combine an extreme ugliness with an extraordinary degree of femininity. I don’t mean a jolie laide. That phrase puts the subject straight into the sexual mess where we are not, nor were not. She had a kind of security—that kind which stems perhaps from getting on very well without some of our less attractive qualities, such as the need for revenge, more success than other people, protection from other people or indifference to them. I remember thinking it was a good job I was no longer bothering with writing beautifully a Wilfred Barclay book because she again was a real person and useless to the novelist because he cannot describe them and they do not bother to describe themselves, existing more in their silences than their speech. I am still not clear how she got me to see that I didn’t need the document at all but could leave the business for the time being as I had no intention of meeting Rick again until the steel wire was slackened a bit. I remember ending our time together envying her bitterly. The things you could see that woman had no need of!

  The other thing, other reel I have from Zurich was about a graveyard. The thing is that the stone had the man’s date of birth on it and nothing else. Later I remembered the date and it was my own date of birth. There’s no doubt about it. I sat in one of those plastic hotels you get in big cities and saw the stone with my mind’s eye and read the date letter by letter. There was room left for the rest. So I got back on the road again with a hire car. I must have gone high to get across the mountains and this was—I think—because a hearse kept following me. I must have dodged it by going up a side road, one of those that are only used by foresters. There are blank bits here because I remember coming down the Italian side and finding the treeline below me. God knows where I’d been. Then I stopped because I’d detected a movement in the earth. Well, where I was, it wasn’t earth but mud. The track was stones and gravel with nasty drops round it here and there and outcrops of rock which hadn’t done the hire car any good. Well, I sat in the driving seat, and I saw old roots and bits of tree trunk or branches sticking out of the mud beyond and above me and the thing is they were moving. Then I saw that all the mud was moving down, the skin tearing and mending itself and the sticks and things writhing as in pain or waving as if for help of which there was none, natch. It hadn’t occurred to me you could have an avalanche of mud but there it was and it missed my hire car but cut the track so that not even a tank could have got through. I had to slither and slide and climb and scramble. I came on Italian workmen doing things to the road at the bottom and when I explained I’d left my auto up at the top they laughed at me. I had a lot of being laughed at and fuss.

  I have a reel about being back in the colossal motel and having the same dream over and over again. I must have stayed there for weeks, it was so impersonal. The place I mean. It stuck up, concrete sticking out of a concrete wasteland. This dream was I’d be in Marrakesh where I’d never been and I’d be running away from Rick who was chasing me in a hearse. My only course was to run out into the Sahara beyond roads so he couldn’t catch me. I’d spend the rest of the dream out there. Dream by dream the beginning got left out, shortened, or implied until I was having a dream just of being out in the desert. It was everywhere and it was just the essence of experiencing unpleasantness. I suppose I was always naked for I don’t remember (re-visualize) clothes. There was compulsion. It wasn’t the usual, indescribable, rootless, pointless compulsion of dreams and nightmares. It was logical because it followed on the fact. You’ll know those pathways of duck-boarding they put across beaches in hot climates so you can get to the sea without roasting the soles of your feet? Well, here there wasn’t any pathway, just the sand which was very hot, oh very hot, oven-hot. There wasn’t any sky that I was aware of over this desert or if there was my attention was fully occupied with the sand. You see the logic of the compulsion? Christ, how I had to move, dance, run, jump up and down! It was better in the air if that’s what lay above the sand so getting one foot out was the best I could do since even in dreams I’m no dab hand at suspending the laws of gravity. However, using all my mighty dream-intelligence, I evolved a compromise that given time might even be a solution to the problem. I bent down and endured my burning feet while with my hand I made a hole in the sand. It seemed logical at the time that this should result in a hole so deep and black it was sickening, like a hole in the universe, but it wasn’t burning sand. If I bored enough holes I had a space to put a foot and escape the burning; at which point I would wake up. Sometimes when I stirred the sand with my hands I found I was writing a strange language or making pictures and this would give me room for both feet and I would wake up. But my real trouble began when I took enough pills to knock me out flat because it meant I didn’t dream which was of course the object of the exercise but the dreams simply waited for me and when I woke up there they were, and I would have them in the bar or wandering round the concrete waste in which, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make a hole with my hands and all I did was call attention to myself. I must have moved on. However, the dreams came too.

  There’s telepathy. There must be, otherwise there was no reason at all why my other reel should be of where it was, that’s where Liz and I had a honeymoon the year before we got married.

  I’d avoided it since the divorce. I’m not a sentimentalist and if I were, what the hell would I be doing going back to a place where that all began? But somehow I got there. They knew me after a bit, the hotel filing system being what it is, and by some extraordinary means someone had stuck my gold credit card in my passport which apart from another hire car was all I brought with me. So there I was in the hotel and I went across to the sleazy one and got them to send my sacks of mail across. I walked both ways.

  I’d forgotten to say this reel is about Rome, no, not religious Rome but hotel Rome. You get to Piazza what’s-it with the fountain in the little boat and then up the Steps and the hotel is at the top. There’s a church up there too but the glass is lousy and the hotel far, far preferable. It’s a very understanding hotel. They turned my hire car in and gave me the room I wanted, one with a balcony because if you have things you don’t want to think about you can always look at the view and fashionably dislike the Victor Emmanuel monument though it’s better than most of the rest of the crummy Roman architecture, you can see I have no taste. In any case my desert kept getting in the way of the view. Now here is a remarkable thing and I regard it as being in the same line of phenomenon as Padre Pio and Wilfred Barclay, bank clerk, it’s all in the mind. The fact is that even when I was awake and sober my feet were beginning to
hurt and so was my hand. That made me change hands in the dream when writing or drawing but I only made both my hands hurt. So I would spend a lot of time in the bathroom with the cold tap on, sitting on the edge of the bath with my feet in the water and putting one hand at a time under the tap. It helped to a certain extent. In fact I must draw your attention to another of those farcical incidents to which Wilf is subject, he had the stigmata like St Francis only in reverse as it were, for being a mother-fucking bastard as my best friend would say instead of getting them as a prize for being good. I make a joke of it as indeed it does not need to be made, being one already but believe me it was no fun. The whole situation was thoroughly out of hand. I remember one evening—no. It’s a separate reel.

  One evening when my feet and hands were just about bearable and I could see the skyline I was sitting on the balcony trying to get things together. I’d found myself wandering in Rome that morning because I’d been looking for Who’s Who in America meaning to get a line on Halliday. I’d discovered the Steps again at last. They were littered with dropouts, hippies, junkies, drabs, punks, nancies and lesies and students, as usual, and all of them were wearing guitars or playing them very badly or trying to sell the tin shapes they’d cut out and spread round on the stairs as necklaces or rings or earrings or noserings, there were carpets of artificial flowers and so on. It was a toil getting up but nobody minded me or tried to sell me anything the way they would have if I’d looked as if I could afford to buy. But looking at them I realized what a mess I must be myself and I went up to my balcony and put my head between my hands and tried to think. I decided I’d use my journal to get things straightened out and understand what the score was. Then of course I remembered that I hadn’t got my journal; and I had an instant picture (reel) of myself here and there in Switzerland and Italy duly writing my journal in telephone books or on walls or the windows of cars or on lavatory paper then wandering on wherever I might be going if anywhere. I also had a glimpse of myself that very morning, looking in Who’s Who in America—why had I not seen the dreadful significance? For the page that should have contained Halliday’s entry was bare, bare, bare, just blank, white paper! Oh then I started up, feet or no feet, and I was looking across at that same church with the lousy glass and my God he was standing on the top. He was, and I fought my way back into the bedroom from the balcony and sat there on the bed, burning and trembling. I started to shake. I reasoned that I had to stay awake because if I fell asleep he would simply step across from the roof and collect me. Also of course, pills and drink, either or both were out because either or both would render me helpless and unable to resist him if he should choose to step across anyway. This last consideration tightened things altogether. I don’t know how long I sat, shaking and staying awake. I know a woman came in to make the bed but I was sitting on it and it wasn’t unmade so she went away again; and another man came but from the hotel and not from the next roof so I wasn’t afraid of him and ignored him. In the war I had a boil, oh one hell of a boil as a result of my wound, and it swelled and it swelled and there was the time—half an hour it may be—when the pressure from my heart pushed the pus so hard against the skin that it was pain enough to make a man faint. I remember I couldn’t believe that the pain would increase but it did. Well the tightening went on, it drew in and in. I suppose I slept or went into some mode of being that wasn’t quite being awake or simply being mad.