I take a bite of my pastry, enjoying the creamy custard bursting out through its warm and buttery skin. Jesus Christ, what an unpleasant person I am! I feel that kind of prickly, poisonous, over-fastidious jealousy so often, in so many different situations.
‘I’m wrong to sneer at the conventionality of Amanda’s liberal outlook,’ I write. ‘Any fool can find inconsistencies and contradictions in someone else’s values. But that’s just how it is. Beliefs are never consistent, but either you pick some of them and use them to give some sort of direction to your life or you spend your whole life rejecting everyone’s values for not being absolutely pure and true, and never completely untainted by self-interest, and end up doing nothing at all. It’s like placebos, I guess. They really work, even though they’re not what they claim to be, but you have to allow yourself to believe in them.’
When I’ve been scribbling away for half an hour, the waitress comes to see if she can get me anything else. I usually come to this café when I’m in the town. It’s one of those places that decorate the walls with signed pictures of writers, artists and other cultural figures, and has books you can borrow, and newspapers you can help yourself to, and is a kind of solitary island of bohemian life in this frontier town, which, from a metropolitan point of view, is otherwise a cultural desert. They all know here that my father is the famous TV scientist – in fact, his photo is up there between an actor well known for her left-wing views and a prominent journalist who writes for the second-most liberal of our six ‘quality’ newspapers – because the absentee owner of this café is an aunt of my mother’s, Aunt Xenia, a former Dean of Humanities in our most famous university, and still a formidable woman even now in her old age, who also owns my cabin, where, if the stories are true, she once used to entertain the local tribal chieftains, though she is now too frail to leave the capital. Most of the staff here make a fuss of me, partly I think because they are impressed by the reflected light of my dad, but no doubt also because they’re aware that I am related to their own ultimate boss. This particular waitress, though, has always been rather cool and aloof, as if not just unimpressed by these things but wanting me to know that she’s unimpressed. Today, however, she is unexpectedly friendly.
‘So what are you up to today?’ she asks. ‘Are you stopping long?’
I tell her I’m planning to do some writing, and then perhaps have a walk around the town, and come back later to meet my friend Amanda. ‘You may recognize her, actually. The tall woman who I’ve come here with a couple of times on Sunday mornings to have breakfast? She quite often comes here on her own, I think.’
‘Oh yes, I do know who you mean. That’s nice. So you stay over at hers, do you?’
‘That’s right. Hence the breakfasts here! It’s a fair distance back to my cabin, so I usually head off back there in the early afternoon.’
‘That’s nice. Anyway, what can I get you?’
It’s lunchtime now, I decide, so I order a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a small beer. It’s good to be enjoying city things again. It’s good to be able to take money out of my pocket and buy stuff with it, knowing that when the money runs out, I can just walk to the bank round the corner and it’ll give me more. That makes me feel powerful and in control. The only thing that gives me that kind of feeling back at my cabin is my gun.
I decide I’ll go shopping when I’ve had my lunch, not simply for provisions like I normally do, but for fun. There’s not a massive amount of choice in a place like this, but still, I’m sure I can find something a bit smarter to be wearing when Amanda shows up and actually I’ve got time to get a haircut too. If I don’t take too long over it, I could even fit in a quick visit to the public baths to freshen up. And why don’t I buy her a present of some kind? A bunch of flowers, perhaps, or a plant in a pot to liven up that damp little apartment of hers?
I look down at my notebook. The tricky thing about placebos, I think, is that you have to believe in them for them to work, and there’s no way you can believe in them once you know they’re placebos.
But I’m looking forward too much to spending some money to worry now about things like that. I take out my playing cards, shuffle them and start to deal out a row of them for a game of patience: the King of Leaves, the Seven of Coins, the Ace of Swords, the Prince of Cups . . . It’s funny how each combination of cards has a different feel. Even the exact same cards seem to tell a different story if dealt in a different sequence.
I find myself wondering how many possible ways the entire pack of forty-eight cards could be dealt out, and spend some time working it out in my notebook, giving up when I realize that the answer will be absolutely astronomically vast.
For some reason, lying here in my bed this morning after one of the foreign women has fed me and cleaned me, I’ve been thinking about those imaginary forests where I sometimes thought of setting my famous novel. Ha! When I say famous, I mean famous in the rare sense of (a) non-existent and (b) only a handful of people have ever heard of it.
They’re the forests from fairy tales, really, aren’t they? Forests from the fairy tales of the old countries from which our ancestors came. They take us back to childhood but also to a time when, even in those countries (which these days lecture us, from their deforested landscapes, about the importance of preserving our wilderness), forests could extend for many hundreds of kilometres, and you knew, as you passed through them on rough unsurfaced roads, that behind that bland wall of trees there really were wolves, and bears, and outlaws who would happily kill you for money, and perhaps also – why not? – witches in little cottages made of gingerbread, and dismal caves where giantesses sulked, refusing out of bitterness and jealousy to shed the tears that would release from his tomb the shining god who the whole world loved. Also, there were enchanted castles behind thick barriers of thorns where princesses lay sleeping while, in an upper room, the lance with which Christ himself was pierced continually dripped His precious blood. They all merge together now, those stories, and though it’s true that I’m confused as a result of being old and sick, and on my own all the time, and because of the drug they give me for the pain (which, by the way, knocks spots off that stuff I used to smoke back in the day), I’m pretty sure it’s also true that they really are all just parts of the same story, all just lumps of the same basic substance from which everything is made.
What I used to find compelling about the idea of a forest is that it’s divided up – unlike, say, a desert or a prairie – into countless separate and very local and intimate little patches of space by the trees, which prevent you seeing very far. So you can be in one place where life just seems ordinary, but you know that, in other places nearby, someone is grappling with a dangerous enemy, someone else is falling in love, someone else again is being born, and though you can’t see what’s going on in those other places at the moment, there’s no wall between you and them. It’s all happening, all at once, in the same place, though we don’t experience it that way because of here and there.
Here and there. What is that all about?
Time’s the same, of course, except that time has two kinds of there, one called yesterday and one called tomorrow. Identity, too. I and you and them: all that’s just another kind of here and there. These things strike you when you’re very small, and then you get used to them, they seem too obvious to mention – like the fact that an object you let go of falls downward – and you forget that after all there must be a reason for it, and that you don’t really understand the reason. I suppose that’s why I was so fond of the weed in my younger days. It took me back to that sense of pretty much everything being mysterious and strange.
But now I’ve come back to the edge again, almost in sight of the nothingness from which I so surprisingly once emerged, and I spend most of my time lying here going from one of those little intimate spaces to another, each one being a memory, a thought, a place I’ve been, or someone I’ve known, or something I’ve read or imagined – and sooner or later they merge together o
r mutate, as in, for instance, an idea turns into a shape, or a person turns into another person, or a real location acquires the characteristics of an imaginary one, and then I sink into sleep. Even when I’m asleep I know there are certain places to avoid and I can tell when I’m getting near them because of the feelings that radiate out from them, like dread or grief or shame. Sooner or later I forget where I am and stumble into one of those places by mistake, but for quite long periods I manage to keep myself in the pleasanter parts of the forest, wandering about there in my mind while cars and trucks growl and honk and roar in their own separate world below my window, and the leaky tap goes drip-drip-drip in the kitchen I no longer visit.
But all of that’s during what you might call the forest phase. As the drug wears off, things close in. There’s more pain. It isn’t overwhelming yet, but I’m more aware of it and I’m also aware that it’s going to get much worse, and so, of course, that alters how I see things, and results in a more pessimistic and fearful view. This is the castle phase. Now even pleasant things have a tendency to turn sour, and instead of open space connecting one place to the next, I have more of a sense of hard stone walls. And at the same time, I’m aware that I’m a prisoner, locked in not by a jailer, but by the sheer crapness of my own crumbling body, which could at best make its way as far as the door or the window, and not even that with any ease. I’m aware of the ceiling above me and the floor below me, and the walls all round, and people doing stuff there, things that I can’t see and can’t reach and most of the time can’t even hear, apart from radios and TVs, though I have occasionally heard shouting matches and things being thrown, and, once, some very noisy fucking, and several times a party going on, and every now and then someone playing a guitar and singing – and the fact that these other people in their own rooms are so near to me, yet completely out of reach, only emphasizes the smallness and meanness of my cell. Everything I turn to in my mind seems stony and hard and difficult to penetrate.
But that’s not the end of it, because next comes the dungeon phase, and now the pain is so bad that it becomes the single colour of all my thoughts – a kind of ugly, nauseating redness – so that whoever or whatever else I manage to think of, the thought is always overlaid at once by the sickly redness of pain, and all I really care about is when the fuck is that foreign woman going to come – whichever foreign woman it happens to be this time – and she’d better not be late, or I’ll change to another company. I lie here willing her key to rattle in the door. When that doesn’t happen, I make myself count to a hundred before I’m allowed to have a second go at willing her to arrive, and, if she still doesn’t come, I begin to count again, all the time worrying that perhaps she’s forgotten (whichever one of them it is) or been in a car crash or something, or her boss has forgotten about me and told her to do something else, or they’ve got their rotas mixed up, or my money has run out, and I’ll just have to lie here in this dungeon as the demons close in and it becomes more and more like the torture chamber, which, I have imbued just enough religion to vaguely fear, might possibly turn out to be my eternal fate.
But here she is. Here’s the sound of the key, and the door opening, and the foreign woman screwing up her nose at the stale air. I know this one. She’s called Charity. She comes from one of those little islands – I forget which – and she’s always very friendly, so I rather like her, even though she’s extremely scatty and often calls me by the wrong name. She laughs cheerfully when I point it out, and assures me it’s nothing personal, because not only does she get her many clients mixed up (‘my ladies and gentlemen’, as she calls us) but she even mixes up her husband with her daughter, or her daughter with her son, and all of them with the dog and the cat, on a pretty much daily basis.
‘Hello there, my dear,’ Charity says. ‘What kind of a day have you been having?’
‘Just give me that injection, and it’ll get a whole lot better.’
She finds the needle embedded in my arm, attaches the syringe and almost at once the pain . . . well, it doesn’t exactly disappear, it’s still there at the end of the tunnel if I choose to look for it, but it’s far off in the distance and why would I want to look that way?
There’s a place I often see in these moments. Nothing happens there, and there’s this heavy leaden light. There is something dreary about it, and empty, and yet it’s strangely soothing. Hard to believe that it really exists and that I actually saw it with my own eyes.
The same waitress comes up to me again when I return to the café. I’ve never known her so keen to serve me. ‘Oh, you’ve gone and got changed!’
I suppose she’s just a shy person who takes a long time to get used to people.
‘Yes, what do you think? I thought I’d make an effort for my friend.’ I show her the potted orchid I’ve bought for Amanda. ‘I feel I treated her badly last time I saw her, and I want to make up for it.’
‘You look very smart,’ she tells me. ‘So. You’re still planning to stay overnight and then have breakfast here in the morning?’
I laugh. ‘I hope so! I think so! But obviously that’s up to her. She should be along shortly.’
‘A glass of something to keep you going?’
‘Just a lemonade, I think. I need to pace myself.’
I look at my watch. (I never even wear it back at the cabin.) It’s four. School finishes at three, and it’ll take her perhaps half an hour to get home and find my note, and then let’s say another hour to freshen up and get changed into evening clothes and walk the very short distance here from her apartment. She should be along before five. I’m sure she will. We parted in a friendly enough way, even if there were uncomfortable undercurrents, and she’s absolutely not the type to sulk or bear grudges. She’s a very considerate person. Even in the unlikely event that she’s got something else on tonight, she’ll arrange to meet up later, and maybe give me the key to her flat.
I open my notebook, and attempt to record some thoughts and impressions, but I’m a little agitated, a little nervous. I feel I’ve entered territory that I normally avoid, though it’s hard to say exactly what it is. And oddly, the waitress seems to pick up on my agitation because she’s always hovering around, and making comments like ‘Still no sign of her then?’ or ‘What are you going to do if she doesn’t show up?’ or ‘Will you still stay in town, or will you go back up the river tonight?’ It’s nice, of course, that she’s decided to give up her former surliness towards me, and it’s definitely something to be encouraged, but she’s starting to get on my nerves a little.
‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll come,’ I tell her. ‘But I guess I’ll go back upriver if not. I’ve always wanted to experience that whole river journey after dark. You get fireflies over the water at night, and – what do you call them? – those big white creatures . . .’
‘Naiads?’
‘That’s the one. Those naiads come up to doze at the surface in little family groups. You can hear them breathing. And sometimes you can hear the smaller ones squeaking, and the older ones grunting reassuringly. It’s all very peaceful.’
She nods, and moves off, not back into the café, but out into the promenade, where I see her in front of the statue of Barca, taking out her phone and making what seems like quite an urgent call, or at least a serious, businesslike one, before coming back to serve another customer.
The air is cooling now, the light is just beginning to fade from the sky and the promenaders are out. Strolling in both directions around the fountains, they greet friends, and maybe stop for an aperitif in one of the cafés, the men wearing suits, the women in smart dresses and fancy hats, and the children out of their school uniforms and in clean and freshly ironed clothes. They are the middle classes of the town, I suppose, but they’re not the slightest bit like what my friends and I meant by ‘middle class’ back in the city, where we used the term to refer self-deprecatingly to our own particular section of society. These are the sort of people, I feel sure, who voted for the president, and go to mas
s on Sunday, and give their full support to our national army in its war against the terrorist insurgency.
‘Still no sign?’ the waitress asks. The lights have come on in the fountains – red, gold and blue, the national colours – and small bats are hunting moths around the pretty spherical lamps that line the promenade.
‘Nope. Nothing.’
‘Have you not texted her?’
Tomorrow Page 10
