‘He looks fucking miserable,’ said Jason. He realized he’d grown used to being consoled by Barny’s foolish eagerness when he returned empty-handed from another record company.
‘That’s because he’s getting the toxins out of his system,’ said Haley. ‘You can’t imagine what they put in the average can of dog food.’
‘Toxins?’
‘Yes, horrid toxins for a nice doggy. Poor Barny’s addicted to toxins, aren’t you, you silly doggy?’ Haley grasped Barny by the ears and shook his head. ‘If we put him on Vegginuggets he’ll probably come back as a human being in his next lifetime.’
‘Now you’re really making me feel guilty.’
‘Don’t be so cynical, he might be the next Gandhi. Yes! Who’s a clever Gandhi-doggy?’
‘But Gandhi’s dead already,’ Jason protested.
‘Poor Gandhi-doggy, living with such a boring old pedant,’ said Haley irritably.
Barny drifted away from the park bin and Jason’s thoughts returned irresistibly to the frustrations of his career. In his twenties, driven on by the belief that bad news was infectious and optimism self-fulfilling, he’d been in the habit of saying things like, ‘all the signs are good … the record company is really interested … we should close the deal before Christmas’. The discovery that he was known as ‘all-the-signs-are-good Jason’ put an end to his assumed cheerfulness. A period of tight-lipped silence was soon followed by his present policy of talking very generally and bleakly about ‘economic conditions’.
At thirty-two he was getting too old for a big break in rock music; perhaps he’d been too old for a long time. It was his birthday soon. As an Aries he was supposed to be explosive, ambitious, driven and shallow. Haley said that even Jung thought there was something in astrology. Jung thought there was something in everything. He even talked encouragingly to his kitchen equipment, just to be on the safe side. Haley also said that thirty-three was a really crucial age, when Christ had been crucified and Buddha enlightened, but Jason didn’t want to start a world religion, he just wanted to make a record — and then start a world religion.
He frowned sensitively and sang into an imaginary microphone. Like phosphorescence in a churning sea, bulbs flashed from the adulatory crowd beyond the edge of the stage. His face caked in make-up, his eyes blinded by the sting of sweat and the glare of spotlights, he no longer shifted about restlessly in his diffident and troubled skin but blazed with the certainty that he had become a turbine for momentarily transforming the frustrations and desires of a million raw souls. He closed his eyes and inhaled the exhilarating liberation of fame, and his new identity, a mirage of falsehood and calculated carelessness, stood up and walked away like a confident ghost from the corpse of his old uneasy self.
Yes, yes, he wanted it so badly. He kept his eyes closed to sustain the vision a little longer. To become completely phoney and to be worshipped for it, and then to be thought ‘real’ because he gave in to his wildest vices. He threw back his shoulders and felt himself grow taller. Bliss, it would be bliss.
Barny, who could not be expected to know that his master had transformed himself into a global icon, one of those truly famous people who are recognized everywhere, in Vanuatu and Kathmandu as well as the King’s Road and Fifth Avenue, barked feebly by his side.
Jason, realizing that he was on Clapham Common rather than the stage of the Hollywood Bowl — he thought fondly of Johnny Rotten saying, ‘Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been ripped off?’ when the Sex Pistols left after playing only two songs — started running homewards clapping his hands and shouting, ‘Come on Barny!’ to his exhausted pet.
Tomorrow, he and Haley would be flying over the Hollywood Bowl, not in order to gulp down the nectar of his stupendous popularity, but on their way to a workshop to repair their ailing relationship. As soon as Haley had suggested the workshop, Jason had started to feel that things were really about to happen for him musically, but he was in no position to refuse. She might throw him out of her house.
She had recently declared that their relationship was ‘totally sick’ after going to a Co-dependency Group on three successive Wednesdays, and returning home with a grisly new friend, Panita, who believed that ‘self-satisfaction’, as she called it, was the aim of life and that it could only be achieved by violently breaking off relations with everybody she had ever known, including ‘old selves’.
‘She should break with her new self while she’s at it,’ he had commented sourly.
‘I think that’s a really abusive comment,’ Haley said.
‘Oh, piss off,’ said Jason.
‘No, Jason, it’s typicaclass="underline" I make a new friend and so you have to put me down. Is it because you find it threatening? Jason losing control of Haley, is that what you dread?’
‘Oh, go abuse yourself,’ he’d shouted, slamming the door.
‘King Baby!’ she screamed. ‘You’re the archetypal King Baby.’
The terrible truth was that he did find it threatening, knowing that the price of admission to the inner circle of self-empowerment and ill temper was the freshly dripping head of an ‘abusive’ lover or parent or employer.
Nowadays, when he reached for his Nirvana Unplugged tape in the car, so he could sing along in sweetly tortured emulation of Kurt Cobain, his hand had to push aside a clattering heap of Pia Melody tapes, about chucking your boyfriend on to the street, as he paranoiacally imagined, not having heard any of them, but just knowing that they were muscle-building exercises for Haley’s determination to boot him out.
He would willingly have donated his dole cheque to a minicab in order not to be driven to the airport by Panita. She was arriving in a couple of hours and that morning he’d been unable to resist complaining to Haley.
‘Don’t you think it’s “totally sick” of her to want to drive us to the airport when you’ve known her for less than a month?’
‘No, Jason, I actually think it’s typical of the sort of kindness you can expect from a person who’s really trying to get their life together, not that you’d know much about that…’
And so another argument had started, and he’d had to take Barny out of the house for another walk.
* * *
‘Your partner doesn’t seem to understand what you’re going through at the moment…’ Haley read the words with mixed satisfaction. The trouble with finding her private thoughts figured in the dance of the planets, as reported in Aromatherapist, the magazine for professionals like herself, was that Jason had the same Sun sign as her. It was so true, he didn’t understand her, but if the horoscope was true, she didn’t understand him either. Anyway, Sun signs weren’t real astrology. Mars and Venus, morbid Pluto and dissolute Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon all told their vast symbolic stories. The Moon was enthroned beside the Sun, Mercury was their chamberlain and Mars their chief of staff. So many influences, cardinal, fixed and mutable, evolving through their progressions, blocked and amplified by their aspects, acting through different signs in different houses, could describe the potential and the waste, the weakness and the strength, the obsessions and the ignorance of any shade of personality. When a fiery sign could be in a watery house, or an earthy house filled with planets in an airy sign, anything was possible. Her own chart afforded moments of solemn reflection. Her Saturn was conjunct her Sun. Either she would crumble completely or develop a strong identity through overcoming Saturnian challenges and frustrations. Saturn was also conjunct her Mercury, which might mean that she was very stupid or — like Einstein, whose Saturn was conjunct his Mercury — that she would prove to be a deep thinker. Haley tended to favour the second interpretation.