The next morning I felt even worse. Initially because of the shame of the previous day’s ‘lecture’, later because, as the plane descended, I found I couldn’t equalise my right ear. In addition to my still-splitting headache and my swarf throat I also felt like my right ear was going to explode. Strictly speaking the plane wasn’t descending, it was banking and turning in a holding pattern over Heathrow. I asked the flight attendant for a boiled sweet but my ear wouldn’t budge. The pain in my ear was so intense that it eased the pain in my head. ‘My poor ear,’ I kept saying to myself, swallowing and yawning, sucking a sliver of boiled sweet. I’d had an abscess in the same ear when I was a boy. I lay in my mother’s arms, apparently, my ear full of that inexplicable pain of childhood, saying ‘Press, Mummy, press.’ My ear kept popping and my mum kept pressing, I thought to myself as we banked and turned over Heathrow, pressing my ear, swallowing and yawning, trying to unblock my ear. Often in planes I find myself thinking of having sex with the flight attendant: pushing my hand up between her legs as she walks past, fucking in the toilet: standard in-flight porno stuff; now I thought of lying in a flight attendant’s arms saying ‘Press, Mummy, press.’ I was a sickly child. I was off school for so long that the truant officer came round to see what was happening. As well as my terrible eczema I had terrible warts, about fifty of them on my fingers. One day a boy at school told me that they were really good warts, they looked just like real ones. An early example of what I later learned is termed irony. The warts were burned off with dry ice — solidified carbon dioxide? — one day in Gloucester. They turned purple and then vanished. As compensation my parents bought me an outfit for my Action Man: Snow Patrol with white camouflage outfit, skis and green goggles. A strange choice — it was June — but we spent the rest of the afternoon in the garden at home, in the sun. My father took the day off work, or maybe that was another day, when I had some teeth out. After I had the teeth out I spat blood on to the pavement as we walked to the shop to buy an Action Man outfit. My mother said I should use a handkerchief and spit into that — as I had tried to do in the lecture hall in Denmark — instead of on to the pavement. It is possible that the Action Man Snow Patrol outfit was bought as compensation for the teeth not the warts.
I remembered all these things when I was back in England, enduring the flu, and recovering from the ill-fated lecture in Denmark. Writers suffer more from the flu than other people and I suffer more from the flu than other writers. If you’re going out to an office or a factory every day then there’s always a holiday element in being sick. You might not feel great but you are at least having a few days at home: it’s a rest, a chance to watch afternoon telly. Whereas writers are home all day anyway; they can watch all the afternoon telly they want. What the flu does is stop them working — so there is, albeit in heavily diluted form, a sense of being on some kind of holiday. Whereas for me, even when I was feeling a hundred per cent I rarely got down to any work. I could be in the best of health and all I did was mope around, shuffle around in my slippers, wait for the early-evening news. In terms of what I got up to on a daily basis there was next to no difference between my healthy routine and my flu routine. Basically, I realised when I was laid up with flu, I lived each day as though I was laid up with flu even when I didn’t have flu. Having flu made no difference — except that I felt terrible. As well as feeling terrible from flu I also felt terrible about the way that I squandered my flu-less days — and by squandering my flu-less days I also made the days when I had flu even worse because if I had stuck to a rigid work schedule I could at least have enjoyed flu as a relief from work. As it was, having flu was simply an intensification of everyday misery; all flu did, I realised, was render bearable misery unbearable. But in retrospect even this unbearable misery — I’ve said it before and I might well say it again — turns out to have been bearable. Life is bearable even when it’s unbearable: that is what is so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.
Just as I was getting over the last stages of flu, my agent called to say that one of Lawrence’s plays was being performed, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Did I want to go?
‘When is it?’ I said.
‘Thursday night.’
‘Oh, Thursday I’m going to see Nusrat.’
‘Who?’
‘Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the qawali singer. That’s a shame. I would like to have come,’ I said, thinking how fortunate it was that they overlapped. I had not been to the Théâtre for twenty years and I had no intention of going again now. It was not even a question of liking or disliking the theatre. The important thing was the pleasure that came from not being interested in the theatre. I am interested in all sorts of things but it is lovely to not be interested in the theatre. Not being interested in the theatre means a whole area of life and culture means nothing to me: there are entire sections of listings magazines that I don’t need to consult, vast areas of conversation I don’t need to take part in, great wads of cash that I don’t need to consider parting with. It is bliss, not being interested in the theatre. Not being interested in the theatre provides me with more happiness than all the things I am interested in put together. There is a moral here. To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.
Take Nusrat who I was going to see on the same night I had been invited to The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. He had played twice at the Théâtre de la Ville when I lived in Paris and both times I wanted to see him even though this was next to impossible because everything at the Théâtre de la Ville is sold out months in advance. Both times I called the box office but the phones were always engaged. Both times I turned up at the Théâtre de la Ville in person to have it confirmed that the concerts were sold out. Both times I turned up at the Théâtre de la Ville well before the concerts were due to begin with a little home-made sign reading ‘Je cherche une place’, both times I took my place among the dozens of other Nusrat fans who didn’t have tickets and were holding signs saying ‘Je cherche une place’. The first time, right up until the concert began, I was hoping that I would be lucky but I was not. I went home, far unhappier, far more disappointed than if I had not turned up with my little home-made sign. The second time I turned up even earlier and did manage to buy a ticket, from a scalper, for twice the official price. I had an hour and a half to kill before the concert and I sat in the Sarah Bernhardt Café thinking about the way I had paid twice the asking price to get into this gig. Once inside I realised I had one of the three or four worst seats in the house, and I spent the first half of the concert thinking how much more I would have enjoyed it from a better vantage point. The second half I spent worrying that this particular concert of Nusrat’s was not nearly as good as the concerts by him that I had already attended. Then, when I got out, all I could think of was the way that, had I not been so preoccupied by the price and location of the seat, I might well have enjoyed this concert as much as the previous ones. Uppermost in my mind, though, was the question that was sure to be uppermost in my mind when I went to see him again on Thursday: why did I keep making such efforts to see Nusrat when I had already seen him play ten or twelve times previously?
Compare that with the bliss of not being interested in theatre, of knowing nothing about it, of never being tempted to go! Oh bliss of indifference!