Not empty — full of her.
Talking to her about goats, about tongues … As if all I could think about was … As if I was constantly in a state of …
Lurking — I was lurking somehow — spattered with olive oil and tepid bits of parsley, opposite a not-so-much-younger woman, but for God’s sake there is a gap — mind the gap — a discernible gap and one feels that one has no right to expect …
I mean, the letters are one thing …
Dear Mr August
He kept at least one of them folded in his pocket when he went out and about. Always. For ever. Two folds of cream paper were in there today, snug by his heart and full of tiny, hot motion. Like a pacemaker he couldn’t quite keep up with.
Sweet Mr August
Inside his jacket, held safe, were whole remarkable sentences of kindness, meant for precisely him. Bespoke.
You get me through.
And she gets me through and once I’ve tried a few rehearsals, I can write that to her. I have told her that truth, but she simply gives it back again. The whole process is bloody well unending, apparently — and then you have to bloody meet her.
You get me through, Mr August. And you’ve changed things that happened a long time before I met you. Now everything can seem to be the route that led to you. So I make sense. I never expected to make sense.
I know her off by heart. Her music.
But I can’t play my own tune, not now, not under my fucking circumstances.
Heading away from the station, Jon understood he was fine on paper. A person of around sixty — genuinely, technically not quite sixty — could be, in their absolute absence, possibly impressive and — if not attractive — then agreeably lived-in.
If you’re bluesman cool, any kind of cool — then you can get away with being lived-in …
I’m not bloody lived-in. My face has squatters. My premises have been ruined by moral subsidence and stress — I’m all crumbled façade and squinting little windows.
Why does the skin around one’s eyes collapse with age? Exuberant eyebrows, endless sodding vigour in your ear hairs, nose hairs — but your eyelids turn entirely apathetic. Is this a type of natural mercy? Do the slumping lids join the fading eyesight and spare one the pin-sharp details of one’s personal decay?
Jon’s vision was, in fact, still quite serviceable. He only needed glasses for the work on paper.
Papers of colours appropriate to their function, memos, reports, emails — and letters.
I wear the glasses when I’m trying to write letters back, to match her, to correspond, to be …
Jon cradled the back of his neck with one cooling hand and stood beneath the sodium lights and tactful surveillance cameras of South Kensington. He had this sensation of weakness in his legs which made him believe that his brain was being damaged. If perhaps he could think less …
What the hell should I have said to her? What warning should I have posted in advance?
We do live in an age of prior warnings. We have less and less real safety, but there’s hardly a human experience now that isn’t introduced by catalogues of cautions: walking routes, furniture, sandwiches, films …
I may contain scenes of mental collapse and sexual …
This evening may end with … Myself, everything, something.
Jon spun slowly, sighting along the voluptuous, straight perspective of Exhibition Road and its central, prickling spine of futuristic street lamps. It seemed for an instant to lead his eye along towards a great emptiness, a devouring space.
I do want her to be happy.
A kind of hot cramp ran down from between his shoulders and crouched at the small of his back. Chalice’s voice was somehow still rooting about and doing harm within Jon’s inner ear.
Chalice, you are a thing with an inhuman scent.
Jon felt himself becoming shadowed, essentially naked and ready for display in a suitable case, exuding just the air of melancholy that would prefigure an extinction. His reflection in the window of a tiny Chinese restaurant apparently agreed. He was this stricken outline, tall but round-shouldered — this old-school monkey man lost inside a good coat.
You don’t know me, though, Harry fucking Chalice. You haven’t noticed we’re not the same species. I’m not a modern man who’s chosen to unevolve, slide back to the days of blood and territory. Your kind — you’re out for wild cries and hunts through darkling forests in like-minded troupes.
Not far away in the dark was the Natural History Museum, dozing inside its swarming terracotta ornaments and creatures.
One day last year Jon had made an entirely innocent visit — no notes to leave for anybody. He’d trotted upstairs to visit the hominid cases, wanting to contemplate the skulls and faded dioramas and to be with the vanished dreams inside his forebears’ skulls.
They might have imagined all kinds of humanities: strange musics, dancing and setting one’s palm tight to a wall and painting around it to show the cleverness of fingers, keep a record of the tenderness that might touch other skin, might care when someone reached for care, might be their warmth and their shape of safety.
I really do want her to be happy.
He’d perhaps also liked the idea of standing with a fresh letter flickering in his hand and showing the models of his silent relatives how he had prospered and advanced.
I try to progress.
But all the displays on the origin of his species, that entire section, had been removed.
They’d been replaced with odds and ends about Darwin and a weasel-worded panel for the kids to read on evolution — heavy emphasis on the theory. The panel avoided ever stating whether we’ve evolved, or just been pressed out by God, like fresh little gingerbread babies. Gingerbread, rib bones and mud.
In a palace built to celebrate the scientific method and the safeguard of information in a world full of dangerous dreams … In case they offend opinions, they tucked away their facts.
Evolved human beings had thought this was the proper course to take. In the Natural History Museum.
It was like — in a small way, a tiny way …
I don’t want to see this.
It was like coming home …
I don’t want this.
Why I think of more harm when there’s so much harm loose here already …
It was like coming home that first time …
The picture of it was unfurling like a bolt of bloody cloth, tumbling.
It was like coming back to find one’s home not as it should be and a man sitting in one’s armchair in one’s living room and smirking inside an atmosphere which suggested activities had been undertaken. And the man had that particular look — that special, concupiscent, lazy glance — which he turned to your wife when she came through from the kitchen carrying two fresh glasses of beer …
I’d successfully forgotten that on occasions she did drink our free beer. On occasions when I was elsewhere.
And one would rather not believe one is a cuckold, not even in theory, yet here it is — the evidence.