As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out.
But Meg wouldn’t do that.
He punched his fist into his palm, caught his own knuckles clumsily — not a manly gesture, only stupid. The images didn’t stop.
Also like — in a small way — coming home one summer holiday and seeing one’s mother as one passes the bedroom door — the carelessness of limbs when the sleeper isn’t sleeping, is only passed out. The smell of sweetness and sourness and wrongness.
Post-partum depression — my fault.
She was given drugs, repeated drugs, eventually hoarded and then gorged-upon drugs — her doctor’s fault.
It wasn’t just me who ended up leaving Society Street. Mum went, too. Dad spent years there in the same house with her, but having to live by himself. She was intermittent. She was chilly. She was a ghost’s body. She was lots of things which weren’t her fault.
One cannot understand an addict when one is a child. When one is older, one reflects and analyses their inabilities, acknowledges their disease …
It makes no fucking difference.
One still feels precisely the same.
As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and every neighbour suddenly was able to peep in and find your mother, undignified and overcome.
Women who have wild cries inside and get dark like forests — that isn’t their fault, but I couldn’t currently stand it.
Jon stopped — inside and out.
He’d been pacing — like a captive creature — to and fro at the back of the station. He made himself angry again about the museum, specifically the museum.
I have become a preposterous old geezer, ranting and raising my hairy knuckles against the decisions of the young.
Moralfag.
Scraggy old lad.
Defending knowledge in the face of evasions and entertainment.
He realised that he’d been holding his breath for some time.
He exhaled.
This is good, this is appropriate thinking. This is better than the thinking I cannot think and shouldn’t mention, because then I’ll think it.
Fuck.
As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and therefore continued the process of handing the world to the humans who have stolen Darwin and portrayed him as only cruel — the ones who feel his theory must be savage, because he describes the working out of powers greater than their own. They find such an idea cruel — these men and women who can value nothing in those around them but fitness and competition, taking and keeping and blood and bone.
Which is a generalisation of a type we would avoid unless we were making an unwise and emotive pronouncement, shouting on television, on the radio, in a paper, on Twitter.
Does it really matter where? It’s all shouting.
In media and electoral terms, shouting is a requirement.
One is reminded again of how much — in both senses — one hates.
But one really would rather love, if one could manage.
Jon — inhaling and exhaling as he should — crossed the slightly unnerving paved road now laid out beside South Kensington Station.
You take your luck here with the cruising cars. The aim is to promote coexistence between traffic and pedestrians by removing any clearly defined pavement. Survival of the fittest.
Children might be harmed here, I feel. That would have been one of the risks assessed and presumably discounted during the planning process.
Jon did not approve of harming children. He believed they should be always defended.
I’m also not in favour of risks.
He pushed himself past 20 Thurloe Street, home to the Polish restaurant where Cold War spies once met their handlers — Kim Philby tackling pork knuckle, or pierogies, poppy-seed cake — handing over the goods between courses, one had to presume.
I met Lucy in there once — a joke location that I couldn’t find amusing. He doesn’t care if I get blown. He’d think it was funny, thinks I’m funny.
Everyone, apparently, thinks I’m funny.
Or possibly Meg doesn’t and I should phone her. I need to do that. But I keep forgetting.
But instead Jon kept walking, left behind the cheerily fogged glass of the establishment where Christine Keeler once sat being stylishly traitorous, or flirtatious, or whatever else, while her Soviet lover, or client, or confidant, got down to the pierogies. Perhaps.
He went on into Thurloe Square, slipping along beside the well-maintained people carriers that would gather up well-maintained kids in charmingly retro well-maintained uniforms and then ferry them off to their well-maintained schools in the morning. Illuminated windows showed deftly arranged furniture, investment art, bright fragments of lives, meals being prepared by homeowners, meals being prepared by servants, by nannies, by au pairs: the gradations of posture, costume, comfort. Held in the dim palm of the square, a gated garden was all silences and shapes, polite leaves.
I’m sure we could have made a dead-letter drop there, somehow: got keys for access and then hidden slips of paper, little weatherproofed canisters and so forth.
It didn’t matter, not at this stage, not when everything was so near to its end.
Thurloe was Cromwell’s spymaster — appropriate to have his name salted round about.
In Thurloe Place, the pavement at his feet seeming to give every now and then, sinking. The rush of traffic as the road widened was both absurd and horrifying to him.
Thurloe was a survivor. Under Cromwell and then Charles, John Thurloe kept his head, because he had a necessary mind. There’s hope in that.
Jon felt like running, but did not.
One ends up with a friend, that’s the trouble with letters. One posts out slivers of oneself and gets these warm, these hot, these delicate pieces of someone else back and one is in their mind — they write and say they keep you, hold you in mind.
And if you sleep, you dream their body.
Fuck …
Jon reached a junction and peered to his left. Apparently he had to peer this evening, had to strain for the shapes of things with his perfectly serviceable eyes. Across the road was the Brompton Oratory: that high neoclassical mound of ornaments and pillars, that pretty heap of dirtied Portland stone.
Inside, it’s a bit Vegas: lots of marble, like an upscale hotel bathroom with confessionals for light relief. I never quite took to the place. And traitorous letters died there while they waited for the KGB — the communist faithful nipping up the broad front steps to slip indoors beside the holy-water stoups, carrying codes past the mother of God in her seasonally adjusted robes, tucking secrets into the chapel for St Cecilia.
St Cecilia watching.
Oh, but that’s a fucking lie. Of the worst kind — reliable information polluted by credible bullshit. If I had the strength I’d punch myself.
I have no idea who passed over what or where and St Cecilia is a statue and even if statues could see, hers doesn’t watch. She’s lying on her side with her head draped in a cloth — a very lovely model of a corpse. A victim of state torture in white marble, the cut to her throat not obvious … Slim waist and noble suffering. After an original by Stefano Maderno.