“You think I’ve got a problem?” he said when I’d finished. Normally I would give an analytic grunt here, but I said, “I think you need to play the guitar. You miss it more than you know.”
“Bushy can’t do it sober.”
“I bet you weren’t drunk when you learned to play the guitar.”
“I was a kid.”
“There you are. Miriam says you give a lot of pleasure to people when you play.”
“She said that?”
He was thinking about this and smiling to himself when Miriam herself phoned. Bushy had to leave. She and Henry were going out that night.
“One more thing,” said Bushy before we parted. “Haven’t you noticed nothing peculiar about me?”
He was standing directly in front of me, as though on parade. I looked him up and down. “I haven’t, no.”
“You sure?”
“Is there anything peculiar about you?”
“My nose. Can’t you see, there’s a groove in it.” He ran his finger down his nose. “That’s pretty deep, innit?”
“It’s not an unusual feature, if that’s what you mean. It doesn’t stand out. You are a fine man, Bushy.”
“My nose is turning into a backside. That’s not unusual-to have a pair of buttocks screwed to the front of your face?”
“Is it getting worse?”
“I’m telling you, soon I’ll be shitting out of me nose. What can I do about it? Is there an operation I can have?”
“Like plastic surgery?”
“Kind of.”
“How much is it worrying you?”
“How much would it worry you,” he asked, “if you had shit dribbling out yer face?”
“A lot,” I said, feeling as he intended me to, that I was either stupid or mad not to grasp such a simple truth.
“Don’t mention the hooter to Henry,” he said. “We likes each other. I wouldn’t want him thinking I’m batty.”
I said, “Bushy, you wouldn’t want to be too sane. How dull is that? The sane are the only ones that can’t be cured. My first analyst used to say, ‘Our work is to heal the well, too.’”
The Harridan, who had been collecting glasses across the bar, trotted towards Bushy, pinched his gut and kissed him on the cheek. “Hallo, Bushy dear, you farting ol’ pygmy dick, gonna come and have a drink and more with me?”
He almost turned his back on her. “When I’m in a business meeting?”
“Oh dear,” she said. The Harridan succeeded in being tiny and voluminous at the same time. She didn’t move-was she on casters rather than legs?-so much as bustle. “You didn’t used to be too busy for yer little yum-yum baby.”
“This man here’s a high-flying doctor, one of the top men in the West.”
“Why’s he in here?”
“To partake of your watered vodka!”
“Always nice to have a doctor in the house, just in case.” She made a face. “Mind you, some of my girls could do with some looking into.”
“He’s a head doctor!” said Bushy impatiently, tapping his forehead and circling his finger. “A shrinker.”
“Even better!”
When she’d gone, I said, “Let’s see how the nose develops. We’re going to keep talking anyway.”
“Will you keep an eye on it?”
“Sorry?”
“My nose?”
“I will,” I said. “I will.”
“Thank God, boss, you saving me only life.”
One madman, Bushy, looking after another madman, Wolf. And neither of them heroes of desire, the sort of madmen that R. D. Laing idealised: their craziness not making an increase of life but, rather, consternation, despair, isolation. I felt as though I’d just stuck my tongue through the flimsy cigarette paper which separates sanity and madness.
Before we left, Bushy said, “Thanks, boss, for hearing me. If I have any other dreams, will you have a look at them? There won’t be too many-I can’t sleep much.”
“Okay.”
“I like you, boss. Henry’s a good geezer as well. Man, he can chat! Was he always like that?”
“Yes.”
“He won’t let her down, will he? It would destroy Miriam. You put them together-now she’s a different person, really happy. An’ she wildly pleased with you for taking care of her. She say you never did before. No one did. That’s why she got such a close family round her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
As I hurried home-thinking of myself bent forward, like a fleeing question mark-a section from Dante’s Purgatory came to me: “Accurst be thou, / Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, / Than every beast beside, yet is not fill’d; / So bottomless thy maw.”
I rang Ajita and arranged to see her. She was the person I wanted to see, the person I felt least anxious with at the moment. Then I thought how much I admired Bushy’s curiosity about his inner world, and the fact that he realised the benefit of becoming acquainted with it, recognising, too, that he couldn’t do this alone.
I’d been considering Ralph Waldo Emerson and his essay “Circles,” the first words of which are: “The eye is the first circle.” For the next few days I could look at a door and imagine an eye at the keyhole-an eye followed by a head, by a body, a man. A man who had come to hunt me down, arrest me, condemn me. For what? For being a criminal; for committing the most monstrous crime of all. Things are always what they seem.
I suspected Wolf was watching me, but he didn’t come to the flat. Perhaps he was only my dream. Echoes of echoes, and nothing known for sure.
Yet if I felt paranoid, it wasn’t without reason. Murdering someone is no way to get rid of them. Speaking from experience for once, I’d say it’s a guarantee of their repeated return. At the same time, I was hoping that Wolf had decided that persecuting me was a futile idea and had gone away. Not that I really believed or expected this. Our own wishes are no guide to reality. As far as I could work out, he had come to London only to find me and to remind me, over and over, of my crime.
At lunchtime a few days later the door bell rang, and I knew I hadn’t succeeded in keeping the Wolf from the door.
I asked, as he came in, “By the way, how did you find me?”
“I’d been thrown out of my home. My clothes, my collection of antique swords, everything was gone. During the day, in the library where I’d keep warm, I saw a book by you, in German. It was a sign you were asking to see me. It wasn’t difficult to get an address. Don’t forget my father was a cop. Now, I’m dirty.”
“Sorry?”
“Please, will you let me wash here?” He was unshaven and dishevelled. “You cannot refuse a man a little water.”
He wanted me to cook him scrambled eggs while he took a shower and freshened up. At this point he was only asking for things it would be difficult to refuse. He was trying to make his way further into my life, and I was getting used to him again.
However, when he’d washed and eaten, I told him, in my firmest voice, that financially I was on the run and always had been-every month I was one step ahead of what I owed. I had given Josephine my stake in the house, but she constantly requested more money. These days reparation for the crime of leaving your lover was limitless. Money had become the substitute for love. On top of that I had to pay for Rafi’s education for another ten years. Henry blamed Thatcher; I blamed Blair for being unable to provide good state schools for the over-eleven.
I said, “No one becomes an analyst for the money. There are scores of therapies and not enough sick people, if you can believe it. In London you fall over wealthy people everywhere, most of them without much natural intelligence or talent. It makes me crazy that I didn’t think about my financial situation as a younger man, instead of walking around depressed and arguing with myself.”
“What you say makes me unhappy. Couldn’t we do something?”
“It’s too late.”
“Yes, why would you bother when you’re all set? I am not. You know why.”
Everything bad which had happened to him since the night in the garage was my fault. If he hadn’t volunteered-out of sincere goodness-to help a mate whose girlfriend was being mistreated, he wouldn’t be in this position now: a man who had been persuaded into a murder that had stained his entire life.