— Larry, you have let me. By telling me.
— Pooh. A journalist.
— A friend, Larry. A daily friend from the sum of all your days. You’ve kept your promise.
— What! Telford, what exactly have I told you?
— Like I said, all I want, no more.
— I have a story but no name.
— Well, I can’t use your name anyway. But I accept the reality of your story –
— But which story, for heaven’s sake, surely you can let me hear the tape?
— Not now. It needs editing. It wouldn’t help you, Larry, the incoherence –
— Did I mention … something, anything, about …
— Something of this, something of that. You spoke confusedly about many things, and ideas, and people. That doesn’t matter. I’ll sort it out and make some sort of sense of it, take what I want, it depends on what I get elsewhere, you see, about which I have only a hazy notion, but I’ll mix you in, don’t worry. I’ll make the film in such a way that others will accept it.
— Oh yes. The law of probability as to that works out at a thousand million to one. So what will you do? You’ll use illusion, camera-tricks and stand-ins.
— I’d rather not use a stand-in for you, Larry.
— You ask all the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers, the wrong picture made of itsy bits of nothing … What promise, anyway?
— Oh, a promise we made long ago, which you seem to have forgotten, oddly enough, to meet again at double our ages and …
— and what, have a cosy chat, about life and love, truth, beauty and goodness or else, what, our achievements?
— and … expose ourselves.
— I see. And what have you exposed?
— A traitor, Larry. The Judas in all real friendship, who betrays in order to understand, or perhaps because he understands.
— Ah, what good listeners trained interviewers make. They probe, they pry and all the time they merely prepare traps, to show their superiority over something or other.
— Like psychiatrists?
— But then, nobody really listens.
— I really listened, Larry, believe me.
— Yes, doubly, with your inner and your outer ears, or so I thought. But your inner ears stood in fact outside yourself, a mere mechanical device lurking behind the sofa, with useful gaseous matter between us to propagate and distort the sound-waves travelling through it and upset the definition. I thought the acoustics of friendship corked the space around us, that the giant ear of the world had died, that I consisted of no matter and spoke backwards in silent bubbles up the time-scale as in a vacuum created by my trust.
— In speaking to me, Larry, you spoke to the world, your other self, your twin. And the world, consists of people. Each with a love of something, a fear of the unknown, however buried –
— Goodbye. Tell-Star.
The conversation bleeps at a non-natural impulse along the nerve fibres, blood-vessels, muscle spindles of the empty city, through to the Whale and River constellations and perhaps getting a reply if any intelligent life exists or has existed five hundred thousand light-years ago, although a blockage occurs when waves requiring matter to propagate themselves find none. Something however creates the wavering outlines that make the nervous handwriting across the dials and if not the eyes then some faint memory, surely, behind the eyes, filaments of gas in violent motion or extragalactic nebulae in collision. But if we survey the space around our galaxy, Ladies and Gentlemen, we find it very empty, for no other comes closer than a million light-years or so, making the chances of collision fairly negligible. Yet great clusters occur, moving at over two thousand miles per second, so that most of the noise must come from colliding galaxies. Some argue, nevertheless, that parts of a divided nucleus recede from one another at great speed, the violent processes involving collision of interstellar matter and ejection of high energy particles from the atmosphere of young stars, that cause the nervous handwriting across the dials in bleeping peaks and plains, letters to citizens in bright imperatives, drink infra-red, do not spit gamma-rays and see the ungrown foetus of men’s love inside their atmospheric density, say it with smells of primitive noises from their deepest entrails if any, for we make the bumps as we go along with a great waste of horsepower more and more disorganized and no control-panel, only the little orange lights that flicker Uninhibit, Next Instruction, Pot Drawer and things like that, red, amber, green, bright cepheids, Blue Giants and new concentrations that may ultimately form hi pa, oh my sweet Potato. But how changed, enormous eyes painted black all round and how did you get in?
— The landlady let me in, pa. My, you look awful. Worse than in hospital.
— Did you see me in hospital, Patricia?
— Course.
— But surely, surely your mother hasn’t let you come here alone?
— To the big city? Course. Why not? Well, not quite alone. I travelled alone, but she put me on the train.
— But where —?
— Oh, I stayed with my boy friend last night. Why did you call me sweet potato? Does that mean you fancy me after all or something?
— My darling little girl. Come here. Of course. More than anything in the world. Haven’t I shown, petted, taught you to speak, played cat’s cradle with out meridians –
— You do say funny things, pa. Heh, that tickles, laugh, you thought I’d died, my love, kiss kiss bang bang, steady on there, pa, you got a complex or something?
— You’ve grown, Patricia.
— Well, two years, pa, what d’you expect? You’ve hardly seen me.
— Didn’t you come home, for the holidays?
— Home? No. Ma farmed me out with Stan and Liz. Said you needed quiet or something. Martin came home though. Funny that, with his trumpet and all. I never made any noise at all. But you can’t follow the logic of crumblers.
— Patricia. I don’t understand. Your mother — and why do you call her ma, Patricia? I find it ugly.
— All the girls call their crumblers ma and pa now.
— Crumblers. I suppose you mean parents.
— Well, what do names matter? Got a cigarette?
— What, at your age?
— Nearly fifteen pa, don’t act square. Thanks.
— And what did you say, just now, about staying with your boy friend?
— Larry. Funny that, don’t you think? You’d say I’d got a complex no doubt. Nice. Plays the guitar. Bit off, though, not very bright. Unlike me.
— But Pat, my sweet, do you — I mean what do you mean, stayed with him?
— With his uncle and aunt. Crumblers too but all right. Nice in fact. Nicer than him.
— But do you sleep with him?
— Well, one hardly sleeps.
— All right, make love.
— And there again, I wouldn’t call it that either, if it exists at all. His performance, shall we say, lacks something. And he has pimples.
— So.
— Only a stage, of course. Still, by the time he’s grown out of that and handsome I’ll have grown out of him. Already have. A lot of rot, really, why does everyone make such a fuss about it?
— One day –
— Oh, one day I’ll understand everything, I know that but not love, pa, it doesn’t interest me, a thing that gets squares round in circles, like Stan says, no crumbier he, despite his paunch and grey hair, ma understands anyway. No, I’ll solve the universe, pa. Can I go to Cambridge like you? I’ve passed my –