Harriet’s feet walked easier after a time. She took to wearing long full skirts and cheesecloth blouses, her hair came down. She got herself a room, stopped wearing a bra every day and bought Time Out every week.
So there was her copy of Time Out in the kitchen at the shop and I had a look at the Classified adverts, CLAIRVOYANT and HYPNOTISM were available, ANOREXIA NERVOSA, CONSULTATIONS IN CONFIDENCE. Also NUDIST CLUB (Females free), MASSAGE TUITION, RUBBER ENTHUSIASTS, TAROT DIVINATION, NATURAL FOODS, CANDLE-MAKING, ATTRACTIVE ORIENTAL CHICK (Why was she in Miscellaneous instead of Lonely Hearts?), HOMOSEXUAL MEN AND WOMEN, PICNIC — Bring just one ingredient to share, ENCOUNTER, GROWTH CENTRE, QUAESITOR, KALEIDOSCOPE — Bio-Energetic Workshop. I glanced only briefly at Lonely Hearts in which Sensitive sensual male, 23, Handsome Aquarius, 37, and UP TO SIX DATES from only £1 offered themselves.
There are times when I do something and then I say: It’s come to that. That is of course different things at different times. It’s come to a lot of thats in my life and I suppose they’ll keep happening right up to the last and final one when perhaps my last words will be: It’s come to that.
BIO-FEEDBACK, said one advert. Alpha-Wave Machine. I’d read something about that in a magazine. People who can do proper meditation get into a state of quiet alertness in which their brain waves change, and there are now machines for monitoring the brain waves so you can hear yourself getting into or out of the state that produces alpha waves. I didn’t think I could make even one alpha wave, I didn’t think there was one quiet place in my brain. I just wished the turtles and Neaera H. would go away although sometimes I didn’t. I wished that I could turn off my head, stop thinking. My dreams are usually busy with Dora and the girls so I don’t even have any spare mental time when I’m asleep and I mostly wake up feeling worn out. Sexual fantasies offer a little distraction but aren’t really restful. Reading is all right but not always, Dostoyevsky overstimulates my mind. Cinemas are cosy until you have to go home, TV feels like self-abuse.
Lately my fantasies have been of a place that doesn’t exist. Not Port Liberty. Port Liberty is for the clear-eyed, the competent, the strong. My fantasy is of a give-up place. At County Hall maybe, in a grotty corridor, a door with frosted glass: DEPARTMENT OF CAPITULATION AND UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. The usual stand-up desks along the wall with dried-up biros on chains. Forms to fill in: Campaigns in which served, Terms if sought, Next of kin. A kindly Indian civil servant to give procedural advice. One capitulates or surrenders unconditionally, signs things over and is sent to some kind of refuge for non-contenders. I never imagine the refuge, just the giving up. Whether they have TV or books or brothels I don’t know but it’s out of the struggle. Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war and all that. At least there’s a model of Port Liberty but the Department of Capitulation and Unconditional Surrender doesn’t exist anywhere in any form. The loony-bin isn’t the same thing. I’m not crazy but then maybe nobody is. So I rang up Mr Bio-Feedback.
The place was in St John’s Wood. Big bright spacious flat, high ceilings. The kind of flat that so many young Americans seem to have found or inherited from expatriate uncles before rents went up and unfurnished flats became impossible to find. Mattresses on the floor with Indian spreads, many colourful cushions, some modern things, some rattan. Home-made abstractions and blown-up photos on the walls. Lots of shelves, lots of books. Expensive sound-equipment, speakers about four feet high.
The young man with the Bio-Feedback machine was a sleek and healthy beard-and-sandals American with a wonderful head of hair that looked as if it might charge him like a battery pack. Very peaceful and serene-looking, looked as if there were mostly alpha waves in his head. Cheques from home, I thought. Very likely never worked a day in his life. Family man too, the bathroom was full of toys and infant gear.
The alpha-wave detector was quite a modest little plastic-box affair that didn’t look as if it had more than £5 worth of parts and labour in it. He’d set it up on an impressive scaffolding of planks and pipes but it still didn’t look like more than £5.
‘What do you do for a living?’ I said.
‘This,’ he said peacefully. ‘And I’m the company’s representative for the machines so I’ll be selling them too.’
I sank into one of those big plastic hassocks that look like overripe tomatoes that have hit the ground and somehow not burst.
‘You?’ he said while he dabbed electrolytic jelly on the side and back of my head and fitted the electrodes. I felt ashamed of my dandruff.
‘Assistant in a bookshop,’ I said.
‘I thought it might be something literary in one way or another,’ he said. He turned on the machine, set the volume. ‘It’s a wave frequency filter and amplifier,’ he said. ‘You’ll hear the alpha waves.’
I listened. Dead silence.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said.
‘I don’t think I’ve got any alpha waves,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got anything but noise and static in my head.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Everybody has alpha waves. Are you into meditation at all?’
‘No,’ I said. I closed my eyes. Silence from the machine. I thought of a grey heron I’d seen once flying over a marsh flapping very slowly. A nice serene thought. Silence from the machine. I let go of the heron, let myself sink back into whatever there might be to sink back into in my mind.
Cluck cluck cluck, said the machine quietly.
‘That’s alpha waves,’ said the young man.
I drifted into it again. Cluck cluck cluck cluck, said the machine in another little burst of chicken talk.
I went on with it for a while, I’d paid £2 for the hour. Sometimes I got bursts of ten or fifteen clucks together and was quite pleased with myself. That accounts for my not having gone mad, I thought. There must be quiet places in my head where I get a little rest now and then without knowing about it. A cheering thought.
I took off the electrodes. ‘What about your alpha waves?’ I said. ‘Are you good at it?’
‘Don’t you want to keep going?’ he said. ‘You still have more time.’
‘I don’t think I have the patience for a whole hour of it,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear you do it.’
He wired himself up with the electrodes, closed his eyes and looked even more serene than before. Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck, went the machine steadily and smoothly like a Geiger counter next to a piece of uranium. It clucked almost continuously, with only the briefest of pauses.
I shook my head. What was there to say? He wiped the jelly off my dandruff.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and got up to leave.
‘Do you think you’d like to do it again?’ he said.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘But it’s nice to know the alpha waves are there sometimes.’
As I was going out he said, ‘I didn’t give you quite a straight answer when you asked me what I did for a living.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to, I only asked out of curiosity.’
‘Actually I’ve been living on money from the States,’ he said. ‘But I hope to get going with this.’
I went home with my alpha waves. You never know what you’ve got going for you. Who knows what other kinds of waves are clucking along inside me, maybe homing me in on something good somewhere, sometime.