40 Neaera H
When I opened the door to my flat it was like opening a box of stale time. Old time, dead time. The windows were all closed, the place was quite airless. I opened the windows, looked out over the square. I think I’ve read that grains of wheat taken from Egyptian tombs have grown when planted. Wheat yes, time no. There’s a mummy at the British Museum, a woman if I remember rightly, I haven’t been to the Egyptian Antiquities collection for a long time. Strange, to be dead and collected. She’s lying on her side in a sleeping position and as I see her in my mind she looks more alone than if she were lying formally on her back with folded hands. Her skin is old parchment, there’s nothing personal about it, her bones are just bones. But her sleeping attitude is naked and private, the privacy of her sleep remains even though there’s no longer a person inside it.
When I turned on the lights the night outside looked so black that I switched them off again. Shutting out the night makes it blacker. I remembered being a child out of doors in the dark of summer evenings, winter evenings, late dark and early. One saw perfectly well, it never seemed really dark until I came into the house. Then the night outside the windows would be very black.
I didn’t know what to do really, didn’t know how to pick up where I left off. There no longer seemed to be continuity in my life. The road went up to the turtle-launching and ended there at a chasm where the bridge was out.
I turned on the light in Madame Beetle’s tank. There were snails in the tank, red ones, six or seven of them. They were cleaning up the algae, there were little clear meanders on the glass where they’d been working. Yesterday’s and today’s meat lay pale and wan on the bottom. The snails were working on that as well. Madame Beetle was in the corner of the tank under the filter sponge. There was a note under the china bathing beauty, I read it by the light of the tank:
Took the liberty of dropping in
a clean-up squad. Can take them
back if you don’t want them.
Best wishes,
WEBSTER DE VERE
Cheek, I thought. If I wanted to run a dirty aquarium that was my business. Come to think of it Madame Beetle was a predator, why hadn’t she had a go at the snails? Tired maybe.
I looked in my bag for cigarettes and there was the letter to Harry Rush still unposted. I lit a cigarette, went out of the flat and down to the corner. There are two telephone kiosks and a pillar box there. The telephone kiosks aren’t the same size, one of them’s larger and more heavily built than the other. I always think of them as bull and cow. They stood there, red in the dark, dark in the light of the street lamp, the bull telephone and the cow telephone and the pillar box. None of them said a word as I pushed the letter through the slot and it dived into the dark. Goodbye £1,000. It was never really there.
41 William G
I woke up. There you are, I thought: life goes on. There was an old German film I saw at the National Film Theatre, Harry Bauer was in it. Massive man, head like a bald granite statue. In the film he was in prison for a long stretch, twelve years I think. He marked off the days on the wall of his cell with a bit of charcoal. When he got to the half-way mark he threw back his head and let out a hoarse cry. I thought of trying a hoarse cry, decided not to. Anyhow I was past the half-way point.
Saturday it was. Nine o’clock. I looked out of the window. The day was grey and wet. Harriet would be on her way to the shop. My mind turned away from everything all at once. I realized at that moment that the end of all things need not be difficult. No effort of any kind, just a turning away by whatever means might come to hand.
I went to the bathroom. Sandor hadn’t cleaned the bath. A ring of Sandor dirt round it, Sandor pubic hair. Rage coursed through my veins. I’d had a whole life, a house and a family! And it had come to this: Sandor’s pubic hair in a rented bath.
I cleaned the bath, had a bath, shaved even though it was Saturday. Dressed, went to make my breakfast. Sandor’d left the cooker filthy and evil-smelling as usual.
I went down the hall, knocked on his door. I was shaking all over. Sandor opened the door. He was in his dressing-gown, some lurid Persian-looking thing. He was wearing red velvet slippers that made his feet look very white, the hair on his ankles very black. His feet turned out as if there were no limit to the amount of space they could take up.
‘Too much!’ I heard myself saying. ‘Too much!’ I said it again.
‘What you mean?’ said Sandor, filling up the doorway and growing larger. His breath smelt the same as the cooker. Squid? Kelp? Goat hair?
‘Too much!’ I said again like some clockwork idiot.
‘What?’ said Sandor with a very red face and a very black moustache. ‘What the devil you mean?’
‘You clean that cooker,’ I said.
‘What clean cooker? Who say?’ said Sandor. More breath.
‘You clean cooker, I say.’ I poked him in the chest with my finger. Springy chest, great deal of hair.
‘Mind,’ he said. ‘Go slow, I caution you. Piss off. All best.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not all best. All bleeding worst. Clean that cooker right now.’ I grabbed him by the lapels of his dressing-gown. I was quite surprised to see my hands shoot out and do it. Thin wrists.
‘Aha!’ said Sandor. ‘You better don’t make trouble, you.’ His hands shot out. Thick wrists. All of a sudden I was turned round with my left arm twisted up behind my back. I flung my right arm back as hard as I could and caught him in the face, then we were both on the floor and he had me in, yes, a scissors grip. I started to laugh but lost valuable breath doing it. What a terrible pong he had. His personal smell, no amount of bathing would have helped. He tightened his legs and I felt all my ribs crack. I might have known that a man with a moustache and an accent like that would be an accomplished wrestler. I wished I’d waited till he’d got his trousers on, he was only wearing underpants and I hated his bare legs round me.
We’d fallen out of his doorway into the hall. My face was on the musty threadbare carpet, one ear pressed to the silence of the carpet, the other listening to Sandor’s heavy breathing as he squeezed harder. A train went by on the far side of the common and in my mind I saw it under the wet grey sky, under the trailing edges of grey cloud drifting, the single clatter of the train as lonely, as only as a trawler out at sea, the only diesel putter on the wide grey sea with silence all round as far as the eye could see.
In my mind I saw the wet iron rails receding Putney-wards, cold wet iron in the rain, red lights, green lights shining on the iron, shining red, shining green, fixed and flashing, no confusion. The rails led very likely to Port Liberty. That was my mistake, I’d always thought a sea approach and never thought how very iron and wet the rails were. Tower Hill, the lights would say that passed beyond the trees along the common, Upminster or Edgware. I could see in my mind the grey and rainy air over the trains, over the common, in between the branches of the trees. I stretched out my hands, thought of holding the grey air cool and wet in my hands.
I’d been wrong to feel my past no longer mine. I was joined umbilically to all pasts but why labour it. Squeezing was all very well, the question was: did one in fact want to come out. Was one willing. To be. For whom was the effort being made? Not the untold jackdaws walking on the quay, I wasn’t going to believe that. I’d asked a straight question and I wanted a straight answer. Was it for her? Was it for him? I didn’t think it was for me. Go ahead and squeeze, I thought. I’m not coming out just because you want me out. It bloody isn’t for me.