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Dear God, teach me to be careless.
*
Come on. Forward.
What do runaways wear? This is important. I should make a list, as Susan has taught me. At Victor’s there will be no proper place for my clothes. I am quite fastidious about such things. It would be better to leave most of them here. But if Susan has any flair she will slash my Vivienne Westwood jacket. It would be dispiriting if my departure went unnoticed – a measure of delirium is essential. As for shoes, I can’t take many pairs, but I will require something both stylish and comfortable to give myself confidence.
I have several suits, each of which I favour at different times and like to wear out to lunch, an event I look forward to all morning, since it is the first time in the day that I become aware of other people. This week I fancy the double-breasted four-button pinstripe. The trousers are tapered, with flat front pockets. I wear them with dark blue suede loafers. It’s not boxy but wearing it makes me feel magisterial. I am convinced I will be served first in shops and that I can talk down to people. I will need it for all the bars and restaurants I will be visiting with Victor, to offset his sky-blue number. But I can’t go round like that every day. I will need other clothes too.
I bought a brown checked suit the other day, a light, summer thing, to cheer myself up. It has to be altered and they won’t send it over for a few days. I bought shirts too, but I can’t remember how many or in what colours. I can’t stay here just for that; I will have to ring the shop and get the stuff diverted. I can’t even wear it yet. And by the time the weather has turned warmer, I will have been gone a while.
I remove my signed photograph of John Lennon from the wall and slip it into the empty bag. That is something to take. A handful of CDs too. Alfred Brendel or Emil Gilels? Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding? Perhaps I should remind myself that I am absconding, not appearing on Desert Island Discs. Yet I still can’t hear the beginning of ‘Stray Cat Blues’ without wanting to hitchhike to Spain with a teenager. I am, too, more likely to listen to Hot Rats than I am to read Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, Beckett and the other poets of solitude and dread that restored me as a young man. Probably it is the human condition that we are ultimately isolated, and will die alone. But tonight, standing here, I want so much to reach out that I could punch through the window.
Patience is a virtue only in children and the imprisoned. Neither Susan nor I are impulsive. In the middle-class way, while others were frolicking and wasting – how I envied any prolonged dissipation! – we both planned and contained our frivolity in order to get all we have. I had a teacher who used to say that every extra year of education adds five thousand pounds to your income for life. I have been able to rise at five, leave the house and get to my desk by five-forty-five. I have excelled at relinquishing things I liked – it isn’t any fun giving up things that are not fun. When unnerved I start seeking pleasures to relinquish. But Victor – or is it his therapist, it is easy to confuse those conspirators these days – says toleration can become a bad habit. Yes, I will defer deferral. I am getting on with it. I want it now!
I have been drinking. I will put down the beer bottle, after this swig.
How little directness there is, when you look around! We have to make things distinct by indirection. What a redundant and fearful dance it all is, as if our feelings are weapons that could kill, and words are their bullets. I will go upstairs, sit on the edge of the bed, and tell Susan firmly and truthfully that I am going to leave. I can’t stay here another night. What’s the point? How absurd to think that this is something one could prepare for! There is only the unknown and my coming to terms with it. I will pack, kiss the children, and go! It will be done and I will be away.
Yes!
My children hunt through their toy boxes, chucking aside the once-cherished to drag out what they need to keep themselves interested. I am the same with books, music, pictures, newspapers. Can we do this with people? That would be considered shallow. We must treat other people as if they were real. But are they?
Yet what makes me think I should have what I want? Surely you can’t constantly be replacing people who don’t provide what you need? There must be other opportunities for sustenance – in pictures, books, dance – even within. Yet all these forms are enraptured by love and desire, and are created from them.
Susan, who is four years younger than me, thinks we live in a selfish age. She talks of a Thatcherism of the soul that imagines that people are not dependent on one another. In love, these days, it is a free market; browse and buy, pick and choose, rent and reject, as you like. There’s no sexual and social security; everyone has to take care of themselves, or not. Fulfilment, self-expression and ‘creativity’ are the only values.
Susan would say that we require other social forms. What are they? Probably the unpleasant ones: duty, sacrifice, obligation to others, self-discipline.
When she says such things I wonder if we haven’t been a particularly privileged and spoilt generation. Between the deprivation of the post-war slump, and the cruelties of the eighties, we were the children of innocent consumerism and the inheritors of the freedoms won by our seditious elders in the late sixties. We had a free, superior and somewhat lazy education. Then we went on the dole for five years in order to pursue our self-righteous politics, before starting work in the media and making a lot of money. We weren’t much restrained by morality or religion. Music, dancing and conscienceless fucking were our totems. We boasted that we were the freest there’d ever been.
Like the hippies we disdained materialism. Yet we were less frivolous than the original ‘heads’. If we dropped out to become carpenters and gardeners it was because we wanted to share the experience of the working class. We were an earnest and moral generation, with severe politics. We were the last generation to defend communism. I knew people who holidayed in Albania; apparently the beaches are exquisite. An acquaintance supported the Soviet Union on the day they invaded Afghanistan.
We were dismissive and contemptuous of Thatcherism, but so captivated by our own ideological obsessions that we couldn’t see its appeal. Which isn’t to say we didn’t fight it. There was the miners’ strike, and the battles at Wapping. We were left enervated and confused. Soon we didn’t know what we believed. Some remained on the left; others retreated into sexual politics; some became Thatcherites. We were the kind of people who held the Labour Party back.
Still, I never understood the elevation of greed as a political credo. Why would anyone want to base a political programme on bottomless dissatisfaction and the impossibility of happiness? Perhaps that was its appeal: the promise of luxury that in fact promoted endless work.
My friends and I talk of culture, the state of our minds, and work. But rarely, now, of what could be; there are adjustments but not revolution. There have been enough revolutions. If Marx had been our begetter, the ideologue of the century’s first half, Freud was our new father, as we turned inwards. Certainly, the world in which we negotiate our days at work, in love, in our hobbies, in sport – is one of other people, described, these days, in language derived from analysis. Most of my friends seem to spend most of their time on their backs, sleeping, fucking, or having therapy and talking about their ‘relationships’ on the phone.
The women, I think, were fortunate to go in two directions at once, into themselves and out into the history world. They examined their lives more than we did; they experimented; the interesting ones changed more than we did. What is left? The freedoms Nina takes for granted, a free girl swinging about the city. All is absorbed.
I never married Susan. She asked me several times, in a number of moods, hoping, I suppose, to move or amuse me with one or other of them. It might have been her liking for weddings that put me off, and her fondness for chiffon and those thick cardboard invitations with embossed writing. Certainly I enjoyed making her the only unmarried woman in her group of friends from university. She learned that her love involved sacrifice. Anyhow, I still to
ok it for granted that not marrying was a necessary rebellion. The family seemed no more than a machine for the suppression and distortion of free individuals. We could make our own original and flexible arrangements.
I have been told the reasons for the institution of permanent marriage – its being a sacrament, an oath, a promise, all that. Or a profound and irrevocable commitment to the principle as much as to the person. But I can’t quite remember the force and the detail of the argument. Does anyone?
Asif will know. He is an intellectual. But even he doesn’t dangle his tongue in his wife’s hole on principle.
I asked Nina to marry me.
‘I can’t,’ she said.
‘I won’t ask again.’
‘Yes, ask,’ she said. ‘Ask.’
Victor says marrying is too expensive. The women take all your money.
Not that Nina ever asked for anything. She was too proud and scared of change for that. ‘I don’t want to be one of those well-fed women,’ she’d say. ‘Not yet,’ I’d reply.
If I offered to give or lend her money, she looked horrified, as if everything, suddenly being made so easy, was devalued. Scarcity was part of her life, including love. Sometimes too much of everything is as bad as too little.
You pick up other people’s feelings. Mother wanted to leave. She would stay; she would always have to stay. Women of her time had no money of their own and nowhere to go. They did, after all, have televisions and fridges. Inside she was on the run – from me; from all of us. Children stop you living. That’s what her unhappiness told us. It’s them or you.
Mother won’t say much about my leaving. She is a little scared of me now, having angered me too much. But she will say that it is bad for the children. Odd how the needs of children seem so often to coincide exactly with the opinions of their parents.
Not only does Susan work until seven, but she attends dinner parties, goes to the cinema and theatre, and sits on boards. She may be exhausted but she’s involved. After I’m gone there will be devastation. A lone middle-aged woman with kids doesn’t have much cachet, and Susan is always aware of her status. Successful and well-off, I was considered a catch, once. I was offered a lot of work, particularly from America. I wasn’t precious about what I did; not precious enough, probably. But talent is always at a premium; everything else requires it. In certain moods she has been proud of me. A man can give a woman gravity and light. Perhaps she would rather have a busted, broken-backed relationship than nothing at all. At least there is someone to empty the dustbin. She will, unfortunately, become the recipient of sympathy. At dinner parties divorced men will be placed next to her. In the end, she will get by without me. In my view she’ll be better off that way, though she can’t see it yet. And I, without her?
Recently I have been tempted by a dream of self-sufficiency: a small flat, a cat, books, TV, music, a dope plant, friends to dinner; a museum on Sunday, followed by a bus ride to the end of the route with one of my sons. Alone but not lonely. I was living alone before I got back together with Susan. The first boy was conceived out of isolation, you could say, a few months after Father died. Yes; I understand the temptations of self-sufficiency, the idea that we can secure everything we need within, that our own caresses are as lovely as another’s. But I don’t want to be so seduced again. I will throw myself on others, going all the way, not hovering on the fringe of life.
Victor’s flat is in a fashionable, bohemian part of town. There will be plenty of bars and restaurants to go to in the evenings. But he keeps most of his possessions in suitcases, and his washing in a pile in the corner with a damp towel on top. The only food in the kitchen is a loaf of bread, a rancid pat of butter, and several pots of jam, pilfered from hotels. To keep himself going Victor scoffs vitamin pills with his beer.
Victor has a disturbed mind, at times. His head booms like an ancient cavern filled with deadly creatures. I have considered it a sign of intense life to be so tormented. Victor yearns for quality of life, by which he means a quality of feeling, not things. But would you want to live with someone like that? Three times a week he weeps at his therapist’s. Five years and no sign of a cure. His therapist has told him to express himself. They offer such advice without considering the public. Who says self-expression improves your mental health? Look at the artists: art therapy every day. You’d think they’d be the sanest people around, Van Gogh, Rothko and all.
Victor gets competitive; men do. He wants what I have, and he wants to be like me. It’s painful being him, but he asks for too much, and sometimes hates me for being myself.
I turn out the lights and find myself climbing the stairs to the bedroom. What am I doing? If this is my last night here, if these are, indeed, the final hours, hadn’t I better get packed and ready? Soon I will be dead. Is it really the last night? No, no, no, never. Not really. I was only entertaining myself. Perhaps I will take a chance. That’s a good idea. If she is awake … what? Yes; I will talk to her a little – after all, she has guided me out of confusion before. Then I will sleep, and continue as usual next morning. I will be glad to have endured this instructive and heavy discontent, but will have done nothing excessive.
I leave the light on in the hall. I step into the room.
I can make out your hair in the jumble of blankets and pillows. I stand looking at you.
I wish you were someone else.
Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy? Is it too much to want to sleep in someone’s willing arms?
It’s been weeks since we fucked. I’ve stopped approaching Susan in that way, to see whether, by any chance, she desires me. I have waited for a flicker of interest, not to mention lust or abandon. I am a dog under the table, hoping for a biscuit. Not a crumb.
Without removing my clothes I lie down. Yellow light streaks the room from the streetlamp opposite. It is a harsh, sickly colour, reminding me of the smell of gas. I look at the ceiling where the roof has been leaking. Someone has to be here to sort it out. Without me looking authoritative, the workmen could take advantage.
In the street there are raised voices. Most nights there is some kind of altercation. My neighbours punch one another, and worse, at every opportunity. Every couple of months a car is torched.
It’s a mixed area: immaculate black women in white smocks, head-scarves and long skirts go to the Farrakhan Centre nearby, the men in lounge suits and little red bow ties. Thin, efficient white boys in short-sleeved Ben Shermans, with short, neat hair, hurry to fights, carrying bags of chips. Black men in tattered shirts and shapeless trousers shamble to the pub on the corner. Smart women in black with briefcases go to and from work. Outside the pubs wait women with pushchairs – the girl-babies with pierced ears – yelling through the open door at their permanently parked men staring up at the TV screen. The supermarkets have guards in ill-fitting uniforms watching you from the top of the aisle as you plump the fruit.
There’s little to steal. There’s more in my fridge than there is in most of the shops. You wonder why people put up with it. But they’ve got used to it; they can’t see that things could be different. It is not how much that people demand which surprises me, but how little.
It is not a safe area, and in the morning I am going. Victor’s wife, I remember, rang him urgently after he left, to say there had been an attempted burglary. He was surprised, on returning home, to see the windows had been broken – from the inside.
Now I am warm and getting dozy. The bed is comfortable. The house is silent; the children sheltered, healthy and asleep. She made a lovely meal. Having finished the wine, I have been contentedly swilling my brandy in the glass she bought me.
In India they don’t seem to put the same emphasis on romantic love. Couples copulate when necessary and get on with their separate lives. In Lahore my uncle lives in one part of the house with his sons, three brothers, male friends, and anyone else who feels like staying a couple of years. My aunt, the daughters, female servants, and the children, live in another part. T
hey meet, at times, but there is no funny business.
Perhaps it is a fine idea to have the women close but not too close. Presumably, over there they suppress their desire, but I am of a generation that believes in the necessity of satisfying oneself.
Maybe; but I have lost my relish for living. I am apathetic and most of the time want nothing, except to understand why there hasn’t been more happiness here. Is it like this for everyone? Is this all you get? Is this the most there could be?
In the morning I will be gone.
It is my yearning for more life that has done this, and we are yearning creatures, a bag of insistent wants. Sense says one needn’t follow every impulse, pursuing every woman one fancies. But one can, I guess, run after some of them, never knowing in advance what glory one might find.
Susan stirs.
Which scientist was it said bodies never meet? I stroke her back. I am convinced she can feel my thoughts, can feel me wanting her. If she wakes up, puts out her arms and says she loves me, I will sink back into the pillow and never leave. But she has never done such a thing; nor me to her. In fact, sensing my fingers on her, she moves away, pulling up the covers.