On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (18 page)

Second floor. Room 5. I knew that the man who came shuffling to the door had died while he was still in his thirties. Less than ten years ago. Now, like someone else I had only a vague recollection of having come across quite recently, he could well have been getting on for seventy.

He was gaunt, pale, haggard. Stooped. His sparse blond hair, several shades lighter than my own despite its matted greasy dirt, had at sometime been pulled back in a ponytail but had largely worked loose of its rubber band and now fell in lank strands. His clothes were filthy and they stank. Or he did. Or the room did. Most probably all three.

My first words caught in my throat while I tried to adjust to this further air of fetidness; the rest of the house had been a long way from sweet-smelling.

“Mr Tibbotson. You won't remember me. I'm—”

“Daniel Casement,” he interjected in the flat reedy voice which more than his appearance, more than the brown tweed jacket and the light grey trousers, the white shirt and maroon tie, put me right back into that classroom in Nottingham where I'd most often heard it. He spoke the name with no suggestion of pleasure, nor even with any discernible surprise—although I suspected it had never been within his nature to show much surprise at anything.

And I could hardly have expected pleasure, could I, whatever the gaps in his present social calendar?

Indeed perhaps only because he'd been conditioned not to leave a visitor standing on the doorstep did he grudgingly invite me in. It was a courtesy I might willingly have dispensed with; the staircase and the landings, as I've said, seemed marginally less foul.

The room had mouse droppings scattered across its bare boards—along with other kinds of detritus. I saw this even by the dim wattage of the naked light bulb. There were no curtains at the window but the encrusted dirt on the glass threw everything into premature darkness—I guessed it was probably mid-afternoon—even though there'd been no hint of sunshine in the street. A half-filled bucket which you'd think most people would have covered, or at least tucked away into a corner, appeared to contain more than just one day's release of urine.

Of excrement as well. Some of it—or all of it—had floated to the top.

We sat on a pair of creaky chairs beneath the flyspecked bulb. Thank God he offered no refreshment.

“So
you've
been sent here too?” he commented at last—and in those few words there was, undoubtedly, pleasure. “The great Mr Daniel Casement, the boy we always deemed most likely to succeed … since he was unfailingly so good at pushing past, or knocking aside, anyone who stood in his path.”

This onslaught took me unawares. And his tone wasn't flat any longer. Similarly at school the only times it hadn't been flat were when shot through with either vitriol or pain.

“Who's we?” I asked.

“Everybody. Certainly all of us in the staffroom.”

“And is that really how they spoke of me?” He nodded with clear satisfaction. “But I thought the teachers—I thought most of the teachers—”

“Liked you? Yes. I'm sure that's what you thought. You always had that overweening ego.”

I truly didn't recognize this as being a valid description of myself; either at school or in the years that followed.

“You've no idea how sickening it was to see you flash around your sex appeal—or what you must have thought of in that way. It was all a bit pathetic really. One can see that now.”

I said nothing. It was true I could remember consciously employing charm on occasion, to achieve whatever I was after.

“Yet somehow you acquired this little gang of simpletons and sycophants. A gang whose every member was unpleasant though not nearly up to your own level. God how I hated having to teach the form which most of you were in! Always I had to pause outside the classroom before I could finally bring myself to open the door and stride in looking confident.”

He had never looked confident.

“But you got at me,” I said, “from the very moment you walked in. Just couldn't seem to leave me alone. Seemed positively to want me … I don't know …
want
me to be unpleasant.”

“No. No one asks to have his life made miserable.”

“Well anyway. Whatever the rights and wrongs you clearly got the whole thing so tragically out of proportion. I was only a—”

“No one asks to be driven to the point of breakdown. No one asks to be hounded on towards despair and suicide.”

Oh come off it I wanted to say. You can't offload that kind of crap onto me; one silly little schoolboy can't be held responsible for a grown man deciding to put his head inside a gas oven. (And hadn't he even taken off his jacket and tie before he'd done it I wondered.)

“And even now it doesn't end. I am
still
in a state of despair. Thanks to you. What's more—it never will end. Here there's just no let-up. No way you can destroy yourself and finally have done with it.”

And it was all there in his expression: he wanted me to know precisely what I'd set in motion, wanted me to know that it was merely a beginning, there could be no idea of my ever—
ever
—being able to atone. I must remember him for all time.

“So what price happiness?” he asked. “What price eternal peace of mind?” Yes he was talking about
me
now not himself. And he actually laughed as he did so, laughed quite wildly. He showed his greyish tombstone teeth; he showed the craziness in his gunge-filled eyes. I swiftly looked away.

But it was scarcely more comfortable to glance about the room. You saw at once what he was up against, or some small part of it, you saw at once—

“Don't even think it!” he exclaimed. “Don't even think you can
begin
to understand!”

I nodded guiltily.

“To mention,” he went on, “only a couple of things. Which still won't give you any understanding—but it could maybe bring me a measure of relief merely to talk of them. Even to the likes of you.”

He scratched his head reflectively. His fingernails were jagged—dirt-rimmed—and I again averted my eyes, pushed back my chair a little, to avoid all those airborne flakes of dead skin I could imagine whirling about me.

“Every day and almost all day long the man in the next room coughs and hawks and clears his sinuses. You think that isn't much? The walls are paper-thin and you just sit here and
wait
for that following small explosion. Then every day around this time he somehow stops it for an hour or two so every day around this time my hopes get raised, I start to think Well maybe that's the end of it … I know of course it's not.”

“And the other thing?” I asked, after a suitable pause—which did in fact contain a good amount of sympathy. (How couldn't it have?) Not enough though. The sources of other people's irritation can never be as wearing as the sources of your own.

“The other thing: the two men overhead who were once tap dancers and who still rehearse their routines every night—
all
night—for all the world as though they're now preparing for a comeback. These are such petty things you're going to say. I can assure you they're not. Does hell accomplish nothing more you're going to say. I can assure you it does. Yet scarcely needs to.”

“Then can't you speak to them, these men?”

“That wouldn't change a thing.”

“Why not?”

“Just trust me—it wouldn't.”

He then added however: “But still I think of them sleeping solidly throughout the day and so I bang upon my ceiling as fiercely as I can. Every half-hour or so. Yet neither this nor my neighbour's constant hacking—in which case I might have seen some point even in
that
…”

“Maybe it will stop sometime”—an immensely lame offering—“for some reason which you can't foresee. Maybe you'll get new neighbours.”

“No.”

“Why? How can you sound so sure?”

“You still don't get it do you? You don't even come within a mile of getting it. And I suppose you used to kid yourself that you were bright? Even the stupidest do that.”

I gave a shrug.

“Because, you numbskull, the days in hell repeat themselves and repeat themselves and repeat themselves. Endlessly. In every dreary detail.”

“But how can they? How can the days merely repeat themselves? The very fact we're talking to each other now…?”

“You come here every afternoon.”

“What?”

“And we always hold this selfsame conversation. Next I shall say to you, ‘You've only just arrived in hell, you haven't got the least conception of the way it works,' and you will say, ‘Then if I've only just arrived…?' And I shall say, ‘They always knew that you'd be coming. But they couldn't wait to reunite me with my greatest earthly torment, they gave me daily previews of how it would forever be.'”

I shook my head, in point-blank denial.

“Of course,” he continued, “how do I know whether you're still merely a projection or indeed the bona fide article? I don't. But I suppose, when you think about it, it doesn't really make a lot of difference.”

I did think about it. But it was extraordinarily difficult to get to grips with, and despite everything else I'd heard, my mind seized selfishly upon one isolated phrase.

“But how can
I
ever have been anybody's greatest earthly torment? I simply don't see it.”

“That's what you always say and I assure you that you may not have meant it and would probably never actually have wished it on anybody, not even such as you would wantonly have done that, but all the same … And then you say, ‘I don't believe in predestination, just can't, just won't!', and I say, ‘This isn't a matter of predestination, it's only a matter of foreknowledge,' and then your poor butterfly mind, always unable to settle for too long on any single point of discussion, flits away from that one and you say—”

“But this time I'm real. This time I'm real! This time I'm here!”

“Exactly.”

And he again grinned his death's-head grin—with what again could have been taken for genuine enjoyment.

“Yes. And how are the mighty fallen! Eh? I'll wager that you—
you
—never supposed your life would end in failure.”

“No—and it didn't either.” Sympathy was one thing; but I was only prepared to extend it so far.

“Indeed, end in the greatest failure of them all,” he said. “Just like my own life did. Just like mine! In the end you came down to the same level; you can't much like the thought of that!
Us
with a common bond!”

Yes surely his pleasure now was genuine. Even in hell you could experience pleasure maybe so long as it sprang from a sour source.

“Oh the great Daniel Casement! Opportunist, sexpot, golden boy! To finish up his days a weakling and a loser—a fucking all-round big-time loser—weak through and through for all the world to see! A
suicide
no less!”

“No!” I shook my head; shook it vehemently. “That isn't how it was! That isn't at all how it was!”

How openly he was gloating! Plainly he felt no interest in trying to disguise it. “Oh yes my friend. That's always how it is. Terminal illness or annihilating failure. People will readily admit to the former of course but seldom to the latter. Look at you: a case in point. The fact that I admit to failure makes me—in that alone if not in countless other ways—wholly your superior, poor self-deluding clown.”

I said: “Mr Tibbotson I'm afraid you've got it wrong.” I thought I had rarely heard such coldness emanating from my own voice. “Shall I tell you why I killed myself? If you must know I did it purely out of love. Otherwise what? I'd have needed to go on without the one person who meant more to me than life itself. Frankly no contest; I couldn't have faced it.”

“Oh out of love?” he said. “How sweet! How very touching! How syrupy and spineless! Or in other words—how pathological! How neurotically and morbidly dependent! ‘No contest' you say?
That's
what you couldn't face: the contest that everybody's life becomes when they find they have no one but themselves to rely upon.” His jeering rose another octave. “But to try to make out you died for some great transcending passion—pure cinema! Romantic tosh! Aimed at the stupidest most sentimental audience. Not worthy I'd have thought even of you.”

A cockroach plopped into my lap. The small shock I experienced was well-timed: at least it gave me a chance to cool down and tell myself if it consoled him to believe I'd ended my life in humiliation and defeat—well what did it matter, let him enjoy whatever scrap of comfort he could find. I merely said, as I very cautiously resettled after shaking off the cockroach: “Is there no way then of breaking out?” I meant from the cyclic repetition we'd just been talking about—talking about for ten years now?—but he misunderstood.

“No. There's only one way you can ever leave this place.” His tone seemed to grow even more disdainful.

I didn't know whether he was speaking of hell or simply of the rooming house. Perhaps the two were interchangeable?

“And what is that?”

“I'm tired of telling you,” he complained—then stopped. Stopped in an attitude of some surprise. (So, patently, I could be wrong: sometimes he might have been known to show surprise.)

“I don't normally say that. Normally I … normally I just tell you.”

I too felt somewhat disconcerted though for a different reason. His manner had unexpectedly softened; become almost friendly.

“Well?”

“But there was no one who cared for me enough.” At first he said this quite matter-of-factly yet then he repeated it—repeated it slowly. I immediately knew why. He was paraphrasing his usual answer. “Oh my mother of course. Everybody has a mother. And maybe the younger of my sisters. And there was a girlfriend once but she went on to marry someone else.”