On Chasing Brad Through Purgatory (20 page)

I didn't again attempt to shake his hand and he didn't even stand while I mumbled my goodbye but as I glanced back from the doorway he was already shambling towards the thin-mattressed single bed whose stained sheet and almost transparent blanket, inadequately pulled over, must have provided as much of a welcoming home to bugs as it ever did to man. For an instant I saw him sitting on the platform on Speech Day, in his gown and mortarboard, as erect and bright-eyed and well-groomed as any of those who sat on either side and I saw the incline of his head and tight-lipped smile as the colleague next to him made some small jibe or comment. “We're going to get you out,” I repeated softly. “Before you know it I'll be coming back to tell you how.” Then uncertain of whether I felt more saddened or noble I hurried down the stairs and past the spotty desk clerk who looked up from his magazine and must have been giving me his usual obscene smirk as I wrenched open the warped front door. In the deserted street and against one side of the building I had a long-awaited pee (you should've seen the state of the lavatory which on my way up I hadn't been able to bring myself to use) and thought again about the problems which beset me.

But they didn't seem quite so all-encompassing as before.

19

Before you know it I'll be coming back
. Goddammit could I truly have said that? I was the guy who'd once remarked to Brad, “If people don't mean things they have no right to say them. This is a warning. Don't ever tell me you'll phone me this evening or tomorrow or whenever without doing it.”

“You're
so
intolerant.”

“Unless you've got some bloody good excuse,” I'd added.

Some twelve months later Brad had appended a footnote. “We're the two most trustworthy sincere and utterly reliable people whom I've ever had the good fortune to run into. Forgive me if that's in any way tautologous. Who can be deserving of tautology if not such splendid upright folk as we?”

We're going to get you out of here. Before you know it I'll be coming back to tell you how
.

We? Who's we? And how were we going to do it? And how long was ‘before you know it'? And dear God please provide me with some answers.

Any, that is, apart from the glaringly obvious one.

I'd rather have ‘Hypocrite' branded on my forehead. ‘Be warned, you can never take his word for anything.' I mean literally—quite literally. Branded. Written with a red-hot nail. Without the use of anaesthetic.

Thereby agony undergone for an hour. Searing pain; discomfort—for a week? Shame and humiliation throughout the full remainder of your everlasting life.

As opposed to the daily replay of details that were dreary loveless and uninteresting even to begin with. For all of eternity, endlessly rotational, unstoppably repetitive—Brad forgive me if that's in any way tautologous?

Well strictly no comparison. Clearly. Torture is the easy option.

Even though I'm scared to death of pain.

Though why in the name of fuck am I even going on like this? Am I just trying to convince myself I've got a heart like anybody else and don't merely dismiss a matter out of hand … before at length I let myself dismiss this matter out of hand? Please Brad. Tell me what you think. Tell me it's the greatest load of crap you've ever heard. Anything. Just talk to me. I really do need to have you talk to me.

It really isn't any of my business is it? Still less any of my responsibility? How can it be? It may sound hard but in the last analysis Tibbotson's tragedy is simply that.
Tibbotson's
tragedy.

You always said that for an honest bloke I went in for such an awful lot of bullshit. You were right.

You always said it would have been nice if I'd finished my education; had really got to know John Donne and Alexander Pope and other minds as fine as theirs; had read some of the great philosophers and maybe managed in the process to discard a few of my more woolly ways of thinking.

You always said that one day I should honestly try to get off my backside and just do something about it.

And to think I actually put up with all that kind of talk! You wouldn't have found many as forbearing and as sweet-natured as I. As me? I love you Brad; love you, respect you, need you, want you. All the time; for ever and ever. I'd like to make you proud. I really would like to make you proud. Just tell me what I ought to do.

Well first and foremost get something to eat
. I can practically hear you saying it. How you used to carry on—and
on
—about blood sugar levels, most frequently mine!

I looked about me. (Instant obedience!) Found a snack bar on the corner which wouldn't have won any prizes for hygiene nor have got written up in the Good Food Guide but the nourishment was free and—yes you're right—now if at any time I was going to need to keep my strength up. And if my mouth and teeth should afterwards feel furred with grease … well at least cholesterol isn't an issue I have to worry over any more, so there are blessings to be counted even in such a crude, ketchup-splashed—blood-splashed?—none too warmly recommended little eatery as this. (Well certainly not recommended by myself: you should have seen the way the plate was almost thrown down on the table, the cutlery picked up off the floor, the fork tines literally encrusted.)

Then after that the coach station.

The coach station is on the outskirts of town right at the end of Main Street. Here we're not talking Wells Fargo, more National Express or Greyhound. But who ever uses them? Are they there only to tantalize: so near and yet so very nearly impossible? Otherwise—well, what? Allegedly there are buses leaving for every destination known to man but the location of the countless bays is hopelessly confusing even when they're all as empty as they are at present. However by dint of much perseverance (and anyway having nothing else to do) I finally discover the embarkation point for Pack Hill tucked away between those for Manila and Santa Barbara. On the concourse there is often litter blowing round your ankles. Yet despite such frequent currents of well-nigh freezing air, jets of it almost, the atmosphere remains invariably heavy with the reek of petrol and vomit, a reek which sits on your stomach, stirs up its contents—in my case hamburger and chips and onion, half-cooked and probably done in lard—and is clearly self-perpetuating: it can't be long before even the most determined will add at least one further small puddle. Large puddle? I say ‘invariably'. Following my meal at the snack bar I have spent more than twelve hours in this terminus and more than twelve hours spent in such a place seems practically the same as always. Supposing, I thought, this was to form a part of your cyclical hell: the time passed mainly on broken insanitary benches in a dark stench-laden terminal, with a stomach chill and a thumping headache but not so much as a moment's real sleep throughout the whole long night. The whole long night following on from the equally interminable late-afternoon and evening? It didn't bear thinking about. It just didn't bear thinking about.

It had to be thought about.

I told myself almost whimsically that it had to be thought about. Why? Because there wasn't so far as I could remember a single really worthwhile thing—both generous
and
disinterested—that I had ever done in the entire course of my life. Not totally, totally disinterested.

Would this one be disinterested? (I asked myself whimsically.) Even that guy in
A Tale of Two Cities
who knew he was doing a far far better thing knew also that he was heading for a far far better place. Not for him straight from the guillotine into a bus station. Or a room with mouse droppings and bedbugs and a pail of piss. (And worse.)
His
act wasn't disinterested. I'm not saying it wasn't very nice of him and all that but the thought of almost guaranteed gold stars must at least have momentarily occurred to him. In those circumstances, having myself led a thoroughly useless and dissolute existence, perhaps I too would have taken another chap's place in the tumbrels—especially someone's whose earthly life appeared so chock-full of promise. (It struck me that Dickens had somewhat stacked the cards but all right.)

Yet the difference was that
I
—here in another kind of hell, in fact the hellish prototype of every once-and-future variation—
I
would not be notching up any cluster of gold stars. There just wouldn't be a real incentive any longer. No praise, no rewards. If I chose to stay then that was it. I stayed.

And stayed for somebody whom I had never liked and whose own earthly life had never seemed to promise very much, certainly not from the outside. So why should his
heavenly
life merit outside sacrifice, anyone's, even mine? The spared man in the book had had a lover waiting. I had a lover waiting. Did Tibbotson?

But then I remembered that the sacrificing fellow in the book hadn't much cared for that fellow
he
was liberating; and besides—as he would no doubt have reminded himself as he moved forward to redemption—judge not lest ye be judged and in the eyes of our maker every one of us is just as precious as absolutely any other. (Undiscriminating or what? Take even me and Brad.)

Not that the
lest ye be
would need to worry me any longer; any more indeed than high levels of cholesterol. I smiled wanly. That on its own should feel quite restful. (I whimsically informed myself.) I'd always worried a little about being judged: being judged in heaven just as much as—or maybe rather more than—being judged on earth. This certainly hadn't stopped me from behaving badly; consult Mr Tibbotson; but usually (and most typically until I went to sleep that night) I had at least worried about it.

Perhaps my greatest danger at the moment consisted in my trying to prove—but only to myself, I didn't care (well not too much) about Tibbotson—that I was a good bloke; had it in me to be a wholly unselfish human being. Almost Christlike; in this one and totally isolated instance. Special. For me there was something terribly seductive in the notion that in one good act, outstandingly good act, I could conceivably justify my whole existence.

So even now it wouldn't be disinterested. No way. Of course not. I simply mustn't lose sight of that important fact.

Important? Essential!

And while it was true that in one sense anyway my whole existence had already been justified by Brad I still wished I had gone to Rwanda at the time of the genocide or to Kosovo in all those months of civil war or to any place where there'd been almost unimaginably appalling conditions either man-made or natural and where any bright and able-bodied person could possibly have been of life-saving assistance. Thailand, Pakistan, the Niger. Of course (that sad refrain running throughout so much of my recent life) it was pathetically easy to say this now when I no longer had the chance—any more than I had had the courage or the altruism when it could perhaps have made a difference. At the best I had only been an armchair hero; paving the way for a terminus-bench wannabe. Both equally useless. But I wished it had been otherwise.

One can always wish it had been otherwise.

Presumably Brad would mourn for me if it was borne in on him at some point that I was now never going to catch up with him. But heaven—though naturally I wasn't at all an expert on this subject, let me be the first albeit regretfully to have to admit to that—heaven wouldn't in the least live up to expectation if unattached people who didn't positively choose to be unattached needed to remain so. (And could there in all honesty be many, or even any, who positively
did
choose that state, I mean long-term?) So there had to be upmarket introduction agencies or singles bars or dinner parties designed with that one same sweet objective: no messing around: partner matched perfectly with partner to ensure an absolutely wonderful first date—and each subsequent meeting only compounding and improving on the last. Oh God! I felt jealous already. In the light of what might just conceivably be about to happen would the mere two years which Brad and I had spent together in the temporal world come gradually to seem almost insignificant by all eternal standards? A rather quaint prelude, even fairly cute in its own small way, but in contrast understandably very thin, understandably extremely shallow?

No! That was it. That made up my mind for me. I'd been talking almost as though I was really going to go through with it but I saw now there was obviously no chance. Sorry mate. Just me and my usual trails of fantasy. Sorry about that.
Before you know it I'll be coming back
really meant nothing more or very little more than
See you, see you around sometime!
—just a thoroughly ordinary form of leavetaking. Final assessments of a person's true integrity didn't ride on whether that person actually saw anybody again after he'd unthinkingly said See you! Surely? It was in fact the kind of casual farewell which I myself had often made to people whom I scarcely knew.

“See you!” “Be seeing you!”

Yes mate—really truly sorry. Almost touched base. The only mercy is you'll never know how close you came.

Poor old devil.

But let's face it you poor old devil: a lot of it's your own fault anyway. It's not as though (I imagine) there aren't any facilities here for washing and shaving and trimming your nails. Supposedly you must have arrived in your present state but then you could have spent your first day giving yourself and your room and your self-respect a thoroughgoing repair job. That's what I'd have done. And I'd have whistled as I worked and I'd have sung and I'd have danced. (Those two guys upstairs clearly had the right idea; I bet they feel quite jolly as they go through all their tap routines; I hope they chose the right music to dance to.) I'd have had only humorous positive thoughts. Throughout the day I'd have told Brad repeatedly how much I loved him and appreciated him and how enormously grateful I'd always feel for the way in which he'd changed my life. I'd have read something that repaid constant re-reading. I'd have—