The World and Other Places (17 page)

‘I’ve known warmer Januarys,’ she said.

I turned to her with intense interest.

‘Have you? When? Which ones? What year?’

‘Are you one of those amateur weather forecasters?’ she said.

The helium balloon, the barograph, the pressure sensitive needle registering the rise and fall of warm and moist, the hottest, the coldest, and all normality in between.

What could I invent to measure my changeful days? And
if I could be carefully recorded on special paper would it help? Help me, that is, to have a sense of who I am?

Never has so much been recorded by so many; the documented, identified, archival, tagged and saved world. The British Library has a copy of nearly every book written since 1840. Weather records began in 1854. Births, deaths, marriages, all there. Planning consents and blood groups. Tax returns, passports, dietary habits and driving licences. Where to find me, what I’m worth, what I watch, what I wear, my goings out and my comings in, for my security on surveillance camera. All you need to know except what I need to know: Who am I?

‘Ask a silly question,’ she said.

‘What colour are Mickey Mouse’s underpants?’

She looked pained. ‘I meant, ask a silly question/get a silly answer. You’re not a weather forecaster are you?’

‘I never said I was a weather forecaster.’

‘Are you on drugs?’

‘Are you?’

She stood up. ‘I’m going to call the park keeper.’

‘Here, use my mobile phone.’

‘You’re a pimp.’

‘I’m desperate.’

She started to walk away. I shouted, ‘I can’t walk away, don’t you understand that? I can’t walk away.’

Every year thousands of men and women disappear. I don’t mean the ones who sell up, move away, remarry, get a job in Acapulco, go into a nursing home or mental hospital, or even out onto the streets. I mean the ones who are never seen again. The ones untraced and untraceable. Faded photographs, out of date clothes, the years piling up in the place left behind. The place where they walked away, without a suitcase or a passport, bank account untouched, appointments still fresh in the diary.

I think of a see-saw. At one end, life’s accumulations, at the other end, the self. For many, perhaps for most, the balance can be maintained. The not too unpleasant ups and downs of day to day, a little loss here, a little gain there, the occasional giddy soar or painful crash.

What happens when the accumulated life becomes so heavy that it pitches the well-balanced self into thin air? All the things that I had and knew, crashing to the floor, myself shattered upwards, outwards, over the roof tops, over the familiar houses, a ghost among ghosts. I might as well be dead.

I shall be treated as dead. The dead have no rights, no feelings, the present deals with the past just as it likes. I shall become a thing of the past, worse than dead, a living dead,
to be avoided or forgotten, to be abused because I shall have revealed myself as someone who can’t cope.

We have to cope don’t we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society.

It cares very much that we should all be seen to cope.

‘You don’t look too well dearie.’ It was the vagrant in her bizarre rags, a bright blue plastic laundry bag pulled round her shoulders. She sat on the bench and flicked off the lid of a polystyrene cup.

‘Hot tea. Here.’

I took it. I had seen her buy it just a moment since from the van at the park gates. It was clean and steaming and the sting of it in my throat felt like TCP.

‘All alone,’ she said.

‘All alone.’

The boat in the Irish sea. The boat on the glittering day when I had been happy. My mind had emptied and in the centre was a clear circular pool. A diving lake I never dived in because I could never get there through the rocks and rubble of the mind’s accumulations.

‘Look at all that rubbish,’ she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all.

‘They’re taking it away,’ I said.

‘Where to?’ she said. ‘It just gets moved around dearie, that’s all.’

If only the world could rid itself of just some of its contents …

The January sales. Everything Must Go. But where does it go? And when it’s gone, every last steam iron and every fun-fur bikini, it will all be back again, smugly cloned in Taiwan, filling up the indecently empty shelves.

If I were Rupert Murdoch or the Sultan of Brunei I could spend my daily fortune buying more and more goods from more and more shops in a race to keep them bare. I could have bulging bodyguards armed with slim powerful credit cards, charging floor to floor, crating up their hostages on Amex.

What would I do with the silent refrigerators nobody plugs? With cascades of lingerie, unbottomed, unbreasted? With dog baskets, egg whisks, jacuzzi liners, wigs?

Could I spin the silk back into silk worms? Could I pay the ored metal back to the earth? Could I return the pine
to the snow forests, the polymers to crude oil wells deep in the sea?

Load it up and send it to Mars. Why not? Deep space is a litter-garden of clapped out rockets and abandoned probes. We’ll be going there ourselves soon. Human detritus on its final adventure. I’m no better than the rest. What am I but a piece of cosmic waste worth my weight in effluent?

The other day my drains were blocked. I noticed the sinister rise of flush-water in the toilet pan, and outside, by the culvert, the tell-tale mixture of paper and turds mashed into a tuna-like paste.

I cleared what I could of the flies’ picnic and called out those alarming men in fluorescent vans who strap on a gas mask and fire a water cannon into the sewer. Their boots are always caked with other people’s … overspill.

While I was waiting to rejoin the community of the sanitary I had to relieve myself in the garden. Pants down, haunch squat, out it comes, lob of earth over the lot, presto.

Meanwhile, back at the drain, strong men swam in a brown flood.

I looked at the toilet and the yards of pipe connecting it to the drain, and the yards more of pipe connecting the drain to the sewer, and the sewer itself, pipes tall as houses, carrying the end products of family life out to sea, where
the same families, for twenty-one days in August, will complain of the stench of themselves.

We were in a boat and the sea was deep and clear. I’ve seen a photograph of the earth, copyright NASA, taken from the moon. The seas cup the world in blue. The blue-held world rested on light.

The sea is not dark and dense but banded with light, as if the light could be mined. I’m an optical millionaire, floating on gold and platinum, gold beads on the surface, pale bars beneath.

I’m as rich as a fish.

Two pounds of cod. Or a litre or fifty centimetres or whatever it’s measured in these days. These days, these January days, the fish-stall in a swoon of ice, the fishman, glassy eyed.

Cod Mornay, cod crème, curried cod, cod and chips, cod battered, buttered, breaded, with beans. One thousand things to do with cod, except drop it down your trousers.

‘What?’ The fishman looked at me suspiciously.

‘Your leaflet on cod,’ I said. ‘Most informative.’

‘Cod is beautiful,’ he said, with a vehemence that surprised me. He was raw, thick, muffled, cold, with hands lobster-blue and a wart the size of a mussel under his eye. Why should he care about cod?

‘Cod’s my life.’

‘Your whole life?’

‘Every bone.’

His wife came from out the back. She had oily skin and sparse hair and ears like flaps and her mouth was pursed in a perpetual ‘O.’ She wore a pale grey plastic mac and a pale mottled headscarf. She was the most cod-like woman I had ever seen.

I stared at them, standing side by side, in an aquarium of content. Whatever they had, I didn’t have it, and it wasn’t cod.

I moved away through the swimming crowds and passed a large poster advertising a seminar on
THE LIFE WITHIN
. I took out a large felt tip and wrote neatly at the bottom, Stall 4.

Why not? Weren’t they Buddhas in their own way?

And here we reach the problem.

I am trying to find a way out, or maybe just an air vent, or a window, a different view that would calm and steady me against this mounting desperation. It’s not too late, even though I am already half out of the ejector seat, losing my grip, breaking up, classic symptoms of a bottled life.

The problem is what to do about the problem.

I can’t go to church. I’m not of the generation who simply believe. I can’t put my trust in science either, whose most
spectacular miracles have not been to feed the multitude on five loaves and two fishes, or to raise the dead, but to perfect mass destruction and prolong senility.

On those ratings, God is still ahead.

My knees will not permit of yoga. I do not have the frame for an orange sari or the mind of the East. I can’t hear the sound of one hand clapping or find peace through twenty years of silent archery. I don’t doubt any of it, but I can’t do it.

The good life? Buy a smallholding and milk organic goats? Not for me. Nor a boat in the water, though it’s what I go back to time and again. Perhaps that’s where I should start, that image, a boat in the water.

The vulnerability of it. The insolence. Isn’t that the winning human combination. Isn’t that us, tumbling through the years? To suffer. To dare. Now, the sufferers don’t dare and the darers don’t suffer. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with us all. Wrong with now, sharded people that we are.

The boat in the water. At every turn the waves threaten.

At every turn, I want to push a little further, to find the hidden cove, the little bay of delight, that fear would prevent. And sometimes I want to ride out the storm for no better reason than I need the storm. And if I die, I die, that’s the gamble, the game. I cannot protect myself although I can take precautions. Society can protect me least of all. It
does so by limiting my freedom. Freedom or protection. What kind of choice is that?

In the boat on the water these things are clear.

What then shall I do? Write my own programme?

I’ve seen nightclasses advertised in personal creativity and healing. My neighbour has joined one, and now she rolls home, week after week, with a few atrophied crayon drawings and cereal packet poems. She started these classes feeling like a worm. Now she believes she’s king of the world. Is this an improvement or is it new delusions for old?

In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life’s greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.

So what is it to be? Banality of convention or banality of individuation? Shall I choose society’s clichés or my own?

Is it a step forward to have understood that there is no real difference between them?

These days, these January days, one Christmas just gone, another only fifty weeks away. I take out my pocket calendar and find that important days are marked in red. How few of them there are.

Is this my lot, to move blindly on the year’s wheel, accepting what comes, making nothing happen? Christmas
to Christmas, holiday to holiday to holiday. Someone who strains forward because the present is so tedious and the past is a handful of snapshots?

I reached for my fat felt tip. It was green. I coloured in today’s square. Today was important.

My small rise of jubilation was straightaway wetted with the thought that this was probably what people do in psycho-therapy.

‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘The whole world’s a nut house anyway.’

I walked home holding on to the green square. My little square of sea and I a boat in it. When I arrived at my tall house in between other tall houses, I was afraid to go inside. I was afraid that the tiny sliver of self I had won would be consumed again into the mass man; parent, spouse, teacher, home owner, voter, consumer, bank account number, bus pass.

But there are no solutions and there will be none. I can’t get a job in Acapulco. I can’t walk away. Just as I must wash, dress, feed myself every day, even though I have done it the day before, so I will have to find, every day, a green square to walk in.