1982 Janine (20 page)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and
 
 
 
 
 
and
 
 
 
it's no use. The resistance is too strong. I'll have to think about something else until it vanishes. Think about real sex. How often have I had it? Start at the beginning.

Two months of sex three times a night. Is that possible? Is memory exaggerating? Perhaps, but I often went to bed with her thinking, ‘Not tonight, I'm too tired.' I would embrace her cosily and slowly come awake all over. Nearly every night I am sure we loved on getting into bed, then once when waking in the smaller hours, and once just after or before the dawn. What delicious deep sleep she gave me in between. But
surely
it cannot have been three times a night? Let's say twice a night which is 2 months X 4 weeks = 8 weeks X 7 days = 56 nights X 2 per night = 112 times, let's say 140 no no no 150 times at least with Denny I'm certain.

In the six weeks before marriage we did it fully only twice, or perhaps only once. Nothing happened during the honey-moon, then twice a week for not more than ten months is 10 × 4 × 2 = 80 but some weeks we didn't so more like 60 plus twice before marriage and once just before she left me in 1967 is 63 times with Helen.

Six or seven weeks but so erratically that three times a week on average is probably on the generous side so 18 times with Sontag.

Once one night and twice one night is 3 times with the editor.

No times. Nothing really happened.

No times either but for a moment I felt alive again. For years I had lived in great deadness of spirit, a deadness I still inhabit but last week was unusually painful. Spring is always the worst time for me and we had three or four days of sunny weather which affected the women as usual. It looked as if all of them between fifteen and fifty had come out dressed to provoke my lust. The sight gave me such pain that I had to walk about staring at the pavement a yard before my feet. I also grasped the pillbottle in my pocket like a talisman though I was in no danger of suicide. I will only be in danger if I sit down, empty the pills on to a tabletop or bedspread like this one and count them. There should be more than fifty. If I count them it will occur to me that only cowardice stops me swallowing them with a big tumbler of Glenlivet, and that if I do not swallow them I will detest and despise myself till my dying day. But I am in no danger of counting them if I walk about, keep staring at the pavement and visit crowded pubs. When I'm at home at the weekend I make a practice of pubcrawling. I spread my drinking between about twenty pubs, visiting six or seven in a single night but never the same pubs two nights running. In this way nobody gets to know me thoroughly or notices how much I drink. There is a lane which rises from the bank of the Kelvin and is so little used that it is still cobbled with stones of the horse and cart days. After dark I approached the arch of a high bridge where the lane begins and saw a shapeless dark figure descending the slope on the far side. I do not know how I knew the figure was female or how I sensed that it had sensed me. We slowed down as we neared each other and when the width of the arch separated us we were standing still and I had an erection. This was a novelty to me. I can induce erections by fantasising but I must cuddle real women for a very long time before I go stiff down there. I was astounded by what this woman was doing to me. She was squat and old with a bloated discoloured face but I felt hopeful and grateful, I crossed over 
and put my hands on her shoulders. This is hard to remember.

Remember it.

She said, “Yes all right but I've got to be careful, I want to see what I'm getting, ken?”

I thought she was talking about my prick and that she was worried in case it was diseased. I led her into a dark space behind a cast-iron pillar of the bridge, unzipped my flies and took the penis out. She felt it. I said, “It's all right, you see. Come home with me,” and I zipped it in again and led her back the way I had come. I was so excited that I babbled to her, I can't remember what. I wanted to make her excited and hopeful and compliant also, I put a twenty-pound note into her hand and told her she would get more tomorrow if we spent a good night together. She suddenly stood still and said, “But will ye marry me?”

I said, “No, I've been married already.”

She said, “Then I'll never content ye. No no no no I'll never content ye, I cannae dae it.”

We were beside the entrance to the underground railway. She walked away into it with my twenty-pound note. I stared after her and shouted feebly, “Please come back,” but she disappeared round a corner wailing, “No no no I cannae content ye, I cannae content ye.”

I grew angry and bellowed, “YOU ARE UNJUST!”

I turned and ran up that lane and in a minute was in a crowded pub ordering a large gin and tonic. Gin has a foul taste but I take nothing else at the weekends because it is not noticeable on the breath. The penis was lying down again but I still felt like babbling though I do not often talk because people who talk give themselves away all the time. I saw a man I knew slightly and said to him, “A funny thing just happened to me.”

I told him about it. His face took on a vague, absentminded look, he said, “Excuse me,” and went away.

‘Not very social,' I thought. I saw a girl who attracted me, a student possibly, she stood in a group of other girls. I said to her, “Hullo.”

She answered, “Hullo!” with a surprised but pleasant smile.
I think she thought we had met before and that she had forgotten where, I am obviously a respectable man who does not chat up young strangers just because they are attractive. I said, “There are a lot of funny people around here, you know. I've just met one.”

I told her about the whore under the bridge. To make the girl laugh I used an astonished, half-glaikit Glasgow voice like Billy Connolly's. I spoke loud enough for a lot of people to hear me.
Oh God let me not remember
. I don't remember much else. Except getting very angry when they turned their backs, and hurling my glass over their heads at the gantry and grabbing another glass from a table and hurling that too then running out. I ran and ran a long way. Later I saw a Pakistani grocery which was still open. I remembered I had no eggs and bacon for breakfast and went inside. A boy of perhaps twelve, thirteen, fourteen was serving behind the counter, a handsome self-contained little boy. The shop was otherwise empty, I

Do not make me remember more. I do not deserve mercy but I need it. Give me peace God. Stop me remembering that I went to the back of the shop where a cold cabinet full of dairy produce stood. Stop me remembering that I thought I could not be seen from the counter and started stealing eggs bacon butter, dropping them into my broad coat pockets and it is not far to the wardrobe.

Wardrobe doorcreak. Coat pocket. Cool small bottle fits hand snugly. Back to bed. Unscrew cap. Slight rattle of little white blunt torpedoes spilling on to coverlet. Will you stop remembering that you went to the counter with only a carton of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, milk in your hand 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and stop remembering that the boy marked the price on the till and said, “Is that all?” and I said, “Yes” and 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 stop remembering that he came round the counter and quietly put his hand in my pockets and took out all I had stolen and laid it on the counter and 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 will do the trick but I still have 51, 52, 53, 54, 55 and 56 if I
cannot stop
remembering that he said

Stopped. Good! You nearly drove me too far, God. I am leaving the pills on the coverlet in case you make me remember what the boy said.

That whore showed I am not yet completely dead. I am grateful to her. The aftermath is unimportant. Let me remember other good lively times with real women.

had a lovely cunt, why do I remember it so clearly? A chamber upholstered in slick wet warm smooth satin like a royal Victorian railway compartment with little unexpected buttons and chandeliers in the walls. I must have had my hand in there a lot. She loved being entered, perhaps loved it too much. Even when we had both been dry for a long time her cunt still clung to my prick demanding to be rubbed, and when at last the friction hurt me so much that I had to withdraw she felt she had completely lost me so she told me to leave. She valued prick too desperately much, as I overvalue cunt. That is why we both had so little of what we fancied. I was once with some journalists in the Glasgow Press Club and they started gossiping about women and someone said my editor was frigid: nobody had ever managed to get into her but soandso who was a fair judge HAHAHA and he said she wasn't much good. I could have told them that she had been tender and pleasant to me, except afterward. But that would have sounded like boasting and perhaps started a rumour that she was a secret nymphomaniac. Men who gossip spitefully about women are not the arrogant bastards they want to seem. They are humble people trying to show their importance, like servants boasting about their aristocratic connections by describing intimate details of aristocratic life. They talk nastily about sex because they resent being unable to enter this world, or feel much ecstasy, or replace themselves, or respect themselves, without help from a woman. What sex does not sometimes hate the other for threatening its independence? But I am not humble so I did not say, “She was not frigid with me,” I said, “There may be more to her than you have noticed.”

And these journalists went on boasting and moaning about their sweethearts and wives until a young one said, “I wish I could be sexless and self-contained like Jock here.”

I smiled slightly. An older one said, “Nobody is sexless. Jock must have a source of satisfaction somewhere, he couldnae stay sane if he didn't.”

I stood up and said to the older man, “What would you like to drink?”

He was right. My source of satisfaction is Helga sitting with Stroud in the viewing theatre watching Big Momma in her tight white cotton dress leading by a leash collared Superb who is barefoot and nude under her dungarees down a ramp to a circle of light where the Doctor stands stop. Remember realities.

visited me for the second time bringing pans full of messy mixtures. Her taste in food, I found later, was like her sexual tastes, she got a lot of ideas from fashionably eccentric books on the subject. These usually combined an oriental religion with recent chemical discoveries in order to advertise cheaply exotic recipes, but Sontag was too adventurous and impatient to read any single recipe from start to finish. She never completely formed an image of what she was going to make but started with a pile of ingredients, two or three vague ideas and a grimly determined expression on her face. The result depended on intuitive improvisation, and if this failed she blamed the shop where she had bought the ingredients. But I always praised her cooking as I praised her lovemaking, because both were better than I could do for myself. She was a woman, we comforted each other, we did not live in the same house so her irritating habits were bearable. She would have liked us to live together but I was afraid of coming to love her four-year-old son. In a few months I might have felt like a father to that boy and then I suspected Sontag would start treating me as selfishly as she liked and I would be unable to leave her.