I have the sausages on a grill borrowed from the oven, which has become terminally carbonised by fat since Emily left. I’m judging the moment to place them on the fire, which contains small vulcans spitting out lurid flames, like a Roman candle. Gazing at fires makes most people introspective: I am acutely, even painfully, aware that Emily really doesn’t want to see me again. I find it difficult to think of anything else; it is impossible for me to let go and grant her this personal space. ‘Personal space’ is a self-serving phrase, and I need to resolve the semantics with her. I know in the rational part of my mind that there is no point in promising to change (for instance, by putting my underclothes somewhere more sensible).
I imagine the Sheffield pedagogue enjoying the tumultuous sex I had once had with Emily, as though I had passed to him a sexual dowry. It was I who had unleashed this sexual fervour, and it sickens me to know that this passion – these private and personal gymnastics – has broken out to a wider audience. The secret pleasure I derived from knowing that the quiet, studious girl I lived with – verging on the mousey, if I am honest – was a sex fiend has come back to bite me. But the irrational part of my brain – like most people, I am a little vague on the precise structure of the brain and how it works – anyway, the discrete coils that deal with love and emotion and artistic yearnings cannot accept that Emily no longer loves me. I try to remind myself that for the last three months when we were together in this suppurating bunker of a basement flat, bought with a deposit from her father, I was often bored and listless – depressed – and we fell into long periods of oppressive silence. It was as if we had no idea any longer why we were together.
It was Emily who made the first move. She has very neat, precise handwriting, and spends a lot of time in shops that sell paper and pens. She particularly loves Parisian
papeteries
. We once made a pilgrimage to Cassegrain in the Boulevard Haussmann. It was quite early in our relationship, so I feigned interest in these
haut-bourgeois
knick-knacks. In the Marais we tried a variety of teas made from improbable botanical ingredients. I particularly liked one from Dammann Frères which offered
un univers riche en saveurs et en surprises gustatives
. An even bigger surprise was the bill. We were intimidated. The French have a way of blackmailing you with their perfectly matched clothes and ostentatious slimness; we took home an ornamented commemorative box of the stuff, just to demonstrate that we were not up from the burbs.
Dear Rich
I have decided that I have to have my personal space for a while at least. Please don’t try (
this ‘try’ really enraged me, as if I were a fan with delusions of a relationship
) to contact me in the foreseeable future, because that would be counter-productive. I am totally serious when I say I need a period of reflection. I feel that I have creative energies that I must explore. I am not saying you are stifling them (
precisely what she is saying
) but I want to study creative writing and I need to gather myself. Although you probably won’t admit it, I suspect you will welcome my decision to leave London.
Emily.
No I don’t. I don’t welcome it at all. Particularly now that you are fucking some beardy, wannabe D. H. Lawrence who pops his fat northern face into Wikipedia half an hour before a lecture and jots down the names of two or three writers he has never read, with a few crafty quotes to lard his talk, which is about showing-not-telling, the use of voices, the deployment of figurative language, the skill of differentiating characters, making a start – and then he mentions writers like Amis and Rushdie and Tyler and Franzen and some others that nobody in Sheffield has ever heard of like W.G. Sebald, Dacia Maraini and William Maxwell, and after that he will ask you to read aloud your own writing, something that is, of course, a lot easier for the tutor – the bastard with whom you are exploring your creative energies – to pronounce upon than to write anything himself, particularly as his last book – I have found out his Pooterish name – it’s Edgar Gaylard – his last book sold 306 discounted copies and reached a high of 1,400,000 on Amazon.
I want to send Emily something from Beckett’s play,
Krapp’s Last Tape
:
Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known.
Gaylard’s book was published by his father-in-law, who is the proprietor of a specialist magazine about garden accessories:
Everything you need for the garden, from water features to wild-bird feeders
. Were you aware that Gaylard is married? He has two children, popularly known as the Lardies (I am imagining this) aged twelve and fourteen. They have piano lessons out of town at Hathersage twice a week after school. Could that be when Mrs Gaylard (Jacqui) can be relied upon to be safely occupied for a few hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays driving them in her Ford Focus to musical renown? On the pretext of wanting to forward some nondescript mail, I sent Emily a text, asking for a forwarding address, but she did not reply. Actually, I know exactly where she lives. I have stood outside.
The fire has subsided and the toxic fumes have mostly ebbed. The Welsh chapel is sinking back into its accustomed rock-of-ages sleep, which is disturbed only occasionally when young boys throw bottles and stones and dustbins at the few remaining panes of glass. Police cars howl on Mare Street. They do more than howl: they whoop and sob. They make a noise like the brown hyena. The sodium lights of the Nye Bevan Estate, above and beyond the chapel, look as though a dense swarm of excited orange bees is gathering around them; the air apparently contains moving, whirling, unidentifiable particles.
I assess the fire: still a little chemical, but a good even heat. It is one of my remaining conceits that I know how to make a fire fit for a barbecue. I place six sausages on the grill and lower it onto some bricks which are not entirely level so that one of the sausages rolls through a gap where a spar is missing and falls into the embers of the garden furniture. At this moment a fox, attracted by the Calvados and apple scents, appears at the rim of the firelight. Only its muzzle and appraising eyes are visible. The effect reminds me of those puppets in Prague which perform against a black backdrop. Puppetry is a strange art form. I spear the errant sausage with a fork and throw it to the fox. It grabs the sausage and leaps nimbly onto the crumbling garden wall and vanishes. These foxes have an amazing leap on them. I am ambivalent about foxes; on the one hand you have to admire their adaptability and resilience; on the other they tear open rubbish sacks and spread the bones of KFC chicken – a local favourite – all over the place.
With the help of a headlamp bought for a camping trip to Brittany with Emily – it went badly – I grill the five remaining Norman sausages, wrap each one roughly in white bread slathered with ketchup, and eat them fast, as if I have something pressing to do. If anyone, a logician for example, were looking down from the surrounding high-rises and saw a man with a headlamp eating sausages at high speed in the lea of a Welsh chapel he might make some misleading deductions.
There is a damp and unstable cardboard box of my father’s papers, which I was planning to burn, but now I change my mind: the fire is too low to burn damp cardboard, and anyway I should read them one day. The fox appears again and fixes me with its wised-up,
nothing-to-do-with-me-mate
, stare. I throw some bread in its direction. The fox emerges into the light just long enough to assess, and promptly reject, slices of Mighty White with ketchup. In this weakly flickering light the fox’s pelt has a ghostly aura for a moment, before it vanishes into the charged night.
Now I have a sense that I am a character in a Pinter play: deluded, losing my grip and prey to forces I don’t understand. Pinter went to school not far from here, at Hackney Downs. Maybe really to understand London – what could that mean? – you have to live in a liminal place like Hackney. Michael Caine is another former pupil, I think. Pinter and Caine, of Jewish immigrant stock. The rot set in when the school went comprehensive; boys with attitude were decanted there, academic standards plummeted, staff became unhinged, developed sore backs, took sick leave, school closed. No more four-eyed Jewish professors, playwrights and actors.
I’m thirty-three next birthday. Emily has left me. I miss my father. Both of them gave me pain, but now I am dying of loneliness. For my peace of mind I reassure myself: it’s not loneliness in the sense of having no one to talk to – I have friends – it’s the loneliness of feeling less and less qualified to live in this world. It’s
anomie
, which has redeeming associations with the artistic.
The dense air pressing on the garden, the spavined chapel, the rising symphony from the streets of rap, of police sirens, of violent domestic argument, of football chants – as if anybody gives a fuck about which team the morons support – of breaking glass, of cars trembling with bass – all this adds to the sense of being disconnected because it speaks of some sort of human involvement which doesn’t involve me: here I am licking the last of the ketchup off my fingers. I turn the headlamp off.
My grandfather, a Harley Street urologist, sent my father to Winchester. But my father considered Pangbourne College more than adequate for me. Alaric Leofranc Cathar (
née
Carter), the intimate of Richard the Lionheart, saw himself as the only licensed intellectual in the family. His short stay at Oxford confirmed it. Until 1972 Pangbourne College was the Nautical College, preparing boys for life in the Merchant Navy. When I arrived there many years later the whiff of rum, sodomy and the lash still hung in the air. In my time the older boys practised ‘bog-washing’, which involved pushing the heads of uppity younger boys down the lavatory and pulling the chain. Another jape was called ‘divisional scrubs’ and involved younger boys being covered in shoe polish and then showered. Personal space was very low in the college’s hierarchy of values. Perhaps it was originally thought necessary to prepare pupils for the close and intimate cohabitation of naval life.
At the end of my first term, my father asked me, with that old roué’s pointless smile on his threaded face, his hair flapping winningly over his brow and coursing in two wavelets back over his ears, how school had been. I said, ‘Oh, fucking marvellous, I have learned how to wash the inside of a lavatory with my head. Thank you, Pater. I’m sure it will come in handy when I join the Navy.’
He laughed: life is after all really just one cosmic joke.
‘That’s cool, man.’
I hit him, knocking him off his chair. From the floor he appraised me for a moment. I was only just fourteen but had been doing a lot of rowing on the Thames, the college’s one and only area of excellence. He was against violence. He stood up, blood streaming from an eyebrow, and walked towards the door. He stopped.
‘I will write to the Commodore and tell him that all shore leave should be cancelled indefinitely. I won’t see you again until you write me an apology.’
‘I had shit in my mouth and hair. Can you imagine what that was like? And then they rubbed my balls with Cherry Blossom shoe polish.’ (It was oxblood brown.) ‘You should be writing me an apology.’
I was sobbing, but my father was already on his way upstairs to rummage in his bathroom, whistling – I seem to remember – ‘Light my Fire’. He was probably stoned. I refused to go back to school and hitch-hiked to Deeside in Scotland, where I boarded with my father’s sister, Phoebe, and worked for the rest of the summer as a ghillie; my aunt, whose face was already being colonised by a light – not unpleasant – down, was well-read and kind, although preoccupied. Her husband had shot himself. Gamekeepers are prone to this as they have the weapons. She never told me what happened to my mother. When it was obvious that I wasn’t going home, she enrolled me at the local school, from where I won a bursary to Oxford four years later, qualifying as a Scottish student from a state school, and in this way helping the college in question with its admissions record.
I leave the fire glowing a persistent toxic green as I take the box of reprieved papers inside.
3
Outside my room
there is a small mosque. I can see its minaret – modest with a circlet of ironwork at the top – from my window. The first call to prayer – the
adhan
– is at five in the morning. Four times the
muadhin
calls out:
Allahu Akbar
. I lie in bed entranced by the call. Amplified by loudspeakers, the call to prayer makes my body tremble; it seems to enter my bones and agitate the marrow.
What the
adhan
speaks of in this mad, beautiful, violent, restless city is the human longing for certainty. And why wouldn’t you want certainty if you lived here? This is a place where horrors, all of them in the name of a higher authority, have been committed for thousands of years, a place where countless people have died for their religion, where the walls have been built and destroyed and rebuilt constantly, where Armenian, Syrian and Orthodox priests sail blandly about – Quinqueremes of Nineveh – where observant Jews with side-locks wear their painful blank devotion on their pale faces, where creased Bedouin women in embroidered dresses and triangular jewellery sit patiently outside the Jaffa Gate to sell vegetables, where young Arab men, in strangely faded jeans and knock-off trainers, push trolleys of foodstuffs, where in countless cafés men contemplate what might have been, their hair failing, their faces turning to yellowed ochre, as though the tea they drink endlessly is staining them from the inside. Or perhaps it’s the water-cooled smoke from their hookahs that is doing it, smoking them from the outside. I think of the salmon smokeries up on the Dee. It was my job to take the clients’ salmon for smoking. I graduated to leading the Highland ponies, draped in dead stags, down the hillside. Sometimes I was trusted with driving the little Argocats, which could go anywhere, even fully laden with a stag and a couple of stout German hunters trimmed with forest green.