The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (41 page)

–and what, have a cosy chat, about life and love, truth, beauty and goodness or else, what, our achievements?

–and … expose ourselves.

–I see. And what have you exposed?

–A traitor, Larry. The Judas in all real friendship, who betrays in order to understand, or perhaps because he understands.

–Ah, what good listeners trained interviewers make. They probe, they pry and all the time they merely prepare traps, to show their superiority over something or other.

–Like psychiatrists?

–But then, nobody really listens.

–I really listened, Larry, believe me.

–Yes, doubly, with your inner and your outer ears, or so I thought. But your inner ears stood in fact outside yourself, a mere mechanical device lurking behind the sofa, with useful gaseous matter between us to propagate and distort the sound-waves travelling through it and upset the definition. I thought the acoustics of friendship corked the space around us, that the giant ear of the world had died, that I consisted of no matter and spoke backwards in silent bubbles up the time-scale as in a vacuum created by my trust.

–In speaking to me, Larry, you spoke to the world, your other self, your twin. And the world, consists of people. Each with a love of something, a fear of the unknown, however buried –

–Goodbye. Tell-Star.

The conversation bleeps at a non-natural impulse along the nerve fibres, blood-vessels, muscle spindles of the empty city, through to the Whale and River constellations and perhaps getting a reply if any intelligent life exists or has existed five hundred thousand light-years ago, although a blockage occurs when waves requiring matter to propagate themselves find none. Something however creates the wavering outlines that make the nervous handwriting across the dials and if not the eyes then some faint memory, surely, behind the eyes, filaments of gas in violent motion or extragalactic nebulae in collision. But if we survey the space around our galaxy, Ladies and Gentlemen, we find it very empty, for no other comes closer than a million
light-years
or so, making the chances of collision fairly negligible. Yet great clusters occur, moving at over two thousand miles per second, so that most of the noise must come from colliding galaxies. Some argue, nevertheless, that parts of a divided nucleus recede from one another at great speed, the violent processes involving collision of interstellar matter and ejection of high energy particles from the atmosphere of young stars, that cause the nervous handwriting across the dials in bleeping peaks and plains, letters to citizens in bright imperatives, drink infra-red, do not spit gamma-rays and see the ungrown foetus of men’s love inside their atmospheric density, say it with smells of primitive noises from their deepest entrails if any, for we make the bumps as we go along with a great waste of horsepower more and more disorganized and no control-panel, only the little orange lights that flicker Uninhibit, Next Instruction, Pot Drawer and things like that, red, amber, green, bright cepheids, Blue Giants and new concentrations that may ultimately form hi pa, oh my sweet Potato. But how changed, enormous eyes painted black all round and how did you get in?

–The landlady let me in, pa. My, you look awful. Worse than in hospital.

–Did you see me in hospital, Patricia?

–Course.

–But surely, surely your mother hasn’t let you come here alone?

–To the big city? Course. Why not? Well, not quite alone. I travelled alone, but she put me on the train.

–But where –?

–Oh, I stayed with my boy friend last night. Why did you call me sweet potato? Does that mean you fancy me after all or something?

–My darling little girl. Come here. Of course. More than anything in the world. Haven’t I shown, petted, taught you to speak, played cat’s cradle with out meridians –

–You do say funny things, pa. Heh, that tickles, laugh, you thought I’d died, my love, kiss kiss bang bang, steady on there, pa, you got a complex or something?

–You’ve grown, Patricia.

–Well, two years, pa, what d’you expect? You’ve hardly seen me.

–Didn’t you come home, for the holidays?

–Home? No. Ma farmed me out with Stan and Liz. Said you needed quiet or something. Martin came home though. Funny that, with his trumpet and all. I never made any noise at all. But you can’t follow the logic of crumblers.

–Patricia. I don’t understand. Your mother – and why do you call her ma, Patricia? I find it ugly.

–All the girls call their crumblers ma and pa now.

–Crumblers. I suppose you mean parents.

–Well, what do names matter? Got a cigarette?

–What, at your age?

–Nearly fifteen pa, don’t act square. Thanks.

–And what did you say, just now, about staying with your boy friend?

–Larry. Funny that, don’t you think? You’d say I’d got a complex no doubt. Nice. Plays the guitar. Bit off, though, not very bright. Unlike me.

–But Pat, my sweet, do you – I mean what do you mean, stayed with him?

–With his uncle and aunt. Crumblers too but all right. Nice in fact. Nicer than him.

–But do you sleep with him?

–Well, one hardly sleeps.

–All right, make love.

–And there again, I wouldn’t call it that either, if it exists at all. His performance, shall we say, lacks something. And he has pimples.

–So.

–Only a stage, of course. Still, by the time he’s grown out of that and handsome I’ll have grown out of him. Already have. A lot of rot, really, why does everyone make such a fuss about it?

–One day –

–Oh, one day I’ll understand everything, I know that but not love, pa, it doesn’t interest me, a thing that gets squares round in circles, like Stan says, no crumbier he, despite his paunch and grey hair, ma understands anyway. No, I’ll solve the universe, pa. Can I go to Cambridge like you? I’ve passed my –

–Well –

–Pa, I did brilliantly. Two years younger than everyone and top of the whole country in maths, pa, and chemistry, and very high marks in biology, but I failed in English and Latin. They said it doesn’t matter, I can get a scholarship, pa, so if you can’t afford it –

–Did your mother send you?

–Course she sent me. To try and get some sense into your head and some money out of you. We can’t live only on what she earns, though let’s face it, she’s done well, hasn’t she. I want to take up astrophysics, like her.

–Well –

–Don’t say well like that, pa. Haven’t you any pride in me, don’t you take any interest in what I’ve done?

–Of course I do, my darling, of course. It fills me with a very, very peculiar pride. I mean that. Because I know, well, what infinite pleasure could come your way, but sadness too –

–Pooh … Why sadness?

–Oh, I don’t know. Hard work, for a sense of –

–But I love hard work, pa.

–I expect you do. Tell me, my pet, why this get-up?

–You like?

–Well, you look so geometrical. All those zips. And with, turn round, a hole in the left buttock of your trousers.

–Where? Oh, so they have. How teasing. Anyway, you can’t blame me, pa, you give us no money. All the girls have –

–So, you lay the blame for the hole on your buttock at my door?

–No I don’t, pa. Kiss kiss. Bang bang, steady state, ow that tickles, stop, you dirty old man. Say, pa, how about it?

–Hmm. How about, what?

–I mean all this nonsense between you and ma. So banal you know, sort of, common, I don’t mean vulgar but, yes, well, it does have a kind of vulgarity. What the crowd does. All the girls at school have split parents or ménages à quatre or any way lots of them. I always prided myself on my originality. You’ve let me down, pa.

–Patricia, your mother has said she never wants to see me again.

–Oh, phooey. I say that to my boy friends a thousand million times. It doesn’t mean anything, pa.

–You seem to know a lot.

–Well, I don’t know much about adultery but I know what I like. My pa at home, not quarrelling with ma, not quibbling poor old Martin about things, laughing and joking about his funny old patients and his crazy scientists, helping me with my equations –

–I’ve forgotten all my equations, Pat. I must have left them in the pocket of, well, my student’s gown. Anyway, you’ll have gone way beyond me by now.

–Yes, I expect so. I’d hate to do medicine I must say. What made you change, pa?

–I don’t know. Losing my equations, perhaps.

–You mean they didn’t come out? Mine always come out. I’ll show you.

–Thank you, Pat. Thank you.

–So you’ll come back, and work, and everything?

–I’ll … think about it, my sweet.

–Oh, that means you won’t.

–Really I will.

–I mean come back. Well, at least work again, pa, even away from us, here, start up again, you’ll find plenty of sick people around. A man must work.

–A conventional little girl, after all. So all you want is my money?

–Course. Why not? Besides, it’ll keep you sane, pa. You can’t just sit around and mooch in this godawful
boarding-house,
living on bread-and-butter or something.

–One could live on square roots for ever, just raising them to the nth power.

–Oh, you lovely man. I really fancy you.

–Too.

–Let’s make a deal, pa. I work for my scholarship, and win it, you get a practice going again, here, anywhere you like, and then, who knows, time heals or if it doesn’t, well, at least you’ll have helped some square or other out of his spinning circles.

–Physician, heal thyself.

–How about it, pa?

–Sounds to me easier for you than for me. You show me your equations and I show you a mended crumbler.

–You’ve got a deal. Bye, pa. Love love.

Great clusters occur, moving at many thousands of miles per second, radiating infinite processes with the collision of interstellar matter and high energy particles from the atmosphere of young stars, filling the room with wavering outlines, as on a map of ocean depths, doubling, trebling each other’s trebles, bursting its walls, the house, the square, the street, the entire sky. Words drop into the overlapping rings that lasso out to catch faces, voices that swim for dear life through the heavy water, some drown, some float, some gasp in the chilly depth, some slice the water with a skilful crawl, while Stance or someone walks nonchalantly out of his hiding place, smoking a big cigar. Good man, he says, can you repeat, we’ll do a take next time. I won’t, I won’t repeat, why didn’t you have your camera on, your little individual flan through which you photograph the world? Well, I wanted to get the galactic background first, tricky, you see, in ultra-violet light, but we’ll mix you in, don’t worry. The door ushers in the decoy blonde, no, not that one, I replaced her, he never noticed. Shoot. My God, your eyes. You didn’t ring, so I came all the same, I thought, oh, Larry you look dreadful.

–I – er –

–Haven’t you slept? Did you have any breakfast?

–I – er – had some coffee somewhere. I walked all night.

–Telford?

–How did you know?

–I thought he might – try something like that.

–No. No. Not what you think.

–I don’t think that. No, Larry, I don’t think the obvious worst of people in advance, only of myself. Telford wouldn’t. He just wanted, so much, to understand, what had happened to you. So did I. But we all have our clumsy ways of trying to understand. Mine the unhappy woman’s way, his, the journalist’s way. Let’s put it like this, Larry, he can’t himself understand until he has reformulated it so that all can understand.

–Appropriated it.

–If you like.

–I don’t. I see little difference between that and the woman’s way. A possessive way.

–Or the artist’s. Do you find that so very hard to forgive, Larry?

–Oh, forgive. But accept and live with yes.

–Live with! But surely Brenda has never shown that kind of possessiveness.

–Brenda! Who cares about Brenda! I must get that thing back. You must help me.

–Of course I’ll help you, Larry, if I can. But you mustn’t talk like that about Brenda, she –

–Oh, yes, yes, I suppose, if you insist, she would have shown possessiveness if I had let her.

–I see. Yes. I do see. So very well. Because in the end this comforted me most. The knowledge, I mean, that you would never have let me either, and the sense of irrelevance fills the room as she bombards it with the particles of her self-absorption, her eyes trying to intercept more than a long habit of merely professional listening to the failures of men that takes over and says let you what or something, I only meant, that I would have preferred that kind of
not-possessing
to not-possessing someone I don’t want to possess. I mean, someone I don’t respect, and so on in this language English, that she never uses until the long habit of asking all the wrong questions and so getting all the wrong answers gathers itself with a why did you marry him, anyway.

–Larry, my dear, you have a genius for attracting
self-punishing
women. And the self-punishing woman, when she can’t get what she wants, destroys the little she might have and attracts, or can’t repel, the man best qualified to punish her. Brenda did the same.

–Yes, yes. Energy works that way. Look, Elizabeth. I must get that thing back.

–We all want things back, Larry. I said to Stanley once, I had serenity until you barged in. Because you know, I did achieve serenity, quite soon in fact, don’t flatter yourself. I got a secretarial job, in Angola. Then Kenya. It made me happy. I met Stanley in Kenya.

She still bombards the room with the particles of her anxiety that spiral at high velocity round the lightning zig-zag of her magnetic field, her eyes trying to intercept the pain behind two starless coalsacks which, however radiate no interest, and remain obstinately fixed on the long habit of professionally asking what did he say?

–Oh, the usual, bed-getting phrases. Then I had a baby.

–Really.

–We have two boys. At boarding school.

–He never mentions them.

–No. Oh, he likes them well enough. He spent most of their childhood destroying their confidence as he destroyed mine. I don’t know what he wants from people, the genius he hasn’t got, I suppose, and yet the moment anyone shows the slightest individuality he can’t stand it. The elder, called after you incidentally, has taken up the guitar. Not very well. The other, well, it doesn’t matter. I haven’t come –