Drift Read online

  Oh, and I’m forty-two, and I’m looking forward to:

  Chronic rheumatoid arthritis

  Incontinence

  Osteoporosis

  Contractures

  Fibrositis

  Bronchitis

  Hypertension

  Rectal carcinoma

  Paraphrenia

  Inguinal hernia

  Dementia

  Et cetera

  What’s this? A liturgy? A fortune cookie? A prophylactic prayer? A Christmas list of antonyms? Superstition? Fate?

  No, it’s a journal… and I’ll have to force some writing onto it each day, which cannot be dissociated from any other… parasitic days, symbiotic and sucking days indistinguishable from the profusions of disgust, loathing, anxiety, each day the last, except for this practice causing something to be set in motion… shit, piss, the pen: the repository of so much weakness.

  Indeed, of my latest book, one notable critic said I should have won the Nobel Prize. Two of the greatest living writers labelled me ‘original’ and ‘most gifted'.

  In moments like these I would have liked to die.

  I had them to dinner; bought expensive drinks. Found nothing in common. Say no more. Except that my mother locked herself in the next room coughing and whimpering until they left.

  I’m stuck in Hammersmith, London, SW13. I’m dying in Hammersmith, London, SW13, pretending my life was something else, and even though there’s a kind of drudging discipline, an immitigably English drudgery, there’s also a terribly overwhelming emotionalism. I needed love. (This too, was an English thing, to need but not to display… screwing oneself up without help). And by will, by force of will alone, was dizzily bending my life towards its irrationalities.

  Then suddenly, I was receiving letters from Tasmania. I felt dizzy again. The hole into the past gaped.

  4

  They ply towards shore, a mess of rock and shingle four hundred yards away. Cliffs loom, but nobody worries. They don’t look at cliffs, just as they don’t look at whales when they broach. Fright at the size makes one paralytic. ‘Tis the deep casting an image, Sperm McGann said. Pull a whale ashore and ‘tis no more fearful than a blubber raft.

  At fifteen, slicing up ambergris in the belly of a beast, two flensers crackling with blood had held him down and violated him. The initiation, they said. You either get to like it or you fight it. McGann broadened his shoulders, furling sail and mincing whalebrain for spermaceti. His sharpened spade needed only four good strokes. He held up the blocks of wax. A record for a kid. He kneaded the substance. Shaped it into their faces. They were rather surprised, pleased almost. Hee haw. Within the belly of another whale, he decapitated them. Stuffed their testicles in their mouths.

  Nobody messed with him after that.

  5

  It can happen anywhere, anytime. I have to sit down. Sometimes I’m gone for an hour, for a day. It’s getting worse. I’m told amnesiacs discover whole new worlds, unknown galaxies, possibilities forever unaccounted and unaccountable, blank balance sheets; that they appear conscious only from one moment to the next, flickering, like an animal. Phenomenal. No wholes, no gelatinous presence, but sometimes, profound sensitivity.

  Yes, it’s heartbreaking to return from such fugues to the cheap wisdom sniping at the air between these advertising hoardings, the batwings of my soul… wisdom’s sour breath as it grabs the back of my neck and thrusts me up against reality. Nothing there, between aspiration and my story… a desire to tell, with an insufficiency of logic which I cannot even begin to explain.

  But what if you, dear Emma, won’t tell me more, allowing your pain to be locked within you forever?

  Witness the reason for this shoal upon which I sport, ask why I look longingly at my own death with mucilaginous eyes, staring from a lost cove into one of the most isolated stretches of the mind. Oh, how I long to get away!

  But you are keeping me from that. You, who harbour fear, perhaps a story which I have to know before I… though if given a suicide, I hope you will be able to say: ‘There goes commitment, there, the grist of understanding', and if you can say that now, then, dear Emma, let’s drink a bottle together.

  Why then, do these tears still cling, if they’re not reptilian? It’s the sulphur in the air. They mine here, in south Wales… my holiday destination… as far as I can afford. I wish I could come to Tasmania instead. The air stinks, the hills run with slag, the stream through the town belches a kind of black liquid. There’s a STOP sign stuck in the mud, uprooted in some motor accident, which now bespeaks a prophecy if no one repents. Cold too. Icy flakes peel over fences.

  At pre-arranged points, Company buses pick up the men. They stamp in their overalls with lunch boxes in hand, queuing docile and grateful. The buses grind past, windows fogged with breath, heads lolling in sleep, oil smearing the panes. They don’t see me. They don’t see that I want to die for them.

  But I’m on holidays.

  In the mornings Mother slurps her porridge and sneers with a broken tooth.

  Twelve novels published… with each, the hole getting smaller, like on a sinking ship, water level closing off the escape hatch… twelve novels and I still can’t feed her. She lives off a pension and has done so for twelve years while I’ve been writing books from the day of Father’s death. The day after, in fact, when I ransacked the house and sold the furniture.

  So now the day wanes into an insipid glare. I’m tired of these venial ambitions, the mimicry of culture. Tonight I’ll break something, shatter the festivity of these celebratory moments which bring on nausea. Another literary function upon which I will vomit.

  Back to London on the six o’clock train. Words will be spoken. Arguments with well-fed men and women on private incomes all writing dull prose reeking with bad plumbing and afternoon tea-parties, extra-marital affairs and dubious heritage. Men and women who know nothing of the chaos of the soul, who are ignorant of the squeakings of real desperation.

  A few of Ainslie’s friends will be there and I’ll find myself acting crudely, trying to squeeze a few quid out of them, knowing I’d have better luck with those who sleep under bridges. From the very beginning Ainslie and I agreed to have total freedom with each other’s lives. She had a strange zeal, as aristocrats sometimes do, for saving the world. She disappeared every so often to Marrakesh, Zanzibar, Bangladesh. She was doing things for World Vision, Save The Children, Amnesty International etc., although I suspected there was something else behind it… behind the network of women bureaucrats, late-night phone-calls, assignations, official dinners. Perhaps it was something as mundane as power. You could get a buzz out of the alms corporation, receive eleemosynary electricity or compassionate credit from hours of talk, reams of paper. The power to impose boredom.

  Towards the end, when Ainslie and I separated, she used to accuse me of not adding to the economy. I told her I was a daily donor to the sperm bank of England, might even have been fertilising Royal ovaries. Nights I used to creep into her flat at Knightsbridge to unsuccessfully sniff out other men in her underwear.

  Ainslie. She was about two hundredth in line to the throne. Why she married a bum I don’t know. I suppose being a writer attracted a certain type. The communion of souls, wisdom, all that sort of shallowness a woman working simultaneously in the Stock Exchange and in the United Nations inexplicably experiences. Perhaps the massive contradictions made her simplify things. She cried a lot, but I could never find her soul. She read best-sellers with a gun under her pillow. She realised early that honest Fascism got rid of a lot of unnecessary turmoil. I’m sure she had a hand in several revolutions. I was naïve enough to believe that had its attractions. She had no time. But for me, the wingèd chariot had turned into an agonisingly slow pendulum.

  We parted amicably enough, after a long series of emotional tearings… once you hit the motorway of bitterness you drive your separate ways forever… though the signs say GO BACK! WRONG WAY! you gleefully wait for the fatal collision… one irretrievab
le step at a time. We parted when numbness had made me invisible, socially inept even with my poetic dog-tag. After countless empty evenings at one function or another, I, who was always slow to shuffle my words and views, my Thames-side accent wandering rudderless in the upper reaches, became garrulous and outrageous. One night, after a dinner party with an ambassador and his girlfriend, after I had the girl’s stockinged foot twitching like a landed fish in my crotch beneath the table, Ainslie and I began a violent argument. Later in the kitchen, she had picked up a fruit knife. I was insulted.

  At least use a carving knife! I screamed.

  She had completely forgotten the gun.

  But Ainslie was not spiteful. Even as the removalists came, she was still throwing things my way. Using her influence, I became a judge on the Booker Prize Committee for literature. I picked up the books from the Hammersmith P.O., three big boxes of them, (somehow it fell upon me to distribute duplicate copies to the other judges), and threw them into the river.

  ‘You sure you don’t want any?’ Mother slurps, the tassels on her tea-cosy cap skimming the scum. With memories like these I won’t cry at her funeral, unless the moment overtakes me.

  New Year’s Eve tonight in south Wales. Mother has lost her mind and the Welshmen are singing, but we won’t be celebrating. Mother always switches off the lights at eight. You don’t try to change that kind of routine. Except she suddenly says, looking at my lined pages stained with rinds of whisky: What are these circles for? Are they runes?

  Everything is significant for Mother. It’s the same with art. I’m tired of art. I’m simply celebrating quietly.

  In our rented terrace in the Rhondda, I ladle out porridge from the aluminium saucepan, its handle glued to a florid tea-towel. I cut triangles of bread, bounce on some rubbery cheese and fire up the griller. Mother pulls down her knitted pot-warmer. It’s three degrees in the kitchen. Food stains mark the side of the stove. Between the plastic sugar bowl and the greasy tin teapot, there is a hole in the wall made by mice. A peephole.

  Off to London tonight, then away, never to return. My mother will die, kill herself out of anger and remorse. There’ll be a murder tonight, I guarantee. But first, the peephole. It’s where I keep Emma’s letters, just in case Mother comes across them. She would have no qualms about reading Royal mail. Damn. My cheese-toast is burning. Smells like blubber.

  6

  Sperm McGann went a-whaling and when there were no ships for him, drifted along the quays of Hobart Town, notorious in the 1820s for its stink of try-works, melted blubber hanging heavy in the drizzle. It was notorious for other things too, and McGann covered the waterfront, making waxworks, a dab hand at casting your simulacrum. Death crowded into his tent on the pier and sat for him. Outside, the freak shows, the Tiger Children, the Native Woman Born of a Whale, flesh carved like scrimshaw. In the pubs and laneways, murder, rape, a commerce in dried heads.

  They ply for shore, oars like the legs of a water spider.

  Cadence, men.

  McGann, master of his own whaleboat.

  Lay aft!

  Turning his head he sees the captain standing by the running lights, a flaring match over his pipe. The lines of the cliffs grow distinct. Rocks and inlets appear, sluiced sand peeping white, strands of pebble in the vague moonlight.

  He steers the boat into a cove and smells the buttongrass on a shift of dead wind.

  Ease oars!

  They ground in the sand and drag the boat up, making sucking sounds with their feet as they reach in gathering harpoons, spades, muskets, pistols, clubs. McGann motions to them and they follow. He knows this headland like the back of his hand, his hand which is tattooed with scars and laced with tendons. He stoops, signals to avoid the twigs, branches, stones balanced on rocks - all the traps set for inferior ears – but he knows they would already have heard these white men, clumsy bastards, let alone smell them. He would have been concerned if not for the covenant he’d struck: axes for women. Move. Wait. Had to go through this charade like wombats. The natives expected it.

  In the next cove, a red glow. Around it, sleeping figures, one turning, slapping at a mosquito. An incandescent log splits and explodes…

  Aaiiieeegh! A roaring. Bloodlusting. Men charging on top of others. The sound of steel upon flesh. Confusion. No form to this but naked power. An old man lifts his head and receives a musketball which snaps it back and bone and brain spray out in fountains of blood. We respect no covenant, McGann yelled, bearing down with supposed courage and alcoholic pride, while three young men stand with trembling spears, cut down with harpoons before they can aim. Aaiiieeegh! Human flesh is nothing to such fine lances and practised arms, the expanding barbs clean through the other side. Children clubbed like seal pups. In five minutes they are dragging the women with them, pushing them into the whaleboat, the natives running off in smoke and swirling firebrands, gurgling with blood while their brothers are hoisting them on shoulders without seeing McGann’s men return to finish them off, muskets like bursting flowers, cascading sparks in their backs which are suddenly wet and dark and the woman McGann holds in a headlock has smoke in her hair, frizzled fish-oiled hair smelling like smoked salmon.

  7

  Opening a tin of kippers for lunch, I marvel at how these far reaches keep cropping up, but I won’t have history yield to mere imagination. I’ll have to go to Tasmania, put the pieces together, abandon writing to disprove the artefact. In London they are already making a mockery of me. Witness this unkindest cut; the usual journalistic canard of reducing literature to patriotism:

  He really should get out of Britain. His ‘innovatory technique’ is nothing but young wine in old bottles, a kind of puritanical confession in rebellion against the imagination, which he classifies as ‘lying'. It just doesn’t cut the mustard here. We’re a nation of craftsmen, not noted for experimentation and anarchy, for those Continental practices of public self-humiliation, microscopic recordings of self-consciousness and irresponsible frivolity. All this is more of the same really, but in the final analysis, writing is writing, life is life… and the former is always subordinate to the latter.

  The London Review of Books

  Pure tabloid. Mark my words: even my death will be a failure.

  I worm past slag heaps searching for a pint of Welsh Bitter, lukewarm, hopping amongst the crippled and desperate, the victims of mine disasters, little bent-over men with lung diseases, the spittle slippery underfoot even after they shovel on the sawdust.

  Why drag my old mother here for a holiday?

  At the age of ten they evacuated me to Wales while she was bombed in Hammersmith, pieces of aircraft and human debris and shrapnel landing on our greenhouse, our little glass shed in our tiny backyard where my father used to grow spring onions. Smells like roast pork, Mum said, looking up, until pieces of entrails smeared her specs.

  Yes, I was removed to south Wales and placed with a family, he a locomotive driver for the mines, having spent most of his life in India; she from Rajasthan, a little woman who cooked chutney and mixed pickles and lime all day, telling stories of India as she cooked. Despite all the brutality of those times, she had focussed her life on spices, and despite this terrible war against the Germans, had made each little rationed meal as delicious as a feast with her home-grown herbs, making my mouth water, (indeed, I remember now… it was the slowness with which we were required to eat, masticating twenty times before swallowing, chillies and herbs infusing my nasal passages with fiery snuff which bonded with the word… delicious… arrggh!… delicious… water!… the paradoxes of taste… the next day wishing I could have shat in a bidet), as I now walk past the slag-filled river, the cold wind biting, tearing through the valley, almost smelling her meal-time commands and stories and bringing my old mother here to share what only I am appreciating… another woman’s cooking. A true family, they were. Dead now, the locomotive driver and his wife, but I can still smell chutney and pickles above the sulphur and coaldust. It is emanating from Pertab�
�s Punjabi Pop-In Place up the street. Pertab’s son a mining engineer with gambling debts.

  So, into the curry-house.

  Hello, Pertab, you old perturbaned Punjabi.

  Hello and how’s your father?

  Neither of us knows each other well. Ethnicity and confusion in practice here. Unfortunate, this mention of my father. I normally apologised for the luxury of eating out. I let it be known my father left us for a fancy woman and got knifed in Shanghai. Years later the Communists paid up for the liquidation of his business, so we cashed in his shares. It wasn’t enough, but I’ve got these credit cards, you see. Lies buy time. What could I have said? That my father, this country, my years of national service owed us these slag heaps, this curry, this lukewarm beer?

  Nobody owed anybody anything.

  They didn’t take credit cards in the Rhondda.

  My father was in the First War. See this photo of him, a portly man with a pipe, a pudgy face, kindly, almost.

  He was at Ypres and came back. One of the few. Gassed. Emphysema gave him that gurgling in his lungs. He said he was glad he wasn’t an officer. I hasten to add there was no bullet-hole in his back. The working class had its advantages, nothing to live up to, but nothing to die for. He and a mate shot their lieutenant before they went over the top.

  He gave me this gold-nibbed dip pen he said he’d taken from the body of a dead German… an officer. Then later, when he was dying, he said the German gave it to him.

  I told him it was all right, my father said. I told him that everything was all right, and of course it wasn’t all right. His guts was oozin’ out weren’t it? It was a lie. It weren’t even a comforting lie. I should’ve told him he was dying. That’s when he gave me the pen… for me to write to his family. It is my experience that people never carry out the wishes of the dying. Have you still got the pen son?