Then there was total silence, as if the world had died.
And at last, when the silence itself had died, and only with an effort, I made myself look up.
Dad and Doris were staring at me unblinking, like people in a still photo. Except for tears running down Doris’s cheeks.
I thought, I’ll always remember this moment, this scene, this picture of Dad and Doris, remember it till the day I die.
And suddenly, quite at that instant, I felt happy. Such relief! A cloud-floating lightness of being. All my body was smiling. Except for my face. Which remained impassive, as if mildly frozen with dentist’s Novocain.
Now, with all words spent, all spilt out of me like rubbish from a bucket, I could think of nothing else to do but pick up my knife and fork and eat my food. Smoked trout, rice and salad.
Doing this seemed to release Dad and Doris from the spell that had fixated them. Now they too picked up their knives and forks and began to eat.
Nothing was said, not a word, till we’d finished eating, and sat back in our chairs, replete but shell-shocked, our eyes still anywhere but on each other. PTS. Post Traumatic Stress.
Then, after a decent interval, Doris got up, practical and decisive as always, saying in her everyday voice, ‘Coffee?’
Dad nodded, I nodded, Dad said, ‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘Please.’ Doris put on the kettle, prepared the coffee pot, arranged the cups. Dad wiped his mouth with his napkin and dropped it in a crumple, as usual, on his plate. I picked it up, as usual,
you because there is always a small delay, a small gap of time, between it happening and you knowing about it.
For example: a pinprick on your finger. There is a very small gap of time between the pin pricking you and you feeling it. This gap in time which it takes for the message that you are being pricked by a pin to reach your brain and for you to become conscious of it may be very very brief, but it is a gap. The event has happened before you know it has happened. You can actually see this when you watch it happening to someone else.
When I burned myself the other day while I was putting a casserole into the oven, I was burnt before I could react. This is obvious. I did not know about the present moment when I was burnt until after the burn happened.
In other words, by the time we know something has happened, it has become part of our past. What is happening inside us is just like light coming to us from the sun and the moon and the stars. It takes a certain amount of time to reach us. And by the time it reaches us the sun and the moon and the stars are no longer where they were when the light started from them, because they have moved on. What we are seeing, when we look at them, is the way they were in the past. In the same way, it takes a certain amount of time for an event that is happening to us to reach our consciousness and by then the instant of the happening is in the past and something else is already happening to us.
I think of time like an hourglass, a figure of 8. In the top part are the sands of the future. In the bottom part are the sands of the past. Each grain of sand, each particle of everything that happens to you, must pass from the future to the past through the neck of the hourglass, the waist of the 8. And the neck of the glass is so small, so brief, that it is impossible to say when the moving grain of sand is precisely at the point of ‘the present’.
Therefore, though there is such a thing as the present time
folded it neatly and laid it beside his plate, as usual. Dad smiled at me, as usual after this ritual. I smiled at Dad, as usual.
‘Might be nice to have it outside,’ Doris said.
‘Good idea,’ Dad said.
‘Could I take mine to my room, if you don’t mind?’ I said. ‘There’s something I need to do.’ (Be on my own.)
‘Of course, darling,’ Doris said.
‘Only if you give your old dad a kiss,’ Dad said.
‘Only,’ I said, ‘if my old dad stops calling himself my old dad.’
‘Quite right,’ Doris said, pouring my coffee.
‘Promise?’ I said to Dad.
‘Promise?’ Doris said to him.
‘Okay,’ Dad said. ‘If it means getting a kiss from my amazing daughter. Promise.’
I gave him a kiss.
He gripped my arm with one hand and stroked my head with the other and kissed me back.
‘Now,’ he said, pretending to push me away, ‘bog off and leave us love birds to fart about alone.’
‘You’re disgusting,’ I said.
‘Thanks for the compliment. At least that’s one thing you can rely on.’
‘True,’ I said, taking my coffee from Doris and making for the door. ‘You are consistently obscene.’
‘Always have to have the last word,’ Dad said.
‘Yes, you do,’ I said, closing the door behind me before he could answer.
I was fast asleep when my mobile went off just after one. Will. The gig had gone badly. His drummer hadn’t turned up. A substitute had been found at the last minute but he was hopeless. The sound system had gone on the blink. The gig’s manager had refused to pay the full fee, saying his
punters in theory, there is no present time in our real lives. There is only what has already happened and what will happen. There is only the past and the future.
We do not live in the past. We cannot live in the future. And there is no time we can call the present. So, if there is no present time, where do we live?
My answer is this:
Our present is the time when we are conscious of what we know. That is where we live and the time we live in: the time of our consciousness. And our consciousness includes our memory of our past and our openness to the flow of our future.
Ode to Will’s body
In the speech
of his body I
find comfort.
In the phrases
of his flesh I
find pleasure.
In the grammar
of his bones I
find courage.
In the rhyme
of his hands I
find peace.
In the questing
of his eyes I
am discovered.
In the opening
of his mind I
am entered.
In the hard
bearing
hadn’t had their money’s worth. Will, molto lamentoso, phoning from outside my front door. Could he come in? Would I ever have said no?
(In the days before mobile phones he’d have thrown pebbles at my window and we’d have whispered our moonlit version of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene. She speaks! O speak again, bright angel! He might even have climbed in – he could have done, there was a convenient drainpipe. With love’s light wings did I o’erperch these walls, For stony limits cannot hold love out. But as Dad and Doris had gone to her place for the night, he didn’t need to. I just chucked the key to him and he let himself in. Mobiles and broad-mindedness, not to mention absentee parents, have taken all the romance out of clandestine assignations. Is romance possible only when there are strict rules to be broken? Thy kinsmen are no stop to me. If they do see thee, they will murder thee! Ought I to be much stricter with you, my daughter, and say no and block your mobile and police your night life so that you have to work really hard to lose your virginity? What do you think? Though I suppose, by the time you read this, the question will already have been answered.)
Will was one of those people who are always full of go, always up, always optimistic, always undaunted. He was as veritable as Romeo. Until suddenly – not often, quite rarely in fact – something went wrong that, for no reason you could predict, would flick a switch in his psyche and down he would plunge into a slough of despond, where he’d thrash and grumble like a disgruntled tiger mired knee-deep in quag. Which is how he was when he reached me that night.
Maybe I was only half-awake when he arrived, maybe I’d been so emotionally up and down I needed a dose of grace myself, and maybe because of that I didn’t try hard enough to
lift him out of his pit. Or maybe he was in a mood to be in a bad mood. Maybe that’s what he wanted, to hurt and be
weight and
thrust of him –
in the slow
swifting
heat and
pulse of him –
in the lavish
howl and
gush and
spurt and
give and
take of
him – I
am lost
for words.
Fairy Tale
(for my daughter when she is sixteen)
Once upon a time there was a knight who loved the king’s beautiful only daughter. The knight did not want to inherit the kingdom, what he wanted was to marry the princess. But the king was so jealous of his daughter he shut her up in a room at the very top of the tallest tower in his castle so she could not meet and marry the wrong man – or any man at all come to that, for like some (most?) fathers, whatever they might say, he wanted his daughter only for himself.
The knight tried everything he could think of to attract the princess’s attention.
He tried to bribe the king’s guards to smuggle a letter to her, but none of them would for fear they might lose their heads if they were caught. ‘Anyway,’ each of them said, ‘what makes you think the princess would be in the slightest interested in you? I mean, look at you! Call yourself a knight! You
hurt, the way people do sometimes punish the ones they love the most instead of punishing themselves for their own weaknesses and failures, and end up hurting themselves while doing so. Whatever the cause, we didn’t harmonise but cut across each other. Will was grumpy and furioso, I was at first lackadaisical and pianissimo.
‘Don’t you care?’ he whined.
‘Of course I care,’ I said, smiling but feeling weary.
‘Doesn’t it matter to you that the whole frigging thing went pear-shaped?’
‘Of course it matters.’
‘Don’t you mind that I looked like a stupid idiot?’
‘Come on, Will! You’re not stupid and you’re not an idiot and everyone knows you’re not.’
‘Well, it doesn’t feel like that.’
‘I thought you couldn’t give a shit what other people think about you.’
‘I don’t.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘It’s only one gig. It isn’t the end of the world, for god’s sake!’
‘I don’t care what other people think, but I do care when things go wrong. I should have checked on Shaun [the drummer]. You know what he’s like. You can never rely on him. I should have cancelled when he didn’t turn up. Or I should have just played solo stuff.’
‘Should have doesn’t change anything.’
‘O, thanks! Brilliant!’
‘Forget it. Come to bed.’
‘I can’t forget it. I don’t want to come to bed. And you’re just lying there like nothing’s happened.’
‘So what d’you want me to do?’
‘Nothing. Anything. I’d like to smash something up, if you want to know.’
look more like a silly girl than the princess herself. Be off, and stop bothering us.’
He waylaid the princess’s maid when she was shopping for the princess’s tampons at the local Tesco and tried to persuade her to put in a good word for him when she was combing the princess’s luxuriant long black hair, but the servant girl said, ‘I’ll give you one if you pay me right, but you’ve got about as much chance of winning over that little stuck-up miss as you have of winning the lottery. And anyway, what do you think you are! You look more like a mangy girl than our Maisy, and she’s only thirteen. Mind you, if you were a girl I reckon you’d stand more of a chance with milady because she’s given me the finger often enough, I can tell you. But as you aren’t you might as well toddle off, you daft happorth!’ And she laughed so hard that she bust a gut and had to be carted off to hospital for abdominal repairs.
Failing in these efforts, the young knight tried to attract the princess’s attention by singing to her one bright moonlit night. But he’d warbled only a couple of verses of the ditty he’d spent ages composing before the night watchman chucked him in the moat for keeping him awake. And that would have been the end of the night for the knight, a nasty death by drowning, had his armour been made of metal, but it wasn’t, because he couldn’t afford such a luxury leisure item and instead had made his kit out of an old cardboard box which he’d painted blue onto which he’d sprinkled silver sparklers his mother used to decorate cakes. He thought his ensemble looked rather flash in the moonlight, very eye-catching. Luckily for him, the cardboard’s buoyant quality before it was soaked through kept his head above the moat’s pungent water, which is just as well when you think about it. (You see, they didn’t have proper sanitation in those days. The moat was used for, shall we say, the royal effusion, not to mention that of the king’s loyal subjects as well as the kitchen garbage, and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.)
‘Stop pacing around.’ I’d broken out in a sweat. I pushed the bedclothes off and sat up. ‘You’re frightening me.’
‘Frightening you? Why?’
‘I’ve never seen you like this before.’
‘Like what?’
‘So angry. So violent.’
‘There’s a first time for everything.’
‘Will, please!’
‘I’ll go. You’d like me to go.’
‘No!’
‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it.’
‘What?’
‘Going.’
‘Is it?’
‘Me going to college. Leaving you here.’
‘O, I see! No.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Only to you, then.’
‘You don’t care that I’m going.’
‘Will! You know that’s not true.’
‘That’s what this is about.’
‘It’s not about anything. You’re just a bit upset.’
‘So it’s me! I’ve got it wrong again!’
‘No, it’s not you!’
‘Fuck it! What, then? You tell me.’
‘I just don’t know how to help you.’
‘To hell with it!’
‘And that frightens me as well. Tell me how to help you.’
‘I’m going.’
‘No, Will, please! You know I love you. I love you!’
‘Don’t use that word!’
‘Why not? It’s true. At least I tell you. You’ve never said that to me. Not once, not ever. Why not? Don’t you love me? Is that it? Is that what this is about?’
His cardboard armour kept him afloat just long enough to dog-paddle his way to the bank and extricate himself from the castle’s gunge.
After that he was desperate, and as knights always do at this point in the story, he visited the local wise old woman, also known as an old crone, sibyl, witch, green lady, helper, interfering old bag, mad old trout, depending on the storyteller’s intention and gender bias. This one was in quite good shape as a matter of fact, having taken more care of herself than the usual run-of-the-mill witch, even her breath wasn’t too ripe. She, of course, was expecting him. The fact is, they’re always expecting anybody, it doesn’t matter who, so long as somebody comes, because the truth about old sibyls is that they are very lonely (they’re always very old, you see, and never have any teeth and all their friends died ages ago), and as loneliness is the worst condition that the human being can find him- or herself in, this makes them keen to be visited by anybody anytime, because anybody’s good for a gossip, even girly knights who aren’t quite up to the job. The hours they spend alone also makes these old biddies wise because they have yonks of time, not to mention experience acquired during their long years of living it up before they lost their dentures and became old crones, to think about the meaning of life and come up with a few simple solutions to busy people’s personal problems. (Nowadays they’re called Agony
Aunts aka psychotherapists.)
I won’t bore you with the usual witchy dialogue, take it as read, but what she advised our knight, in the tricksy crabwise way of these characters, was that he should think about Eros because the answer lay in little pointy sticks with feathers on one end. It took our hero three days (three is required in these stories, whether it be seconds, minutes, days or whatever, and it is days in our knight’s case because he wasn’t too bright but he wasn’t that brainless either, and anyway they were nice sunny days and he felt he deserved a bit of time off
‘People use that word all the time and it doesn’t mean a thing. I love dancing. I love a good night out. I love a Big Mac. I love spewing in the gutter when I’ve had a belly full. I love my cat. I love football. I love Christmas. I love a nice cup of tea. I love a good screw. I love tomatoes. I love picking my nose and eating it.’
‘All right!’
‘I love having a shit.’
‘All right! All right!’
‘I love everything—’
‘I get the picture. I really do.’
‘– which means you don’t love anything at all. It’s just a meaningless word.’
‘But which word can we use when we do mean it?’
‘Not a word that doesn’t mean anything any more, that’s for sure.’
‘What then? Tell me. Say your word for it.’
‘I don’t have a word for it. I’m not sure I even know what it means.’
‘You do! You do! I know you do.’
‘How? How d’you know?’