the caption read. ‘Oh dear. Who let Aunt Bertha in?’ The picture, basted in the usual citric, achromatic light, was of a piece of meat with a grease-mottled, lipstick-smeared glass in its hand.
The chipolatas clamped around a chipolata turned out to be my fingers. The meaty midgets head-butting each other were my knees. The red tones had been brought up in the printing so that all available flesh (too much – very much too much) looked flayed; it was mottled, purple-on-purple, like hung game. As for my face. I won’t begin to describe my face.
The calls started coming in straight away – geared-down Sunday-morning voices trying to gear up to a sense of weekday commiseration, outrage, concern. ‘Think of yourself as a great glass bell, yeh? Filled with junk, yeh?’ monotoned one born-again chanter or meditator, newly put in touch with her breathing planes and alpha waves. ‘Clear the junk out, y’know, and then polish the bell so it can reflect what you really think and feel.’ Peppy advice. Fax’n’info. Bits of jolly-up. On and on.
‘Let me tell you something Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “I was drunk for many years”, he wrote in his notebook, “and then I died.”’
‘Of course you know what your trouble is. You’re life-lagged.’
But they could have saved their breath, well-meaning as it (mostly) seemed to be. That picture was all the prompting anybody could need. I was out of there already. I was already gone. Faded, as my friend Sammy would say, in bolivion.
*
I had hoped to get to the village during daylight. But I’d ended up taking a later, and then a still later, train. So now it was dark.
The cottage, when we eventually arrived there, was on the edge of the village, just off to one side of a lane, standing on a small quay on its own.
Lights were burning in one of the rooms and there was smoke rising from the chimney – the work, I knew, of a Mr Brotherhood, who lived nearby and took care of the place when it was empty.
The panting of the taxi sounded loud and queerly familiar in such an unfamiliar place. When I had paid him, the driver drove to the end of the quay, where his lights swept along an outbuilding and then settled for a couple of seconds on a boat slip where the quay dwindled informally away to seaweed and stones. He did a tight turn, tooted and sailed past me with a wave.
I watched while he went over the stone bridge we had crossed coming in the opposite direction, and marvelled that half an hour could have him back in the land of bar-fights, Kebab-U-Likes, and puke-ups in the back seat.
It was June and there were certain accents on the air which of course I had no way of naming (plants, flowers, all manner of maritime and rural things). There were boats moored to the quay, and standing out of the water on the edge of the quay, balanced between trestles. Viewed at such close quarters they appeared as strange as Venusians; they loomed above me, and I felt a compulsion to step forward and touch one, put my hand against its rippling flank, as if it was a thing in a zoo. Smaller boats were moored out in the river. Their metal masts made a clean clinking sound in the dark as hawsers (I guessed they were called) and other bits of metal beat against them.
The background to all of this, though, the incidental music about to be prioritised now, was the sound of water. It reminded me of something. And what it mostly reminded me of was itself: water lapping in even waves against the hulls of boats with odd kitschy names and breaking on the bits of shingle beach.
But as I stood and listened and it grew louder – it was now the only sound there was – it reminded me insistently of something in addition to – an approximation of – itself. But what? I couldn’t remember. And then I remembered. It was the sound of a thousand working men drinking a thousand pints in the loud swilling sheds where I ended my professional career.
Drinking on that scale and in those circumstances
The chipolatas clamped around a chipolata turned out to be my fingers. The meaty midgets head-butting each other were my knees. The red tones had been brought up in the printing so that all available flesh (too much – very much too much) looked flayed; it was mottled, purple-on-purple, like hung game. As for my face. I won’t begin to describe my face.
The calls started coming in straight away – geared-down Sunday-morning voices trying to gear up to a sense of weekday commiseration, outrage, concern. ‘Think of yourself as a great glass bell, yeh? Filled with junk, yeh?’ monotoned one born-again chanter or meditator, newly put in touch with her breathing planes and alpha waves. ‘Clear the junk out, y’know, and then polish the bell so it can reflect what you really think and feel.’ Peppy advice. Fax’n’info. Bits of jolly-up. On and on.
‘Let me tell you something Scott Fitzgerald once wrote. “I was drunk for many years”, he wrote in his notebook, “and then I died.”’
‘Of course you know what your trouble is. You’re life-lagged.’
But they could have saved their breath, well-meaning as it (mostly) seemed to be. That picture was all the prompting anybody could need. I was out of there already. I was already gone. Faded, as my friend Sammy would say, in bolivion.
*
I had hoped to get to the village during daylight. But I’d ended up taking a later, and then a still later, train. So now it was dark.
The cottage, when we eventually arrived there, was on the edge of the village, just off to one side of a lane, standing on a small quay on its own.
Lights were burning in one of the rooms and there was smoke rising from the chimney – the work, I knew, of a Mr Brotherhood, who lived nearby and took care of the place when it was empty.
The panting of the taxi sounded loud and queerly familiar in such an unfamiliar place. When I had paid him, the driver drove to the end of the quay, where his lights swept along an outbuilding and then settled for a couple of seconds on a boat slip where the quay dwindled informally away to seaweed and stones. He did a tight turn, tooted and sailed past me with a wave.
I watched while he went over the stone bridge we had crossed coming in the opposite direction, and marvelled that half an hour could have him back in the land of bar-fights, Kebab-U-Likes, and puke-ups in the back seat.
It was June and there were certain accents on the air which of course I had no way of naming (plants, flowers, all manner of maritime and rural things). There were boats moored to the quay, and standing out of the water on the edge of the quay, balanced between trestles. Viewed at such close quarters they appeared as strange as Venusians; they loomed above me, and I felt a compulsion to step forward and touch one, put my hand against its rippling flank, as if it was a thing in a zoo. Smaller boats were moored out in the river. Their metal masts made a clean clinking sound in the dark as hawsers (I guessed they were called) and other bits of metal beat against them.
The background to all of this, though, the incidental music about to be prioritised now, was the sound of water. It reminded me of something. And what it mostly reminded me of was itself: water lapping in even waves against the hulls of boats with odd kitschy names and breaking on the bits of shingle beach.
But as I stood and listened and it grew louder – it was now the only sound there was – it reminded me insistently of something in addition to – an approximation of – itself. But what? I couldn’t remember. And then I remembered. It was the sound of a thousand working men drinking a thousand pints in the loud swilling sheds where I ended my professional career.
Drinking on that scale and in those circumstances
Similar Books
