Art & Lies (20 page)

‘She’s mad. She’s mad. She’s done this. She’s mad.’

At the attic, the door was bolted from the outside but locked from the inside. Jack rammed it with his shoulder and came away howling. It was an original door at least six inches thick.

‘Bitch!’ he shouted. ‘Bitch, Bitch, I’ll kill you.’

Then Matthew took up the cry and stripping off his white towelling dressing-gown, keeping on his rubber boots, he fought the door with his whole body until it buckled under him and fell in, straight, with him gasping on top of it and spread across it as though it were a raft at sea. He struggled up and I saw that he had ejaculated over the knob.

‘Where is she? Where is she?’

She had gone.

I got into my car and drove a few miles down the road. The rain had weighted into snow and as I pulled over to avoid a bad skid I saw a young woman walking lightly and with a quick spirit. I wound down the window to offer her a lift, I tried to reassure her by explaining that I was a doctor. I didn’t see her face but I heard her voice and it had yellow in it.

Why should she trust me? Who am I anyway?

Who indeed. What identifies a man? His job? His children? His religion? His dental record? It was easy in a white coat. Easier still in a dog collar. ‘This man belongs to God. Please return.’

I have been returned. The verdict was Not Guilty.

I left the dock cocooned in sympathy. The kind man with the kind face, musical voice, and long careful fingers, that shook slightly as he spoke. Handel. A free man.

The lady in question has had a complication, but it is too late for me to make any difference to her now. Too late for her.

And for me? Too late for me?

I drove on to the station hoping to meet the morning train. The weight of the day hung around my neck, the day beginning to stink a little as it wore. I had no prayers.

Was it the weak sun magnified by the snow that put a yellow glaze on the dirty streets? I could not get the yellow out of my eyes. I did not have jaundice, and this was not the sickly, sticky yellow of disease, but a firm clean drag of bright, over the optic nerve.

What we think we see, we don’t see, I know that. I know that colour is an intervention of light. Light it was that made a gold crust on the baked snow. The biscuit-shaded snow out of the polluted sky. If it could find grace in the moment of a morning’s colour, then why not I? My grey heart light again.

I, Handel, runaway and stray.

He had his back against the smooth trig point which sheltered him against the wind. His collar was up under his chin, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. He had his eyes closed and the wind washed him. Cold wind-water splashing his cheeks. His cheeks felt long and hollow, fluvial channels salting up, as rivers do close to the sea. He was crying.

He cried out of the heart of him, cried up all the lost days and mortal indecisions that he had thought were gone but were still stored in the skin and bone of him, a tank of pain, tapped.

He had no space behind his eyes for the tears he found, tear-falling from the lachrymal glands. He dug his fists under his brow-bone but the tears ran through his tight fingers, would not be contained now, his clothes were marshy. A heron landed above his head.

Still the light. Light drained of colour but unclouded. Metal light that ran a roller-cutter edge between the sea and the sand, so that there was no blend of both, only a definite line of fallen grey. Sheeted light that shuttered the view.

Still the light. The seagulls flew through it with difficulty, the light resisting the flap of their wings. Unfriendly bird light heavy with moisture. The sagging air.

On the salt flats of his sorrow the man stared at the ending day. There was comfort in his pain, a recognition, something at last brought face to face that had lived back-turned for most of his life. His life, spent on the run from a crime that carried no penalty but the one its nature exacted. There was a dead place in him that reason could not quicken. A roped-off tomb unvisited by love. Always he had held back his heart from books, pictures, the passion of the music that meant so much to him, the nearness of her face. And it was not her face only. Every day he killed in himself the starts of feeling he feared. A daily suicide gone unnoticed by those who assumed he was still alive.

Felo de se. The crime against himself God forbidden.

Father I have sinned.

Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience my child?

Sins of conscience …

The little baby in its warm coat of blood. There is more to the story than I told you at the time.

It had long been the law in the city that, just as two doctors were required to certify a woman, so two doctors must give their consent before a woman could qualify for a legal abortion performed in a charitable hospital. The rule had been a success, few abortions were performed. Performed. Back stage things went on as usual, unrehearsed, unregulated, without proper equipment, but for a very good price.

When I tell you that a young woman was sent to me hoping for the second consent that she needed, you will understand why I refused, won’t you? I am a Catholic. It is no use arguing with me over this. Res ipsa loquitur. Not true, Handel, not true. The thing doesn’t speak for itself does it? No, I admit, it does not, but ignorance is a great comforter. Very few Catholics are theologians. It is our method to leave the thinking to some and the obeying to many.

Abortion is complicated for us, because our thinking on it has changed over the centuries, or should I say our ordnances have changed? Our thinking revolves with sickening dizziness round and round the same problem: When does the embryo receive its soul?

Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the prevailing view, although by no means the only view, was that the male receives his soul on the fortieth day, while the laggard female must wait until the eightieth day. If one accepts that, it is possible to distinguish between Foetus Inanimatus, which has no true life, and Foetus Animatus, the gift of God and sacrosanct. Thanks to the blessed absence of technology, it was impossible to be sure of the sex of the child, and, with unusual common sense, Canon law allowed abortion, up to the eightieth day, if the mother was in mortal danger. Again, mortal danger was a moot point before science decided that everything could be accurately diagnosed, and so there was an element of compassion, a little leeway, in many of the decisions made by ordinary local priests.

In 1869 Pius IX decreed that every foetus has a soul from the millisecond of conception.

The woman who came to me was young, poor, unmarried, uneducated, beautiful, illegal, Catholic. We talked, and while we talked, she did not look at me, she stared at my kelim on the floor. I was mindful of my position, my responsibilities, the seriousness of this.

I knew what my priest would say …

‘Tell the slut to control herself.’

Yes, tell her that, why not?

‘Have you had an examination?’

‘Yes.’

‘And there are no complications?’

‘No.’

‘You and the baby are both healthy?’

(I had her report, why was I putting her through this?)

‘The doctors say so.’

‘And you have a job?’

‘But not if I have a baby.’

‘Why weren’t you careful?’

(Tell the slut to control herself.)

She didn’t answer, and I could see in her face, with its delicate chitinous bags, all the careful days unravelled in one spontaneous act.

She left. With a single stroke of my pen I condemned her child to life. It would not be for me to feed him, to clothe him, to bathe him, to wipe his head, to wake for him when he cried, to sleep beside him when he was afraid. It would not be for me to walk out every morning to provide for him, to come home every night to comfort him. To comfort him. It would not be for me to tell the little creature, born full of hope, that there was no hope in the world.

How to say, ‘This filthy room where you were born is likely to be the filthy room where you will die and all the years in between will be grey cloth.’

How to say, ‘You will pay for your life with every day of it.’

There are no social programmes now, because we all know that single women become pregnant so that they can live off the State. And even if that were true, even when it is true, what does it say about us, the wagging fingers and severed heads? TELL THE SLUT TO CONTROL HERSELF. And if there is no Self to control? No dignity, confidence, purpose, spirit, place in the world, understanding? Not for her. Not for her. She can’t afford any of them. And if she does make money, she’ll find she can’t buy them. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

She left. Probably I would never see her again. Probably she would find a back-street boy with a knitting needle and a dose of crack. Probably the baby would not survive the shack birth, infected cloths, poor milk and cheap food. Probably it would catch a cold that would develop into pneumonia. If it lived at all it would be to fill up the gutter with the rest.

What could I do? It wasn’t my baby.

But there was a baby wasn’t there Handel?

Yes. There was a baby. The windy night fog-stained. Fog in horizontal columns, like battering rams, driving up the narrow streets. A brown fury, grit and dirt of carbon monoxide.

I didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps I would have recognised her name but the name I had was not the name of the woman I had seen last winter. Why should she hold on to a name? I haven’t held on to mine. At the derelict house, wrapped in an orange mesh poultice, to show it was unfit for human habitation, I met a man, the father of the child, he said. Big, brawny, scared, he had tried to take her to hospital, but she had refused to go.

I walked up the exhausted stairs that smelt of kerosene and chips. The room had a stripped car engine in one corner. A throw-out bed. A big box from the fishmarket, that he had lined with newspapers, he was proud of it. ‘For the baby,’ he said, and offered me the one stool. She looked at me. Did she know me? Did I flatter myself that she could know me? We look alike, the men with money and power, give or take a few pounds. Our tailors work side by side in the same street. We drink the same vintages from the same five chateaux. Most of us drive the same kind of car, and we read the same newspaper. Yes, we are the individualists of our age.

How lovely she was … Madonna of the Desperation. Deep blue lines of tiredness rimming her eyes, her knuckles, starched against the pain. Frail, membrane-thin, but not yet exhausted out of her youth.

I was not the father of the child but I knew that I had brought her to this moment as surely as if I had penetrated her. I wanted to get rid of the other man, this was something private, something between she and I. We were intimates, she and I.

I sent him away to fetch water, and sat myself down at an angle to her on the sunk bed. Her legs were aching and I began to rub them up and down their length. She lay back, glad of the relief, women tell me I have good hands.

I had to tear up my shirt to make cloths.

‘It is not the doctor who is naked,’ she said, laughing at me.

I was embarrassed. I hate anyone to see my body. My body is the shape of my clothes and nothing more. I was glad of the dim flare that lit up the corners of the dirty room, better than it exposed my skin. I did not want her to look at me.

‘Lie back,’ I said. ‘You must rest.’

I was much paler than her, gecko-white on the warm stone of her, a lizard in too much light. If anyone had come in, what would they have thought? That I was paying her? Yes, that I was paying for pleasure as men do to whom money comes easily and affection so much harder. I have women friends who confide in me about their husbands’ habits. Of course, their husbands boast to me about their exploits, and although the facts are identical, the story is not at all the same.

Silence and stillness as I sweated to birth the child. The mother was brave and hardly cried out above the wheeze of the flare. The creaking bed, the wheezing flare, that putter-puttered almost out. The feeble flap of curtain fighting the wind. I, between her legs, kneeling with my head down, not sure whether it was a child I was delivering or myself. She smelled of iron and tar and field mushrooms.

I kissed her cunt. I took all that I could of her huge birthing cunt into my mouth and kissed it. I held my tongue against her clitoris, big as a pullet egg, and under the yoke of her orgasm, the baby began to shift. I pulled my face away in time to bring forth the head of a little girl, body umbilical bound. I bit the cord, swung the child upside down, and in response to a tiny slap, she discovered her lungs. A bright red baby yelling herself purple in the blue air.

The mother was laughing and I laughed too and wiped my smeared mouth on my own shirt, and then, gently, gently, wiped her. There was nothing I could say.

I left her quite a lot of money, hiding it where I hoped the other man wouldn’t find it. I promised to come and see her in a couple of days.

I never saw any of them again for twenty-three years.

What makes up a life; events or the recollection of events?

How much of recollection is invention?

Whose invention?

*

Look in the mirror Handel, the long mirror that reflects the whitened body, cuttle-fish bleached and brittle boned. What can you see that is really you? The man to whom you think you are accustomed? What can you see? The gene pool that has made you one shape rather than another; that has bestowed upon you your blue eyes and their quizzical stare. The inherited strengths and failures of your ilk. Is that you? Look deeper: How much of your thinking has been thought for you by someone else?

Speak Parrot!

What kind of parrot am I?

My range is wide, my accent, good. When I speak I am convincing. Very often I convince myself. Isn’t there a proverb; In the country of the Blind the one-eyed man is King? But what of the articulate among the guttural? Once upon a time I would have been listened to with respect, now, I am regarded with suspicion, and for the wrong reason. I know that I am false; the irony is that the barkers and jabberers believe themselves genuine. As if to speak badly is to speak truly. As if to have no command of language must ensure a complete command of emotional sincerity. As if, as journalists and novelists would have me believe, to write without artifice is to write honestly. But language is artifice. The human being is artificial. None of us is Rousseau Man, that noble savage, honest and untrained. Better then to acknowledge that what we are is what we have been taught, that done, at least it will be possible to choose our own teacher. I know I am made up of other people’s say so, veins of tradition, a particular kind of education, borrowed methods that have disguised themselves as personal habits. I know that what I am is quite the opposite of an individual. But if the parrot is to speak, let him be taught by a singing master. Parrot may not learn to sing but he will know what singing is. That is why I have tried to hide myself among the best; music, pictures, books, philosophy, theology, like Dante, my great teacher is dead. My alive friends privately consider me to be rather highbrow and stuffy, but we are all stuffed, stuffed with other people’s ideas parading as our own. Stuffed with the idiocies of the daily paper and twenty-four-hour television.