Gut Symmetries (15 page)

It would not be the first time that Jove and Stella had covered the traces of where I began and where they ended. I liked the playfulness of the lovers' argument: who are you and who am I? Which of us is which? Liked it less when the erotic twinhood devolved into forged letters and faked signatures.

It had begun as a game. Post-coital ludos lathered with champagne. Bubbling with love I had shown Jove how to calligraph himself as me. If he could turn his wrist to mine, he might become me, he might free me. If he could be let go into myself, then I might be let loose into another self. He might displace me as a heavy solid displaces water.

At the time, I did not find this analogy sinister.

Once upon a time there were two friends who found a third. Liking no one better in the whole world, they vowed to live in one palace, sail in one ship, and fight one fight with three arms.

After three months they decided to go on a quest.

'What shall we seek?' they asked each other.

The first said, 'Gold.'

The second said, 'Wives.'

The third said, 'That which cannot be found.'

They all agreed that this last was the best and so they set out in fine array.

After a while they came to a house that celebrated ceilings and denied floors. As they marched through the front door they were only just in time to save themselves from dropping into a deep pit. While they clung in terror to the wainscoting, they looked up and saw chandeliers, bright as swords, that hung and glittered and lit the huge room where the guests came to and fro. The room was arranged for dinner, tables and chairs suspended from great chains, an armoury of knives and forks laid out in case the eaters knocked one into the abyss.

There was a trumpet sound and the guests began to enter the room through a trap door in the ceiling. Some were supported on wires, others walked across ropes slender as youth. In this way they were able to join their place setting. When all were assembled, the trumpet blew again, and the head of the table looked down and said to the three friends, 'What is it you seek?'

'That which cannot be found.'

'It is not here,' she answered, 'but take this gold,' and each of the diners threw down a solid gold plate, rather in the manner that the Doge of Venice used to throw his dinnerware into the canal to show how much he despised worldly things.

Our three friends did not despise worldly things and caught as many of the plates as they could. Loaded down with treasure they continued on their way, although more slowly than before.

Eventually they came to Turkey and to the harem of Mustapha the Blessed CIXX. Blessed he was, so piled with ladies that only his index finger could be seen. Crooking it, he bade the friends come forward, and asked in a muffled voice, 'What is it you seek?'

'That which cannot be found.'

'It is not here,' he said in a ghostly smother, 'but take some wives.'

The friends were delighted, but observing the fate of Mustapha, they did not take too many. Each took six and made them carry the gold plate.

Helter-skelter down the years the friends continued their journey, crossing continents of history and geography, gathering by chance the sum of the world, so that nothing was missing that could be had.

At last they came to a tower in the middle of the sea. A man with the face of centuries and the voice of the wind opened a narrow window and called . . .

'What is it you seek?'

'That which cannot be found ...found .. .found,' and the wind twisted their voices into the air.

'It has found you,' said the man.

They heard a noise behind them like a scythe cutting the water and when they looked round they saw a ship thin as a blade gaining towards them. The figure rowed it standing up, with one oar, but it was not an oar. They saw the curve of the metal flashing, first this side, and then that. They saw the rower throw back his hood. They saw him beckon to them and the world tilted. The sea poured away.

Who are they with fish and starfish in their hair?

DEATH

June 8 1960. Liverpool, England. Sun in Gemini.

My father at the wheel of the
Godspeed.
Myself birthed and bloody in my mother's fur. The creosoted cabin, the paraffin lamp. Smell of oil, tar, sardines and gin.

I flew into London Heathrow and when the Customs officer asked me if I had anything to declare, I said, 'My father is dying.'

I took a connecting flight to Liverpool and a taxi to my grandmother's house, the old two up two down nearby the defeated docks.

Grandmother always had seemed fabulously old, unicorn old, strange figure out of time. Now she was biblically old, upright as a prophet, sharp-tongued as the Serpent himself. She opened the front door as if it were the Hall of Judgement. Perhaps it was.

'David's asleep,' she said. 'Your mother's drunk.'

I went inside and through to the kitchen. It had been carpeted, tiled, formica'd, glassed, and beside the coal range was a built-in gas cooker. I looked around for the rabbit. Gone.

'The Social Services,' said Grandmother, pronouncing it KGB. 'They said, "Do it up or go into a home. Not fit for human habitation." I said I am human and I have inhabited it for more than sixty years.'

We sat down at what kitchen shops call the breakfast bar.

'I should be dead,' said Grandmother. 'I should be dead not David.'

I listened to her story of what had happened, running it back through my mind to where it had begun. I had seen my father put off his bright self and shroud himself in dead men's clothes, the pressure suit and pressure helmet of normal life. When at last he was fully dressed in the ways of the world he had pumped up the suit with an inflation of respectability. He had protected himself against himself. His pressure suit saved him from the disruptive forces of depth.

At the same time he began to corrode inside it. His first crisis, when I was nine, and we had moved to London to jump ship at the death of the docks, re-detonated the action man inside him. He became a cartoon of his vigorous positive self. At the moment of decline accelerate. He dragged himself out of shadow into a twenty-four-hour day. He had successfully made the transition from the old-fashioned values of the post-war world into the edginess of modern life. He was admirable, my father, admirable and brave, and unable to see that the shadow he so feared was his own.

During the seeming sunshine years his shadow lengthened. Fixedly gazing ahead, my father pretended not to notice. He did not notice that the sun on the sun-dial told a different story to the one he was telling himself. He had to be a hero under a high noon. The light should not waver or wane. He forgot that time processes. Fatally he did not remember that by some loop in its own laws, time can precess. My father got older and younger at the same time. As he became more senator-like, the wild boy, the dock boy, my tug-boat father, rioted, though well below the protection of consciousness.

He started to complain of a twitch. The doctor gave him tablets. At board meetings, at his most imperious, leading the good men in grey, he twitched. One side of him remained dignified and upright. The other side leapt galvanically. He was advised to take time off. He refused.

At the Cunard birthday celebrations my father twitched a full bottle of Krug over HRH Duke of Edinburgh.

'A Greek,' said my grandmother, pronouncing it 'Who?'

The board retired him. It was no disgrace. He was comfortably in his sixties and could have chosen to leave on his own account. His chauffeur collected him on his last afternoon as himself, and asked, as usual,'Where to, Sir?'

'Liverpool,' said my father.

As the Jaguar spun the motorway under its wheels my father wondered why the road should not go on forever. What was his destination? Who was driving? There was the familiar outline at the wheel. Himself in the back assuming he had control. He had made himself passenger of his own life.

He leaned forward to tap on the window. He wanted to tell the driver that he would prefer to get out and walk. He fell back, shaking himself. Get out and walk? He was going to Liverpool. What was the matter with him?

'Be someone. Be someone.' His mother's words tattooed on his body, his secret skin worn under an expensive suit.

'I am someone,' he said out loud. 'But who?'

How he had hated the two up two down terraced house. How he had hated his own father, coarse, suspicious. How much guilty relief he had felt when his father had been torpedoed.

A year before his father was killed, he had come home after a gas accident in his submarine. What should have been a container of oxygen had corrupted his lungs into a rebellion of mucus and blood. He had recovered but his left side was permanently damaged. The nerves and skin clung to him in a pantomime of life that was not life. His lidded eye, his drooping mouth, the wasted, twitching arm and his leg in his boot fastened so tight that it seemed to be there to hold the leg on.

David remembered having to sit on his knee and dive for sweets in his dead pocket.

His father was given a clean bill of health by the Navy doctor who wanted him back in the submarine. The night before he left, he crept up to David, asleep in bed, and bent down, a bandana tied over his face, whispering 'It's in the air, lad, it's in the air. Can you not smell it? It's in the air.'

David could smell it. The thick soaked uniform smeared with blood and urine. The stale water. The smell of death and destruction. The smell of a stretcher and a dirty red blanket. If the horror is inside you how do you get it out?

In the terraced house David learned not to breathe.

When his father was killed David felt a rush of air in his lungs. He breathed so hard that he feared his nostrils would jam with wardrobes and chairs. His bellow lungs opened so wide his nose could not supply them. Would he die with every piece of house furniture packed into his respiratory tract? He leaned out of the window trying to breathe in the whole sky. In the morning his mother's bedding plants had been uprooted from the garden by a violent wind.

He loved his mother. He would be someone.

David got out of the effortless Jaguar and handed his chauffeur £1,000 in cash. He shook him by the hand, thanked him, and turned away, upright, untwitching, towards the buildings that had been Trident Shipping. His chauffeur reversed quickly and drove away. The car had to be cleaned and ready that evening for David's successor.

David went into the old buildings that his mother had cleaned from 1928 until 1978 and where he had started work in 1947. The sheds, stores, wharf-ends and offices had been converted into an art gallery, theatre space and healthy-eating café. David walked across the shiny floors and puzzled over the installation of wire netting and lifelike plastic cod. Out of place among the jeans and baseball caps, the man in the Savile Row overcoat ordered a piece of carrot cake and a cup of strong tea. A group of students glanced over at him.

'Who do they think I am?' he wondered. 'A rich stupid old man.' And he laughed because he had been poorer than any of them and cleverer too.

'This used to be the clerks' office,' he said out loud. (The students looked up and then looked away.) 'There were twelve of us in here. We used to call it the Apostles' Shift. Every week the company stopped a shilling off our wages to pay for the suits we wore.' (He paused.) 'A shilling. Might as well say a doubloon. All in the past. History, I suppose.'

He thought about it. Getting old was not something he had expected. He wanted to say, 'Why am I old?' and although he knew that question had no meaning, it had meaning to him. His body and his mind, allies for so long, had begun to quarrel. And his spirit? Where was his spirit in this new parting of the ways? He didn't believe in God but occasionally, uncomfortably, he had a sense that God believed in him.

'I am a stupid old man,' he thought.

He took out his book.
Other People: A Mystery Story.

He had been attracted by the tide because it seemed to him that other people were mysterious, unknown. He got along by making assumptions about them, they got along by making assumptions about him. How much of any of that was true? The students had glanced at him and looked away. They thought they knew what he was, in so much as he was anything at all to them. He had his own impressions of them; lazy, shallow, scruffy, dull.
He
hadn't been to university and look at him now.

'Yes,' he thought. 'Look at me now. Why not? It tells us nothing we need to know.' He wished he could go and speak to them. He wished he could say, 'I am not that man you see sitting in the corner. My name is David.'

He looked at his feet under the table. He did not see his polished Oxfords and dark wool socks, he saw thick-soled boots with steel tips, heels hooked over the spindle of a clerk's high stool. A fluffy cotton mop pushed his feet back into the present.

'Mind yer feet, please.'

'Mother?'

'David.'

He furrowed his face at her. She had not worked here for twenty years. What was happening to him?

It was his mother, stuffed into her pink overall like a prune inside a wrap of bacon.

'I'm doing the cleaning.'

She sat opposite him, KGB in her voice.

'Pretend you don't know me.'

The students nudged one another and a girl giggled.

'What are you doing here?' she said. 'You'll get me into trouble.'

'I retired today,' he said, and the words sounded far off. Someone else's.

'Well I'm still working and if they find out you're my son I'll lose my job.'

'Why?' He didn't understand.

'Look at the age of you. I told them I was sixty-one.'

Sixty-one. Sixty-one. She was nearly ninety. Anyone could see that she was nearly ninety. Her stomach had slipped to her thighs. Her breasts had slipped to her stomach. Her neck was in her vest. Her chin was in her neck and her eyes had receded so far into her hollow skull that from the camouflage of her thin hair she should have been able to see backwards.