The History Man (3 page)

On the pavement, outside their tall terrace house, set in its broken curve, Barbara is already standing, waiting for him to come. She wears a white, pinch-waist, full-length raincoat; she carries two red canvas bags, Swiss, from Habitat. He leans over to open the passenger door; she reaches into the van to put the bags into the back. ‘You must be feeling very good,' she says, getting into the seat beside Howard, ‘everything's starting for you, so you're feeling very good.' Howard lets out the clutch; he turns the van, back and forth, in the terrace. ‘I'm fine,' says Howard, driving to the end of the terrace, turning up the hill. ‘Shouldn't I be?' Barbara pulls on her seatbelt; she says, ‘I can tell when you're feeling good because you always want to make me feel bad.' Howard follows the arrows and the directional marks, the lefts, the rights, the no entries, that lead him up the hill and towards the new shopping precinct. ‘I don't want you to feel bad,' says Howard. There is a turn to the left, barred by a red arm; it is the entrance to the high multi-storey car park on the edge of the precinct. ‘Well, I do feel bad,' says Barbara. Howard makes the turn; he stops the van in front of the arm; he takes a ticket from the automatic machine. ‘You know what you need?' he says; the arm rises, and Howard drives forward. ‘Yes,' says Barbara, ‘I know exactly what I need. A weekend in London.' Howard drives up the ramp into the blank concrete of the place, through the flickers of light and dark, following the wet tyre-tracks. Howard says, ‘You need a party.' The van spirals upward through the high, blank building. ‘I don't need a party,' says Barbara, ‘it's just another sodding domestic chore I have to clear up after.' Driving through the concrete and the metal, Howard sees, on the fifth floor, a space for the van to park; he drives into it. The garage is dark and grey; he pulls on the handbrake. ‘You just had a very dull summer,' says Howard, ‘now everything's happening again. Come on, let's go and shop.'

The car park is a low, cavernous place, devoid of people, a place for machines only; out through the unwindowed parapet, you can see the town spread out below. The Kirks get out of the van; they walk together, over the oily, roughened floor, to the blank metal door of the lift shaft. Barbara says: ‘Your excitement fails to infect me.' Howard presses the button; the lift grinds in the shaft. The doors open; the Kirks get in. There are aerosoled scribbles on the lift walls: ‘Agro', ‘Boot boys', ‘Gary is King'. They stand together and the lift descends. It stops and the Kirks walk out. A long tiled corridor leads towards the precinct; there is human excrement against the walls of the brightlit passage. They come out among the high buildings, into a formal square. The precinct has straight angles; it has won an architectural award. There are long glass façades, the fronts of supermarkets, delicatessens, boutiques, the familiar multiple stores, displaying the economy of abundance; there is a symmetry of tins and toilet rolls in the windows of Sainsbury's; spotlights and shade permute the colour range of sweaters and shirts, dresses and skirts, in the Life Again Boutique. In the open space in the middle are multicoloured paving stones; amid the stones, in some complex yet deducible code, are tiny new trees, fresh-planted, propped by wooden supports. A waterless fountain contains much litter. The Kirks divide their tasks, half to you, half for me. Barbara walks towards the automatic glass doors of Sainsbury's, which slide open mechanically as she approaches them, and close again as she passes inside; Howard goes on down the precinct, to the wine supermarket, which is called Your Wine Seller, and has very special offers at very special prices. He walks inside, under the bright spotlights; he stands under the anti-theft mirrors, and inspects the bottles of wine that have been tossed carelessly together in the wire bins. He goes to the small counter at the back of the store.

The assistant looks at him; he is young, with a beard, and wears a maroon jacket with a yellow Smile badge on the lapel; this leaves his face free to be very surly. Howard sees with gratification the indignation of the employed and oppressed, the token resistance. He gives his order, for five dozen litre-bottles of cheap red wine; he waits while the man goes into the storeroom, and wheels out, on a wire trolley, a stack of big cardboard cases. He asks for the loan of twelve dozen glasses; ‘We don't lend them,' says the assistant. Howard delivers himself to the task of persuasion; he emanates concern, he invites the man to the party; he gets the glasses. The assistant stacks the boxes of glasses on another trolley. Howard takes the first trolley, and wheels it, across the open space of the precinct, over the coloured paving stones, past the empty fountain, through the tiled passage, to the lift; he ascends in the lift, and unpacks the cases into the back of the minivan. He returns with the empty trolley; he takes the second trolley of glasses up into the car park, and then back to the store. When he reaches the van again, Barbara has still not returned. He stands by the van, car keys hanging from one finger, in the empty, cavernous place, devoid of people, amid the shuttered concrete planes, the rough surfaces, the angular lines of air and space, light and darkness. He stares out, over the unwindowed parapet, at the topography of the town. There are torn spaces below, where the motorway and the new housing projects are being constructed; beyond are the rising shells of hotels, office blocks, flats. There are two Watermouths; the unreal holiday town around the harbour and the Norman castle, with luxury flats and expensive bars, gift shops and pinkwashed Georgian homes; and a real town of urban blight and renewal, social tensions, discrimination, landlord and tenant battles, where the Kirks live. To one side, he can see the blocks of luxury flats, complete but half-empty, with convenience kitchens and wall-to-wall carpeting and balconies pointed at the horizon; to the other side, on the hill, stand the towers of the high-rise council flats, superficially similar, stacked, like a social workers' handbook, with separated wives, unmarried mothers, latchkey children. It is a topography of the mind; and his mind makes an intellectual contrast out of it, an image of conflict and opposition. He stares down on the town; the keys dangle; he populates chaos, orders disorder, senses strain and change.

A Boeing 747 flies in off the coast heading for Heathrow; the engine noise booms in the cavernous building, sounds off the metal of the cars. In the corner of the concrete place, the lift-doors scrape back; someone walks out onto the sounding floor. It is Barbara, walking towards him, in her long white coat; she carries the two red bags, full. Her body is faint colour moving over grey cement. He watches her move through the planes of light and dark. She comes up to the van, and opens the back; into the interior, on top of the boxes, she pushes the bags, holding French loaves and cheeses. ‘Enough?' she says. ‘Of course, if there's five thousand, you'll be able to increase the quantity.' Howard opens the driver's door, and gets in; he opens the other door so that Barbara can come in to the passenger seat. She sits down; she fastens the seatbelt. Her face is dark in the shadowy place. He starts the engine, backs out of the space. Barbara says: ‘Do you remember Rosemary?' Howard drives down the spiral ramp, with its code of arrows and lights; he says, ‘The one who lives in the commune?' ‘She was in Sainsbury's,' says Barbara. The van tilts down the ramps; it makes the sharp turns. ‘So you asked her to the party,' says Howard. ‘I did,' says Barbara. ‘I asked her to the party.' They are on ground level now; Howard turns the van towards the exit, the bright wet daylight. ‘Do you remember that boy she was living with?' asks Barbara. ‘He had a tattoo on the back of his hand.' Through angular blocks of air and space, light and darkness, they move to the light square. ‘I don't think so,' says Howard. ‘You do,' says Barbara. ‘He came to one of our parties. Just before the summer.' ‘What about him?' asks Howard; the stubby red arm is down in front of him. ‘He left a note for her on the table,' says Barbara. ‘Then he went down the garden, to an old shed, and killed himself with a rope.' Howard reaches out of the window, and hands the ticket and a coin to the attendant, who sits opposite and above him, in a small glass box. ‘I see,' says Howard, ‘I see.' The attendant hands Howard change; the stubby arm rises in front of him. ‘When?' asks Howard, moving the van forward. ‘Two days ago,' says Barbara. ‘Is she very upset?' asks Howard. ‘She's thin and pale, and she cried,' says Barbara. Howard carefully eases the van out into the line of rush-hour traffic. ‘Are you upset?' asks Howard. ‘Yes,' says Barbara, ‘it's upset me.'

The traffic line jams. ‘You hardly knew him,' says Howard, turning to look at her. ‘It was the note,' says Barbara. Howard sits behind the wheel, stuck in the line, and looks at the moving collage. ‘What did it say?' he asks. ‘It just said, “This is silly.”' ‘A taste for brevity,' says Howard. ‘What was? The thing with – Rosemary?' ‘Rosemary says not,' says Barbara, ‘she says they were going great together.' ‘I can't really imagine going great with Rosemary,' says Howard. Barbara stares ahead, through the windscreen. She says: ‘She says he found things absurd. He even found being happy absurd. It was life that was silly.' ‘Life's not silly,' says Howard, ‘it may be chaotic, but it's not silly.' Barbara stares at Howard; she says, ‘You'd like to quarrel with him? He's dead.' Howard inches the van forward; he says, ‘I'm not quarrelling with him. He had his own thing going.' ‘He thought life was silly,' says Barbara. ‘Christ, Barbara,' says Howard, ‘the fact that he killed himself doesn't make it into a universal truth.' ‘He wrote that,' says Barbara, ‘then he killed himself.' ‘I know,' says Howard, ‘that was his view. That was his existential choice. He couldn't make sense of things, so he found them silly.' ‘It's funny to be existential,' says Barbara, ‘when you don't exist.' ‘It's the fact that we stop existing that makes us existential choosers,' says Howard, ‘that's what the word means.' ‘Thanks,' says Barbara, ‘thanks for the lesson.' ‘What's the matter?' asks Howard, ‘are you getting yourself seduced by this absurdist thing? It's a cop out.'

The traffic jam unstops. Howard lets out the clutch. Barbara stares ahead through the windscreen, down at the traffic movements on the hill. After a minute she says: ‘Is that all?' ‘All what?' asks Howard, moving forward through the peculiar private track that will take him through the traffic lanes and take him back to the terrace house. ‘All you have to say,' says Barbara, ‘all you can think.' ‘What do you want me to think, that I'm not thinking?' asks Howard. ‘Doesn't it worry you at all that so many of our friends feel that way now?' asks Barbara, ‘do things like that now? That they seem tired and desperate? Is it our ages? Is it that the political excitement's gone? What's the matter?' ‘He wasn't a friend,' says Howard, ‘we hardly knew him.' ‘He came to a party,' says Barbara. Howard, driving down the hill, turns and looks at her. ‘Look,' he says, ‘he came to a party. He was on drugs. He and Rosemary were getting into some crazy magical thing together, the kind of thing that hippies switch into when the trips turn sour. He never talked. We don't know what his problems were. We don't know what seemed absurd to him. We don't know where he and Rosemary were going.' ‘Do you remember when our sort of people didn't think life was silly?' asks Barbara, ‘when things were all wide open and free, and we were all doing something and the revolution was next week? And we were under thirty, and we could trust us?' ‘It's still like that,' says Howard, ‘people always dropped in and out.' ‘Is it really like that?' asks Barbara, ‘Don't you think people have got tired? Found a curse in what they were doing?' Howard says: ‘A boy dies and you turn it into a metaphor for the times.' Barbara says: ‘Howard, you have always turned everything into a metaphor for the times. You've always said that the times are where we are; there's no other place. You've lived off the flavours and fashions of the mind. So has this boy, who came to one of our parties, and had a blue tattoo, and put a rope round his neck in a shed. Is he real, or isn't he?' ‘Barbara, you're just feeling depressive,' says Howard, ‘take a Valium.' ‘Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a, bang. Bed a friend. That's your problem-solving system,' says Barbara. ‘Always a bright, radical solution. Revolt as therapy. But haven't we tried all that? And don't you find a certain gloom in the record?' Howard turns and looks at Barbara, inspecting this heresy. He says: ‘There may be a fashion for failure and negation now. But we don't have to go along with it.' ‘Why not?' asks Barbara, ‘after all, you've gone along with every other fashion, Howard.' Howard takes the turn into the terrace; the bottles shake in the back of the van. He says: ‘I don't understand your sourness, Barbara. You just need some action.' ‘I'm sure you'll find a way of giving me that,' says Barbara, ‘the trouble is, I've had most of the action I can take, from you.' Howard stops the van; he puts his hand on Barbara's thigh. He says: ‘You just got switched off, kid. Everything's still happening. You'll feel good again, once it all starts.' ‘I don't think you understand what I'm telling you,' says Barbara, ‘I'm telling you that your gay belief in things happening doesn't make me feel better any more. Christ, Howard, how did we come to be like this?' ‘Like which?' asks Howard. ‘Depending on things happening, like this,' says Barbara, ‘putting on shows like this.' ‘I can explain,' says Howard. ‘I'm sure you can,' says Barbara, ‘but don't. Are you going straight off to the university?' ‘I have to,' says Howard, ‘to start the term.' ‘To start the trouble,' says Barbara. ‘To start the term,' says Howard. ‘Well, I want you to help me unload all this stuff, before you go.' ‘Of course,' says Howard, ‘you take the food in. I'll bring the wine.' And so the Kirks get out, and go round to the back of the van, and unload what is there. They carry it, together, the bread, the cheese and the sausages, the glasses and the big red bottles in their cases, into the house, into the pine kitchen. They spread it on the table, an impressive array of commodities, ready and waiting for the party in the evening. ‘I want you back by four, to help me with all this fun we're brewing,' says Barbara. ‘Yes, I'll try,' says Howard. He looks at the wine; he goes out back to the van. Then he gets in, and drives off, through the town, towards the university.