Weekend (22 page)

Dan made a face and raised his wine-glass. He reciprocated the gesture. But they were toasting different things.

What the Sphinx asks Oedipus is this: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three legs in the evening? Oedipus works out that a child crawls on all fours, that we
walk upright on two legs and that we may use a stick in old age. He says the answer is man, human beings. The Sphinx kills itself. What Oedipus thinks he is doing is answering a question. What he doesn’t understand he is doing is volunteering for a destiny, and an unfulfillable destiny at that. The death of the Sphinx is the authority of the animal world, of nature, apparently abdicating in favour of the supremacy of our species. But the Sphinx had given us a riddle that has a much darker meaning than the one Oedipus attached to it. To prevent the Sphinx from ingesting us, we are effectively obliged to ingest the Sphinx, to take its darkness into ourselves. If we refuse merely to be another part of the darkness of the animal world, that darkness will remain a part of us, endlessly compromising who we think we can be. The riddle is not just a question. It is also a prophecy. Whoever has the ingenuity to answer the riddle is condemned to live the prophecy. Step forward us. What walks on four legs is an animal, what walks on two legs is most definitively a human, what walks on three legs is a mutant. Tell me. What animal has three legs?

Marion still couldn’t think of one. Someone had suggested afterwards in the dining-room that a flea might have three legs but this was disputed by several voices, although fortunately no one had the physical evidence on them at the time.

The painting suited his mood. It was called
Crucifixion
. It showed an empty spangled Elvis Presley one-piece suit against a nondescript pale background, suspended in space with the arms extended. What could have been blood ran in two rough lines downwards from the empty armholes. It was like a pastiche of a religious artefact. The painting seemed to him to fit the man who wasn’t in it. It seemed to celebrate and mock at the same time.

He had liked Elvis. He thought he had embodied the social rebellion that was rock ‘n’ roll more effortlessly than anyone else. In his early films, almost uniformly dire as they were, what was always unmistakable was the coolly subversive threat he gave off. He had the amused, self-confident eyes of a man who knew he had an awful lot of testosterone in the bank and would spend it exactly how he chose. He looked like a breaker of the rules. He looked dangerous. But long before the end, the threatening stud had turned into a confused and conformist fat man, eating junk food and popping pills and dying in the lavatory. The adulation was empty. It was always empty. Think of the self-serving hysteria that had erupted round the death in New York of John Lennon, a talented musician who for most of his adult life didn’t know his ass from his ashram.

He stood in front of the painting for a while, letting it remind him of the emptiness of things. He didn’t know if the meaning he took from it was what had been intended by it. Maybe the artist was just another worshipper at the posthumously established Presleyan Chapel. He certainly seemed to be inviting us to compare Elvis with Jesus. Maybe there was no intended irony. He didn’t care. He saw in it the folly of investing banality with a depth of feeling it couldn’t carry, like putting a midget on stilts and then being impressed by his height.

He let the thought chasten him. Hadn’t he been doing the same? He cringed at the memory. That big bastard. He obviously wore the jockey shorts to advertise. Showcasing his only talent. Dennis, she had called him? Denis? No, Dennis. The greater width suited him.

‘It’s all right, Dennis.’

The cow. He should have told her that to her face, except that he didn’t particularly fancy being knocked down a flight of stairs. Instead he had stood there, with the flowers and the chocolates advertising his silliness. The gifts denied him any means to make a dignified retreat. They made him feel as if he had wandered into the wrong play. He had no part here. He might as well have been someone in flannels and holding a racquet who appears suddenly in a kitchen-sink drama, saying, ‘Tennis, anyone?’

Fucking tennis? Only if you’re the ball, my man. He might have been standing there yet, staring into his own stupidity, if the Incredible Hulk hadn’t given him his exit line.

‘You better leave, pal.’

‘Hm,’ he said, and turned to go.

‘Your bag, David,’ she said.

Trying to put all of his contempt into one last stare, he picked up his bag and came downstairs. A stare was safe enough. He imagined he could have been in another country by the time Dennis worked out what it meant.

Anyway, he supposed the contempt was really for himself. It was a long time since he had done anything as naïve as that. It would be a longer time before he did anything as naïve as that again. Hopefully never. The flowers he had placed neatly and ceremoniously in the trash can in the street had seemed symbolic, a bouquet laid at the grave of his sentimentality. It wasn’t just the flowers he was putting in the trash can. Belief
in the trustworthiness of anybody else went with them. RIP. Even Sandra had turned out to be devious. Why had she turned up at Willowvale after saying she couldn’t possibly come there?

He wandered away from the painting. He had always enjoyed coming here to the Gallery of Modern Art. It was like a kind of anti-church for him, a place for mortifying your delusions, for reaffirming the absence of any lasting significance. He liked the gimcrack nature of some modern art, how it often made itself out of any oddments of life that came to hand. It seemed to him an iconoclastic assault on the pretentiousness of the past. Like Rachel Whiteread’s subversive plinth. Asked to devise a statue for an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, she put an upended, pale and ghostly plinth on top of the stone one. She stood reverence on its head. She seemed to be commemorating the emptiness of what we are trying to commemorate. Think of the crumbling significance of a statue of Field Marshal Haig. She seemed to be commemorating the insubstantialness of our ability to commemorate. Think of some grand mausoleum in a deserted graveyard. All we can really commemorate, her plinth seemed to be saying, is our desire to commemorate.

He came upstairs to brood over a piece that he liked. It was called
Inner City
. He stood studying it again. It was like the model of a set for a film, an abandoned back lot in a studio that had been adapting a seedy story by someone like Raymond Chandler. It was hauntingly detailed, a shadowy staircase and office windows and blind apartment blocks that drew you into their dark ambience, making you wonder about what kind of lives would be lived there. It was eerily empty but he thought he could imagine the sort of people who belonged in such a place.

They would be the kind of people Duane Hanson had created – those fibreglass figures, painstakingly constructed from body-moulds, nearly all of them dressed in working clothes or the leisurewear of their time, every one of them rendered in a meticulous detail that records each sagging jowl, each fold of fat, the shadow of minute hairs on the forearm. Painted into what could pass for living flesh, they stand or sit, staring bleakly past any attempt to engage them in eye-contact.

He could imagine them here, blue-collar America transported into this environment: a weary waitress bored into being a submissive automaton, housepainters having a break they don’t seem to know what to do with, a fat man wondering why he is mowing a lawn, tourists who stare vacantly upwards, baffled by what it is they are supposed to be admiring. ‘We have worked the work,’ the expressions on the faces of Hanson’s people always seemed to be saying, ‘we have bought the tickets, and we have reached a place which is nothing like the way we were told it would be. Is this all there is?’ They were the morning-after supplement to Norman Rockwell’s
Saturday Evening Post
. The shining-eyed inclusiveness of Rockwell’s Americans became in Hanson the dislocated stare of the dispossessed. They were fixed in their eternal bewilderment, resonant anti-icons, individuals who represented nothing more than their own intractable individuality, the loneliness of the unique bodies in which they were trapped. Harry Beck had mentioned Auden. ‘In headaches and in worry vaguely life leaks away,’ Auden said. Hanson’s people were staring into the truth of it. They were the labourers in the vineyard of the American dream who never got to taste the wine.

He wouldn’t be making the same mistake. There was no
dream, American or otherwise. There was only the way things are and what you can do with them. He studied
Inner City
dispassionately, as if it was a map of where he was, and turned away. Here endeth today’s lesson.

By the time he came out into the street, he knew what he would do. He would find a hotel and it would be a good one. Don’t mourn rejection, celebrate release. The freed man ate a hearty dinner. He would do that. He needed a little more time and a comfortable place to clarify his immediate future. Veronica Hill hadn’t narrowed his options, she had expanded them.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Hm. Why?’

‘You look as if you’ve been crying.’

‘Just lack of sleep, I suppose.’

‘It was that kind of weekend, was it?’

‘Well, you tend to sit up late. Discussing lectures and stuff.’

‘And stuff?’

‘That’s everything, I think.’

She stood watching her mother separate coloureds from whites to be added to her parents’ washing. It occurred to her how convenient it was that the thong her mother was holding, before placing it in the appropriate pile, was so skimpy. There wasn’t enough of it to retain much dust from the time it had spent on the floor of her room, not to mention being kicked away by David Cudlipp. In the difference between what the thong meant for her and what it meant for her mother she saw an expression of the distance between them. It was a good
thing she had been careful not to take the torn dress out of her bag when she removed the other used clothes from it.

‘It’s been fixed for June,’ her mother said.

‘What has?’

‘The wedding.’

‘Wedding?’

‘Jennifer’s wedding. It’s in June.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘Well, I hope so. I just hope she isn’t showing too much.’

‘She’s pregnant?’

‘I told you that. Honestly, I think nothing registers with you if it isn’t in a book. Or comes by email.’

Email, she thought, and her mother’s voice receded from her and the sound of her father mowing the front lawn before the rain came seemed as distant as her childhood.

So, we’re nature’s freaks. Very impressive freaks, but freaks. We can’t just live. We have to dream our lives as well. In taking over the animal world, we interrupted nature with unanswerable questions. No other creature does that. In one of his poems Auden points out that fish are seamlessly a part of nature, in contrast to us. Fish don’t begin the day by wondering, Should I swim left today or should I swim right? They just swim. They inhabit their element totally. We stand on our three legs both inside and outside our element. Edmund Blunden has a poem where he talks about going for a walk to get relief from something he’s working on: the question of who wrote Shakespeare. All around him he sees a world fulfilled in simply being, a world from which he feels
excluded. He notices a flower and thinks how lucky it is. It has no worries like him. He says he ‘beheaded it for blooming insolence’. We can’t just be in nature. We have to argue with it. We contradict it. We introduce God to it. Even death we haven’t accepted as final. People talk of the worm in the apple. We’re the apple in the worm. We can’t just be. We distort the nature of being with our dreams. And the dreams, we have demonstrated over millennia, are unfulfillable. Open any newspaper any day of the week to see the incursion of the naked animal into society. Think of the horror of the brutishness that is happening daily all over the world. We haven’t grown out of our animal origins. We have perfected, refined, technologised them. Some of you will have been reading
Heart of Darkness
this term. Human history has located that place precisely. The heart of darkness is the darkness of the heart. Our dreams don’t work. But we can’t stop having them. We can’t just inhabit the present. We try to foresee the future. Even the past can’t just be the past. We have to keep ransacking it for meaning to find out if who we were can tell us who we are.

On the bed she looked as if she was lying in state. The light coming through the gauzy curtains from the street-lamp outside softened the furnishings around her, making them look as mysterious as the artefacts in an Egyptian tomb. The dimness also gentled the suffering which had been etched for so long on her face, completed the cosmetic ministrations of the undertakers. The dress was the one she had worn on her last evening out before her living space finally contracted to a
wheelchair. Although this stillness had grown upon her by inches, its totality was shocking. She had become sheer fact, immutable.

He stood at the bottom of the bed, staring. His thoughts buzzed aimlessly around her body like flies, still trying to take sustenance from the dead. He was glad he had told the undertakers to leave her here tonight. He had to find a way to take his first farewell. He imagined he would be taking other farewells for the rest of his life. He was glad this was the dress he had chosen. She had loved it, and it was as if he had released her into who she had been before her illness.

If he had had a mobile phone, he would have known earlier. He had phoned regularly from Willowvale, checking on how Catriona was, but Mhairi had given no forewarning that anything was different. But how could she tell? Catriona had spent so long precariously poised between living and dying that she was always liable to leave discreetly and without warning. Between a whisper and silence is no great distance. As far as he could tell from Mhairi’s tearfully fragmented account, Catriona had probably died while he was on the ferry. It struck him that he still didn’t know the precise cause of death. The doctor had used some technical term which he assumed related to breathing but he had been too disorientated to ask for clarification. He remembered the word ‘airways’. He would have to speak to the doctor again. He didn’t know what difference the knowledge would make but it was important to him to have it. It seemed disrespectful to let her die without knowing exactly why. He should have had a mobile. He felt as if his aversion to modern technology had caused her to die without him. But then he felt that this thought was just a screen for the one he didn’t want to face: he had already abandoned her by being with Vikki Kane.