I have a complaint to ma.., p.16
I Have a Complaint to Make, page 16
Fred smiled at her. “You’re all right. That’s the main thing.”
Her hair was only partially grey, and her round face was unlined; she seemed to be getting younger.
“Yes, I’m fine but what about you? Do you want any money?”
Fred shook his head quickly. “I wouldn’t mind an ashtray,” he suggested.
She went out to the kitchen to find one. Fred looked round the room. All the furniture was new, he realised, as if his mother had slowly shed every vestige of the past and was determined to start afresh. He leaned forward and tickled the cat.
“Hallo TFC,” he said. He had called it TFC ever since it was a kitten, but only he knew that it stood for “the fucking cat”. Elderly aunts had often secretly delighted him by calling “TFC!” as they dangled a morsel before it.
His mother returned with an ashtray.
“I’ve seen you looking better,” she said. “Are you eating enough?”
“Mother, don’t worry about me. You’ve done your share of that.”
“You were never any trouble, Fred. I just can’t understand why you haven’t found the right job. Your father could have got you into insurance, but you refused to have anything to do with it. I always hoped, with the exams you got, that you would become a teacher. There’s no money in it, I know, but it’s so … worthwhile.”
Fred had forgotten these earlier ambitions of his parents. It seemed a long time ago. The old feeling of guilt at the disappointment he was causing returned briefly, but it had lost its bite.
It was all irrelevant now, and his only concern was to see that his mother was contented in her new life on the coast. They talked for an hour and he kept the conversation away from himself.
When he left the bungalow a weight had been lifted from his mind.
Black clouds drifted across the sky as he reached home. They were an unfamiliar sight after the hard, dry summer and people were looking up at them in the street.
Fred left the station and walked quickly into town. The temperature had dropped and the farmers’ prayers had been answered: the drought was almost over.
It was early evening now, and the workers were queueing for buses home. What did they have to look forward to? An evening in front of the television, no doubt. The average Briton now spent eight years of his life slumped in front of the box. It frightened Fred to think about it.
He decided that a couple of drinks would help him on his way and headed for the Cellar. For a change, Miranda was presiding over an empty bar. He gave her a big smile and took a stool at the counter.
“You look unusually cheerful,” she said. “Getting a job obviously suits you.”
“The martyrs sang as they went to their deaths, Miranda. Give me a large whisky with ice, please, and a smile.”
He felt strangely light-headed as if, without sufficient ballast, he could soon be floating round the room. He held the edge of the counter firmly.
“Poor old Fred,” Miranda said as she placed the whisky in front of him. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”
There was something comforting about her efficiency—she could carry the load for two. Perhaps a tall brunette was what he needed after the unhappy months with a short blonde.
“Miranda,” he said, “I have a proposition for you. A proposal, even. How would it be if we got married?”
“Pretty bloody awful, I should imagine. What brings this on?”
“Should I take that as a rejection?” His whisky glass was empty already. “Miranda, baby, in an ideal world—”
“In an ideal world you’d be ideal. But you’re not. So we won’t. Would you like another drink?”
“I’m not like the average person, admittedly. I’m a particular sort of person.”
She took his glass and refilled it.
“Bum, I believe, is the generic term.”
He shook his head. “Okay, I’ll call it off. I’ll cancel the invitations. It’s a small world that blows nobody any good nor iron bars a cage.”
The double whisky on an empty stomach had affected him more than several pints of beer.
“I’ll have one of your best cigars,” he said. Expense no longer mattered.
Miranda went to the end of the bar where over-priced cigars were displayed in a small showcase. Fred picked up the evening newspaper that had been left by an earlier customer. In Ireland, devout Christians were enthusiastically removing people’s kneecaps with Black and Decker drills; in India, fifty thousand people had died in a cyclone: in Dresden, in East Germany, the flower of British youth had rioted after a soccer match and made Churchill’s activities in the same city look like benevolent reconstruction.
He put the paper down and thought: I wish that I could have been somebody else, just for a few minutes, to find out whether being a human being felt like this for the others, too.
Miranda brought a selection of cigars. “Take your pick. I don’t know—whisky, cigars, no job. It beats me how you survive.”
He took the cigar that was nearest and spent some time getting it alight.
“It beats me how I survive as well,” he said. He sucked at his cigar. His survival had mostly been on a day-to-day basis, and when he looked back at it now he was surprised at how much survival he had assembled. There had been many times, when the pressure was there, that he had marvelled at the way that he and everyone else had managed to get by. He would meet somebody after a week and have to restrain himself from congratulating them. There they were—they had done it somehow, found twenty-one meals, seven nights’ sleep, avoided any of a hundred possible disasters and appeared again—upright, solvent and well. But nobody else, apparently, regarded it as an achievement. It always surprised him.
He watched the cool Miranda slicing lemons at the back of the bar. Survival posed no problems for her. She would go from this job to another and from there into marriage without so much as a change of expression. No doubts would assail her, no opinions would be revised. Life, from where Miranda was sitting, appeared to be ridiculously easy. The subversive idea that it could be slightly less fun than an impacted wisdom tooth had obviously never occurred to her businesslike brain.
He tried to picture what marriage with her would be like. She would be all bustle and efficiency, meals on time, bills promptly paid, but his lethargy, which would start as a private joke that brought them together, would quite quickly drive them apart. Would she pull him up or would he drag her down? Perhaps he would begin to share her uncomplicated view of the world: contentment could be catching. At least, with her feet on the ground and his in the clouds, the sex would be interesting.
If you must know, doctor, my personality is a fatal compound of whimsy and despair. I can’t help seeing the joke through the tears in my eyes.
He looked round the bar and hoped that a friend would come in. He had a powerful need to talk. But the room remained empty and there was nobody he could count on seeing.
“Has Trader been in?” he asked Miranda. Even now, with no customers, she had found something else to do: she was breaking up the ice from the ice machine and dropping it into a green plastic container on the bar.
“He was in early. Said he had to go home to supper.”
“Beans on toast.”
“He said seafood.”
“Sardines on toast. I’ll have another whisky.”
He had nearly drunk enough now: one more drink and he would be ready.
Two men came in, shaking rain from their jackets. The deluge had started. They went to the bar and ordered brandy. The mood was appropriately sepulchral.
Fred, on the way with the drink now, beckoned Miranda. There was nobody else to explain to.
“You see,” he said, “you have to play the game of life with the cards that you’ve been dealt.”
As usual, Miranda had the answer.
“Nobody knows what cards they have been dealt, though. That’s the whole point.”
Fred considered this. “I’m beginning to get an idea, and from what I can see it’s a rough old hand.” He finished his drink and stood up. “I have seen the future and it doesn’t work.”
He walked out into the rain. Within a few yards it had drenched his shirt, but he walked on at the same unhurried pace. He wondered, as he walked, where he had gone wrong. It didn’t matter, but it gave him something to think about.
Should he have used his time differently? Had his interests been too limited? Why hadn’t he become absorbed with potholing or pottery, acting or painting, football or sailing, music or motor-cars, or any of the other minor obsessions which evidently carried millions of people from one day to the next?
It seemed a stupid idea and he dismissed it. It was all very well wondering where he had gone wrong, but the sinister truth was that he was not convinced that he had. At his most neurotically apprehensive, he even had a crazy suspicion of happiness. To achieve it would somehow be challenging the gods. He knew intuitively that if the day had ever arrived when he had all the things he wanted—whatever they were—he would step off a pavement with the sun in his eyes and vanish under a sixty-seater coach.
He walked on through the rain. His walk was more urgent now; occasionally it seemed to be more of a march. He passed the petrol station where he had once worked, and the old people’s home, a transit camp between useless living and useful dying. A lonely lorry rumbled past. It was mid-evening and the town was surprisingly deserted: a nation was communing with its television. Dusk was falling and the rain, if anything, was heavier now.
The town hall clock broke the silence as he reached his flat. The chimes seemed to bring him back to life, and after that he started to do everything slowly but carefully as if there was no room for a mistake.
He climbed the steps to his door and let himself in. He put the hall light on, and went straight through to his own bedroom, where he went immediately, almost anxiously, to a chest of drawers. He rummaged through one of them until he found the Bayard automatic. He looked at it for a few moments and then placed it on the green duvet on his bed. When he had done this, he pulled a towel off the back of a chair and went over to the mirror to dry his face and hair. He combed his hair with his fingers, dried his hands, returned the towel to the chair and then went back to the chest of drawers. This time he found the six bullets that he had bought with the gun, and a half-empty packet of cigarettes. He went back to the bed and tried to get all six bullets into the magazine, but it was built to hold only five. He returned the sixth bullet to the drawer and left the loaded automatic on the bed. Then he took out a cigarette and lit it, before sitting down at the desk in the corner of his room.
He pulled back his chair a little, so that he could open the desk’s drawer, the contents of which he began to examine in detail. At the top there were only bills: water, electricity, rent, gas—even the newsagent wanted eight pounds. He pulled them out of the drawer and with them, in the same handful, came an out-of-focus colour photograph of Camilla sitting on a beach, a penny toll ticket to Clifton Suspension Bridge, a membership card to a long-defunct jazz club, a postcard from the other side of the world showing a dhow being loaded with mangrove poles, and a street map of Paris. Behind them in the same drawer were three diaries that had never been used, a pair of pyjamas that he had never worn, two books that he had never read (Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, and The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse), a Christmas card from an old girlfriend, a newspaper cutting and his red notebook. Drawing more frequently than usual on his cigarette, he took the last three items out and shut the desk.
He looked, first, at the Christmas card. The picture on the front was from Raphael’s Madonna and Child, and written inside, in thick-nibbed fountain pen, was the message: “Every happiness, Fred—at least all you’ll allow yourself to have.” He stared at the card as vacantly as he had done everything else in the room and it was some minutes before he put it down. Before he did, he tore it into eight pieces, as if he found its purpose offensive, or, more probably, had sensed some accusation in its inscription. He pulled another cigarette from the packet and lit it from the one that he was just finishing, and then he picked up the newspaper cutting which he looked at, first casually and then with increased interest. It was an old story from a London newspaper which began: “One in ten of all the deaths of men and women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four in Kensington and Chelsea are by suicide.” Fred read the article, which he had saved himself, as if he had not seen it before. “Suicides tend to increase in the middle class and decrease with poverty, say doctors. Unemployment and overcrowding have no correlation with suicide.” For some time, Fred seemed undecided what do to with this, but finally he tore it up and put it with the remains of the Christmas card.
He cleared his desk of everything except his ashtray and his red notebook, which now lay closed in front of him.
It was to this book that he had returned many times over the months, scribbling poems or questions or jokes without plan or direction, as if the wildly multiplying words could somehow stand as his witness. There had also once been the fanciful notion that he could make money from his poetry.
Eventually, he opened the book, which was over an inch thick and more than half full, but he flicked through the early pages as if he already knew them too well. It was only when he came to the last half dozen pages that he began to read every word.
I’ll Be The One Standing Here
When you get back from Juan-les-Pins
And the romance is all over, my dear
When your world has collapsed and you need a kind word
I’ll be the one standing here.
When he leaves you for dead in a warm hotel bed
And you know that you’ve wasted a year
When you drag yourself home with an ache in your heart
I’ll be the one standing here.
When you return in a daze and your life is a maze
And the long future fills you with fear
When you’re too sad to cry and you’re too sick to die
I’ll be the one standing here.
(And what I shall say is: It serves you right for sodding off with that pouf in the first place.)
She was a card, that girl.
In her heart
She wanted diamonds
But she slept with a spade
And now she’s in the club.
When they came for the Jews I was not a Jew, so I did not protest. When they came for the Catholics I was not a Catholic, so I did not protest. When they came for the trade unionists I was not a trade unionist, so I did not protest. When they came for me there was nobody left to protest.
Pastor Niemöller
I think my sexual problems are reaching proportions unknown to medical science. It is no longer only pretty girls who distract me in the street. Anything between twelve and fifty slows my stride. I contemplate goalie’s dives across the pavement, my tongue wedged in knicker elastic, police sirens wailing.
F.J. Carton
I am learning to bring into my voice that polite acerbity that makes people feel that far from being welcome they are not even tolerated and are under continual and scathing analysis at every moment.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
“The Crack Up”
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
“This Be The Verse”
The Eight Points for Attention are as follows:
(1)Speak politely.
(2)Pay fairly for what you buy.
(3)Return everything you borrow.
(4)Pay for anything you damage.
(5)Do not hit or swear at people.
(6)Do not damage crops.
(7)Do not take liberties with women.
(8)Do not ill-treat captives.
Mao Tse-Tung
I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.
The Earl of Chesterfield
Beer makes you think.
Food makes you fatk.
F.J.C.
DEAR SIR
There is a flaw in the game of football. There are too many goalless matches. The goal posts should be further apart.
Yours etc., Moving Finger
There is a flaw in the game of cricket. Nineteen out of twenty-five Test matches between England and Australia were drawn. Introduce a fourth stump.
Yours etc., Moving Finger
There is a flaw in my personality. Wherever I look, I see flaws. I’m hypercritical. Nothing satisfies. I’m picky to a fault. Take the anthology of cliches and misprints that you call your newspaper …
Yours etc., Moving Finger
A POEM
The world looks at me and asks
Why is he clowning?
It should really ask
Is he waving or drowning?
ANOTHER POEM
How does a plant drink?
How does a fish blink?
How does a cyclops wink?
How does a woman think?
Coffins Are Comfortable
This morning I saw a postman
with a smoking bomb in his hand
and a letter-box full of hostages.
It would be nice if more people
had flocked to my banner, he said,
but you can never tell a blind man
what colour red is
or describe an orgasm to a eunuch.
In the under-developed territory of his mind
he chased an elusive idea.
Callouses and parcels, palaces and castles.
The epicurean delights of the postal regime
eliminate subcutaneous fat
from my bank account, he said.
Me poor, you rich.
This morning I saw a bishop
exploring a garbage can.
I’m in holy ordures, he said hungrily,
as a worm trotted up his gaiters.
Man cannot live by God alone.
This morning I saw a policeman
mugging a man in a bank
while laughing soldiers machine-gunned
