1. Baal
alf-skipping and half-tumbling down the steps, very stoned, half-drunk, full of cares and young enough yet to resolve them, we paid another visit to the Somali Club, one mildish autumn midnight with the viscous Mersey hiding behind a Cathedral, which seemed a tremendous rock, a petrification out of its time. The owner at the door was a large bottle-blonde Irishwoman called Jessica, with features as calm as a Dalek's and kind as the dear Queen Mother's. Her husband the Somali who gave the dive its name cooked curry in a dirty room upstairs. It was rumoured he carried a gun, but the rumour was only for show: Jessica dealt with any aggravation. She let us in for free like she often did. She mothered us in a delinquent sort of way, never seeing us short of a drink or a spliff and always asking after our studies. "Immanuel Kant," she'ld say, "now there was a man!"
Inside, the club was a cliché of clammy walls and smoke, loud music and smelly bodies. At the far end (not very far) was a small stage where punk bands of not deliberately inadequate musicianship would perform on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, but which tonight was bare. I'd dropped my tab of acid earlier and it was beginning to take effect, just gently now. Z would drop hers later, about an hour before we intended to visit the hospital. The stage not very close seemed to me to be gradually receding; and while the walls at eye level seemed very very close, as one's gaze rolled over them towards the ceiling they curved and space curved with them.
We sat at a rectangular table with our backs to the wall. I had a pint of beer in front of me and Z had a rum and blackcurrant. Four other people came and sat at the table, two at the long side opposite us, and one at each end. We were more or less surrounded and I didn't like it, but I didn't feel too uncomfortable at first. It is more precise to say that this was the thrill of discomfort that we had hoped to find that night. The two individuals opposite had longish greasy hair and greasy, spotty skin; the two at the end had shortish, spotty hair and longish greasy skin. My ears heard no speech through the racket, but the drug could hear their moving mouths, the accents and the brand of cigarette:
wohhshiduinwivvaouankaleicchkimm?
Z looked at me to ask if I could hear them. I looked back at her to say I could.
Z was intimidatingly beautiful, a beauty of personal presence rather than feature. The reason she was with me was simply that I wasn't intimidated. I considered that I had an intimidation of intellect rather than of beauty, and it was this that gave me the authority to hit them, or at least inflict some sort of violence on them. Z looked at me to suggest as much, but I had already made up my own mind. We both knew that the other would know what was the right thing to do when the moment came; but for the present - and the present now was becoming a much more subjective notion than usual - I should simply enjoy the acid. Hallucinations are a recreational commonplace nowadays, but twenty-odd years ago their comparative rarity gave them a psychological significance that is often forgotten. Some people attributed various kinds of mystical importance to them and even developed a sort of dimwit liturgy; I, though, was far too robust a philosopher for such silliness. These four greasy people offered an opportunity for empirical research, and perhaps they could do us an unintended favour. We weren't going to kill them, or even leave them seriously maimed: two or three scars between them perhaps, badges of mean pride.
I squeezed my way past the man at the end of the table to go to the bar. He pointedly refused to move his chair but since I was as skinny as a hypodermic it made no impediment and augured well for what was to follow shortly.
The barmaid had given me my previous pint in a thick, chunky beermug. I asked her this time for a straight glass please. They lack the weight of the mug, of course, but they break more easily on impact and an immediate gush of blood gives one a tremendous moral advantage.
I sat back down. The greasy people had used my absence hopefully as an opportunity to regale Z with innuendo, which it did not yet suit her to discourage. The acid was beginning to have a not inconsiderable effect by now and the greasy people looked like bacteria swimming in their own sebum, while Z was bright as a black pebble in a twinkling brook.
The violence came with a wonderful, natural fluency. Z and I had almost finished our drinks, having listened to and looked at the greasy provocations, and when Z was about to light a cigarette one of the people on the long side of the table offered over his own packet and asked if he could give her one. Graceful and swift as a lizard's tongue her arm unfurled and stabbed a nail into his eye. (We found out later he lost the sight, but no matter.) I twisted my glass into the face of the person past whose chair I had earlier been forced to squeeze. These two recoiled and one of the others seemed to make an instinctive swipe - I couldn't really see properly for a pandemoniac second - but then none of the four moved for what seemed quite a long time. Z and I pushed over the table and ran quickly for the door at the rear of the stage, beyond which there was an exit into a yard. Looking back quickly I saw Jessica grabbing the two uninjured people and telling them to take their friends and leave. I imagine she added firmly that she would tolerate no such nonsense on her premises.
Out in the pleasant moonlight I could see that Z's face was damaged. It was just what we needed for the hospital. She was bleeding from the mouth, and though the flow would stop there would no doubt be some compensatory swelling. Her cheek was bashed too. With a little extra distension around her eye, which I could easily add, she should look almost perfect. We were complimenting each other on a first-rate performance when Jessica came out.
"Well, my dears," she said, "I didn't see what started it, but I'm sure you were acting in principles." A typical tremendous plural. She sounded like an Irish frog on amphetamines. "I'll help you over the wall and you can get across the waste ground. They're out the front. They won't see you. Mind that eye." And she helped us up over the wall. The yard was sunken so there was no real drop on the other side. The debris looked splendid that evening as we walked toward the main road. There really is no rubble to match Liverpool rubble, no rust or broken masonry, no domestic debris or bits of forgotten production-line or dead animal or living ghost.
"I'll take my acid now", said Z. O, yes, the night was made for acid.
A taxi came round the corner from Upper Parliament Street and we hailed it.
"We want to go to Sefton General Hospital," said Z, "but first we would like to drive around for a while and make a couple of stops. Here is ten pounds." She gave him the money and we got in the cab. The first stop was home, where we picked up a bag Z had packed in anticipation of two nights away. She looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. "I think the damage is quite adequate", she said. "We shouldn't want to make them suspicious." I was relieved. It would have been difficult to hit her without any provocation. She wore a red silk dress, bright as the flame of creation, and a choker of red beads, collapsing suns at her throat, and we both looked at the reflection of her eyes in which I saw - or supposed I saw - I don't think one can really see such things - both endless love and the most terrible fear. You must remember that I was hallucinating.
We went back out to the taxi and asked to be driven to the river.
"This be a monster," she chuckled across the water, "or sperm for the Griffin, crawling up a Liver Bird's cunt." We stood there for quite a while.
"They'll do it this time. This time they'll say yes. Maybe this time yes, yes, yes. And now you see, the night is a creature, sitting among its building blocks and time is its little twitches. A corpuscle burps." The acid was hitting her now. Nothing burped: the taxi-driver had honked his horn impatiently. It was time for us to go.
"He'll never see all this," she said as we drove through the city. "He'll never go to a movie like this or any other." The windows of the taxi did indeed seem like cinema screens. He'll never know two religions are better than one and monotheism culturally superior to polytheism. Or zilchotheism. He'll never know how many fingers make one." Now she was doing the old acid-head trick of waving a hand in front of her eyes and seeing a thousand freeze-framed instantaneously. You've probably seen it in pop-music videos. "He'll never know the Pope came here, to bless all the rickety children."
"Please don't mention the Pope when we get to the hospital. Not when you see the psychiatrist." They had to consider her mental well-being.
We drove up the hill of Upper Parliament Street and stopped sharply at the traffic lights at the top.
"The serpent's flicking us off his tail."
We drove down a long road with a pub on every other corner. I had a curious feeling of being in the country. I was in a childhood episode of Robin Hood.
We arrived at the entrance to the hospital. It looked like the lodge of an old country estate, with nicely weathered brick and precarious slates.
I seem to remember that there was a tree-lined drive to the casualty department. The trees arched over and enclosed us. It was as though we were driving up an arboreal cervix, gloomily verdant, wood-muscled and constricting. Z saw it differently. "Now we're in the Serpent's gizzard." Inside the hospital was bright, though quite tastefully dilapidated.
We must have looked striking. A nurse came to see us immediately. Z's eyes were huge and under the lights her bruises were rather lurid. It hadn't struck me before how badly hurt she really was. She obviously had no sense of left or right or up or down and she wept and laughed. It was a jolly good show.
"She's on drugs," I said calmly. "She's pregnant and she's trying to get rid of it. I think she's gone quite mad. She wants an abortion please."
They took her away and told me to go home. It was a good night for a stroll.
2. Tsimtsum
Each day is unique. Is each Christmas? Or, I wondered, did each Christmas conform to a prototype, an ur-type or template? Was every day consistent with underlying myths, somewhat like James Joyce's Bloomsday? And was Christmas a time for such thoughts? It ought to be impossible to argue for an ur-type of Christmas, because everyone knew, and did not care, that Christmas was a recent invention. On the other hand, it could still be argued, could it not, that despite the cultural accretions, there were sufficient similarities between all forms of midwinter ritual across both continents and ages that a prototype Christmas could easily be constructed? But Christmas wasn't the time for such thoughts.
So I thought, or inwardly rambled, as I put down my can of cider and pulled on a sock. It was my right sock, because Pythagoras had ordered that his followers, the members of his peculiar sect, should always put on their right sandal first in the morning (or it may have been take it off first at night) or it might have been the left sandal (or may have been take it off) or any of the other combinations. Toggle socks on and off to taste, but be consistent. Whether it was technically correct or not, my habit with the socks was Pythagorean in spirit. It was midday. I had half drunk my breakfast. It was Christmas Eve, the most important day in the busker's year. Some people would have been out for hours already, booking their pitches for later. I wasn't like them.
Before I pulled on the other sock, I rolled a cigarette. Had the Greeks had tobacco, what would its God have been like? Would he have been woody and peaceful - words like "columbine" and "chestnut" come to mind - or would they have become aware also of his death's head aspect? Would he have been like Dennis Hopper as the leader of the Smokers in Kevin Costner's Waterworld? They drank, of course, but even Bacchus got a pretty bad press. Look at Euripides: drink-fuelled mob violence. Look at the way Cicero slags off Mark Anthony for getting pissed so often. I wonder why the Ancients never mention smoking dope? They must have had it. Perhaps wine was expensive, the prerogative of the affluent, cultured and literate, and cannabis sativa, poor unruly weed, fit only for poor unlettered underbeings, not worth a mention. But a stoned plebeity is no more productive or useful than a pissed one. I rather suspect it's a Mystery, a secret of the initiates. Those weird Oracular dicta? Distinct whiff of dope there, I'ld say. One can't busk when stoned. No spliff till the work is done. Alcohol is more like food. One can't work without it. Too many hells intrude. Better the one hell to keep out the other hells.
The other buskers would have been up at six o'clock to get down to the underground, to Piccadilly Circus, Bond Street, Knightsbridge and the long subway from the tube station to the museums at South Kensington. The regular buskers would curse the students and newcomers disrupting these their pitches for the lucrative festive season. We play here all year. This is our livelihood all year. What right have these fuckers - to one or two of them the word arrivistes might have occurred - to fuck things up now. I swigged. I lit my cigarette. I think he would have been a brittle God.
This life was not theatre or epic poetry. This journey to the underworld had neither imperial sweep, nor carnal passion nor love-scorned passion. The Circle Line stood for neither Styx nor Lethe nor Liffey nor Royal Canal, despite all the dirt and aggression and heat and cold and crowds and isolation. There was Dave the Clown and his tall, anorexic, toothless Norwegian girlfriend with her trinkets. There was Pete, the nervously schoolteacherish chap who played hornpipes and Andrew Lloyd Webber on his penny whistle, and gave all his money to Carol, who was his girlfriend although she wouldn't sleep with him. Carol's mother in Liverpool had a parrot that couldn't be looked after when she was admitted to a mental hospital, and Pete and Carol had had to go to Liverpool to rescue it. There was Jack. This year there would be no Jack. I took another swig and leaned forward to switch on the radio. It was Desert Island Discs.
Jack was a stocky Scotsman about 5' 6" tall. His skin was bright red from drink and he was a junky as well as an alcoholic. He played a sort of wooden flute that had a throaty tone, and he played everything staccato, breaking down crotchets into quavers, quavers into semi-quavers and so on, fluttertongue. He abused the public, the station staff and the police. Should any innocent busker who didn't know better stray into his territory at Piccadilly Circus Jack would threaten violence, or Jack would make it impossible for him to continue playing. He would play against him. He would push him. He would smash his instrument or equipment. He would smash the musician. As well as sticking needles into himself, he fucked anything that moved, anything of his own social standing. Jack died of AIDS, but I doubt if he cared much.
Jack was the reason that Dave The Clown's Norwegian girlfriend had no teeth. I saw it happen. At Piccadilly Circus, at the bottom landing of the Piccadilly Line escalators, there is a very short tunnel leading to the bottom of a disused, rotted, old iron spiral staircase, near to which there are four or five steps leading up to the Bakerloo Line platforms. Few members of the public know of the shortcut, so the space forms a handy little cloister where buskers can rest or wait their turn for the pitch and eat, drink or (it must be confessed) relieve themselves. Or you can just observe unobserved. Someone whom I didn't know was doing a Jake-the-Peg act: long raincoat, artificial leg adjacent to real left leg, right leg and artificial leg raised and swung sideways, Jake apparently supported by third leg only. Public, initially baffled, then amused, give Jake money. Worse ways to earn living. Although this Jake was a stranger to me he seemed a pleasant enough person and I was happy to watch him and wait my turn for the pitch. Along came Jack, red, furious and stinking. Who the fuck's this fucker, he elocuted. He walked up to him, pushed his shoulder and punched him extremely hard in the middle of the face. Jake went down and his peg went flying. Clown and Norwegian had come up behind me and we all rushed forward to restrain Jack, who had grabbed the peg, which was a sturdy piece of wood with a large Doc Marten's boot secured to its end, and raised it like an executioner's axe over the helpless Jake. When we shouted Jack span round and instead of swinging the axe down on Jake swung it at us, with an action similar to that of an athlete gearing up to hurl a ball-and-chain "hammer." I dodged it. Dave the Clown dodged it. The girlfriend caught it in the mouth. Teeth and blood. Jack threw down the leg-weapon, stamped on Jake's flesh-leg, breaking it, and stomped off up the escalator, screaming: "Fuckers, you fucking fuckers, I'll fucking have you for this." Dave and I sorted it all out, but the girlfriend never got her teeth back.
On the radio the castaway-guest explained that she didn't come from a particularly musical family, although her mother had played the piano and they had held musical soirees. I put out my cigarette.
I put on my right boot and pulled up the laces. I knew that the list system broke down. At the bottom of the escalators, tucked in the edges of the emergency
STOP
buttons, you would find if you looked a torn-off piece of paper with names listed beside hourly intervals of the day. Sometimes a name would be crossed out and another substituted. Some of
the names would be on it every day, against the same times. Sometimes you knew the names were made up, by someone hoping to cheat an extra pitch for themselves, sometimes they would be names written down by a friend, and you would judge from the name of the nominee the likelihood of their turning up to play the pitch. If you were friendly with the busker concerned you might well say "Look, so-and-so isn't coming, I'll take the pitch." A civilised lie. But the lists would disappear. They would be taken by station inspectors, if they were malevolent, and many were, when they came to move on the buskers. Or a busker of little bottle would leave the pitch after having been moved, instead of waiting a minute or two and starting again, and another busker finding the pitch vacant would destroy the list and tell other buskers who came along that he had found the pitch "empty" and that there was no list. He would thus ensure himself of at least a full hour's playing (however long he had already been playing he would say that he had only been there five minutes) and he could probably book another hour for later on a fresh list. Of course he might himself be moved and the new list destroyed. Or the police might move it. Or the police might even arrest the busker, and again the pitch would be buggered. So I just hustled and flitted and usually managed to wrangle a couple of decent pitches, partly by using and partly abusing the list system, and certainly by knowing how to decode the hidden messages a list contained. I didn't need to get up early. I only needed to know my trade.
Today of all days I needed to know my trade, because I would not be able to busk for another week, because there would be no public to busk for, or at, or in spite of, and because after Christmas one's takings declined dramatically, like the Roman Empire perhaps, and because I had to buy two weeks supply of drink and because I had to buy a present for my girlfriend, whom I wished was not my girlfriend even though I slept with her; and because every day was like every other day and today was like every other day only more so. The guest had met her husband while they were studying together at the Royal College. No, doing recitals together put too great a strain on their marriage, and now he only managed the business side of things. So money unites them, I thought, and music drives them apart. What would Pythagoras have made of that? What would Jack?
Now I was shod. I stood up and kicked over several empty cans that were littered around the mattress. I looked at the stacks of change placed neatly on top of the sadly defunct and anyhow seasonally redundant refrigerator. "Nemo Me Impune Lacessit", a warning to coiners (and those who crossed Jack). Were there coiners still, and if there were would they be likely to have Latin? Did they ever? Did Charon inspect the crenellations of his fare before pushing off into the Styx? And the Welsh inscription, "Pleidiol..." unpronouncable etc: a non-p.c. warning to Welshmen? Did Charon have Welsh? Could even Pythagoras imagine such a tongue? Then the rows of 50 pences, then the rows of 20s, and so on, and finally a little pile of £20 notes, paperweighted by an Uzbecki coin that almost doubled its thickness. Was it all worth counting? Was there perhaps sufficient? Could I take off my socks? Even to think of it was to show a weakening of resolve. One's public waited. And there was the pleasure of defeating the cold, the bitter enemy one was still young enough to overcome. One could savour the triumph. I may have little, but I have fought valiantly this elemental foe. I am as valiant as Cuchulain, proud and independent as a crofter with his dog. Pete with the untouched Carol had a dog, a King Charles spaniel called Charles. He once had a Rhodesian Ridgeback called Cecil, but it wasn't very popular with the punters so he swapped it.
I would not even drink a second can. One needed only to be in control. The enemy isn't the elements. The enemy is people. There was no courage in sloshery. The second can was for the outward journey. In the carriages on District Line trains there were some seats which were slightly boxed in from the others. One could make a little office for oneself, with one's shoulder bag on one side and one's beer can on the other, and do the crossword in relative privacy; and being situated in the middle of the carriage one could see into both adjacent carriages when the train went round a curve, and get off if ticket inspectors appeared in either of them, working their way along the train. Not that it mattered today. Today I could afford a Travelcard. But some days I couldn't. There was, I reluctantly admitted to myself, a very good reason for that. (Is Christmas a time for admitting such things?)
I am too quiet. I play the ocarina, a little thing like a ceramic seashell. It sits cupped in my hand, invisible, sweet-toned, quiet. Some admire it. "It's such a nice change", they say, "from electric guitars", or even "At least it's not Cavatina", and they rummage, middle-aged women mainly, in small leather purses for change, sometimes as much as six or seven pence. But too often brusque young men swagger by with a curt "Can't hear you, mate." Of course many are appreciative, but I would say that my earnings are about a third of what they should be, simply because I am too quiet, too easy to ignore. Anyone can hear if they wish, but many choose not to. Have I chosen too, unobtrusion where there should be clamour, and have I chosen wrongly? The castaway would miss the social whirl. I count my money. Let today be different. Let me chose my luxury. Warmth and peace. That's two, and I have to be strict with you. No, they are one, like morning and evening star. There is enough. Today there shall be no prototypes. I take off my boots. I shall hide for a fortnight and there shall be peace. I shall have sufficient alcohol. I shall take off my socks. I shall have myself, and I shall play the ocarina to imaginary Gods, at Christmas, a time for such things.
3. Churchgoing
As the train rolls over the bucolic curves of the north Kent landscape, you can see Canterbury Cathedral in the distance, not the surrounding city, just the medieval edifice, all Glory to God under his summer blue sky. Really, it makes one quite rhapsodic; and already the image was embedded in my memory as we lay beneath the Roman walls and the warm night darkled around the three of us, my lover, our foetus and me. Only indirectly around the foetus, yes, but her amniotic comfort as pleasant at least as ours. The world should be full of love, but everywhere there is violence.
In a fantasy, only half-envious, of property ownership, we'd looked in the windows of all the Estate Agents, who seemed to have a street to themselves, a nice street, picture-box old; and had our pictures taken next to waxwork models of Geoffrey Chaucer and a fishwife (name not given); and we'd toyed with the idea of going to see a murder mystery by Agatha Christie at the Marlowe Theatre, but since the day's mood was one of mellow sincerity, irony, particularly dramatic irony, would have blemished it, so instead we had strolled by the river, through well-kept gardens with graven memorials to the dead of the Burma campaign in World War Two and their well-loved leader "Uncle Bill". Ferocity needs tranquil moments, I suppose, and fond or homely noms-de-guerre.
According to an article by Frank Owen in a 1945 edition of Phoenix, magazine of the South East Asia command, Uncle Bill, aka Field Marshall the Viscount Slim KG GCB GCMG GCVO GBE DSO MC, had a clear opinion of the racial character, for want of a better phrase, of his enemy. "Slim has an animosity towards the Japanese based on an intense dislike of all their society stands for. 'The Jap is not an animal,' he says, 'there is nothing splendid in him. He is part of an insect horde with all its power and horror.'"
But Uncle Bill loved his own men. He addressed his officers thus, before launching the counter-offensive that was to lead to the defeat of the Japanese:
"I tell you, therefore, as officers, that you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world."
Owen continues: "The spirit which Slim breathed into that division, on that blue, sunny morning in Palel inspires the whole of the 14th Army. His victorious host has now marched back a thousand miles, planted its battle flags on the citadel of Mandalay and above the capital city of Rangoon, killing 100,000 Japanese on the way. Their achievement must be attributed in large degree to the character of their Commander."
What is the difference between a horde and a host? I don't know the numbers of Allied dead. Did they die of their own free will for freedom? If not, had they died for nothing? If a priori one had no free will, one was no less free living as an insect than living in a liberal democracy. It was nonsense to say that one preferred one form of unfreedom, pleasant enough for an insect, to another, a hedonistic delusion. Was the difference between Uncle Bill and the Emperor-God Hirohito simply that Uncle Bill was a better balanced personality? It is better to be nice, and if we like to pretend that we choose freely to be nice it doesn't really matter. Of course what we wanted to be and what we were determined to be were identical; of course one could go further and argue that consciousness itself, let alone so-called freedom, was an illusion; and of course such things sounded absurd at first to the layman: but once you got him thinking about them he would end up saying that, alas, he couldn't help it, that he still believed he had free will and a conscious mind, even though he knew it was ridiculous. Well then, whichever way the metaphysics crumbles we seem ridiculous, even the dead, even the yet to be born (who, we all agree - don't we? - never ask, never choose, to be conceived or born). In the face of mass exterminations we all seem ridiculous.
But did these things matter only in extreme circumstances, or with very large numbers, like the predictions of Relativity being more accurate than those of Newtonian mechanics only at velocities near the speed of light? Perhaps it is true that there is no the difference between say a million killed at Auschwitz and a million killed on the Somme? Pick any sufficiently large killing field and it would appear that those who died in it did so no more of their own free will than that those who died at Auschwitz were born Jewish in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century of their own free will. But some chose not to enlist, some saw the signs and chose in time to emigrate. Such freedom of choice was available to everyone. Anyone could make their stand, anyone somehow or other could flee. Making the usual provisos for the infirm and very young, did the rest, assumed free agents, have only themselves to blame? Of course not: the notion of blame, or of praise, becomes irrelevant to the unindividuated mass. If it is irrelevant to the masses, why then is it relevant to Hitler or Churchill or Kaiser or Viscount-Generals or Emperor-Gods? Were they of a different kind of moral species? If they were not, they too were corpuscles in the historical monstrosity, though any of their individual acts could be considered in the same way as the act of the Jew who escaped, the Conchie who objected. The world may be statistical, considered from the viewpoint either of physics or social science; and though statistics may predict outcomes either for masses of particles or for human populations, the whole point of a statistical approach is that is does not, because it would be both methodologically and epistemologically inappropriate, predict outcomes for individual particles or persons. Rejoice - you are a statistic! It is because you are a statistic that you are free. That is why one may speak only of personal freedom, of individual acts of kindness. It is absurd to punish someone for crimes against humanity: they should be punished only for murder or impoliteness, not for making the wrong sort of history.
My lover took my hand in his and placed them both upon my belly. The baby was kicking, not too hard. The thought that many deaths had made this pleasure deepened it, made it more precious; but my own past was not gone.
"I almost had a baby once," I said, and he opened his question-mark eyes, "and I murdered it." He said nothing, so I carried on talking.
"I was only nineteen. It was when I was a student, and I lived with X."
He sighed. X was the only famous person I had ever known, though he wasn't famous then of course, and for a while he had loomed over our relationship. Though I no longer felt anything about X, I had felt for a long time that my lover became uneasy whenever X appeared on television or there was a story about him in the newspapers, which was fairly often; but even that had faded, I thought, and now my lover couldn't even be said to hate him properly any more.
"You don't really know why you hate him. You read about him, and you know he isn't what he seems, because I told you. You know he's a mental and physical sadist. But I didn't tell enough. You don't know enough to hate him properly.
"I got pregnant and we were very poor, and we didn't know whether to have the baby or not. One day, I would want to have it and he would not. Then the next day I would want to get rid of it and he would want to have it. We thought that if we had it it would ruin our futures. We wouldn't be able to continue studying or we wouldn't be able to provide for the baby properly. We would have to do proper jobs; whereas if we continued studying and made our futures secure, then we could have a baby. On the other hand, this was our baby, not any baby, and although we approved of abortion in principle as a matter of choice, still to abort our child would be wrong, even if we did it unwillingly. You see he was a moralist even then, even before he found the convenience of God. At least in those days he based his judgements on the world he knew, on his own mind, not on the abstracted models of opinion pollsters or the insights of mass psychology. But we were both lying to each other. We both knew that love should be enough; but what neither of us would admit was that really when it came down to it, we didn't love each other enough. That was the one thing we couldn't say to each other. Eventually, the truth unspoken, we aborted the child.
"No, that's not right. It's not exactly what I mean. The reason I haven't told you the truth before, is that I loved him well enough. I loved. I've never dared tell you how much I loved him, because you might not believe I could love you so well. And how could you believe I could love someone who treated me the way he did? What would it say about me? It was for him that the child was aborted. In the hospital they put me in the maternity ward. It was full of women with their new-born children. I think they put me there to punish me, to tell me I had sinned. He himself, hadn't he told me often enough how stupid I was, how inadequate, how I could never do anything right? The whole of the health administration was suffused by a Catholic ethos. The first doctor I saw wouldn't refer me for an abortion, but he was legally required to let me see a doctor who might. It all took time. My belly swelled. My breasts grew. There was even some slight lactation. Through it all, I was never given any support, only made to feel a sinner. He'd already prepared me to believe it.
"Eventually, I was two nights in hospital. I found out later he spent them screwing elsewhere. I've told you he beat me, time and again. That's a strange idiom, sort-of-evocative, probably meaningless. When you're being beaten time is endless. Anyway I never told you why, or when it started. Only the first time matters. After the first time, every time is justifiable. After the first time he was always drunk when it happened. The first time, he was sober. It was a bright afternoon, after the abortion, when after the turmoil all seemed calm. We were both reading and I suddenly screamed at him, out of the silence:
'You killed my baby. You murdered my baby.'
"For a long time I thought he was right to beat me. Didn't any man have the right, after such an accusation? Or if no right, at least a powerful excuse. It was only much later that I realised that what I had said was true. The baby had died from lack of love. That was why he beat me: not because he felt the loss of the child, but because I confronted him with the emptiness of his own heart. He always thought he was exempt even from his own judgements. That is why you should hate him: because when he speaks of Christian virtue, he has none. I killed a child because I was blinded by love. He killed because he did not love. And I think that's why he preaches, too"
Now it was all purged. My lover lay still. A dog was snuffling round the borders of the lawn on which we lay and his owner ambled after him, an old man with a cane, perhaps a Burmese veteran, perhaps a senior officer, perhaps now an habitué of the Marlowe Theatre or its bar, a Tamburlaine out of his time and grateful for it. Perhaps a descendant of someone who once served a Caesar.
The grass and the evening were still warm, the sun sinking lower behind the antique ruins. I used to think that St Augustine, author of the Confessions and The City of God, and Saint Augustine, converter of the Angles and founder of this cathedral, were the same person. "'Hear me, O God! Woe to the sins of men!' When a man cries thus, thou showest him mercy, for thou didst create the man but not the sin in him. Who brings to remembrance the sins of my infancy? For in thy sight there is none free from sin, not even the infant who has lived but a day upon this earth." (Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions Book 1 Chapter 7) Why are these infants sinners? I paraphrase, but in the opinion of the Bishop of Hippo, it is because they cry for the breast. Did the other one disagree with him?
I remembered the cool of the Cathedral crypt in the hot afternoon, and a side chapel in particular. There were bare stone walls, how many hundred years old I did not know, and at one and a recess in which was hung a picture, an old icon perhaps of the Garden of Eden, because in it was a tree around whose trunk a serpent curled, and in the top of the tree sat God in his throne. I don't remember Christ in heaven. The sun and the moon were in a sky of harmless clouds and in front of the tree there were two black figures dressed in bright robes. One was an angel who seemed to be admonishing the other, who may have female, may have been Eve. But on her bodice was an image that must have been the infant Christ. Perhaps she was holding him there, or perhaps he was inside her body. Perhaps she was Mary, and perhaps the Eden was only a image of that to which Christ would restore us. Mary/Eve stood in front of a throne, in Eden or outside it, certainly not in God's heaven. Perhaps the icon painter was trying to show a whole cosmos of sin and purity, judgement and forgiveness. This was not Eden, this summer evening, nor did I wish it to be. I wished there to have been no history, which needed interpretation, which because we are inadequate need myths, which because we are fools become lies; but I wished nonetheless that my daughter might be born here, in this hallucination of comfort and rest, far away far away, far from any Augustines, agonised or otherwise, inventing in the Lord's name a metaphysics for the Lord's third millennium, praying for a random scrap of redemption in a theological lottery, far from Thomas Becket and his martyrdom, far from imperial legions and their futile, sanitising mission, here to begin a journey of her own beyond the emergence of time and rejection of sin, beyond submission and rebellion, to crawl and toddle slowly towards integrity.
Note: Tsimtsum is a Hebrew word meaning roughly "withdrawal". It is a central concept in the teachings of the Kabbalists of the 16th century. "In the mysticism of Isaac Luria, God is imagined contracting into himself in order to make a space for creation." (Karen Armstrong, A History of God.)
© Nigel Tasane