Art & Lies (3 page)

It was winter. The Clean Air Act stops where the slums start. The slummers burn what they can; rags, tyres, bodies. The crematorium is very quiet. I crossed the river at Tower Bridge. The great paved jaws of the bridge had been opened to let through an invisible fog-bent boat. I heard the clang of the bell and the slow clatter of the bridge on its huge chains. I thought I heard drumming, drumming, footsteps marching in dead motion to the Tower. I could see the thin grills fixed in the thick stone. Did I see a face?

Underneath, the river ran in grey floods, thumping against the abandoned wharves. I knew my way well enough. My mother had often taken me to the Tower in my school holidays. One of our ancestors was executed there, like me, he was a Catholic.

I knew my way well enough, but the roads, like all the roads in the City, were under constant repair. When they were not being repaired they were closed in case of demonstrations. Closed in case of bombs. Closed for the Public Good. There was so much good being done to the public in those days that I am surprised we are not all saints.

I have no celestial power and I had forgotten my street atlas. Finally, out of tiredness, finally, out of despair at another fluttering orange ribbon, another set of abandoned cones, I turned the wrong way into a one-way street where the narrow houses loomed like cudgels. Darkness, fog, squalor, an old woman pushing a high-wheeled pram. I swung to avoid her and beat the car into a brick wall. Never mind, it’s only a Daimler.

Never mind, within the blank uncurtained windows, spattered with television light, I found the rooms I wanted. Electricity is expensive but you can still see to make a cup of tea by the flicker flicker flicker of the TV screen.

‘When you grow up Handel, you must do some good in the world.’ I held my mother’s soft hand and ran beside her cuban heels. I saw her only once a day for our walk at three o’clock. She was a tall column of silver fox. My father was a monument of tweed. I had no idea that there was such a thing as vulnerable flesh.

The woman lay uncovered on the bed. She had torn off her cotton dress. The man with her was using it to wipe her head. The room was unlit but for a smouldering kerosene flare. The kind they use in garages.

I asked for hot water. None.

I asked for clean cloths. None.

I wanted to scream at them ‘What do you think this is? Dickens?’ They were both staring at my evening dress. What do I think this is? Dickens?

I took off my jacket and starched tie, my waistcoat and stiff shirt. I cut the shirt into six clean squares and gave the man money to buy hot water from a neighbour. He left, the room was quiet, the woman looked at me.

‘It’s stuck.’

‘Yes.’

I knelt down and let my hands across her triumphant belly. Why doesn’t she split? I know why she doesn’t split, I’m a doctor, but why doesn’t she split? Her skin was stretched over her with upholstered zeal. She was smooth, perfect, no frills, no tucks, only the supple leather of her body, tobacco pouch round, tobacco pouch brown.

She opened her legs, I knelt between them, unhappy. I have never seen a woman’s a woman’s… what shall I call it? Vagina? The endless cross-sections, the exploded diagrams, the formaldehyde specimens, the shrunk-up sun-dried vagina. Beaver? No good. It looks nothing like a beaver or a pussy or a fox. Cunt? Is that the best I can do for those delicate labial folds and the monkish cowl that hides…, that hides…, a bead, a pip, an acorn, a pearl, a button, a pea …

‘Please hurry.’

To engage the head I must enter her but my hands are not clean. What if I infect her? What if she infects me?

She started to cry out as the baby tried again to force itself round. If I took her to hospital they would certainly take the child from her and she was probably illegal.

There was a bottle of vodka on the floor. Thank God it wasn’t gin. Too Dickens.

I held it up quizzically. There was an inch or so left in the bottom.

‘That’s mine for the pain.’

I poured it over my hands and washed them together.

‘Are you Jewish?’ she said.

‘Just be glad I’m not an obstetrician. I’d have slit you down the middle by now.’

That shut her up and her screams too. She was quiet while I pushed my hand into the blood-packed warmth of her body. Quiet and dignified and wide. I was the one bent over, sweating, my back arched, my head down. My hair fell forward on to her thighs.

She began to give birth. It was a gift, a gift of life in that cold dead room, on the cold dead streets. The baby was ready. The baby was skimming down the birth canal and into the windy world. Gently, gently, I brought her forth as if she were my own. I felt that she was my own. I cut the cord that moored her and she was free, her own, laid on her mother’s belly in a little coat of blood.

The man came back with a washing-up bowl of lukewarm water and two bottles of vodka. To his intense horror I took one bottle and poured it into the bowl down to the last drop.

‘He is Jewish,’ said the mother.

Carefully I washed her thighs and the long dark stretches of her cunt. I dried her with the rest of my shirt and covered them both in a blanket from the car. I was going to wash the baby and then I thought, ‘The smell is all she knows, the smell is all she has, go away now Handel.’

I put on my jacket, collected my things and closed the door, promising to return in a couple of days. I left them some money.

The moon was up and the cold had frozen the fog into brown slabs. I reversed the car down the slimy street dark under the unlit lamps.

The Second City is political. Politics of slums, apartments, mansions. The correct balance must be maintained. On no account should there be too many mansions or too few slums. Apartments hold the balance; the rich are terrified of being reduced to one, the poor dream of owning their own. The political city thrives on fear. Fear of never owning an apartment. Fear of owning merely an apartment.

Homelessness is illegal. In my city no-one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabiliser.

I parked the car outside my house and pushed through the thick sticky fog thinking of old ladies’ curtains. Where the fog parted, the tarry light still lay on the city, dirtying it, exposing it, the harrowed city, beauty pawned, and irredeemable.

I threw myself into my white bed and fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed that my body was transparent and that the sun drummed on my liver and tuned my spine in yellow octaves that I could play with both hands.

A few days later, as I had intended, I went back to the house. On the opposite side of the street a bunch of squatters were watching the security patrol welding a steel door over the slumped entrance. I walked up to the patrol and asked one of them what had happened to the people who had been living there. He shrugged and carried on with his work. I realised that, like all security men, he had long since lost the power of speech. He pointed his oxyacetylene torch at a closed blue van.

There were two men in the front of the cab, feet on the dashboard, bodies sagging into the sagged seats. They stared unblinkingly through the filthy windscreen, the radio on full volume, they were both about twenty-five. They appeared to be dead. I tapped on the window and one of them turned his head slowly, slowly, and looked down at me as though I were a human being. I flashed my medical card and slowly, slowly, he wound down the window.

‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m trying to find the people who used to live in that house.’

‘Got nothing to do with me.’

‘Do you know where they are?’

‘No.’

He raised the window, but then his mate said something to him, without moving his lips, and the window was speedily lowered again.

‘You from the Pest Destruction Office? Were they an ’Elf Azzad?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Did they have the fucking pox?’

‘No, but one of them had a baby.’

I’m not a sentimentalist. Every week life and death passes under my hands and that has given me a certain serious reserve. Intimacy with death has produced, in some of my cruder colleagues, a kind of
danse macabre.
Daily contact with what seems to them a horrible fate, horrible because unrelieved by any spirituality, fate because inevitable in the chanciest, cruellest ways, has grown in them a love of the grotesque. There is something of the Middle Ages in these modern men, who must be forever caricaturing the suffering they fear. Morbid practical jokes and a pleasure in the corrupt is the hallmark of many of my eminent colleagues. I look at them and I see, not the confident wonders of modern science, but a fearful fourteenth-century face carving a Death’s Head in a gloomy village on the Rhine.

And for myself? I, who have often leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. After death, the traces in the face of what was slight or mean or superficial, begin to disappear; the lines become more simple and dignified; only the abstract lines remain, and those in a great indifference. It is possible to be comforted by death in its distinction. Pause now, before this transitory dignity breaks up, and there is left, not horror, not fear, but profound pity. The
pietà
of the Virgin Mother over the dead body of Christ. Madonna of the Sorrows. The pity of the mother for the child.

The Spanish girl in the upper room was not a virgin and I have to confess that babies do not move me much. That is, not those healthy hospital lines of crocheted flesh, the mother and baby unit, factory and farm of the future. And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown, will be by the same people exploited or ignored.

But when she took the child to her breast, it seemed for a moment that the desolate space budded, and that what had been harmed was given back undamaged. The grim room softened and the crack in the window was filled with stars. The baby could not see the stars but they fell on her little body and made a blanket of light.

Now, with the ugly steel door nearly fitted, I had to insist my way up the wormy stairs to the abandoned room. The kerosene flare and the curtains were gone. The winded mattress was bloodstained from the birth. Nothing remained except for a piece of my shirt. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

Outside, the graceful yellow fountains of the arc welder threw down the light into the oily pavement puddles. The light struck off the welder’s metal boots in glowing chips. He wore his halo around his feet.

I questioned him again but all he said was ‘People vanish everyday.’

He sealed the door into the frame.

People vanish everyday … The Third City is invisible, the city of the vanished, home to those who no longer exist.

This part of the city is far larger than you might think. Easy to target squatters and immigrants, black marketeers and tax dodgers, call girls and mad men released into the community. The list of official disapproval is heartily pinned up in every law-abiding square. We know who’s hiding and why, we are the clean outdoor types, we don’t go in for night work.

People vanish everyday, but it’s not you and me, is it? We are solid and confident, safe and strong, we can speak our minds.

Can I? Can I speak my mind or am I dumb inside a borrowed language, captive of bastard thoughts? What of me is mine?

I have an affection for the mediaeval period, perhaps because I am a man of shadows, and the glorious lights of the Renaissance bewilder me a little. Perhaps because, in the mediaevals, with their love of systems and hierarchies, I find the fullest and most human outworking of the old theory of ‘Kyndly Enclyning’. A theory that starts with Plato and runs in a many-coloured current through Boethius, Chaucer, all the thinking of the Middle Ages, and is still lively in both Shakespeare and Bacon. A truth, still apparent, though disregarded, that things move violently
to
their place, but calmly
in
their place. To put it another way, everything has its right home, the region that suits it, and, unless forcibly restrained, will move thither by a kind of homing instinct. But how will I find my ‘right home’, that house not built with hands, unless I am in my right mind? Every day, in my consultancy, I meet men and women who are out of their minds. That is, they have not the slightest idea who they really are or what it is that matters to them. The question ‘How shall I live?’ is not one I can answer on prescription.

Most common are the retired or fired businessmen who develop cancer. They come to me in broken health, in fear for their lives, and the phrase I hear first is ‘I’m not the man I was.’ As we talk it becomes clear that he is the man he has been always, yes, well-off, yes, respectable, but immature, without self-knowledge, a man without breadth or depth, but shielded from this lack by his work, by his social standing, by his loving wife, by his young mistress, by his slap-on-the-back pals. Often, as we talk, he tells me that he has never liked his work, hates his family, or that he has lived for his work and that without it he is a child again and what should he do in the mornings?

Saddest of all are the women who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue. They made the sacrifice, often willingly, and they are still waiting for the blessing. While they wait their cancer does not.

It’s awkward, in a society where the cult of the individual has never been preached with greater force, and where many of our collective ills are a result of that force, to say that it is to the Self to which one must attend. But the Self is not a random collection of stray desires striving to be satisfied, nor is it only by suppressing such desires, as women are encouraged to do, that any social cohesion is possible. Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child. ‘What do you do?’ is the party line, where doing is a substitute for being, and where the shame of not doing wipes away the thin chalk outline that sketches Husband Wife Banker Actor even Thief. It’s comforting, my busy life, left alone with my own thoughts I might find I have none. And left to my own emotions? Is there much beyond a childish rage and the sentimentality that passes for love?