Judith (9 page)

I said ‘Yes, I see.'

Oliver said ‘Come here.'

I thought – But it is I who am fixing this?

– I am the goat; and Oliver is the peg to which I have wanted, needed, to be tethered?

You know that pornographic story of the woman who is chained up in a cellar and she is beaten and buggered or whatever and she accepts this, likes it even? She doesn't have to think anymore, doesn't worry; whatever happens is the responsibility of the man who owns her. And what is unpleasant doesn't take very long: it's either in the past, and thank goodness it's over, or it's in the future, which may never come: but as a result you're not bored even if in the present there is nothing happening, because there's the past and the future and you're at peace. For what is peace except a sort of nothingness in which you are not bored; and how else might you achieve this? I think a lot of people fix their lives in some way like this: it's not just that the story is pornographic. I mean a lot of people suffer and so are not bored and then it's quite nice when they stop this: how else do you explain the things that people do? I mean, why should they so willingly destroy themselves?

Also – whoever wants to be the man who owns the woman in the cellar?

Oliver would say ‘This is your centre of gravity? This?'

People have got used to talking in such savage ways about sex; it is as if Achilles and Penthesilea were still on their battlefield.

But there can be something so sweet, like honey, at the centre, passively: it is this that is like the string of a puppet taking over?

Perhaps it is of recognising this that people are scared: lest – what? – their sins should be forgiven them and they should become something different?

I thought – In India the god Shiva is a god equally of creation and destruction –

– But his dance is to do with stillness within his circle of fire? Oliver had been quite near to death. He was ill. I sometimes massaged him – his thick white skin and flesh.

He would say ‘Harder!'

I thought – Well, who is the woman in the cellar? You dig down to get the hook in; for the gold; the buried treasure.

He would say – There!

I would think – You who are so powerful! You think you are in control? But have we not known, you and I, that the chosen, the elect, have been accustomed to be victims?

From where I am writing now I can see, framed in the doorway of my hut, the estuary with the blue and green hills in the distance, the shore with the gold-pink sand; two or three dogs even; the birds dropping down like notes of music. This is the present. The present is not what we experienced in the cave. Those were shadows.

Can I say – What happens when you know the elect are victims?

– Then, of course, what you are, you also are not? You can turn those shadows in the cave into what shines like trees in a painting?

On the path that goes down towards the sea there is a man in a white robe squatting: he is talking to a child: the child looks up to the hut where I am sitting. The man is like Christ: the child is the carrier of some message. The message is given: it has to be found: it is both the land, and the seed that a bird is carrying.

The child runs down towards the river. The birds are above. They are unheard; they are the form and vibrations of music. I am writing this with a pencil and paper on my knee. The
marks I make are like those on a butterfly's wing. The child has been told – Do not tell anyone.

What is being drawn up, by a string and a hook from the sea, is the substance, the thing-in-itself, of music.

Oliver did not seem to have difficulty in getting hold of drugs. He would make a telephone call by picking the receiver up, dialling, letting the number ring two or three times, putting the receiver down, dialling again, giving a message in some sort of code – usually to do with flowers. The next day or even a few hours later a packet would appear in the letter-box downstairs. I would go to get it. Oliver did not seem to worry about the packet lying about downstairs: part of the business, it seemed, was to be a gambler.

There was cheap heroin coming into the country at this time, from Iran or Pakistan or somewhere: money had once been poured into such countries by the West to make them self-sufficient; it was easiest to become self-sufficient by growing poppies for heroin; this found its way back to the capitalist West which thus got a return on its investment. Even when revolutionaries took over some of these countries I suppose it still seemed sensible to allow such a return to the West. Cocaine seldom seemed to be a problem: there are always revolutionaries – are there not? – in South America.

Then there were alchemists in Amsterdam who fashioned pills and potions in strange and fearsome mixtures for the conjuring-up of meanings of the world – phantoms to order, coming in various shapes and sizes.

There is so much written about the pain and deathliness of drugs: but what are their delights: what have humans always wanted to get hooked-up into?

Humans have this drive to commit themselves, to give themselves over, to a cause, a god, a fatherland, a lover. They join groups, parties, armies, treadmills; their aim is to become identified, loyal, fixed, all-of-a-piece. It is scarcely bearable to be something blown about on your own. To be alone and be yourself is to know some great hollow at the centre; this can
be the terror that there is the drive to fill; it can also be used, of course, to make music.

What is easiest is to dress up in uniform, march to Moscow, flop about like Tristan and Isolde on some beach. You do away with emptiness at the centre by doing away with life. Snow covers the bodies on the plains around Moscow: the dying music moves to the perfect silence on the beach.

Drugs are for people who understand not too little about society but too much – and yet nothing more. Why dress up for Moscow? Who's bluffing with that song and dance on the beach? If you've got a death-wish why not do it at home, decently? Don't spill over into the environment with your medals and romanticism and shit.

Drugs, like bombs, are given pretty names: Fat Boy, Thin Man, Angel Meat. The stuff that Oliver got was mainly mixtures: you experimented: have not people always experimented to find out meanings of the world?

There was a substance you swallowed that made you solid and perfect and eternal: as if you were a golden statue straddling the entrance to a harbour. Looking down you could see small ships like flecks on piss beneath you: you did not need to do anything because anybody could do anything to you: they could tear you, chew you, there would still be all the kingdoms of the world beneath. You were that firm solid god whose toes people kissed like the sea.

Then there was a powder that you sniffed that made you feel as if you were the active instrument of god: you marched through valleys of orange trees to the last great battle of Armageddon: you were a tank in hot streets churning amongst brown bodies of children. They ran towards you with their hands up shouting – Peace! You raised your arm; opened your fingers; your dust settled down upon the world. Walking back through the burnt-out orange plantations you smiled – This is peace!

There was a shredded stuff you chewed and then you could in fact go out into the streets and people appeared in forms that you had imagined in dreams: they were great tufted things
like celery, like penises; they waddled and slid along the pavement. There were holes propped up in the shapes of mouths; there were eyes and ears clamped tight or writhing like anuses. You began to laugh. It was laughter by which you could be blown about and filled: you were a hollow swinging from a lamp-post.

Oliver and I both kept up for some time the pretence that he had to stay in bed: this was necessary for us, I suppose, as the peg to which we were tethered. I would go out to the shops; I would have something to come back to – the huge sick queen bee at the centre. This was our game: it was like that of Achilles and Penthesilea.

Then one day I went out without my keys. There was the impression again that I might have done this unconsciously on purpose. It seemed sensible that I should crawl back once more along the parapet to a window; then I might get at my keys without disturbing Oliver. I also had the idea that it would be a chance to see what Oliver did when I was not in the flat. Might he not even be one of those objects that do not exist when the observer is not there? I mean, of course, that I as observer would be there – but as if in another dimension.

I crawled out along the parapet to the sitting-room window and through this I saw Oliver standing, naked, in the middle of the room; he was talking on the telephone. I thought – He is practising being that vulgar golden god, is he, with his legs apart above a harbour. Then – But why is he not using the telephone by his bed?

I was on my hands and knees on the parapet like a cat. I thought – It is as if he has planned that I should crawl to see him standing naked in the sitting-room.

He was talking in an animated way on the telephone. He looked straight at me. He went on talking.

I thought – You mean, our game of pretence is over? But then will we not, as Achilles and Penthesilea, tear one or the other of us to pieces?

Oliver put the receiver down and came to the window and opened it.

I said ‘I forgot my keys.'

He said ‘Come in and get warm.'

He moved about the room without difficulty. I sat on a sofa. I thought – I am watching him in the way that up to now he has watched me.

He said ‘Had you been out there long?'

I said ‘No.'

He said ‘You're looking rotten.'

He came and stood over me. He put his arms on either side of me against the back of the sofa.

I thought – You mean, it is now my turn to be ill?

He said ‘Let's put you to bed.'

I said ‘What about the shopping?'

He said ‘I'll do the shopping.'

I thought – This can still work? We need not end up savaging each other like Achilles and Penthesilea?

I did not, of course, become ill all at once. I had for some time previously been using bits and pieces of dope. But these flip-overs happen quickly.

You are elect, heroic, on some parapet like a bird: then suddenly you are over.

Your mind does not register exactly what has occurred. You wake up in bed. Your old life is like a body on the pavement.

Well, what point was there for me in getting out of bed in the mornings now? Oliver would usually go out about midday. He did not tell me where he went. He said that he did not intend to get in touch with his wife or his old girlfriend.

There are gaps in the mind. There are gaps in this story. When you do not wish to remember, do you invent?

Why should Oliver have moved into this flat? Why had he risked taking sleeping pills with such apparent little chance of being rescued? Why did he wish his friends and enemies to think him dead?

One of the fantasies I made up at this time – Oliver going off and leaving me with pills and powders and the television in bed – was that he must be some sort of secret-service agent (of
course! what better explanation was there? such are the contemporary fantasies made flesh to deal with the rubbish of the human mind). Oliver had had to pretend to die in order to stay alive: he was in hiding from people who were after him. Well, of course, this did not quite make sense: but it is the not making sense that such fantasies are there to deal with. And I had been required because Oliver had needed me to look after him; perhaps this was why he needed now to keep me hidden – so that I would not tell. He went off each day, indeed, not to see his wife or his girlfriend, nor even to paint (I knew he still had a studio somewhere: but there would have been nothing fanciful enough for me, I suppose, in the idea that he had gone off simply to paint), but rather to visit those small, ruthless Englishmen like banjo-players who were his masters and who had their offices somewhere in the Charing Cross Road: there he would get his further instructions in the world of poisoned umbrellas and messages stuck like bits of lavatory paper within trees; and it was this world I was involved in! Might there not be a knock on the door one day and I would go to answer it and in would come those men in shiny suits leaping about like salmon; they would hold their pistols with both hands in front of them like people straining to have a shit; and I would say – You can do what you like to me! And then I would shoot from underneath the bedclothes; for they would not have known, would they, that I was heroic, immune, perfect.

When Oliver returned to the flat he used to say – You're a mess! We'll have to clean you up. Shall we? Then – You know, do you, it's a turn-on to be a mess?

Well, what do you think this sort of thing is about humans? They choose to find it easier to stay watching shadows on the wall of a cave?

There was a day when Oliver had gone out and I was sitting in the alcove of the bedroom window; from here you could see the pavement on the street below; I had been watching people coming and going as if they were little bits and pieces of slime-mould: do you know about slime-mould? it is a fungus
that grows in the forest. It starts as bits and pieces and then it comes together and forms a worm; this worm crawls all-of-a-piece and then it erects itself like a penis and explodes; so the little bits and pieces are scattered all over the forest. Then they begin to come together again – and so on. I thought – These people in the street, who are bits and pieces, they will need some enormous explosion one day to make them come together? and so on.

I was watching the street and I saw someone wearing a macintosh and looking like a private detective in a 1940s film: he was standing beneath a lamp-post. I thought he was Desmond. I mean he might have been Desmond: I had not seen Desmond since the night of the
Die Flamme
party: but might he not have heard – what? – that I had been captured and held hostage by men with moustaches like poisoned umbrellas? and might he not have come to rescue me from beneath a lamp-post – had not Desmond always been like someone in a 1940s film? He would have come treading down the steps of the Casbah; shadows would be flailing like the branches of trees against a wall: the images, memories, of course, become mixed; they are like the worms struggling to get out of a tin can. I thought I should be careful not to let myself be seen from the street: but how should I let Desmond know that I was here? What is it that people throw down from a window – a pebble? a button? a note of music? I thought I might go down in the lift and see if it was Desmond: but did I in fact want to be rescued? I could say – You must forget me! Go! I must never see you again! And then I could die in his arms. And so on. I went to the lift. I was wearing a dressing-gown. I had been smoking – what? When the lift moved I began to feel very ill. I sat on the floor and perhaps I did not know where I was for a time: I seemed to be inside one of those machines in the intensive-care unit of a hospital: there were men outside watching switches and dials. Or I was one of those eggs on the inner surface of a womb: someone outside me had drunk vodka and gin: they were trying to dislodge me: there were waves washing over me: I had to hang on. I suppose the lift
reached street-level, but I did not get out: I think it was one of the neighbours who found me. And then after a time Oliver appeared; he took over; perhaps he had been one of the people watching switches and dials. He was gentle: he called me his ‘old thing'. I thought – But this is some code: he is telling me that he knows that I know what he is up to; but they don't let you get away with this sort of knowledge, do they? It is I, still, whom they are after; whom they will have to try to see will end up dead.