Spurious (12 page)

The damp, I say to W. That’s my apocalypse. Does he know I have mushrooms growing from the ceiling? Does he know they’re gathered in the far upper corner of the kitchen? It used to make me shudder, I tell W. I used to hate it. But now …

I’m fascinated by the damp, I tell W. I can’t help it. I go out there again, to the kitchen, to the bathroom. I put my hand on the clammy wall. The damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but the one who sees it, touches it? Who am I but the one with its spores in his lungs?

One night it grew me, I tell W. One night a spore unfolded itself to a make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue …

Somewhere, on the other side of the wall, life has reached a new level, I tell W. Somewhere, damp mutters to itself; damp dreams, there behind the wall. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will it say when it wakes up?

What will he write about next?, W. muses. What’s to be his next project? He’s casting about, he admits it. Wasn’t he supposed to learn Greek this summer? Protestant guilt keeps driving him into the office, he says. In he goes on the bus, thinking he ought to be doing something, but not quite sure what. He sits in the office among the parcels of review copies of books he keeps receiving. There are dozens of them, piled up all over the place. They depress him enormously. He can’t bear to look at them.

For my part, W. notes, I still have a stupid excitement about books. It’s because I’m illiterate, W. says, and because they’re slightly above the level I can understand. Whenever I visit, I insist on opening the parcels and filling up W.’s shelves with fresh new books, reading him the most ridiculous of the blurbs. It must be the bright covers that attract me, W. says, whereas they depress him horribly.—‘All these books!’, he says, with weary horror. ‘Look at them!’

Whatever happened to W.’s publisher? Once the most generous and gregarious of men, he insisted upon travelling hundreds of miles to visit W. and take him out to dinner. They spent days going over the manuscript, which was properly proofread (not like mine, W. says, which was farmed out to Malaysia). And he’d decided on a full colour cover for the paperback—an expensive undertaking, W. notes. Granted, the final version still had typos on the first page (to his amusement) and even in the blurbs on the back (which he found even funnier), but it was a handsome volume, and one of a series of handsome volumes.

But what’s happened to the publisher? He’s gone out of business, that much is clear. Of course, you could never get hold of his books anywhere, which also amused W. As soon as his book was in print, it was out of print, he said. It was always and already out of print, he said, which was fitting, he said. Luckily, he got a box of free copies, says W., which he sent to his friends. Were it not for that, no one would believe it had existed.

To W., it’s completely inconsequential whether the book is in print or not. You should always publish with friends, he says, and the publisher was a friend. But where is he? He doesn’t reply to emails or telephone calls, W. says. Doubtless there’s no longer a computer in his office, nor a telephone, he says. Doubtless the office has long been stripped and demolished, and he’s sitting sobbing in the ruins.

You should always publish with friends, W. notes, and that’s all he wants from his vanished publisher: a sign of friendship, of their shared failure. That’s all he would want from any of his friends, who are all failures, whether they know it or not.

Why has everything become so absurd?, I ask W. Why has it all come apart just at the moment when we might have got somewhere? But W. reminds me of what we both know: that any success we’ve had is premised upon exactly that absurdity.

We’re like captains of the Titanic, we tell each other. W.’s already steered his ship into the iceberg. It’s wrecked—all hands lost. W. remains on the bridge, the last man standing, but there’s not long left.—‘It’ll be your turn next’, says W. ‘How long do you think you’ll last?’

The iceberg’s looming, I tell W. I’m mesmerised by it. So was he, says W. He knew it was coming and that it could only come. He knew that any success he had had was premised upon this greater and pre-ordained failure. He’s dignified in defeat.—‘Not like you’, he says, ‘gnashing your teeth and wailing from the rooftops’.

I am getting to know the moods of the damp, I tell W. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And then, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased, and if so, with what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them.

Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly, high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along—the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it’s not running with water as it used to be. Dehumidifiers work night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pinpricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only contained?

The damp and I are companions in the quiet flat. Little happens here; the damp does its work as moisture is drawn through the filters of the dehumidifier into its transparent collection tray, and I try to do mine. When I am away, I tell W., I think the damp plunges forward like a dark wave; I can smell it, very thick in the air, when I open the door. Damp in a wave, welcoming me home, thick and brown and wet in the air.

Sometimes I sponge down the walls with a mixture of water and bleach. It needs to be done in the bathroom, too, where black spores of mould are forming. And the wallpaper in the bedroom, too. But these are only symptoms. I touch a cool sponge to the wall as to a fevered brow. Be calm, be still, do not toss and turn. And now I imagine the damp is a dream of the wall, that it is lost in itself somehow, and that if the wall were only to open its eyes and see me, then all would be well. But the wall seems to fall into itself. It’s lost in damp, or damp is what rises up when the wall disappears into its coma.

Sometimes, I tell W., I like to imagine that I could pick the walls up like a Chinese screen and turn them to the sun to dry. To lift up the ceiling and the flat above and let the sun find the wall, and dry it. That would let it live. That would awaken it. As it is, the wall is hunched upon itself and hidden from the sun. It weeps in a corner.

But how long for? I think warmer days are approaching, I tell W., though it was freezing today, and there were a few snowflakes in the air. Warmer days, and the simple honesty of the sun, which will bake everything dry. And if I cannot pick up the wall to turn it around, inner to outer, so there are no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, there is still the slow penetration of the sun, slow, and over the whole outer wall, rendered and unrendered. And one day it will be summer, too, in my kitchen.

The disaster has already happened, said W. during our presentation. That’s what we’re committed to, he said, meaning him and me. It’s already happened! It’s all finished! Can’t you see that it’s finished? But no one agreed with us. We’re quite alone, we agreed afterwards, walking to the train.

Alone with the apocalypse! The only thing for it is to drink. Luckily we have a bottle of Plymouth Gin in our bag. We are sober men, terribly sober, we agree. It’s only those who are the most sober of all who have to drink, and then to the point when they can no longer pronounce the word
apocalypse
. It’s only then, drunk as lords, that they will know God’s plan, which they will immediately forget.

Are we capable of religious belief? Of course not. We’re not capable of anything, that’s the trouble. We’re up against the apocalypse with no means to fight it.
The disaster has
already happened
. We were born, for one thing. We’re going to die, that’s another. And the oceans will boil and the skies burn away into the outer darkness …

It’s all over, it’s all finished. This is the interregnum. A little reprieve, an Indian summer. But we’re deep into autumn, and winter is coming—or should that be the other way round? Deep into spring—a new kind of spring, a boiling spring—and a summer will come that will burn away everything.

Maybe it will come later, after we’re dead. Maybe sooner—tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. But in another sense, it’s already come; it’s spread its cloak around us. We’re men of the End, of the Very End. We’re men of the Disaster, which no one else knows but us. Which no one else
feels
. Drink, drink, we have to drink. We unscrew the top of our gin bottle as the train rolls out of the station …

These are the End Times, but who knows it but us? No one. We’re quite alone with our knowledge, which is really a kind of feeling. We’re on our own, we decide. That’s what we have in common: a sense of the apocalypse. A sense that the time has come, and these are the days of our Judgement.

We’ll be found wanting, we know that. We two above all—we’re terribly guilty. What’s to become of us—of us in particular? No one believes in us. No one listens. We’re out on a limb—terribly far—and we’re sawing it off. We’ll fall off the edge of the world. We are falling—who believes us? Who believes in us?

These are our thoughts on the train that rushes through the night. We’re drinking gin with great determination. We have to drink!, drink! until we can no longer say the word,
Messiah
. That’s our punishment, and we must be punished. This is what it has come to, here in the dark, rushing forward …

What place do we have in the world? None. Where’s it all going? To perdition. To desolation, and to the abomination of desolation. And are we going with it? All the way! That’s where we’re heading now with our gin and our apocalypticism, full speed into the night.

Messianism has driven us mad, or half mad, we decide. What else have we been thinking about? What else has driven us through our reading and writing? We’ll be glad when it’s over: but when will it be over? There’s no sign yet. Messianism hasn’t finished with us.

We’re fated in some way. We’re circling round and round what we cannot possibly understand. And isn’t that why we’re drawn to it? Isn’t that the lure? You cannot understand this idea. You’ll never understand it, not today, not tomorrow. But the day after that?, we ask. The day after tomorrow?

That’s our faith: it’s not faith in the Messiah, but that we might be brought into the vicinity of the
idea
of the Messiah; that a little of its light might reach us. The Messiah: isn’t he forever beyond us, just beyond? We’ve always just missed him. We missed the appointment …

Wasn’t he supposed to arrive here, now? Not today, and not even tomorrow. But the
idea
of the Messiah: might we reach that? Is there something left of his passing, some trace—some sign? The day after tomorrow: that’s when it will reach us, if it does: the
idea
of the Messiah.

But won’t it have been too late? Won’t the page have already been turned? But perhaps that’s what it means: the idea can burn only for those who cannot see it, who have already gone under. It’s on the other side of the mirror, although all they can see are their own stupid faces.

And what do we see, in the reflective surface of the train windows? Whose faces are those behind the glass?—‘My God, look at us’, says W. ‘Look what we’ve become’.

The water taxi to Mount Batten. We’re in choppy water, but sit out nevertheless on the exposed part of the deck.—‘Poseidon must be angry’, says W. as the surf splashes over us. W.’s learning Greek again. Is it the fifth time he’s begun? The sixth? It’s the aorist that defeats him, he says. Every time.

It’s choppy!—‘We should libate the sea’, says W. Then he asks me if I know why the sea is salty. It’s because the mountains are salty and the sea is full of broken up mountains, he says.

It’s also full of ozone, of course. That’s what cheers you up when you’re near the sea, W. says, the ozone that choppy water releases into the air.

Have we failed? W. is certain: we are complete failures. We should be drowned like kittens, he says, for the little we’ve achieved. But what chance did we have?, I ask him. What could we have done, under the circumstances? That’s always my question, W. says.—‘You’re always looking for excuses. It’s your Hindu fatalism’.

W. says my entire worldview is organised so that I never have to take responsibility for anything, even my supposed Hinduism. W. was brought up with the idea of eternal damnation, he says, and the thought of it still makes him shiver. Hindus are immune, W. says. I should try living as a Catholic and then I’d see (W.’s family were converts, of course). And as a Jew (W. is Jewish by bloodline).—‘It’s the guilt that’s worst’, says W. ‘The sense you can never measure up’.

‘Detachment, that’s what you Hindus have to achieve to escape the wheel of rebirth, isn’t it?’, W. says.
Moksha:
the cessation of desire. It makes sense to him, W. says. Look at my flat, for one thing. It’s disgusting. Do I desire to clean it up? No. Do I desire to deal with the damp? Not really.

‘It’s a kind of test for you, isn’t it, your damp?’ W. says. All I have to do is to desire not to change it, W. says. All I would have to say is,
The damp is eternal; I accept that now
. That would be
moksha
, wouldn’t it? Ah, if only it were as simple for him, W. says.

‘This is how proper people think’, says W. in the beer garden in Turnchapel, his arms held behind his back and his head raised. ‘Do I look as though I’m having lofty thoughts?’

What thoughts has he had? I read from the back of his notebook.
The messianic and the apocalyptic
, it says, the ‘and’ underlined.
Pathos
, it says.
Blood in the chinks between the
stones of the law—Kafka
, it says.
Groessen = dimension
, it says.
Capitalism = paganism
. And then,
The real future is waiting to happen beneath the marketing of the future
.

And then, a little further on:
We have to live two lives, one turned to the world and to the horror of the world, and the other turned to our friends
. And still further on,
Eternity in time
. And then,
Kafka—thin, Brod
—
fat
.

There’s a list of ingredients, too:
juniper (Italy), lemon and orange peel (Spain), orris root (Italy), Angelica root (Low Countries), cardamom pods (Sri Lanka), coriander seeds (Russia)
. And some tasting records:
Warm spiciness. Peppery notes. Earthiness and sweetness
. That was from the visit of the Chief Distiller of Plymouth Gin, W. says.

W. cherishes my special love for Turnchapel. I become gentler when I’m there, he notes, kinder. He likes my tender side. In another life, I could have lived here, imagine … We muse wistfully on what I might have been like.—‘A better person’, W. thinks, ‘taller, with some nobility of character’.