Weekend (16 page)

The two letters, together with the one from the publisher, lay on the desk by the window. Sitting there, he glanced at them. Three rejection slips in one delivery. Maybe he could get into
The Guinness Book of Records
. Success out of failure.

He felt detached about it. It was as if they were dead letters, unable to reach the person they had been meant for. Not
known at this address. The publisher’s letter was rejecting a book Harry felt someone else had written. The editor of the poetry magazine was corresponding with a night of drunken mischief, which had seemed funny at the time. He shouldn’t have gone to the pub before the reading, especially not on a night when so many drinks were to appear unasked before him, donated with good intentions by people who had decided they owed him one.

The letter from the guardian of the Women’s Guild, prissy with outrage as it was, was definitely authentic evidence for the prosecution. But Margaret Bauer was talking to the prosecution’s chief witness. She thought that was bad? He could bring evidence she couldn’t imagine. She might get him fined for breach of the Women’s Guild’s peace. During a hangover, he had sometimes felt he knew enough about himself to justify bringing back the death penalty.

She was right on her own terms, though. (And hadn’t she enjoyed herself, making an epic out of a complaint.) How could he have done that? A mangy literary lion among the ladies. It was pathetic. Next he could rampage through primary schools, reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. At least he would pay them back the twenty-five pounds. He thought he might give them compensation and make it fifty. But he decided not to be abject about it. In fact, maybe he should deduct a five-pound penalty for the tweeness of the letter? No. Twenty-five pounds it was, a straight refund.

The answer to his dismay with his own past wasn’t to put himself in hock to it but wave it goodbye and try to find a different future. He would like to have a try at social maturity before they buried him. But he knew he was going to miss some of those ludicrous times.

He wouldn’t be having another night like the one with Big
Eddie. That had been a weird one. Like a holiday booked through Kafka Tours. You don’t know where you’re going till you get there, and even then you can’t be sure where it is you have arrived.

He had gone into the pub he used at the time to have a quick drink before he caught the train to Edinburgh, where he was to do an evening reading in a bookshop. Big Eddie was just back from abroad where he had been working as a brickie. He had hands that made a pint dish look like a thimble. He was, he told Harry, absolutely loaded. He meant with money, but you could have taken it the other way without any loss of accuracy.

‘Where you headed?’ Eddie asked.

He told him.

‘Mind if Ah come?’

‘It’s a reading, Eddie. I’m reading out a book. There’s not going to be anybody pole-dancing or anything.’

‘So? As long as Ah don’t have to do the reading, what’s the problem? Do they not have something like wine at these things?’

He took the point. He knew there could be risks. Eddie was a nice wild man but he was definitely a wild man. He had once jocularly introduced himself to a woman by asking her to take her clothes off. She slapped him so hard on the jaw, his head must have been reverberating like a struck gong for minutes. Eddie apologised sheepishly and went away. That was Eddie – he was so incompetent with women, he invited them to beat him up and get it over with.

He had seemed in calmer vein that night. He didn’t look permanently sane but he did look as if he was having a lucid interval. The taxi to the station had to make a detour to Eddie’s flat so that he could collect what he called ‘some
luggage’. Harry thought Eddie had a strange concept of a night out. He had wondered if it was Eddie’s term for money. But Eddie came back out with a shirt in a Cellophane wrapper that said ‘Made in Hong Kong’. Harry thought Eddie had a strange concept of luggage.

The reading in George Street had passed without serious incident. Apart from drinking enough plonk to make the young woman at the wine table panic about stocks and start to look nervously round the bookshop (perhaps she was wondering if there was a paramedic in the house or a bouncer), the most extreme thing Eddie did was to tell any attractive woman who came within earshot that he was the one who wrote the books and he just let Harry put his name to them.

When they hit the street again, they were both high – Eddie from the wine and Harry from the buzz of knowing that some people had actually read something he had written. Passing a casino, they decided they were high rollers. The man on the desk looked like a bull with a bow-tie. He explained politely to Harry that they had to be members to get in. It would cost five pounds each. Harry was taking out the money when the man said they would have to fill in a form and post it to the casino. The whole business might take a week or so.

Eddie was talking about offering the man a bribe when Harry noticed a woman leaving. He persuaded her to sign them in. She recognised him and, after signing them in, joined them at a table for a drink. Eddie left to play roulette and returned in ten minutes, saying he had lost seven hundred pounds. Their benefactor was called Marie. She had read
Lodgings in Eden
and she and Harry were discussing it when a small fat woman approached their table. She had a champagne glass in her hand.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to Harry. She pointed to another
table. A young man who looked as if he hadn’t started shaving yet waved suavely, raising a champagne glass with his other hand. ‘That’s my husband over there. We got married today. We’re having a party at our place to celebrate. And we’d love it if you would all join us there. Our treat.’

‘My dear,’ Eddie said, ‘you’re a charming woman.’

They lived in Pilton. When they all arrived in the living-room there was a skinny boy dressed only in jeans asleep on the sofa. He looked like something out of a Victorian print of destitution. He seemed to be about fourteen but the happy couple said he was eighteen and had been thrown out of his parents’ house. He woke up and sat staring round at everybody during the subsequent party.

The party was a mug of tea each. As Harry began to sip it, the woman who had signed them in mouthed at him not to drink the tea. Check out the cups, her silent lips suggested. Her grimace implied they might be plague carriers. Come to her place, she secretly conveyed, and they could have a real party. They made their polite excuses.

At her place the party was tea in attractive cups. Harry was beginning to think that people in Pilton had a strange concept of a party. He fell asleep in his chair to be wakened by the woman telling him that he would have to leave. It was after four in the morning. It seemed Eddie had been through at her bedroom, trying her door.

Outside in the street in windy darkness Harry cursed Eddie elaborately.

‘You know what?’ Eddie said. ‘She had a chair against the door-handle. Why would she do that?’

‘You should know.’

‘What? Naw, naw. She had the wrong idea. Ah was lookin’ for the lavvy.’

Harry had a vision of dying of hypothermia in the street in the company of a man to whom coherence was a foreign country when they were saved. God sent a taxi to Pilton.

Dropped off in Princes Street, Harry said he must get some sleep. The door of the Mount Royal Hotel was open and they went in. Upstairs, no one answered the bell when Eddie hit it. Harry saw a key lying on the desk. The tab on it said ‘110’. He took the key and went along to the room, which, as if by arrangement, had two single beds. They stripped to their underwear and went to sleep.

Harry woke at half past nine in the morning to see Eddie finishing making his bed, tweaking the top coverlet meticulously. Harry made his own bed and suggested they have tea and biscuits before leaving.

‘Let’s not take liberties,’ Eddie said.

There was no one on the desk when they came down and Harry left the key where he had found it. After the train, they took a taxi to the street where he used to live. When they parted, Eddie still had his shirt in the Cellophane wrapper. Harry wondered if perhaps Eddie liked to take a shirt with him in case he got arrested, so that he could look nice in court.

It wasn’t that it had all meant anything. What he remembered was an escape from the necessity of meaning, a kind of social version of freefall which had its own exhilaration. He let other strange memories arrive with a kind of detachment. He simply touched them as they passed like emigrants boarding ship. They might revisit occasionally but their home would no longer be here. That time he had put his table napkin over the talkative woman’s head, as if she were a budgie in a cage, passed by. He shouldn’t have done that. He wasn’t promising to cause no more trouble but he would try to make it more purposeful in future. He stood up and pulled
the curtains. In the mass of grey that merged sea and sky, the dawn light was a lovely minute statement – like one sentence on a computer screen, he thought.

He wanted to make his own statement, however ineffectual. He wanted to reclaim his experience as his own. He might be as mad as Muldoon but he would make a small cairn of words. He had to do it now.

He opened the A4 notebook he had brought with him. He found a Biro pen. As he sat down at the desk, it seemed strange to be preparing to write a sustained piece of prose again with a pen. It felt good, though. Perhaps that was what he had been doing wrong for years: writing by computer. A pen seemed to connect the brain more directly to the page. Thought seemed to travel more carefully along the arm on to the paper. You earned the words more thoroughly, on your body. They didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere, as if random. You had to carve them out.

He started to write, while the dawn grew as if in personal response to his need for it.

So you thought Jekyll and Hyde and Adam Yestreen were bad news? (Harry Beck was talking.) You haven’t heard the worst of it. Here comes their great progenitor. The daddy of them all. A man called Oedipus. Are you sitting comfortably? Well, don’t. There’s nothing here to make you feel relaxed about yourself. Here’s the story: in ancient Thebes a child is born. When his father, King Laius, consults the Delphic oracle about the boy’s future, the news could have been better. This boy, it is foretold, will murder his father and marry his
mother, Jocasta. Cancel the cards of congratulation. In fact, Laius decides to cancel his son’s life. It’s the only way he can see to prevent such a horrendous prophecy from coming true. But this is his son after all. So he devises a way to kill him without getting too much blood on his own hands. He drives pins through his son’s feet to cripple him and gives him to a servant to be abandoned on a hillside somewhere. Presumably to starve or freeze to death or to be eaten by animals. But the shepherd’s only human. He feels compassion for the child. He gives the boy to a man who is travelling far away into Boeotia. What harm can the boy do there? Oedipus is adopted by the king and queen of Boeotia. Lucky fellow. He grows up knowing them as his parents. But in early manhood he overhears some man telling another about the prophecy that was made at the birth of Oedipus: he would kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus is just as horrified as Laius had been and adopts his own strategy to outmanoeuvre the oracle. Thinking his adoptive parents are his real mother and father, he flees from Boeotia. How can he kill them when he will never be in their company again? Guess which direction he innocently heads in. On his travels he comes to a place where three roads meet. There he is ordered to get out of the way by a man being carried by his servants in a litter. Oedipus is nobody’s pushover. He is a man of massive pride and quick to anger. There is a fight in which Oedipus kills the man and his retainers. The man is called Laius, although Oedipus doesn’t know that. He presses on until he comes accidentally to Thebes. The city is being terrorised by a monster called the Sphinx, a kind of animal amalgam. Of every traveller it asks the same riddle. If you can’t answer it, it eats you. Oedipus is the first to get it right and the Sphinx kills itself. Thebes is freed. As their liberator, Oedipus is made king of
Thebes and marries their queen. Her name is Jocasta. Many years later Thebes is caught in the grip of a terrible plague. Consultation with the oracle reveals that the city is harbouring someone unclean and, as king, Oedipus is determined to find the source of the pollution. With great difficulty he finally discovers that he is himself the problem, that the man he killed at the crossroads was his father and the woman he has married is his mother. Destroyed by the news, Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus finds her and, taking an ornamental pin from her robe, he blinds himself. He’s eventually banished from the city. He dies in exile. And there we are. When the ancient Greeks told stories, they told big ones. Just let all of that sink in for a moment. What can this avalanche of accidental horrors actually mean? For this wasn’t some cynical Hollywood director cobbling together another blockbuster to make us spill our popcorn. The definitive version of Oedipus was written by Sophocles, a man with a profound understanding of human nature. He was giving us a message about ourselves in which he apparently believed. But what was the message? What is he saying about us?

‘She’s at it again,’ he said as he came in.

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘Mrs Fawcett.’

He leaned over to kiss her cheek but she turned her face up to his and their lips met full on. The magazine she had been reading slid off her knees. She pulled him down to her. He let his briefcase fall on the floor. They kissed for a long time. When their mouths parted, they were both breathing heavily.

‘Come on,’ he said.

‘Maybe we should eat first,’ she said. ‘Dinner’s on.’

‘We can eat any time.’

She pushed out her bottom lip and tried to blow some ruffled strands of hair off her forehead.

‘Is she really doing it again?’ she asked.