Collected Stories (56 page)

My father, the headmaster of a local school, said, before he died of heart failure, that he’d always regretted not becoming a postman. A gentle job, he believed, wandering the streets with nothing but dogs to worry about, would have extended his life. Idiotic, I considered this: worrying was an excitement I needed. But now I had some idea what he meant.

Not that he’d have survived on a postman’s salary. I had begun to realise that I, too, wasn’t used to today’s financial world. I’d always bought my own milk, but had no idea of the price. I’d seriously underestimated what I’d need as a Newbody. The price of condoms! Apart from the cash I’d put aside for my return trip, I’d spent most of my money and couldn’t use my bank accounts or credit cards. Until my return I needed a cheap place to stay and money for my keep.

It was in Greece, on a boat one morning, that I met a middle-aged woman with a rucksack who was going to study photography at a ‘spiritual centre’ on the island I was visiting. She had hitchhiked from London to visit the Centre, which was known to be particularly rejuvenative for those suffering from urban breakdown. When I told her my sad story, she offered to take me along with her.

While I waited in a café in a nearby square, drinking wine and reading Cavafy, she went to the Centre and enquired whether there was any work I could do in exchange for food, a place to sleep and a little payment. Otherwise, I would find a job in a bar or disco, and crash on the beach. The woman returned and told me the Centre had been looking for an ‘oddjob’ to clean the rooms and work in the kitchen. Providing the leader didn’t dislike me, I would eat for free, earn a little money and sleep on the roof.

We walked down to a handful of flower-dotted, whitewashed buildings on the edge of an incline, with a view of the sea. She opened the door in a long, high wall.

‘Look,’ she said. I did: the devil peeping into paradise. ‘They must be between classes.’

It was a shaded garden where the women – naturally, it was mostly women – sat on benches. They talked, wrote earnestly in notebooks and read. In one corner, a woman was singing; another was doing yoga, another combing her hair; on a massage table, a body was being kneaded.

Here, these middle-aged, middle-class and, of course, divorced women from London took ‘spiritual’ nourishment, meditation, aromatherapy, massage, yoga, dream therapy. What baby with its mother ever had it better than in this modern equivalent of the old-style spa or sanatorium? The three men I saw were middle-aged, with hollow chests and varicose veins.

She asked, ‘Will you be all right here?’

‘I think I’ll manage,’ I replied.

After being shown around the kitchen, the ‘work’ rooms, and the dining room, I was taken to see the Centre’s founder or leader, the ‘wise woman’, as she was called, without irony, or with none that I noticed. I had the impression that it would be wise for me, too, to lay off the irony. It was too much of a mature and academic pleasure.

Patricia came to the door of a small, shuttered house ten minutes’ walk from the Centre. In her late fifties, she was big, with long, greying hair, in clothes with the texture and odour of cheap oriental carpets. She invited me in, and ordered me to sit on a cushion. As I dozed off, she talked loudly on the phone, read her correspondence (‘Bastards! Bastards!’), scratched her backside and, from time to time, looked me over.

When I got up to inspect a picture, she turned. ‘Sit down, don’t fidget!’ she said. ‘Be still for five minutes!’

I sat down and bit my lip.

I could recall her variety of feminism from the first time around: its mad ugliness, the forced ecstasy of sisterhood, the whole revolutionary puritanism. I didn’t loathe it – it seemed to me to be a strain of eccentric English socialism, like Shavianism – as long as I didn’t have to live under or near it. It did, however, seem better being a young man these days: the women were less aggressive, earned their own money and didn’t blame anyone with a cock for their nightmares.

I was irritated by what I considered to be this woman’s high-handed approach, and was about to walk out – not that she would have minded – when it occurred to me that for her I was virtually a child as well as only a potential menial. I was neither an Oldbody nor a Newbody. I was a nobody.

I’d always had a penchant for tyrants, at school, at work and in the theatre where, when I was young, they flourished, having come from army backgrounds. I had enjoyed testing myself against them. How many times could they beat you up before they had to come to terms with you? However, now I was shaken by a blast of late-adolescent fury. I’d forgotten how adults talk down to you, when they’re not ignoring you, and how they hate to hear your opinion while giving their own. You’re at one of your parents’ dinner parties and your parents’ friends ask you how your exams are going and you tell them you have failed and you are glad, glad, glad. Your parents tell you not to be rude, and you’ve just been to see
If
… Your parents want a gin and tonic but you want a machine gun and the revolution, and you want them now.

Despite this, I guessed that Patricia had an intelligence and intensity my former persona would have enjoyed. I liked the fact that the one thing I wouldn’t have said about her, even after only cursory inspection, was that she was serene. Long periods of inner investigation and deep breathing, or whatever therapy she practised, hadn’t seemed to have cured her of irritability or incipient fury.

When she did look at me, with what I was afraid was some perception, I felt I would shrivel up. For the first time I felt that someone had seen me as an impostor, a fake, as not being what I seemed. The game was up, the pretence was over.

‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked.

‘Leo Raphael Adams.’

She snorted. ‘Arty, bohemian parents, eh?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I probably knew them.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Lots of things.’

‘Lots of things, eh?’

‘They moved around a lot.’

‘Good for them,’ she said. ‘What do you want to do?’

‘Work here for a bit,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do anything you want me to.’

‘I should hope so. But don’t pretend to take what I say literally, Leo, when you know I mean “in life”.’

‘In life? I don’t know,’ I said genuinely. ‘I’ve no idea. Why do I have to “do” anything?’

She imitated me. ‘Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t give a shit.’

I shaded my eyes, as if from the sun. ‘Why do you keep staring at me?’

‘Your blank face.’

I said, ‘Is it blank? I’ve looked at it a lot and –’

‘I can imagine, dear.’

‘I’ve never thought of it as blank.’

‘Is there one intelligent thought in there – something that will make me think, “I haven’t heard that before”? I must have forgotten’, she went on, ‘that conversation isn’t a male art.’

There was a lot I did want to say, but if I started on at her I wouldn’t know what it was like to be young.

I said, ‘You want me to leave.’

‘Only if you want to.’ She started to giggle. ‘We don’t usually have men working here, though there’s no rule against it. I may be an old-style sixties feminist, and the self-esteem of women in a male world may be of interest, but it wasn’t my intention to set up a nunnery. Your porky prick’ – she looked directly at my crotch – ‘will certainly put the cat among the pigeons. I think that will amuse me. You can stay … for a bit.’

‘Thank you.’

Patricia went to the window, leaned out and yelled into the square.

‘Alicia!’ she called. ‘Alicia!’ Almost immediately, a girl appeared. ‘Take him away,’ she said. ‘He’s working here at the moment. Give him something to do!’

As I walked back, I was aware of someone beside me, as insubstantial and insistent as a shadow.

‘I think I’ll get out of here,’ I said.

‘Is that what you normally do – run?’

‘If I’m feeling sensible.’

‘Don’t start getting sensible.’

I said, ‘Something about me seemed to enrage her.’

‘You take it personally?’

‘I’ve decided to.’

‘Why?’

‘It made me wonder what sort of power I might have over her.’

‘You’ll never have any power over her.’

Alicia was not a girl, but a young woman from London, a frail poet with a squint and a roll-up in the corner of her mouth. She told me she had been staying at the Centre for three months, at the expense of an American benefactor, writing and teaching. Despite the relentless sunlight and the hunger for it of the other women, Alicia had not tanned. Her skin remained remorselessly ‘Camden High Street in the rain’, as I thought of it. She was to show me the roof of the Centre, where I would sleep. It was baking during the day and most likely cold at night, but it suited me, being secluded. I like the sky, though until now have lacked the time to ‘commune’ with it.

While I unpacked my few things, Alicia opened a spiral notebook, coughed her soul out, tore at her nails with her teeth, and asked whether I minded hearing her poetry.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘I haven’t had any contact with poetry since I was at school.’

‘Where were you at school?’

All over the place.’

‘Read anything?’

‘Toilet walls.’

She warned me: her poetry was mostly about things.

‘Things?’

She explained that even here, ‘in the cradle of consecutive thought’, the language of the New Age and of self-help, now beyond parody, had taken over the vocabulary of emotional feeling and exchange. If the language of the self was poisoned, it was disastrous for a poet. This was yet to happen to objects without souls, on which she had decided to concentrate her powers.

‘Give me an example,’ I said.

She began with a poem about kettles and toasters. I liked it, so she followed up with another about her Hoover, and with a further one about music systems, which was unfinished. When I asked her to go on, she told me what the others were to be about – carpets, beds, curtains – and requested suggestions for more.

I changed my shirt, a moment I always enjoyed, and said I thought one about windows would be good.

‘Windows?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘What’s wrong with windows?’

She explained that it was ‘too poetic’ a subject. Quoting John Cage, she said she was interested in the ‘white’ emotions rather than the ‘black’ ones. She needed to get past the ‘black’ ones to the ‘white’ ones.

‘D’you see?’

‘Not a word of it. Me, I’m only the cleaner.’

‘That’s who I’m writing for. Cleaners and crooks – I mean cooks. Some poems open only for the ignorant.’

‘I must be your man, then.’

She was looking at me. Her face was pale but unmarked, as though her despair had neglected to invade it. Yet now, one of her eyes was twitching like a trapped butterfly. I wanted to go to her and press my finger against it. But maybe I would have just pulled it off and torn it to pieces. The poor girl must have fallen in love at that moment.

The work I had to do at the Centre was hard. My body was uncomplaining – it liked being stretched and exerted – but my mind kicked up a fuss. In a life devoted to myself, it had been years since I’d been forced to do anything against my will. I’d always been reasonably successful at getting women to look after me. Now I helped with the cooking; it was good to learn to cook. I emptied the bins and carried heavy sacks of food from the vans; I was taught how to build a wall. I swept, cleaned and painted the rooms. I guessed that this was what the world was like for most people, and it didn’t harm me to be reminded of it.

I came to appreciate the simplest things. I grew a beard and learned t’ai chi, yoga and how to play a drum. I swam long distances, sunbathed, read, and listened to the women at meal times and at night, just hanging around them, as I had my mother as a child. I cultivated a reputation for shyness and silence. I might have been a beauty, but direct attention was the last thing I craved. Sometimes I would massage the women, singing to myself. One time, I saw one of the group lying under a tree reading my last play, which was produced five years ago. As I walked past her, I said, ‘Any good?’

‘The play’s not as good as the film.’

I had begun to love the beauty of the island and the peace it gave me. I was almost free of the desire to understand. Agitation and passion seemed less necessary as proofs of life. I wondered whether, when I returned to my old body, my values would be different. I had been certain that I wanted to go back, but it was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone now. There were decent arguments on both sides. What could have been worse? I would put it off for as long as possible.

Patricia usually appeared at breakfast and made a speech about the purpose and aims of the Centre. Once, she told us one of her dreams; then she interpreted it, to prevent any misunderstanding. There was an impressed silence, before she swept away. She uttered few words in my direction but she always looked hard at me as if we were connected in some way, as if she were about to speak. I supposed she looked at everyone like this, now and again, to make them feel part of her community. I no longer believed she understood me, but did I make her particularly curious? She seemed to say: what do you really want? It agitated me. I kept away from her but she remained in my mind, like a question.

Patricia’s workshops were the most popular and intense, and always full. However, as Alicia told me in confidence, they were known more for the quantity of tears shed than for the quality of wisdom transmitted. But I was only a kitchen skivvy and took no part. Taking my father’s advice, I was on a working holiday.

Ten days after I’d started, Patricia came into the kitchen, where I laboured under the regime of an old Greek woman with whom I could barely communicate. I’d never seen Patricia in the kitchen before. Like the obdurate adolescent I wanted her to see me as, I refused to meet her look. She had to tell me to stop peeling potatoes.

‘Just stop now.’

‘Patricia, I wouldn’t feel good about leaving half a potato.’

‘To hell with potatoes! I am about to begin my dream workshop with the new group. I’ve decided that it’s time you joined us.’