Exchange Place (3 page)

Opium

As I write, I have notebooks strewn on the desk, on the sofa, on the floor, and I refer to them from time to time, or rather I flit from one to another, skimming, flicking through the pages from back cover to front and back again, foraging for I know not what, a glimmer of a memory, a phrase, a string of words, something jotted down a week, a month, a year ago, that might be germane to this present moment, something that is in my mind or on my mind now as it was then. One of the problems with the notebooks is their fundamental lack of organisation. Some are dated on the cover, others bear a title which might indicate their contents or preoccupations, some are both titled and dated, and some individual items are dated, but many are not. Consequently, although the cover of a notebook might be dated, there is no guarantee that a particular passage will have been written around that time, for in practice I sometimes pick up any notebook that is at hand rather than the current one.

Some entries are neatly written, some are scribbled, some are so scrawled as to be illegible, so that the writing seems the product of several hands, written by different people. Some entries are quotations from other writers, though many have no quotation marks, and sometimes I am uncertain as to whether a particular entry is my own work, or the work of another, or an amalgam of the two. Whatever the case, I like to think of that other work as being written by myself. Indeed, some of the notebooks carry my name, John Kilfeather, on the inside cover, and my address, as a form of security. A proof of my identity. Then again some entries which must have made sense to me at the time of writing make little or no sense to me now. You might say that I am faced with a jigsaw puzzle. But this is not a jigsaw puzzle. There are no straight edges or corners to help with the framing of the picture; and the picture or the story I am trying to piece together does not yet exist.

I open a notebook at random, and come across this: ‘Dublin train 11.00/13.20
JULES VERNE
Cocteau 80 days’. The cover of the notebook is dated Dec. 2009, and I now remember what I had forgotten, that I first read Jean Cocteau’s
Round the World Again in 80 Days (Mon Premier Voyage)
on the Belfast–Dublin Enterprise Express. 11.00/13.20 must refer to the train times, though I cannot remember which train I took, or on what day, or why I made the journey, for the entry is undated. Cocteau was inspired by a stage production, at the Châtelet Theatre, of Jules Verne’s novel, as indicated on the first page of Cocteau’s book. ‘Never for me,’ writes Cocteau, ‘will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the back of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance.’

In 1936, at the suggestion of his then lover Marcel Khill, Cocteau undertook to duplicate Verne’s adventure, securing financial backing from the evening paper
Paris-Soir
, to whom he would send a series of instalments along the way. He soon discovered that Phileas Fogg’s journey in 1873 was indeed a fiction, and that even in 1936 it was barely possible. The practical arrangements were made by Khill, whose real name was Mustapha Marcel Khelilou ben Abdelkader, born of an Algerian father and a Norman mother. Throughout Cocteau’s account Khill is referred to as Passepartout, the French for a master key, skeleton key, or picture mount, rather than passport. Khill was also Cocteau’s opium supplier, and one of the features of the book is their constant and frequently rewarded search for opium dens. Much of the book reads like an opium dream.

My notebook contains five pages of notes with page references to Cocteau’s book written with a Muji 0.5mm black ink gel pen written at my table seat on the Enterprise Express. They are followed by a pencilled entry, most likely written at a later date: ‘cf. Notebooks of Robert Frost, p. 89, Every thing that is a thing is out there and there it stands waiting under your eye till some day you notice it, p. 127, The strangeness is all in thinking two things at once, in being in two places at once. That is all there is to metaphor.’ And when I read Cocteau’s book I was indeed in two places at once. I do not know how many times I have been on the Dublin train, but the journey is so familiar to me that were I blindfolded I would have a good idea of where I was at whatever time, at whichever point on the line. Lisburn – Portadown – Newry – Dundalk – Drogheda – Dublin. I might well have been in Lisburn, a nondescript market town, I might have glanced out the window at a row of backyards – washing lines, pigeon lofts, sheds – before writing, ‘8, I owe much to the Rome express’. I stretch my hand up to the bookshelf on the wall above my desk in 41 Elsinore Gardens and take down Cocteau’s book, which has languished there unopened for I do not know how long, open it at page 8, and begin to read these words I now transcribe:

‘I owe much to the Rome express. It cleared my mind of cobwebs, the befuddlement of one who after many years of sleep is woken with a start; it resolved the difficulty I had found in living on my own resources instead of suffering the lot of a somnambulist walking precariously along the edges of a roof … Now at last I was submerged – how marvellous it was! – in simple, human sleep, dense and opaque, broken by lucid intervals when I rose to the surface and saw between my feet the landscape scudding past, framed in the carriage window. Trains play Beethoven symphonies. Memories of their themes float up, and automatically blend into the breathless rhythms of speed. It is as if the deafness from which they sprang were akin to the silence of the railway carriage, a complex silence made up of innumerable noises. The throbbing pulse of blood through its dark metronome of arteries, echoes of triumphal marches, glimpses of nightbound stations and, by day, of white, almost Moorish cities, with minarets, square-built houses and lines of fluttering linen hung along the foreshore of a sea dyed laundry-blue – all compose the intervals of a dream theatre where dramas inexpressible in words are played.’

I came to the end of Cocteau’s
Round the World Again in 80 Days
as the Enterprise Express pulled into Connolly Station in Dublin. I know this because the last note in my sequence reads, ‘Read in 2 hrs 15 mins – pulling into Dublin.’ I had been in another world. The translation I read is by Stuart Gilbert and appeared in 1937. Gilbert also translated Georges Simenon and Jean-Paul Sartre, and assisted in the French translation of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. As I write these words it occurs to me that I should read Cocteau in Cocteau’s French. I order the book online from the cryptically named Tgl Harmattan 2, Paris, France, thinking of myself in Paris, thinking of Joyce blinding in Paris, naming, for his party-piece, the shops along O’Connell Street.

Pilot Light

It was night. He was walking along Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle in Paris when he glanced up and saw the blue and white enamel sign that read Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle. I’ve taken a wrong turn, he thought, and doubled back along the boulevard in the direction of Hôtel Chopin, walking until it became Boulevard de la Poissonière, which in turn became Boulevard Montmartre, the same line of boulevard under different names. He walked until he came to Passage Jouffroy. It was night and the iron gate was locked. He pressed the intercom button under the words Hôtel Chopin. He heard a hiss as if of static. Kilpatrick, he said. He heard the gate click and he pictured the night porter at reception. He opened the gate and stepped over its threshold and the gate clanged shut behind him, echoing in the empty arcade. The closed shops were dimly lit from within. Night light. What was the word?
Veilleuse
. He walked past a window in which stood a headless mannequin wearing a dressing-gown of blue and gold silk brocade and he thought again of the blue and gold paisley scarf he had not bought in Bon Marché knotted round the neck of a male bust, its generic face blank under the grey trilby. He fingered the red and white polka dot scarf at his throat and thought of the man he had seen in Rue du Sentier. It seemed long ago.

He pushed open the hotel entrance door and entered the foyer. There was no one at reception, but his key was there on the desk, attached to a heavy wooden tab which bore the number 36. He mounted the three steps to the lift and pressed button 3. He waited. There was no response. He pressed again but still nothing. He turned to the dark staircase and depressed the timer light switch. What was the word?
Minuterie
. He remembered it was also the word for the timer in an explosive device. As he came to the first floor the light went out and he had a brief phantom image of the lighted staircase. He groped his way to the landing and pressed the next timer switch, hurrying his footsteps so as to remain in the light. On the third floor he unlocked the door to Room 36. He went in. He switched on the light. He put his briefcase on the floor. He took off his hat, scarf and overcoat and laid them on the bed. He took off the tweed jacket he had been wearing under the overcoat and laid the jacket on the bed. He went into the bathroom, went to the washstand, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves, turned on the tap and splashed water on his face. Blind for a few seconds, he groped for the towel on the rail beside the washstand. He dried his face and his hands. When he replaced the towel on the rail he saw that the wall to the right of the rail was splashed with water that must have dripped from his hands as he moved from the washstand and groped for the towel, and he remembered that a similar pattern had occurred every time he had splashed water on his face, whether after shaving first thing in the morning or splashing water on his face last thing at night, and he remembered that afterwards he did not remember it until the next time it happened, and then it reminded him of all the other times.

The splashes had dribbled in rivulets on the wall and he remembered thinking on those other occasions what he was thinking now, that they were like a river delta or a root system or a route map: if in the morning, an augury of the path he would take that day; if at night, a portent of what he would dream. He looked into the mirror and for a brief instant it seemed the mirror was a dark portal into Rue du Sentier where the man had appeared from and then vanished into the dark. He saw the street like a stage set and the man like a magician taking his bow to the audience that was Kilpatrick, except Kilpatrick could not see himself, all he saw was the man dressed in the clothes Kilpatrick had been dressed in. He came to and saw himself looking back at himself and he wondered how many hundreds of faces had appeared in the mirror before his, the many who had looked in the mirror and how many were living or dead. He wondered if the mirror had a memory of those faces or for those faces. He thought that for all he knew the man in question might have looked into this mirror too.

He went back into the room and hung up the clothes that had been lying on the bed. He turned on the bedside lamp and turned off the ceiling light and lay down on the bed in the clothes he was wearing. The lamp had a dimmer switch and he turned it to its lowest setting.
Veilleuse
. Night light, sidelight, pilot light.
Mettre en veilleuse
, to dim, to put on the back burner. From
veille
, a period of wakefulness;
la veille
, the day before yesterday.
La veille de sa mort
, the eve of his death.
Homme de veille
, night watchman. In the dim light of the bedside lamp he closed his eyes and thought of himself watching himself or watching over himself. He fell asleep.

He was in the Crown Bar in Belfast. The dream was in the present but it was set back in time because the bar was lit by dim strip lighting and not the original gas lighting that had been reinstalled when they restored the bar after the bombings of the seventies and the eighties. Kilpatrick was standing at the marble-topped counter. There were three other men at the counter beside him, separated by their own space, all of them gazing at the display of bottles ranged on shelves before the mirrors of the reredos or gazing at their reflections in the mirrors. The man to his right turned quizzically towards him and said, Nice jacket. The man was wearing a tan three-button hacking jacket buttoned at the middle button. Nice jacket yourself, said Kilpatrick, and the man smiled. What’s that you’re drinking? John Powers? he said, and he gestured to the barman. Same again, he said, pointing to Kilpatrick’s drink and his own.

John Bourne, he said, extending his hand. Kilpatrick shook the hand and said, John Kilpatrick. Two Johns, said John Bourne, I think you should be Kilpatrick, and I’ll be Bourne. Saves confusion, don’t you think? Nice Donegal tweed, said Bourne, where did you get it? Oh, you know, the Friday market, said Kilpatrick, Yours? It’s my father’s, said Bourne, he died in it. He pointed to a frayed hole in the breast pocket. Couldn’t bear to get rid of it, Savile Row. The old man had taste. Of course, odds are, yours is a dead man’s jacket too, except you don’t know who he was, though for all you know you might have crossed him in the street years ago, before he died, and you thought, nice jacket, not knowing you’d end up wearing it some day. It’s a good fit, said Bourne. Think it was made for you.

The barman put two John Powers on the counter. John Bourne raised his glass and John Kilpatrick raised his glass. They were about to clink when the strip lighting began to flicker and Kilpatrick remembered that the Crown was due another bombing and he woke up as he always did before the bomb went off. For a moment he did not know where he was. Then he remembered he was where he had been, lying in the clothes he had been wearing before he fell asleep in the dim light of Room 36, Hôtel Chopin, Paris.