First Person and Other Stories (6 page)

Go on, the man shouts. He waves his hand in
the air. The cat doesn’t move. The man aims the hose again. He hits the cat. The cat jumps in astonishment again, takes a few steps then stops and turns to look back at the man with its wide stupid cat eyes.

Aw, a voice says.

It is quite a high voice.

The man checks all round him at the roofs and gardens of the other houses but he can’t see anyone.

Go on, he shouts at the cat again. He stamps on the roof.

When he’s chased the cat right down the back lane with the water, the man crosses the roof, gathering in the hose. He climbs in his window and turns to shake the nozzle outside. That’s when he sees the small boy, or maybe it’s a girl, edging down out of one of the sycamore trees at the back of the houses.

The boy or girl has what looks like a book, or maybe a cardboard packet, under one arm. Biscuits? The man watches him or her negotiate a safe way down from quite high up in the trees, moving the packet from under one arm to under the other, careful from branch to branch until he or she is within reach of the roof of the shed in the garden below. Then the boy or girl slides downwards and out of view.

That night the man can’t sleep. He turns in his bed. He sits up.

A child believes I am cruel, he is thinking to himself.

The next morning he is almost late for work, not just because he woke late, but because he goes and stands out on the roof for several minutes then leaves home later than usual. That evening he takes a taxi, but though he’s home half an hour early and goes straight out on to the roof, it’s raining, and it’s noticeably cold, much colder than yesterday.

There’s no way a child would climb a tree in such weather. The tree would be too slippery. There’d be no point in sitting in a tree in the rain.

The leaves are nearly out on these trees. It’ll soon be summer. The ends of their branches against the grey sky look like they’re swollen, or lit, or like they’ve been painted with luminous paint.

It doesn’t look like it will brighten. It doesn’t look like anything is going to happen tonight.

He decides he’ll wait out there on the roof for a little while longer, just in case.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. The third person is a way to tell the story. The third person is a revitalisation of the dead.

It’s a theatre of living people. It’s a miniature innocent thief. It’s thousands of boots that are made out of glass. It’s a total mystery.

It’s a weapon that’s shaped like a tool.

It comes out of nowhere. It just happens.

It’s a box for the endless music that’s there between people, waiting to be played.

A young woman is ironing in a kitchen in a prison. But she’s not a prisoner, no. Her father’s the chief gaoler; she just lives here. A young man comes into the kitchen and tells her he’s decided that he and she are going to marry. I’ve chosen you, he says. She is desultory with him. She suggests to the audience that he’s a bit of a fool. Then she sings a song to herself. It’s Fidelio I’ve chosen, it’s Fidelio I’m in love with, she sings. It’s Fidelio who’s in love with me. It’s Fidelio I want to wake up next to every morning.

Her father comes home. Then, a moment later, so does Fidelio himself, who looks suspiciously like a girl dressed as a boy, and who happens to be wreathed in chains. Not that Fidelio’s a prisoner, no. Apparently the chains have been
being repaired by a blacksmith (whom we never see), and Fidelio, the girl’s father’s assistant, has brought the mended chains back to the gaol.

But it seems that Fidelio isn’t much interested in marrying the boss’s daughter. Fidelio, instead, is unnaturally keen to meet a mysterious prisoner who’s being kept in the deepest, darkest underground cell in the prison. This particular prisoner has been down there for two years and is receiving almost no food or water any more. This is on the prison governor’s orders; the prison governor wants him starved to death. He’s clearly a man who’s done great wrong, Fidelio says, fishing for information – or made great enemies, which is pretty much the same thing, the gaoler says, leaning magnanimously back in his kitchen chair. Money, he says. It’s the answer to everything. The girl looks at Fidelio. Don’t let
him
see that dying prisoner, the girl says. He couldn’t stand it, he’s just a boy, he’s such a gentle boy. Don’t subject him to such a cruel sight. On the contrary, Fidelio says. Let me see him. I’m brave enough and I’m strong enough.

But then the prison governor announces to the gaoler, in private, that he has just decided to have this prisoner killed.
I’m
not murdering him, the gaoler says when the governor tells him to. Okay, I’ll do it myself, the prison governor says. I’ll take
pleasure in it. And I’ll give you a bag of gold if you go and dig a grave for him in the old well down there in his cell.

It’s agreed. In the next Act, the gaoler will take the boy Fidelio down to the deep dungeon and they’ll dig the grave for the man who, we’ve begun to gather, is Fidelio’s imprisoned husband. Meanwhile, as the First Act draws to a close, Fidelio has somehow managed to get all the other prisoners in the place released out of the dark of their cells into the weak spring sun of the prison yard for a little while.

They stagger out into the light. They stand about, ragged, dazed, heartbreakingly hopeful. They’re like a false resurrection. They look up at the sunlight. Summer time, they sing, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the cotton is high.

Then they all look at each other in amazement.

Fidelio looks bewildered.

The gaoler shakes his head.

The conductor’s baton droops.

The orchestra in the pit stops playing. Instruments pause in mid-air.

The girl who was doing the ironing at the beginning is singing too. She’s really good. She shrugs at her father as if she can’t help it, can’t do anything about it. Your daddy’s rich, she sings, and your mammy’s good-looking.

Then a man arrives in a cart pulled by a goat. He stops the cart in the middle of the stage. Everybody crowds round him. He’s black. He’s the only black person on the stage. He looks very poor and at the same time very impressive. When the song finishes he gets out of the cart. He walks across the stage. He’s got a limp. It’s quite a bad limp. He tells them all that he’s looking for Bess. Where is she? He’s heard she’s here. He’s not going to stop looking for her until he finds her. He glances at the gaoler; he regards Fidelio gravely for a moment. He nods to the girl. He approaches a group of prisoners. Is this New York? he says. Is she here?

Yeah, but, you say. Come on. I mean.

But what? I say.

You can’t, you say.

Can’t what? I say.

Culture’s fixed, you say. That’s why it’s culture. That’s how it gets to be art. That’s how it works. That’s why it works. You can’t just change it. You can’t just alter it when you want or because you want. You can’t just revise things for your own pleasure or whatever.

Actually I can do anything I like, I say.

Yeah, but you can’t revise Fidelio, you say. No one can.

Fidelio’s all about revision, I say. Beethoven
revised
Fidelio
several times. Three different versions. Four different overtures.

You know what I mean. No one can just, as it were, interject Porgy into Fidelio, you say.

Oh,
as it were,
I say.

You don’t say anything. You stare straight out, ahead, through the windscreen.

Okay. I know what you mean, I say.

You start humming faintly, under your own breath.

But I don’t think interject is quite the right word to use there, I say.

I say this because I know there’s nothing that annoys you more than thinking you’ve used a word wrongly. You snort down your nose.

Yes it is, you say.

I don’t think it’s quite the right usage, I say.

It is, you say. Anyway, I didn’t say interject. I said inject.

I lean forward and switch the radio on. I keep pressing the channel button until I hear something I recognize.

It’s fine for you to do that, you say, but if you’re going to, can you at least, before we get out of the car, return it to the channel to which it was originally tuned?

I settle on some channel or other, I’ve no idea what.

Which channel was it on? you say.

Radio 4, I say.

Are you sure? you say.

Or 3, I say.

Which? you say.

I don’t know, I say.

You sigh.

Gilbert O’Sullivan is singing the song about the people who are hurrying to the register office to get married.
Very shortly now there’s going to be an answer from you. And one from me.
I sing along. You sigh out loud again. The sigh lifts the hair of your fringe slightly from your forehead.

You’re so pretty when you sigh like that.

When we arrive at the car park you reach over to my side of the radio and keep the little button pressed in until the radio hits the voices of a comedy programme where celebrities have one minute exactly to talk about a subject, with no repetitions. If they repeat themselves, they’re penalized. An audience is killing itself laughing.

When you’re sure it’s Radio 4, you switch the radio off.

We are doomed as a couple. We are as categorically doomed as when Clara in Porgy and Bess says:
Jake, you ain’t plannin’ to take de
Sea Gull
to de Blackfish Banks, is you? It’s time for de
September storms.
No, the
Sea Gull,
a fictional boat, moored safe and ruined both at once in its own eternal bay, is less doomed than we are. We’re as doomed as the
Cutty Sark
itself, tall, elegant, real, mundanely gathering the London sky round its masts and making it wondrous, extraordinary, for the people coming up out of the underground train station in the evening, the ship-of-history gracious against the sky for all the people who see it and all the people who don’t even notice it any more because they’re so used to seeing it, and just two months to go before there’ll be nothing left of it but a burnt-out hull, a scoop of scorched plankwork.

We are doomed on land and doomed on sea, you and me; as doomed holding on to each other’s arms on the underground as we are arguing about culture in your partner’s car; as doomed in a bar sitting across from each other or side by side at the cinema or the opera or the theatre; as doomed as we are when we’re pressed into each other in the various beds in the various near-identical rooms we go to, to have the sex that your partner doesn’t know about us having. Of all the dooms I ever thought I might come to I never reckoned on middle-classness. You and me, holding hands below the seats at Fidelio, an opera you’ve already seen, already taken your partner to;
and it all started so anarchically, so happily, all heady public kissing in King’s Cross station.
Mir ist so wunderbar.
That’s me in the £120-a-night bed, and you through in the bathroom, thoroughly cleaning your teeth.

I’ve read in the sleeve notes for the version of
Fidelio
I have on CD that at an early point in the opera, when all four people, the girl, the thwarted young man, the woman dressed as a boy and the gaoler, are singing about happiness and everybody is misunderstanding everybody else and believing a different version of things to be true, that this is where ‘backstairs chat turns into the music of the angels.’
How wonderful it is to me. Something’s got my heart in its grip. He loves me, it’s clear. I’m going to be happy.
Except,
wunderbar
here doesn’t mean the usual simple wonderful. It means full of wonder, strange.
How strange it is to me.
I wish I could remember her name, the ironing girl who loves Fidelio, the light-comedy act-opener, the girl for whom there’s no real end to it, the girl who has to accept – with nothing more than an alas, which pretty soon modulates into the same song everyone else is singing – what happens when the boy Fidelio is suddenly revealed as the wife Leonore, and everybody stands round her in awe at her wifely faithfulness, her profound self-sacrifice. O
namenlose.

Which is worse to her, the ironing girl? That Fidelio is really Leonore, a woman, not the boy she thought he was? Or that her beloved Fidelio is someone else’s wife, after all, and so, in this opera about the sacredness of married love, will never, ever be hers?

Oh my Leonore, Florestan, the husband, the freed prisoner, says to Fidelio after she’s unearthed him, after she’s flung herself between him and certain death, between him and the drawn blade of the prison governor. Point of catharsis. Point of truth. After she does this, everything in the whole world changes for the better.

Oh my Leonore, what have you done for me?

Nothing, nothing, my Florestan, she answers.

Lucky for her she had a gun on her, that’s what I say, otherwise they’d both be dead.

Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin. And nuttin’s plenty fo’ me.

It’s famously unresolved, you know, I say. Even though its ending seems so celebratory, so C-major, so huge and comforting and sure, there’s still a sense, at the back of it all, that lots of things haven’t been resolved. Look at the ironing girl, for instance. She’s not resolved, is she? Beethoven called it his ‘child of sorrow.’ He never wrote another opera after it.

Half a year ago you’d never heard of Fidelio, you say.

Klemperer conducted it at two really extraordinarily different times in history, I say.

I am flicking through the little book that comes with the version of Fidelio you’d just given me. The new CD is one of my Christmas presents. Christmas is in ten days’ time. We have just opened our Christmas presents, in a bedroom in a Novotel. I bought you a really nice French-looking jumper, with buttons at one side of the neck. I know that you’ll probably drop it in a litter bin on your way home.