The half-strangled croak of a magpie and the thudding of car doors behind bargain-seekers and DIY enthusiasts pierce the morning calm. The buddleia has finally flowered in spite of the chill. Last year, its purple cascades attracted a splendour of butterflies, a veritable catalogue of species: Red Admiral, Cabbage White, Painted Lady, Swallowtail and Peacock fanned their dusty wings on the concrete. Now a desiccated bumble bee lies in the grass and the blooms hang lank and neglected.

I have been reading through the articles I culled from a certain tabloid wailing about the nomination of Peter Mandelson as Commissioner. That the portrayal of the body responsible for initiating European legislation could not be described as a paragon of sycophancy is hardly surprising, particularly in the light of the dual function of the criticisms, namely to take a swipe at Blair and to disillusion even the most obstinate of Euro-sympathisers. A sample from the editorial listing the “demands of his office”: “Slipperiness. Duplicity. Unaccountability. Shady deals in smoke-filled rooms. Dodgy practices. Politics by cliques”. To hammer home the message that the European experiment is nothing more than an exercise in wanton wastefulness it continues: “To put this particular snout in the trough that is [Waffle Central] – a magnet for bribery, corruption and financial malpractice – beggars belief”.

Righteous indignation at taxpayer-funded extravagance also finds expression in Geoffrey Levy’s fulminations concerning “the plump, expense-account living of EU grandees”. The pampered, parasitical pen-pushers know no inhibitions when it comes to hedonism: “Eurocrats love to be seen being disgorged there [at a two-star Michelin restaurant] from chauffer-driven limousines, knowing it will cost them £200 a head for five courses including baby lamb and black truffles and up to £620 for a bottle of Chateau Petrus 1973” (presumably the journalist conducted detailed investigations at the establishment in question, scanning the menu, totting up the figures in his notepad whilst slipping a few discreet forkfuls into his mouth to amuse his jaded palate, charging it to his employers without a second thought). Apart from Commissioners, only Members of the European Parliament are entitled to the use of official cars (commensurate with their rank and on a par with the respectful treatment their national counterparts take for granted) and even civil servants in the top category (Grade AD) cannot afford to squander obscene amounts on gorging and still pay their mortgages at the end of the month. In the ten years I have been a fonctionnaire, the real value of my per diems has been continually eroded to the extent that I now subsidise my employers for the privilege of carrying out my ordinary duties. The reform of our statute (which regulates working conditions, remunerations and so on), heralded as overdue modernization was little more than a thinly disguised pretext to slash our long-term income in the interests of footing the bill for enlargement in a political climate where national governments are unwilling to admit to its real cost let alone stump up for it. We have been stripped of all motivation to improve our performance. Even when promoted we do not actually earn more for the first couple of years and our salaries have never kept pace with inflation. Career advancement takes twice as long for a fraction of the reward. Although the discriminatory L (which might as well have been an abbreviation for Leper or Lobotomy as far as our level of acceptance within the administration as a whole was concerned) has finally been removed from our designation (we are now subsumed under AD instead of marginalised as LA), this is no more than a transparent ruse to improve the equal opportunities record of the institutions by concealing the excessive concentration of women in the linguistic services and their virtual exclusion from top-level management posts in spite of the glut of rhetorical flourishes proclaiming support for the ideal (a simple headcount of female Directors-General the most telling index of how far we have progressed in reality). The ushers scurry around empty booths to collect the pencils at the end of meetings, every staple is accounted for. As in the private sector, grumbling (including legitimate complaint) is a pastime restricted to leisure hours for fear of being overheard and snitched upon, surface camaraderie simulates sincerity in the strategic clinking of glasses. Every month my in-box contains death notices of colleagues who have not reached their mid-fifties, felled by stress-induced heart attacks and strokes. Only the self-abasing toadies and ruthless climbers survive to draw their (reduced) pensions it seems. To hell with chin-up feigned cheerfulness.

Lisa, whose nicotine-gravelled voice and chaotic disregard for bureaucratic strictures sit wonderfully with her short black skirts and elegant heels, dropped by on Thursday during a hearing. Her mascara-rimmed eyes brimmed with tears as she itemized the sorrows a pre-summer split had heaped upon her. Why did his wife not have the decency to have an affair herself before throwing him out or simply die? He wanted to be a good husband, he claimed, yet he had been unfaithful to her throughout their marriage, why bother starting now? I recognised the scenario, having emerged from it, battered and bruised, myself. JMCD’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, but it did not spread to the lymph glands as he had hoped in his cowardice about taking a decision. I had suspected something was amiss when she made a throwaway comment about needles being handy for poking holes in condoms a few days earlier. Her plight is iniquitous: Lisa is one of the most intelligent, witty and mischievous women I know. Her sexual attractiveness appears effortless. To deflate the pomposity of stuffed shirt bores her favoured technique is to lob half a glass of the best red over their carefully laundered shirts. It is this anarchic streak I adore. Unfortunately, however, suitably educated available males are thin on the ground, the alternative to celibacy the emotional equivalent of walking through a minefield blindfolded. To make matters worse there is no shortage of slender-waisted trainees in their twenties just passing through. Behind the pubs cluttering the pavements with their metal-topped tables, less familiar streets shelter hotel after hotel where the rooms are rented by the hour.

In my late teens (between finishing the final, optional year at school and departing for university) I was completely ignorant about sex. True, I had picked up a few expressions, such as “aphrodisiac”, without a clue as to its practical benefit or application (on one of the few occasions my Mother and I went to the local theatre together to watch a charity fundraiser performance by the hospital’s amateur company I embarrassed her by boasting that I had understood the joke about the erotic stimulants, persisting in my whispered explanations as she pretended not to have heard).

The “sex education” class held during our first year on the hard wooden benches of the science lab amongst the asbestos mats and Bunsen burners by the prim and proper religious instruction teacher began with her enquiry in her high-pitched approach males with caution and preferably gloves to avoid contamination, knitting needles and lace christening gowns eternal spinster voice: “Can anyone tell me what a prostitute is?” In the midst of my form mates (the class we were assigned to for registration purposes of radically different composition to the other, streamed groups) I enjoyed the dubious authority of oracle of wisdom (the downside being not so much that there were challengers eager to topple me from my position as that the envious continually lay in wait to trip me up, reveal a weakness and ridicule me for it), but I was stumped. The word was a mystery. I burned with impotent shame. Amidst the giggles, the class rebel Gail put up her hand. Miss Packer could not ignore her for once, since she was the only volunteer. “A woman who is paid to have sex with men, Miss,” Gail beamed in triumph, savouring both the opportunity to pronounce the forbidden words and to bask in the collective awe, drinking in the hushed admiration as well as my tight-lipped, scarlet-cheeked expression. As to the mechanics, we were shown anatomical posters of a flaccid penis revealing musculature and a womb. Dire warnings of disease and unwanted pregnancy followed. That the act of carnal union might have a pleasurable component, that nature might have endowed us with the capacity to still our raging hormones without outside participation was never mentioned.

When I first encountered CC he had a summer job as a sales assistant in a shoe-shop. From the Grammar (as opposed to the Academy, which I attended and which enjoyed the best academic reputation, or the High, notable chiefly for its proximity to the Academy, which provoked many a battering between rival packs of thugs decked out in blazers and ties) he was an unknown quantity. The part of town he lived in was a council estate prone to flooding when the T was in spate. I ventured there only on visits to my Auntie H and cousins Glen and Wayne and, even more rarely, to play with the daughter of the neighbours opposite, AD, in the pub her mother served in. The establishment was owned by Mrs. D’s lover, Matt, her part-time shifts a means to escape the suffocating affections of her husband, Hamish who tolerated the affair (it was conducted quite openly), albeit racked with periodical bouts of anguish. I was jealous of AD at the time: she had a chute in the garden and, worst of all, her own pony. When they moved to Potterhill Gardens, our contacts became less frequent before drying up altogether.

Although his father was a Labour councillor, staunch Marxist and atheist, CC joined the congregation of our born-again fellowship, The Church of the New Covenant not long after our initial meeting when he slid a pair of grey suede court shoes on to my stockinged foot. I had been drifting around various congregations before I was sucked into the fanatical world of the fundamentalist sect, lured by the guitar-playing, salted popcorn-making Anne, assigned to take care of my spiritual welfare after my conversion at the “Christ is the Answer Crusade” in the City Hall. Her large, watery blue eyes radiated equilibrium, her blonde locks entirely natural and she shared my passion for the German language: it was a match made in heaven. Having long been a member of the Scripture Union, my faith had lapsed into neglect like an overgrown garden. The argument that had led me to come forward and offer my soul back to the Lord simple and flawless in its logic: for those in the audience who had once believed the evangelist had but one question, when we sat down in our chairs, did we expect them to collapse beneath us? Would it not be accurate to contend that we placed our weight upon them in full expectation that they would hold? Was Jesus not the same, a dependable support? Simply because we had lost our way did it mean that He had abandoned us, would refuse to bear us? If we routinely put our trust in an inanimate chair, why not invest it in the Lamb of God who died to wash away our sins? Opening his arms wide to the crowd, the preacher implored us to pay heed to the still, small voice, the emotional resonance of his appeal amplified by the crescendo of the onstage choir. One faltering step after another I made my way into the ecstatically swaying crowd.

CC’s cocky grin pursued me, constantly flashing in my direction. His red hair (“ginger nut, carrot top”) and squashed strawberry nose possessed a certain appeal, his tight corduroy trousers bulging conspicuously with delight whenever I rewarded him with some throwaway platitude. Once he had professed his love for me I felt bound by it: in the Church women were mere appendages to men, obedient automatons sworn to abide by every decision of their masters more favoured by God. We could speak in tongues, interpret the divine messages thus imparted, prophesy, lay hands on the sick, but our destiny was not ours to control, our wishes denied, our needs hushed over, our desires unarticulated and irrelevant. We were not entitled to select a partner of our own, but encouraged to bow to God’s will (which inevitably manifested itself through the male vessel). We were considered engaged without a single word on the subject ever having been spoken. Sex before marriage was out of the question; even hand-holding frowned upon. A kiss had to be perfunctory, dry and chaste, preferably a peck on the cheek to avoid exposure to Satan’s persistent and insidious wheedlings.

We spent many afternoons in the kitchen of his cramped house, boiling the kettle for tea. The strip of garden beyond the living room window bald, the paint on the wooden fence peeling disconsolately. The pavements were strewn with rubble, cars slumped on deflated tyres, hub caps missing, graffiti sprayed across walls and garage doors marked the boundaries of gang territories. Whereas his mother was irritating in her resignation and whining tone, I found his father offensive in every way: ill-mannered, coarse, foul-mouthed, proud of his lack of privilege and keen to show off (compensating for his modest stature he kicked a football round with the lads, determined to score the first goal between imaginary posts indicated by sweaters. As the crack of a shattering window pane reverberated through the afternoon air, C and his progenitor hurtled through the front door. Gasping for breath, the latter declared in the manner of a guilty ten year old: “A wee boy done it and ran away!” pointing at himself before succumbing to a spasm of laughter. He never did own up to the deed officially). He positively salivated when I wore my low-cut dress to the farewell inebriation ceremony in honour of C’s elder brother. “I hope you know where to look and what to do after,” he lewdly remarked to his son whilst gawping down my cleavage. Many months more were to elapse before the watchful eyes of the Lord Almighty lost their potency as a deterrent. He fancied himself as an artist and had enrolled at the University of Edinburgh a year earlier to study architecture. The youth hostel had commissioned a painting for their communal sitting room, which he was busy executing in acrylics. I was leaning back against the wall watching as he applied colours with the brush. He turned round suddenly, creeping over the carpet on his hands and knees. I refused to respond to him as he cursed me for being a tease, for taunting him with my prim perfection. Clasping my waist, he began rubbing his lower body up and down my thigh like a randy dog until shuddering. As he withdrew to the bathroom a wet patch stained his trousers. This set the pattern for my acquiescence to his masturbation. I would lie back, fully clothed on the bedspread, rigid and tense with the discomfort of his hardening penis as it dug into my flesh. “Going bang” as he called it left me feeling sick to the stomach, dirty, degraded, violated, yet I had not the strength to protest against it. This would have meant confessing the sordid act to the pastor, for which I would have been condemned as the guilty party, evil source of all pollution (as actually happened when my inability to endure finally vanquished my trepidation). As his appetite for release grew, he would take off his glasses, undo his belt, rolling his trousers down just far enough to enhance his stimulation whilst ensuring we would never be caught should we be disturbed by the telltale creak of the stair and tucking a wad of toilet paper into the waistband of his underpants to catch the warm stream of milky ejaculate. My eyes glazed over as I stared at the ceiling in the subdued light behind drawn curtains, fists clenched at either side.

He confided in me how he had experimented with various lubricating pastes and potions before devising the preferred method. He had dipped his fingers into hair gel and hand cream, shampoo and shoe polish, smearing them over the sensitive glans, foreskin retracted. His least successful trial had been with toothpaste, which had left him doubled up in agony with his mother knocking on the bathroom door, anxious to relieve herself and puzzled by his reluctance to admit her whilst he was having a bath. After all, had she not seen him in his full glory many times before?

In a frivolous frame of mind, I purchased a full set of erotic underwear from House of Fraser, the most exclusive department store in town: basque, suspenders, fishnets, garter, all in matching black lace trimmed with tiny red roses. I only wore them once, for his delectation, half-hiding in the cupboard. His request to try them on himself took me aback, but I did not object, fascinated and repelled simultaneously. His entire body quivered as he stepped into the shoes I had purchased from him. After our association had ended and news reached me that he had been awarded a third-class degree (to all intents and purposes a fail) I felt a tingle of satisfaction that retribution was at last mine. He disappeared to France and I have never heard of him since.

Ironically, perhaps, I did not lose my virginity to CC, but to THAK, his best friend, whose appearance at the Church every Sunday morning was not motivated by pious thoughts of the hereafter. It was his talent that captured me like a butterfly in an upturned jar. His draftsmanship was the most skilled and witty I have ever set eyes on, manic in its level of detail (he often used a magnifying glass whilst designing the stern carvings for his Vasa-inspired model sailing ships). Having saved some of his meagre earnings from a youth training scheme, which involved sketching the finds on an archaeological dig in the local cemetery, we travelled to Edinburgh, booking into the North British Hotel (nowadays known as The Balmoral), an imposing sandstone pile at one end of Princes Street, blackened by the soot of departed steam trains. We checked in as Mr. and Mrs. K, handing over the vast sum of £50 in cash to the receptionist and ordering a full Scottish breakfast to be brought by room service in the assumption that our nocturnal exertions would leave us famished. Our room overlooked the Scotsman headquarters and Waverley Bridge with its constant two-way stream of Lothian and Borders Transport double-decker buses. He demonstrated the operation of the bidet before we took a shower, lathering each other with soap. The orange glow of streetlights fell across the crystal vase with its fresh-cut flowers as we spied on the journalists and type-setters beneath the neon glare of their office strip-lighting. He was naked beneath the Paisley-patterned dressing gown we had acquired at a second-hand shop in Stockbridge. Finally taking up occupancy of the double bed with its sagging mattress, I turned to him, inadvertently kneeing him in the groin. Clutching his manhood, he thudded to the floor, my hymen left intact for the foreseeable future.

We were clumsy, awkward and shy, our intercourse furtive, guilt-ridden and swift, my knickers and tights at my knees ready to be pulled up at any moment. Graham (CC’s other close friend) was my real tutor during the single night we spent together. His father had been L’s drum teacher at school, slightly overweight and prone to slipped discs. Graham’s room in the flat on Causewayside, which he shared with his landlord, was cluttered with equipment cannibalised from recording studios, mixing boards, amplifiers, weird arrays of dials and knobs. His collection of vinyl worthy of the serious musician (and semi-professional DJ) he was. We had spent weeks taping my novel, I reading it aloud, he adding sound effects and music, making adjustments with his headphones on, ever patient when laughter seized hold of me. His hair was auburn, his skin malnourished pale, his eyes the shade that melts me still. Having played my favourite track from The Enid album From the Region of the Summer Stars to which he had introduced me, he sat on the battered sofa next to me and somehow we were ravenous, tangled, my lips burning, his tongue thrusting into my mouth. Damp with anticipation, I carefully complied with his instructions as he taught me how to sit astride him, move my hips, clasp and grip. I lay beside him, unable to sleep, afraid to reach over to him again, yet somehow disappointed. I had attributed my unsatisfied hunger to a fundamental incompatibility between myself and THAK (rather than to the hurried and incompetent nature of our fumblings), innocently believing that my fated companion would magically induce climax. Although Graham was not an option (being in thrall to an underage girl), he was plainly more experienced than THAK, yet still I ached. Sex with all men would always be the same, I concluded: hollow, meaningless. Hence the flint-like detachment I displayed. No position, practice, humiliation or indignity could move me. No soft moans of surrender ever welled up in my throat.

[1994 and 2004]

Chocolate remains an overwhelmingly feminine food in spite of recent changes in advertising campaigns, the standard courtship or atonement gift for men too poor to afford diamonds. Côte d’Or, for example, exploits the high testosterone cult of physical prowess with its wet-suited barefoot water skier twirling to the tune of “I’ve Got the Power”, which never fails to reduce SM and myself to fits of giggles in the cinema seats. The sportsman in question so obviously self-enamoured we dubbed him the “total wanker”.

Another vision of hyper-masculinity is to be found in the Lion Bar campaign, the ferocious predator, untamed, magnificent, the lazy lord of all he surveys with a harem to service all his needs, from fresh meat to sexual relief, symbol of power and nobility throughout the centuries. Presumably intended to reassure straight men that their virility will not be called into question by consuming it (none of my gay friends being shy about admitting to a sweet tooth as we tuck into Sachertorte at a Viennese coffee house). Echoes of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, the Man in Black leaving his calling card on the plump silk pillowslip before plunging off the cliff in a death-defying dive, the contemporary equivalent of the trials the medieval knight willingly endured to secure the favour of his unattainable mistress (as well as somewhat more romantic than calling in at the local corner shop).

The supposed energy boost of eating a bar (“A Mars a day helps you work, rest and play”) dominating the more prosaic, utilitarian sales pitch. Here chocolate is a fuel as opposed to an indulgence, the every day emphasised in lieu of special occasions (as reflected in the packaging: whereas boxed chocolates are carefully arranged in plastic indentations with a guide to the delights of the soft and hard centres, the humble Mars is more modestly clad in a single wrapper, the intermediate category combining the luxury of dual layers, the outer by which the product may be identified, the inner shiny to suggest preciousness). No need for guilt, it is ingested for a specific purpose.

Although it is not essential to sustain life, it does provide solace for all the random and unfathomable injustice of the world. The Flake commercial from the 1970s showed a beautiful woman sitting at her easel in the middle of a field, brushes resting in a jam jar, her watercolour ruined by a sudden shower. As the red and gold of poppy-heads and ears of corn run together, she reaches for the phallus-substitute in its garish yellow sheath. Comforted, her mood brightens to the extent that she accepts the accidental blotting of the errant paints as an abstract rather than a representational expression of her surroundings. Thus chocolate restores balance and harmony, replenishes vitality. As decorum insists that we women must swallow our rage or else risk opprobrium (the duty of the subordinate being to sublimate), the compensatory reflex of treating ourselves proves strong and the pleasures of chocolate seduce us. Like masturbation, it is an act of self-gratification furtively enjoyed.

Or take the Lindt caption (“quelques instants de finesse dans un monde de brutes”) equating appreciation of the blend of cocoa bean, fat and sugar with the attainment of civilisation and culture: the contemplations of a weedy art lover gazing in silent reverence upon the Mona Lisa are rudely interrupted by the arrival of a swarm of Japanese tourists, snapping away furiously, flouting the ban on use of flashes. Once again chocolate is a consolation, the tender soul of the appreciative viewer favourably contrasted with the bustling Philistinism of the average punter. Sophistication and refinement must be painstakingly acquired as does the taste for the finest Swiss confectionery.

“A finger of Fudge is just enough until it’s time to eat; a finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat; it’s full of Cadbury’s goodness and very small and neat; a finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat”. Chocolate as symbol of maternal affection (every Christmas I would gorge on the contents of my Selection Box for breakfast and at lunch time in secondary discover a Dairy Milk lovingly slipped beneath my cling-filmed sandwiches).

Chocolate is smooth and yielding, melting on the tongue, the texture of submission (according to one newspaper article the sensation is as close to the experience of drinking mother’s milk as an adult can normally come). Chemically, it is reputed to trigger the same reaction in the body as falling in love. A contextual chameleon, chocolate is suitable for conveying almost any message: marking birthdays and anniversaries, speeding recoveries, assisting promotions, expressing gratitude. At times of crisis or upset it is always there, the default option, the safest bet. As the slender waistline becomes the sole index of female worth and the anti-obesity obsession bloats into hysteria, chocolate takes on the allure of the forbidden, “naughty but nice”, breaking off a square and rolling it around the tongue tantamount to subversion in the high fibre, whole food, macrobiotic age. Since when did knowing a habit was bad for us ever put us off? The manufacturers compensate by stressing how many glasses of full-cream milk went into each portion (Cadbury’s recent announcement that it would abolish the king size range to my mind a sop to the politically correct brigade, as it will not deter hard-core munchers, the sanctimoniousness of the hand on heart gesture rendered even more unpalatable in the light of findings concerning quite how dangerous the firm’s principle ingredient of hydrogenated vegetable oil has proven to be: had its continental competitors prevailed, Cadbury’s would have been banned from selling it under the traditional designation, forced instead to call it by the far less appetising – yet substantially more informative – name of “vegelate”. A more caring concession would have been to banish the trans-fats, replacing them with cocoa butter).

Waffleland’s most famous export is its pralines, poured into moulds to yield Pharaoh’s heads, dollar signs, walnut shells, coins and treble clefs. Elderly shop assistants bend over the selection, nimble fingers and polished nails hygienically kept out of contact with the goods in transparent gloves, which are discarded after each customer’s order is neatly arranged in a ballotin of cardboard and weighed to the second decimal.

Like fine red wine, chocolate’s flavour is best appreciated at room temperature. It ennobles the vulgar biscuit, warms and satisfies, however briefly. I am helpless to resist.

[1994]

Fat women amble passively
Sucking fish oil from their fingertips
Curling their double chins in scowling smile

Academic achievement was the means to an end. In my naïve youth I always asserted I’d pay someone to do my housework, wash my dishes, generally take care of the sordid practicalities of household maintenance on my behalf, as indeed is now the case. It was the path to freedom from drudgery, vindicating me, releasing me from the feminine pursuits of knitting, sewing, changing nappies. I entertained a horror and revulsion towards the idea of pregnancy: the baby would usurp and disrupt, the equivalent of a lobotomy (in the words of CC); it would be a parasite, sucking out nourishment, sapping the love and devotion as well as draining the finances of the host. It didn’t seem natural. At the same time, however, I brooded on the possibility of having a child by each of my lovers: then I’d be cornered, I couldn’t avoid taking a decision, more sinister, the act of giving birth would map out the course of the rest of my life, determining my future in pseudo-comforting predictability, absolving me from the need to agonise over what to do. It was similar to the time when I believed I had read every book worth the effort. That nothing of beauty remained and a fog of despair descended.

I loathed taking responsibility for myself, yet steadfastly refused to have anyone tell me what to do. They didn’t have to in the end, as I put myself into the Church, obeying my masters whilst they pointed the finger of blame at me.

Charm was my great weapon. I could charm anyone, learning the art of benign manipulation when I needed to cultivate friendships. I am always the inadequate one, forever afraid that if I do not give unceasingly I will become boring and be blown aside like chaff, the substance leeched out of me. Women were not rivals for male affection: vain, pouting creatures, exotic birds displaying their plumage. CD never had a girlfriend throughout the years I pursued him at school. To me, they were sporty (sport equalling atrophy of the brain, the evidence obvious as no one good at gym ever appeared to excel academically). They were more interested in men initially and that was an unforgivable frivolity (until my vulnerability to peer pressure conspired with my hormones to trip me up). Boys were a distraction, good to attack and spar with, otherwise irrelevant. I never respected a boy other girls found attractive. In the end I wanted one, but that desire was fuelled primarily by the impulse to be accepted, to dissolve into the anonymity of the crowd. I began reading my Father’s Psychology for Nurses (in the days when I daydreamed of becoming a psychiatrist) and came across a passage stating that normal children often had to be taken to hospital with objects lodged in their ears or nose cavities as a result of the drive for self-exploration. Mortified that I might not fit into the stereotype I took a fake pearl from my necklace and shoved it up my left nostril where it indeed became stuck. In panic, I called upon my dismayed Dad to poke around until he could retrieve it, unable to account for why I had been so silly. Some of the great heartbreaks of my schooldays centred around rejection, being shunned, excluded from the accolades and rewards of perfect conformity, notably by never being made a prefect, to the astonishment and disbelief of my classmates who ostracised me as “Little Miss Swotty Pants”. I could cope with the spurning and hostility of my envious fellow pupils, but not with the disdain of authority: had I not complied with every rule to the letter? I saw the teachers as my allies rather than my adversaries, wasn’t it punishment enough that genius had passed me by at birth? In this renewed pariah existence, isolated once again, the Commission (or more accurately one sub-Directorate thereof) has turfed me unceremoniously out of the beatific ranks of its servants and I have not the faintest notion why. My face doesn’t fit, though my qualifications are better than most. Perhaps it is because I speak my mind, am too blunt for the spineless liking of my appointed chief.

I can’t conceive of any man or woman ever being attracted to me. I’ve always had to put in the energy, do the running and so many disappointments. I always attributed the failures to some innate shortcoming within me, not a simple matter of chemistry. I’m banished to the wilderness of the sexually inactive now, not of my own volition (although in a sense it does involve a choice, since, as Becky pointed out going to a disco would probably lead to being picked up, sex would be available). I find the idea of purchasing sex appealing as it topples the male prerogative, assuming the quality of a daring act of defiance and emancipation – is this all merely an outlet for frustration? Bugger contentment, it never did anything but wallow or hobble. That’s not what I want, is it? I’m like AB, but my self-censoring prudery stems from a terror of not measuring up, confronting head on the possibility of not being attractive. There is no proper infrastructure for heterosexual women to meet companions (dating agencies apart). It’s either sex or tending roses and feeding cats with delicate chunks from ring-pull tins, checking the light on the answering machine out of the corner of your eye every time you enter the hollow domain with its mass-produced posters to alleviate the monotony of the enclosing walls.

I long for a man to do something as simple as ask me out. At school I was ridiculed for not having a boyfriend. By my final year I had achieved a certain notoriety due to my outspoken defence of my faith (which culminated in a grilling in the senior common room to which I was escorted at knifepoint). Taunted for being a lesbian, in reality I was asexual, my infatuation with Callum McH (more commonly referred to simply as CD by both staff and pupils alike ever since the day the English teacher, Murdo Mackenzie had bawled his initials in wrath at the start of the morning interval to summon him back to the classroom) fuelled by a desperation to belong. The more than semantic difference between loneliness and solitude, as Hannah was aware. My error and fatal flaw that of caring too much about the opinion of others. I rake through my past like a pile of autumn leaves, a conscientious park-keeper trying to keep everything neat and tidy. Until the gust scoops up an armful, blowing them over the footpath.

When I first heard about Marisa (whom CD later settled down with in Madrid) I was hurt as he had symbolised the eternal bachelor, the potential source of sex. I had never taken his other girlfriends seriously, perhaps because my impression was that neither did he.

At dinner, my focus on Gy’s anecdote was interrupted as one of my colleagues at a table outside collapsed. Her eyes rolled, curdled vomit like chocolate porridge dribbled sedately out of her slackened mouth, her body slumping in slow motion on to the concrete. Suddenly the prospect of tucking into a plate of fried Camembert, potatoes with onion and bacon, neatly garnished with lettuce and tomato did not seem quite so appetising. Her friends supported her until the ambulance arrived, by which time she had perked up enough to have her blood pressure taken. In all likelihood the oppressive humidity not even the downpour had succeeded in alleviating was to blame.

Having spent most of his life in the English capital, Gy takes a perverse delight both in his superior linguistic gifts compared to the average Anglo-Saxon and in the advantages of straddling two cultures, the advent of summer marked by his elegant white hat with the black band (the Welshman’s description of him as “a dapper little man” not inaccurate). Most of his fellow group members from the island whose shores he is about to quit permanently in favour of a many-acred estate and Baltic climes assume in their arrogance that he is unable to decipher their utterings whereas, in reality, he is more fluent in their mother tongue than they themselves. He shared a car into town with one of them, who, completely ignoring him, spent the entire journey cradling her mobile to her ear arranging a weekend away with her lover. As he rightly surmised: “She will hate me forever once she finds out I was listening to every word. It was hard to keep a straight face”.

He lamented vociferously the absurdity of his two degrees from Scottish universities not being recognised as proof of his competence in the language of the Bard. In order to benefit from the fifty percent higher salary that such knowledge entitles him to, he will be forced to sit a proficiency exam usually reserved for teenagers prior to applying for admission to undergraduate courses. My lover advised him to acquiesce in the interests of a swift resolution, although Gy (justifiably) feels it is beneath his dignity.Over the umpteenth glass of still mineral water (the heat such that abstemiousness appeared the most rational choice) he recounted the saga of his kidney stone, detailing his heroic struggle to wring out treatment from the NHS. On the evening of his first attack, he committed the tactical error of not accepting the offer of an ambulance to casualty, thereby (unwittingly) sealing his fate for the next several months. Appointments evaporated with monotonous regularity less than a week before they were scheduled, a stent eventually fitted to ease the discomfort. He recalled one occasion in particular when he had been summoned for an examination only to be forgotten on a trolley parked in some obscure corner behind pull-around curtains clad in the patient’s gown of disempowerment for several hours until shuffling to the ward reception in his standard-issue slippers to demand attention or release. Maximum effectiveness was achieved by adopting the accent of his forefathers and complaining at the top of his voice, inducing a squirm of embarrassment amongst the staff powerful enough to stimulate action. After the stone had been shattered by ultrasound he kept pissing out fragments for weeks on end. Our past history such that I was forced to suppress a grin at the poetic justice of a tube being inserted in his penis during one stage of the cure.

Sunday, January 29th, 1988 [Copenhagen, to THAK]

Article, write thyself!
Unfortunately I am no enchantress, so the books pile higher, the papers scatter to cover more and more of the prickly carpet, the desk becomes less comprehensible to the casual observer – it’s reached adolescent stage again in this room –clothes no longer folded, but hanging for dear life on chair backs where they were flung. Orange juice rings on the plastic window sill, tired eyes, headaches, unfinished business, it all bespeaks activity.
The only consolation is this (not that it can’t last forever because at the moment it feels that it will, even the prospect of the next two years or so an eternity!) finding a message from “home” better, from one loved and loving, best from the one most loved and loving, from the mundane (work) to the superlative in one easy flow of thought. When working I am at peak vulnerability (lowest emotional ebb in other words), empty post-boxes become afgørende, life and death to mood. Do not decode wrongly: not only are your letters the most-coveted, you are also the only one to break the exile of silence. This state of activity should remind me that the present is everything. Scotland is illusory. I am cut off from the motherland; her voice cannot reach me, her succour indirect, the affirmation of my separateness. I have not begun at the beginning, so T [Chameleon: doctoral supervisor] will be presented (not even a full chapter, but a “snippet”) with something up in the air, or rather firmly down on the table, a piece of the puzzle, not necessarily the one I have chosen tactically as centrepiece around which to fit all else, whether naturally or with fretwork, merely the one I have contemplated most and found most attractive to begin with – magpie caws! I fear. This is the moment I have sought to avoid, the poise of the tightrope walker, the threads sway hypnotically in the gales of confusion, creak, creak, such delicacy of balance, creak, creak, here we have the artist’s skill, there the waterfall, barely concealing the jagged flint, creak, creak, the reputation built up through practice, worry, self-doubt and self-congratulation, the future of this scantily-clad, sequined woman depends, creak, creak, on the steps she now takes and they cannot be faltering, they must, creak, creak, bespeak grace, elegance, creak, creak, they are not the steps of a beginner, of an unknown, creak, creak, they are to overcome, to prove her worth, her talent, that she can perform in the tradition of others, creak, creak, but with an expression unique, creak, creak, smile, look relaxed and confident, whatever your moral failings, they can neither harm nor aid you now, pay no heed to superstitions, creak, creak – will this wind never cease its howling? – see the man to your right, the man with the orange hair, the long, green tweed coat, creak, creak, the other man beside him, in pastor’s dress, of unknown heart, they will you to fail, to be dashed, splayed, gutted on the rocks, then to the left your father dear, your lover sweet, your mother still fair, your brothers two, one by birth, one by choice, let them bear you across, look into their faces bright, tense, they cannot see the geological outcrop, only the costume, the hurricane calms to a breeze, cross, cross beyond them, the observers who have invested time, thought, they do not know the outcome, but will criticize the execution, examine, compare, it is fear of their words, creak, creak that holds you back, spray from the waterfall, it is cold here, cold, alone, I cannot turn back, she thinks, immobile, suspended, impermanent state, some are restless, others fall, the only reason to come, hope of a spectacular drop, yes, I can read it in the demonic face of that raven-haired, grinning gentleman in top hat and tails, my friend or my enemy, the steps must be taken – so – now – creak, creak, one, two – now – right, left, stop.
I haven’t read Rubin’s article itself yet. The writings about it, yes. The scandals it provoked still fresh in thought; the reasoning behind (or lack thereof) such a reception. It needs to lodge in the barrel of my brain and mature a while, ripen, ripen, rich flavours, yes, maturation. It’s to do with national sentiment. Post-Darwin, post-Gobineau (Gobbing-o, Goblin-o), we are most definitely post-19th century, almost post-genocide, yet we are no more tolerant or enlightened. Information, as always, the privilege of a select elite, the food of others, only there are none who claim custodianship of the whole. It’s fragmented, experts on oestrogen, on fertilizer, on Bismarck, on cattle-fodder, on Spinoza – never, in the history of mankind, has one who has read so little managed to fool so many – on chocolate-powder and sloth-breeding. We constantly redefine, reevaluate, good for researchers or they’d be out of a job. If all had food in their bellies would there be more works of genius – happiness the aim on greater and smaller scales and levels of selfishness, liberate, emancipate, eradicate, eliminate, oppression is universal, woe s Macht gibt, gibt es auch Unterdrückung, Macht in der Familie, samfundsmagt, who is the source of all this power? Heredity, inherent, latent, spark of release, jeg skal komme i gang med at tænke, nationalism, racism, Siamese twins joined at the waist, inseparable. I am warm, living, be warm and living with me. We require a new understanding of nationality. Citizens of the earth. “How can he be Scottish, he’s black?” This misplaced vocabulary of scorn. It amuses them – can he really have an accent like that? Bearsden (just to add class to the equation).How many Scottish, European values has he assimilated? Is he genuine, hybrid or torn between? A victim of appearance, upbringing, plain birth then? Accept him as he is. Is it language? Is language nationality? Not quite! Britain is not America, not even culturally. What must be challenged is assumption (prejudice). What must be challenged is unquestioningness (reflex, prejudice). They can preserve the beautiful and perpetuate the ugly. The shape breaks from circle, to mathematically complex, infinitely-sided, angled, a behemoth to behold. We fear change so we fight it, but we are too pitiful, we do not want to sacrifice our too-brief lives, our pleasures, even our pains, for any ideal. Nor are we forced to. “The problem is the unfair distribution of wealth and leisure”. This would bring the Union of Highly Qualified Criminologists out on strike, the aristocracy-supporting into hospital in a state of shock, the man who’s worked his way up from nothing and who now feels entitled to gorge on the fruits of his harvest out in a rash, the intellectual into print (critically, of course). We are supplied with targets for hate: dirty Libyan colonel, if it weren’t for him there’d be no terrorism and we could live in prosperity and peace. What a cry of shame, what a cosmic blush, peace is the product of overkill stockpiles, the raspberry jam (preserve) of the A-bomb. In German, they say an untidy room has been hit by a hand-grenade. In Danish too. We say a bomb. In that case, the decisive campaign of WW3 was fought here recently. Enough of this rambling discourse.
On to the practical:
1) Let me know in good time when you’ll be moving because I know Sybil [Chameleon: the landlady], that she’d stop at nothing to get rid of you. I don’t want anything to happen to you, please try to find something central, that is, near the University, a council house, though not a horrible high-rise, would be ideal, you could keep the mice with impunity and would not have to share with anyone so I could live there for a while until we find somewhere better, that is it has to be somewhere I can be too, with you – you want me to be, don’t you? Let it be a council house out at Liberton or somewhere, though that isn’t central. Maybe we can find student accommodation together when I return? A pity students are not deemed respectable enough for a secure tenancy, isn’t it?! Say NO to Pilton, it makes Hunter’s look like Disneyland – you’d either be incinerated in your sleep following the murder of our furry friends and theft of the sword, or die of cholera or be mugged on the streets.
2) If I’m to be home for a month it’ll be March. L is coming over for two weeks between May and June sometime. What I’d like is for you to come over as well. Wouldn’t it be possible? You could come after your exams then I would return with you. No? Too uncertain, like last time. Too much hassle trying to squeeze money from Uncaring Bastards. When I next have a grant instalment I may be able to afford a return journey, though I fear I will be too badly overdrawn (Cambridge and clothes).
3) My parents phone me every Saturday at 6 pm (Scottish time). They are expecting you to come at least once. Mum has something for you. Re council house/flat: surely my parents would give you the camp bed? Guests use my bed, unless they’re R’s guests. There must be a spare mattress. If only you were a student already! What about grants? Bursaries? College admin. must be aware of possibilities. I received your latter far too late to call you at J and CD’s when you were there. I’m taking a break now.
Back again. Ten to three now. I don’t know whether I’ll be returning for good (or bad) in September. I can’t see it, somehow. It’s the end of January already and I still have mountains of papers to work through. In Germany as well as here. To assess the influence of Pan-Germans on local policy. To examine H.P. Hansen’s on his activities in the Reichstag/Landtag (Preußen). Now that I have actually got as far as writing I see what holes are left in my reading and how I have to proceed. Yet this Rubin-Arbeit is isolated. Rerup tells me the second wave of harsh treatment (post-Köller) is what I should be concentrating on. Relatively unknown territory. The usual dismissive, summarizing phrases have been formulated, but the Grundarbeit lacks.
When I return, when I’m actually finished I’d like to spend two or three months in P, living at my parents’ house, so that I can record as many of my memories as possible, spend time with them, going walks with Dad (I nearly wrote the dog, but he’ll be gone by then, I suppose), talking to him and Mum before they’re too old – later, you see, I will probably have to look after them. All those years I lived in that house I wasted as far as building a relationship with them was concerned. I regret this deeply. And I must also spend time like that with you, before we have a Cassiel, Freder, Russel or Daniel to worry about (one good reason why we should have been rich!). For your books and your drawings you need time – unless we can buy time it is not possible. Are we going to buy time through my working and you not? (Women are never paid on equal levels with men, even if the work is the same). What of my own creations? Since we moved in to Albion Road you have been the more creative. Unquestionably. My time has been divided between exam-work, you, other friends. I have taken much of your creative time and energy in return. Perhaps I would only come to resent you if I supported you. Perhaps you would only come to resent me if you supported me. A life of poverty and deprived of status no longer appeals to me. If we lived unemployed, we would be treated as Sybil treated us – without respect, without being allowed dignity. When we are old, we will be treated without respect and lose our dignity anyway. It’s more the status than the poverty. I have been mocked and disrespected by others all my life. Now I am tired of it and would rather be envied, even despised, than be an object of condescension. You are only in a position to make demands if you are already in possession of power. There are different types of power – moral power, financial power – it is the latter we need in order to build ship, temple, house, mausoleum. What are those edifices but the ennoblement of all flesh? Yes, it is a glorification of ourselves, but, in so doing, we glorify mankind’s best strivings. We do not crave immortality through immorality, but through the purifying beauty of art and worship. They showed a BBC documentary on Hirohito, which brought out the fascist in me. I despise the carnage wrought by him, especially in prolonging the hostilities (when civilians were being slaughtered) to ensure the continuation of his exalted status (“saving not only his own neck, but his royal luxuries”), yet I also felt sickened by the humiliations he had to endure…from Godhead to all-American peace and family-loving, wholesome role model – BLEUCH! Far rather he had died with honour in the manner of his forefathers. I wish you were Emperor somewhere, a divine Emperor. The rituals that would surround you. I would be your priestess, monotheistic monogamy! To another idle daydream. Many artists and film stars in the 1920s and 1930s had “leisure vehicles”: land ships. We really must go to India and China in one of them. L can provide the medical knowledge. We would need a mechanic and survivalist as well as a photographer. It’s this Goliath (money) that stands in the way again.
Surely, my love, you have been tested with fire and with water, with air and with earth, there has been no end of ordeals for you to endure, you have remained faithful throughout, so I must call on you to remain faithful in this final trial, separation. If we had money (that again!) you’d be permitted to live here too. I cannot understand the point of this separation, it cuts too deep, what is the purpose? That I miss you to distraction is not under question, nor should it ever be. I am sick of it all, we must each defend the other against the slings and arrows of outrageous mundanity, excessive selfishness, time, pressures of illness, now we are young and healthy, but I am terrified of what will come to pass – how can we survive? No one can split us asunder, no matter how much malice, how much violence is invested in the effort. Only inconstancy’s soft-skinned caresses, her whispers of renewal, promises of greener grasses can lull one or other of us to drowsy capitulation. Remain faithful to me. One act of betrayal was enough to expel Adam and Eve from Eden and burden the human race with the curses of sin and death. I am the repentant sinner. We must love one another.
How I long to hear your voice on the phone. I must work, to give us the choice, the freedom we need.P.S. Remind me to send you a note for Sybil asking that my share of the deposit be paid to you (to keep the money I’m sure she’d point out that I paid half, entitling you to only one hundred pounds).

Entering the courtyard with its uneven marble slabs I feel like Sam Lowry reporting for duty at The Ministry of Information. Overcrowding renders the process of procuring a simple lunch unbearably stressful. Yesterday, having gone out of my way to find the shortest queue, it still took thirty-five minutes to be served with coffee, a freshly pressed orange juice and a stale Emmental and ham sandwich packed in a plastic triangle. The Axminster Bar (epithet derived from its pompous carpeting depicting poppies and other wildflowers blurred almost beyond recognition for artistic effect) was four deep, the Swan Bar (nickname reduced to a euphemism, the new building having been hastily erected on the nesting site, leaving the magnificent birds exposed, bedraggled and forlorn in churned furrows before the diggers and concrete definitively drove them away) swarming with yellow-stripes (temporary contract holders) and idle colleagues hoping to further their careers by buying rounds for the right people, leaving The Press Bar with its funerary black walls and halogen lighting as the sole refuge. Much aggravation (and aggression) could be spared by introducing a ticket-based queuing system. Such a logical solution would, however, mean that the staff could no longer comply with their (secret) instructions to serve Members first, then all men and only afterwards women, regardless of order of arrival.

A further reminder (as if one more were needed) of our subhuman status the shared toilet facilities. Only we are expected to cheerfully suffer such an indignity. One single porcelain bowl for the varied excretions of sixty men and women. Pressurised water spurts out of the tap so violently that it soaks trousers and skirts unless you remember to take the precaution of standing two steps back, a bottle of liquid soap testimony to the architectural incompetence whereby design takes precedence over the mundanity of user-friendliness (refilling the built-in dispenser an operation of dizzying complexity due to the tight squeeze that crawling under the washbasin would involve).

Even in town, the restaurants are full to overflowing. An excerpt from the English translation of the menu in my favourite haunt: “The head of pig in frost crudenesses chips, bacon strips and onions”, surpassed only by: “Puff pastry of goat expenses to the basil and tomatoes” (in the original: “Le millefeuille de chevre frais au basilic et tomates”).

“Exciting, isn’t it?” asked one of my friends whilst surveying the chamber. This from a man whose black eye and swollen lip became the stuff of legend when he recounted the tale of how he had acquired such battle scars. Having been seduced in Madrid by a well-muscled, lissome youth, he was sitting peacefully on the sofa when a key turned in the lock announcing the return of the jilted lover who proceeded to chase him round and round the room, lashing out with his fists. No cries of intercession could protect J from his cathartic fury. Having, in his words “printed the T-shirt”, he now prefers to contemplate pictures of flowers.

The bells announcing the end of the vote send officials scurrying through the corridors barely wide enough to allow two people to pass without catching a whiff of after-shave or deodorant. Greased-back hair and pinstripes the uniform of the ruthless self-promotionalists milling in front of the chamber with expressions blank until the chosen target comes within visual range. Their gleaming-toothed smiles as sincere as a TV evangelist’s faith.

A colleague who recently succumbed to the after-effects of years of drinking was once stricken by a perforated ulcer on mission and abandoned to his fate whilst the delegation continued on its merry way without giving his condition a second thought. His credit card company took care of his hospitalisation and subsequent repatriation. We truly are invisible, soft targets when it comes to making savings, otherwise an unavoidable encumbrance, grudgingly tolerated in the name of preserving diversity.
The unremittingly grey sky spits raindrops on undeterred shoppers who dodge the spokes of umbrellas in plain colours or with institutional yellow stars. Brown puddles slosh beneath the tyres of limousines, condensation obstructs the view. No buskers strum guitars half-heartedly in the passageway above the building site for the sake of a few coppers.

At the reception following my Mother’s funeral, A, daughter of our former neighbours, recalled the afternoon teas she had prepared for us. Salmon spread sandwiches on plain bread with the crusts removed, slices of Battenberg cake, home made custard creams, shortbread, all served on the best china, milk jug, pot with woollen cosy brought upstairs to my room on a tray. A custom I had only read about in books in the days when I had not yet set foot in a restaurant.

Every Sunday, my Mother would cook a full Scottish breakfast: fried egg, black pudding slices (which I rendered edible by drowning in HP Sauce), sausage, French toast, bacon, mushrooms. She was proud that when we were at primary school we always came home for a proper lunch. Balancing the tray on my lap (the dining room had been converted to a nursery when my brother was born) I sat in an armchair in front of the TV set, the children’s slot cosily named Watch with Mother in line with the social expectations of the non-working class: Pogle’s Wood, Noggin the Nog, Andy Pandy, The Woodentops in black and white. We never ate together except at Christmas.

In our household, my lover is responsible for all the meals. I commute in to Waffle Central at 7.24, returning at variable hours each evening (though only rarely before 19.00 and a virtually unlimited extension of our working hours about to be formally announced), my son arriving back from school long before me. We live three parallel existences with our separate interests and computer screens. Aluminium containers from countless take-aways litter the cherry wood parquet.

Brute survival dictates that women must compete in the rat-race, although “emancipation” has not brought most of us equality of pay in spite of the statute books and threat of prosecution. We must outperform male colleagues to be taken seriously, yet at their booze-swigging lunches they reduce us to our reproductive capacity, assessing our desirability as opposed to our professional skills, token blonde invited along for decoration.

A report condensed on pale pink paper proclaims that Waffleland is the sixth best country in the world to live in. The criteria: federal political systems, acceptance of multiculturalism and affirmative action for disadvantaged groups. Yet another instance of academic myth triumphing over reality. Federalism in this country, apart from an excuse to invent new forms of taxation to tap the incomes of those exempt from national dues, is a politically correct euphemism for cultural and linguistic ghettoisation. Mere gloss. Posters on the notice board of the local authority offices warn citizens that only the language of the region may be uttered on the premises, until my visit yesterday, forms were only available in that tongue, completely ignoring the truth that the bulk of the population comprises refugees from the grime-encrusted sprawl, diplomats, international civil servants, that neither of the main contenders in the blinkered and bitter struggle for supremacy is the real lingua franca. Graffiti scrawls disfigure shop fronts, whose signs dare to dispute conformity, propaganda glutted on the disgruntlement of the unreflective cursing us as parasites (whilst conveniently forgetting that without our contribution to its economy, the country would collapse) shoved regularly through the letterbox slit.Badly maintained roads, sewers pumping the untreated water of the capital into river courses, fruit beer, mayonnaise on chips, the fiery red of endless brake lights cutting through the drizzle, listed buildings routinely falling victim to demolition squads in spite of petitions of protest, pubescent girls raped, starved and locked in cellars to die, wreaths and formal photographs with every strand of hair positioned in place, best dresses and smiles captured between bouts of wriggling unable to fill their lungs with breath, serial killers dissolving the bones of their victims with commercial drain unblockers, hypocrisy, complicity concealed behind slender Art Nouveau facades and the uneasy twitch of net curtains. Regulations stipulating which variety and colour of flowers are to be grown in window boxes, tunnels choked with traffic driven underground. A preacher on the Metro loudly confessing the sins of his past, hair dye and rouged lips, swaying trams and Turkish bakeries. Crucifixes of ivory, ribboned lapdogs defecating on the pavement.

[To N, 8th August 1997]

Memory: Or The Bankruptcy of Morals and the Indifference of Time

Old Women

To look at them, you’d think they were immune
Sitting on the park bench beneath the twisting branches
Their fingers like the twigs
Curving backs and sagging breasts
Sucked dry by time.

Their glassy eyes and neat-set hair
Did they ever cry out in anguish?
Did they curse or ache with joy and loss?
Memory and complaint their conversation,
Cast aside to dream and talk and wait,
This deadly calm, this resignation.

I know no bonds of morals nor of truth, the self is all there is and nothing further. No punishment, no reward, no relief, the excess that abounds around me a curse, the beauty I cannot experience if I cannot possess, the darkness within that conceals my deepest thoughts, each blade of grass I have seen, each song I have heard, each drop of wine that has caressed my tongue, each word I have spoken, each secret confided to me, all will pass. Abundance, abundance is response, appetite, untiring, unabated longing, longing. Fertility, ripeness, dripping fruit, peaches, dark-skinned plums, tear them apart, cut out the stone, the juice flowing down your fingers, the sweetness. This world continues as it always has been to spite us, to mock us in our loss. Haughty time who will not turn back to us, deaf to our entreaties, cold-hearted, merciless. If the self is all then memory is the essence of what makes me, I spit in time’s weather-beaten face, I warp and distort, travel back to the sunshine and the rainfall of then, away from the drabness of the dismal now. My memory deceives me, seduced by my will and my frailty. My memory breathes nostalgia into my lungs, altered by the wisdom that comes from transition, obstinately refusing to yield a name, though the features be clear, so that all I ever was is nothing but a falsehood.

We are like fish, drowning in the air, flapping helplessly and the angler casts his bait, paying us no attention. Plucked forth from the void to perish in an alien element, torn from the safety of inside and abandoned by our loved ones when they grow weary.

“The Persistence of Memory”, Dali’s soft watches oozing over the strange landscape: defiance, rejection, raging, the active principle. I carry the earth within me and I am dust. Writhe with the world’s sorrows and tribulations. I am a shattered vessel, fragments remain, but cannot be pieced together. What is true when I can only remember? Inside, outside, the memory is a social interaction. I remember you, I remember the group we were part of, what you told me, what we did together, yet you will not remember it as I do…These colourful shards that appear before us when we do not expect them: a resemblance and the heart is set pounding; a fragrance and there you stand, smiling; an echo and I hear your laughter behind me, the ferocity of raw emotion, consuming, distracting, the power, the redemptive quality of memory. And what of it if the Rationalists dismiss it as nothing but a tool to preserve the spark of life within us? Leave them to their enquiries and investigations, come with me instead to an unknown place, a meadow neither of us has seen, imagination drawing its strength and authenticity from memory. We cannot control the future, but we alter the past. What has been and gone an infinite resource. Laugh in my face, Time and I will spit at you again: you may bend me, but never shall you rob me of those I have loved completely, never shall I beg at your feet, never shall I stretch my hands towards you regardless of the suffering you cause.

Family album. I do not know the names of my ancestors, my relatives. Face after face, some young, some old. My parents in a rowing boat, my Father covering his injured eye, both smiling in the sunshine, the mountains in the background. My Grandfather’s photographs from his voyages, first crossing of the Equator, the Middle East, the coy girls willing him back. My Mother in the farmyard, waving at the lens from the back of a blinkered Clydesdale. Myself in the garden, red hair down to my waist, squatting in the paddling pool. My old dog, a border collie. At my Uncle’s wedding, dressed smartly. My Uncle who died of pneumonia aged thirty-three. And I wonder what you have seen and felt. Did you hear sirens and smell panic? Did you run through the streets, leaving footprints of blood whilst I agonised over some petty dilemma? Can an embrace extinguish the night sweats of terror, the naked glare of the light bulb in the bunker? Can compassion soothe the injustice?

“Blade Runner”: memory becomes a commodity, the ultimate nightmare of commercialization. Your recollections are no longer your property, but may be stolen from you; someone else’s body feels the pang of love lost, the filter of consciousness you believed to be yours alone now shared. There can be no certainty and therefore no authenticity, no identity. Am I me or has my awareness been borrowed, implanted? Did I ever actually have a mother? The Replicants clutch on to their photographs with the ferocity of obsession, the memories they contain more precious than life itself. Their creator has endowed them with prowess and strength, their existence curtailed. Cynicism, exploitation, the last barrier of sanctity battered down. The self as a source of doubt instead of a sure reference.

I have known euphoria and wanted to conquer, to mow down all who opposed me, who dared to block my path. Now I crave rest, sanctuary from the endless striving, the endless seeking. To know your presence, to breathe your breath, to sit upon your window ledge and watch the traffic, to bask in your smile.

Now my Muse is tired and demands a nap, poor dear. She’s flabby, too long unaccustomed to the exertion. I’ll put her to bed with a cup of tea and a cheap novel she can titter at. It ought to perk her up, give her self-confidence a boost. She’s not at her best, a few grey strands appearing, though, when I hold up the mirror for her, she plucks them out impatiently. These artistic types, coquettish, flighty. Best to pander to their whims if you want results. So, if you’ll excuse me, duty calls…

Empty Houses

Empty houses
Where clocks once ticked
Bluebottle dried
On the window sill
Starlings cling
To the washing line

Empty cupboards
Wiped clean of crumbs and dust
Porcelain dogs
Moved to another’s shelf
Empty attics
Floorboards deprived of creak

Empty bed
Stripped bare of sheets
Cold mattress
No more postcards
To this address

Elragadtatás

A fly beats against the window pane in anger and a bullet splits the sky. Years fall away from my face and no angry God reaches down to pull my hair out by the roots. By my side, untouchable amongst the joking crowd, laughter fills the dim interior of the bus as we flee the dance of lightning above the plains.
One eternal moment of remembering: I live, I breathe again.
Flesh slouches on the bone, heavy in the afternoon air, not dew to melt.
Acorns lie strewn across the path, the boats are moored at the lakeside, sirens and wood pigeons wail.
The world is empty and unyielding, indifferent to our fates; no plea can protect us from despair who stalks us with claws of whetted stone.
One eternal moment to stretch beyond the restless waking and the dream, sinking into the sweet arms of the harvest-field when the scythe has passed.

Will and Testament

Sites of significance are so often located on hilltops, half way between earth and heaven, separated from the profane sphere, away from the arguments that billow through open windows, from the list of solemnly pronounced disasters with a hint of compassion to salve the conscience of the viewer, away from the lilacs and the strawberries beneath their protective nets, the starlings on their telegraph cable, the abandoned bicycles and the smell of fried potatoes.

My primary school surveyed the steady climb of terraced houses rising up to meet it, disciplined, in single file, no unseemly haste, disgorging their recalcitrant offspring to recite in the classroom: A for apple, B for ball. Likewise the park next to the cemetery that afforded an excellent view of the entire suburb from the brow of the grassy slope so beloved of dog-walkers. The upper storeys of the college peeping cautiously through the larch and pines; the back gardens with benches of peeling green; spades and hoes resting against the walls; the newsagents and greengrocers with their entourage of sullen boys stubbing out cigarette ends before trudging homeward; the red public telephone boxes; the hospital with its dull chimney and sour wisps of whitish smoke; the war memorial with its list of fallen heroes and lion’s head cast in bronze above a granite basin choked with grit, a drinking fountain run dry; the nursery of densely huddled firs, a soft brown carpet of needles concealing their roots; the boundary wall separating the living from the dead.

Iron gates and a sign with the opening hours. Transition from one quality of space to another, finite, infinite. This is not a place of transaction, but remembrance, contemplation and stifled grief to be entered for a specific purpose. A long driveway lined with cedars and a monkey puzzle tree to shelter the wood pigeons. Polish war graves, regimented rows of diminutive white crosses, cut flowers, lilies and purple irises. Silence. Lawns immaculately tended, standpipes at regular intervals for filling the tributary vases. Mossy-winged angels wringing their marble hands, features blurred by the lichen and the rain. A monumental cross for the forgotten and unidentified. Family plots with bright gold leaf for the recently deceased. No fences to mark off territories. Husband, wife, daughter, son, father, mother, brother, sister. The occasional photograph on a headstone, youth, health, pensiveness.

I used to stroll along the gravel paths with my Grandfather, through the various sections: the Italian community, the Chinese with dual inscriptions, the children. He would pause to read at random, but knew that the statues fascinated me, particularly the little black Jesus. He stood in a niche, shielded from the ravages of the weather, arms extended, palms held upwards to testify to his sufferings. His long hair flowed down below his shoulders, his robe long and loose, concealing his feet. Humility shone gently from his face. He could have fitted into the pocket of my dress and no one would have been any the wiser. Week in, week out we performed the ritual without my ever paying attention to the occupant over whom he watched. When my Grandfather died, he left his body to medical science, to the cold polished surface of a stainless steel trolley, with its discreet incline and drainage hole for fluids. I have searched the length and breadth of the graveyard, but never succeeded in finding the little Jesus again.

The dead do not complain, nor do they protest, oblivious to our tears, our recriminations, our pleas for solace, our whimperings. The dead do not weep, they do not moan, they do not laugh, they do not curse, they do not whine, not even stirring in the stirrings of the oak boughs beneath which they lie. They do not hear, they do not feel, they do not taste, they do not scan the thousands of columns of print, the local happenings, the world events, the trivial romances of stars, they do not heed the gossip of neighbours, speculating about affairs, they do not need. The dead have no voice, no slender thread of consciousness preserves them from the void. Recorded and forgotten, they were, insensible to our squabblings, our desires, our hatreds. The church bells in our spires toll for us, the apricots and peaches ripen for us, the clouds release their rain for us.

Twilight. Back on the main road, a bus allows passengers to alight before pulling away from the kerb, a burst of laughter escaping between the doors.

Emberroncs

The frenetic siren of an ambulance rips through the brooding air of a summer afternoon. A crowd has gathered outside the pub, glasses dripping with condensation. A smear of blood and foam across the road to the pavement; the twisted frame of a bicycle. Car door flung wide, a wasp battering against the windscreen. Police notebooks overflowing with witness statements, confessions.

Who was it? We asked. An old man, the reply. An old man in the shimmering haze of a summer afternoon. A dog pants beneath the shade of a poplar.

We cross over, heading for our bus. Horns shriek, a wedding procession, the resplendent bride waves in the glaring heat of a summer afternoon.

[2nd August, 1998]

For reasons of sheer greed, our neighbours have taken it upon themselves to build a new house in what used to be the middle of their lawn (in Waffleland, no tax is paid on income from renting out property). Where once cone-laden branches of pine swayed in the winter gales, a slender crane now towers. In the months since my departure, brick walls have sprouted. The distance between the dwellings is minimal, reminiscent of a cramped outskirt estate where courts are involved to adjudicate over the trimming of unruly hedges, rather than the opulent leafy suburb guaranteed by boundary fences.

My morning coffee tastes bitter, although it is the same brand as I have been drinking these past months. My lover snores beneath his blanket. Having missed two opportunities to put paper out in the collection for recycling, the hallway has become almost impassable, cardboard boxes piled on old TV magazines.

A spray-painted dog cocks its leg against the electric interchange; raindrops hang from the umbilical cables. A rubber glove hangs, torn on a bramble thorn.

Having summoned me to accompany him to the schmooze-fest of welcome, Gy invited me for a compensatory coffee in the Smarties Bar. Outside, drizzle seeped from the grey sky, glossing the leaves. Balancing his snuff-box on the bridge of his right thumb, he inhaled a pinch. His father had died on holiday near Naples at the age of ninety-three not long after hearing the news of Gy’s election. The consulate took charge of the ashes, which could not travel back without a passport, remains of the departed being sacred to the Italians. A courier picked up the urn at the other end.

I am still not immune to his charms despite all that transpired between us. The intervening distance will preserve me, as will the sycophancy of lobbyists in their razor-creased, pin-striped plumage and the camera’s unblinking glare.

[To JMCD, 9th July, 1995]

The capital in the heat. Teenagers hurtle unhelmeted on mopeds, pillions gawping manically at bared flesh, taunting the less than idolatrously perfect. I with my precautionary umbrella warding off the menacing orange glare of impending cloudburst, an object merely and an object of scorn. The sunshades have closed like disappointed daisies whose well-worshipped has trailed away again and no matter how inevitable they still stare after him in hope. Beer foam clings to sheer glass precipices, cotton, short-sleeves, shorts, trainers, the season’s uniform for the casual stroller and only I am undefined. Having left G at R’s where Shilamat bemoans a headache and René shows off his latest battery-powered acquisition – sonless, husbandless, refugeless, comfortless – an embodiment of lack and longing. Swallows dive in the pink-stained twilight, gnats hover beneath the arbours in the park and the sandpit is deserted except for the gangs and the prowlers. The road thirsts for traffic, the city has emptied itself, spat out its sun seekers, its amusement junkies, coiling around its poor and unloved. Even the trams run less frequently, as if school holiday were synonymous with collective liberty, and I can’t remember when I last felt alive. I have nothing in common with the waitresses who attend the white plastic mass-produced garden furniture on the shit-strewn pavements cluttered with discarded mineral water bottles and ice cream wrappers. I am supposed to be grateful that I am not alone (though J reminds me that I am), that I do not have a spouse incarcerated indefinitely on suspicion of terrorist offences as I was last lectured: think yourself lucky, young lady. You could have your hands amputated and where would you be then? Or you could fall asleep in the bath and sink slowly and gently away.
“M doesn’t love you, Mummy, because he makes you cry. I’ll have to kill him”.
I can’t stop the tap in the guest bathroom from dripping. There’s a stain on the enamel I am too indolent to remove. Perhaps there was a time when I had strength, when I had power. When? When? At His Highness’ behest. His Lordship who sits in the royal box with his lawful wedded in sickness and in health for worse and for worse because of a piece of paper (we know all about them from our history lessons and were they ever a guarantee?) tells him to do his duty for the four successful gene transfers whilst his parched lips may be wetted with the cuntjuice of his obedient servant who swells his cock in evening caresses and morning tangles, reminding him he is God and King and sex and he isn’t a day over the crest of the hill and what does it matter, because he never promised her anything anyway? He is grateful for her delusion, her endless hopefulness and ignores the barren and sterile times that make his flesh creep, but he never witnesses anyway so he can still praise himself for his infinite generosity in satisfying two and imparting purpose bountiful, but who will soothe him when he is tired? Who does his senseless body for when he stirs in his sleep? When he grunts and his breathing fails him, the instinctive shudder roping back his departing soul? Whose lap could he weep in? But no, he prefers to gather and horde paraphernalia for the gaping fledglings, inured to all but their screechings, the colour-coded red and yellow landing strips. The numbing distraction of their constancy. The tea sets, the sextants and navigational aids, the first editions and the silverware, the bricks and stones and slates to enclose his wearying sinews and greying brow. For they will listen, those walls; they understand the principles of heritage and custodianship; they lay no claims, except love and care and silence and they merit it by the simplicity of their demands, painted and unpainted, stroke after tender stroke of brush and vinyl and no harm will ever befall him for he too is loved. He knows that he is loved, that he can retire to his cocoon and look at the items he has collected, recall their stories, how he came by them. The antique market in B, red and green striped awnings, the stallholders who laughed in expectancy, a sale, a sale. Sedate throng appraising oversized Japanese penises and the modesty of the courtesans flinching at the prospect of accommodating such a prodigious member. Although they will not forget them, the browsers will not purchase the prints. Delicate porcelain Venuses and ribald corkscrews – do you feel you have to get round me? I want to cought up my lungs, great gobbets of green and red, great hacking coughs, handfuls of phlegm, then a startled stagger and a blackness without reawakening. These haranguing women, howling women, not my style. But who put the tears in their eyes? Who stung them? Who burned them? It is easier to be a coward and retreat. Grandfather clocks tick, marquetry twists elaborately, sprouting into flowerheads. You need never wake up. The silver tray will be at your bedside and a sour and gaping mouth will exhale, trickling saliva on to the neighbouring pillow. Ageing together in harmony and bliss whilst you recall with fondness the endless waves, the rolling of the metal miraculously united with the derision of the firth. You think yourself in command, they think you in command, from the radio operator to the cajoler of engines, but you know that the swell can bear you up, hurl you and your lifeboats, your years of training and the MOD’s investment to oblivion, to the weed-wreathed rocks, to an honourable discharge from the tiresome anxiety of placating, appeasing, compensating for the inability to be heard, for the stubbornness of others whom you fail to manipulate, whom you slowly destroy through denial. For you deny everyone who loves you – you give to all in part, accepting the whole in return. Though flattered, you still expect. Did I look back? Are you a shade to descend beyond my mortal grasp when I in Orphean pride sneaked a look over my shoulder? You elude us all, yet seek our approval and adoration to confirm you in your view of yourself as good. You devour us. For some you provide a garden, a secure set of yields, but companionship? No. Certainly that is not what you receive. A lawn, immaculate. A chair in the sun and a breeze only half-apprehended. A chair at a desk weighted down by Hungarian dictionaries and the flotsam and jetsam of despair. You fear. You fear that at your core you are but an insubstantial husk. So you crave love to conquer every shortcoming and flaw. You make love like you drive, masculine, aggressive, at top speed and pushing beyond the limits. Taking control, dictating. You go straight to the origin of conscious life, wasting no time on tenderness. You plunder and when you are done, sink away into exhausted satedness. Not that I, the identity-less, the lost, complain of that. I am sick of dishonesty, though my breast aches and my shoulders hunger for an embrace. You are afraid to expose yourself to risk, preferring greed and wanting. Old man, when you are ash on water I will be burning, unassuaged. Who will confort me then? My children will not pity me.
“Szeretem,” she said and looked at her husband. A watercolour of Stadshuset without clutter, a white candle on the table, a goose, a figurine of an apple-cheeked boy, chin cupped pensively in premature pose of melancholy, hands uncalloused. My photographs had perturbed her. Whereas János asked: “Why does he always wear a beard?”
I, the revered guest who had sown a seed of trouble in her mind. I love him too, Ungit and I know why you love him, therefore we two ought to accept each other. You would not lecture me on the benefits of rationality then. You who live in harmony and kindness and goodness, spreading these qualities to all those who encounter you. Every detail of our last visit is carved into them, absorbed into living tissue, scrutinized, litanized, cherished. I was afraid I could only be loved by association, and why should she not love me whose wish is to make you happy? Look at the cost to me. You who humiliate me and cast me aside, protesting at my tears, who asks of me that I never sleep with anyone else when I could be sleeping with you, leaving me to fester whilst you screw someone who doesn’t remotely love you like I do – out of DUTY? I should despise you. I who lobotomize myself, suture, cauterize the wounds to staunch through another solitary day! Yet you only penetrate as far as I allow. I gave you the ground rules, girl. You muster legions of excuses, myriads of opt-outs. I only have one weapon of self-defence, a luminous sword. No, I couldn’t talk to her. When she asked me why I was learning Hungarian, she revealed her innocence. I laughed: “M miatt”. To her you will forever be that superlatively bright little boy; to me you are a man. I can give succour to the child, but will not fuel your arrogance or prop up your ego.
Meanwhile, in permanent mourning, I cannot even move. So I let ebb my youth for you, laying on protection to give a reason to the world for keeping me fettered, alone and outside.
To which you retort you must be bad for me and so you’ll leave me. Leave me to renounce even my integrity. I do not want a reward for being a good, silent little girl. Thus revenge, sour, stale, bitter, malicious revenge is all you permit me. You are a fool, JMCD to squander love which is freely given, to place greater value on indifference, jealousy, outright hostility than on harmony, tolerance, sacrifice and healing. But to wake up would be so dangerous you perpetuate my limbo. Knowing what I want and what indeed I require in order to exist.
Back to square one – not wanting the alternative – which is so enormous I cannot even contemplate it.
We blindfold each other. Yet you are the selfish wretch. I the wronged.
Nor do I care that you, in Scotland, may one day have a different nightmare. Of what might have been when your tongue is coated with ash.

[1995. To Gy]

“Then I realized that there was an infinite variety in women as people…and that sex was the most direct route to knowing a woman…a route they like, one that we like, and often the only route that can break down the barriers and permit close acquaintance (…) Each woman was a unique individual worth knowing, and, if we took time enough, we might find we loved each other. But at least we offered each other pleasure and a haven from cares” -
Robert Heinlein, “Time Enough for Love”.

“Mamma, look at the clouds, it’s a hurricane. The hurricane is awake and hungry and thirsty, and so he will eat the clouds that are full of rain, but then he will die, because he ate the clouds” (G on the way to school this morning).

It is a stormy morning. The youth of Waffleland sit, arms folded, morosely fixing their gazes into the void which passes for privacy on the plastic seats of the bus, brain stimulators switched on, competing with one another in a cacophony of tinny drum beats. Closing out the hostile world. Conformism is non-conformity. The wind tried to wrench my umbrella out of my hand, straining the spokes, but I managed to keep hold as I stepped inside. A man in his late twenties clad in the urban uniform of the student, dark green combat jacket and black woolly hat blew a surreptitious kiss to his girlfriend as she waved to him from across the road. Such tight embraces for but a few hours’ separation.

Saturday night in old London town. The library visit was not successful, since what I was looking for had been taken out on loan. Once I found something, I could forget the discomfort and lack of belonging that always tingles down the nape of my neck for the first few moments, disappearing into the page. C wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant, selecting the most downbeat in the entire street: “I go for atmosphere rather than style. You usually find better food in places that don’t tart themselves up”.
She had steamed sea bass, insisting that she was a vegetarian (had I still been one, I would doubtless have fallen out with her. It is not nearly ascetic enough to savour the fruits of the salt waters).
Her trip to the capital was motivated by a quest for knowledge. She was afraid I would ridicule her if she were to recount her activities in further detail: “You can keep a secret, can’t you, F?”
Precious from her whose indiscretion had destroyed my relationship with A through divulging to the group a comment he had made. I sighed. She talked. She has become involved with a meditation group led by “spirit channelers”, whose leader, when she goes into a trance, is taken over by Joseph of Aramathea and who can answer any question one might care to ask. She has one week to make up her mind whether to join them and explore her channelling abilities or forever leave them. My residual Christian prejudices balked at this “Satanism”, this “demon worship”, but I listened. The medium cannot recall a single word she has said afterwards, so every utterance is recorded and a transcript sent to the questioner to peruse at leisure. Most of the work of the meditation group involves the study of these transcripts plus a lot of prayer to ward off natural disasters, since they are Gaianists, believing that our violence, cruelty and negative energy are prompting the planet to retaliate. They claim to have saved many lives already with their preventive supplications. I did not dismiss anything she said, but took it seriously as an indication of a thirst for knowledge and who am I to ridicule such a search? I informed her that we were both acting on a similar impulse, choosing different methods to achieve fulfilment and generate meaning. She was less tolerant of me than I of her, brushing aside the utility of books as a source, to which I replied that the mystics of this world have always sought more direct forms of enlightenment, a term to which she strongly objected until I explained that I meant purpose, meaning rather than nirvana, and that I agreed with her that reason has its frustrations and limitations. Why bother with second-hand renditions when you can hear it all direct from someone who was there?
The she told me a little about her past lives. She has had several in Egypt (my impression being that in the New Age circuit you have zero credibility unless you have had at least one past life in those desert climes), including one as a priestess at Karnak. I smiled, jesting that I am firmly convinced that I have had one past life as a Hungarian; otherwise I cannot remotely begin to account for the affinity I feel towards the people and language.
“I wonder what La D will go down in history as this time?” she laughed.
“Oh, I’m sure I will be lost without trace, C, a drop of dew that will evaporate in the dawn light and be forgotten”.
What had convinced her of the veracity of the claims is that she recently had a skating accident that damaged her knee and so consulted Joseph on this, him having been a doctor and all.
“What should I do about my knee?”
A detailed reply about the precise nature of her injury followed, along with instructions about how it could be remedied, the medium not having any inkling about the existence of the problem, the answer given without the slightest hesitation.
Her face shone, she expected a response. All I could do was mutter a few platitudes about some people possessing greater intuition than others, that their sensitivity allows them to diagnose the malaises of the soul and that they have a long tradition of shamans and healers from whom to borrow a ritualistic form of presentation. I am not unkind. She ended up happier, with her mind at ease, I having reassured her that she was not insane and that she must follow whatever path to contentment she can find.

After dinner, I seduced her into accompanying me to Prêt for a dessert. I was overwhelmed by a craving for chocolate which still rages through my system! However, no respite was at ahnd, as all they had left was coffee and walnut cake, a poor second, which I nevertheless consumed – my need was so strong. During this less spiritual chat, the subject turned to JMCD – will I ever be free of him? That weekend, our last weekend, JMCD and I had gone to that very branch of Prêt, by the Albery, with D before the performance of “Uncle Vanya”. C prefaced her remarks with the customary: “I probably shouldn’t say this, but…” giving me the benefit of her considered opinion. He was, to quote her, a wanker, because, whilst we were together, he played on my insecurity, constantly making me prove myself, making me feel so much less than him, whereas the opposite was true. That I writhed around in desperation attempting to show that I was not inadequate. Although I might have felt completely inadequate it was only his inadequacy that was obvious to all. Do you know that in the course of our relationship I broke three telephones in sheer rage? I would smash them to the floor in impotent anger at his betrayals. The present telephone almost became number four, but miraculously survived! I look back and the hours and hours of waiting, the tears, the grief are what come to mind first. My life was a libation, my energy and, worse, my love, my essence poured endlessly on to the thirsty sand, to no avail. For weeks I would wait, shunning all for the sake of a few moments’ conversation that mostly never happened. At the time, the sacrifice was willingly made. Just as well that I have escaped…

“A short, fat dumpy woman, whom I’d loved for five years. I went out with her in the end, for three weeks. Five years and three weeks, frightening, isn’t it?”
Overheard on the Eurostar. Spoken by a relatively young, successful and to the exes of the world, handsome man, whose equally beautiful, well-attired and skinny wife (expecting twins, as she beamed to her friends) worshipped him from the seat opposite. I have strengthened. I can meet their scorn for the likes of me with scorn in equal measure. After they had been chivvied back to their seats by the purser, I wept. My fertility is preying on my mind. We were delayed for an hour and fifteen minutes, so I had plenty of opportunity to sift through my feelings. I was very tired, my guard was down, as you put it. What follows is what I noted down on the train. Eine Momentaufnahme about something deep and fundamental, which should not be seen as a threat.
Yes, the offer I made in the “Interlude” was a heartfelt one, though, had I been a manipulative and calculating being, I would have held fire with it until much later [to pay for sex selection of an embryo to be implanted with the aim of providing him with the male child he so ardently craved – Chameleon]. JMCD would have labelled it a “serious tactical error”. However, since there are no tactics, there is no campaign, it does not matter. I know why I protested about responsibility so vehemently. Men hate responsibility (so do women: The reason I laughed so heartily at your anecdote about the girl who would have fucked you if you had poured her more g and t was that I recognised a loathing of blame and potential for self-recrimination there that I empathise with to an extent). It was intended to reassure you that I am not setting a trap with an heir as the bait. What you said about ten years hence is perfectly valid. I cannot argue with that except to say that such a statement is true of any child conceived in any form of relationship. The risk is greater here, but it is not negligible in a different set up, and for that reason I reject it. I am willing to assume the burden, the penalties and woes without wishing to inflict them on anyone else. There are many consequences to such a choice, of which I could not be aware last time round, but of which I am only too aware now, which is to say that I do not make such an offer lightly. THAK would disappear for a start. No more psychological props, no more fantasies about being rescued from the dire state of spinsterhood by the Great Artist. More struggle against the accursed Waffleians. More official stigma and disapproval, more interference from nosey-parker social workers, less freedom, longer confinement. On the other hand, I now have all the benefits of the protection of my employers. They pay for my hospital stay, I would even have time off that I never had before. All the benefits and no opportunity. In one way, I have nothing left to lose; I have lost it all already.

After we made our agreement, JMCD refused to take the slightest risk, calculating to the minute when I was ovulating, when he had to put on a condom. When we were fucking, I would never be sure whether he would remember when I was safe and when not. He would always hide a rubber under the pillow when I wasn’t there and, just as he was about to come, pull it out, slip it on and finish what he had started. Fair enough, I hate Johnnys too. But it was the way that he did it. Being used. I respected him, I did his bidding. I complied, believing that he would eventually relent and leave her, that if he were compelled by events to choose between her and me he could not be so base as to abandon me. How often did I soak the pillow whilst he snored. (JMCD conked out immediately after ejaculation, sometimes falling asleep on top of me, almost suffocating me). He never let me know in advance that he had no intention of granting me my wish, leaving me to speculate whilst giving him the internal massage he enjoyed so much. Had he made it clear in advance, it would not have soiled me so. What galled me more than anything else in those days was the easy fertility of Liz. A slip of paper, a contract permitting her to realise her maternal ambitions, my lack of a certificate denying me the right to mine. She bore him four children. His longest standing mistress, my immediate predecessor, his secretary at Stewart’s in D, had a daughter by him. Her life had been hard, married to a man who beat her so severely that (she claimed, though I insisted to JMCD that she was lying to him in a bid to snare him, as she had a second child by her new husband later) she was told by the doctors that she could not have children. They never used contraception. He knew something was wrong when, after eight years and the child, she failed to contact him after going on a coaching holiday he had funded for them. She married the bus driver a few weeks later. The only unique feature of my relationship with JMCD is that I didn’t dump him, he dumped me! How could it be true that he loved me, that I meant anything to him when these other women had given him children whereas he refused to impregnate me? It was very hard. Ergo, I didn’t mean anything at all. That was my reasoning. What is it about me that makes me so unsuitable, so undeserving? What is it about them that makes them so much better? Nothing could allay this, nothing assuage my thirst for an answer. Grist to his mill, allowing any amount of influence. Small wonder I had to prove myself, again and again and again. Ultimately I want to mean something to any man I care about. Particularly if I fuck them. Particularly if I open up to them.

Another M. This time G’s father, Manfred. I would never have become entangled with him sexually had it not been for my experience with Dan. He had sat in the same library in the University of K when I was there for my year abroad as an undergraduate and was still there when I returned as a postgraduate. I never felt any passion for him. Sure, we fucked. He had only had one girlfriend prior to me (he was 30-something when we first met). What I liked about him was that he was the first man I had met who didn’t have some sort of hang-up about sex, who wasn’t embarrassed about it or ashamed/self-conscious about himself or engrossed in abuse or kinky practices. The Rigsarkivet in Copenhagen attracts the most way out types! He took delight in sex in a most uncomplicated way. A revelation. A boost in my darkest hour. (As if that weren’t enough, he was also the only Marxist I’ve ever fucked! Sandal-wearing member of the anti-sports and anti-car leagues). Manfred loved me and, when I finally allowed him to see G, he adored his son. When he came visiting me in Denmark during my pregnancy, I panicked. I was not ready for commitment (I gave birth in Scotland. On leaving Copenhagen, I did not supply him with my new address. Despicable and cowardly, I know). “Wir werden Eltern” was the title of the foetal development book he brought with him. Clinching it. I knew I could not go through with it, my stomach churning at the mere thought. Even though his atheism and cynicism made him an avowed enemy of the institution of marriage, he would still have wanted to live with me. There I was, up to the eyeballs in debt, with a half-finished thesis, having achieved zilch. His instinctive reaction on the phone when I informed him of my state was simply to say: “Ach, Scheisse”.
He soon came round to the idea, however and I was terrified that he would try to use German law to win custody of G, so I hinted at THAK that he might be the father (there had been a certain amount of overlap) in order to have him own up to the deed at the Registrar’s, putting paid to any leverage Manfred might have enjoyed. It haunts me to this day. If anything happens to me, by accident or design, THAK gets G. I must do something about this. In passing, I have nothing against the father having a say in the upbringing of a child. Manfred decided to turn his back on G. I never prevented him from visiting whenever he wanted. I put the foot down over him bringing his new girlfriend with him, arguing that G already has a mother and that I would not tolerate having my position usurped, although in reality I couldn’t stick the idea of them having sex under my roof whilst I was rotting away in unwanted celibacy. Not that I actually wanted to screw Manfred by that stage. Furthermore, I never took a penny from him. Nor from THAK. G and Manfred are separate concepts in my mind. To be blunt: the one has nothing to do with the other. In one respect, G is the result of my complete despair, a fleshly being to bind me to life, whether I like it or not.

I could not have THAK’s child. Even now, when he is not my “fasztartalék”, as you brilliantly punned, I still meet him without G. He came to visit in the early days, when he still harboured an illusion that I might invite him to move to Waffleland. He was always highly ambivalent towards G, my fault, as I rebuffed all attempts to interrogate me as to the real father. It never seemed worth bothering about. The acting father versus the biological was to me a superfluous distinction. To vent his disappointment and resentment at me for my sexual adventures (he even knows about H, but still grimly clings to me), he spends a great deal of our shared time reeling off the list of past transgressions on my part. After all, he has never fucked anyone else, he is as pure as the driven snow and I am a damned harlot. Accusation, recrimination. Then he wonders that I can sleep next to him without touching him, without indicating the least stirring of desire. You know, in January of this year, he asked me again whether G is his, and I spelled it out for him: NO, NO. When G was but a few months old I was exhausted and did not have the energy to bath him. THAK had been simmering with barely concealed wrath all day, pretending to watch a black and white war film he was not remotely interested in (he loathes the genre) purely to spite me. I begged him to help give G a bath. Flinging the remote control on to the carpet, he stormed through to the bathroom and repeatedly submerged G to stop him from crying (babies being, as you know, extremely sensitive to mood and tension). He almost drowned G. I was livid, yet powerless. Although I had to physically fight THAK to rescue my son, so hopeless did I feel about the prospects of replacing THAK with anyone else that I bit my arm in the back room as I tried to comfort G. Far from sending THAK packing on the spot, I apologised instead, abasing myself. THAK cannot pick on someone his own size, someone capable of self-defence. In fact, THAK took sadistic pleasure in taking out his suppressed frustrations over me on G. I instructed Shilamat never to leave them alone together. Really, had I believed for an instant that I could find a partner, I would have put an end to our association, but I was frightened, weak and pathetic. THAK is malicious by nature. He would smash G’s constructions in blocks, gloating at his “lack of imagination”, cursing him for shamming distress, for manipulating me. It was intolerable, yet I put up with it. Worse: I allowed my child to be exposed to it. THAK was mortally jealous of the attention I lavished on my offspring and was desperate to regain my interest.

I believed, on making the decision to become a single parent, that having a baby would obliterate my desires and raging needs. How naïve. It proved as wrong as my earlier assumption about age calming the beast. I am confident that I can raise my son well. I acknowledge, though, that I am fortunate to have such an easy-going boy, a bright child with a sense of humour.

My new self-definition depends very much on you. How precarious my hopes, how intangible my dreams. How dissociated/dislocated from my present surroundings I still feel. Now I can take them or leave them, which is an improvement. The odds are against me. In life. I am not a vindictive personality. I am deeply saddened that Manfred has turned his back on his son, unfortunate though his experience has been. I am certain that he has become a father again, by the girlfriend who has lived with him ever since we split (she was 18 at the time). Now I could withstand the contact. I have no intention of concealing from G who his father is. What has become abundantly clear is that a great deal of understanding, kindness and delicacy is required in these situations if the tie is not to be curdled with rancour. I am embittered by my experience with M. I am also embittered by my experiences in Waffleland. I would dearly like to have another child. What a confirmation it would be to me to have yours, perpetuating your line, you who are the measure of all things. Even if it doesn’t last. (How reminiscent of Gaffe in “Blade Runner”: “It’s too bad she won’t live”. Scott regretted the imposition of the happy ending so much that he tried to restore what he saw as a loss of credibility by editing it out in the Director’s Cut. It impoverishes the film immensely, leaves too many loose ends, although the first time you see it, I admit, the original ending grates. Having seen it so often before the Scott-approved version, I reckon the moguls were right for once, but you can make up your own mind). You have already responded to this, in the “Interlude”. I hadn’t realised, until sitting, blowing my nose into the napkin, that it was opening up such a personal can of worms for me, or, if you prefer, reopening wounds that have barely begun to scar over. I am not going back on my offer, though.

One final thought in passing. You confessed that what made you stick it out with Katryn was pride. You thought you could convert her. Is there an echo here? Can I be redeemed? You know I love you.

It was not until I entered the house that it even truly struck me. We went to see the flowers at Mrs. Duncan’s and I realized which house – directly opposite – of course I recognized her, fifteen to twenty pounds’ worth ordered that morning for good neighbourliness. You see the lady “through the wall” hadn’t been keeping well and didn’t answer his knocks (for help) against it, so he struggled across to the Duncan’s – how? – down the gravel driveway, the green-painted iron gate was probably pulled across, down step after step. Their light was on as they were waiting up for their daughter to arrive from England and he collapsed into her arms, the back of his neck soaked. She towelled him off, yet did not phone for an ambulance immediately, calling my Mother instead, then the doctor, not Doctor B because she didn’t like him, but the other young one from A who arrived before my Mother, then the paramedic who reaped only praise and the woman ambulance-driver who slammed the doors in my Mother’s face. The response to her objections that she wanted to be with her father-in-law inappropriate mirth: “I thought you were just another neighbour”.

My Father was called off the shift when his condition started to deteriorate and how the old progenitor muttered in that final half hour about R having to come over to trim the hedges. Groaning and being forced to let go, fighting hard. My Father has seen so many die that he knew he was in pain, chit-chatting to distract him. He didn’t want to nor did he expect to die, not really. Dad told me it would not hit him until the tasks are completed – the house being empty will show that he’s gone. He won’t be seen shuffling up for his pension or down to the grocer’s with the collected money for his tins and his comforting booze, always wearing the same old hat, green with a leather band, the grotted-up old dark navy coat and the grey trousers. He won’t pop over for a few quick words about problems with his insurance or TV license or bills and then leave.

The house had not been redecorated since my Granny died. I remember when he came across: “It’s Chatty” he whispered. She had drawn her last breath next to him in the bed. He even cradled her dentures in cotton wool inside a decorated box at the bottom of the wardrobe. Most of the furniture left after she did, the purportedly valuable, certainly the antique, leaving nothing but an outline on the wallpaper. So I held on to what was meant to have been a second edition Burns’ collected works. He kept asking for them back, but my Dad insisted that he would only sell them for drink, which I took absolutely literally (in the narrow-minded fashion I often do) refusing to relinquish them to the last. He had mentioned the books again during my penultimate visit home. They were to be kept in the family. I didn’t seek his permission, a niggardly thing all in all, but the infamous incident had poisoned my mind against him for years – it was frightening and in the taut sphere of family matters blame festers when the issues are not confronted (and when is anyone comfortable enough to confront them?). I underestimated his love for the Bard until confronted by the relics he had cared for: a newspaper clipping of Tam O’ Shanter, a tartan-bordered postcard of the poet’s house with a quotation from A Man’s a Man for a’ that and a further photograph of the cottage covering a ventilator, cut so precisely that we could not take it down (and why should we destroy the final tribute to his ingenuity when everything else had been stripped bare?).

The grandfather clock was replaced by a shambolic white cupboard in the hallway, other objects and ornaments fallen to the sound of the gavel, time passed, but it ebbed and flowed around that house. The television that was in my bedroom when it was still mine and I hadn’t left for the continent was stored there. As was gradually revealed to us he never threw anything out: her button box; cardboard containers with rusted tacks and paper clips; a coffee jar with a red plastic lid filled with what looked like clear hair gel, but turned out to be wallpaper paste kept over from God only knows when. G could have run around to his heart’s content, picking up bits and pieces. The garden, reached by a brick-edged slab path and surrounded by low box hedges, was hopelessly overgrown. It held a midden [compost heap] and rows of lettuces, tatties and strawberries. The back path, which hadn’t been stripped of trees to protect, screen and hide, was well-trodden. I’d deliberately go along there to see him digging knowing no one else had the right. The hedge clippings piled high. One of his neighbours had a plastic greenhouse. Slowly, only straw littered the rich earth, a few pathetic leaves growing wild and peppered with caterpillar holes. I always remembered it was his plot, walking there with Tighson [my border collie] and THAK. I always looked out for him on his bench or at his kitchen window, but rare were the sightings. Then my return trips became more and more infrequent, even more seldom the wanderings that way. These were the days before council houses went on sale to their tenants, before they were tarted up, anonymized and “upmarketed”. Before the statutory double glazing and the removal of the stiff metal frames.

As soon as we entered the back door we were hit by the stench of rotting fish, three kippers, neatly wrapped in paper. Everything was completely normal, except that he wasn’t there. He had a plate full of jelly (bright red), banana slices decorating the top and sprinkled generously with sugar. The washing that he could still manage to do himself rather than sending over to our house on the pulley, a couple of pairs of socks and some underpants. The tap was dripping, some washed dishes on the draining board, neat and tidy. The first disturbance throwing out the dead flesh and pouring the contents of the sugar bowl into an ancient tin of a type no longer manufactured. Then into the living room, his chair almost next to the TV so that he could make out something of the picture, his long, slender table by the settee on which a pillow and blanket were draped, pushed back as if he had just got up for a pee, the remote control lying useless, his glasses folded, his newspaper and an almost-finished packet of Rennie indigestion tablets, everything else exactly as it had been forever and ever since Chatty’s death, all the original fittings intact. His bed unslept in. A packet of Player’s Navy Cut with butt-ends saved up to be thrown out, the whole interior nicotine-yellow, layer upon layer discolouring everything, even the glass in the frame protecting the peacocks embroidered in silk I have fallen heir to.

I hadn’t stepped into the bedroom, back room or bathroom for more years than I can recall, yet I immediately knew they hadn’t changed: the plastic fish-panel decoration above and below the handle of the kitchen door, the toilet with the flower transfers, the black marble-effect wallpaper in the bathroom with the mint-green border, the white porcelain, the Mabel Lucie Atwell verse with the little boy, rosy-cheeked and dripping after his bath, wrapped in a blue towel, his hair black and tousled, the back room with the Singer sewing machine operated by a treadle, the views of Loch Tummel, the bedspreads, the “Oriental beauty” postcard winking seductively, the silver-look brush with insets of flowers, wardrobes full of new pairs of trousers and immaculately pressed jackets. We were astonished: why did he never wear them? His silk dressing gown, worn dragons between shoulder and lapel, distinguished tassels hanging from the belt. My Mother told us that she had just cleaned it ready for his admission to hospital for the operation to remove the cataracts. He was bitterly disappointed when they informed him the intervention had been left too late or some such equally pathetic excuse, that he would be left to go blind. My Father sighed that he had been fed up and that ultimately the heart attack had been preferable to years of suffering. It’s true, yet Death is never a welcome visitor. I had wanted to unlock all the stories from his head. He had travelled the world in more innocent times and had recounted all his infamous scrapes, such as when he and his shipmates sneaked into a mosque and were caught out, lucky to escape with their infidel lives. Or the stories of Japanese executions with the prisoners buried up to their necks, their exposed parts smeared thick with honey and giant ants released to devour them. He also told tales of battle action, his whisky-slurred voice imitating the cadences of his submarine commander. Then there was the Danish girlfriend (he lived up to the sailor’s motto “one in every port”) in Copenhagen. Her father was actually Norwegian, owner of a shipping line who wanted my Grandfather to marry her. They were inseparable during his stay there, the badly scratched and dented Carlsberg tray with the mermaid on the rock testimony to his continued affection. He outlived his wife and younger son and a trace of him remains in G who has inherited his dark brown eyes, the shade a perfect match.

A bright yellow bucket once used to hold emulsion had been placed under a small bedside table in lieu of a chamber pot. In the drinks cabinet cocktail sticks with horses’ heads rested in wine glasses. The striped shopping bag was consigned to eternity in a black bin bag along with the hat in which a few grey hairs still lingered. The grotesque “let’s make soup” wallpaper in orange and yellow with salt and pepper shakers, half-peeled onions on chopping boards, radishes and egg whisks. The coal bunker, the lilac tree. Looking over the lawn, a memory of Chico, his Pomeranian, who danced round and round in feverish circles whenever excited, entered my mind unbidden. We would take him for walks together with our own Pomeranian, Sheila, up the big banking and along to “echo point” where he would shout for me. I was his “little princess” – he had always wanted a granddaughter as all the other children were boys – and he also took credit for my interest in foreign languages, having taught me some phrases in French whilst I was at primary school.

It was straight down to the business in hand: my Father being as cold and unsentimental as he could. He loathes hoarding and the task became easier the more we divided up and cleared out. R and I were anxious not to lose anything. I need a house to clutter. The personal items yielded warmth and amusement – a binding force – we each have our recollections of him and we were familiar with his faults, but why condemn him for them? God knows we take after him and back and back all the way to Adam, we are all flawed. Nevertheless the undercurrent of pain threatened to sweep us away, so we laughed. Brave-facing it may be, but living and sharing.

I came downstairs in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, my Father already in the living room. We drank a cup of tea (THAK’s nickname for our residence “the house of the ever-boiling kettle” no misnomer). A mixture of worry and raking over the past. Stricken by the same affliction, my Father began to look through the hidden photographs. We laughed at how well endowed he appeared to be in his tight-fitting uniform trousers: “He must have gone around half bent most of the time,” my Father grinned.
We joked about the bottle-opener we had found tucked away in a drawer, in the shape of a naked woman it was more schoolboyishly naughty than offensive. “Randy old bugger,” my Father’s comment.

The house soon won’t even smell of him any more, my Father and R are moving the remaining furniture in a hired van, my Mother, B and C ripping out the carpets, workmen will tow away the antiquated fridge and the Tricity cooker before stripping off the wallpaper. The tea towel with the lyrics of Amazing Grace and the staunch piper on the battlements will be unpinned, the curtains released from the grip of their plastic hooks. Not just one life has passed, but an entire way of life, an era preserved in grey matter alone, experience and wisdom, mischief, pranks and wamth, blood, shit and trickling semen, alcohol vapour and lineage, identity running deeper than the fragmented forgetfulness gnawing away at the selfish society we inhabit. Row upon row of tins. R wouldn’t take them no matter how hungry and I wouldn’t rummage through the coat pockets. The silence is more eloquent than the sobbing – it is easier that he left his body to medical science, although the notion of some students dissecting him on a slab without knowing his story is repugnant enough for me not to dwell upon. Maggie’s anecdote about her classmate who had cut the penis off one of the bodies, tying it on a string to swing around her head like some demented trophy a far cry from the reverence the bereaved wish for (the mutilator was expelled for her violation). There was no parting, the leave-taking deprived us.

He came to me in the maternity ward, asking if I wanted grapes to which I retorted that I was not ill, whereupon he returned the next afternoon with strawberries and a tin of cream. Breathe it in deep and never let it go – keep him, this love that you cannot express and which you do not ever want to exorcise – there is no guilt, there is no regret, for why should I cut and dry the man for posterity by hollowing out the substance of his soul. The dew has not yet lifted from the grass and it is 13.25. When I next go back with “eggy pieces” [egg sandwiches] it will be the last time: one last journey to the skip left. I will never be able to set foot in that house again. Others will breathe, but not notice the slightly acrid smell of his. I will be excluded from the dwelling he occupied for over thirty years, longer than I have been on the face of the earth. I wouldn’t want to visit a atranger there, however. The little boley hole under the outside stairs, a miracle of economy. I never had the nerve to look in it: a little, frightening store of evil? No, but a bogey man might want to jump out at you, creasing up at your petrified face. Old deckchairs had been put into retirement there. My parents always had to have the latest things – “better”, “cleaner”, more comfortable – you never see anyone who lets their possessions age with them. My Father who flees from the old-fashioned. Cobwebs hanging like necklaces and sneeze-inducing dust, a few picture hooks and nails sticking out, the fire with its artificial logs and the wooden mantelpiece displaying the knick-knacks of travel and heritage. The newspaper-rack he never had any use for, made with his own tools, like my doll’s house and the sledge. He was skilled and active and his heart must have been resilient to endure the alcoholism (that mellowed) and the fags over so many long years. The concrete floors were painted round the edges (only the rich could afford fitted carpets when he moved in, most lucky to have even a square of fabric), the bedroom particularly striking, the detail of the rings and grain of wooden boards lovingly reproduced – had he done this himself?

During bouts of delirium tremens, Auld Nick would appear to my Grandfather to remind him of his ultimate destination. His fists would clench in rage at the taunting, stretching tattoos as blue as the veins beneath.

A goldfish floating on the surface of a bowl of discoloured water, a cat’s spine snapping under the heedless tyres of a lorry, the gouged glass eye of a favourite bear, the fallen fledgling poked with a stick to swirl with maggots.

[September, 1992]

Edinburgh with your buzz of waspish wardens ready to serve the public interest by decorating the windscreens with tokens of the general dissatisfaction over double parking – clad in the colours of warning, lurking behind scaffolding, ever-vigilant; your felt-hatted drunkards and wan fallen privileged junkies, the bench-dying, tweed cast-off multitudes and those unable to find refuge or shelter. Mr. Excuse Me still prowls, eyes blind to human nature accosting random passers-by with his whine for the price of a bottle of twelve year old matured in oak vats in the guise of a cuppa – a beggar in gentleman’s clothing. Politeness is perhaps more appropriate in this capital where the air is not galled with hostile anonymity and if we do not nurture that old tradition we will no longer be able to distinguish between the capitals of Europe. Here I sit alone, surrounded by lunchers escaped from the deluge, downpour, drookit, drenching with my plate of cauliflower cheese and chips before me – packet crinkle cuts, the likes of which have not been seen since the last Spry Crisp ‘n Dry occupied pantry space at my parents’ abode. Freedom for a couple of hours, yet it’s not freedom to encapsulate even the essence of this place with the fragmented images that numbed the mind on each walk – busy violins accompany the sweat-beaded symphony of waitressing – the crowd hungers and it demands and since it is paying it must be satisfied, now. Couples everywhere, naturally. I could pose as the artistic and aloof lesbian. Eye contact and even smiles with men here are possible and they are polite, though only too ready to assume a tutelary role, quite sickening in its extent and (to them) self-evident quality. This is recuperation. I may and can open my mind again, no matter what the degree of triviality – but is that a sin, to be mundane? These details are what separate, distinguish, create the unique atmosphere of a place, an epoch. Not that I’d suddenly plunge into reading a 19th century French or Russian novelist – reality can be sensuous, but it is too often drab – it is the hidden reality, often again mundane, trivial or inconsequential, which lies behind the motives, the actions, the structure of a society or a relationship that betrays the essence. Do we need anything higher? Deeper? Content. Respite. Relief. Free to observe from a table or two away. I am at last comfortable here in the midst of this gathering, conspicuousness subsiding, – I had to put sugar in that – purportedly – medium cup of Kenya – the tortured alabaster twists and churnings are still pedestalized – perhaps if they weren’t on pedestals they’d be mistaken for hatstands or dog-toilets (peestands) – I’m not the only solitary – we are both deprived of the burden of conversation (thank God!) – he communes with his newspaper, I make love to this pad with my pencil. I’d like to commission a painting from one of the artists whose work hangs here – a flame-headed Venus and her lover (female too) – his paintings are distilled cruelty, which is why they are erotic. The lamps are strung over the rafters here. As I queued for my lunch, a pigeon flew in from the open window. I can’t see it any more – it perched up there. They are ready to talk to you in shops and restaurants, even unoccasioned and most definitely unsolicited on the street. T slated my ability (or disability) to forget such temporary acquaintances – yet another of our differences – the jealousy running over the brim of the bitter cup. I took a helping of chocolate cheesecake by way of rental for this chair for a few moments longer – I neither relish the idea or wish even to entertain a desire to return to that flat – these days have been toiled through in discontent – I just finished it: much too quickly. The café is fairly empty now. There are detailed instructions for everything everywhere – is it presumed that the ignorance that has been spoonfed into the capillaries is the victorious force here? I missed the bus, though I could have caught it had I decided to run. Outside George Heriot’s School and the taxi rank – how good it has been to hear no window-rattling jet-rumblings. The taxi-drivers in their sawn-off hearses wait, placid behind magazines and newspapers, perusing football scores and page three girls. A man in a kilt called a golden Labrador to heel and each complaint to Lothian Regional Transport will be dealt with individually they assure in the bus notice. This city is bereft of time, change heralded only by the new names on the shop fronts, unravaged, the new jellied in the mould of what has been. Rain starts dripping, almost undetectable (particularly through greased-up hair like mine), the “seat” in the bus shelter a steel bar. Even with an arse as well-padded as mine it is still a question of the correct centre of balance. Brown paper bags for submarine sandwiches that drip mayonnaise the tuna appear to have respirated. I have one single postcard left to write that is sendable at any rate, to Eva and Ryszard, no, to Katy, the one to Copenhagen needs an address unavailable in my diary. It soothes the soul. I’ll retreat here where M can care for the offspring and I can be the solitude-seeker to write and T won’t know I’m back and I can lurk and watch and choose my company when I please. Maybe even use a quite different base – two women, Polish speakers, beside me – one day if I can spare the effort I can follow their conversation. What about a tea rose bush – bulging with ripe rosehips, elsewhere green pods, flowers and attendant bees – there’s a patch of bare soil beneath the briars where children have crawled, which they have claimed as a ganghut, much like the secret hideout in P. Oh there I could sit and camouflage my existence to the gulls and blackbirds of memory – there was the council strike and the grass on the pitch grew long, above the waist, a swish of jungle, crawl through, cut through, roll through, bound through, but THAK interrupts me – he provokes, presses, pushes, designer irritation, custom-built annoyance, the irony being that it is so transparent, intended to elicit a reaction, not the sort of attention he wants, though, not the affection of bliss or even mild Zuneigung, but contempt.
[1992]

I had not yet recovered from the twenty hour drive by the time I woke, the usual five minutes before the alarm was due to wrench me back to full consciousness. As I reached the entrance to the road, the bus imperiously glided past, forcing me to head back for a lift. Fortunately, the traffic flow was smooth, facilitated by the summer weather and the school holidays. As I placed my handbag on the conveyor to be scrutinised by the grey-uniformed guard the building was still semi-deserted, the corridors populated by legions of cleaning staff, meticulously wiping every ledge, the whine of suction breaking the silence.

Already my absence for one academic year had taken on the intangible quality of an illusion, a rapidly fading dream in which my real self receded into the pitiless shades as helplessly and unwillingly as Eurydice. The mesh guarded the coffee machine and upturned bottles of the bar, unwanted works of art obstructed passage. My pigeonhole contained little of interest: a salary statement, a copy of the new staff regulations, a cosmetic letter of condolence from an uncaring committee upon my sad loss, its nauseating and mendacious platitudes interspersed with references to the financial implications of my changed circumstances. The programme pinned to the wall confirmed my suspicions about being assigned to the only meeting being held the entire day. In spite of belonging to the highest ranks of officialdom, we are compelled as a caste to share a single office. At peak times (such as the beginning of the lunch break) the throng is unbearable. Our “relaxation rooms”, located in inaccesible corners next to ordinary offices, appropriated by stealth, leaving us with nowhere to go whilst on pager duty on the premises. My reverie was abruptly interrupted by the announcement that if I wanted to use the computer I would have to call security to re-open the door as I was being turfed out, the vacuuming having been completed.

The sickly smell of disinfecting alcohol assailed my nostrils as I entered the booth. Apart from the new consoles the first anomaly to attract my attention was the downsized mineral water in oestrogen-rich plastic packaging replacing the glass (which I always imagined was refilled at the end of the day from the taps in the toilets), although the colour coding (red for sparkling, blue for still) remained the same. The label had also undergone a face-lift with a dove emerging from a stream instead of the previous crudely-drawn generic mountain range to suggest purity. In the early days of my career we could choose between a carton of milk and fresh orange, the latter ceremoniously opened by an usher. At least when the tea came round real slices of lemon were piled carelessly on the plate rather than the concentrate in single portion containers we had lately been compelled to pour in.

Having adjusted the chair, my first act was to fill in a leave application form, not merely indicative of my state of mind, but the result of bureaucratic constraints (the deadline for submitting them about to expire). It is compulsory for us to take ten consecutive days when it suits the institution (the period fixed from on high), the only category bound by this stricture (merely one instance of the discrimination to which we are routinely subjected, expected to submit to the indignity not just meekly, but with a cloying smile of gratitude).

As my Father and my lover loaded the boxes into the people carrier from which the seats had been removed to accommodate the accumulated research materials, I knocked on the Welshman’s door.
“Come in!”
He was sitting in the armchair by the window, unlaced shoes abandoned under the table, feet resting on the low table strewn with draft chapters and articles.
“I’m off then,” I announced.
“Take a seat”.
I informed him that I had written a formal letter of thanks to the head of department in which I had praised the secretaries who had smoothed the transition with their friendliness and himself. Although no regard would be taken of my words, I felt I owed them that much. In response to my remark concerning the indifference with which my presence had been greeted by his appointed superior, he assured me that his relationship with TM was perfectly affable, but that he had to be handled with care as any criticism was taken as a personal affront, that he was a hard man: “Pastoral care for students? He dismisses the idea. A couple of years back, we had two suicides. There was this first year from Northern Ireland who didn’t settle in very well, becoming increasingly withdrawn. Nobody had spotted him around for a while and we began to worry. TM contacted his parents and they came over immediately. They hadn’t heard from him either and were extremely concerned. When they arrived, he called them in for an appointment. Do you know what his words were at the departmental meeting? ‘Well, the monkey’s on their back now’. Incredible!”
“I take it he’s divorced,” my wry comment upon the Professor’s callousness.
We strayed on to the subject of his recently published book on a notorious political theorist.
“It’s the fastest thing I’ve ever written. It was like opening a cupboard and everything falls out on top of you. I know exactly what the critics will say: he’s just compiled every quotation available and there’s no substance. I admit as much in the introduction. It’s a speculative work, as nothing can be proven”.
My lover leaned in through the open window to retrieve a bottle of water I had bought for him. They shook hands.
“I’m waiting for a nubile young researcher to give me a massage…in my dreams,” the Welshman laughed before showing him the review he was reading of a new volume on the subject of how Hitler’s psychiatrist had contributed to his maniacal self-belief by instilling a sense of election and destiny in the Führer-to-be during treatment for a nervous affliction induced by the war.
“I won’t keep her long,” he assured, as my lover returned to the business of lugging.
“I’m easily embarrassed, you know. I can’t shake the image of that girl doing her warm up exercises out of my mind…it brings out the hard disciplinarian in me. So, you’re driving back? Watch out for the silver Mercedes. One minute it will be in the mirror, the next overtaking you, as if everything else on the road was detritus. Bastards!”
We stood up and I turned to leave: “Goodbye, A, it’s been a blast”.
“Yes, it’s like that sometimes,” he smiled.
Having locked the almost empty office, I handed in the red plastic in and out trays and the pair of scissors at the reception, as well as the key.
The armless statues looked on impassively as I passed through the gate one last time.