Archive for the ‘de kooning’ Category
a queer sort of petrified sphinx
I finally watched I’m Not There. Todd Haynes’ method was immediately clear to me. I was quite amused when the Richard Gere Dylan – a man who seemed to be looking for the part of an ordinary man in an extraordinary world – wandered into the town of Riddle on Halloween. Here we have the familiar conceit of the world as a riddle, perhaps in a modernist incarnation. Riddles have an answer, have a sense and a meaning even if they are elusive. Nietzsche’s ‘World Riddle’ came to mind, the Welträtsel, and Pope’s poem ‘The Riddle of the World’. The riddle is second cousin to the jigsaw and the scheme in cosmological terms. Dylan Gere is a clear contrast to Dylan Blanchett , the one who just a year or two earlier had looked out on the world as an apocalyptic junkyard.
While Dylan Gere is wandering pensively around this place of Riddle, the narrator says something like ‘nobody’s who they seem to be’. Ha ha, I thought. He should have been in Glasgow on that night!
I suppose that the question watching the film threw up for me was whether Dylan was just an ordinary man in an extraordinary world or whether he was an extraordinary man in an ordinary world. (For the sake of completeness the other possibilities are an ordinary man in an ordinary world or an extraordinary man in an extraordinary world). The modern world itself of course never settles long enough to be called ordinary, so we might say that extraordinariness is the normal condition of existence in a society like ours. Extraordinary is the ordinary condition of late modernity. And the sixties were an extraordinary time. America at war with itself, a tortured nation, a nation disintegrating. Assassinations, napalm, the space race, the arms race, the cold war, television, rock and roll, paranoia. These were apocalyptic times. But isn’t modernity in any case pretty much the normalisation of apocalypse?
The film presents the self as a fragmented, vulnerable and contested reality. If we accept this premise then perhaps we should recognise that as a person Dylan was both ordinary and extraordinary, and that this was perhaps key to his difficulties. And yet it is the idea that Dylan was arguably Everyman in the film that interests me most, the notion that in reality Dylan is much the same as you or I and that (increasingly?) our situations are becoming like his. Nowadays we all have to deal with shifting personae and shifting expectations. And with the lure of celebrity. We can no longer be satisfied with ordinary lives and in our world of greedy media an extraordinary life will make you famous; we are somehow fooled into thinking the corollary of this is that to be famous will make your life extraordinary and transform you into an extraordinary person. It won’t. But to be a celebrity is an almost normal goal now. The opportunities are many, from Big Brother to The Weakest Link. And yet how will being a celebrity even for a day change us? We will expect a transformation, a sudden coming into real being. And yet the opposite is likely to happen. The half-hearted realities of ordinariness will vanish from out hand; we will suddenly become no-one at all.
Of course Dylan’s burden as a celebrity was exceptional. But perhaps only different in scale, not in nature. We all want to ‘live the dream’. Haynes’ tale from this perspective is a cautionary one: the dream is only a dream and once you see that you will collapse into yourself. Anomie and dissociation will follow. You may want to refuse them. You will not be able to.
Haynes has his Dylans speak lines from various Dylan sources – sleeve notes, poems, Tarantula, interviews and so on. At one point one of them says a poem is a naked person. It’s interesting Dylan didn’t say self: a self and a person are not the same thing. A person is an outward reality, a social and political entity. The self is a supposed inner entity, a psychological item. People will say Dylan is a complex person. Did anyone ever suggest he had a complex self? The self is something we imagine we see when gaze into ourselves (ha ha – did you notice the tautology here?!) The self is like a soul. Like an essence. We imagine each self as having a unique simplicity. Can we imagine a person without a self? This seems almost like asking if we can imagine a person without a body.
Bob Dylan is a complex person and it is this complexity that Haynes film seems to want to unravel. And yet ironically I think the film falls into the trap of trying to show us Dylan’s soul, even though it takes its primary text from the song which says ‘I’m not there’. Maybe it needs to do this for dramatic reasons, since where would a western narrative be with a protagonist too elusive or transient for the audience to identify with? There is no narrative to chaos, and without a narrative there may be no space for a me. Maybe there is something to be said for the idea of the self as a centre of gravity for the narrative of a life. Maybe the self is a necessary fiction, the unavoidable consequence of giving chaos an order. I accept chaos, Dylan Blanchett says, but I don’t know if chaos accepts me.
In Haynes’ narrative we are presented with a succession of selves we are to suppose Dylan to have had. We like to imagine the self as an onion, and think perhaps some people have more layers than others. Dylan’s layers are peeled away, one after another. I think the film is structured so that the reflective persona of Dylan Gere perhaps represents Dylan’s curious soul, the simplicity that he finally is. Dylan Gere appears almost as if he’s the father of the others, the one from whom the seed of all the others came.
Maybe this is a stretch, but does it make sense? Was Dylan more than one person – one self – at any one time? Dylan’s selves were successive rather than simultaneous. One didn’t lie beneath the other; one lay next to the other, succeeded it. Each self was performed and the performances were repeated until they were succeeded by a different performance – a different self. Haynes is right to give these selves different names; the extent to which they can be said to be the same self is problematic. Dylan’s life is a succession of selves, none of which has any privileged or higher reality. His life, like all our lives, is a life caught between becoming and having been. The self is not there, only the performance that is what we are. Dylan Gere appears to perhaps be the real Dylan, the inner man, a meta-self, a self beyond performance. But even this is an illusion.
Dylan breathed in the chaos that is America and breathed out shapes that made sense, the shapes of a new America, brave new versions of traditional identities, hanging in the air, fragile and flickering, as vulnerable as ghosts in a hurricane, like projections on the screen of the nation. Dylan performed a succession of American selves. Or perhaps a succession of American personae. In the end Bob Dylan found he could not escape from Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan was never really there at all. He sang America and America sang him. A song is anything that can walk alone, he said. A song falls short of selfhood. A song is not even a person, it seems. A song might be no more than a ghost.
The thing that I wonder about is whether Dylan in this film is Everyman. But the thing I remember about the film is the music, the way the songs seep from the scenes and haunt the images. The songs ambush you, taunt you, lure you into places you had forgotten about. The songs unsettle you and reassure you, sooth you and pierce you, empower you and terrify you. They do all these things at once. This is a film for Dylan freaks by a Dylan freak. In the end this is what the choice of songs says to me. These are legendary, hallowed songs, the songs from which the myth of Bob Dylan is woven.
I’m a bit worried about Tom Ridley. Tom is the admin manager for the area and works between three sites. I met him at the photocopier today. It’s a Xerox Workstation M35 model, a freestanding square box that’s about the size of chest freezer, or in animal terms, a small horse. Tom was talking quietly to it, promising it a ‘special treat’ if it was a ‘good boy’ and behaved itself for him.
‘Hi, Tom’ I said. ‘How you doing?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he replied. ‘Just trying to encourage Frodo to be a good boy for me.’
‘Frodo?’ I said. ‘The photocopier’s called Frodo?’
”Yes,’ Tom replied. ‘If he’s good all day I’ve promised him that I’ll take him out this afternoon.’
‘Out, eh? Anywhere special?’
‘The beach. He just loves the beach. Of course I’ve got to keep him on his lead in case he runs into the waves and gets washed out to sea. He’s still just a puppy really and very excitable.’
Tom leaned on Frodo’s stout ivory plastic frame as he spoke about him. I was wondering which end was which.
‘Of course the other thing about the beach,’ he went on, ‘ is that he gets to meet other photocopiers. That’s good for him because he needs to learn how to socialise with them and not to be aggressive or snappy.’
‘Yeah, that’s a good point,’ I said. I asked him if Frodo was almost finished his current job and could I perhaps copy a couple of reports.
‘Of course,’ Tom said. ‘You’re such a good boy, aren’t you? Now be nice for the man and copy his things carefully for him, do you hear?’
Tom patted his ivory friend affectionately on the shoulder, picked up his wad of documents and set off down the corridor towards his office.
About mid afternoon I went down to the photocopier to copy some documents. The photocopier was gone. I abandoned the idea and decided I’d go home early. I decided to drive down through Sleekburn and along through Cambois. I’d seen a television news item about E-on’s proposal to build a new coal fired power station there on the site of the old one and that local people were protesting about it. Quite understandably so too, because the government isn’t insisting that only so-called ‘clean’ coal fired power stations can be built. But did we really expect them to? Next thing you know the local MP’s will be telling us how this will be good for jobs, our own brave Socialist warrior foremost among them, no doubt.
It was dusk on the beach. As I drove south listening to Dengue Fever I saw a figure close to the shoreline making his way north. It was Tom. He was pulling along the Xerox M35 by a leash, like a man dragging a mule. Frodo seemed to me to be a rather more reluctant walker than Tom made him out to be. I was somehow reminded of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. For a moment I fancied I saw two small photocopiers run up to Frodo and sniff at him. Frodo set himself back on his haunches and his hackles went up. Tom is right, Frodo isn’t yet well socialised. I drove over the crossing and up through East Sleekburn, past the site of the old power station and Wilson Avenue. It was dark and there wasn’t a soul around. I wondered if I shouldn’t email Tom’s manager about his behaviour, but I decided it was really none of my business so long as he returned Frodo by morning and wiped the sand from his wheels before taking him back into the office. It’s certainly odd for a grown man to adopt a Xerox M35 as a pet and take him for walks on the beach, but it isn’t something which is very likely to harm children, at least not as long as Frodo is properly muzzled when they are around him.
When I got home that night Brenda was there. She had come to collect some more slippers to send out. She was wearing a knitted garment of many colours, a long wrap-around cardigan of sorts. It had multi-coloured words of some sort embroidered all over it.
‘Hi, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Nice cardie.’
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said. ‘It’s handmade. We bought it from a textile artist in Hawick a couple of weeks ago. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a doozy,’ I said. ‘What do the words say?’
‘You mean to say you don’t recognise them?!’ she said. She turned around to let me read her back. Entangled in meandering lines were phrases I struggled at first to recognise and disentangle. And then one of them became clear to me: a robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage.
‘The Auguries of Innocence?’ I said. ‘Your cardie’s got lines from Blake embroidered all over it?’
‘Yes,’ Brenda said, swinging back around. ‘Isn’t it fab?! Tristan bought it for me on a day out. I just had to have it. I’m going to wear it when I go to my next poetry weekend. What do you think? I think they’ll just adore me in this!’
I tried to read Blake’s entangled utterances as they crept and crawled and snaked and snaggled over her shoulders and down her arms and across her torso and around her hips. If the sun and moon should doubt in mustard yellow criss-crossed by the poison of the snake and newt in dull maroon. In emerald green, the beggar’s dog and widow’s cat giving birth to the long divergent slate blue arc of the wanton boy that kills the fly.
‘I think it’s fantastic, Brenda,’ I said. ‘Does she also do the Proverbs of Hell?’
‘Yes, she does. Oh, that one’s really beautiful too. Oh, did Margaret tell you about her horoscope, by the way?’
‘Not really,’ I said, remembering how last night I’d noticed Orion again for the first time this winter. ‘What star sign are you again, Brenda?’ I asked.
‘Taurus, of course,’ she replied. ‘Loving, loyal, prosperous and patient, the creative type. Doesn’t it show?’
‘It shows in your cardie,’ I said.
‘What sign are you, again?’
‘I believe I was born under the sign of hammer and sickle,’ I said.
De Kooning wandered in. I picked him up.
‘Have you got your stock of sunglasses in yet?’ I asked.
‘No, not yet. Why? Are you after a pair.’
‘Yeah, I was thinking about getting a friend a pair of Ray-Bans for Christmas.’
‘Aviators?’
‘No, Wayfarers.’
‘I’ll see if I can get you some, if you like.’
‘Thanks, Brenda. Yes, that would be great.’
Margaret came through from the kitchen. She’d put on a big pan of onions to boil. I went through and put a pizza in the oven for tea. I gave De Kooning some prawns and sat in front of the television to watch the news. Later I went upstairs and rummaged among my books to find something William James wrote about the notion that the world might be a riddle to which there is a single answer.
All the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul, draw the admiration that men have lavished on them from this oracular role. By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monotonous challenge to his divining powers. THE Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!
After I’d eaten I went out in the dark and walked through the town. Christmas is coming. The streets were remarkably quiet. I caught sight of my reflection in Woolworth’s window and for a moment thought it was a stranger. I was thinking about Nietzsche and Descartes and the Wizard of Oz.
.
exodus and a last hand of whist
They’ve been demolishing Newsham Library this week. I noticed as I drove through Newsham on Friday that it is now almost all down. A gaping space has opened up between the shops and the flats, a sort of scandalous vacuum. I caught glimpses of it down Elliot Street and the back lane between the Black Diamond and Tanz-N-Ere. I could see the giant crooked metal arm of a demolition machine poised above the rubble. It reminded me that things are disappearing so quickly. I really must hurry and photograph all those buildings and places that will be gone any day now. This is a matter of urgency to me. Time moves on inexorably, flattening the old world to make a place for the new. It worries me that some places might be destroyed before I’ve made a record of them. I want my inventory to be as complete as it can be. I know of course that the photograph will never really bring them back. But it may bring back memories. Things do need to be remembered. My granddad spent the last years of his life in sheltered housing in Newsham. He probably toddled down Winship Street to this building every week a few years ago to find himself a book to read, probably a political biography, or maybe a travel book or a whodunit, or maybe The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The truth is I don’t really know what my granddad’s taste in books was.
In 1984 I was a student. During the miners’ strike I was a member of the Labour Party. My monthly ward branch meetings took place in a room in Newsham Library, which at that time may have been a community centre of sorts, I think, or maybe it was still a working men’s club. Bundles of canny old ladies from another age would faithfully attend to make tea and provide a sort of amiable Socialist ballast. They had votes they gave away in the same good-hearted spirit that they gave away the cakes and biscuits they brought along. The rest of the branch comprised a bunch of men of various ages, dispositions and motivations – Arthur Hancock, Ronnie Milburn, Bill Brookes were among them, as I recall – who would debate or mull over or grumble or chunter on about the heroic tragedy or stupidity of the strike, flying pickets, the difficult or duplicitous position of the railwaymen, Kinnock’s devious cowardice, Scargill’s reckless leadership, or whatever. The branch chairman was Peter Mortakis, an insignificant Machiavellian sort of man with the political and moral integrity of a blowfly. He was in cahoots with the MP at the time, a useless, self-serving, Rumpolian, persistently absent carpetbagger. A lawyer. The sort of man who could have been Tony Blair’s favourite uncle.
The room where the meetings took place was dark, maroon and brown, full of deep shadows and dim yellow lights that glinted on the glasses and bottles behind the bar. A sense of history seemed to stain the place, like blood on an old carpet. I never felt comfortable there, but it was a place where I somehow had to think I belonged. It was like needing to stand for a while in a painting by Norman Cornish or Tom McGuinness. Here was a world of ordinary people bound together by adversity. Here was the security of a mythical universe. Of course I can see now that the writing was already on the wall. Thatcher had already lined up the machines that would one day come and demolish this place. This week that day arrived. You can be pretty sure that a block of affordable first-time buyer apartments is already on its way.
Things have been hectic at work in the last two weeks. A tsunami of referrals has hit us after a period of inexplicable calm. This is always the way in social work. It’s unlikely that some mysterious force is at work in society that from time to time casts a curse over a particular place and makes a lot of children there suddenly begin to suffer harm at the same time, a sort of evil spirit that randomly visits a part of the population. It’s more likely that these waves are to some degree chance occurrences and a consequence of fluctuations in levels of responsiveness and concern among professionals. But maybe it is all down to chance. And a sighting of Snow White’s stepmother in Ashington would hardly come as much of a surprise these days.
Thursday was a particularly bad day. Kids scared to go home from school, kids with bruises, kids with fractures, kids with burns, kids home alone, babies losing weight, babies in cold houses, tiny babies that no-one could find. Drunken mothers, drunken dads, dads throwing plates at walls, mothers throwing shoes, depressed mothers, dads doing drugs.
Late that afternoon everyone in the team was out on something or other. Michelle had spent half an hour with the police trying to get into the house of a twenty five year old mother called Tania who seemed to have lost all interest in her three week old baby. The flat was in darkness but the key was visible on the inside of the door, so there was obviously someone in the house. Eventually Tania came downstairs and answered the door. She was with her new sixteen year old boyfriend, Joe, the same boy who a few days earlier had bitten her on the face during an argument. She’d dumped him, she said. Joe and Tania had been in bed when Michelle and the police disturbed them. But where was baby Davina? Tania wasn’t telling. Tania wouldn’t take Michelle and the police to see her, not even under the threat of arrest. Michelle rang me up: what should we do? Baby P was on all our minds; the moorings of rationality were coming loose. All we could hear was the footfall of the beast slouching towards Bethlehem.
‘Have you tried torture?’ I said. ‘Pull her fingernails out. Offer her money. Tania needs to be persuaded to tell us where her baby is. If she doesn’t do so she’s got no chance of keeping it when we find it. But for God’s sake don’t make her any promises. We’re not going to be able to leave the baby there tonight now in any case, are we?’
Fifteen minutes later Tania told them where the baby was and they all set off in the police car to find her. She turned out to be with Tania’s sister. She’d been there all day. She was fit and well. On another day we might have decided to just leave her there and look at it again in the morning. But Baby P was on the minds of the police officers too. Baby Davina was made subject to Police Protection. Michelle arrived back at the office with the baby in her arms at about half past five. I told her who the foster carer was going to be.
‘Oh, is Debs around?’ she said. ‘I’ve just seen a police car chasing a white Mercedes down Milburn Road. I’m sure it was being driven by an Arab.’
‘Debs is at the hospital,’ I said. ‘Kid with a broken arm.’
On my way home that night I went to Tesco’s at North Shields. I was looking for a DVD of The Wizard of Oz. They didn’t have one, but I did pick up a copy of Todd Haynes film about Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. I didn’t see it when it came out, although I’d wanted to. At about seven o’clock I was driving back through Whitley Bay. My mobile rang. It was Debs.
‘The paediatrician says the injury could have been accidental. She’s not prepared to say it wasn’t.’
‘And the kid and mother are sticking to their story that he fell off a wall?’
‘Yep.’
‘And there have been no previous concerns about this kid?’
‘Nope.’
‘Then the kid goes home and we do an assessment, I guess.’
‘Should we have a strategy meeting?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Debs. Maybe. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’
I turned on the car radio and listened to Bob Harris’s country show on Radio 2. He played a song by George Strait called ‘I Saw God Today’.
On Friday morning Debs’ husband phoned in to say she was sick. She’d been taken ill during the night. It sounded serious and she was probably going to have to go into hospital.
‘Tell her to take it easy and that we hope she gets well soon,’ I said, and began to wonder what I could do with her caseload.
‘Anyone fancy doing an assessment on a kid with a broken arm?’ I said to the rest of the team. Daft question. They all looked at me as if I needed treatment. At that point reception rang to say that Jack Verdi had arrived for a meeting with Debs. I went along to see him.
‘Hi, Jack,’ I said. ‘Hey, hey, rock and roll! What’s with the shades, dude?’ He was wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators.
Jack laughed, but he didn’t explain. I told him Debs was poorly and that the meeting couldn’t go ahead. He was fine about that and immediately went on to talk to me about the genius of Keats. Jack sees himself as in some way Keats last real disciple, which is odd for a man who’s prepared to prance around in little more than his boots to impress a few dozen middle aged women. There’s only so much mellow fruitfulness such women can take. But autumn is always a peak activity time for the disciples of Keats, of course, so Jack’s digression wasn’t really that unexpected.
Today it was breezy but bright and fairly mild for November. In the morning I walked down Plessey Road and bought The Guardian at the newsagents. I then continued on down to Park Road corner and along Beaconsfield Street towards the town centre, before turning to cross Croft Road and go up Marine Terrace and back across Broadway Circle. A few leaves still cling to the trees but most are assigned to the gutters in drifts of yellow and brown or stuck on the roads like squashed butterflies.
This afternoon I rode along to my dad’s on my bike. The refurbishment of his house is still not complete. It’s becoming pretty obvious that a lot of the tradesmen recruited by the private contractor doing the refurbishments – Frank Haslam – don’t know what they’re doing. Some of them have admitted this to my dad. Some of them also seem to be canvassing for the redecoration work off their own backs. My dad’s cheesed off, but there’s not much he can do to get the work finished any quicker.
My dad was born and brought up in Newsham. I told him about the library building now being knocked down. I asked him what he could remember about this building.
‘We called it the Big Club,’ he said. ‘Your grandfather used to often go down there at one time to play cards. He was very friendly with Bob Oxley, who was the steward at the time.’
He went on to tell me that what is now the Victory Club used to be the Wooden Club, because it was a wood building. There were also a couple of other pubs in Newsham in those days, neither of them more than a stone’s throw away from the three that still survive. They were the Miner’s Arms and the Turk’s Head. Newsham Coop used to be close to the Miner’s Arms and close to the Big Club, During the 1926 General Strike the Sunshine Fund or some such charity used to provide meals for the kids upstairs in the Coop building. The thing my granddad always remembered was the smell of the gingerbread pudding drifting down the stairs and into the street.
The local doctor had a room in the house opposite the Big Club. I think my dad said he was called Dr Gordon, although this could be a Freudian slip: it might have been Gardener. Either way, he was known as ‘The Butcher’. He was the doctor employed by Cowpen Coal Company for their compensation scheme. He had a reputation for sending men back to work at the pit when they were still unfit to be there.
It was getting dark as I rode back. The light was enchanting. The sky had those hard clear gradations from black-blues into orangey-greens and tobacco that you only get in winter. The sea was a pale and steely blue. There were quite a few people on the beach with dogs.
I got back before dark. The washed-up computer desk has disappeared from Hugo’s front garden and the gates to his drive are open. It looks like the Alligator is at long last ready for the road. I went inside and negotiated my way through to the kitchen over the assorted assemblies of slippers. I gave De Kooning a sachet of Felix and made myself a cappuccino. I sat in the conservatory reading The Guardian for a while. The headline said that eight out of ten children who are seriously harmed are ‘missed’ by agencies, whatever ‘missed’ means. This sort of stuff scares senior managers to death, of course. ‘Whither goes Sharon Shoesmith, there go I,’ they think. It’s a situation you can be sure will soon mean a lot of work for the rest of us.
I picked up De Kooning and we peered together out into the darkness beyond the garden fence. The glimmer of strange lights was appearing again in the Citadel. Margaret was on the phone talking to Geraldine.
‘Have you seen any sign of rats out there?’ I whispered to De Kooning. ‘No? No, I thought not.’
Margaret came through and said that she and Geraldine were going to ring Griff on Monday and give him an ultimatum: get rid of the rats or they call in Environmental Health and go to the press.
‘What if there aren’t any rats there?’ I said. ‘How can anyone prove they’ve got rid of something which isn’t really there to begin with?’
‘How could they not be there?!’ Margaret said. ‘Trevor’s seen them again twice this week!’
I began to think that the mythical rats of the Citadel might be refugees from the Big Club building at Newsham. Maybe they are an exiled tribe of working class rodents displaced by modernity, looking for a new set of premises under which to continue their way of life. On their exodus they probably crossed Winship Street and made their way through the allotments and across the old railway line and then followed a route through the back gardens down Twentieth Avenue. I can see them now, scurrying bravely along carrying everything they own, all with their little knapsacks on their backs. Suddenly after forty days of dodging cats and kids with airguns their long walk brought them to the Citadel. The bare girders loomed above them.
‘This must be our new home!’ their weary little hearts exclaimed.
Which seems fair enough to me, but it isn’t exactly the future Margaret and Geraldine have in mind for them.
I was going to watch my new DVD tonight, but Margaret cancelled her plans to go out. I sat in the conservatory reading for a while and then logged on to Amazon. I ordered The Wizard of Oz. I went out and walked up to Newsham. It’s a cool, clear sort of night. The wind has dropped. I walked up Elliot Street. The lights from the pizza and chip shop, the Chinese and the Indian take-away flooded out across the dry pavement. The smell of curry and onions floated in the air. The rubble of the Big Club is fenced off. The big Cat machine stands among it, it’s demolition arm resting its heavy nose on the ground. I stood on the other side of the road.
‘Okay, granddad,’ I said. ‘German whist. Your deal.’
.
if rats are made out of nothingness
New Labour won the Glenrothes by-election. Gordon will be gloating. He sits at night in his new primrose yellow room full of broken cogs and scattered springs and cannot believe his luck. He sniggers. He chortles. He laughs like a Kirkcaldy drain. How many dark nights did he sit over-winding his beloved timebomb, praying to the mythical deity that the bloody thing wouldn’t blow up in his face? But blow up it does and guess what: he’s off the hook! You’d almost think Gordon had done this deliberately, wouldn’t you? I gather he’s now asked Sarah to get him a wrecking ball for Christmas. He’s told her he’s come up with an ingenious solution to the recession in the construction industry.
I spoke to Talullah Hudspith a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her since Rosie’s leaving do. She asked me what I thought of Jack’s performance.
‘Quite remarkable,’ I said. ‘And brave. The man rocks, doesn’t he?’
Talullah and Jack have an odd relationship. Some say she has a thing about him; others say the exact opposite is true. I personally remain agnostic on the Talullah and Jack issue.
‘Do you think so?’ Talullah said, with more than a hint of a sneer. ‘I thought he was bloody ridiculous, actually. I mean, what on earth would possess a man of his age to prance around like that in front of all those poor women? He’s got no shame.’
In the light of this response you too will now no doubt be hypothesising about Talullah and Jack. I certainly was. But a tactical evasion seemed the order of the day.
‘So is he back at work?’ I asked.
Talullah chuckled, or perhaps snortled. ‘Oh ho, he’s back all right!’ she said. ‘The dirty hound’s always skulking around in the shadows somewhere. He’s never yet spoken to me about his antics, of course. He’s quite ridiculous, really. Do you know he’s now wearing dark glasses for work? He never takes them off. Who the hell does he think he is, Elvis Presley?!’
‘Yeah, I would be too if I’d done what he did!’ I said. ‘The guy’s probably just a bit embarrassed.’
‘Embarrassed?! Him?! That’s a laugh. You couldn’t knock him back with a shitty stick, man. No, he’s a star reborn, that’s what our Jack is. I wish he’d do us all a favour and just retire.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘How’s the delightful Mrs Gormley? Did she enjoy the night?’
‘Oh, Betty loved it! She’d do it again tomorrow if she could.’
‘Maybe Jack’ll play for her if she asks him nicely,’ I said. ‘If he really is a star reborn, he’ll have no problem with that. Nor will she, I suspect. Just as long as he keeps his pants on next time.’
Talullah’s from a theatrical blackground. She’s naturally dramatic. She’s the kind of woman who likes to start a riot. Maybe it just gets up her nose that Jack upstaged her.
Mandy has been into the office a couple of times this week. There have been almost daily sightings of the Arab in the white Mercedes and she’s getting very stressed. On Friday she and Mr Zee were waiting to see Debs when I arrived at the office. Mr Zee looked very smart, as always. His rich brown cape was almost shimmering in the morning sun.
‘How you doing?’ I said to him.
‘I’m okay,’ he replied. ‘You know.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I know. So are you still reading Bukowski?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I decided he wasn’t my cup of tea. I’m reading Neruda at the minute. They’ve got lots of his stuff at ZorrStore.com. I’m trying to get into Rumi too.’
Mandy then told me that the phone had rung seven times during the night for each of the last three nights, and each and every time it was the same old tune.
‘Is Flinty still with Molly?’ I asked.
Mandy shrugged and looked at Mr Zee.
‘We don’t know,’ he said.
‘Have you told the police?’
‘Yeah. Nothing they can do. The caller’s using a stolen mobile.’
When I got home that night there were three more big boxes of slippers in the hall. De Kooning was sitting on top of them playing king of the castle. Geraldine was talking to Margaret about the latest curse of the Citadel: rats. They were first spotted by Big Trevor while I was in Glasgow it seems, scuttling around beneath his railings.
‘They weren’t there until the builders came,’ Geraldine said.
I wondered if she thought the builders had imported them as a sort of alien species, or simply because no building site is complete without a good infestation of rodents.
‘So how did they get there?’ I asked, already allowing my mind to toy with the notion of their ex nihilo creation.
‘Well, it can only be the building site, can’t it?’ Margaret said. ‘They weren’t there until they started building that monstrosity.’
Okay, I thought, but how did they get here? Did Griff dress himself as the Pied Piper and lead them here from their old haunts along the quayside? Did they hear along the grapevine about the Citadel site and make their way here, like the Israelites to the Promised Land, like Americans to California? My guess was that they’ve always been here or that perhaps the sightings are apocryphal, a plague of the Citizens’ collective imagination.
‘We need to visit the site en masse and register our protest,’ Geraldine said. ‘Rats are dangerous. Did you know that they sometimes curl up on your pillow beside your face as you sleep! Imagine that. It’s horrific!’
‘Will we be safe?’ Margaret asked.
‘As long as we wear sensible footwear we will be!’ Geraldine said, obviously recalling the mass trespass during the summer when she fell off her high heeled boots. It’s not often Geraldine makes a joke about herself.
‘I’ll wear my Timberlands,’ Margaret said. ‘They’ll never get me in them.’
I went through to the conservatory to drink a cappuccino. There were a dozen or so pairs of slippers lined up across the floor. They were obviously part of the Christmas stock. Slippers with owls and guitars and ducks on them. Camper van slippers, cows and gingerbread men slippers. There were also a couple of pairs of fake fur leopard skin bootie slippers. I stepped over them and stood at the window. The sky was almost dark. There were vague lights flickering somewhere deep in the carcase of the Citadel. It looms over us like Kafka’s Castle. I began again to wonder where Hugo had put his little giraffe.
‘Edna will never come home now,’ Margaret said, after Geraldine had left. ‘She’ll never cope with the idea that she might wake up and find a rat sleeping next to her face. It’s an absolute crying shame.’
I stared out at the Castle. I wondered about the rats that are made out of nothingness.
‘I’m going to Brenda’s tonight,’ Margaret said. ‘Her friend who’s an astrologer is coming to her house. She’s going to do my horoscope.’
I nodded. I said nothing for a minute or so.
‘Are you taking some of these slippers with you?’ I eventually asked.
‘No,’ Margaret said. ‘But I am taking the boxes in the hall.’
When she left I had another cappuccino and sat for a while reading my book on Scottish art. Some of W G Gillies’ paintings are stunning. I love his border landscapes and they sort of feel like home to me too. It takes a lot of confidence to paint as freely as he does in those paintings. But I was particularly taken on Friday night by his 1973 painting The Garden in Winter. We sometimes fail to see the beauty that lies in the ordinary things, the things we can see from our windows. We sometimes fail to see how much those things really matter. I gave De Kooning his prawns and painted a new square canvas over with a Prussian blue ground.
I watched it dry and listened to Meg Baird’s album. I decided I would have to go up to Temple soon to see the house where Gillies lived and where he did all those late paintings.
I watched Newsnight. I went to bed.
.
at the mansion of the halloween lolitas
This photograph shows Adam Smith’s bust in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. I took it on Friday. It shows Smith and his ghost looking at one another. I wondered if perhaps it could stand as a metaphorical comment on our current economic woes.
I went to Glasgow a couple of days ago, mixing business and pleasure. I went via the A69 to Carlisle and then up the M74 to Glasgow. The soft slow blaze of autumn smouldered up the Tyne Valley and over into Cumbria and all the way over the Galloway hills. It is Samhain, the time of the end and beginning of the Celtic year, the time of the festival of the dead and bone-fires, the time of apples, nuts, egg-whites and crows. The time of the final harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year.
Kelvingrove is a beautiful place, the most impressive and enthralling gallery and museum I have ever been in. It contains and somehow or in some way integrates many diverse aspects of the cultural and natural worlds (although I might want to argue that once something enters a museum it can only be culture, and not nature, and not only for the obvious reason that there are no stuffed animals in nature!). Because of the design of this huge old mansion – all stone staircases and long balconies which look over its large lower spaces – it is a place which throws at the visitor an astonishing succession of quite unforeseen and often surely quite accidental combinations of items. These idiosyncratic juxtapositions, depending as they do very much on the eye and interest of the individual observer, make the experience open-ended and potentially unique for each visitor. Kelvingrove offers the imagination an endless feast, a chance to make chaos out of order and a new order out of chaos. It’s a magnificent junkyard rather than a marvellous jigsaw. Hugo would love it. Go there. You won’t see what I’ve seen, but what you do see might amuse you.
Kelvingrove is a metaphor for the city itself in the way it brings together disparate objects and experiences. Kelvingrove is also a metaphor for the attractive but ultimately misleading façade offered to us in the self-(mis)representation of modern cities by their marketing and PR people. Don’t get me wrong, Kelvingrove is a fantastic, enchanting place and I’d happily spend a whole week there; but it doesn’t show the whole of life and it doesn’t show the whole of Glasgow life. Glasgow has higher child poverty levels than anywhere else in Britain. In some parts of the city forty-nine out of every fifty children are living on or below the poverty line. In Kelvingrove poverty simply vanishes up the sleeve of social history. Kelvingrove does its job incredibly well, but it’s just not its job to tell the whole truth.
I went to Kelvingrove on Friday to look again at the paintings of the Glasgow Boys, which I’d previously looked at while they were temporarily housed in the McLellan Gallery on Sauchiehall Street while Kelvingrove was being restored. In Kelvingrove the paintings are exhibited in the ‘Scottish Art’ room, along with paintings by the Scottish Colourists, whose work I also like a great deal. I used to like Fergusson the most, but looking on Friday on Friday at the Kelvingrove selection – which I think is relatively weak in terms of Fergusson stuff – I began the think that in some ways Peploe and Cadell were at least his equal and in some ways his superior. On the strength of the Kelvingrove, Fergusson’s work looks less original than theirs and his handling of paint far less subtle and skillful. I’ve never yet been much impressed by Leslie Hunter’s stuff and Friday didn’t change my mind much on that question.
The Glasgow Boys’ paintings astonished me, as they always do, in their perception of light and their rendering of this in paint. On Friday I especially noticed George Henry’s paintings. His A Galloway Landscape is in the far corner of the Scottish Art room. I had mistakenly thought it was in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh when I last saw it, but clearly it must have been in the McLellan gallery at the time. I love this painting, but always wonder how it looked when it was first painted. I wonder if the obscurity of the cattle isn’t the result of the whites becoming dirty and dull – although this hasn’t happened to the clouds – and whether Henry really wanted them to be so murky, although of course the murkiness may well be one of the reasons for the painting’s success now in engaging some viewers. Things sometimes mean more to us when we’ve got to decide for ourselves what they are.
I had intended to go and see the ‘Impressionism and Scotland’ exhibition, which had just opened that day. But I spent too long in the other parts of the gallery it was late afternoon before I got there. I decided to leave it till another day. I bought three postcards instead – one of Henry’s Galloway Landscape, and another of Cadell’s Interior – the orange blind. The third is James Guthrie’s strangely haunting portrait Old Willie – the village worthy.
It was already dusk as I walked back up to Kelvinhall subway station and caught the underground back into the city centre. I wandered through the crowds of shoppers on Buchanan Street and back down to my hotel. Later I came back out and went looking for an Italian restaurant that might serve a good vegetarian meal.
Glasgow is a big city and seems to throng at all times of the day and night. By comparison, Newcastle looks hardly more than a small town. On Halloween Glasgow was full of weird and wonderful characters of all kinds. Of course, we all know that until recently Halloween was a humble folky sort of date on the calendar, but that like many other minor annual occasions it has been hijacked by business looking to make money wherever it can. The colours of this enterprise are orange and black, its sacred vegetable is the pumpkin.
On Friday night in Glasgow there was many a ghoul and ghoostie, some fine Draculas and Frankensteins, many a witch and crone. There were zombies and the undead, droves of unquiet corpses wandering the city with blackened eyes and theatrical blood on their anaemic chops. This is no more than you might expect.
But was there something else going on that night?
Maybe it was just me, but on Halloween in Glasgow it began to seem that nobody was who they seemed to be. The city seemed to be virtually inhabited by people in fancy dress, and I really don’t know yet if this was to do with Halloween or about something else entirely. What I do know, of course, is that on this occasion it was nothing to do with Flinty.
As I was crossing the huge space of the Central Station I noticed there were lots of young girls dressed as bumblebees and angels and fairies. Batman then passed me, arm in arm with Catwoman. When I got outside there was a whole queue of strange characters at the bus stop opposite. Interspersed with the usual vampires and ghouls I spotted Minnie Mouse and Scooby Doo, nurses, French maids, police women, Eskimos, Red Indian braves, Superman, The Grim Reaper, and, to my amusement, an Arab. It was beginning to feel like home.
Around the next corner I encountered my second batman, this time accompanied by a very short and tubby female Robin. Next up was Wonderwoman, and then a male superhero who was clad completely in a banana yellow skinsuit except for black trunks. I lack the knowledge to identify him for you with certainty. I called him Banana Man. He shook my hand firmly and reassured me that the city tonight was safe in his hands. He had a heavy Glaswegian accent. I then encountered Rob Roy, Snow White, a tramp, a Roman centurion, and two ghosts in kilts playing the bagpipes. It was as this point I realised I could now no longer differentiate with any confidence between the real and the make-believe.
On Nelson Mandela Place I came across the three wise men talking to a female Dominatrix and my third Batman of the night. Inexplicably, Mandela himself wasn’t around, but of course the night was still young.
At the restaurant I played safe. I had garlic bread followed by the special for that night, pumpkin ravioli in tomato sauce. I had vanilla ice cream for dessert. Later, when I stepped back outside, I encountered a character who I think was Tintin’s dog, Snowy, who appeared to have had a little too much to drink. He was trying to catch up with a rather lean but stylish scarecrow, inspired, I felt, by the one in Wizard of Oz. As I headed back towards the river I met Robocop, Cinderella, and a black cat, along with the regular tribe of ghosts and hags and girls in leopard skin boots and bikinis.
I made my way back down past the Station towards my hotel. Outside the Solid Rock Café at the bottom of Hope Street there were a lively crowd of truly strange characters, some of them in fancy dress and some of them characters I hadn’t yet seen that night. There was a cool-looking gunslinger dressed all in black and – a particularly rare find, I thought – a Super Mario! In my head I was already working on my “I-Spy Weird People in Glasgow at Halloween” book. Super Mario will score you 25 points. Snowy and Nelson Mandela will each score 15. A normal ghoul or hag will score 2 points, a man in a kilt 5 points, 6 if he’s playing bagpipes.
I crossed the road to the hotel and made for my room. The Scots will know better than I do what to expect of Samhain. But what I’d just experienced seemed to me to be taking guising to a whole other level. If Tristan had been there he’d no doubt have explained the whole things in terms of commodity fetishism, or some such aberration. I put the kettle on. I wondered if I should drink my instant cappuccino by candlelight.
The next day I had a look around the shops and listened to the street entertainers and buskers on Buchanan Street. The world had regained its previous shape. I went to the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art and looked at the show of Jo Spence’s photographs, some of which were those she took of herself while she was dying of breast cancer. It’s a harrowing and somewhat dark exhibition, although ultimately her bravery and creative courage can only be seen as uplifting.
After nightfall I was out again, and for while at about eight or so, stood near Pizza Hut on the corner of Jamaica Street and Argyle Street. I was exploring my thesis that at nights Glasgow is always full of weirdoes and that what I’d seen the previous night wasn’t really a grotesque late Capitalist version of an ancient Pagan festival at all. I quickly spotted Scooby Do and two guys who were dressed a bit like turkeys. Then Batman crossed the road at the traffic lights. This was reassuring.
And then I noticed a stream of young teenage girls trickling out of the Cathouse, which I took to be a nightclub and which is situated below the Station. There were dozens of them, all aged between about twelve – and in some cases less – up to about fifteen, dressed as what I took to be fairies or angels or characters from children’s stories. They teetered from the Cathouse in high heels and stumbled over the road to KFC, often taking their shoes off half way across and walking on in their stocking feet. They wore socks that were knee high or just above the knee, often striped, sometimes white, sometimes with bows at the top. They were all wearing very short skirts, which were often bright pink and full and frilly and looked like tutus. The girls all had bare thighs. Some of them wore tiaras or antennae or red devil’s horns. Quite a few wore white or pink angels wings. It was obvious that their dress encoded a blatant combination of childish innocence and precocious sexuality. They were Alice in Wonderland crossed with Fifi the French Maid. The street was awash with Glaswegian Lolitas of some kind.
Did there bloody mothers know they were all out like this, I wondered. Where the hell were their dads? Was this a one-off dispensation for Halloween, which in Glasgow goes on for several days? As I waited I watched the gauche, self-conscious young girls stumbling in twos and threes across the road and along the path and on past Poundland and Subway towards the east end of the city. Occasionally a stretch Limo would pass and sometimes toot at them. The police passed in a Panda, but they didn’t give them a second look.
I later researched these Halloween Lolitas on Google. It seems that Gothic-Lolita is quite a hot style for young teenage girls at present, and that the style owes some of its popularity to the Japanese harajuka girls and a look promoted by Gwen Stefani. These Glasgow girls display many of the key features of the style. In fact all that was really missing were the parasols. So it isn’t just a Halloween thing. And nor is it just a Glasgow thing. It seems pretty clear that girls like this will be appearing on a street corner near you any day now. It struck me that some of the girls we deal with at the office probably dress this way when they go out. I wondered if this was something we should care about.
When I got back home this afternoon, the house was filled with the sweet smell of onions and pastry. In the hall there were several large boxes of slippers. Christmas is on its way. I went into the kitchen. There were five onion pies on the bench cooling. De Kooning came scampering in to see me. He rubbed his head against my shin.
‘Hey, I didn’t see you in Glasgow the other night, did I?’ I said.
I picked him up and ruffled his fur. He began to purr.
‘Come on, then,’ I said. ‘You can help me unpack. I’ve got some new postcards to show you. The Glasgow boys and girls are something else. You just won’t believe the wonders I’ve seen this time.’
.
on the day the clocks went back
The clocks went back last night. British Summer Time is over, the dark nights are here. It was a sunny morning, cool and windy. As I left the house to go for a walk and get the newspapers, Hugo was getting out of his car. He had a small plastic giraffe under his arm.
‘Here, mate, that tree of yours has suddenly gone yellow, hasn’t it?’ he shouted.
‘Happens every autumn, Fletch,’ I said, laughing.
Maureen and the Whelp were knocking on the Widow’s door.
‘She’s gone away,’ I said.
‘Oh?’ Maureen said. The Whelp gawped superciliously over her shoulder.
‘No, no,’ I said, seeing that my remark had an ambiguity which those who were religiously minded might find especially confusing. ‘I mean she’s gone to stay with her brother in Derbyshire. We’re not sure when she’ll be back.’
‘Oh,’ Maureen said again, but this time with a relieved smile. She got out her note book and wrote something in it. Perhaps she was noting that the Widow hadn’t escaped doing business with them by grabbing an early flight to heaven with the Methodists.
Boz went completely off the rails last week. He came to the office several times with one query after another about his children and his rights and the stupidity of the law. On Wednesday he was arrested for stealing seed from a bird-feeder in a garden on the Fallowfield estate. It appears that he had been reliably informed that commercial bird seed contains cannabis seeds.
Boz had estimated that there are probably about five hundred bird feeders in Ashington, mostly hanging from trees and bird tables in the new private estates. He reckoned that there would be on average a pound of seed in each feeder. If ten percent of that was cannabis seed that would be fifty pounds of the stuff. Boz reckoned a shrewd dealer would surely pay a tidy sum for fifty pounds of cannabis seed. All he had to do was to break the town into manageable harvesting districts – each district being about the right size for one night’s work – and systematically gather the seed from the gardens. He couldn’t fail.
On Wednesday night he found himself with his back against a six foot lattice fence in a garden in Magnolia Drive, cornered behind the garden pond by a Rottweiller called Dexter Dan. Dexter Dan’s owner, Geoffrey Harrison, a retired seaman and Chief Storekeeper by trade, shone his high-powered torch into Boz’s face and told him the police were on there way. Rather uncharacteristically Boz said nothing and instead began eating the seed from his pocket. He later explained that he’d calculated that trespass was a less serious offence than possession of more of a Class C drug than he could reasonably argue was for personal use only.
Boz was released the following morning and came in to see Lily at about lunchtime. He told her of the idea he’d had and how he’d been apprehended on his very first seed gathering expedition.
‘They kept me in a cell all night, Lil,’ he said. ‘The police have no right to do the things they do, you know. Do I look like a criminal to you, Lil? Do I?’
Lily shook her head ambiguously. ‘So did they charge you with anything?’ she asked.
‘They’re complete numpties, complete bloody wassocks.’
‘So you were charged with something?’
‘They charged me with criminal damage to a bird feeder.’ Boz looked Lily straight in the eyes. He was very serious. He was saying loud and clear that this was no laughing matter.
‘Well, that’s not serious, Boz,’ she said. ‘I mean, it might never get to court.’
‘They also charged me with the theft of ten ounces of birdseed with an estimated value of two pounds fifty.’ He paused.
Lily put his hand on his shoulder.
‘I’ll be a laughing stock, Lil,’ he said. ‘The numpties from Newbiggin will call me Birdseed or Pecker or something else just as stupid that they’ll think is absolutely bloody hilarious. I’ll never be able to hold my head up in Ashington again. Never.’
‘Forget about it,’ Lily said. ‘Listen, no-one will ever know about it in any case if it doesn’t get to court. And I’m sure it won’t, Boz. It’d be a waste of public money.’
‘Can I have the kids this weekend, Lil?’ Boz asked, very calmly. ‘I need them with me right now. You can come and inspect the caravan if you want.’
Lily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Boz’, she said. ‘You know that can’t happen. It’s just not the right thing for the kids.’
Boz shook his head slowly. But he didn’t get angry at all. In fact, Lily felt he accepted this very easily. He looked very composed, as if he’d finally gained control of himself. As if, as Lily put it, the penny had finally dropped. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I just needed to ask you. You understand that, right?’
‘Yes,’ Lily said. ‘I do understand.’
What happened in the next few hours is somewhat unclear. However, at about eight thirty on Thursday evening the police were called to Bubbles where Boz was being restrained by the doorman and a couple of lads from North Seaton. Boz had gone into Bubbles and announced to everyone there that he was a suicide bomber and that he was about to blow the place up. He pulled open his jacket and revealed a belt which he claimed was packed with explosives. The doorman sauntered over, head-butted him and threw him to the ground. The lads from North Seaton then helped out by putting in the boot. They removed the belt and found it was packed with Rowntree’s Table Jelly.
The police arrested Boz and initially considered holding him under Schedule 8 of the Terrorism Act 2000. However, it struck the duty Sergeant that a man who had just one day earlier been arrested for stealing birdseed from a garden feeder and who at the time of arrest had nothing more dangerous on his person than some unopened packets of Rowntree’s Table Jelly, probably wasn’t a member of Al Qaeda. In fact, he probably wasn’t at all well. Later that night Boz was sectioned. He is now in St George’s Hospital.
On Friday night I went to a working men’s club in Cramlington for the retirement do for Rosie Lake, who has managed long-term placements for children since time began. I don’t like these sort of does and, while I like and respect Rosie, I would normally have given it a very wide berth. Unfortunately I was roped into being a late replacement for Jack Verdi, who was going to play the piano for some of Rosie’s colleagues who wanted to sing a few songs for her. Jack rang me up and told me that for personal reasons he wouldn’t now be able to play. He asked me to stand in for him. I reluctantly agreed. I said I was surprised that he wasn’t able to go as he and Rosie had once been rivals for the same post and had been through a lot together. He said he genuinely regretted not being able to play for her.
Jack Verdi used to be a professional musician before he gave it all up to become a social worker and raise a family. Jack was in a band that made one or two chart-topping singles. He lived the rock and roll lifestyle to the hilt and in his younger days had quite a reputation as a hell-raiser. The story of how he once threw the ironing board out of the window of the Chelsea Hotel is still recounted in music circles to this day. Jack was hot tempered and quite notorious for getting into fights with other musicians about apparently insignificant issues. One story relates how he once threw a pint of cider over a sound engineer who’d suggested that B-flat was a better key than G for a particular song. This propensity for fighting led to Jack acquiring the nickname of ‘Scrapper’, and again even now from time to time in Q or Mojo or Rolling Stone you will see Scrapper Verdi invoked as the paradigm for the wild man of British rock.
On more than one occasion in recent years Jack has been expected to play at departmental leaving does, but for one reason or another he has never yet done so. Some people believe this is because Jack very much prefers the electric organ to the piano, and because he cannot bear to play anything but a top class instrument. It’s said he has a really wonderful organ, but that it’s far too big to bring along to a do. Someone once told me it’s a Hammond organ – complete with bass pedalboard and every other bell and whistle – and that it once belonged to Billy Preston. What people say is that Jack’s reputation depends upon his organ and that without it he’d be very ordinary. They say this is the reason he never plays in public nowadays.
I think that may be a little harsh. Jack has in fact sometimes turned up at a do but when he has he has always done something other than play the piano. It is true of course that he has sometimes chosen to do something unexpected and slightly eccentric. When Sally Chaudry left the Adoption Unit, Jack went along to her leaving do, stepped up to the microphone and read aloud for her selected passages from Moby Dick. Then, completely unaccompanied, he sang in their entirety two long Greenland whaling songs. The urge to perform really is irrepressible in some people.
I went along to Rosie’s do at about seven. I checked out what songs we were doing with Betty Gormley, who was the main singer for the evening. Betty – known to her colleagues as “Butterbeans” – is a bluff sort of woman from Rotherham. As a young woman she worked in a textile mill and used to sing in local pubs at nights to make some extra money. Like Jack she got a taste for the limelight and even though she moved on in her life – she married a man who ran a betting shop and got herself an education – she too is still drawn back there sometimes.
There was a reasonable turn out for Rosie’s do, including one or two notable faces from the past. There were also some notable absentees, of course, not least among them Gilmour, who had told Rosie he’d be there for sure.
Once everyone had arrived Freddy Fotheringay, Rosie’s senior manager, made an amusing if somewhat predictable speech about the great service she has given the Department. He then presented her with her leaving present. Rosie took to the mike and did her bit, paying warm and generous tributes to colleagues past and present. She also took a few well-aimed shots at the pernicious effects that managerialism is having on the services provided for vulnerable children. Freddy smiled and took it on the chin. The Inspectors will be back soon and there’s not a blind thing he can do about it. It occurred to me at that point how Rosie suddenly looked older than she did just a week or so ago, and somehow much smaller. When someone’s working life comes to an end does something physical suddenly happen to them?
I took to the piano and Betty along with one or two of her colleagues took to the mike, most notably Talullah Hudspith, the youngest woman in the room, who has a strange penchant for feathers and platform shoes. We banged out three or four numbers from the Chas and Dave Songbook, which always goes down well this kind of audience. We then did one or two of Betty’s personal favourites – ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ – before ending with a rousing version of ‘Wish Me Luck (As You Wave Me Goodbye)’. Betty knew her audience well; it all went down perfectly.
Performance over, I sat at the back of the room with a plate full of crisps, the only guaranteed vegetarian option from the buffet table. I was sitting musing on the meaning of retirement and the loss of purpose that it sometimes brings. I was also musing about how suddenly it can alter our perception of a person, especially if that person has been powerful at work. That loss of power seemed to me perhaps the thing that stripped the person of their aura, that made them suddenly seem physically different. I was wondering if that is why my dad sometimes seems so small to me nowadays. He never did when I was a kid. Do we always instinctively equate size with power and does this affect our perception? Do we imagine a big person is powerful and therefore imagine a powerful person is big?
I was pondering how I might make my getaway when Butterbeans Gormley got back on to the stage and called for everyone’s attention. There had been a complaint made to the police and they were on their way over now. They wanted to interview Rosie, she believed, and possibly some others. No-one should leave the room. Rosie shook her head. She was genuinely aghast at this prospect. Everyone present was stunned into silence.
And then the policeman entered the room. He had his hat on and a truncheon at his side and walked purposefully into the middle of the darkened room. And at that point Butterbeans must have pressed play on the CD player. ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Hot Chocolate began blaring out. The policeman looked up and threw his helmet across the room.
It was Jack Verdi. One or two gasped, one or two covered their faces, one or two cheered. Most pinched themselves to see if they were awake and tried desperately to get their hands to make a clapping motion. Jack began gyrating sinuously in front of Rosie.
Jack looked flushed to me, but he was clearly still in remarkable condition, the result no doubt of the obsession with jogging he has had in recent years. He ripped of his Velcroed on jacket. We all know where he got this routine from, and it wasn’t Herman Melville. He ripped off his shirt, ripped off his policeman’s trousers. He writhed around shamelessly to the relentless music, dressed only in shiny black boots, black socks and a black leather thong. Jack was giving it his all, turning back the clock to give Rosie a send-off she’d never forget. There was only one question now: were we about to see the Full Monty Verdi?
Jack’s a friend, so let me spare his blushes. But I will say this: sometimes there’s a lot to be said for a Greenland whaling song. There’s a lot to be said for the Hammond Organ too.
Yesterday I finished my painting of Corby’s Crag. It has a certain roughness to it that I like, and the palette is wider than I’ve been using in the last year or so. I’ve got too many paintings lying around the house now. Perhaps I should try to sell some of them.
This afternoon I went out on the bike for an hour or so. I rode out across the reclaimed land from the old Isabella Colliery and then on up to Bebside and up the Heathery Lonnen to the Three Horse Shoes. It was hard work riding into the strong westerly wind, but it was a beautiful autumnal day. In places the roads were laminated with brown and yellow leaves and blowing down all around me. I rode up into Cramlington. It began to rain lightly and for a few minutes I stopped in a subway, where I read the graffiti and reflected again on Jack’s performance on Friday night. Once a rock star, always a rock star, I thought.
When the rain stopped I decided to head for home. With the wind at my back I flew down the Laverock Hall Road, past the bruised blackberry bushes and the tattered hawthorns. I came down Plessey Road with the late afternoon sun at my back and could see my long shadow pedalling ahead of me. In the pale blue sky over the sea there were a few ragged dark grey clouds. One of them was shaped like a West Highland Terrier.
I sat with De Kooning in the conservatory as I ate my rice and broccoli. I was trying to reset my watch, to turn it back an hour. It’s a complicated multi-function digital device and I still hadn’t discovered how to do it when Margaret came into the room. She was waiting for a pan of onions and turnip to cook.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Trying to set my watch,’ I replied.
‘Oh, of course,’ she said. ‘The clock’s have gone back.’
‘So are you going to reset all the stopped ones?’ I asked. ‘Make then quarter past two instead of quarter past three? You should really.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘The time on a stopped clock is meaningless.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. ‘It seems to me that you’ve now got twenty two clocks that are all an hour fast.’
Margaret shook her head and tutted.
‘Well, what about the Napoleon in your room?’ I said. ‘Are you going to put that back to the same time as the others again?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. Some things are best left alone.’
Which reminds me, I must go out and see where Hugo’s put the small plastic giraffe.
.
waiting for the miracle
My computer’s been down. In a way it was if the world had stopped. A bit like not going to work. A bit like being without a television.
Last week Boz got himself locked up. At the beginning of the week he was in the office talking to Lily about abducting his children and hiding away with them in the caravan at Sandy Bay. Lily pointed out that he had already sabotaged his own plan by disclosing his secret whereabouts. Boz threw a wobbler and stormed out. He went into the car park and began methodically ripping the wing mirrors off cars. This is no easy task – a bit like pulling out a rhinocerous tooth, I thought. Once extracted he threw the detached mirrors over the wall into the street. He detached five in all, including both the driver’s and passenger’s side from Meg Bomberg’s BMW. At least no-one will notice the wiggly scratch now, as Lily said.
Boz then went and sat on the wall and had a cigarette. He was sitting there almost serenely when the police arrived in their Ford Focus panda car. They rolled down the window. The officer asked him if he knew anything about the five broken mirrors lying in the road.
Boz shook his head. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘Naw, nowt to do with me, mate. Do I look like a vandal? Naw, it must be the numpties from Newbiggin.’
Lily walked out into the car park at this point. Boz glanced at her.
‘So do I look like a kidnapper to you?’ he asked the police officer. ‘Do I? Do I have the look of a man who would abduct children? Well, come on – do I?’
The police officer glanced across at his colleague. He had a wry smile on his face. Lily hadn’t said a word.
‘You think that’s funny, do you? Eh?’ Boz said, throwing his cigarette down and standing up. He scrunched his stub into the pavement. For a moment he stood looking at the police officer, nodding his head slowly. Then like a leopard he suddenly pounced on the Focus wing mirror and began riving at it.
The police officers leapt out, twisted his arm up his back, slapped him in handcuffs, and threw him in the back seat of the panda, its passenger side mirror dangling like an almost severed limb. Boz bellowed and sang that they were numpties, numpties, numpties, that all policemen are numpties. They took him away to the station.
Lily looked at me and shrugged. ‘Do you think it’s time to cancel the anger management sessions?’ she said.
That night when I got home the clock was still ticking. The global economy was in a state of chaos. De Kooning wanted me to pick him up and carry him to the kitchen. I did so and then went for a walk before night fell.
On Thursday morning I caught the beginning of In Our Time as I drove to work. By sheer coincidence, I would suggest, the programme was looking at miracles. In the introductory part they looked at the Jewish and Christian versions of the idea and the way it was bound up with the idea of God and His power to intervene in the world. It seems that the Hebrew word used in the Bible means both ‘wonder’ and ‘sign’. It interested me that these two concepts could be separated. The programme moved on to the Hindu and Taoist view of miracles, where a miracle can just be a wonder and not a sign at all. It seems that someone with these world views can witness as a miracle and regard it with a sense of wonder – and be fully aware that it defies the laws of nature – but not think it has a meaning. Such things are not signs. The Taoist has no idea why they happen and isn’t much bothered in any case. They just do. This is an attitude that is alien to the west, I was thinking. Western cultures are heavy on ‘the need for cognition’, so much so that some Western psychologists consider it to be one of our fundamental traits. We need to know why things happen. We want explanations. Everything happens for a reason. We need to give an event a meaning.
The programme mentioned the case of the Hindu milk miracle, which occurred in 1996, and involved a stone statue of Ganesha the sacred elephant drinking milk. Or seeming to drink milk, depending on your point of view. This caused great excitement in the Hindu community and Hindus from far and wide came to witness the phenomenon. Even in Britain sales of milk near Hindu communities soared as people went off to get a bottle and feed a spoonful to their local stone elephant. The excitement was about something wonderful happening and the desire to witness a supernatural event. There was little concern about what the event might mean, it seems. Of course even in India the need to explain quickly asserted itself in some quarters. Scientists rapidly came up with the explanation that the stone elephant appeared to drink the milk because of capillary action: the stone was porous. Hindus resented this wonder being taken from them. Why is it that things that have an explanation cannot still be wonderful?
I was thinking, of course, about the Napoleon in Margaret’s bedroom. Its tick was nagging at me. Maybe I should just regard it as a wonder, a clockwork Ganesha. Maybe I should try to persuade Margaret that this magic ticking really had no meaning, that it was a sign of nothing at all. What in fact was the evidence that it had a meaning, and what was the evidence that it had any particular meaning? Was there a message in the ticking, a secret language of ticks that a suitably inspired listener might translate? Is there a Rosetta Stone of ticking? I doubted it somehow.
When I got in De Kooning ran up to me, as if he had great news. Had the Napoleon stopped? I picked him up, but before I got to the door of Margaret’s bedroom I knew it hadn’t. I pushed open the door and looked over at it. It gazed back smugly. It was ticking steadily, indifferently, like a cow chewing the cud of time.
‘I think I’ll have a cappuccino,’ I said. ‘Do you want a few prawns?’
I sat in the conservatory with my cappuccino, trying to read The Guardian. I wondered if I should ring the Greek, but I knew what he would say: the clock will stop, be patient. I began to think I would have to take matters into my own hands and take a spanner to this insolent clockwork wonder. I began to fear that once word got out about the Napoleon’s perpetual motion, miracle freaks from around the globe would flock to our house for a glimpse of this wonder. They would come with camcorders, digital cameras and mobile phones and probably pay for the thrill of recording it, although what the value of a recording of a ticking clock – albeit an impossibly ticking one – would be was a little unclear to me. What would be important, however, was that Margaret and Brenda didn’t realise the money making potential of this freak clock.
Scientists and horologists from around the world would descend upon us. Theories would proliferate. The government would call for calm. Gordon would have to decide upon some Calvinist neo-liberal position on the question, a view with which all cabinet ministers would be bound to agree. It would have to be made very clear that even if this miracle is a sign, it’s not a sign of anything about the economy. There were clear dangers that it would be read that way in the current climate, given that the miracles the unregulated global markets have brought to us are now falling apart around their ears. Gordon would have to act to marginalise and neutralise the miracle of Margaret’s Napoleon.
It was becoming clear: a miracle can lose its gloss fairly quickly. Miracles might not be all they’re cracked up to be. Naturalists and supernaturalists, deists and atheists and Seventh Day Adventists, Neo-Druids and a host of other New Age pilgrims would squabble and debate night and day at our gate. Makeshift camps would spring up on the grass verges, mini-Glastonburies. The faithful would be found asleep or urinating in gardens. The neighbours would complain. Geraldine would probably go to the press. The miraculous clock would be as bad as the Citadel – worse possibly – another dreadful blight on their peaceful existence. The police would put permanent traffic cones down the street. Celebs would arrive for a photo opportunity. Robbie Williams might arrive. Or Jade Goody. My mind went back to the spanner: surely it would be better to nip this curse in the bud? But how could I do that without admitting that a miracle may have occurred? How could I destroy the evidence that I might be wrong about the nature of the world? I was in a cleft stick. I’d have to hold firm and wait. The Greek was surely right: the Napoleon would stop any day now.
I spent a lot of last weekend out and about, walking or cycling. I was avoiding the ticking, I suspect. When I was in the house I’d sit in the Conservatory staring at the dark dreadful matrix of the Citadel with De Kooning, playing music loudly enough to make absolutely sure not a tick could be heard. I listened a lot to Teddy Thompson’s latest album. It turns out to be an especially good record to drive away unwanted ticks. I think De Kooning liked it too. From time to time I got up with him and we danced a little as we looked out together at the darkening world.
On Monday I was going first thing to a meeting in North Shields. Margaret asked me to drop off another box of slippers at Brenda’s on the way. I got there at about half nine. Tristan answered the door. He came to the door in pale blue pyjamas and a pair of checky brown slippers, which looked brand new to me. His hair was tousled.
‘Morning, Tristan,’ I said. ‘Are you not working today?’
‘No jobs,’ he said. ‘Business is slow. It’s the cwedit cwunch, mate.’
Yes, of course, I thought to myself, the cwedit cwunch. It has consequences for us all, even a Trotskyist plumber from Whitley Bay.
‘So is this the beginning of the end for capitalism, do you think?’ I asked. ‘Is this the way the system collapses?’
‘It’s in sewious twouble, mate, that’s for sure. But they can’t afford to let it fall. They’ll pwop it up no matter what it costs. No point in expecting miwacles, as the man said. And as my father always weminded me, capitalism is adaptable. It’s wuthless. It’s survived this long and it’ll survive a while yet. And he was wight. I’m beginning to think the world will be on its knees before we’ll see socialism.’
It was nice to be reminded of the illustrious Wupert. Tristan, of course, is probably right.
‘So is Brenda in?’ I said. ‘I’ve got a box of mules for her.’
‘Yes, she’s just getting weady.’ Tristan said. ‘She’s got a client in about ten minutes. She’s been away for the weekend and she got back late last night.’
‘So where’s she been? Anywhere special?’
‘A poetwy festival. She loved it. She seems to get a lot out of mixing with poets. She finds it exciting. It’s a load of pwetentious wubbish to me. But each to their own, eh? ‘
I nodded. ‘So what kind of client does Brenda have this morning, Tristan – someone for acupuncture?’
‘No, weiki, I think.’ Tristan replied. ‘Mr Armitage. He’s been having twouble with his kidneys. Or is it his knees? Anyway, here he is now.’ Tristan nodded towards the road. An old man in a blue Rover was pulling up. I gave Tristan the box of slippers and bid him farewell.
‘Say hello to Brenda for me,’ I said. I was wondering what kind of poetry she reads. I was wondering if she reads Lorca. Perhaps she prefers Bukowski.
I drove on the North Shields, listening to some more Teddy Thompson. I was noticing the ways he reminds me of his dad, something that wasn’t very obvious to me at first.
When I arrived at the office Boz was sitting in reception.
‘So they let you out, Boz, did they?’ I said.
‘Of course they did,’ he said. ‘Do I look like a criminal? I hadn’t done anything in the first place. It was their fault, not mine. That’s the trouble with the police, they show people no respect.’
Mandy Potts was in the interview room with Debs. Debs told me she was worried because the phone calls had started again. Over the weekend they’ve had Yvonne Fair on three separate occasions. Someone has also told her that a white Mercedes was driving around the estate in the early hours of Sunday morning and that Elephant Carmichael’s been released on bail.
‘And she says Molly Armstrong’s on the game,’ Debs said. ‘Mandy says Flinty always tried to get her to go on the game when he needed money for drugs. She thinks he must be desperate. When he can’t get drugs he’s unpredictable.’
‘So what does she want you to do?’ I asked.
‘’Nothing, I think. She just wants to talk about it. She wishes he would just disappear, but she knows I haven’t got a magic wand.
‘Is she still with Mr Zee?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ Debs said. ‘The kids were with him while she came in.’
I listened to Teddy Thompson again as I drove home that night. When I got in I heard the Napoleon ticking. I let De Kooning out and got changed. I went out for a walk. I walked over to the old campsite beside the reservoir at South Newsham and then down to the beach. I walked along the promenade and then followed the beach road and Wensleydale Terrace to the park. I went along the quayside and through the footpath on Ballast Hill. I walked along York Street and from there through Morrison’s car park. I went all the way up Bowes Street and then along Renwick Road and past the council offices on my way home.
When I got back Margaret was in. As soon as I came through the door she asked me if I’d done anything to the Napoleon.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I won’t touch it, I promise.’
‘It’s stopped,’ she said.
‘It’s stopped?!’ I said. ‘Your Napoleon’s stopped?!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s stopped. Have you done anything to it? Please tell me the truth. Have you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I swear I haven’t. I’d thought about, of course, more than once. But, no, I haven’t touched it.’
Margaret shook her head. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it. What am I going to tell Brenda? Why would it suddenly stop?’
This was an odd question, the exact opposite of the question that had been bothering me. I had ideas, but I didn’t think Margaret was in the mood for them. What I wanted to tell her was that Teddy Thompson was to blame. But I didn’t.
De Kooning came trotting in from the garden. It was almost dark. I picked him up and went into the kitchen. I stood him on the bench and put the kettle on.
‘So what do you think of that?’ I said to him, almost gleefully, scratching his head for him in that way he likes so much. ‘The clock’s stopped. Just think – no Robbie Williams, no Katie and Peter, no Jade Goody. It’s a miracle, isn’t it, an absolute bloody miracle!’
.
eliza and the last day of summer
Last Sunday I went to Keswick to see Eliza Carthy at the Theatre by the Lake. It was a fine day that had the feel of the last day of summer. I strolled around the town – which was surprisingly busy, I thought – and browsed in the outdoor shops. It’s sale time because it’s the end of the season and next year’s stuff is about to come in, and perhaps also because the economic slow down is having an impact. I sat outside at the Lakeland Pedlar with my elderflower cordial and carrot cake and gazed up at Skiddaw. The mountains were lolling in a loose grainy mist, benign and summery. I was wishing I’d brought my boots. But I hadn’t.
I wandered along the lake path from Crow Park down to the National Trust Centenary Stone at Calfclose Bay. On the way back I sat for a while on a seat near the Ruskin Memorial at Friar’s Crag looking out over Derwentwater. Perhaps his unquiet ghost sat down with me for a while. Places are made of memories. I was thinking about how double-edged they are, how the past perpetually constructs and reconstructs the present, and how the present constantly reconstructs the past. I gazed at the soft roller coaster ridge of Causey Pike and the snaggy peak of Eel Crag, like a lover gazing at a beloved he cannot reach. Memory is a landscape of longing and loss. The power of association is greater than Ruskin wanted to admit. But I wasn’t thinking about any of the many days when I’d walked these hills, any particular adventure or experience. I was just opened up somehow, peculiarly undefended in the face of the mass and texture of the place. I seemed to be somewhere beyond the particularity of events, but somehow there and then in a very particular moment. I wished again that I’d brought my boots. I went past other walkers as if I was carrying a secret, as if I’d stolen one of the hills and it was in my rucksack, wrapped up in my black fleece. When I got back to my hotel room it struck me that I hadn’t taken a single photograph. Some days, I suppose, we must need to just let the moments be. Remembering, like art, is like an an act of love that sometimes feels like a violation.
I sat in my room near the window reading The Observer. But I wasn’t really paying attention. I wasn’t taking anything in. The articles floated by on the skin of my mind. None of them broke the surface tension or sank. I was preoccupied, wrapped in the paradox of being somewhere else at the very moment of being most fully here. It was probably beauty I was really wondering about, and how it had both immediacy and depth. The landscape of the Lakes is something that like most other people I experience as beautiful. There are paradigms of beauty we learn as children and find on every postcard. And yet while I knew that it was a common experience in its appearance and in its immediacy, I felt beauty must also be idiosyncratic and individual in its depth. Surely it’s more than a mere facade. Beauty is recognition. Beauty is knowledge of a kind. I was wondering if memory isn’t at its heart. I doubted that beauty could exist for a being without a memory. Beauty, I thought, in my Ruskinesque register, is a kind of angel of memory.
The articles in The Observer floated by. I was sounding a tad transcendental, I was thinking, a wee bit like a Platonist. A bit high-falutin’ and airy-fairy. Perhaps Ruskin’s ghost was still yammering inside me. I’d have to watch that. Beauty is recognition, but it is organic, material, iterative, cumulative, learnt, synthetic – I was looking for the words, the qualities to nail it down, to make sure it stays where it is, here in the real and ordinary lives of real and ordinary people. Beauty is not beyond us, not elsewhere, not the glimpse of another world. I was getting hungry. It was teatime. I was thinking that perhaps the study of idiosyncrasies of beauty must be like the archaeology or geology of memory. I was thinking I had wasted my money buying a newspaper today.
I had a quick shower and put back on the clothes I’d just taken off. I ate at Casa Bella, where the food is consistently good, much better than it ought to be for the price, I always think. I sat at a table near the window and watched the passers-by. I was feeling okay, I thought.
Eliza is lively and engaging, pale skinned and girlish, ordinary in a way. The intimacy of the venue suited her well and enhanced the sense of her being emotionally and personally close to her audience. This is probably particularly important for a folk artist, where being perceived as remote from her audience might be an unfortunate irony. The perceived distance between an artist and her audience is of course a key element in the experience of the performance. Eliza’s rapport seems utterly natural, as if it’s never had to be worked at. This is an illusion too, of course. She has a nice line in apparently spontaneous waffle, as she might call it, about things her audience of ordinary people know and can identify with, like boyfriends, mobile phones, families, babies, getting drunk, parties, rowing on the lake, and the pirate’s hook that happens to be hanging on the microphone stand. Tonight’s performance was ostensibly as much a conversation with the audience as a performance of the songs from her latest album. The conversation – in actuality a sort of monologue, of course – undoubtedly added context and thus depth to the songs and therefore altered and arguably enhanced them for her audience. The truth is that as entertaining and likeable as she undoubtedly was, I found myself at times wishing she would play a little more. There is depth and common experience – an inescapable humanity – about folk songs which is personal in any case and which can stand alone. I felt like a spoilsport at times, as if I was being a little churlish in my desire to hear her sing and play her fiddle more. And I was, because she is so personable and probably very genuine.
What I like about Eliza’s records – her music – is the intensity, the way the force of her music – rhythm, repetition, persistence, tone, texture, and what have you – ensnares me, wraps itself around me, possesses me. I like the way dark spaces are opened up- chasms – and the way the music is a kind of rope that swings and hauls me around spaces that seem simultaneously dangerous and safe, depraved, reckless and (ha ha – I’ve slipped this one past you once before!) sublime. I like how I’m made to lurch and stumble, teeter and soar, glide and fall. What I like is the palpable physicality of her music, how it reunites me with movement, with the dynamics or kinetics of being an animal in an animal’s world. Maybe this is one of the things the beauty of music remembers for us, the way the body moves, how we made and make the space where we find ourselves as bodies. I’d watched videos of Eliza on YouTube and she seemed to me to be also possessed by the physicality of her music. I had come to witness some of those moments. And I did. Eliza and her band are all strong musicians and seem to be deeply involved with their material. There were times when I got what I came for, the immediacy of Eliza fiddling and stepping and swaying around the stage like a distracted hobgoblin, driven to a dance that is as deep as we are, as deep as any of us can be, and stepping up to the microphone to fathom and release unfathomable emotions. Eliza surrenders her voice to her song, her body to her violin – that’s how good she is.
After the concert she came out into the bar and sat at the table with her CD’s. I bought another copy of Dreams of Breathing Underwater and asked her to sign it for me. She’s pregnant and I wished her good luck with the baby and she thanked me for that. Eliza wants to be the same woman off stage as she is on stage, I thought, and maybe she is, in some ways at least. But it would be a mistake to assume that a Yorkshire lass has any less of a secret life than Leonard Cohen.
The next morning I had intended to hire a rowing boat and go out on the lake for an hour. I was thinking I might drown the ghost of Ruskin once and for all. But it was raining steadily. I drove down past Thirlmere, over Dunmail Raise and through Grasmere in the quiet silvery rain and it looked very like the first day of autumn. I went to Ambleside and browsed around the outdoor shops there, but again bought nothing. I wandered around the town and spent a little while in the Old Courthouse Gallery looking again at the paintings of Libby Edmondson, which I particularly like and whose style in some ways reminds me of mine.
When I got back home there was only De Kooning in the house. I could hear the Napoleon still ticking in Margaret’s bedroom. De Kooning gave me a nudge with his head and I took him to the kitchen and gave him some prawns. I told him Eliza was good but asked him not to mention Ruskin. I went through to the conservatory as I checked my mail. There were seven large onions on the coffee table. The clatter and rumble of the Citadel men was relentless.
When Margaret came in I asked her if she’d wound the Napoleon up.
‘I have not,’ she said, emphatically. ‘I haven’t tampered with it at all. Brenda has advised me that intervening would not not a good idea.’
‘I didn’t know she knew about clocks.’ I said. ‘There’s no end to her talents, is there?’
Margaret rolled her eyes. She didn’t need to tell me that the awakening of a long dead clock would be regarded as a sign by Brenda. What it was a sign of was less obvious, of course.
‘Did you tell Brenda about my spider’s corpse theory?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Margaret replied, tersely. ‘She said that such an explanation is so far fetched and unlikely that it can be safely dismissed.’
And yet the idea that the clock might start up again in contravention of the laws of nature and in doing so have a higher meaning, which might be of very great significance indeed, isn’t so unlikely, it seems.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay.’
On Thursday I noticed the clock was still ticking and I asked Margaret again if she had wound it up. Again she said she hadn’t.
‘Then someone has,’ I said. ‘Because even if we don’t know why it started, what we do know is it won’t keep going unless someone keeps winding it up. Perpetual motion isn’t possible.’
‘I haven’t touched it,’ Margaret repeated. ‘And I won’t. But let me tell you this – that clock may never stop again. Brenda’s right, everything happens for a reason, and that Napoleon is no exception.’
‘I think I’ll call the Greek,’ I said.
‘You can call who you like,’ Margaret said. ‘There are some things that even the Greek can’t explain.’
I rang the Greek. He said to be patient. Sooner or later the Napoleon will fall totally silent again. But it hasn’t done so yet and it’s beginning to worry me. Imagine if the world according to Brenda just happens to turn out to be true.
.
a broken napoleon and a dead spider
Returning to work after a holiday is always a difficult transition, like stepping from a garden into a bullring. Transitions like this are often best managed by a ritual, and in my case this involves washing and ironing all my clothes, polishing my shoes, trimming my sideboards, and having a long bath. It’s as if the odour of recreation must be washed from me, as if to return to the old world I must make myself a new man. Going back to work is like rebirth. I must purify myself before my eviction from the womb.
Things have been surprisingly quiet at work. Sightings of the Arab have declined dramatically it seems (although Robin Hood may have become a permanent resident). Debs says that in part this is because Elephant Carmichael has been remanded in custody on charges of aggravated burglary and attempting to pervert the course of justice and Flinty’s keeping his head down. More significant though is that Flinty’s shacked up with Molly Armstrong in her flat at Rothesay Terrace down at the Station and is otherwise engaged, at least for the time being. What’s more, the schools are open again, the nights are drawing in a bit, and the weather hasn’t been good. The population of Flinties is dwindling rapidly, as if they’ve been nothing but summer migrants. I spoke to Gilmour a day or so ago and told him so and that I thought things were settling down. He told me that this was great news.
‘Looks like we’ve cracked this one, eh?’ he said. ‘I’ll let the Director know. Good work!’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘We do what we can.’
It rained heavily last weekend. Morpeth was flooded and Northumberland finally became the victim of freak weather and got the publicity and pity that for so long it has been denied. A disaster can be a cloud with a very silver lining. Eat your heart out the Vale of York: Charles and Camilla visited us today. They dallied a while, meandered along the loyal fringe of their postdiluvian subjects and shook a few of their damp northern hands. The television report showed them at a chip shop in Morpeth town centre. I think it was the Market Chippy on Newgate Street, next to the cheese shop. I like the look of Charles. He’s consistently odd. Somehow he reminds me of a gundog, one that perhaps lacks a little in the way of grey matter but who has an irrepressible sense of mischief. A springer spaniel perhaps. A one that would chew your furniture. He also sometimes reminds me of a bedraggled fledgling, an owlet perhaps.
The Widow Middlemiss hasn’t yet returned from Derby. Despite the heavy rain her property has suffered no further flooding. Griff has obviously taken steps to avoid another PR disaster. When I came in from work earlier this week Margaret was in the Widow’s garden dead-heading her French marigolds and hoeing the borders. I glanced across to see if Hugo was back. He wasn’t. I went inside and made myself a cappuccino. I was sitting in the conservatory with De Kooning pondering the realities of wage slavery when I became aware of a faint ticking. I followed the sound to the door of Margaret’s bedroom. I pushed it open slowly, as if I was about to find a bomb. What I found was a lot stranger: the ticking turned out to be the Napoleon Mantel Clock on her dressing table. It had come back to life. It was ticking enthusiastically. It had broken ranks with its twenty two silent and motionless companions. It now said it was almost five o’clock, which wasn’t right but suggested it had probably started working again about two hours earlier, at which time I knew Margaret would have still been at work.
‘The Napoleon in your bedroom is working,’ I said to Margaret when she came back in.
‘It can’t be,’ she said. ‘It’s broken.’
‘It can’t be broken,’ I replied. ‘It’s ticking.’
She went to the bedroom and checked. She was still wearing her wellies and green gardening gloves. She came back with her mouth hanging open.
‘How can this be possible?’ she said. ‘That clock is broken. The Greek said it was beyond repair.’
‘The Greek was obviously wrong,’ I said.
‘He’s never wrong. The Greek is never wrong. Never.’
My pizza was ready. I sat for a while eating and pondering the mysterious resurrection of the broken Napoleon. It had the look of a miracle about it. But it wasn’t, of course. I asked Margaret if it was okay if I examined it. I went into her bedroom and gazed at the ticking timepiece. I picked it up with both hands and looked deep into its face. It was now keeping perfect time. It had a sort of blank insolence about it. A smugness even. This was a clock that wasn’t about to give anyone an account of its baffling revival. I stood it back down on the dressing table, next to a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now. Brenda had recommended this to Margaret a few days ago. I picked it up and flicked through a few pages. Zen meets narcissism. Absurd and incoherent. Pure Brenda. The perfect companion for a clock that rises from the dead, I thought.
I rang the Greek. He told me there was simply no way the Napoleon could be working. It was a broken clock. I told him it had. The Greek was puzzled.
‘Then I was wrong,’ he said. ‘It was never broken. A broken clock is a broken clock, and it cannot repair itself.’
I told Margaret I’d spoken to the Greek and that he’d said the clock must have been in working order all along.
‘If that’s so then why didn’t it start ticking before now?’ she said. ‘And why did it start now? There’s something funny going on here, I’ll tell you that. Clocks just don’t stop and then start again without reason months and months later. It doesn’t make sense.’
‘There’ll be an explanation,’ I said. ‘But we might never know what it is. Perhaps a dead spider was jamming the works and it has finally decomposed or its corpse has finally fallen from the cogs. That could have happened.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, yes, that’s very likely,’ she said. ‘The corpse of a spider falling from the cogs. I think I’ll give Brenda a ring.’
I glanced at De Kooning. He was washing his face with his paw. Behind me I could hear the television newsreader saying that a junior whip has come out and said openly that their should now be a leadership contest in New Labour. It was starting to rain and looking very dark outside. The economy’s in recession. I wondered what Gordon was doing tonight.
.
yammering 
