welcome the presence of an intruder. I steeled myself – not a cliché, just the right metaphor – to expect further visits, further knocks, further entreaties. I will ignore them, steely in my resolve.
The air is stifling, humid, it feels as if I could drown in it.
Here I lie where I need to be
I am the sailor home from the sea
I choose the darkness because I hate it, and I loathe the sea, it’s so bloody insistent: whoosh whoosh, drown. No, my adventures are over. Save this one, which I am writing.
If – God forbid – I had to go outside now, I would wear a sign. I could print it on the computer, on heavy gauge paper in Gils Sans typeface, and attach it with a string around my neck:
Do not talk to me, or come near me.
I am not interested in your opinions.
Thinking this gives me a warm feeling. I can no longer bear to be in the presence of my fellow man, even to dismiss them. I will not go out, though sometimes of a morning I fold my towel and lean against the door, peeping at my fellows on their daily rounds. The sight of them fills me with hatred, disgust and contempt. This feeling comes upon me with the buffeting terror of a tsunami. I am swept away, hardly able to breathe, in danger of extinction. The thought of wandering into the streets, bumped and jostled by these acrid creatures, makes me retch.
I have lost my capacity to avert my eyes, or my nose. They stay open, however much I blink and flinch and turn away. I keep thinking those thoughts which, if we can only cast them aside, allow us to live tolerable, satisfied and self-satisfied existences. To make do. Reality punches you, pummels you into bruised submission, except that there is no way in which you can throw in the towel, wave a white flag, mutter ‘No más’ like that poor boxer once did, and retreat to the safety of your corner.
Or perhaps to your house? Reality: out there. Aversion: in here? If only it were so simple. If only it worked. How can we bear to be ourselves? How can we bear our children, whose lives begin in pain and terminate in agony? Enough. Too much.
O dark dark dark. They all go intothe dark.
Fucking T.S. Eliot. All of them? Damned? Surely somebody gets to go into the light, don’t Christians think like that? The source, the beginning, the brightness at the end of the tunnel, the soft fading dribble of final consciousness, the ethereal infinite. In his end is his beginning, like a snake with its arse up its head. Welcomed by the heavenly hosts and hostesses. Pearly gates, genial chat with St Peter, try not to push in the queue, get your individual destination. Not very efficient. More sensible to suppose some quick transformation from person to angel. The soul leaves the poor just-dead remains and Swoosh! like that sound mobile phones make when they send a text (better than Quack! Quack!). The soul shoots away and finds itself in the clouds.
What do you do up there? What are you going to do tomorrow? Next year? Next millennium? What sustains and nourishes them, the angels of the dead? In pictorial accounts they are corporeal in some faded, washed-out way, like threadbare cotton nighties left to dry in the sun, softly flapping, drained of essence.
Yet they have human features. Faces, chests, wavy hair, noses, arms (wings, anyway), something sort of leggy. In heaven there are no signs or vestiges of what got you there. No swollen tumours, no bullet holes or crushed skulls, no filled lungs or ruptured appendixes. No shrunken cadavers. Every body filled up and filled in. Reformed, reformulated, returned, retuned, resurrected. Good as new. Better.
Does this celestial self retain its humanity? Does it get cystitis or haemorrhoids? There is no testimony that it gorges and disgorges, excretes or sodomises. Do angels have arseholes?
Do they examine themselves, these freshly minted angels, wonder at this shimmering new essence, this new freedom from weight and care? Might they, before they morph into pure angeltude, do an anxious inventory of what is, astonishingly, missing, as if they had survived some terrible bomb blast, and in a hectic, final shocked moment checked to see what was left of themselves? Lips? Check. Legs? Hard to tell. Eyes? Functioning. Ears. Nothing to hear. No viscera at all at all. No stomach: nothing to eat. No lungs: no air to breathe. No blood: no menstruating angels, no cut fingers. It’s enough to make you scream with laughter. Dead and not dead. Body and not body. It makes me hysterical.
Angels are the riddles of heaven: dead things with feathers. Only the damned remain fully alive, cursing and writhing, bleeding and bruising, smelling and excreting, in agony and despair. Bit like life really.
Later in his dreadful poem, Mr Eliot assures us – can you fucking believe it? – that you are damned according to your profession. The Great and the Good go to Hell, along with the usual haul of cowards, narcissists and murderers. Plenty of arseholes in Hell. Mr Eliot includes himself amongst the damned. I like that in a poet.
Heavenly reward is only for the meek, the humble, the unostentatiously kindly: dinner ladies, scout masters, carers, primary schoolteachers, nurses, cleaners, rubbish collectors, gardeners, college scouts, curates and handymen. The worthies who, in their finest hour, are offered an MBE by the Queen, and are charmingly and naively delighted. And after that they become angels!
And here we have him, ladies and gentlemen! T.S. Eliot: classicist in literature, royalist in politics, the most pompous form of the Jamesian American ex-pat. Worse yet: as from his religious conversion, a Believer! It horrified his friends, his erstwhile friends. That frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf was so distressed that she virtually sat shiva with her husband Lenny the Jew to signal the passing of poor Tom, no longer a member of the atheist tribe.
Unlike Leonard’s, her nose hooked up, not down, it sniffed, she was a great sniffer, a terrific bitch. Her letters and diaries are fastidious, superior, deadly. So much more enjoyable than all those girly hyper-sensitive novels. Mrs Shalloway. To the Shitehouse. Beyond reprieve or comprehension, poor Tom, sighed Virginia, ‘may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He believes in God and immortality, and goes to church . . .’
Of a sudden, he’s all public pious, intellectual, and – how ghastly, how utterly uncongenial – a seeker after wisdom. We are told his poems have spiritual quality. What an oxymoron. Worse! He would be an imparter of wisdom, another failed-priest poet. Like them all.
Like that dreadful gasbag Kahlil Gibran, the archetypal fakir, whose platitudes informed the weddings of a whole generation. Lucy produced two of his ‘poems’ at her ceremony: one read with doleful earnestness by her soon-to-be husband Sam the other intoned by herself:
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Christ! This ghastly humbuggery was enough to make me yearn for Mr Eliot. Perched in the front row on a hideous plastic chair wrapped in a floppy gentrifying serviette, I suffered mightily, and (I gather) let out a discernible groan. Lucy glared at me. She was still angry from our disastrous conversation two days before.
I’d thought I was helping, like a signalman on the tracks diverting a runaway train. She’d been at the house, sitting on the bed doing something with a pile of clothes. She and Suzy had been assembling her ‘going-away outfit’ – which I gather is what your change of clothes after the wedding is called – and Suzy had announced she was popping out to buy some suitable garment or other. Lucy was turned away from me, her shoulders hunched, shaking gently and regularly.
‘Lucy, love, are you all right?’
‘It’s Mummy,
