never owned a car, but persisted in driving around on an ancient, filthy and shockingly unreliable Douglas motorcycle – c. 1942, with the requisite piss-pot helmet. He didn’t own a tv. He found Radio 4 ‘chicken-livered’. He feared the microwave. He thought deodorant was the devil’s sputum. He blamed David Beckham – personally – for breeding a whole generation of boys whose only meaningful relationship was with the mirror. He called it ‘kid-narcissism’…although he still used hair oil himself, and copiously. Unperfumed, of course. He was rigorously allergic to sandalwood, seafood and lanolin; Jeez! An oriental prawn in a lambswool sweater would probably’ve done for him).
Okay. Okay. So Kane freely admitted (Kane did everything freely) that he took so little interest in Beede’s life, in general, that he might actually find it quite difficult to delineate between the two (the big things, the small). He tipped his head to one side. I mean what mattered to Beede? Did he live large? Was he lost in the details?
Or (now hang on a second) perhaps – Kane promptly pulled himself off his self-imposed hook (no apparent damage to knitwear) – perhaps he did know. Perhaps he’d drunk it all in, subconsciously, the way any son must. Perhaps he knew everything already and merely had to do a spot of careful digging around inside his own keen – if irredeemably frivolous – psyche (polishing things off, systematising, card-indexing) to sort it all out.
But Oh God that’d be hard work! That’d take some real effort. And it’d be messy. And he was tired. And – quite frankly – Beede bored him. Beede was just so…so vehement. So intent. So focussed. Too focussed. Horribly focussed. In fact Beede was quite focussed enough for the both of them (and why not add a small gang of Olympic Tri-Athletes, an international chess champion, and that crazy nut who carved the Eiffel Tower out of a fucking toothpick into the mix, for good measure?).
Beede was so uptight, so pent up, so unbelievably…uh…priggish (re-pressed/sup-pressed – you name it, he was it) that if he ever actually deigned to cut loose (Beede? Cut loose? Are you serious?!) then he would probably just cut right out (yawn. Again), like some huge but cranky petrol-driven lawnmower (a tremendously well-constructed but unwieldy old Allen, say). I mean all that deep inner turmoil…all that…that tightly buttoned, straight-backed, quietly creaking, Strindberg-style tension. Where the hell would it go? How on earth could it…?
Eh?
Of course, by comparison – and by sheer coincidence – Kane’s entire life mission –
Oh how lovely to hone in on me again
– was to be mirthful. To be fluffy. To endow mere trifles with an exquisitely inappropriate gravitas. Kane found depth an abomination. He lived in the shallows, and, like a shark (a sand shark; not a biter), he basked in them. He both eschewed boredom and yet considered himself the ultimate arbiter of it. Boredom terrified him. And because Beede, his father, was so exquisitely dull (celebrated a kind of immaculate dullness – he was the Virgin Mary of the Long Hour) Kane had gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti.
If Beede had ever sought to underpin the community then Kane had always sought to undermine it. If Beede lived like a monk, then Kane revelled in smut and degeneracy. If Beede felt the burden of life’s weight (and heaven knows, he felt it), then Kane consciously rejected worldly care.
A useful (and gratifying) side-product of this process was Kane’s gradual apprehension that there was a special kind of glory in self-interest, a magnificence in self-absorption, a heroism in degeneracy, which other people (the general public – the culture) seemed to find not only laudable, but actively endearing.
Come on. Come on; nobody liked a stuffed shirt; nobody found puritanism sexy (except for Angelo who wanted to shag Isabella in Measure for Measure. But Shakespeare was a pervert; and they didn’t bother teaching you that in O-level literature…); nobody – but nobody – wanted to stand next to the teetotaller at the party –
Hey! Where’s the guy in the novelty hat with the six pack of beer?
Kane half-smiled to himself as he took out his phone, opened it, deftly ran through his texts, closed it, shoved it back into his pocket, took a final drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.
‘So what’s that you’re reading?’
He picked up his lighter (a smart, silver and red-enamelled Ronson) and struck it, lightly –
Nothing.
After an almost interminable six-second hiatus, Beede closed his book and placed it down – with a small sigh – on to his lap. ‘Whatever happened to that girl?’ he asked mechanically (having immediately apprehended the fatuous nature of Kane’s literary enquiry). Kane frowned –
Wow…
To answer a question with a question –
Masterly.
‘Girl?’ Kane stared back at him, blankly. ‘Which girl? The waitress?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Beede snapped. ‘The little girl. The skinny one. I haven’t seen her around in a while…’
‘Skinny?’
Kane adopted a look of cheerful bewilderment.
‘The redhead,’ Beede persisted (thoroughly immune to Kane’s humbug). ‘Too skinny. Red hair. Bright red hair…’
‘Red hair?’
‘Yes. Red hair. Purple-red…’
‘Purple?’
‘Yes…’ (Beede yanked on his trusty, old pair of mental crampons and kicked them, grimly, into the vertical rockface of his self-control).
‘Yes. Purple.’
Kane didn’t seem to notice.
‘Purple?’ he repeated, taking some time out to savour the feel of this word on his tongue –
Purple
Purrrrr-pull
– then glancing up –
Ooops
– and relenting. ‘You probably mean Kelly,’ he vouchsafed, almost lasciviously. ‘Little Kelly Broad. Lovely, filthy, skinny, little Kelly…’
‘Kelly Broad. Of course,’ Beede echoed curtly. ‘So are the two of you still an item?’
An item? Kane smirked at this quaint formulation. ‘Hell, no…’ he took a long swig of his Pepsi, ‘that’s all…’ he burped, ‘excuse me…totally fucked now.’
Beede
