The Last Days
Wisdom of the everyday. Wisdom of the long term unemployed, as each day dripped from the sky to form the stalagmites we were. Or were we like the coral forests, accreted from chip cartons and chewing gum? Or were we the nymphs in the pond, still trapped in our old bodies when the others had long since hatched? It was along the floor of the world we were crawling and with dull eyes looking up above the waters to where the others were flying with new, bejewelled bodies.
Around us, the great regeneration. Of what did we dream in those, the last days of the welfare state? In the coming day, shadow, I knew I wouldn’t see you. Never again that turning back when your body, mute, inert, becomes more present, and this presence becomes more heavy and more strange. Body without name and without form! Presence that cannot be called living or dead! Who was I – a dead man? How was it I already lived posthumously, I who was still quite young? The new day was coming and the shadows would be banished.
How many years in that room at the top of the house? I would not say I was happy there. In the summer, baking hot, and in the winter, freezing cold. My laptop on the table by the window. Always half-lit or unlit, the curtain pulled across the window. And pictures of neolithic horses on the wall as though I was in Lascaux, in the womb of the earth. It was a room like the others. What did I do there? What was I to do?
That was five years ago. Who am I now? Well fed, with friends around me, I am not as determined as I was. Then I knew my life as struggle and as the imperative to struggle. If I was tired, I lay down on the carpet; if I was awake, I worked. Who was I, then and at that time? One stretched across the day. Unemployed and thereby infinite, strewn across the day. What did I say to myself? Concentrate. No diversions. I had to gather myself together. But how was I to hold myself together, in that room, in that house?
Routine: the coffee shop and then the circuit round town. I passed the elderly, mothers with pushchairs, the unemployed, the alcoholics: yes, they were with me; our bodies knew one another. Did we say hello? The day was wearing out, we knew it. The day resembled itself, slipping out of use; we knew it in the tiredness of our bodies, correlates of the worn out world. And regeneration? Was it coming? Coming, yes, but not for us. We were to be left behind; these were the last days.
The Recorder
Sometimes I met him by chance, the one who lived in sheltered accommodation. We used to talk of Denton Welch – why him? – and John Cowper Powys – why him? Coffee? I would ask, and only once did he accept. But he was frightened in the closed space of the cafe with the windows misted up and full of people. We sat in the window, but he was frightened, and left quickly. Another time, in the fog, we walked out to the field. He was happy in the open space, he said, but closed spaces terrified him. ‘And I can’t be near people’. Very well. He didn’t have a phone, and I didn’t have his address. Did he know where I lived? We met by chance. Chance arranged our rendezvous in the day, but by chance, too, I knew each time might be the last. Very well.
Who was she, S. S., with her alliterative name? Why wasn’t she at work? Often she was, in her pin stripes and glasses – she would pass me in her small car, bent over the driving wheel, but sometimes I would meet her on the streets, her bare eyed and lost. She worked odd shifts. She spoke to me of her boyfriend. She loved him, she said, and couldn’t help it. He was no good, she knew that. Road crew to The Verve, going from one town to another. She still loved him, she said. She was abandoned to her love. She was the crystal that had formed around love. ‘I know he’s a bastard’. What happened?, said her face to me. Why hasn’t my life turned out as it should have? And wasn’t that the question behind everything she said: have I been cheated of life?
In the record shop, the owner and his assistant were always laconic. From them I took up the expression, ‘oh aye’. They were always still and calm when I brought in CDs and exchanged them for other CDs. What would stir them? What would impassion them? They were used to seeing me, but I didn’t spend money. I brought CDs in to exchange, and took CDs away; that was my role: I kept their stock moving. Did they approve of me? In truth, I wanted to be one of these laconic men, men who said very little, but who were always there, constant, as the world turned around them. I wanted to speak with restraint, and let my intentions be known without expression and emphasis. ‘Oh aye’: for now, I was but the changer of stock, the CD rotator.
In the video shop, I would meet the conspiracist who would speak of the new world order and the disaster that would befall us in the new millenium. He, like me, rented videos to pass the afternoon, returning them in the early evening for a discount. Up and down the racks we looked. Which one, which one? We had seen everything. Like me, he was a deep sea diver of the suburb, he walked along the bottom in a diving suit. Was he an unemployed actor? That’s what he told me. And what of his plans to make films about the new world order? He was afraid of the year 2001. ‘That’s when it’ll happen. They’re coming for us, man’.
Who would remember the minutiae of the day except me? That’s what I was: the recorder. So did the day know itself. So did it remember itself. New cafes were appearing; I tried them all. I passed mothers with their pushchairs and the alcoholics in the sun. And sometimes I would go to Safeway to witness the beauty of one of the assistants – who would remember her as she appeared in the day, if not me?
And how did I appear to the others? The one who spoke of what he would do, not what he was. The one displaced and out of time. Was I out of focus, too? Had I come to resemble myself? It’s true, I had plans; there was a direction in which I was moving. I was ready to be taken; I prepared my CV and my letters of application. Was that what I was waiting for – the rapture? Yes, the rapture was a job, the dreamt-of job, but I was afraid of being left behind. I was wearing out the carpet on the stairs – and would I, too, be worn away?
What did my face say to others? What was said by my gait, my gestures? I am waiting to begin? I am waiting for life to begin? So we encountered one another at the bottom of the world, beneath time. I signed on every fortnight, but fortnight collapsed on fortnight, and it was as though I were living the same life over and again. How to preserve momentum? How to steer when there were no stars to steer by?
The Encounter in the Desert
Perhaps there is an encounter when the world changes direction. Perhaps in that moment we can know the turning back of our bodies, their heaviness, another desire. We were left behind? – Well and good. We were going nowhere? – That was how it was. Who was I, when I reached out to you? And who were you, shadow? I dreamt I met you in my room above the world. A room? A shell, decorated like a cave, but opened by a skylight to the heavens (the cold poured through there in the winter – poured, yes, I could feel air rolling down the walls. And the sun shone through it in the summer, when it was always too hot, dust motes moving in the air).
The desert grew. Did I dream of a companion in the desert? Rather, the desert become companion, my own shadow, coming to me from a past that was not mine. Who are you, shadow, at the bottom of my memory? Days passed, night passed and I was in the room above the world with horse paintings on the wall. When was the last time I’d been touched? No time for that now. I was in the corridor with my eye on the light. Move quickly!, I told myself. I was finishing the first book (though that would be rewritten). Move quickly!
The regeneration was complete – was it true? Everything was over but the denouement – was it true? I dreamt of you shadow, horror of absence, boundlessness of the night, desert of the end, desert of the left behind. When will you come, and to whom will you appear? Why do I dream that the rapture draws back before itself as the delay that is the site of your address and from which your address can take place? Who are you advancing under the veil of the unemployment and as the shadow of a person?
It was our bodies that would speak, but only by interrupting us. It was flesh that would speak, unregenerated flesh, like the glass ground into the pavement and the drifting kebab wrappers. Was this the world in which our desire was caught? Worn out world; image of a world I remembered so as not to engulfed in forgetting. And if I imagined myself the day’s servant, what was this but a desire to be chosen? I was not chosen. What was a place of transit to the workers – a day off, the road that led to the bar – was our world. And didn’t that count for our bodies, too – what mattered was not what we could do, but what we could not. Lift your hand to the door, turn the handle. And when that fails – when you cannot lift your arm?
Wipe the glass – what can you see? No one; the face of no one. But dream of the kingdom on the other side of the mirror. Smash the glass – there is the world of the capable and the working. And meanwhile? In the meantime? They came to the house, the inspectors. They looked at my room and spoke to my landlord. We spoke together in the front room of the house. I would find work soon, I told them. Soon, I’d be away from here. Soon I’d break the mirror.
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