Sometimes it is nice to throw a memory into the air like a kite, hoping the wind will catch it. To throw it into the air, a memory, and let it be caught by the wind and borne into the sky. Why? Why throw it thus? To remember again, or just to know the play of the wind on your face – to know, by the way it is caught, that streaming of writing that catches everything as it streams. Writing! Not to conserve, not to remember now, once and for all, but simply to let itself be written – to play across the memories I give it like wind over a wind harp.
When he couldn’t sleep, David told me, he used to speak to God. Pray? I asked. No: he spoke. Was he on speaking terms with God, then? Did he have a hotline to God? His big, messy bedroom was next to mine. I was sleeping, he was speaking to God. I slept – though sometimes I couldn’t sleep, I kept awake, but he spoke to God; he knew God was close, and spoke to him. For a long time, I was afraid of the dark. For a long time, when I was already old, I was afraid of it – the dark. No God there; only thieves and criminals. David told me how his Aunts prayed – to this saint, to that saint. He said whenever he needed money, even to give to someone else, it appeared in his wallet – just like that. He wanted £1013, and it suddenly came to him – a cheque for £1013. Draw whatever conclusions you want from that, he said.
When he was young, David was clairvoyant. He’s still so now, but he’s too afraid of what he was made to see. Don’t make me do it, he says, don’t make me read your palm. But he does – he reads it, and not at my prompting. He spreads it out, my itchy palm, and reads what he finds there. I can’t remember what he said, although I wrote it down, just as I wrote down other things he said. What was it he said? Nothing; some banalities. Nothing in particular, something or other, but with great conviction.
He always spoke with that, with conviction. When visitors came to the house, they would sit at right angles from him, each in an arm chair and speak seriously of their lives. For my part, I wouldn’t stir from the computer game I was playing. I listened, no matter how irritating it might have been; I was there, listening – for after all, this was my house, too – I paid rent! They came, they spoke, and David would answer them in rolling sentences and rolling paragraphs, in a great torrent of speech.
He was not yet an old man, but he seemed infinitely old and infinitely wise; he had seen everything; he spoke. Was he right? He thought he was right. He spoke from his rightness; he rested in it, as he rested in God. How certain he was! And there was I, so uncertain! How certain he was, this planet among men, and we the orbiting moons of this planet! There were many who wanted certainty, and that’s what he gave them.
He rested in God; around him, icons, and in the corner of the room, holy water and a burning candle. God was there, in the room; he spoke; God spoke, one and the same. How marvellous that this grown man, nearly twice my age would lie prostrate in the church! But God lay down as he lay down; God lay down and worshipped himself – God was only his certainty, his sense of being right. Yes, that was all God was: the firmness and confidence of speech.
He is dead now, David, and I summon this memory only to remind me of those certain, self-certain men I have known, and into whose circle, stray satellite, I was drawn. Was I destined only to be a moon, glowing by borrowed light? Was that who I was, echo-chamber to those who talked in sweeps and gales? He spoke – did I listen? He spoke, and I was soothed in his immense speech.
In the mornings, he decided to come out with me for coffee. He talked in a single, uninterrupted monologue until we got there, the coffee shop, and then continued as we sat down, drank our coffees and walked home. And then he would keep me talking as we sat in the great lounge, he in his armchair and me at the other end, behind the dining table in a dining chair. We were surrounded by his things, by heirlooms, by possessions with stories; we were there in his great domain; that was the lounge and the house: his world.
And who was I, satellite to this planet? Who was I, turning around him as he turned round his own confidence, God? In the early days, we would drive out to the computer shop. What do you want, he’d say, looking over the games, pick anything you want. Then, the way home, he talking all the while and to the delicatessen to get groceries and our favourites – fisherman’s ciabattas with salmon and prawns. Then to the house, and I would set up the game, and the door to the garden would open and someone or other would come to consult him: that’s how the day would pass. One day, another, just like that. There were others, too, in the house – other tenants and guests who came and went, but I was the constant; I was in – I could be counted upon, willing ear, willing conversant.
In the evenings, often, to the restaurants; he had money; retired at 49 on a great deal – yes, he had money, and we ate at every kind of restaurant, returning late, bellies full, exhausted. And even then, guests would come, more guests, to speak, to be heard. But I was already dismissed; even David was tired; even he wanted to rest, to read a book, to watch television. And the next morning it would begin again, the great torrent, the wave of talk.
I will not deny the marvel, the brilliance of what he said. Often, it was marvellous, clear and fresh – the opposite of dogma, the contrary of received wisdom. He spoke quickly, ebulliently; everything had happened to him or someone he knew; to his house came all kinds, from all religions, all backgrounds. He had known them all – famous people and obscure ones; they’d ring him, the famous, the obscure – the phone would ring, and it was a well-known composer, a well known pop star, a dignitary of the church or a man high up in radio; he was a broadcaster, and spoke a high, clear voice, on Thought for the Day on Radio 4. And there he was, singing on a Channel 4 documentary; and wasn’t his good friend, who visited everyday, in the pages of Hello with Prince Andrew?
The world turned around him. Where he went on his high-arched feet, the world revolved around him. The answers he had! The confidence that was his! What a relief to be spoken to and told – what relief to be listened to by a man who knew! Taxi drivers vied for his custom. In they would come, having transported him home, for tea and conversation. In came the postman and the builders and the roofer! In they came – to be heard, to be spoken to.
And who was I, in the midst of this? Who was I, who was there every day and saw everything, every episode? His tenant, that’s what I was called; that’s how I was introduced, so there’d be no misunderstanding. I was invited to everything, I met everyone, dined with everyone – but I was his tenant, and there were others of us; he always arrived, this planet, with a moon orbiting him.
Some nights, at Michaelangelo’s, we would joke the road outside was the sea. At the Nehemet Kadaha, he would be invited to dine on quail’s eggs for free; at Kyria Tina’s, we would eat big plates of – what was it called – Greek pork; at Renos’s, the mezes that would keep coming through the night. At the Nepalese, Raj would bring us whatever he liked – yes, this was the world; they knew him when he arrived, everyone knew him, and would bring him something to surprise and delight him, and he was always delighted and surprised. Manchester was his; it was his city. Manchester – and Salford – and Bolton: the whole conurbation: his, his kingdom.
And when I spoke to him? I could barely say a word. When I spoke? A few words, a phrase, a sentence – but it was never mine, when I spoke to him; I fell short of it. His presence was like the court in the courtroom: what was said there was said by way of that instituted space; it could not be otherwise. I was the defendant and he the prosecutor, even when he spoke, as he did, with words of kindness. Who was I to be perpetually defending himself? And who was he, with his hotline to God the judge? The case would never be resolved in my favour; I knew that. I was losing – I knew it. So did my twenties pass – there, being spoken to, the echo chamber of conversation, the perpetual defendant.
Why these memories? Why now, these memories? Only to know the writing that bears them. Only to let writing make itself from what lets itself be borne. Is it true, then, that I, too, would like to be certain? That writing would be my God, the certainty in which I spin like a neutron star? Or is it that by writing writing spins everything from it but itself, and this is the struggle: that to write, to continue to write must be to feed it memories, not to conserve them but to break them, to let them be broken across the surface of forgetting. For isn’t that writing always turns aside when I’ve nothing more to remember? Isn’t it that it plunges underground, away from me, then when I’ve got nothing else to feed it?
One day, I dream, writing will collapse on itself. One day, the collapse and everything – my whole life – will be drawn across its event horizon. When I stop, when I stop remembering and writing, writing disappears, it withholds itself from me. Hasn’t it thus transformed itself into forgetting? Doesn’t it become at that moment the edge of a black hole?
Too much writing; too much remembering – that’s what I said today to myself. There’s too much of this – too much going on – that’s what I said. For my own sake before anyone else’s. Yes, for my own sake, as though I was addicted to feeding my memories to writing, as though it was thus I could keep writing turning, spinning – writing that was confident in my place; writing sure of itself in my place. Is writing God? Is that what it’s become? Or is it that place where gods cannot be – the chaos from which gods are born and into which they must return?
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