Purgatory

‘Tell the story of the day.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Tell the story.’

Every night this week, The Drift, at least once. I’m listening to it now. I’ve just come in from work. I’ve opened a cheap bottle of Cava. Dull skies; rain. The plants are an island in the flooded yard. Silence. I haven’t spoken to anyone today. Someone is pacing upstairs. Soon, no doubt, the thud-thud-thud of the bass through the ceiling. There’s only of them up there now. He’s light on his feet, but he likes loud music. He has his vinyl, he says, in the room above the one I am in now. I’m ready for it, listening for it behind The Drift.

Where has the other one gone? The other whose parents’ own the upstairs flat? Has he finished his exams and left? But there is the matter of the leak from the gutter at the back of the flats. The leak, the flood, in a single sheet, running down the wall from the full gutter. I should have told him while I had time. The other one, the other neighbour, never answers the door. Neither the front door, nor the back door.

‘Tell the story of the day.’ A second glass of Cava. I’ve been reliving the death of a friend. Strange comfort. I would like to relive it again now. To bring it back to me. To play fort-da with the memory, like Freud’s grandson. Write about it, I tell myself. But I’m written out. There’s nothing to write – not about that. Describe your impressions, I tell myself. The view from the windows. The beautiful garden. The pond, the fountain. Write about that. And the hospice. The nurses, and the great calm. To die there would be to die like a child. To relax into death. To fall asleep as though I’d fallen in the snow. To fall all the way to death.

And at work? I won’t say anything about that. Or I’ll speak very elusively and reserve the other kind of speech for much later. Work: the office, mine, high ceilinged, with big windows that look out over the town. Bookshelves, CD towers: everything is there. And it is orderly. My email box is orderly and the office is orderly. I am prepared, braced. All day, busy. To ready paperwork. To ready documentation, retrieving it from filing cabinets, printing hard copies of old emails. Defensive. Defend yourself. These four walls will not be your enclosed space forever. Soon the wind will blow through here, the office. But that is to the good. No sedentarism. Do not stay put.

‘Tell the story of the day’. – ‘I’ve said nothing yet.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘There’s nothing to say.’ – ‘Say it, then, say that nothing.’ Say it: eight o’clock and it’s not dark. The yard. White light. The island of plants in the flooded concrete. Two wheelie bins. The long scar up the wall where the pipe was pulled out. Need to see to that. Need to fix it.

The Drift. – ‘Write about that, write about The Drift.’ – ‘But The Drift has set itself back into the day, the condition of the day. I can no more write of it than I could write of the day.’ – ‘Write of The Drift, write of the day.’ Foolishly, I’ve dreamt, these last couple of days, of the narrative I would assemble of those years. A narrative: the blog posts are a start. Narrate them, though, from another perspective. From a ‘you’ that addresses their protagonist. A ‘you’ that is spoken by a god, or by several gods. I had that idea in February. I’m coming back to that idea.

I read Spark’s Hothouse by the East River. It was like a dull blow to the head. Hit me without knowing where it was from. What was that? I’ve never read anything like that. What are the rules? Where are the rules? Quick, a context; I need to insert it into a context. I read a critical study – phew. Then another – phew. Now I know. I know what she’s up to. I’m less disturbed. But still – the blow. It was heavy, and dull. What kind of book was that? Who could write a book like that?

I drank Lucozade at lunch time. I thought: I’m too tired, I mustn’t be this tired. Up at six, just as I was up at six yesterday. Can’t sleep until late, but up at six. Working on an essay, so I have to be up at six. It works on me, and calls me me to be up early, when the day is already bright. Six: the day’s been around for a while; it is I who am the latecomer. The day says: where were you?; I sit at my worktable to work. But Lucozade: it is in me now, the caffeine, the sugar. Double tiredness tomorrow, and for what? I knew, today, I would have to be braced. Ready. On the defensive. Lucozade was necessary. I read the paper in the sun, and drank Lucozade, half a small bottle of it, but enough. Caffeine, sugar.

‘Tell the story of the day.’ – ‘I can’t.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘I can’t. I can’t raise myself to the day.’ – ‘All that caffeine and that sugar – and for what?’ – ‘I ask myself the same question. I ask myself the same.’

You are still dying and I am still living. Somehow, both seem impossible. To die – to live. How is it you are dead, and I am alive? I feel cheated. No: I feel I am the cheat. How is it that day comes after day? How is it day succeeds day? One day after another, I wake up, and think: is this it, another day? One day, another: sometimes, walking from here to there – from my office, say, to the library, I think of the books I should read on the apocalypse. I tell myself that that’s what it’s all about: the apocalypse. The day unlimits itself. The day unravels in the day, and only I know that. What separates me from that tramp, with his grimy face? What separates me from the binge drinkers who swap a bottle round in the sun?

‘Tell the story.’ – ‘I haven’t yet begun. I can’t bring myself to the beginning.’ – ‘Tell the story.’ – ‘There is no story. Or all stories are distractions on the way to the story.’ What else, what else? I saw a magpie on the wall of my yard. I had thought, nothing can live in my yard except slugs. And wasn’t there a slug in the washing up bowl this morning? Weren’t my bowls slug-touched, sticky, even though I washed them in the hottest water? I threw it out of the window, the drowned slug. I thought I’d found the hole through which they came into the flat; thought I’d blocked it up. But still they come. Still the silver trail across the bowls and the cutlery.

‘Tell it.’ – ‘Nothing to tell. Nothing tells itself.’ – ‘Tell.’ – ‘But I’m telling nothing. Only the most inconsequential, you can see that.’ This morning, a litre of Plymouth Gin arrives with the rest of my shopping. Gin – and a 2KG bag of ice. Plymouth Gin like a glyph, a ward: that will keep disaster away. Gin – and ice. That will be enough. We went around the Plymouth Gin factory, R.M. and I. We saw how it was made, tasted the botanicals, separately and then as they were mixed into the gin. We held the gin glasses in our hands to warm the gin, and to release its flavours. And now I have a bottle of Plymouth Gin here, in the far North. Perhaps it will watch over me. The Plymouth Gin is watching over me.

‘Tell.’ – ‘I can’t tell. I won’t tell.’ And now it hits me, as I spread the goat’s cheese I bought for my friends’ visit on ricecakes: I am a character in a novel who realises he’s in a novel. But I am not in a novel. And then it hits me again: I am a type, but – what type? Of what am I an example? I’d like to know. I’d like to know where this is all headed. Let’s go further: what if I am already dead, and she, my friend, is alive? Then I’m writing in purgatory. I’m writing my way out. To buy the price of a ticket out. But to where. A ticket – to where?