Runts

W. is growing his hair. ‘It’s what the kids are doing’. The kids are looking very gentle, we agree. -‘It’s the age of Aquarius.’ – ‘So why aren’t you growing yours? Go on, grow it!’ This as we mount the Hoe from the town side. ‘The sea makes me happy,’ says W., ‘does it make you happy?’

It does. The whole panorama, from Mount Batten to Mount Edgcombe, the far off break with the lighthouse at one an end, and, because it’s a very clear day, the very far lighthouse, that can be seen standing blue against the horizon. And then the various islands, large and small. And the whole sweep of water, very blue under the very blue sky: here we are again!

We go down to drink something in a cafe. We talk about the End. How’s it going to come? W. defers to me on this topic. ‘The North Atlantic Drift stopped for a few days in 2005’, I tell him. ‘We’re doomed’, says W. – ‘But the economic catastrophe will come before the ecological one.’ – ‘We’re fucked!’

Recently, W.’s been ill. ‘I’ve never been so ill’, he says, ‘I had a temperature of 105.’ But he didn’t have an ideas, W. says. Not like Kafka, or Blanchot. He was just ill, and wailed, night and day. Later, when I catch W.’s illness, I, too, wail. I demand he bring me Lempsip to where I am reclined on his cough. ‘You’re not a stoic, are you?’, says W. Neither of us are stoics. We’re whiners. ‘There’s no strength in us. We’re the runts of the litter.’

As we walk home, lads shout at us from a passing car. ‘It’s my hair’, says W., ‘you have to get used to it, if you grow your hair. Great, isn’t it?’ I tell him he looks like his father from the 70s, which I saw in his photo album. W. agrees. ‘Don’t you think something has gone wrong with our lives? That we’ve gone off course?’ – ‘Definitely’, says W.