Category: Manchester

Nikolai Dvigubsky’s set for Mirror, says Tarkovsky (as related in a recent book) ‘was an apartment in which time itself lived’. Time itself: but how was the director to show time, to let his audience feel its pressure? The secret was the shot, and preparing for the shot – for particular conditions of light, of weather. The shot, and a minimal number of takes for the shot. A single take was ideal, rehearsed but one-off: Tarkovsky wanted to allow time to flow, living and aleatory – wanted to capture and release what he called ‘the ceaseless flow of living life that surrounds us’. To capture it and release it, both at once: the shot must breathe, live. And it must let time live …

In the end, I’m not sure what this means. I must think about it my own way. Morning, the acid-cleaned yard, dry and bright like the surface of the moon. The rearranged plants. The new table at which I write, at right angles to the window, no longer looking directly out. Pink painted wallpaper instead. A quilt made for hanging instead; a pot for pens. A CD – The Drift. My appointments diary, and then the book on Tarkovsky from which I quoted. This, all this and the light that falls indifferently upon everything, shady in this room, bright outside. The light, indifferent and calm …

How to let time live? How to give life to the shot (the imaginary shot that pans around my flat …)? I would like to lift the occasional to the eternal, write that. That’s what I’d like, without knowing what it means: to lift the morning into the eternal and let it be bathed in its light. The eternal: and in writing as clear and luminous as the moon’s surface. Writing that receives its light from the hidden source of the day, from the sun above the hazy cloud. That burns with that light, with its indifference, its distance.

And now I imagine that that’s not the way time might be found, but something else. A kind of undoing, an uncoupling of moment from moment. The wearing away of time, of linearity, of succession. Sometimes I imagine there is a kind of passion of daylight. That, seen from a certain angle, light will fall into itself and the day turns inwards and away, discovering another dimension. That just as the third dimension might unfold from a second – a line becomes a cube, and with the fourth, is set in motion, there is a fifth and a sixth … an infinite succession. The day unfolds itself in itself, it blooms there. Only this is the opposite of a bloom, its movement is different. The day is discovering itself. The day explores itself in itself; the sun not only shines outward, but inward, light pressing into light.

Where is time alive? Right now? In this room? Or outside, over the acid-cleaned yard? In the sky, or in the sun above the sky? I would like the gates of writing to enclose and free this other time. For writing to lose the eternal and to keep it. Tell a story in order to admit what cannot be told. A narrative that speaks of what fails to happen and withdraws. That loses an event in the Event, time in the fraying of time.

I am in Manchester again, write that. It’s the middle of the 90s, write that. There’s the meadows and the river that runs down to Didsbury, write that. Who was I talking to? What were we talking about, wandering along the path? I don’t think we had plans. We were too old for them, and too young. Too old – we thought nothing unexpected would happen. The same would remain the same. One day would pass, another, and here we were, in the middle of life, already lost. And too young – because we had no come up against the world; the city hadn’t been regenerated, the unemployed hadn’t been called in for training. Benefits rained munificently upon us. We were unemployed, ill, and lived on the benefits that fell everywhere like soft rain.

No plans, nothing to talk about. In truth, we’d worn away every topic. There was nothing of which to speak, nothing in particular, and therefore everything. Speech, voided was filled with light. Our long days – it was always summer – seemed to live not only in our words, but in the silences between them, in the inanity of our humour. We joked, we wore jokes away. We spoke and wore down speech: what was there left to say. But, as we reached it, it was this void we seemed to have in common. Or that seemed to me, at least, what we shared, what was held between us, and that made us the terms of a relationship that seem to precede us and would outlast us. As though it looked only for speakers who had worn away speech. As though it waited there at the edge of speech, for speech to lost its referent, and wander, like the day, into itself.

A wandering speech. A speech lost from what there is to speak about. A speech that has left behind topics and issues. Who were you, and who was I? No one in particular. Neither of us was anyone in particular. It was summer, eternal summer, and the sun blazed above the clouds, lost in itself. The day drew itself up to its fiery point. And speech was drawn into itself between us. And speech drew us, I imagined, to the fiery point at its centre. A point that was, in truth, only an involution, a crossing point to another dimension. Speech had its passion there, between us. Speech looked to attain itself there.

Once I went out with a girl into the uncertainty of the meadows. Was it my birthday or hers? Were we carrying a picnic? We sat in the grass – was that it? We spoke – but what did we speak about? I think a lunchtime passed like that. I watched her stretch in the sun. She seemed sleepy. She doesn’t belong here, I thought, and not with me. Not here, in the indeterminable, I thought. She needed someone who wasn’t lost in time, for whom light was vanishing into itself. Needed a crosser of days, a worker, who could bind time to tasks and live life forward. For I wasn’t living my life, not quite. I wasn’t up to it – to time, it was stranded in me. Time had stranded itself, lain down. We were not to have a relationship – how could we? Nothing was to happen between us – how could it? Like the weapons of the terrorist organisation in negotiations, I’d been placed out of use. Out of use, a tool for no purpose, lost in the long grass of the meadows.

I saw her again, I remember that. Saw her: but there was a veil between us, or I saw her from the other side of a window. Time didn’t seem to gather itself up between us. There wasn’t a threshold there, as I imagined there was for a time that afternoon in the grass. Nothing was to begin – of course. Nothing could begin – that was natural, it was the order of things. It was on the street, she was wearing her glasses for driving; she was smartly dressed. She was on the way somewhere; she had an errand. An errand, I thought, imagine that. And to be on your way – where? Back home? Out for dinner? To meet someone? She had time on her side. Time had been martialled. And I was still lost in the marshes where minute was barely joined to minute.

Men are supposed to suffer their feeling of ineligibility with particular acuteness. No money, no prospects. No car, or the chance of a car. Who among us, back then, could drive? Who had any thought of driving? It was summer, the mid 90s; an eternal noon. There were the meadows to walk through and a river path to follow.  We were to speak and wear down speech. We were to let time neglect itself, to stand still in hidden pools. Time unmoving in the shade, and the sky mounting higher and higher. It was noon, eternal noon. Dragonflies were blue threads (what poem is that from?) Did we suffer? In some vital way, we slept. In some way, we were asleep in the misty rain of our benefits.

Morning, the acid-cleaned yard. I listen to James Blackshaw. An estate agent is coming to measure up the rooms. We did a patch up job on the fireplace surrounds. The Drift arrived – I wanted the original, and here it is, in its box. A tub of pens; vaseline for my lips. A pen and a pencil. The cordless mouse. Above this, all of this, the sun falls into itself. I would like writing to fall, I tell myself. For the words on the screen to buckle and cave in. And yet for those words to remain those words. How to let writing turn a corner? How to let writing surprise itself like an unexpected vista?

The secret’s back there, I think, back in Manchester. The secret’s buried in the mid 1990s when the hallway of the noon arched above me. A shot is falling through the air. Who’s watching? A shot – who’s shooting, what director? The sun directs; the sun is making a film. And the sun writes, is that it? And the sun returns to itself in writing – is that it?

(I used to dream in my foolishness of a book called The Judgement. A book that would fall like an axe from the sky and cut my head from my body. To be judged, to kneel, to be executed. I wrote some pages, I remember that. A sheaf – a whole sheaf of pages, printed out and held together with treasury tags. A manuscript – how laughable! A book in place of a book, of The Judgement. I thought to substitute an ending for what could not end, and to bind the beginningless to a beginning. I thought I could substitute its indifference for words and sentences and printed pages.

Laughter. But you’d stopped writing by the time you found the meadows, hadn’t you? You were done with writing, you’d worn your ambitions away, hadn’t you? Pages, pages, but what difference did they make? There were always too many or too few. Too many – because you’d interrupted writing to write them. And too few – because you could never catch up with what moved through your pages. Laughter. – You threw away your manuscript. – I did, of course I did. – There was never a manuscript. – There never was, not really. A book in place of a book. Writing in place of writing.

Laughter. – You’d tried to approach the noon too directly. Tried to write directly of the sun, of light, of the judgement. – Yes, that’s true. – You’d didn’t know to approach it by indirection, that it could only open unexpectedly like a vista. – And close up again. – And close itself up again.)

There’s no doubt I’ve always felt an attraction to those who feel part, whether by an accident of birth or by some later process, of official culture – of that world of books, of music, of painting, and of travel, being able to compare this European capital with that – even if, at the same time, I always felt it was I who belonged to the new world, the new flattening out, that great work of destroying what has been.

Wasn’t I one of the cultural levellers? I loved the old world – old Europe – but didn’t I hate it too: didn’t I enjoy the great destruction and falling away even as I affected to despise it? Perhaps this was simply an imaginary revenge.

For the years I lived with the monks, all revenge was imaginary: wasn’t I always polite and pleasant, even when it was as though they had lain in wait for me when I came downstairs in the morning and they pressed me to tell them what it was I thought I was doing? What was I writing? what was my project? and did I really think it was philosophy? Did I – really – think – it – was – philosophy, the words dragged out like that in incredulity?

For my part, I tried to say very little, and I knew never to leave a book downstairs for the monks in their jolly joshing to tear apart. And never to leave a chapter draft or a paper draft – never to leave anything behind, doubly difficult when the only working printer in the house was the one downstairs.

The landlord of the house, himself not a monk, had said, quoting Dr Johnson, only a fool writes for anything but money, and so he set to writing vast fantasy novels linked in a multi-volume saga. I was made to read the first one – nine hundred pages – and told him what I thought: it was bad, the imaginary world existed only in the head of its author, but for the reader, thin gruel.

Its author was impressed enough that I became his editor, and he made great readjustments, writing quickly – as always, one draft was enough – he wrote his well known book on a well known philosopher in 5 days; he wrote academic papers, when he was still asked to write them, in a single morning; when he broadcasted on the radio, he needed no notes, but only a single take, his voice on Thought For The Day being much higher than it was in ordinary life.

One draft – I saw him write another 900 page book in three weeks, this one a lot better, and it was decided that as well as an editor I should also be an agent, and we sent a section of the manuscript hopefully to publishers. A series of radio plays had been more succesful, however – nothing of my landlord’s was published, but the plays – a whole series of them, the manuscripts of which disappeared with his death – were heard and loved.

Hadn’t he received fanmail? Hate mail, too, and sometimes on a daily basis, until he invited the one who hated him out to lunch, and off they went and came back friends. That was his generosity and his bravery. I’d said: he’ll stab you, and he, then let him, but they came back friends after a long lunch, and there was no more hate mail.

He was a big man, my landlord, but bigger still was the millionaire priest from whom, it was said, every two years a whole side was carved away like a kebab. He drove a people carrier before that was common, and brought with him one of his girlfriends: a frail sixteen year old he’d picked up when he taught at a rough school, a match to the other frail sixteen year old he kept in his great house, which his wealth had allowed him to fill with exquisite antiques: but wasn’t he too large to sit at any of the splindly chairs?

In his backyard, he kept a pack of dobermans, for he lived in a rough area. One day a girlfriend told the police about the gun he also kept for fear of attack and he was jailed; later, he said he settled happily in prison, this vast man, who wheezed when he had to mount a single step, speaking calmly and with great simplicity with those around him, for that was his charm, his grace.

Like my landlord, he had arched feet and could move quietly and swiftly, and like him, again, he was a man of presence and charisma: a certain man, who stood foursquare on the earth, knowing his entitlement. Once my landlord took his friend out for a lunch of dim sum, and he had ordered, the millionnaire, everything on the menu, and drank a great deal and then pissed in our front garden because he couldn’t hold it in. And he did this with grace, with certainty, though that seems impossible in memory.

He was, it is true, only a half-cultured man; the seventeenth century was alive for him, and the eighteenth, but not those that are closer to us. But then he lived in a house where no piece of furniture, no fitting, was older than 1800: that was how he spent the immense wealth he had.

For our part, there was a Jacobean chest in the hall of our house, and around the walls in the room with the oak parquet there were valuable plates mixed in with unvaluable ones: a ruse to stop thieves and coveters of whom there were many in our house, which took in alcoholics and drug addicts who had given up their vice.

In the garden, the sculpture of a saint, but without a head, and the stables, where another tenant and I would go out to sit and look back across at the house asking how we’d ended up living there and how long it was to go on. I would watch him smoke and we would talk about his business, which he ran from the basement of the house, when he was sober and even when he was not, taking apart and reassembling computers – it was always mess – though he always set aside a computer so that I could come down and play games there and keep him entertained.

He liked to chatter and so did I, and he credited me, in his years struggling to be sober, with allowing him to talk about himself in third person and thus see himself from another perspective and not be so serious. The former eco-warrior, star of a Dutch documentary that showed him saving turtles from German tourists in Greece, who would lie their towels on top of the nests from which the turtle young would hatch, had become a lover of meat and fine clothes.

We were Chorlton dandies and known in the cafes for always going round together, chattering in that way we had which kept them amused for it was testament to closeness of being months and years together. In the evening, he would surf for porn and pin pictures on his purple walls, and I would find old country songs on Napster for us to sing along to – a whole New Year’s Eve passed that way, with the monks downstairs baffled by our loud, sober singing.

For their part, the monks were great gossips and planners and bon vivants: one rule was that if a guest had travelled, then the rules of the fast were broken, and all could eat whatever they liked. Only the Copts refused to be indulged thus – we’d shelled prawns for a big lunch, and it fell to me, in the end, to eat what the Copts would not: a whole mound of shellfish, squid and crab and prawns.

I used to offer to wait on the guests, so I could observe them without participating: wasn’t it fun to be on the fringes of this, more ancient world, where, as I suppose with the masons, one with a lowly in the job in the world could still hold high office in the church and command deference from all?

There was even a supposed princess, a primary school teacher who’d inherited the title from her late husband, who went round with a crusader’s sword in the back of her car, sometimes going out to Spain where it was still believed she the legitimate heir to one of the kingdoms of the Byzantine empire. Why Spain? – I’ve no idea, but there was an order she had knighted with her heavy crusaders’ sword and whenever she was in the house, we all called her princess and addressed her with solemnity.

In the top flat, there stayed for a while the prince of another such kingdom, who gave me some title so I could be part of his virtual court. For a long time, he drove a taxi, and had great plans for an import/export business, but then he came into a compound in Zambia where his uncle had a business. His cousin, who was also remembered in his will, tried to murder my co-tenant, cutting his brake cables. And then the great fraud was revealed: it was not a legitimate business that had been inherited, but something much more shady.

The former tenant returned to find a wife to take out there for the long attempt to run an honest business. He is out there still, I think, but without a wife, lost in his compound with his Zulu servants. One of us even went out to see him once and came back shaking his head. ‘What a terrible place …’ Money was being smuggled back in tubes of toothpaste, I knew that. Horrible stories of murder out there – the life of a black Zambian being worth of course infinite less than a white one. And the settlers with their dodgy, exploitative businesses stranded in their compounds and afraid of revolution.

Colourful times, life full of incident, guests and tenants coming and going: I met all kinds of people there, and heard all kinds of stories, which I knew no one would believe if I told them. The house belonged to another century; the Byzantine kingdom hadn’t ended; no philosopher was liked after Thomas Aquinas, except for a scattering of twentieth century analytics – one monk was taught by Grice. These were scholar-monks, men of knowledge and modesty, sight translating from old Greek, Syriac readers, self-taught Sanskrit scholars, lovers of Old English – it was they who seemed to lie in wait for me those mornings.

Who was I that had appeared among them? I would make excuses to got and fetch them sandwiches and pies from the bakery, chosing for myself videos to return for a pound by six o’clock to keep in my room writing. How many films did I see? Two or three a day, and for years, and sometimes running into the apocalypticist in the video aisles who would tell me of the New World Order that was to begin in the year 2000 and of his failed acting career and his unjust expulsion from one of the universities.

Films – to keep me in my room, working, for that was to be the horizon of my life. To work – and night, and day, it was all of what I could afford to think. Keep your eyes down, I told myself. Focus. And drank too many coffees that sent my mood up very high and then plunging down – a mad life I lived in the hope it would be temporary, for weren’t there among the frequent visitors the terrifying ghosts of the academic world, the man who burned his Ph.D. in a fit of madness and was now in a drawn out legal dispute with the university, the formidable scholar whom no one would trust to teach so wayward was she, but who lived in poverty, and from whose husband my landlord would buy paintings in the knowledge it would keep that poor couple afloat – and others, many others, who had crashing and burning in various ways, but whose life still turned around the chance of a job or at least some part time teaching or a settled courtcase?

Many years passed, and I outlasted all the other tenants. Year after year, I was like Hans Castorp in the sanatorium, at the centre of all incidents. I remember that house so well; I wander it now, in memory and it seems realer than the flat in which I live, just as that life, so frustrating then seems richer than mine now.

Castorp left the magic mountain, I think, to die as a soldier in the war where we see him last, and I left to continue my wrecker’s work on old Europe, loving and despising that to which I can’t belong.

We both belonged to the everyday, that’s certain. Both of us – you came to the cafe in your car, and I on foot. How could we not meet? The cafe: that’s where we coalesced, briefly, from the dispersal of the afternoon. The cafe: for a moment, we were as real as anyone else; we gained by sitting alongside them, the real people. We were flesh – like them. We were alive – like them. But were we alive?

That’s where we met, the cafe, through your ex-girlfriend, who used to visit me at the house to drink tea in the garden. Your ex-? Could she be called that? A week, she had said, my tea-drinking companion, that’s all it lasted. And didn’t you have a week long affair, too, with that soap star? A week – why not longer? We spoke about it that day, do you remember? You said: ‘I couldn’t stand it. I felt trapped -‘ And then told me you wanted to sell your house and move away. ‘But I can’t – I’m ill, you know’. Ill – you were on the sick, you said.

Ill – or was it the day itself? Ill, or was it the eternal afternoon from which you materialised, and into which you disappeared? You rose late, you told me – never earlier than midday, and went to bed in the morning. ‘I’m always exhausted – it’s terrible’. You’d drive to the gay club on Friday nights and Saturday nights, and one night you took me, too, and while I danced inside, you spoke in the stairwell to gay men. On the way back, you said, ‘I’ve never known men like that. I’ve never been able to talk to men like that’. And who was I, a man, to you?

One day we walked out in the Ees with my handsome housemate, and he named for you the birds in the sky and the trees and plants. Later you said: I think in love with him. With him? I was shocked – you loved him, who was a man like me? Yes, that was how it was. Soon enough, it is true, you grew tired of him. But you could love men, too – very well.

When did it begin, our affair? It was your birthday – or was it mine? We went out shopping, didn’t we? You told me of your love for my friend, didn’t you? And then you said, ‘but I love someone else more’. Was it me? We talked in the cellar. The hours fell away. It was late, you called a taxi to take you home, but when it came, I sent it home. That morning, very early, we walked out in the dawn.

So what had begun? To what story did we belong? Not to yours’, that was true. It was to be secret, our relationship, you told me. Secret – but didn’t everyone know? You would visit me in the early hours, after your trips to the nightclub. In the day you were a lesbian and in the night you were a lesbian – but in the early hours, who were you? You’d just come out to your mum, to your brother and your sister, you said. You’d left your old friends behind, and your old life had fallen away, you said. It was as a lesbian you drove to the cafe; it was as a lesbian that you wanted to live.

My housemate showed you a medal with the number 1 on it he’d been given after attending AA for a year. I’m 1 year old, he said. And you said, I’m not even 1. Not even that. Birth was still ahead of you, wasn’t it? You had not been born, you thought; your life, your new life had not yet begun. You’d made the great step – you were a lesbian – but where had it taken you? Were you a lesbian yet?

‘Why aren’t you a woman?’, you demanded of me. Then, an idea: ‘Couldn’t you have the operation? Couldn’t you become a woman?’ Two women. Two women together: that was your plan, your alibi. You called up your friends and told them about me. He’s trans-gendered, you said of me. Trans-gendered: this meant I could be part of your new life.

And when I laughed? When I told you it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard? You left. You never came to the house again. Where did you go? Busy being born in another part of the city, no doubt. Busy at the brink of a new life, in another part of the city.

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?

Constancy

For a time, she cleaned the house, the Scotswoman. For a time the house was hers and we were hers; the house was her territory. ‘I walk it like I talk it’, she would say, ‘not like you’. ‘You live in an ivory tower, the pair of you’, she would say, and I would nod. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ and now we were children too, children with her children, but this was welcome. Just as a washing cat, when you offer her your hand, will think for a moment and then lick you, too, the Scotswoman became our mother, the mother of us all.

Who was I, amidst this activity? I have photographs – there I am, with the children, with the husband and wife, who would divorce soon after, there I am, healthy at last, sitting on the sofa with the others. How was it that a year before I had been so thin and pale! How had I made it from a succession of brown rooms to the light of this house? Shared life; open days turning first in the Spring, then in summer.

The children played and she moved about our house. How much mess there was! How much chaos to order! Constancy: the family was part of our life; the days turned; there was a pattern, a time to be in one place and then in another. Was it to escape the house that I went to the cafe? Rather it was part of the rhythm of my life, the turning of the day. It was necessary to go out in order to return; necessary to make a voyage so to come back to them all eating lunch. Then I would greet and join them; we would eat and talk until the afternoon would call me back to my room to work.

The Regulars

Past the alcoholics to the cafe each morning. I was a regular, just like the man who each morning would put pen to the cafe newspapers, underlining this word and then that. For what was he searching? Whatever it was, it is was with a method known only to himself; when the papers reached me, they were already annotated. There was a fellowship between us, he and I. Both knew the other needed order, regularity; both in the cafe and in the quietness of the morning when the cafe was nearly empty.

And we found it in each other, I in the markings he left in the newspaper, and he knowing the newspapers would come to me, that I would rise and ask for them politely and he would pass them to me politely. Later, when I was busy with the last book, I would recognise his stoop in my own and knew now as then that my fellow regular was engaged in a vast and secret labour.

Broken Mirror

It has changed now, that town at the city’s edge. Back then it was nowhere. Obscure life! Boondocks at the edge of the world! But I wanted obscurity; it was necessary, I knew, to bury myself for a few years.

In the first days, I thought I might return to the world one day; to emerge as out of another dimension and say, here I am! I would return to the world. Meanwhile, I thought, anything might happen; I was ready for adventure. I passed through the supermarket to behold the simple beauty of one of the assistants; I exchanged CDs at the secondhand record shop to hear the shop owners with their Manchester burr; I searched for books in the bookshop. I would visit the library and the delicatessen; I was content, calm, after years at the edge of life, years on my guard.

What I had said to myself, then, before I moved in? I am moving through that part of myself called Manchester. For a time, the Spring and Summer of that first year, it was no longer my world through which I passed; the mirror had broken. What had it showed, that mirror? The desolation that required from me a great act of imagination. But who has the strength for such mythmaking? Mirror of nothing; closed door against which you sank. I was moving through nothing; ‘Manchester’ was the name for my defeat.

How can I forget the lad with the scars on his shaved head following me home and asking for money for a chippy? How can I forget the crack addicts who broke into my house and held me a knife point? They came from my street, said the police, though they could prove nothing. I turned through files of photographs in the police station; what did matter – as soon as one gang was caught, another gang formed; ‘steaming’ happened again. I moved; but a month later, they burst through the door of another house. They held a knife to the throat of my flat mate. ‘I’ll kill her’.

They all moved, my housemates, but I stayed in the house on my own. I covered pages in my handwriting. I read. Without television, without computers, life became simple. Silent days! But who can live on their own for a life? I worked too hard, but I was working on nothing; how could I believe now in the power of myth-making? How many stories could there be? The final metamorphosis: the world become stone; the world become glass. What chance was there against that hardness? There is only one story: the becoming-opaque of what was once transparent. The becoming-obstacle of the world.

I would like to have written, but writing had soured. And how could I read, I who was only able to see the ashes of books? The only drama: there was the day and there I was. The days turned; no one was with me in the house. I passed from room to empty room: no one. Outside, the wide day, outside, too, the  burglars and muggers. I was paranoid; I saw the crack dealers and the drug runners; I saw the muggers with their eyes on our bikes. There were enemies everywhere, indifferent eyes, eyes which looked only for opportunity.

Watching eyes that when I saw them returned my gaze. Some were hateful, they stared and you were to look down when they stared. Some entreated me, asking me for kindness, but in a second, they, too would be fullof hatred.  I followed a crack zombie, arms flailing, walking quickly among crowds in town. He begged from one and then the other. For a few moments, he was wheedling, entreating, and then, refused, his eyes would go cold and he would flail over to his next target.

Some were desperate, like the weak addict who tried to entice me down an alleyway. I almost went, curious about his desolation. He was not a man but a wraith and he was weak from addiction. What new saint could love this man? What power of love could enclose him? He was damned and he passed among the damned. I stepped towards him and then recovered myself. Perhaps he was hiding a knife. He was weak, yes, but perhaps he was holding a knife behind his back. In the end, he had fallen below need like others. Damned men came and went; as I passed through the day, I passed by them, zombies of the day.

Living From …

But now another world had extended towards me like a hand in friendship. Come Spring, and I moved. Come Spring, and the offer: move in here, R.’s gone, there’s a spare room. To that spare room I brought my books; to that room, I brought the CDs I had been left. I thought: I’m ready to give up the world. I want an obscure place to recover. And so over the weeks, through Spring and Summer, I rediscovered my relation to need; I began to eat regularly, I spoke to others, I was no longer devoured by the madness of work.

Nothing happened – the world turned into light and as it turned it was as though it reached more deeply into itself, that it drew on great and secret reserves and made them present. I ‘lived from’ the world, as the philosopher would say; I ate and took pleasure in eating. Before, I boiled noodles and poured powder on them from sachets: that was my lunch, that was my dinner; at teatime, I ate packets of stale gingerbread men from Greggs.

Now, great and elaborate feasts were prepared each evening; I would be given a twenty pound note and sent to the supermarkets: ‘make a magnificent salad’. I discovered errant and distracted time: an hour in the garden drinking tea in the sun, an hour wandering from one delicatessen to another. ‘Have you tried X.?’ my landlord would ask, and when I said I had not, he would buy X., just so I could try it. Shopping became a delight; by day to town and then to the sales in the shops for the rich. I looked for bargains; I found them – coloured ties I have never worn, the velvet jacket I still keep in my office. To live from the world: there were no addicts here, no zombies. Only colours and flavours and the welcoming day.

Sometimes, it is true, the world withdrew into itself; it refused me, it became the surface which spreads indifferently around me. World of addicts, world of enemies. Because years had passed and I was known, there were people to avoid; I was known; I had enemies. Avoid him, avoid her, move furtively, secretly, trace paths on which you would see them before you are seen. Merciless day, I thought, you always found me! You found me in the record shop and the bookshop. You found me in the cafes and in the evening when I drank a glass of Leffe in the bar over the bridge.

I thought, I am becalmed; the town was the ocean and you, the day, were my companion. You were patient, and you waited. The street drinkers knew you; the crack addicts knew, and I came to know I could not escape you. At those times, I went out to escape the house and came in to escape the world. My bedroom was the threshold poised between the inside and outside; it was not a place I could remain. Perhaps that was my life: eternal threshold, poised between the possible and the impossible.

The Welcoming Day

But life was expanding. Champagne before dinner in a hotel restaurant, guest of a rich visitor; Lagavulin in the evening, saffron in the rice. Delight of the world! In the evening we came home from restaurants along the wide pavements on the street. How is it that at night you move more quickly? Satisfied, replete, we came back to the house whose lights blazed into the night. Happiness, was that the word? Steady contentedness in what fruits the hour brought. Round oatcakes, slabs of Lancashire cheese, thick ham, each slice resting on separate papers: the fridge was full, the cupboards were full.

What was it to live in a house where food was forgotten in the press of new food? Amazement that the cupboards hid out-of-date tins and jars! Amazement that great plates of food were thrown out: last night’s dinner, remants of yesterday’s lunchtime feast! Chicken in sauce, pork in pliau rice! Dishes of salmon cooked in milk! When my landlord came in, he would always bring food. Collaver from the church. Communion bread and holy water. Pillow bread from the Arab delicatessen; dolmades and olives from the Greek one. Black loaves of Polish bread, German Pumpernickel; in the morning, we were asked, what do you want to eat tonight?

At night, our garden would become a run through. I would hear them, the burglars, coming through our garden. Sometimes I would look in the dark to see if I could catch them. Why not grow the hedges really high?, I asked. Because then they could work without being seen, prising open our windows and our doors. Then they could break their way into the cellar door and rise up into the house. When they all went out and I was left along in the house, I could not settle. What was a house uninhabited? I switched lights on and switched them off; who was watching, outside? I left rooms and entered others; I made sure the curtains were closed. The house was too vast. Then, at last, they would all come home. Relief! Life was close again. Life was close around me.

Sometimes, walking out at night, I would hear muttering behind me. Sometimes, I saw figures standing behind windows, shouting out. I thought: I am being followed. I thought: they are looking for me. Who was there? For a long time, I stayed in at night. I feared the darkness, or rather it was darkness that what I feared seemed to hide itself. When scaffolding came up round the house, the burglars would call taxis out at 4 AM to see who was there. After all it was easy to scale the scaffold, to climb to the first floor and then the second … I slept with my light on. I couldn’t fall asleep until dawn; morning, for me, never existed. How to sleep when sleep was darkness? My landlord would go to the door when the taxis came to show he was there. A big man, unafraid of the dark at 4 AM. A man whose house was all around him, and whose tenants, except me, were asleep.

Megalapsyche

What is it to be enrooted in life? To send deep roots into the earth? I knew what it was to live among those who were so enrooted. Old furniture in each room, the Jacobean chest in the hall, the oak parque, the plates around the picture rail: the house was rooted not just in the world, but in history. How deeply it was rooted! What it must be to stand at the doorway and think, this is mine! It’s many rooms were filled with tenants. In its rooms we lived, each of us, in retreat from the world. Obscure life!, but that’s what we wanted, obscurity.

The house had found us, as it found the taxi drivers who would sometimes leave their cars and come in with my landlord. I would find them in the dark room by the fire. Builders who visited to work on the house would lunch with us in the sun. One would detach himself from the others and speak to my landlord. Long and private conversations on the bench in the garden. Of what they were speaking? The grass was long around their ankles, but still they sat. The sun went down, but still they were sitting. Then he left in peace, the builder, having spoken and been listened to.

He died a year ago now, my landlord. In a dish in the living room, there was money for anyone to take. If you asked, you would receive. What does it mean, to be a man of God? What does it mean to be gathered by God as into the house and its many rooms? I do not know. But for my landlord, God was there in the house as he was everywhere. He waved incense into the garden. Bless the plants and the trees, bless the animals. It was an old Russian practice, he said. In the corner of the room, there was the icon, with a candle burning in front of a saint’s face alongside a bottle of holy water.

I saw his photographed face, my landlord’s, a year ago in the church. Many of us were there, former tenants, visitors, guests. The disgraced doctor. The man who wrote letters of hatred to my landlord. The woman who left five messages a day on his answering machine. Where were the taxi drivers? Where was our roofer? We had not known how to get hold of them. They had come and they had disappeared. I thought: now we’ll be scattered, all of us. That is what death does, it scatters us, we are given back to ourselves, we who were in steady orbit around the one who died. But to whom are we given? One without you, friend, one minus you, which is to say, to a new isolation.

Monks

The monks are coming; the monks are always coming, some on great, slow orbits, appearing once or twice a year, some arriving more often; a knock on the door, a friendly greeting, and there he is, one of the great company of monks with his long beard and his rasam. This one we moved from the other side of the country; this one is visiting the church in our city; always there are monks – Orthodox monks, but Copts, too, sometimes Dominicans in white, sometimes Benedictines who, it was said, were allowed stereos in their monk’s cells.

They visit and bring their novices with them; they come, and we prepare great feasts. Travelling monks are allowed to break the rules of the fast, and so, even in Lent, we are allowed to eat meat when we eat with them. We are grateful! A feast, in the long days of Lent! Who are we? The head of our household, of course, and then those of us who are living there.

We eat, we are expected to eat as a household every night, those of us who live there. Out of curiosity will I serve the monks. I want to see what monks talk about, and I would prefer to serve them than sit amongst them. And so I serve them, bringing in a dish of this and taking out a dish of that. Meanwhile, the monks are talking; they are gregarious, even the hermits. They gossip; they are terrible gossips, and they speculate about movements in the church. And then, too, they talk seriously of projects undertaken. A translation; a transcription; a new website – yes, they have a great deal in common, a mission. They are a cadre, a club and belong together.

So our house sees their assemblies. So our house allows them to come together, staying monk with brother monk in our many bedrooms. In the mornings, I will often find a monk on the great sofas. ‘Oh it’s you -‘; I offer them some tea, ‘tea, father?’ Sometimes, in the evening, a blinking novice in an armchair. Today, tomorrow, five hundred years ago, in the house it doesn’t matter. It could be the middle ages; it could be 1850, but the monks are here and the monks are coming.

Bit Players

R. and I order the monks according to their helpfulness. We serve them; they sit, we bring them things, still they sit; the hours pass and they are sitting: these are the unhelpful monks. And the ones who help? Very few of them, it is true, but they come to the kitchen, they wash up, they never rest, they’ve guessed we are not part of the church or of any church, that we are out of their orbit and are here only by chance, strange meteorites. They do not ask what marooned us on this island; they respect our privacy. But now for a time, we are here together, so let us talk.

Yes, these are our favourite kinds of monks, jolly and bright eyed, ready to speak on all matters. But the other kind – those who accept without helping – we avoid them, we flee upstairs, we take refuge in the rooms of my friend the drunk where he surfs for porn and I play computer games. How did we end up here? I ask him, but here we are, regardless, scenery shifters, bit players in a drama that is not ours and that we don’t understand.

Aunts

Around the house, watching over it, the aunts. How many were there? They were the long deceased sisters of my landlord’s father, seamstresses and spinsters all of them, who watched over my landlord when he was young, and of whom he always spoke. Aunts in league with saints who, when they wanted something, would find the right saint and pray; so would what they wanted by given them.

Ask and you will receive, my landlord would say. He lived in a miraculous world, a world of miracles. He lived in a world where he was watched by God and by angels and saints. There were icons on our walls; the saints were there. And then the big icon of Jesus which my landlord gave to me, but which I never put up. My landlord was watched, he was seen and rested in the gaze of the divine.

Marvellous it was to see him stretched out at church, this big man. A tall man, a big man prostate before the altar. God was watching him, he knew that. God saw all, and when he could not sleep, he told me he had a discussion with God. How wonderful to be accompanied thus, I thought. How bereft we felt, R. and I, how unwatched!

Orslem

Guests passed through our house. I took a young Turk to the hills one sunny day. She had rediscovered her faith; it was becoming deeper. Fearing her arrival – she was known by all to be fearsome – we scrubbed the flat clean. But she knew us; she came with cleaning things and cleaned it again. Then she came down and spoke with my landlord about God. I remember, that day we went to the hills, buying a celebrity magazine. Why did you buy that trash? she said. Why do you need it?

As we walked she told me she had rented her body from God. ‘That’s why I have to look after it’. We reach the brow of the hill, and she speaks of her old life, her old romances. That is over now, she said on the top of Kinder Scout, and when I saw her again, years later, she was veiled and arrived with the husband she married six weeks before after the death of his wife in childbirth. They brought with them twin six week old boys and spoke of God to my landlord.

Eternity

How long did I live in the house? Long enough to know those changes that occur only in deep time – the cracks that appeared in the driveway, the door to the garden that sealed itself one day so it could never be opened, the caving in roof of the old stables at the back of the garden. Long enough to have felt my life entwined with the life of that house. I passed from room to room; I lived in most of them, I met every visitor, even those who appeared once a decade.

What happened? Everything. What happened – nothing at all; time passed – there was too much time, as I tried to finish a thesis and then publish papers, as I tried to find a job. I worked in the South for a year, but I came back. Years passed. Would I leave? Would I ever make my own life in the world? But the world was distant; it was as though I was falling in time, growing older but without knowing my age. I thought: inside I am old, but outside, I look the same as I ever did. Yes, inside I am aging, time is falling inside me, my age is incalculable.

Monks came and went, guests appeared and disappeared, each year the students would come round for dinner. We held a party when I got my Ph.D. and a grand dinner when I left first for a job in the South and then my job in the North. Everything happened; nothing happened. The icons watched me; monks came and went. Imbroglios in the church; new parish priests, new scandals. D. M. gave up church for a long time. His godsons visited daily and then visited no more. X. and Y. were divorced, now their children stayed with us everyday and my landlord walked them to and fro from school.

Whose life was I living? Too much God, R. and I agreed, too much church. How tired we were of hearing about the aunts! We wanted to live life on our own terms, but what could we do? So the years passed. We lived outside the world. How could we tell them?, R. and I said of those we knew outside the house. Who would believe us? No one would believe us; no one knew. When friends visited, my landlordwould dominate the conversation, showing off, speaking in great monologues. Friends would come and he would take over. Some would become friends of the house, which meant friends of my landlord Some would never come round again (‘that guy’s crazy!’).

Who could get a word in? The house was a stage and my landlord was the star. We were bit-players, backdrop to the conversations over which my landlord presided. Sometimes we were allowed to say a word; sometimes a tiny gap in the monologue would appear, but for the most part we were silent. What was there to say? And so we retired to the stables at the bottom of the garden. My landlord wouldn’t come there; we moaned and sighed and complained. What we said was what we were not allowed to say, so we blasphemed and swore.

The Phonecall

One night a phonecall, very late. A phonecall in the hall downstairs that my landlord answered, at about two in the morning. It was for me, from X. How many years had I waited for this phonecall! I had waited with a waiting that kept me young somewhere, that was still youth inside me. Youth amidst age and aging. And that waiting came forward in me then, that night. I listened out, as I always listened at that time. Could it be her? So it was, and after many years. But it was late and my landlord made his annoyance known. ‘We’re all in bed! You’ve just woken all of us up!’ From where had she rung? I didn’t know. She didn’t ring again, not for another few years, as I knew she wouldn’t. I thought: I’m not even allowed that phonecall. Even X. couldn’t reach me, not here.

My landlord didn’t like the sound of her, he said. Of course not; I was not to be allowed her; foolishness in love was not to be permitted. My landlord told me I would lose touch with my friends and lose touch with everyone. There was the house, only the house. Monks came and went, the students came once a year. Stories of the aunts were told and the saints venerated on appropriate days. The priest would come with his incense to bless our rooms. Great feasts were cooked, and in the summer we ate every night in the garden. Cracks appeared in the driveway and the door that use to open sealed itself shut forever. Eternity! How had we found ourselves, R. and I, living in eternity!

Gracchus

In the dust, a cat is writhing. It is already blind, and it writhes, not dead, but not alive. It writhes in the dust between life and death. Let’s take him to the vet, I said. She – my partner then, a long time ago – said the same. But her father’s wife said, he won’t let that cat be put down. He’s coming back from work later and he wants to see what he can do for him. But he can’t do anything for him, it’s too late. We are in the garden of my girlfriend’s father’s house. It is a big house, in a prosperous area. He’s done well to own such a big house, with a wide lawn. But he makes his wife live in another, smaller house, down the road.

His wife – and this is his second wife, still young – lives down the road. But she is here, today, to oversee the current crisis. The cat writhes in the dust; he’s had a stroke; he’s not dead, but he is not alive. The cat is an embodiment of pain. It is pain, this cat, and remains on the threshold between life and death. The vet has already been out. Put him down, said the vet, he’s not going to get any better. He’s had a stroke, said the vet. He writhes in the dust at the edge of the wide lawn of my girlfriend’s father. But the father loves the cat, who sleeps beside him every night.

The father, a vast man, a strong man, sleeps beside the cat every night as he has done since the cat was a kitten and he was ten years younger. His wife sleeps down the road with the young children, but he sleeps with the cat at the heart of his big house. You should have him put to the sleep, the vet said, when he left. It’s cruel. You can’t do anything for him. The cat is pain, pure pain, but the father is out. He wants the cat to be alive when he returns. He wants the cat to be there, beside him. But the cat’s incontinent, I said.

The smell was bad. We were with a dying animal, an animal at the brink of death. The smell was already bad as though the cat were dead. But the father wanted to be with the cat to the end. He wanted to accompany the cat all the way to death. Because he was tender with the cat as he was tender with no one else in his life. This vast, brutal man, king of his house, king of his lawn had found a tenderness in his relation to the cat. And this tenderness would disappear when the cat disappeared. He would lose his tenderness.

Every night he would drink heavily at the pub. Every night, he would stomp home to his big house, where the cat was. And they’d sleep together, the cat and he. All night together, sleeping together, traversing the night together. For he was afraid of the dark, the father. He was afraid of many things, but most of all of the dark. For a time, he was in a mental hospital. He feared the dark as he feared madness. What had happened to him to make him fear the dark? No one knew; he spoke to no one, though perhaps he spoke to his cat. Perhaps his cat knew his secrets.

But no one else knew them, not his ex wife, who’d left him a long time before, nor his new wife, who, we could see, was scared of him. Who wasn’t scared of him, this vast man, this taciturn man with great hands and a great, broad back? Who didn’t fear him, the one who drank pint and after pint every night, who panicked if he could not drink, and stomped home to his vast house in his vast lawns. He was the king of the house; what he saw, he owned.

Sometimes his son and daughter would come to him, asking for money. Sometimes he would give them money. But they came because they wanted more than money. Never mind, money would do, he gave them money. He never visited them, or anyone. Everyone had to come to him, to his house. He met the world on his terms, and his son and his daughter were part of the world.

True, when they were younger, they played pub gigs together, they’d had a covers band, and he made sure they studied musical instruments. True, he loved music, and he had pictures of the covers band in his house. There she was, his daughter, my girlfriend, and there he was, his son. Both could play a dozen instruments. Both were involved in the music business, one with a studio, one with a band. He loved music, playing it, singing it, and loved coaching his children. They sang and played with him for a time, and then stopped. He was a bully, that was clear. And after a time, it was not worth seeking the love of a bully, even by singing and playing with him.

So his son and daughter became part of the world. So they joined their mother, who had already left. Now he was alone, there was his new wife and their children, to be sure, but they were made to live down the street, away from him. He was alone with his cat, which meant he wasn’t really alone. A cat was there with him. The cat was entwined around his life as it entwined itself around his legs in welcome when he came home from work.

There was the cat, there was his house, there were his lawns, and there was the pub, where he would down pint after pint, nervously, quickly, as if there were no time to waste. He was a man of ritual, that was clear. A man who held himself together by rituals. A man who had woven a cat into his life, just as the cat had woven himself into the man’s life. They lived together, man and cat, and perhaps he hoped they would die together.

But the cat had preceded him. The cat was going ahead of him, and he wanted at least to accompany the cat all the way to death. He’d left instructions: the cat must not be put down. The cat had to be alive when he returned in the evening. So the cat writhed in the dust. So the cat blind and mad writhed in the dust, at the brink of death, no longer living, but not yet dead.

I have dreamt of you, anonymous cat; in my dream you spoke from where night touches day. As your stillness, totem, set itself against the memory of your agony I learnt of the agony which will one day separate me from everyone, sacred being, man apart. You spoke to me, cat, and I learned of a dying unto which we will all be delivered. You spoke, cat, your address reached me from the dawn and from the dusk. Lesson of margins, lesson of thresholds: I am still your student, I live beneath you, knowing that one day I will meet death with your face and I will know your agony in my own.

Henry

I would like to have been there when R. discovered Henry’s body. Henry was his cat, after all, or he was Henry’s man; there was a rapport, that was clear, and there was something at stake in their relationship, that mattered to them both. When Henry had chosen to live with us, he was already old. He had lived in a house on the other side of the road, but his owners had bought a dog. So he sunned himself in our garden, rolling full stretched in the dust and, one day, came into the house and stayed.

His long white fur was always matted and dirty, his nose, too was dirty. There was dirt round his eyes and his ears were torn from a hundred fights. You could feel his spine if you passed your hand down his back, and from his tail, great tufts of white sprouted irregularly. He was sticky, too, never quite clean, but sometimes R. would comb all the dirt from Henry’s coat. Then Henry would stand purring in his glory; he was handsome again, proud and young. He stood and up arched his tail, ragged plume.

He was already old, it was true, but it was with us that he elected to spend his last years, this old tom, who we called Henry. R. had moved back into the house at the same time; cat and man recognised an exile in each other. Both were transient; they moved between places; this is what they recognised. Both were on their own and both, for a time, had experienced the luck of a house that welcomed them. Good fortune in the vale of tears! Happiness of a last home in the wilderness!

You asked for nothing, Henry, and you came to us, asking for nothing. Happy we were to discover you asleep in this room and then in another. You passed through our rooms, Henry, and our house became a place of transience, and I knew again the impermanence of the world and the fleetingness of good fortune. I knew it, Henry, and R. knew it, he who would fall from the world even as I returned to it. That is why I wanted to be there when R. found Henry’s body stretched out dead on the kitchen floor. There was no one in the house; two exiles – one dead, one alive. A dead cat and a man who was now without witness.

Petruskha

She had only one word, but it was a word that could be inflected for every occasion. Like a little bear she prowled our house, getting older and more tiny. At twenty-two she could still climb the sofa and meow her one word. If we ate, she hunted what we ate; we shared it with her, buying an extra fish from the fish-and-chip shop, or a cooked chicken from the supermarket. She ate very well, but she was old, and deserved to live well.

She had been my landlord’s mother’s cat, and like his mother had lived into great old age. She had survived the tenants and guests who passed in and out of the house; she was there, growing more crotchedly as she grew older, as the house turned around her. She was its centre, its mobile, vocal centre, passing from room to room on her inspections, and sometimes playing like a kitten on the stairs when your fingers became creatures who popped through the railings. So she indulged us: she was no kitten, though she knew we liked to think of her as a kitten. So she indulged us, for she knew we’d need playing with. She passed from room to room, seeing all, impressed by nothing. All would pass, she knew; all would change, but then nothing would change, for her gaze rested equally upon all.

Her one word: ‘n-gow’. her one word, by turns imprecation and complaint, by turns the frustration of the ‘one cat protest committee’, as my landlord called her, and a greeting. ‘N-gow’: word addressed to the world in general or to herself, word for all and for no one, register of frustration or crotchedly joy. Speak, Petrushka (that was her name), you have the right, for all that you have seen, and for all your eyes have rested upon! Speak, cat of another enchantress and survivor! For you know, Petrushka, what rests in the turning of the world! You held the resting-point at the heart of that house; it was yours, your threshold, your reserve! You watched us pass and the world pass, watched the doors swing open and close, watched guests and tenants stay and then leave again. The house was yours, cat-witness, and you rested in its secret.

When did she die? When she was swollen with a cancer. Three days before, she sat with us in the sun. There we were on the patio, eating our dinner, and there was a chair for her, where she sat approvingly. Then her abdomen began to swell; she was ill, we knew that. She was twenty-two and it was time. The vet injected her, she struggled and was still. There were perspiration marks where her paws touched the leather. Now the limp body of a Manx cat, a little bear, born without tail and as small as a kitten.

The Stork

My friend the drunk said she looked like a stork. He didn’t like her; he had just moved back in, and went with me to the cafe every morning. She would come too, but unbidden and uninvited, taking a seat with us although she had no reason to be there. Who was she, anyway, to be sitting with us, with her car and her big house and her husband and her job? Who was she to think she might join us, who had fallen from life, and came to the cafe at that time to try and hold ourselves together? We were braced against the day, but she rode on top of it; we sought rhythm, regularity, but she was greedy for novelty. We were her toys and baubles, but she unsettled us.

This was after the affair – after it was agreed we would not see one another, that I would not seek her (but when had I ever sought her?) and she would not seek me. It had ended; she had told her husband, now he knew, and they were to move so they could leave the old memories behind. They were looking for a new house in the winding streets of the former Quaker village; soon they would move there; soon, champagne socialists, lecturers and consultants in business, they would hold a party to celebrate the election of New Labour. It was 1997; they were Blair’s people and I was not, and nor was my friend the drunk. It was enough for us to cross the day, enough to arrive at the other end intact.

The day stretched ahead of us, but there was the cafe, which opened at 11.00. Half an hour there, then back to the house, full of espresso. Then the long wait until 5.00, the second visit to the cafe. But there was J., who haunted us there. J. who lay in wait. She’s like a stork, said my friend the drunk, and by this he referred to her height, her sleekness. She was tall, sleek, gym-toned – why wouldn’t she be? And around she drove in her car. Into work and back again, and then into town. In the days of the affair, I went with her. Her husband, much older than her, did not care for the new places in town she liked to visit. So she took me, and that’s how the affair began.

How could I feel guilty about deceving someone who liked Shed 7? The first time I visited their house, I thought, so this is how they live, the champagne socialists. This is what it means to have money. And I thought: I would like to defile this house. I thought: I do not belong here, I was brought here, and I would like to defile it. What did they understand, the champagne socialists? They had two cars, they drove all around town, the town was theirs, the world was theirs, and what did I have?

Now I would defile their world – and how I delighted when the secret was out, when he, I was told, smashed up the house in rage. I don’t believe it, though. He wouldn’t smash anything. The world was his; what he had lost was not the world; he kept his place. It was a temporary setback. An excuse to move house. And so they prepared to move. And in their new house, when New Labour won, they held a great party to celebrate. Back together, affair over, they had their party.

She had said to me, I want a child. Her husband didn’t want a child, but she wanted one. I met her sister, who had a child, but not a husband (he hadn’t wanted one either). I met her mother, who did not want her husband.

Socialism or Barbarism

This was in the months before my friend the drunk had moved back in. No one in the house but my landlord and I. No one but he and I, and he liked to harass me. No one but my landlord and I and the monks who visited, and my landlord’s sport was sexual harassment. Go and get yourself a fella, he said. Can’t we have a half-and-half relationship?, he said. Monks circled the house, some on a far orbit, appearing once every few months, some arriving every night. But there was my landlord and I, and my landlord was unhappy when she appeared at our door in her gym lycras. She was running home, she said, and was just calling in. There she was, calling in.

She’s an elf, said my landlord, meaning she had just one side. She’s made of tin, said my landlord, meaning she had no depth. But she had a friend whom we introduced to my landlord, who was happy to entertain a young Canarian monarchist. Happy to talk of the Royal Houses of Europe with the son of a rich family who found himself in a Salford highrise, studying something or other.

The affair began. I’ll never leave him, J. said of her husband. But later she said, I want to leave him. Why had she sought me out? She found me on a train; she told me she had walked up and down the train to London to find someone to sit next to, and there I was, in my yellow shirt. She sat next to me. She sat there, and I knew she wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to talk. But she talked, and I, reluctantly, talked to her of celebrities and fashion. We enjoyed ourselves; the hours passed, talking happily about celebrities and fashion.

It was 1997. K. had already said of New Labour that it would make no difference. Socialism or barbarism, he said, and this is barbarism. Blair was young and Major grey, but it would make no difference. So I was young and J.’s husband grey. So was I novelty and he routine. And I who wanted to escape from my house found my escape and the days blossomed in the countryside around Manchester. We passed through the halls of summer and she said, I want a child. Let’s have a baby, she said. I want a baby like my sister, she said.

This was in the woods around Manchester, to which we drove. For me, this was already magic: driving from one place to another, driving out of the city and to the woods. For me, it was enough to escape from the house, from the city, to the woods. Here I was in the woods, in the halls of summer, I was driven there, a car took me. I was picked up and taken to the woods: this was already a big deal. How else could I have taken myself to those woods? How else could I have made my way? But there I was, in the woods.

Her husband didn’t want a baby, she said. She had been his student; he found her a job, she worked in his department. He didn’t want a child and she was in her thirties, and tired of her life, of her house. Let’s move away, she said. Let’s move south, she said. They had a house on Gran Canaria. Let’s move there, she said. She owned a house of her own, let’s move there, she said. Three houses they had between them and two cars. Three houses, two cars and they took half a dozen holidays a year. She said, I want a baby, and I liked that their happiness was caving in and that I was the occasion of their unhappiness.

Efficacy

Efficacy, I said to my friend the drunk when he moved in, that’s what I wanted. I wanted to feel real, I told him, to know I could make changes in the world. I wanted to put a dent in New Labour I said. I wanted New Labour ruined, I said. It was 1997. Those who had grown fat from Conversatism wanted to assuage their consciences. New Labour arrived and it was already clear they were a continuation of the same. New Labour arrived and still the rich would live far above us, still their world was far above ours. Socialism or barbarism, said K. and this is barbarism, said K., and he was right. What money there was in the world! How well they had done, those sixties radicals! How well had they done, those radicals! How many houses they had! How many holidays they could take!

Their lives streamed above us; we watched them. Soon, the drug dealers disappeared from our part of town. The dealers opposite were replaced by a family who transformed the house, opening it to the light, sanding the floors, minimalising everything. Next door, another family moved in, then another, until the whole street was full of them. What had happened? This was the time of the property investors. This was the time of profiteering from property, unabashed and unashamed. Now property was bought and sold by everyone. What began under Thatcher completed itself under Blair. What was despised by socialists under Thatcher was completed by those who called themselves Blairites, and without shame. The world was bought and sold, and without shame.

We haven’t got a chance, I said to my friend the drunk. We haven’t got the shamelessness, we haven’t got the money. So the world of the rich arched above us. So they crossed above us, the rich, it was magnificent. The street was transformed, unrecognisable. Floors were sanded, closed curtained windows which for years had hidden drug dealers were opened; yards transformed into gardens. The takeover was happening, and faster than before. Big new cars outside the houses. Hanging baskets from the lampposts. What had happened? Derelict parts of town were redeveloped. City lofts appeared. Cafes spread across the city. Tramways. It’s finished, I said to my friend the drunk, the takeover is complete. There’s nothing left, I said.

He, meanwhile, had decided to join the enemy. He bought a suit and briefcase and went to work. I received an invitation through the mail to the party at J.’s new house in Chorlton village. I didn’t even dent their relationship, I said to my friend the drunk. Nothing changed, nothing happened. Look at this I said, waving the invitation, nothing happened, don’t you see?

Poison

Long after the affair, J. and I walk through Chorlton Ees. Are you happy now?, I said. You should see our house, she said, it’s beautiful. Then she said, I don’t really want children, not anymore. Maybe I never did. I thought, the affair didn’t happen. Nothing happened, and nothing will happen. It’s over, nothing will ever happen again. Barbarism, I thought, it’s the unashamed reign of barbarism.

J.’s husband was consulting in Bulgaria again. They don’t know anything about business over there, she said, it’s hilarious. I remembered the stories the husband told me. They don’t wash, he’d say. It stinks over there, he’d say. And it’s so inefficient!, he’d say, but so cheap! He was there to advise them, to bring them the good news. We’re buying a place over there, said J., it’s really beautiful. Unspoilt. It’s really cheap. Then she said, he’d thought it was hilarious, when I said we were going to move South together. What will you live on?, he’d said. He’d thought it was really funny. You like holidays too much, he’d said.

I thought, it’s the end, we’re living at the end. Nothing will happen, ever again. Barbarism, I thought, the barbarians are not at the gates, but they’ve passed through the gates, and now they live among us, I thought. It’s finished, I thought, we’re the barbarians. We’re turning into barbarians, I thought. The colonisation is complete. It’s like the X-Files, I thought, but no conspiracy was necessary. And I knew it was hatching in me, too, that one day I would fall away and a barbarian would step forward in my place. But I thought, I’ll do my best to destroy the barbarian inside me. I thought, I’ll poison him with my poisoned thoughts. I thought, I’ll drip poison in his ear. I thought, I’ll poison him by the sheer extent of my hatred.

King of the Day

Pink light of an autumn afternoon, we play tennis and between the courts, upright but staggering, here he comes, the leatherjacketed drunk with a six-pack in a plastic bag. Here he comes, the drunk who likes to wander among us, up and down the courts, asking for a light.

He likes to be one of the players, he likes to feel he’s included and to be greeted in recognition. Don’t look at him, I tell my tennis partner. Don’t make eye contact. The Indians next to us have to suffer him; he asks them whether they have a light; he admires their tennis and shouts his approval. Then children on bikes call out to the drunk. He ignores them, and they set themselves up at the other end of the courts and shout at him.

The children shout at the drunk, the drunk at the Indians; we’ve been put off our tennis; it’s begun to rain and the court is slippery. Time to leave. The drunk leaves with us, and I see he is young, though his face is ruddy and hard. He does not speak to us, but to himself, beatifically; he is content; to himself, he has been watching the lads play tennis, he was one of the lads, one of us. One of us, and with a crowd of children around him. He was the king of the day and we, the tennis players and the children, were his subjects.

My Friend the Drunk

Later that evening, what usually happens when I plug my phone in and keep off my dialup connection happens again: he phones, my old friend, the drunk. He must phone me several times a night, for I am rarely there, and when I am, rarely accessible. Now, because it has been two or three weeks since we spoke, he is polite. ‘Have you got a minute?’

We shared a house for many years. It was a dry house; there wasn’t a drop of alcohol there. Before he moved in, I used to pass him in the streets, the drunk. I’d pass him as he went round the off-licenses in the morning. He liked red wine; I think he still does. He always drank good red wine. I used to meet him in the streets, he smiling, but vacant. He would talk to me about Massive Attack remixes. About the Mad Professor. We spoke; it was a ritual; I went out each morning for my coffee, and he went out to buy good red wine.

When I moved into the house in Chorlton, I took his room, which was still full of his things. The plays he’d tried to write. The journal he kept. He had been drinking again, and had been evicted. Drunk, he had bothered the tenants in the flat above the house, had wandered up there one night and scared them. He went; I took his room next to that of another alcoholic, another drunk who was trying to give up the drink and would lapse himself, a few months later. He, in turn, had taken a room of the drug addict who had set himself on fire. The addict’s pretty face was burnt to charcoal; the tip of his nose was missing – it is the hardest thing to restore in burns victims, said the plastic surgeon. He was gone; someone else moved in just as I moved in.

The drunk, who would become my friend, used to visit my landlord. Without compunction, and knowing where the money would go, my landlord would give him a a couple of twenty pound notes. Then he would go, the drunk, through the back door through which he came. Sometimes the drunk would find himself in another city, lost and without knowing where he was. He’d phone and my landlord would arrange a hotel room for him. Of course he would move in again, the drunk, we all knew it; a year later he brought all his stuff around, determined to give up drinking.

At that time, the house was nearly empty. Another drinker who had relapsed had been expelled. It took us two weeks to evict him, he was well built, violent, a man used to fist fights and intimidation. He scared us. Every morning he would rise and drink a few cans in the garden and then stagger off to the pubs. Sometimes I would go out to find him in the evening and he’d be bothering other drinkers in the pub, swaying, beatifically but absently, entirely given over to the happy streaming of drunkenness. Then he left one morning, still drunk. His room was empty; I took it, and later my friend the drunk took my room.

He arrived with a mess of possessions. He had joined the Hare Krishnas recently and been expelled. He had joined the Buddhists and been expelled. He was a seeker, he said, an environmentalist. A documentary had been made about him on Dutch television: there he was, bearded, a young Adonis speaking about the turtles he was trying to save on Greek beaches. But now he was with us to dry out.

Two twenty pound notes came my way. Take him out, said my landlord, so we went to the Chinese restaurant and he ate meat for the first time in years. That night he said he had decided to become a yuppy, to shave his beard and wear a suit. So he bought a suit and shaved; he was handsome; he never looked like a drunk; his olive skin was clear and unlined; older than me, he looked younger, bright and strong and handsome.

Months passed. He moved to the flat on top of the house. Now he was away from us, away from the household who would always eat together every evening, he began to drink. Soon, he never came down during the daytime. Only at night would he venture downstairs. At night, at three AM, to sit out in the outhouse to have a smoke. I barely saw him, but we would speak on the phone. Each of us had his own phone; the rule of the house was that no one should knock on the door of anyone else. There were phones, and if someone was trying to call you for dinner, you were phoned, not called down. For there was no shouting, no calling, but there were telephones.

We spoke; he slurred, just as he did last night. By the time he was evicted again, he slurred so badly I couldn’t hear what he said. He couldn’t form a word. He used to leave slurring messages on all our phones. I visited him. His new flat stank of piss. He had lost control; he slept in the sofa in his lounge and wet himself. The flat stank – he could barely talk, he mumbled to himself, day and night were the same for him; when he phoned he just moaned, not a word could form itself.

For a long time, that’s how I knew him: answering machines full of moans from my friend the drunk. Months passed, then a whole year, and we heard very little. He moved again; he was arrested several times and, since he’d given our house as his address, the police visited us. We said there was nothing we could do, and so my friend the drunk spent nights in the cells. Months passed; we had other tenants, other adventures. Everything happened; nothing happened.

Why did we let him move in again? We knew he’d drink again; my landlord knew it would happen, I knew it would happen, but he was our friend the drunk. Sober, he was funny and intelligent and gentle. He was a Chorlton celebrity; for a while, he dressed like a dandy; he wore red crushed velvet trousers and spent his money on beautiful suits. He was handsome; everyone admired him; he was gentle and funny, but when he drank, the temper would come upon him. The temper would come and he would take the car and drive long miles on the motorway, looking for vengeance on those he blamed for his drinking. Where he could he finish but in prison?

He asked me to send him FHMs while he was inside. They were a prison currency, he said. All day he would lie in his cell, smoking dope. He was tough, he could look after himself, and when he got into crack cocaine, he found he won respect for his drinker’s courage, passing easily among the drug dealers of Moss Side. After a long and violent night he found himself at dawn in Platt Park with one of the biggest dealers, a man feared and admired. My friend the drunk had saved him that night, smashing a rival dealer armed with a machette with his bicycle U-lock. How do I get out of this life?, the dealer asked him that morning, but my friend the drunk wanted to get into it.

Now they would hang out, watching films together and taking puffs on the crackpipe. They visited the crack houses of Levenshulme, smoking with others. He was liked; he was generous; he would buy crack for everyone and they would watch University Challenge and he’d get all the answers right. One prostitute took a shine to him, sitting on his knee and telling him about the paintings she liked. One day she brought him one round to show him. It was by Stubbs, of all people. Was it an original?, she asked.

Stubbs

I’ve long since moved away, but my friend the drunk still rings me. Write down my exploits, he said, I want it all written down. He intended to write himself, he said. Have I read Trainspotting?, he asked. We spoke about Burroughs; he loved Kerouac and for him Leonard Cohen was the greatest of all drunks. Then he turned to the music he had loved as a child when he lived with his divorced mother. They would listen to Kris Kristofferson and the Highwaymen. Now when he phones he sometimes holds the phone to the speaker. Not a word except, listen!

Last night, he was meek. He had no friends left, he said. No one rings him. Instead, he has to ring them, and he knows they don’t trust him. We speak of our great mutual friend. She doesn’t trust me, he says. It was 11.00; I was tired. You don’t want to speak to me anymore, he said. Alright, I’ll just go. I said, it’s good to speak to you, I’ll give you a ring sometime. He said, yeah in six months or something. I put the receiver down and he is still speaking, half-resentful, half-aggressive. And I’ll come and see you, he says.

He speaks of the woman in the burkha next door. She has beautiful eyes, he says, but it’s not enough. He plays cricket with her sons and sometimes she invites him in. It’s not enough, he says, but her eyes are beautiful. Write that down, he says, everyone should know about me. He always asks for that – for his life to be recorded and for me to record it. One day he will write it all down, he says, but in the meantime, I should record it and share it with others.

He speaks about himself, his business. It’s always about to fail, but there is always hope. He speaks about golf, and then football in which he knows I have no interest. He speaks about music, and finally, just when I show signs of leaving, he asks me about myself. But he’s not interested; he cuts in, he becomes aggressive. You think you know everything, he says, but I’m pretty clever. I may not be as clever as you, but I have a great general knowledge, he says. Then a name I don’t recognise. Do you remember that name?, he says. And then, it was from that game of Trivial Pursuits we played, do you remember? The pole vaulter.

I was a legend, he says, and I’m still a legend. Are you going to remember, he says, are you going to write this down?, he says. I’ll write it down eventually, he says, like Burroughs, do you remember that line, "Me and the Sailor were working the yard", he says. You should keep a record, he says. Do you remember when we went out to that restaurant when I first moved in, he says, when you made me eat meat? You should write it down, he says. Do you remember how we used to dress up, he says, and go out to the cafes? Do you remember the party at X.’s? You should write it down, he says, it would make a good story. Someone should write it down, he says, it’s worth remembering. You think you’re so clever, he says, but you should try and live my life. Go on, write it down. That’ll give you something to write, he says.

You wouldn’t last a minute inside, he says. X. (the dealer) respects me, and do you know why?, he says, because I’m hard. It goes back to when I was inside, he says, I handled myself. I used to trade cigarettes and FHMs, he says. They respected me, he says, the lads. I used to trade cigarettes with them, he says, they were so stupid. Write it down, he says, you should write about real things, he says. I’ll give you something to write about, he says. You wouldn’t last a minute in the crackhouses, he says, but they respect me. I talk to crack whores about Stubbs, he says, what do you think of that? Write it down, he says. You should write about real life, he says. I’ll tell you about real life, he says.

Did you think crack whores like Stubbs?, he says. She didn’t know it was Stubbs, he says, I told her it was Stubbs. She showed me a painting and I said, it’s Stubbs, he says, and they were really impressed. They had this painting and they thought it was an original, they thought it was a real Stubbs, "is it worth anything?" they said, he says. So I picked it up and looked it over very carefully and I said, I – think – it’s a copy, he says. But they were very impressed, he says. I always buy enough crack to go round, he says. We all smoke it, he says. It’s not like you think, he says, actually it’s not that addictive, he says. Not like drink, he says.

You should write this down, he says. Real life, he says. Not middle class life like yours, he says. And I’ll tell you what, they were so tight in that house, he says. They wouldn’t buy proper Coke, only Panda cola. They used to buy Panda cola because it was cheap, he says, it was really funny. I told them to buy real Coke, he says. It’s the real thing, I told them, he says. They didn’t know how to take it, he says. They’re not used to having the piss taken out of them, he says. You couldn’t have got away with it, but they thought I was okay. They trusted me, he says. I’m quite hard, he says. You know me, I can handle myself, he says. One day I’ll write it all down, he says. Have you read Trainspotting?, he says. Like that, he says. You wouldn’t understand it, he says, it’s in Scots. I love bagpipes, he says, they make me cry. They remind me of the old country, he says. You never cry, do you?, he says. You don’t know anthing about life, he says, real life. It’s going on under your nose, he says, and you know nothing about it.

Stubbs, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", he says. It doesn’t give you enough, the burkha, he says, you can only see her eyes, he says. But she has pretty eyes, he says. But it doesn’t give you enough, he says, you can’t see what she’s like, he says. I play cricket with her lads, he says, and she makes me dinner, he says. She likes me, he says, but then I’m a good looking bloke, he says. Always was. Not that you aren’t good looking, he says, but I was the good looking one, he says. It’s because I’m tall, he says. Women like tall men, he says. Can you hear that?, he says, it’s Leonard Cohen, he says. The greatest drunk of them all, he says. Can you hear that?, he says. It’s Kris Kristofferson, he says, Sunday Morning Coming Down.

No one trusts me anymore, he says. You don’t trust me, do you?, he says. I have been drinking a bit, he says. Business isn’t going too well, he says. Haven’t worked for months, he says. Been playing golf, though. You have to play golf for business, he says. Anyway, he says, I’ll let you get on. I know you don’t want to hear from me, he says. You’ve never rung me. How many times have you rung me? Twice?, he says.

Stubbs, though, he says, I knew you’d like that story. Write it down. I’ll write it down one day. I’m reading again, he says, I knew you’d approve, he says. Vonnegut, he says. Have you read him? he says. Hilarious, he says. And I know you don’t like Kerouac, but Dharma Bums, it’s great that, he says. "Me and the Sailor were working the hole", do you remember that?,  he says. Burroughs, he says. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it, I’ll let you get on, he says, I can see you want to go. What are you doing? Turn the television on, he says. It’s Dylan, he says. He’s great, Dylan, he says. Shall I tell you who the new Dylan is?, he says. Shall I tell you?, he says.

You don’t know anything, he says. I’ve got the answers, he says, I’ve lived, he says. I’ve seen life, he says. Stubbs, though, funny that, isn’t it?, he says. But I won’t keep you, I know you’ve better things to do, he says. You never want to talk to me, he says. No one wants to talk with me, he says. I know I ring too often, he says. Three times a night? Yes, sometimes, but I just want it to be like the old days, he says. Do you remember?, he says. No one has a sense of humour anymore, he says. The Highwaymen, he says, listen!

So my friend the drunk. So my sketches for My Friend the Drunk.

Conversation with Rob, after yesterday’s post. He tells me former occupants of the house, the moons of Jupiter, are to meet. He views them as usurpers; they might have felt closest to David, but we’d lived there much longer, hadn’t we? No doubt he is right. 7 years, I think, the pair of us, on and off. 7 years! And it would have been longer had I not found a job for myself up here. I was reminded of this as I passed that birthday after which I had sworn to myself I would leave academia had I not found a job. But chance led me to one; I left the house as I left Manchester. But what did I leave? Oceanic time, empty hours in armchairs in the lounge or surfing the net on David’s computer.

I worked then, as is the case for so many, sporadically and according to the whim of my employers. One week, thirty-five hours of teaching cover in a dozen subjects, the next week, nothing. For a long time, I taught Libyan students English every morning. For them, signs of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy were everywhere and they would talk in halting English of the glorious Libyan revolution and the ascendacy of Gadaffi. But I had to wait months to be paid – months at a time when the city council stopped processing housing benefit claims. No money, so I took up the impossible task of cleaning the house in part exchange for my rent. But I was a poor cleaner and my post was relieved by the headmaster-cleaner who, after work, would whip round the kitchen in his suit with a mop. He loved to clean and cleaned agressively. We knew to stay away.

‘A headmaster-cleaner’, said Rob, ‘who would believe that?’ But I remember Pink Dandelion, founder of the Journal of Quaker Studies proclaiming that he was a mineralist, eating neither meat nor vegetables. How was this possible?

7 years! Sometimes I would help prepare the food for grand visitors – or visitors who, ordinary enough in their dayjobs, would assume, in the evening, the robes that befitted their other life. Metropolitans and hermits visited; monks and their novices; we prepared great dishes of fish and seafood remembering their fasting (we, too, lived according to the monastic fasting calender).

I ate well during those penniless years. I lived well, too, never wanting for company. But what company there was! David would launch on great gales of conversation. We would set off in the morning for an eleven o’clock coffee at our favourite cafe and David would already have begun to talk of the crusaders or Old English or whatever had taken his fancy. How he would talk! I would need to say only’ ‘oh yes’ or ‘oh really’ and whether interested or half-interested, nonplussed or indifferent, he would continue as we drank our coffee and as we walked home. I found no chance to speak, but then what did we share? His world was remote from mine as mine was from his, only he did not know of this remoteness, thinking all of us as interested in he in whatever had caught his fancy.

Of what could I talk? I had barely any grasp on the object of my studies. I barely existed to the extent that when I met by chance a married woman who wanted an affair I obliged her not because she excited me, but because I wanted to prove that my actions could have some effect in the world. Later, when, discovered our affair, her husband smashed up his furniture in rage, this too was good; I had acted; the world was changed.

7 years! In his office in the cellar, Rob and I played network Quake, first Quake I and then, over the years, Quake II and Quake III. I know those computer generated dungeons and arenas better than I know any real location. 7 years, and Rob would pin pornographic pictures of Czech models on the purple walls.

When did we resolve between us not to form any romantic relationships? We hadn’t time for it, we were both struggling and had to remain absolutely focused. Rob and I admired the resolve of the Hurricane in the film of the same name to keep himself from emotional attachments lest he be unable to cope with the conditions of his life. We were not in prison, but we didn’t want to think about our situation.

I remembered the story Gene Wolfe retells in Peace. There were only a few of the Sidhe, elflike creatures of old Ireland; those few that remained became swans so they could fly all over Ireland and the world. Years later, when there were only 2 of the Sidhe-swans left, they consented to be transformed back into their old bodies. But now they were wizened and old, the beauty of their youth gone. What had we been before we moved to the house? We’d forgotten. And when we were transformed back into what we were? Age would have claimed us, our youths having vanished in the many rooms of that big house.

Rob flatters me that my effect upon others is to make them speak of themselves in the third person – to take distance, thereby, from the disasters and the triumphs of their lives. A strange gift (even R.M. does this, speaking of herself in the third person as The Young Missle, which I sometimes call her), but one I am happy to have been able to give. That’s what David lacked, Rob and I decided – he was always unable to know how he appeared to others, to see not what he enabled but also what he prevented, how torrents of speech would prevent others from speaking, installing that great differend which meant none of us could say a word.

How could we speak of ourselves? We could not. Speech was not given to us; there was no chance. This was why we formed the Friends of the Kitchen and retreated to the kitchen or the old stables to talk – why, too, cafes, for a time, were our home, where we could admire the coffee and the waitresses and feel ourselves, when served, to be our own persons again, significant and efficacious and able to accomplish real acts in the world. The Friends of the Kitchen, saved from the world but not ready for it, were looking for a place to try out their voices.