Humor (8 page)

Like everyone else, I fell into love to the soundtrack of famine and war. During this episode I failed to think much about it. I devoted my attention to the eyelashes and the freckles on her face. I thought about sex also. During my period of falling I was stung by a wasp, failed to recognise my face in the mirror, was the subject of laughter, ate little and infrequently, assumed I was unique, had difficulties with reality, crashed in my car, had mosquitoes feast on my forehead, lost my job and had diarrhoea.

Although none of the above were important to me at the time. I remember them only because I had fallen into love. Do you love me? I love you. Do you love me? I love you.

And nothing else mattered and nothing else happened. The famine and the war were like wallpaper.

If we had been murdered in our beds. If we had been forcibly separated. If our families had been killed. If we had lost our minds. If she had been killed. If I had been killed. If we had been beaten raped tortured stabbed shot tied up with barbed wire dragged along the road behind the tanks

None of the above.

None of that has happened to us yet.

What’s the idea? This is the idea: you get into your car that you bought this year on some huge mortgage scheme and will have to replace in another year or so after you’ve killed a few birds mammals and maybe a child or two and drive to the supermarket past all the dead shops that have been put out of business by the supermarket and park on a huge expanse of concrete that has been put on a field or a wood then walk probably further than you would to a corner shop and commandeer a huge trolley and go into the supermarket and fill up the trolley with things you don’t want don’t need and can’t afford then have an argument with whoever you’re with because the whole experience is beginning to destroy you and then you queue up behind a line of similarly soul-damaged people then a poor unfortunate kid or pensioner who probably dreams in bleeps reads the barcodes on everything and doesn’t want to hear you say anything and is obliged to ask you if you have a loyalty card and if you want cashback (yes please I’ll have the fucking lot back and you can keep all this crap in my trolley) then you have to cart it all back to your car and load it up in the boot and get in and get out of the gargantuan car park then drive home through the bleak wasteland occupied only by those too poor to own a car and unload it all again into your dream home and then
consume it all and when you’ve shat it all out you have to fucking go back again.

I’m walking along the lane, thinking vaguely that I am off to fetch the future from my unknown destination. Brown-paper grocery sacks flip along the wet tarmac in the breeze, occasionally adhering to the ground where they slowly leak blood, again and again, to the sound of crows calling in a slow frenzy.

The latitude of the Palo Verde nuclear reactor in Arizona is minus eighty-seven point one three one oh five. The longitude is thirty-four point three eight seven five oh. In California, the Diablo Canyon reactor is minus one hundred and twenty point eight five five four five, then thirty-five point two one one four two. In Florida, Turkey Point is minus eighty point three three one six eight by twenty-five point four three six oh four.

My own location is not so precise. I’m sitting in a chair and I’m staring at the wall.

Men in pink fluorescent coats are burying the dead by the side of the road. They are yawning. There is a solitary figure on the overpass, watching the traffic flow east. Three motionless horses are standing by some wet straw in the rain in a redundant field next to the business park which is all made of green glass held miraculously vertical in the brown mud.

That part is in development.

Next door is what I’d call a showcase. The immense green-glass palaces are spaced perfectly amongst each other, and reflected cumuli flick gently across their surfaces. I like the trees; they are perfect, like the ones in architects’ 3D renderings. They have been planted in lines, wide avenues of hopeful saplings bordering new black tarmac car parks, freshly delineated into car-shaped boxes.

There aren’t many people at work in these new premises, because it’s Sunday. But the cars that belong to people who are either very keen or contractually obliged are parked very well, and at a certain distance from each other. The distance reminds me of the distance between men at a public urinal where there’s room for them to be choosy.

I like it that these people are awake and working on a Sunday. It gives me a warm feeling. I’m envious of them. I
imagine them in their cars going home along the A roads, or the motorway, and their cars will be warm with the radio playing, and they’ll be thinking about something. And they’ll turn into the estate of new houses and their house will be in there and they’ll know which one it is and they’ll drive up and park and get out and lock the car and unlock the front door and everything will be all right.

I like it.

After the green park for business is a big housing estate that looks very new. The gardens have grass and white plastic garden furniture. Some have swings, but I don’t see any children. It’s quite hard to see much, because there is a high defensive rampart, ten or fifteen feet tall, running the length of the estate next to the motorway. On top of the rampart is a wooden fence to keep the noise of the traffic away.

After I stopped looking.

A lot of the houses out here are bright red, straight out of the paint tube. The fences around their gardens aren’t right. But over there, to the east, everything is realistic and local and as it should be, except on fire.

Life in our city becomes intolerable and we have to get out. It is very difficult.

We escape to the countryside on the slopes outside the town. But none of the people who live in the country want to help us. We are bringing the plague. I look down at our city. Everything looks strange and perspective doesn’t work any more.

We climb the hills into the woods and we really don’t know what is going to happen to us.

We listen to the radio sometimes and the politicians and the generals all seem to be OK. They can’t commit and often they can’t comment either but we often have to do both.

When this is over we will watch the news. Then the politicians will be more precise. They will have novel ways of arranging events. Everything will be OK, and that will be official. It would be hard, otherwise, to tell what had happened.

Someone standing close to me is shot in the neck. He spins round suddenly very slowly and I can see the hole in his neck where his Adam’s apple should be. It is edited like a scene from a film. The crowd scatters and meshes and the man falls. Bad thoughts crowd my head. But the worst thing is that I want to get away as quickly as I can and I can’t remember where I have left my coat.

First; wet, black rock. Blue plastic flapping fitfully. There must be a wind. Floodlights on tall posts, or maybe security cameras. Huge plastic sacks full of trash. So much trash. Museums of it. Graffiti painted over in a colour approximating bare concrete.

Below are roads, then a roundabout. A big sign says ‘courage’, in capital letters. Everything has a coating of limp soggy brown dead leaves. The cars look balletic on the wet tarmac.

Torn scraps of blue sky. Black. Dark. Yellow light.

Obsolete brick sheds with blank windows and extinct chimneys, men in high-visibility vests, housing estates, blackened hedges, lumped fields, sagging parkland, empty barns, ragged fallow, serried conifers, saturated mud, burst banks.

Trees standing staring.

Then; acres of wet, empty rails. Another sign says ‘the snooty fox’, in italics. Pylons. Pyramids of gravel. Industrial units, Portaloos. Mud. Rubble.

Self-storage. I’d like to store my self. Not needed at present. Will call back later.

An empty football pitch. Studded boots sliding through mud, dog shit. Kwik Fit. Waitrose. Industrial estate. Mobile homes immobile. And a Portakabin remote in
a field of trash. A distant mental hospital. Stockbroker homes.

A huge wet field. One man standing in it. Arms raised wide to the sky. The sun finally comes out. We will shortly be arriving in East Croydon.

I remember with an occluded clarity our inflatable black-rubber stately home.

Back in those days we would wander the corridors in a kind of suspended conversation, words drifting like sunlit dust between us as we stepped forward, never knowing. Our feet would crunch the decades of dead insects that had ended against the grimed glass. The sunlight was millimetres away, but unknowable. You looked blankly from the high window and there was not much to see that I could see but probably many decodings for you. The black rubber radiated a claustrophobic warmth but I was cold to my bones and I wished I had a thicker sweater to keep away the shivers. Out behind the window some birds moved through the grey air writing words.

Behind us our past was filled with people and events, talk and activity, engagement and civility. It dragged us upstairs like a ghost. The floors bounced with a forgotten alacrity and there was a joy written there on the walls but all it said to me was
get out, get out.
I couldn’t remember the way out, or even if I knew the way in. I was carrying the jars of our dried shared life in a crappy old supermarket bag digging into my wrists and it hurt. I wanted at least a bus home but I was at home in our black-rubber stately home. There was no bus and no home.

In the fuggy behind of my memory our past was flexible and allowable; there was a way to make an impression. Today when I try to make an impression I hurt my head against the wall.

Yesterday I asked if we could take our inflatable black-rubber stately home out again; blow it up, and pretend that nothing had happened. But you said no: our tent would do. I cried my tears into another plastic bag and dropped it, unseen, into a bin.

Easyjets crawled across the sky, into the west wind. I read:
in loving memory of.
And:
what will survive of us is love, love is eternal, here rests for a time.

Perhaps the dead lie happily in the well-tended plots, or perhaps they prefer the forgotten, overgrown corners. Perhaps they prefer their names obliterated by time and the weather. Perhaps not.

There was only the sound of the strong west wind in that place, and I wasn't there for very long before I thought that I should leave.

I took some photographs in a dream. I took so many that I filled a 36-exposure roll of film. I took them to the developer’s. They could develop them in 24 hours, 48 hours or 3 days. I was quite excited about the photographs, so I decided to go for the 24-hour service.

When I got the photographs back I was disappointed, because they were all blank, just white rectangles. I thought that perhaps, if I stared at them for long enough, I might find myself back in the dream. I tried this for a while, sitting on a wet bench on a drizzly day in Regent’s Park. It didn’t work. A mother walked past with her child, who said, ‘The sky’s not grey.’

But it was.

I pushed through the crowd towards the main attraction. In a big glass tank was a naked man, standing there gazing ahead, not looking at us or anything at all. In the tank with him were millions upon millions of maggots, slowly chewing away at his flesh. As the writhing maggots gorged on the oblivious man, they visibly swelled and grew, and their sloughed skins were drawn along a glass chute by some kind of suction device into another glass tank where they rolled wispily together in their millions, glowing in the Californian sunset.

This was his act; standing in his glass cell, alive and fully conscious, he was stoically bearing his complete consumption by the squirming larvae that surrounded him. By sunset there would be nothing but a sinewy skeletal armature in the tank. And the crowds would leave, holding hands, moving easily into the dusk.

Everything was normal and as it should be until one day I woke up and there was something wrong. I didn’t know what it was, but it was a kind of persistent thing that I couldn’t quite ignore. Something was cold and it was inside, not outside. It was like a place where someone had poked me with an icicle. A splinter of winter. The days passed like they do and I just got colder. The cold spread until I was like a sculpture of ice. I didn’t sneeze any more, and I couldn’t cry and if I tried to come it was like a tendril of porcelain. I was a solid man. You could throw rocks at me and it didn’t hurt at all. I just splintered a little.

Perhaps fortunately, no one noticed and everything carried on being normal and as it should be, all around me. But I was frozen.