The Fireman - unfinished
Prague, the “magical city” had in the end been a city like any other in this at least, that it was populated with people I couldn’t find it in my heart to love. I was hurt. Some time way back when I had been hurt so deep that I couldn’t find that in myself. In one way or another I had failed. In one way or another it hadn’t worked out. I had no novel. I had no short story collection. I had dissembled and acted out the whole time, just like anywhere else. It was that cliche of cliches: I had gone away and not escaped myself. On coming back, I was going to be a fireman. I had decided. Or rather I had not decided at all. I was desperate. Nothing had come to anything. I hadn’t come to anything. Something inside me had long ago gone wrong and the chances of finding a place for myself were looking slimmer by the day.
I had been a teacher. And not a good one. Native speakers were sought after for their take on life, most came to live a little, and this was reflected in their teaching, which didn’t get bogged down in the usual grammar but was led by conversation. For years I had been depressed by those around me and their limited conversation, but living in these moribund parochial towns had hidden my own shortcomings from myself. I was no conversationalist. Nor was I a natural extrovert. I was bad with people full stop and teaching, I came against this every day.
There were groups I had fun with, where we had fun together. One group in particular I looked forward to, in an office building given over to Ceska Sporitelna, a bank that at that time was readying for a takeover - most of the banks had long gone. I was teaching a small group from a department that was to be particularly hit by the merger or takeover or whatever it was (my own limited understanding of banking and economic concepts and terminology was undoubtledly a failing with many of my private business clients) and who therefore suffered low morale. My lessons, which didn’t, I think, push them too hard, were a welcome break. In fact, on that first day when I turned up with my Kangeroo Poo t-shirt (a long-term favorite) having rushed in the beating sun with my heavy bag on my back, following an outdated map which had me lost for a while in a panic around a new estate, my paranoia and self-consciousness started to give way to a feeling of ever-vigilent ease (I had no other state of relaxation around people, forever expecting that I would fuck it up sooner or later).
Martin, Tereza and Vlasta, who have now presumably long gone, distributed around other companies similarly bought up and sold abroad, helped me a little in that fight within myself to see the good in me.
It’s there. I know it’s there. Buried deep down. It’s just that I know too how difficult it is to get it out, to express it. All of my intelligence, all of my wit, all of my kindness, all of my empathy. Everything I have to give is choked off. I have problems with concentration. I have problems with speech. I have problems interpreting human social behaviour. I have problems too with depression. All of which wouldn’t add up to much if it wasn’t for this: that whatever I do I can’t express myself. I write to save that betrayal of words that happens over and over whenever I open my mouth and engage my tongue. But then that’s where my concentration comes in. My mind is a constant brainstorm and it mutinies against any task I set it.
This has its positives. All of my imagination, all of my ideas come from this very fact. I was sat with a student (a studentka), in her flat across the road from the Penny Market where the 118 bus turns back round on itself, and there she had placed on the table a plate of what looked to me like Jaffa Cakes. We had a weekend intensive course coming up for Ceska Sporitelna which I was terrified of and my mind wandered from whatever it is she was saying. I vaguely remembered a court case regarding whether Jaffa Cakes should be classified as cakes or biscuits. One was exempt from tax, the other was not. This led me in to an idea of how to structure the whole course around a series of role plays. They would be part of a company who’s Jaffa Cakes are their flagship product. They would be first asked to state, without conferring, what they thought the biscuit was. Of course it would be impossible for them to have the precision in their use of the English language to know, but this exercise was to bind the group a little and free them up to make mistakes. Those who gave the wrong answer would be told they were up for demotion or some such. Meanwhile, a stirring defense of the product as cake, or biscuit, or whatever it was supposed to be would be attempted by two groups in preparation for the court case.
I got rather carried away, writing numerous newspaper articles in different styles, and taking different slants on the events. Having a deadline, it was the first time I had completed anything for a long time. I don’t have the files to hand, and if I permitted myself to go out and find them I wouldn’t get this written at all, but I remember The Sun was apoplectic, reporting that crowds of pensioners were rioting at the price hike and denouncing the move as a challenge to England’s very notion of itself. Another newspaper mentioned the product’s infamous advertising campaign in which a pilot was paid to report a UFO and liken it to a Jaffa Cake. The FT covered the finantial implications of it all.
I can get very excited about planning things like that, left to my own devices. I can indeed on occasion be quite Gatsby like in my desire to throw a party, doing the catering and putting in all those finishing touches.
Mostly, though, it all goes wrong. As it did indeed on my farewell party. I walked around in the days before imagining turning up to this in a Union Jack suit, but of course, I was as drunk and incoherent as ever. And Martin and Tereza turned up on the wrong day and waited on their own in a crowded pub.
It was like that towards the end. My last day in one class I made a yearbook and had the students draw each other and me and write notes about each other. I collated them and photocopied them, almost burning the thing out and feeling quite self conscious stood there using so much paper. I handed them out and stapled them, everyone getting the original of their own drawing.
It was then time for goodbyes and I made the usual hash of it. I’m not good at things like that. Finally, one student left, a girl called, I think, Tijana, a truly beautiful dark-haired woman with freckles, a flawless American English accent and a happy-go-lucky personality who had moved to Prague from somewhere in former Yugoslavia. She said something socially appropriate. I said something like “yeah”, something so idiotic and mundane after nine months of teaching that had I a gun I could have shot myself there and then.
I’m Aspergic. That is, I’m a high-functioning autistic. ADHD to boot.
In the time I was there I hid behind the language and the social differences. I learned Czech, a rebarbative language, to a reasonable standard, and tried to speak it as often as I could. Often in preference to English. So much could be forgiven that way, and besides, this made every conversation an education of some kind. And for someone so little drawn to social chit chat, this was a help.
Going back to face life again in England wasn’t easy. My writing hadn’t been going any better. My Apple iBook, which had broken more than once over there, was full of a thousand fragments of writing, of stories, of novels, of poems. All unfinished. Writing was the only thing that could even ever promise not to hurt. That could be my route to expressing myself as others do, however fractionally, however incompletely, in conversations throughout the day.
Like a series of ectopic pregnancies, stories have been living in my head for upwards of ten years, never developing beyond that stage where you can start to see hands and feet, and faces.
And so writing as a career stayed far away in the future buried under a weight of social solecisms each of which burned into me. I was desperate, knowing not only how impossible it was for me to write while holding down a full time job - I had in fact never had one, working only thirty odd hours in a hardware store after leaving university, and, not including the commuting and the tortured preparations, only doing a handful of lessons for most of my time in Prague - but also that what writing I would do would not add up to much at all. My CV was now so threadbare and unimpressive that the first class honours degree kindly tutors had bumped up for me no longer counted for anything and so as the years stretched out before me knowing how much I needed to avoid depression, and how much I would have to achieve to have any hope of any happiness at all, I could see nothing but years and years of menial work making me only more and more embittered and hurt, more damaged than I already was.
That’s why then, there I was, the fireman.
I had been writing a novel. A novel that had made it with me from Scab City, my university town. This novel had started off, as they all do, when another had died, and had started off, too, as an entertainment. This was Graham Greene’s term for his non-literary novels and struck me as providing a guideline for the kind of novel I ought to work towards to simply get the finish line, for one thing, without getting too bogged down in all the details and all the deepest significances of my usual literary work. It was an aim too in terms of getting published, so I could go on to write my more important work, being known and published, I could do so by taking time off from work, something that would be absolutely necessary if I was to progress at all.
The novel began as In Cold Blood. It became, mercifully briefly, Sang Froid before it grew into the impossibly cumbersome Address Exception. I lived this novel, on and off, for years, but forget its most basic details now.
The Iraq war had broke my heart and my spirit. I had come to short stories innocent in many ways, free of baggage. I had always had a sense of right and wrong, a real feeling for social justice, but I had loved the purity of the short stories of Raymond Carver when I discovered him first those ten years or so ago. A year of studying English with Sociology and Politics, and then three of focusing on Politics at university after a first term of English with a double barrel surnamed fright of a classicist (she had studied under Helen Gardner and written some impenetrable introduction to the poems of Edmund Spencer and her Daily Telegraph badge said all I needed to know about her beliefs about the democratisation of education) had been more than enough to pollute any purity in my own writing. Politics now could insinuate itself into anything.
Several projects had died in Nottingham. It was one of my least settled periods. There, living in a house on an estate that would still be given over to the underclass were it not at the time one of the gentrification capitals of the UK, connected to one house with an aspirant musician, and another with the kind of family that can only daily inspire anger and mordant sadness - who knows how many were stuck together in that house with the youngest screaming at her baby, threatening, say, to shit in her dish and make her eat it - I remember sitting in the basement with my manual typewriter on a paintpot trying to work on one story, about a woman with ME and a gauche man next door trying to woo her in his atavistic way, a story which had swelled as they tended to do, into a novel, so too do I recall driving out on petrol I couldn’t afford to the nearest service station to park up and attempt to dictate stories, holding my turned off mobile phone to my ear so as not to attract attention.
One of those dictations was a story about a disabled man in a wheelchair who, though depressed, had found himself a place in life. He had made a collage in the local library out of amateur pictures of feet from a life drawing course he had either himself taken or posed for. The collage featured a quote from Marcus Aurelius, something about mutilated bodies. With poor housing, he helped others with volunteer advocacy work and advice, and the library was a place he could call his own.
Another I remember well was too tricksy by far. How I remember too talking about it with my ex-girlfriend’s friend whose brother had been published. A businessman had been commuting when he falls asleep at the wheel. As he almost crashes into the concrete support for a bridge, his whole life flashes before his eyes and he gets thinking of his childhood, his dead father, and his own life. This stalled for several reasons I also remember well. One, I tied myself up in knots having him sleep, and perhaps dream, in a service station before continuing his journey, where he was to fall asleep at the wheel. It is so much work unpicking such a thing that I find it impossible to motivate myself through it only to redo it. The title of the story, Thanks Peter God, relates to my own memory of the Catholic mass when I was a child and one of my own mistaken interpretations of it all as it washed over me. I had transfered it here confusedly, to a man who had grown up in Ireland, possibly at a time when the mass was still spoken in Latin. It was, besides, something of a gimmick. The story could have lost it for the better. Also, though, my parents visited at around that time and we took a walk around the local deer park. They asked about an old school friend of mine, a gay lad who had had such problems coming out and had such a hard time even at university for his sexuality that he had hanged himself with electric cable. He had done so soon after I had met him after a period of many years one summer in Newquay. Back in school he had passed me love notes, which I had misinterpreted. He wrote so vaguely, starting with a “do you feel like I feel?” that I thought he was talking about depression, something that had already fallen on me. When I realised what it was all about I didn’t extricate myself - a feature of my autism I see again and again in my past is this inability to correct misunderstandings in conversations but to carry on as if they were intended. He had left Newquay early that time, talking a bout a problem his dad had. My friend saw him when he left. He didn’t look like himself. He looked terrified. In that deer park where I ran only a handful of times in my time at university, my parents asked what had driven him to suicide. I replied that he was gay. They didn’t judge him. Once, my father had discovered a Prince CD I had bought and hidden, as I hid many of my purchases out of a sense of guilt that pervaded much of my childhood (I also used to eat chocolates and sweets in secret), he held it up and said that gays brought AIDS into the world. I would have been around sixteen at the time, with hair by then perhaps down to my ear lobes. It was around the time I bought a Nirvana t-shirt. On the front, their smiley faced logo. On the back, the slogan:
FLOWER SNIFFIN
KITTY PETTIN
BABY KISSIN
CORPORATE ROCK
WHORES
Dad took a photo of this. (I found it only later.) He took it back to the shop. And he put a dictionary on the table beside me, leaving it for me, open on the right page, for me to see what a terrible thing it was that I wanted to show to the world. Of course, the entry had many glosses, and the correct one for the slogan was not the one he had had in mind.
Still, I have some sympathy. Who knows what part music may play in teen depression these days. I can look back and think of certain songs, like Black by Pearl Jam with its haunting peroration - “I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life. I know you’ll be a star, in somebody else’s sky but why, why, why-y-y can’t it be mine” - that I would listen to again and again in my worst moments and feel more pain.
It was Iraq, though, that sent me reeling. It sent me towards politics, of course, but I could see no solution. I finally cracked after stalling on Christopher Isherwood’s diaries and all of the tortured philosophising that went with them with their pacifism and the new age nonsense of the set he surrounded himself with - right or wrong I associated that with a justification of their stance to themselves and others. On the stalling, more to the point, of my reading of Greg Palast’s The Best Democracy Money can Buy, a popular and populist book on the workings of the Bush administration. This led me into the next doomed project, the most bitterly satirical and mordantly self-deprecating story I’ve yet embarked upon.
Sweetcorn Teeth distilled my experiences of that time and satirised my own own aspirations to be a campaigning journalist who tolerates all manner of hardships to get to the truth - Palast seemed to me at the time to style himself as the rare man of integrity facing all kinds of difficulties in pursuit of the story. The protagonist lived in a van which ran off liposuction fat from a clinic in the posher area of town around the arts cinema. He pieced together shredded Council documents such as a letter from a woman complaining that she had been mocked as incontinent in a letter replying to her request for justice after her cat had been run over. He became involved, too, in a story about a Robin Hood-style thief, a cross dresser who stole from the rich to give to the poor. On the way he stumbles upon a psychology lecturer from the university who is involved in an S & M ring involving a drug, an anti-depressant, that as a side effect, causes people to have an orgasm when they yawn - this was his answer to uninspired conversation. There was then the police chief with his conversations about sticking stamps to his penis overnight to see if he got an erection and the painful injury he got on running away from the Pyschologist’s house on seeing the mouse with the human penis grafted onto its back (it was around the time of the mouse with the human ear on his back, and I had hated the Future mouse passages of the recent literary hit White Teeth whose message I had found naive). The whole thing was angry and disturbed.
Cold Blood had been a reaction to the disillusion that had fueled Sweetcorn Teeth and which had itself been born of overreaching myself. A close knit party of climbers head out to a dangerous challenge. They are led, as they have been from university, by a closed, driven man. I forget his name. In fact, no, he was called Grip, a nickname born of a mocking reference to his attempts at film-making as well as his climbing. Back from university days he had insisted that they pool their money to buy equipment and, treated the others in the group much as Alex Fergusson treated his footballers….