Daisy Chain Mail - Unfinished
“If I get this wrong I could die by my own hand, it’s as simple as that. It’s been killing me slowly for years, this illness inside of me. You’ve seen it these last two years and been powerless to help. And you’ve tried as hard as anyone could. For years I had no one and when the fits took me I tried to struggle on through it on my own. I tried to fill the hole inside myself. Maybe one day I’ll manage. Maybe I’ll manage with this. But I owe you an explanation. I owe you all an explanation. And talking will never do.
I wasn’t there. I was never there. When you spoke to me and when you held me. When you drank with me and when you fucked me. I wasn’t there.
Working in the warehouse in Nottingham. Working with the elf-like kid in jack boots with the pointy beard. The lad who was turfed out of his college for putting up posters for a college election advertising himself as the Trenchcoat mafioso sometime after Columbine, called to the jewish principal to answer to the fears of students and their parents. The lad who had tried to do himself in. The lad who spent his days on Nazi internet forums and writing a novel for the Doctor Who series set in the English Civil War. I wasn’t there.
I would step into the goods lift and there was a story. A version of Maupasant’s The Horla, perhaps. There he was, this boy wheeling his crates into the lift, pressing down, and down he would go, sweating, fearing deep into his soul as the lift came to the ground floor, the shop floor, the concrete scrolling by behind the shuttered doors with the familiar inane graffiti. And then, as he shrank into himself in terror, down again, past the familiar chatter, to be greeted with the roll of sheet metal by the devil himself, and the burning and the screams of hell. Only later, after another eternity compressed into a infinitesimal flicker of his work mates’ world would he step back to ascend, shocked, broken, traumatised, to wheel out the crates to where they belonged, a world apart from his peers with not the slightest promise of bridging the gap.
There too I would find the young lads spray painting the lift of their council flats, and the young boy left behind in the florid shouts of tags and banners, his heart giving out to the shock of being discovered by an angry tenant, the crazed loner in the trousers held up by string who would call for his cat every night and who had called the lift once again and waited and waited as they held the door on the top floor before setting off, enraged, to take the stairs once again. Trying to get in with these older boys the solvents had gone to his head as he felt elation of art, of laughter, of danger, before collapsing. Quick thinking could have saved him. But that wasn’t the world they lived in.
These were not all stories that could change the world, nor stories even that could quicken the human heart with recognition of some of the most painful truths of life. Many were frivolous. Most were chaff. If these were not I wouldn’t cast them so frivolously away. But they fed off my mind like a parasite, like the wasps that bury their eggs in the soft cavities of a ladybird’s abdomen.
There was beauty. There was love. There was tenderness and hope. But all ended the same way. All died the same way they had come about. My mind, so restless, so busy, moved on and moved on leaving room for nothing. I sat down to write and the stories, still coming, smothered themselves.
There was a time when I needed so much less than today. So few of us make it to those years unscathed, unhurt. It seems to me sometimes that there is a law of entropy that leads us - those more sensitive, those more intelligent of us at least - to find steadily less of what we need as we go through life, needing more and more, needing the love of a good woman or man, needing the affirmation of a decent, steady, hard but rewarding kind of work even as our capacity to find such things diminishes. Needing love, ‘the error bred into the bone’.”
“You’re happy with that?” she asked. It was her poker face. I remembered Joanna Lumley talking on a radio programme about the old actresses in the days before Botox. They never used to move their face, she said. They would say ‘I’m so worried about Jack’ and you wouldn’t see it in their face. To be beautiful they had to be expressionless. I worried about what I projected onto her face, this intelligent, sensitive, dangerously stable and resoundingly beautiful woman who had achieved so much with her life, taken it, it seemed, in the direction she had wanted to, who betrayed not the slightest dissatisfaction with her role and her place in life. I couldn’t picture her desperate to write for herself, to express her own mind. In her company I detected what I thought might be a distinctly feminine contentment with life as it is. The writer I thought, the true writer, has a masculine restless anger, a displacement. It was an attempt, no doubt, at mysogyny, at condescension, at wresting back control, or at self-affirmation, at proclaiming myself as an artist, as someone who stood above life, if so it failed of course: women knew how to live, how to not be distracted from life by seeking missions and purposes.
“It’s not a trick question,” she said. She said it with the tones they programme computerised telephone exchanges to reproduce, flat, calm, mellifluous. She would have complete control over herself until we finished for the day, which would be when I tired rather than her. Clearly she knew how I felt. How could she not when I had opened myself up so carelessly after a lifetime of hiding it all away. Nothing had made it to the page, but she could read between the lines all the same. It was her job. She read the manuscript closer than any reader ultimately would. That made it all the harder. She couldn’t be left indifferent. She couldn’t be left unmoved. If it hadn’t clicked with her yet, it would. She was frustrated by my social cluelessness, by my not knowing my own mind. If I had been a womaniser like many she must have met, a chancer who would attempt at all events to rank up the sexual tension, who had the courage of his convictions, it might have been less invidious.
Get a grip. She was doing a job.
“I don’t much like to read it,” I said. I was holding my thigh away from hers, feeling an uncomfortable tension in my knee and ankle. It was a week response, especially after such a gap.
“Then you’re not happy with it. It only remains to ask yourself why.” She spoke with such patience my spirits collapsed. Already I was struggling with this process but I didn’t want to bottle it as I had the first time, when I had refused to defend it at all and demanded to the point of tears that I take it away and work on it, coming back with my tail between my legs when staring at it in my study, I could only want to rip it up and start again, but knew I didn’t have the courage, the confidence, the self-belief. She spoke to me like so many had - maybe, just maybe I only imagined this - like I was mentally infirm, thin skinned and slow-witted.
“I don’t know”, I said, “I mean…” I hated her for her articulacy. I hated everyone in that building for their professionalism and steadfastness. I was a stuttering fool in conversation at the best of times. My voice, which could be masculine, even strong, those times I had something simple and []to say, was rather week and I tripped over the simplest of words, failing to find others. For two years and more I had hidden behind a second language, distrusting my native tongue, and even that I had failed to master, clamming up once again in the presence of others who spoke it. “…I’ve never thought it was a strong opening. I mean, I always wanted to go back and rewrite it after I got going. It’s arbitrary and…”
“Arbitrary in what sense?”
“Well, I mean, I could have started anywhere.”
“Couldn’t any story start anywhere? It has to start somewhere. You start by saying you could die by your own hand. Is that weak?”
“It makes it sound like a confessional.”
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t like confessionals.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Ok”, she said. She didn’t have to tell me that it might be seen as nothing else.
“Let’s take a step back” she suggested. “You could have started anywhere. You didn’t. You started here. Joe Gargery could have been,” she laughed, “I was going to say a welder.” I made an effort to smile. I knew it was the kind of minor conversational error I invariably failed to repair. “A brewer, say.” I congratulated myself on guessing the associations that may have played out in her mind. Haversham house had been a brewery. But then she had picked the novel because she knew it still reverberated in my mind years after I had read it over and over for my A-Levels. It remained one of the only novels I had read closely. Quite possibly one of the only novels I had read as well as she read each and every one she had got through at a prodigious rate since she was a teen. For her it may have been unfamiliar ground but still I felt she was going easy on me. “He wasn’t. What I’m interested in is if there is anything here that strikes you as weak or as redundant within the framework you have set for yourself.”
“I really shouldn’t drink coffee”, I said, and made a move for the toilet. Looking back on my way out I looked back through the venetian blinds of her office to check she wasn’t looking and darted out for a cigarette. She wasn’t looking of course, she was leaning in to the screen reading closely. I rolled maladroitly, as ever, and gauchely interrupted a gossiping smokers’ quorum for a light, pausing their chat while I struggled to light up in the light wind.
“I was sixteen, seventeen when the sky fell in and had to be thrown up in front of me like I was walking through a parachute.
[Daisy Chain Mail]
…
I came back conscious of the time that had elapsed and the fact that forty minutes in we had done none of the work set out for her.
“The Auden reference,” I said. “That can go.” From two drags in I had been debating whether to say this breezily or peremptorily. It’s a sad fact that a couple of gulps of nicotine can give me such certainty for a line, two lines, no more, and a renewed confidence and morale that goes no further. On bursting into her office I panted it out wheezily with stinking breathe. God I was a mess.
“So we’re agreed,” she said, striking out the offending passage without a trace of ceremony. I hated to think it was tacit that in that line I was attempting to show some of my learning, but in fact demonstrating nothing but how callow I was.
But God she was incredible! The lines of her pin stripe trousers as they broadened around her crossed thighs. The swell of her mauve velvet blouse. The curves of her cheek and jaw and the soft moist hue of her lips. Her eyes - it must have angered her - I could barely glimpse until I perused her at length when she was busy with other things.
“The stories are insubstantial so early on,” I suggested.
“Again,” she said, “that’s structural. They seem ok to me, and besides, it’s too late for that now.”
She could be brutal with feint praise. I allowed myself a smile at imagining how it would be to ask her how it was for her.
She smiled. “What?” She said. “No really,” she insisted. I was glad of her permitting herself to become more human with me, just regretted that it was such a trap that letting my own guard down could only lead to her complete exasperation. I had tried to equalise the imbalance of power again and she had called me on it.
“I’m just remembering [B],” I said, talking of the lad with the jackboots and fascist fixation.
[She asks about him to pass the time. He soon feels she is only humouring him again and wants to press on.]