7 Ridiculous Journeys (4)

 During those sessions, God stayed well clear of the room: not so Emily Newley, Connie’s vicar’s daughter classmate, who occasionally dropped by to sip tea and to look like a placid hen from an illustrated nursery rhyme. Like Connie, she read Theology; unlike Connie, she kept a weather eye primed for husbandly reflexes in unwitting males; she also maintained, at some personal cost and to Connie’s bemused respect, a laboriously labyrinthine coiffure that wanted to wow the Wagnerites at Bayreuth or to crown a Memlinc Madonna. She was one of those women who cascaded outwards, incubating everywhere she sat, and had pioneered, avant la lettre, that wry good humour later perfected by a generation of plus-sized American females. He found they had much in common: Tove Jansson (but she had read The Summer Book and he had not), Bert Jansch (but he could play “A Dream, A Dream, A Dream” and she could not, her instrumental prowess being restricted to Northumbrian pipes); above all, an unlimited tolerance for tea, and tendency to metabolise it into diffuse beamishness. Increasingly, in Connie’s absence Emily would occupy the one good chair, unabashedly resembling a golf course in her accidented topography.

“Connie’s gone off you, you know,” she remarked one day, between sips of PG Tips.

So that was it. Connie hadn’t been round for two days. “Oh,” he said; then, remembering he was British, “what a pity”. His first girlfriend was now, with bewildering swiftness, his first ex-girlfriend - and she couldn’t be arsed to keep him apprised of his status. He glanced at the Blutack-stained Kate Bush poster on the wall opposite. Kate returned his gaze sniffily. “I am punishing you,” she whispered, “for the crime of having, a week ago, shifted your chair and ducked your head ever so slightly so that Connie, Emily and my leotard rewarded your fevered gaze with a syzygy of plump poitrines in perfect perspective, lending listless Lothario lusciousness to the scene. This is not allowed.” He looked at Emily again and noted that she seemed unconcerned, as if a break-up between one’s two closest friends was a bagatelle. He might have expected more sympathy. Maybe she had gone off him too, or was about to? If so, it was clearly important to be alone, as soon as possible, in order to begin rebuilding his ego on other, less treacherously human foundations. This being severally dumped was disquieting, even scary.

“Erm. I think I need to be alone. Not chucking you out or anything.”

She got up to leave: then, as if on an afterthought, offered a one-armed hug. “I’m sorry,” she ventured. “If there’s anything I can do...”

Naturally, he heard this as: “paw and slobber me, if the spirit move ye”. It took two seconds for this interpretation to be experimentally discarded. “No, that’s not on,” she italicised, and departed in a hurry, leaving him face to face with a deeply offended door and a sense of udders.

He sat on the bed and let solitude wash over him.

This, this was the situation. The predicament. The discovery. Over the years, he was to revisit this same old wilderness again and again.

Stretching back through time, beyond prehistory, you would always find this solitary boy crouched on the dangerous plain, innards out, his mouth a perfect “O”, his feet bitten into buddhahood by creepy-crawlies, vultures crisscrossing the sky. He would have been left there by his family, by his wife or his friend, by all of them in concert. There was no malice in their abandonment of him, for malice would imply caring, and they didn’t. And it was the revelation no one cared that awoke him to the haecceity of objects, to the rustle of leaves, to a woodlouse’s need to protect its tummy, to the possibility of gods transacting obliviously behind trees, to the draughts of piercing arctic air that a bogus sense of inclusion in something social habitually kept folk from feeling.

Yesterday you were unreflection, a gaping beak on a quivering neck sprouted from a nest, a hypnotic cycle of brief respites bestowed by looming visitors. Today they are gone, the providers whose full shapes you never saw, and your head turns, and you see yourself. You’re all spindly and flightless and featherless. Anomie, be thou my good.

Outside, the telephone wires hummed, the doves cooed, the ambulances ambulated, and night took place.