By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
8) Paul Cycling
The trouble, he decides, is not that there is a wind, because there isn't. Or only the draught from passing cars. No, it's that the pressure of air moving westwards around the planet is against him. He can get no volition. When he stops pedalling he sinks to a stop. Not like those two caterpillar-humped bridges where all he needed was a couple of kicks on the pedals and he was up and over the second bridge and floating on, granting him the illusion of being free and far from this sticky earth....
Nor is there anything wrong with the torpid bike. A mile back he upended it and spun the wheels. The wind in the spokes hummed a one note song in praise of ballbearings. Naught to do but give his mind to grinding on.
He enjoys those days when his legs feel full of power and his nose, like a ship's blunt prow, cleaves the air and the divided wind slipstreams along his rippling flanks. Not today. Today Bridgwater remains a line of thin red and white blocks laid upon the narrow horizon. Chimneys, like stunted black markers, rise above that horizontal. The size stays the same. The relaxation of the ride, the feeling of unfettered freedom, has long gone. Now he is aware of time being against him: Michael has to be met.
Trying to impress his will upon the pedals he dips his head with the muscular effort. He is breathing harder now, realises that his mouth is open and closes it.
He is grateful for the reprieve of a slight downhill slope. But it offers only a temporary increase in speed. The chimneys of Bridgwater seem as far away. Two green-black jets go screaming together in a semicircle behind him. Over there a row of poplars are like a line of sharpened pencils.
The smoke from Bridgwater's chimneys thins out on either side of their tops. Like the hand of a malign deity, fingers outspread, that smoke reaches out towards him. Black and white, its particles are diluted into the clear grey English air. He tastes the chemicals at the back of his throat, and closes his mouth again. His nose hairs can filter the crap.
Downwind of Bridgwater, within its realm of smells, he knows that it isn't just noxious smoke and chemical vapours coming his lungs' way. Bridgwater is a place of airborne dust and grit, from brickworks, from cementworks, from building sites .... Promiscuous bonfires spout fountains of white ash, a fine dust comes spinning out from carpentry workshops, along with paintspray from car bodyshops and the tart scent of burnt acid from metalworks. Add to that the passing traffic's tainting exhaust fumes and the drifting chemical sprays used in the fields on either side .... Paul's grandfather curses the invention of pesticides,
"They killed all the glow-worms of Westonzoyland."
In his mind Paul holds images of words sinister like herbicides, nitrates, PCBs, carbon monoxide, lead poisoning, fungicides .... Breathing heavily here on these green Somerset levels is unhealthy. He retches and hawks, sends a worm of white spit flying over a new wire fence.
Such thoughts have averted his face from his destination. He recognises the long bend before the motorway bridge. Willows and silver poplars here, trees exuding oxygen. Their massed leaves also hide the chimneys. His blue tattooed forearms are gleaming with a golden sweat.
From the motorway bridge, Paul looks at the gabled outskirts of Bridgwater, no different in its new houses from any other English town; except maybe Bridgwater has more chimneys than steeples. The town, though, has nothing to do with him. He does not feel that a part of it. He does not feel himself to be a part of his fellow men there, nor of anywhere else for that matter.
He will be back in plenty of time to meet Michael.
commentary.... People imprison themselves within their own lives. Aware of this Paul courted freedom. Paul, however, also enjoyed the responsibility of having a family. The two being irreconcilable he compartmentalised them. Conflicts subsequently arose only if the two overlapped the time span he had allotted them. As in his bike ride back from Burrow Mump.
That Paul should have obeyed the impulse that took him out towards Burrow Mump demonstrates how indefinable is freedom. Because, back then, Paul felt constrained to obey such impulses, to throw himself upon unconsidered chance ....
These 'carefree' bike rides were the price he felt that he must pay for being unemployed. (Unemployment being a privilege in Paul's book.) Out of work he had time, theoretically to call his own. Being unemployed he could break up the remorseless routines of the weeks and days without having to pretend to go sick; and then having to sneak off for a bike ride. (He didn't always, when claiming to be too ill to go to work, go for a bike ride. Often he simply sat around at home alone for a couple of days and caught up with himself. Being for these two days unemployed, however, he was up to date with himself, had only to catch up on the bike rides.)
These bike rides were also the price he felt he must pay for continuing to live in Bridgwater. When in prison, and when removing furniture, and people had asked him where he had lived, and if they had known of Bridgwater and so had said that they couldn't understand why any sane person would want to live in the middle of that brown stinkpot, then Paul had told them how very easy it was to get out onto the green Levels or up into the heathered hills. Thereafter, simply to justify his continuing to live in Bridgwater, he had felt compelled to go out into the countryside and under the colossal sky.
Of such complexities and compunctions is freedom made.
Add to that a story a prisoner had told him of walking along a rutted farm track between deep autumn hedges and of a grey deer leaping across the track directly in front of him.
"I lived in that place for three years," the prisoner had told him, "But all I can really remember of those three years is that deer leaping through the blue air above me. Its forelegs were tucked up under its chest. Its hind legs were outstretched. It had short Y-shaped antlers. And one brown eye was looking at me. That deer took three years to leap over that track ...." So did Paul go looking for his deer to go soaring over him, was waiting for all his Bridgwater years to be encapsulated in one such moment.
Yet Paul knew then that that was a dream, not of freedom, but of ownership — to have for himself just such an anecdote. Thus did Paul contrive to put himself in positions where things might happen to him. So did he also like to walk down streets he hadn't walked down before, to ride down tracks previously unnoticed.... all in the expectation, in the hope, that something there would change or explain his existence. Such were Paul's accommodations with circumstance, which he called freedom.
For all of the above labrynthian thought processes, Paul was unworriedly aware that he was not in control of his own life. Nor did Paul have conceit or arrogance enough to want to be in control. He knew that his spiritual and psychological state was dependent on the physical things of his existence. Even taking good health for granted, he knew that he was then limited by the house and district he could afford to live in, the furniture he could afford to fill the house with .... a car would make an enormous difference to his life; but he'd have to work long hours to afford it. Even so it would grant him greater freedom of movement, open his mind to other places .... Possibly. Record players, books, holidays, television, video — each could free, or each could create its own dependency.
So too are we defined and confined by our sexuality, our race, our religion, our intellect, our talents and our taste. (Although the latter three can cancel the first three.) Such are the boundaries of choice.
Paul knew then, too, that always there was something happening off-stage which would affect him. He likened it to watching finches through binoculars .... because he couldn't see the creeping cat — beyond the binocular's field of vision — the finch's sudden starts and flights were inexplicable to him. He had a clear view of what was happening; but, while the binoculars were at his eyes, he couldn't see what was happening.
So too off-stage in his own life. He often knew, with gloomy clarity, what was happening to him here in Bridgwater. His income chased inflation, an inflation caused partly by harvest failure in the Ukraine and Kansas, that harvest failure caused by global climatic changes; those climatic changes caused in part by the industrial practises of places like Bridgwater ....
So could Paul, in his freedom, also become captive to circular thinking. So did Paul also know that he was not in control of his own thinking. Every time that he followed a fashion he knew that his mind, his perceptions, had been altered by persons unknown to him. Defiance occasionally led Paul to deliberately do the unexpected, to do the mirror opposite of what might be expected of him, to thus contrarily battle against expectations' curtailments .... So he made himself smile when, in such a role or situation, he was supposed to have been grim. So he found advantages to living in Sydenham, within the realms of British Smellophane. So he declared himself to have no desire to leave Bridgwater.
He would not, however, Paul then told himself, take perverse satisfaction from how dirty Bridgwater was, would not cap work and pub stories of the worst industrial practices. But neither would Paul be made to feel guilty over Bridgwater's noxious emissions. He was not responsible for Bridgwater's ecological crimes. He did not profit from them.
At the same time Paul knew too well that feelings of guilt or innocence had little to do with laws or morals.
Rich farmers broke actual laws when they let slurry lagoons flood rivers. Most times those rich farmers weren't even charged, let alone fined. They caused more damage than Paul had ever done; and they profited from their semi-deliberate neglect; yet Paul was the one who knew the inside of prison cells.
Paul let himself be angry occasionally at the injustice and waste all about him. The waste of energy, the wasteful way people used their lives. But Paul felt no personal anger at the chemical farmers, nor pity for himself. The paradoxes were others', not his. Although he did feel, when chasing pennies, that he was the one wrongly embattled, that he was the one being drowned by petty circumstance and having to fight his way to the surface and the light ....
In loftier moments, from his bike saddle, he felt sorrow for this tatty little country which wouldn't help itself. Only for him, a moment later, to look on those other men, farmers and industrialists, as the spoilt creatures of this wealthy planet, destroying it with their wanton thoughtlessness. In particular he despised their incidental destruction of the Levels.
Saddened him too. Because Paul had almost convinced himself that he had a profound affinity with the Levels, with that thin crust of peaty earth laying over its bed of sand. There was no misleading sense of permanence there among the repeatedly pollarded willows, only of time and sky slowly shifting. Some egotistical men had tried to leave their imprint: bits of the Levels had been sliced about where they had drained it, elsewhere a canal had been chopped out; and some men in pursuit of quick money had even cut and carted away the black peat for potted plants. All, in the end, men and marsh, would come to a soggy nothing, with the sea waiting.
As to his estrangement from his fellow men — Paul had then decided, it was due neither to his having been to prison nor to his being presently unemployed, rather it was but a general product of the contempt the British have for one another. In the shops customer and assistant despise one another, employer and employee distrust one another; in every industry there is a gulf of scornful incredulity between management and shopfloor. In politics there exists the same contempt between parties. And in everyday civil life the dichotomy of instant hatred continued — between driver and driver, pedestrian and driver, driver and cyclist, farmer and hiker, child and adult, mortgagee and tenant, etc.
A country of public corruption and private morality: no-one expected anyone else to keep to the same standards as themselves. So no two sets of values were wholly alike, none meshed, and so there was no net, no skein of common purpose nor social integrity running through the country. All was alike and divergent. Where then nobility of purpose to salvage a life?
Paul then had no conscious politics. Neither Julie nor Paul considered giving their allegiance to a parliamentary political party. The Tory MP for Bridgwater was once the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Both places owned bleak and dangerous mentalities.
Paul's politics then, though, were more a plague on all their parties. So far from his own perceptions were all their policies that he couldn't credit the relevance of any of them. Quality was a consideration of the past or a mere buzzword, copywriterspeak for expensive. Murdoch had taken over The Times and its crossword and had made them commercial and mediocre. The BBC had been intimidated into inoffensiveness. (Where politicians seek votes or influence, quality is always the loser.)
Ironically those then of the Right, who might have been supposed to mind, who did concern themselves with falling standards, who disliked and distrusted innovation, they did least to preserve the country itself. In fact they were the ones whose industrial wastes were contaminating the seas and the rivers, whose buildings were squaring off yet more greenfieId sites, whose incomes came from the industrial practices that were killing them and us all.
Nor was Paul certain what any of the political parties wanted him to value. Fatherhood? The life of a little child? Profit? Mothering Sunday? Traditions? Institutions? Progress? The working class? Family life? Around about the Levels the families had been so incestuously interbred that there was a preponderance of club feet in the villages. All welcome, therefore, to the motorway yuppies with their candid lusts and fresh genes.
Paul then knew intuitively that human morality was no more than the unwritten laws of the powerful imposed on those without power, and that always would the powerful pinch pennies off the many poor to pay the few rich. He regarded these as immutable laws of human existence, no matter what the politicians said. Besides which, having become used to examining what people said for what was omitted, Paul got quickly pissed off with politicians' speeches.
Authorities had made of Paul, because he had been to prison and had been so often unemployed, a problem. To call something a problem, though, was to imply that it had a solution. In social terms that was not always the case. To solve the problem might require the whole of society to be 'cured'; and not just Paul, not just the part that did not fit in with the present political ideal. Vested interests in any society, though, would rarely allow for such a radical cure.
Paul then knew the mechanisms of vested interest.
In prison he had learnt, from dealers and druggies, that there was no Mr Big beloved by the newspapers. Dealers and users all were more like a snake with its tail in its mouth. The new, when bitten, joined the circle. Then they too pushed at a profit to keep themselves supplied; and to supply themselves with customers they made glamorous their habit, they introduced, they bit, others. To support their growing habit those others then started dealing, started pushing, had to find themselves their own customers, who started dealing .... and so the circle expanded. Paul had refused all offers generously made, and had kept his body to himself.
Those addictive circles were not confined to prison or to tainted needles. Farmers too had a habit. The application of chemicals improved their crop yield. Bankers gave them loans to buy the chemicals. The farmers then had to have improved yields to pay the interest on their bank loans. The chemical companies offered discounts to farmers if they told their neighbours of their improved yields.
To make themselves acceptable/respectable the chemical companies exceeded this sales technique by adding perfume to their PCB (polychlorinatedbyphenyl) pesticides. A family thus strolling along a country lane might say,
"What's that scent?" The whole family then paused and sniffed, inhaling lungfuls of perfumed pesticide vapour. PCBs affect the human immune system.
That added perfume had made Paul suspicious of the scent of massed blooms. As much for that distrust of innocent flowers as for the PCBs and the pollution of the planet, did Paul hate the corrupting chemical companies.
Paul also had an inbuilt aversion to smoke, Bridgwater's and everywhere else. Smoke denoted destruction. Smoke lay always over the cruelty and confusion of war, over the bright arterial gore of every battlefield, over a riot, over a bombed city .... Smoke lay also over every industrial landscape, where lives too were being destroyed. But slowly.
"You can tell farming's become an industry," Paul's grandfather frequently said, "it's the farmers these days who cause most of the pollution."
Thus spoke an old man's bitterness born of a lifetime's irreversible disappointments. Paul, however, still attempted an objectivity born of hope. Human self-destruction was, after all, nothing new; and we have survived thus far .... Civilisation, or at least what we victors subjectively thought of as civilisation, had always been a despoiler. If solely in terms of land abuse. The Roman civilisation deforested the Sahara to feed their fattened favourites across the sea in Rome. Likewise were we Westerners then deforesting Southern America. At that time not even for food; but for woodpulp for newspapers so that civilised men could keep abreast of destructive events. Or ogle the nipples of seventeen year old girls, or kill time doing crosswords, or read their stars, guess their small futures ....
All drives, all desires have but one aim — their own abolition. Thus does every civilisation destroy itself. Thus did the Romans destroy the granary of the Sahara. Thus did the twentieth century delay banning the aerosol and put off curtailing its other noxious emissions. Now the ozone layer is partially destroyed and Earth is about to bake .... Destruction is an integral part of control. We then controlled most of the land surface of the planet. Hope was hard to sustain.
All drives, all desires, have but one aim — their own abolition. Thus does the competitive drive seek to abolish all other competition. Thus, although they confuse themselves with their own slogans, the aim of any capitalist is a monopolistic state, the conglomerate ruling all. Thus, although it claimed to, Britain did not reward enterprise, merit, industry or thrift; opportunism alone was applauded and rewarded, resulting in a consensus of small minds that thought well of themselves solely because they happened to have made some money. Hope was hard to sustain.
Paul and Julie lived amongst such self-congratulatory people and amidst the results of their opportunism. The rules of the profit-takers did not apply to Paul and Julie. Their way of life was perforce different. Small wonder then that they were both so on guard against being manipulated. Small wonder then that they made such small mulish rebellions. Small wonder that they were viewed as problems by the powers that like to be.
True Stories
In August 1985 David John Lazowski, of Stafford Road, Bridgwater, used a wardrobe key to open an electricity meter. 19 year old David John Lazowski said that he didn't regard it as stealing.
On Wednesday 4th October 1989 Robert Tivey was fined £250 and disqualified from driving for 12 months. 34 year old Robert Tivey, the Hinkley C consent team manager, had been on his way to work in the morning when he had driven into the wall of the Cottage Inn at Keenthorne. When breathalysed Robert Tivey was found to have an Intoximeter count of 59. The legal limit is 35.
In November 1989 Frank Parkinson put his hand into a machine at Autobars, Wylde Road, Bridgwater, to release cups that were jammed. 30 year old Frank Parkinson had to be released by firemen. Three fingers on his left hand were crushed.
In March 1990 Kevin Gary Vearncombe, of Devonshire Street, Bridgwater, deliberately bumped into a youth in Polden Street. At the time the youth had on a walkman and his arm was in plaster. 18 year old Kevin Gary Vearncombe shouted at him, then took off his jacket and pushed and head-butted the youth.
