By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
12) Eating
Having worked in canteens and cafes Julie knows that the pristine appearance of the food on the plate belies its kitchen history. She knows too that when Paul's grandfather asks the waiter to pass his compliments to the chef that that is unlikely to be the message related in the kitchen. Rather, if any comment at all is passed, it will be on the niggardly size of his tip. (Paul's grandfather is a man who has never had to live on tips.)
Julie feels an impostor here. Kitchen and restaurant are two different worlds. The strict strip lighting in the humid echoing kitchen allows for no cockroaches or pretensions. Out here in the restaurant it is all deep shadows and warm glows, fostering delusions of intimacy, of seclusion, of wealth.
Julie feels that she is imposing here. The conversation certainly doesn't include her.
Paul was raised partly by his grandparents, has had years of practice with them, begins his dialogues past her comprehension, taking up from points established years before. So he lets his grandfather ramble boringly on, enjoys his grandmother's tart interjections, then amuses them with an apparently unrelated story; and they are all so very pleased with one another. Like the mutual flattery actors and audience go in for, praising and applauding one another, all so very appreciative of themselves.
Julie looks across the table at them; and, as always, with their plump jowls and bead-bright eyes, they remind her of a couple of well-fed fluffy house dogs.
Their appearance, however, is not the principal reason that Julie dislikes Paul's grandparents; but because they say they can't be bothered with children. They say that children are predictable and boring. Children, according to their social tenets, cannot be invited to a restaurant. So they invite Paul and Julie only to restaurants.
Julie also believes that they only like Paul now because he has become their clown. They enjoy the thrill of having a meaty grandson with tattoos on his arms and a criminal record, as well as an appetite for intelligence. They want to be his mentors in the realms of art and taste.
Paul, though, has too much vigour to adopt their arty-liberal inclinations. They talk around a subject, their gestures circling the plates, leaning to the side to approach doubtful topics, even their faces twisting the shape out of certain words. Paul talks directly across his food, his occasional gestures directed to the middle of the table. Nor do they take umbrage at his contradictions, but smirk approvingly when he disagrees with them, for then they can present him with arguments possibly previously unconsidered by him.
Like most married couples, knowing their spouse's philosophies through and through, with each other both are impatient for the other to finish their piece so they can say theirs. While Paul can still, building from ideas new to himself, surprise Julie. So, despite Paul often telling her that she is the one person he doesn't have to explain the whole of himself to, she continues to listen to what he has to say.
Julie draws comfort from her importance to him. Yet here, with these two old people, there is on display a part of him that she does not know, that she has no claim to. Her one consolation is that, later, Paul will tell her of his impatience with them and their attitudes, that it will be to her that he will rehearse his myriad criticisms of them.
"Two stodgy old people," he calls them, "out of touch with everything but themselves."
Julie knows the reality of Paul's Iife, the breadth between his knowledge and theirs. Prison to Paul, for instance, is not some sinister fact in the abstract, but carries the imprint of anxious experience. While his grandparents don't now care whether Paul was guilty or not, they have chosen to tolerate and celebrate him as a proven criminal.
Paul's grandfather frequently says that he is a broadminded man. And, because Paul's grandfather is so very broadminded, he can therefore make crude jokes about ethnic minorities and about feminists, and about the unemployed, and about single mothers, without anyone taking offence, because everyone can see that really he is ever so liberal and ever so broadminded. Paul and Julie went with them for a curry just the once.
With aspirations to village eccentricity, Paul's grandparents cannot abide to be thought of, by themselves, as normal. Or, should they do something normal, then they mock its normalcy. They call this restaurant, for instance, 'a suburban eating out place'.
Even when Paul and his grandparents concur, as on their opposition to the building of Hinkley C, the grandparents seek always an idiosyncratic reason for their opposition, solely to make themselves unique. Under this compulsion to be sophisticated, to be thought clever, they also have to criticise. Thus have they become unable to accept and enjoy anything for what it simply is, will find fault even with a sunset. So accustomed have they become with being critical that, no matter how good a time they are having, they cannot help but seek flaws in some aspect of their circumstance. Thus Paul's grandfather now decides that the lemon meringue is a little too sugary. It isn't. Nor does it matter to the sweating student waiter. A comment, however, has to be passed. Has been passed. The old couple is satisfied.
Julie does not own Paul's affectionate exasperation with them. Julie is suspicious of anyone who deliberately tries to be different. If they want to be different then it must mean that they do not want to be like others, that they, therefore, have a low opinion of those others. Those others will include herself.
Paul's grandfather wants to be markedly different. It comes from, Paul says, his being like a lot of clever men, emotionally immature. His grandfather believes that human intercourse can be governed by reason, by rationality alone. But likes and loves, by their very definition, often defy reason. Love has certainly paid heed but rarely to logic. And for all his cleverness and jokey hypochondria, Paul's grandfather is terrified of old age and death, fights the subversion of time by publicly pretending to a strength and energy that he patently no longer possesses. Likewise he still boasts a vigorous sexuality.
"Sometimes I think he hasn't moved on from thirteen years old," Paul has told her, "There he is in the gents, comparing cock sizes at seventy."
Julie looks to the others in the restaurant. A bearded man with a flat face is sitting opposite a thick-waisted woman with loose long blonde hair. Julie hasn't seen her face. They look like they should be a married couple, but she keeps saying things like, "I didn't know you were interested in..." "I didn't know you were keen on..." "I didn't know you liked..." His deeper voice makes it hard for Julie to hear his words.
She decides that she has nothing in common with these interesting restaurant people. This one meal will cost his grandparents more than Paul and Julie spend on groceries in a week.
A man there in smart casuals is using managerspeak to his smart wife. Listening to the managers in the factories Julie has often wondered if they mock their working language away from the factories. And she has always known, so shiny-eyed zealous are they at times, that they did not, that they have allowed themselves to become wholly the management's mouthpiece, that they have wholly duped themselves with managerspeak of career structures.
Julie's compatriots, her equals though she despises many of them too are those whose total frame of reference is the telly. All, in their workaday conversations relates to something on the telly, a character or a catchphrase. Of their own lives there is nothing. Their own lives lack glamour and excitement. The dramatic and interesting bits, prison and illnesses, are squalid like hers.
An old man, even more upright than Paul's grandfather, is sat at the table by the door, prosperity sewn into every seam of his suit, his yes-dear wife glancing to right and left at his every command, one of those smug I-told-you-so bastards who paid into his pension plan and never once participated in the foolishness of his time. Imagine him young with a punk's pink coxcomb.... Julie smiles.
Paul's grandfather also always tries to go one better over his wife. Paul's grandmother, though, has more spirit than that confused woman by the door. She competes. And, competing, these grandparents are even envious of each other's illnesses, the other's aches and pains. Their own is always worse and the other is always putting it on. Or they both seek and find rare symptoms in themselves: a mutual downward-spiralling hypochondria. All forgotten the moment something else takes their fancy. Small wonder, although it continues to amaze them, that Paul's mother is the way she is.
Julie sees that dithering woman as a result of this suave seIf-congratulatory pair, rather than, as they'd like her to be seen, as an aberration. This grandmother, self-congratulatory again, is smiling at Julie and talking of marriage as an ideal. Because she's failed at motherhood, Julie cynically thinks; and Julie believes besides that marriage is no more nor less than clearing up each other's sick, and staying afterwards.
Paul's mother was never married. To escape the family home, the family story goes, the teenage daughter got herself pregnant to trap a man. The man had refused to be so trapped. (Bridgwater, faced with any such choice, is an easy place for a man to leave.)
Paul's mother, poor woman, was browbeaten as a baby, and made to feel inferior thereafter. Except when, in that same teenage period of independence, she had refused all parental offers of assistance and had let the local council house her. Consequently Paul, only spending school holidays with his grandparents, escaped such close critical contamination.
"About time you paid a visit to your mother," his grandmother tells Paul, "She's slipping towards the abyss again."
Now, poor woman, she is patronised and pitied by the generation after as well as the generation before.
The upright old man by the door is shouting at the bewildered waiter. Faces are turning from other tables. The old bastard is sucking in importance from this.
"The man who barks has someone barking at him," Paul's grandfather says.
Julie smiles to find herself in agreement with him. He returns her smile,
"Should have been an old Chinese proverb," he says.
Paul is also smiling at her, glad that she has become a part of the conversation. She glances to him, pleased that he is not the kind of man who shouts at waiters.
commentary .... Life can be a hopping from ruts and routines to other routines and other ruts, in the expectant illusion that we are enjoying freedom. Paul knew then that, in his occasional employment and his semi-permanent unemployment, he was but switching tracks. Knowledge of the truth, not the continual exchanging of ruts, was what made him feel superior to his once workmates. Though he did not lord that superiority over them. With them he used their language. With his grandparents he corrected his grammar and extended his vocabulary. Alone with Julie he used an amalgam.
We are all of us many people. Paul was no exception. Except that he noted that disparity of roles within himself and at times he sighed for a simple by which he meant singular life. To be but one being the whole of the time.
He knew that others were as aware of this inconsistency in themselves. How, when he started new jobs, people were attracted to his blond height and prison reputation, but were uncertain of him. So they introduced him to people they already knew, used those known peoples' reactions as a measure of him, as a test, see how he fitted into their small order of things and so could gauge what aspect of their own personality they should use towards him.
These often subconscious assessments amused Paul. Not, though, that he didn't want new people to like him. Like us all he would have liked the world to think well of him. But as Paul didn't think well of most of the world he had made his own world a small one consisting of Julie, Michael and Alice. Now, so long as Julie approved of what he did, so long as his idea of what a future and grown Michael and Alice would make of him, he was happy with what he thought of as his true self.
His true self did not know what truth was. Nothing was exactly what it seemed. Paul's grandmother, for instance, simply because she fiercely echoed, or publicly tried to smooth away, so many or her husband's fierce opinions, could have appeared browbeaten by that articulate man. Not so.
It has to be said here that Paul didn't agree with Julie that his grandparents were always in competition. Paul, saying that he had known them longer, claimed that their intellectual bickering was but the public face of their marriage. Privately they were in accord. And his grandmother was the one who had shaped it.
Although she hadn't fed her husband any new ideas, she had, over the years, watched his every new opinion form and solidify; and she had helped shape those opinions by silences rather than words, by affecting an indifference rather than by an outright voicing of her disagreement. Thus, by such covert pressure, had she made those opinions acceptable to herself, thus could she nod in agreement with his utterance of them; and, because she had, inch by inch, adapted to her husband's affectations, thus had the two of them been able to present a united yin/yan public front. And this fiction of themselves in their phoney relationship they had sustained throughout their married lives. Like all other long married couples they would probably die in their self-ordained parts, both holding the other secretly in contempt.
It is not easy for any ego to accept the increasing anonymity of age. Once your own generation was the ultimate. Of the new generation, you were the end result of years of selective breeding. There had never been anything like you before, the world's attention was focused on you. But you too grew old, and when you had children those children became the ultimate. While you, the parents, simply entered the muddy pool of the past, conjoined with all those homogenous adult others.
Even back then Paul had moments of panic when he thought that life was too quickly passing him by, that life's adventures and accomplishments were reserved for others, that he would never own a lifestyle like his grandfather's, that his entire existence would be confined to Sydenham. Then he decided that he didn't want a lifestyle like his grandfather's, fortressed with routines and opinions; and that his life had already had adventures enough thank you. Besides, adventures were only adventures in retrospect, when they could become dressed in a story. In the happening they are a going from this moment to whatever comes next.
And Paul, being still of importance to his young children, could then continue to feel that his life had meaning, that it was of unknown potential. His death, to him, was thus not yet an impending reality. Death as an idea impressed him more than did the fact itself. Is and was. The concept fascinated him. As he got older, though, (if he got older) he would lose interest in it as an abstract and come to dread its inescapable reality, or relish it like a tender wound. Death alone, however, was not then his sole future.
Julie had no concept of herself in any future. She could not see herself either lined and withered, or plump and matronly. For her the future was simply a blank. All she knew of it was that she would not allow certain things of the past, a boozy husband, and debt in particular, to happen to her again.
Nor did Paul then have any concrete image of a future for himself, save that it would probably be more of the same. Although both he and Julie did have the conventional hopes for their children... that they would do well at school, have good jobs, good homes, good partners and good lives. But, both having been made sceptics, they knew how little control they had over that future.
Julie, consequently, had no real ideals for her children. She accepted as self-evident that the rearing of children was/is a lottery. She knew that some children could be neglected, maltreated, abused even, and could find it in themselves to grow into reasonable adults. Other children could be reared conscientiously according to every socially acceptable child manual and they could turn into thugs. The only rule, therefore, Julie decided, was to avoid the worst excesses and to treat her children according to her own conscience; and keep her fingers crossed that, somehow, they would bring themselves up to be someone she would be pleased to know.
Michael, though, had already developed the habit of sneering suspiciously at all adults, suspecting them when they united against his desires of conspiring against him. Especially when, having dared voice a criticism of any one of them, those adults stood up for each other. And Julie had seen herself fail because she knew, but was unable to impart to Michael, that those incompetent adults hadn't been guarding any secrets, had just been watching each other's backs.
All parenthood is thus destined to be miserably wrapped around with guilt. Because all diligent parents are held to blame by themselves for the whole of their children's childhood, even for the nine tenths over which they can have no control.
Julie felt inadequate; and Julie's antagonism towards Paul's grandfather, and his pomposity, was not so much at him and respectable people like him managers and teachers and social workers and solicitors but at the unthinking assumptions of their respectability. They knew so much, but they had no idea what her life was like, what it was like not being able to afford new clothes, what it was like being on her own, what it was like visiting her lover in prison, what it was like still waking nights and listening and waiting for the drunken mumble and the bang on the door.
Paul's grandfather had been a quality control manager. A pseudo-scientist he had now appointed himself an authority on all matters scientific and moral. Sex abuse, for instance. Because he knew he was a liberal, Paul's grandfather liked to talk with other liberals about sex abuse. He could then say out loud naughty words while all around him people nodded solemn and serious agreement, and waited their turn to speak out loud the naughty words. Julie imagined how being raped must feel to the child, and she squirmed in horror at the knowledge she had given herself.
Julie also knew, for all that respectable people like Paul's grandparents talked of fundamental human values and basic decency, they were more impressed by what other people were capable of buying than with who they were, or what they did, or what they made. Such people were only impressed by what one made if one could sell it and, with the money so acquired, buy other things.
Julie saw the middle classes pretending to one another that life was too complicated for honesty.
Julie's, though, was a bitter outlook. She harboured more rancour than Paul over Paul's imprisonment. It had been happening to Paul, a new experience, and therefore, to some extent, interesting. Julie, though, had been simply deserted, abandoned, left to fend.... While Paul had been guilty of what? Crimes are supposed to be unusual, exceptional. Paul had done no more than most of their neighbours.... So, when respectable people on the telly or radio talked about democracy being better than communism, or then South Africa, or Islamic states, Julie said to Paul,
"Sure, that's what the rulers of the democracies keep telling us." She said such things only to Paul, "When everyone's been fed and housed, and people don't get sent to prison because of a bit of bad luck, then I'll consider democracy's merits."
That Julie should feel free to voice such thoughts only in her own house was not because such thoughts, at the end of the eighties, were politically unacceptable to the ruling state, but because she feared derision from anyone other than Paul. At work, for instance, the other women would only have looked askance at her saying such things.
In that level of general intellect Bridgwater is/was no different to the rest of Britain. It is axiomatic that in an age of mass communication most individuals have lost the ability to communicate. People spout jingles and catchphrases and slogans at one another; and expect not to be understood.
Paul's grandfather didn't spout jingles. But Julie didn't like him, because he tried to impress her. Her husband had tried to impress her. To get a reaction from her, to make her see him as an individual, to impose his presence on her, he had beaten her up.
Against her will, however, Julie was influenced by Paul's grandfather.
"These sad young women one sees on council estates," he shook his head in clever sorrow, "tripping along on their white high heels, in their snow-washed jeans, and hanging on to a pushchair for security." Julie would not thereafter even consider buying snow-washed jeans, no matter how much of a knockdown bargain they might have been.
Not that she wanted to be different to the snow-washed mothers. She viewed all such efforts as futile, a vain waste of time and energy. All babies looked more or less the same. All old people looked more or less the same. Only in the middle, in what each person consciously made of themself, were people noticeably different. And if she couldn't afford to make herself different, why bother?
For all his quick acerbity Julie knew that Paul's grandfather wouldn't have lasted long in Sydenham, would soon have made himself the object of feuds and vendettas. He was also one of those who identified with authority. Although he would, while he could get away with it, cynically and with bravura break authority's rules; Julie knew that, on his being caught, his cynicism and bravura would evaporate, and he would beg, and he would plead, and he would cite extenuating circumstances, say I was not the only one.... Because Paul's grandfather was at heart a corporate man. Please don't expel me. Whereas an instinctive, anti-authoritarian like Paul, on being caught breaking their silly rules, said,
"Do your worst. I'm not going to play your game."
Paul told her a prison philosophy on self-reliance. It ran thus,
"No-one will give it to us. We have to take it for ourselves. And if you're scared of the responsibility, if you're scared of being the one who makes the mistakes, then you deserve all the shit they hand out to you. And it doesn't matter what you do back to them. It doesn't matter even who you do it to. It doesn't matter if no-one knows about it but you. As long as you're the one to do it. As long as you mess up their order of things. As long as you make it less reliable. So that no-one relies on it."
True Stories
In April 1986, after coming home to find her ex-boyfriend asleep in her bed, Lisa Bone left the flat she had shared with him to collect her car. Anthony Cowlin had, by this time, woken up and had followed her. As Lisa Bone drove along St John Street he threw a dustbin at her car. Anthony Cowlin then returned to the flat and barricaded himself in.
In April 1989 physicist Alan Martin told the Hinkley C Public Enquiry that fuel elements and other contaminated items were among some 2,600 cubic yards of intermediate level waste already stored on the power station site.
On September 24th 1989 a total of 1,938 council house tenants were in arrears in the Sedgemoor area. The arrears of 850 averaged £19.56, or one week's rent. Another 880 owed less then £100. 208 tenants had arrears of more than £200. The total amount outstanding was £45,111.14.
In March 1990 Kevin Brian Lewis of Bristol Road, Bridgwater, went barging into the High Street Kentucky Fried Chicken. 21 year old Kevin Brian Lewis asked customers what they were looking at. He then punched Ian Howell in the face, causing his jaw to be fractured in two places. As a result of the attack Ian Howell had to have two teeth extracted and a metal plate inserted in his jaw. Sedgemoor Magistrates ordered Kevin Brian Lewis to pay £400 compensation. He was also sentenced to 6 months imprisonment, suspended for 18 months.
