By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
26) Muttering
"Stupid man," she mutters at the television, "Get a new suit." How can any actor expect to be taken seriously when for every role he wears the same suit and the same hairstyle?
"Did I say that out loud?" Maybe.
It's not yet time for tea. She will make tea when the children's programmes start. She doesn't understand the children's programmes, why the presenters get so excited. She will eat her tea as she watches the news.
"Don't know why I watch the news. Only frightens me. That's all they do. Try to frighten me."
Three thousand British women a year die of breast cancer, they told her on the lunchtime programme. Is she going to die of breast cancer? She doesn't mind dying.
"Not suicide though." Suicide is never a solution. Nor is it an escape.
"Be ever after trapped in death." She has thought a lot on death. When she was young, when she was full of vitality.
"Was I?" The very idea of her own death then seemed preposterous. Admissible, but unlikely. Now that she is tired and worn out death is easy to accept. After she had that ovarian cyst, after the pain, then it was easy to plan out her own death. Comforting too.
"Not suicide you understand," she tells the television. Just imagining how it will be, at last going to sleep.
"I don't sleep," she tells the doctors: hers is the doctor-haunting loneliness of the insomniac, "Only nap." Throughout the day and throughout the night she naps. She is aware that it is day sometimes only when the sun shines on the light bulb.
Looking into her mind's mirror the whole time, watching herself do things, puts her physically off balance. Then she has to sit down. Then she naps.
She hasn't had a nap this afternoon.
At least he came to see her. So big though, blocking out the light, talking loud, banging the lavatory door.
They never come to see her now. She never goes to see them. He didn't say anything about them. Did he? Should she go to see them? Could catch a bus.
"Only get told off."
She doesn't go anywhere anymore, walks through all the empty rooms here when she remembers, disturbing the air. This is where she likes to be, has got her little habits, can wrap them around herself like a child's sour blanket.
"No, I don't go out." She is afraid of going out. "Why are they trying to frighten me?" Stories of rapes, of muggings. They make horror movies too, show them in the middle of the night when she can't sleep.
"Why are they trying to frighten me?"
commentary.... When do we learn that we are utterly alone? Paul learnt that lesson during his second prison sentence. Julie learnt it during the nights she was being besieged by her ex-husband. Julie's mother, awaiting the next partnership, has yet to learn the lesson. Paul's mother discovered it in infancy.
To have been deceived in one part of your life is to thereafter distrust all its parts. Infancy was when a profound doubt was generated in Paul's mother. No matter how she attempted to please her parents, she missed the target of their affection. She copied the happy little girls she saw in films and her parents despised her for it. Then, when her parents were, rarely, pleased with her, she didn't know why. Never since has she been sure that what she was doing was right, which was why she held a constant discussion with herself.
Her parents' disappointment was as great as her own confusion.
It is a sad fact that intelligent couples do not necessarily have intelligent children, with the consequence that they can have less in common with their own child than they can with an adult acquaintance who is only approximately their intellectual equal. Likewise it is no fun being the bright child of a dim parent.
Under what appeared to Paul's mother to be her parents' arbitrary rule, they taught her to fear. Fear is a habit. Her fear was another agent of her confusion. Only the children's programmes she didn't watch seemed straightforward. But even they twisted and turned things, looked behind things, so she became confused about what the things were for, why they were made. People too. They seemed to come undone in front of her.
Deaths, violent deaths, were shown on television. Real and fictional. And that's what Paul then argued with Michael over on the television. It was not war itself, Paul maintained, but the quantity of deaths that brutalised. With a single death we can feel both the dying and the grief. Any more deaths, though, and the feelings are too many, too confusing. On television the images themselves are too many for the single human mind. And on television these are not real people. The characters are usually a soap opera stereotype, at best but a dramatist's device. Yet those telly characters were those on which real people modelled themselves, thus creating a new reality, which another dramatist then tried to depict, and in so doing created characters on which other people then modelled themselves....
It was television, however, Paul had to admit — though not in front of Michael — that had taught him morals. Those days when school had been forgotten he had watched those old black and white movies, where the men never took their hats off. Wartime or gangster, western or pirate, right and wrong had been in those films, with their hats on.
His mother would have liked to believe that all was still as simply right and wrong as in those old films. But there were just so many more people now than when those men with hats on had made simple morals. Now was the age, not of grey individuals, but of colourful insignificance. Morality was public consensus centred on the self, but where the self was negated. And if one sees one's self as not mattering, what does it matter what one does?
Paul's mother both watched and carefully ignored the television. Reading was no safer. The hypochondria of housewives was catered for by women's magazines, giving them descriptions of every new ailment, and hinting at worse. Likewise the local papers featured prominently all the local villainy and vandalism.
Paul, visiting his mother, stopping off for a cup of tea with Julie's mother, caught glimpses of other figures standing back from their unlit windows, wondered at the strange occluded lives most people lived; he sensed a town of quiet people ticking like primed bombs, their minds as unstable as sweaty dynamite. They were potentially more frightening and murderous than a few bitter drunks.
Paul stoutly refused to be frightened. Fear for its own sake was a weapon of the rule-makers. The unafraid are uncontrollable. So to their ends, the obeyance of rules, the rule-makers will create and employ superstitions. Fear is the state of the governed. But to be ruled by fear itself, like Paul's mother, was stupid.
Julie's mother was also stupid. She irritated Paul too; Julie's protection of her, the listing of her good points in comparison to his mother.... But for someone who was usually, when with a man, crass, backslapping and uncaring, to be told, when that same woman was snuffling like an asthmatic hog in manless self-pity, that she was a sensitive person... Such was pushing the limits of his affectionate credibility.
Most of his cross-generation anger, though, was reserved for his own mother. Which was why, distance apart, he visited her less. His mother's house was off the Taunton Road. (The Workhouse used to be on the Taunton Road.) That estate was also Paul's living past. He spent his closed-in childhood there, being returned there.... The orange bricks reeked of a misery that sat over the flat place like an invisible cloud perpetually pressing down upon it. There it had been that he had first experienced divergent realities — escaping the reality of home for the reality of school, escaping the reality of school for the reality of home, escaping the reality of home for the reality of his grandparents, escaping the reality of his grandparents for the reality of home. Like all misery, his too had appeared circular and inescapable.
He had learnt only later how to escape, how to thrust aside his anger at his mother's timidity and stupidity, and he had learnt how to flee from the stupidity of others like and unlike her. So had he gone steaming up into the Quantocks to get away from a stupid world — trapped by itself and trying to entrap him — and from the top of the Quantocks he had seen below him a green world as fresh as if he had just reinvented it.
True Stories
43 year old David Iles, of Bath Road, Bridgwater, visited his ex-wife, Theresa, in the afternoon. At her house, in September 1985, he punched her in the face.
In December 1989 Dean Hamblin, of Knightsbridge Way, Bower Manor Estate, Bridgwater, became trapped by his left arm in a machine while slitting cellophane. Other workers switched off the machine and helped free 20 year old Dean Hamblin. He was then taken to Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, where he was treated for a fractured arm.
In February 1990 Ann Heritage, of Chepstow Avenue, Bridgwater, took some photographs back to B&H Fotofast Ltd in Angel Place. 31 year old Ann Heritage complained about the quality of the prints. The manageress of Fotofast Ltd offered to reprocess the prints, but Ann Heritage said no, she wanted her money back. Ann Heritage knocked frames and albums off shelves and told other customers not to use the shop because they were no good. The manageress asked Ann Heritage to leave. Ann Heritage kicked and slapped the manageress. When Chris Hockey and David Evans sought to protect the manageress Ann Heritage kicked Chris Hockey in the stomach, slapped his face and pulled his hair.
In June 1990 Donna Louise Roberts, of Lonstone Avenue, Bridgwater, went with her aunt to visit a partially disabled woman in Osborne Road. While in the house Donna Louise Roberts stole £20 from the partially disabled woman's purse.
