By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
Day One
1) Paul Waking.
5:37 say the red numbers on the black clock.
He needs a pee. Closing his eyes he tries to ignore the balloon of his bladder, sinks into a floating slumber.
5.56 say the red numbers of the black clock.
An hour and a half's sleep yet till the alarm. The day is trespassing on his sleep. And he wants sleep, to not be awake.
The football bladder in his abdomen will not let him slip back under sleep.
The day is sneaking grey through the curtain, carving blue scallops of light along the curtain's rucked top.
5:58 say the red numbers on the clock.
On one single implulse he moves himself from under the duvet and he is creeping across the landing, the air passing cold through the hairs on his legs, his mind trailing after him, trying to catch up with what his body has done.
He pees against the polished side of the ceramic pan so as not to wake the children. He holds down all other thoughts. His mind wants sleep.
The dry ammonia smell rising from his warm and weighty penis reminds him that they had sex last night. He had meant to go for a pee and wash afterwards. Sleep, though, had kidnapped him
He doesn't pull the flush, turns and moves himself out of the bathroom. He sees himself in the landing gloom as a white skin containing red automated jelly. The machine must be kept just about ticking over. Slumbering and walking on the edge of the fall back into sleep. Thought will give his insides bone and muscle. He must keep himself at the jelly of sleep.
He is back in the bedroom trying to decide if he should close the bedroom door behind him. He notices himself doing this. The door was closed last night to prevent the children hearing the noises of their sex. He doesn't want to remember the reasons. He doesn't want to be his daytime self yet, wants to be this sleepwalker with his deliberately limited awareness. Every day, he thinks as he lays the body horizontal under the duvet, we awake empty and we re-invent ourselves. No, to sleep. Sleep! he commands his mind.
6:04 say the red numbers of the clock.
Turning his back on their thought detonations he pulls Julie into his lap. Always, after sex, her body is more malleable to his, is relaxed towards him
His breathing steadies and he slides under sleep.
7:14 say the red numbers of the clock.
He is awake. The back of his mind, though, is still dark and heavy with sleep, is craving his sixteen more minutes. He frowns towards sleep. An anxiety tugs him towards wakefulness. Something from yesterday? What's to do today?
Yesterday was Wednesday. Today is Thursday. Tomorrow is shopping day. Signing-on was Monday last week. Should he go back to the Job Centre today as promised? He won't get the job. Now, before the alarm, he can choose to go or not to go. If he goes he may get a job which may change his life. If he stays home he might finish doing up the bike, might sell it this week, might have some extra cash for next weekend. Choices .... and every choice he makes deprives him of the alternative. He can't, though, be having with the Job Centre this day.
His eyes move to the blue curtains. This new day, already one decision old, seems dim and silent. He imagines the hush of a thick damp mist making people oversleep. Michael has to be got ready for school. Julie has to go to work.
commentary .... Let me make this clear I am Paul. Paul is I. But the Paul that I am writing of here is not me now. The years between him and I, and this writing, have changed me. So I, now, will write of his doings then in the present tense; and I will talk here, in these 'commentaries' of him in the past tense.
Distant that Paul may be, but he is no stranger to me. I know him. I know all these people.
And another look at Paul's initial sense of contentment on waking is now required.
Primarily this sense of contentment came about because he found it easier to love Julie's softly sleeping self: in the day he concealed his adoration lest it repel her. (All his life Paul has heard Bridgwater women say they like their men to be men, by which they mean dour and undemonstrative.)
Having had sex with her the night before had also given Paul a sense of security about her, while also knowing that to be a wholly false security. Firstly because in their enjoyment they inflicted on one another the small exquisite pains and deliberately tantalising delays of coitus; and he wondered then whether those pains were a harbinger of the out and out social cruelties they would succumb to later. And, secondly, he was not reassured by their recently having had sex, because he knew that appetite in relation to sex can only mean capacity for. In sex, unlike food, one cannot stuff oneself to the limit. A woman may say she is satisfied but she is never replete in the sense that she is incapable of having more. So can none of us assume of our lovers that, just because we keep them regularly serviced, they will not stray. Rather, being kept so sensually aware, they may be more susceptible to sexual undertones, be more readily excited by the least suggestion. Paul and Julie's sex life then consisted of two or three groin-bruising, bed-thrashing bouts, which seemed to last all night, followed by weeklong rests.
Mention is also required concerning Paul's being first up to make breakfast and get Michael ready for school. This is because, although Paul had rationalised his being out of work as nothing to be ashamed of employers don't need him, most machines run themselves and, although he knows that he and Julie could be just as financially well off if Julie didn't go out to work, that she only goes out to work because she cannot bear to stay at home; even though he knows that any guilt he feels is politically inspired industry will be rewarded, idleness punished even though he knows that he, as an unemployed individual, was but an awkward government statistic, that in those days of automation it was illogical for him to find historically conventional work for historically conventional wages, still he felt awkward about female Julie going out to work while his idle male self remained at home.
Guilt was not inspiration enough to make him find a job. The factories layed off then by the unnamed hundreds, took on by the singular interview. Those interviews, in the small back rooms of the Job Centre, were designed solely to intimidate. 'Cowed men only need apply...'
Paul knew those interview rooms at the rear of the Job Centre the half-frosted window, the formica table, the two chairs, and on one of those chairs Mr or Mrs Middle Management, or one of their flustered minions trying to follow their step by backward step procedures.
At this two-day point in English 20th century history we have probably reached the nadir of British politics, the crass Thatcher having been 13 years in office. This was reflected in Paul's then belief that Middle Management was the curse of Britain. Middle Management being the people who both lost themselves in procedures and who lost sight of the end product. So, in British football, you had managers who didn't care that their team lost in the quarter finals, only that in losing the team had played according to plan. In cricket those same managers didn't care that their gate would fall but, following their strategy, they sacked their three star players. All those managers prided themselves on being extremely capable of assessing the fine details, of overlooking not one tiny aspect of their operation. Thus they missed the overall thrust of what all those fine details added up to. Middle Management, for instance, thought themselves scrupulously fair in noting the exact time the lower echelons started work and the exact time they finished. While overlooking the fact that their time-logging procedures kept the lower echelons hanging about before they started, and kept them queuing after they had finished. By such stratagems those managers thus antagonised strikes, pushed the wrong product, they prevaricated, were mouthpieces of company policy, talked a language peculiar to Middle Management, lived in little brick houses with garage doors that swung up and over, told each other the same jokes, carefully watched the same programmes, and thought themselves responsible people.
Paul did not think of himself as being responsible. Responsible to who? Paul thought of himself as a landless serf, unemployed and of no permanent abode. He had no title, nor claim to any bit of Britain. And even if he, by miscalculation, got himself a permanent job, then all of his wages would go to pay the rent of what wasn't his. That was his life. And the class, from which Middle Management came, imposed their values and their laws upon him.
Paul knew what he was. In his life he had found out what he was supposed to do and what others supposed him to be. He had wasted fewer time than others in finding that out. Other men, for instance, still believed that they had to have a function: they could not just be. Paul could.
Others also felt that they had to belong. Paul didn't. He knew that he did not belong in Bridgwater. He knew too, however, that most of Bridgwater's other inhabitants were misplaced. Even those born there. None belonged there. Or elsewhere come to that. Which is why they stayed in Bridgwater.
So far as belonging, so far as having a function and a job went, Paul also knew then it was an accepted fact of life to him that all were prostitutes. Are prostitutes. Every time that anybody sells something that they don't want to sell to someone to whom they don't want to sell it, then they are prostituting ourselves. We usually call it going to work. Or doing a day's work. Or having to go to work. In essence we are selling our life's time to an unliked other. And like all doubtful activities we turn it into a virtue.
But, although Paul could then occasionally voice such opinions with convincing certainty, Paul was certain then only that he didn't understand this world. So it was without conviction that he told himself that he did not feel guilty about being unemployed. He certainly did not, however, feel that his manhood was in question because he prefered to be at home looking after Alice. Rather he used Alice's existence to, in part, justify to himself his being at home.
True Stories
In the summer of 1984 lorry driver, Harry Cox, of Weacombe Road, Bridgwater, sexually assaulted a 5 year old girl. 63 year old Harry Cox said, "...the girl encouraged me..."
On the morning of July 29th 1985 an 18 year old apprentice was carrying out routine maintenance in Autobar Vendabeka, the plastic packaging firm, when a gas cylinder exploded and a stream of molten plastic caused him facial injuries.
In October 1989 a collie dog called Geezer bit a woman called Lola Lloyd several times on the leg, as she was walking past the dog's house in Friarn Avenue, Bridgwater. Two of the bites needed medical attention. Geezer's owner, Miss Caroline Master, said that the dog had never shown any aggressive behaviour towards her two young children or to her neighbours. Since the attack Miss Master has bought a strong link chain for Geezer and has put up a warning sign on her Gate. Miss Master also went and apologised to Lola Lloyd for Geezer's attack.
In June 1990 thieves broke in to the Hope Inn, Bridgwater, and stole £250 from the gaming machines. Two days later there was another burglary at the Hope Inn, and £700 was stolen from the gaming machines.
