By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
4) Paul Sitting
At the thin-legged kitchen table Paul sits reading The Guardian. The paper holds itself flatly to the formica top.
From the telly in the living room comes a quiz programme's jingle. Paul feels that he ought to go in there and turn it off; but Alice was grumpy on the way back from taking Michael to school, went straight into the living room, switched on the telly; and, sitting herself in her corner of the sofa, she hugged her green cushion to her tummy. Paul knows that if he tries to change channels now she will cry. She was late going to sleep last night, was awake early this morning. Paul doesn't want to make her cry.
The white quartz clock, with its red hands and blue numerals, measures time without malign noise. Time to be doing. The rest of the paper can wait until lunchtime.
Closing and folding the paper Paul lays it on the check-bottomed chair. The breakfast bowls and cups have yet to be washed.
The stainless steel sink is under the metal-framed window. On the tiled windowsill are small plant pots of red plastic. The windowsill is narrow, the plants pale and spindly.
Paul lets hot water run into the sink, looks out over a hillock of steam.
This end of the garden, by the white outhouses, is a square patch of lawn. Single blades of grass glisten still with the dawn damp. In the narrow flower bed between the vegetables and the lawn is a home-made birdtable. The wooden struts and supports look dry and cracked this time of year. The wire nut-basket hangs, like an empty gibbet, lopsidedly from a bent rusty nail.
Beyond the birdtable and the orange marigolds, in the black/brown soil, are three green neat rows carrot, lettuce and radish. Full grown round lettuce are behind them, and the large mildew-frosted fronds of two courgette plants.
Along the sides of the garden, and across its end, are brown/black panels of lapped wood. Above the end panels is a bush of light green leaves, above them the white back of the house opposite, above the black/grey roof of that house a pale blue sky.
Michael and Alice had porridge for breakfast this summer's morn. Paul scrapes rather than scours the pan. Bowls and plates, inside the warm foamy water, squeak under the sponge.
Paul makes a stack of the dishes and leaves them to drain. Julie prefers to wipe them and put them away. Paul believes that to be an unhygenic waste of time. It has been a longstanding disagreement.
The steel sink is emptied and rinsed of bubbles. Wiping his reddened hands he wanders through to the living room.
Alice, aware of his coming in, doggedly watches the disapproved-of television. Smiling at her Paul drops down onto the fat sofa and pulls her onto his lap. Hers is only a token grumpy resistance.
"What do you want to do today?" he asks.
"I want to go to playgroup." Her newly learnt diction is precise. The faster flow of blood around her little body is warm upon his trousered lap.
"I told you there's no playgroup today." He has guessed correct two of the answers to the quizmaster's nudging clues. Now the quizmaster has digressed to a reiteration of the rules.
"I want somebody to play with."
"We'll go over Granny's."
"Will you stay?"
"It's Monday. Kevin'll be there."
"I don't like Kevin."
"He likes you."
"Does he?"
"He's always happy to see you."
"Is he?"
Paul misses the clue. Where his sleeves are pushed up, Alice absentmindedly strokes the soft blond hairs on Paul's blue tattoos. He lays his lips in a touch-kiss atop her clean warm hair. He could wrap her in his arms here and they could both go back to sleep, all warm and cosy, like a grizzly and its cub in their snug lair. His eyes are heavy with the thought of it. Alice's cushion rolls to the floor
"Are we going Granny's now?"
"I've got to finish the beds and hoovering first. Then we'll go."
"After lunch?"
"Just as soon," he places her back in her corner or the sofa, places the cushion in her midriff, "as I've finished the beds and the hoovering."
The quiz show has become all squares, flashing lights and numbers. Paul glances to the window.
"Oi!" he leaps to bang on the glass. A plump, black-banded tabby was about to step onto his three rows of seedlings.
"I hate cats," he says. Tin-fed sadists slyly crapping in children's sandpits; or, for the sake of a shameful crap, scratching up his new seeds; slaughtering fledglings...
"Well I like cats," Alice stands bobbing on the sofa to look out the window, "Pretty pussy." This is a game they play. "Pretty pussy."
The tabby has scrabbled up onto the fence, glances yellow-eyed back and goes on over the other side, its curved tail like a question mark.
"Bloody cats," Paul pretend grouches.
"Well I like cats..."
commentary .... A person's character is not a simple matter of surface reactions to scenes and events. Those reactions, or non-reactions, have their roots in a deep bed of knowledge. That bed of knowledge is comprised of their own life experiences plus the vicarious experiences of friends, neighbours and acquaintances; as well as all those spectator experiences gained via the television, radio, video, books, magazines and newspapers. Most characters too have developed political and religious schemata to suit their own temperament; and which, confined by the limits of their imagination and the generosity of their spirit, can be both contradictory and complementary to their knowledge.
But nor can Paul, Julie, Michael and Alice be solely described by what they know. Because, like an island is defined by the state of the surrounding, but otherwise featureless, sea, so can each of their characters be defined by what they don't know. But, then again, nor is anyone's knowledge continuous: each can easily forget, overlook, and re-remember bits of their knowledge. Paul, for instance, is aware that, although close to it, he can't remember details and dates of his own childhood. He feels at 21, therefore, that his life is out of balance, that all the formative events seem to have been packed into the latter half, that he has consequently lived only half a real life, that the first part is missing, or is yet waiting to be created in memory. Paul looks at Alice and Michael some days and wonders what they will remember of this life that they are so earnestly living with him minute by minute.
Although it is important to his view of life, Paul does not think all the while about his having been twice to prison. Nor does he dwell all of the time on his being presently unemployed. Nor does he constantly re-examine and update the political and spiritual convictions which have come from those experiences. Some things do, however, require further explanation.
The morning's proximity to the teacher, for instance, had been in itself stimulus for further mental hectoring of him. Because, having seen the teacher reading The Guardian Paul had attributed to the teacher's page by page perusal a weary act of habit. But for Paul his purchase of The Guardian was a self-conscious assertion of his individuality: he would not be palmed off with tits in a tabloid. And, at his kitchen table, Paul imagined the teacher taking for granted The Guardian and his consequent sneering at the journalists' choice of words. Paul, using the newspaper as a symbol of his refusal to bow to Sydenham type, tries to take all that it proclaims seriously. (Prison, again, was the fount of his assiduous newspaper reading. In prison there is no news. Which is why, no matter what the cost, Paul makes sure that he can afford a literate newspaper.)
Julie is happy for Paul to stay at home with Alice. Julie and Paul have discussed, with every new case in the papers, the horrors of child abuse. And because they have talked of it Julie feels reassured those households where that sort of thing isn't mentioned being often those households where the unspeakable happens.
Like most men Paul has been frightened by his male sexuality, which has found for itself stimulus in the most inappropriate places, from in his adolescence bandy-legged whiskery old women bending over in front of him to the red tart lips of a fat cashier; and, surprised by his response, he has felt the shame crawling over his skin and making him vulnerable to every look. (This confusion over their own sexuality is often why most heterosexual males cannot look into the unflinching eyes of male homosexuals. Eye contact is arousing and they are frightened of getting turned on and of becoming, because of a wayward erection, something which they have no desire to be.)
Paul made a study, for his own benefit, of the nature of physical desire. He discovered, from his own reactions, that desire has little to do with conventional attractiveness, with any fashionable notion of what is beautiful. Rather it is a heat being given off by a woman, plus a host of indications of availability, of sexual readiness. Or could it be, regarding women he is not absolutely sure that, like a child, a pleasurable preoccupation with her own flesh, coupled with a curiosity about his flesh; and, added to that the current state of his hormones, his own sexual associations and taboos, the nature of desire being such that what is forbidden by it being forbidden often becomes the most desirable? The Madonna for many men, for instance, is their first sex symbol. In our Western psyche their very familiarity has made the mother and suckling child an image that is very appealing to men, and could be why some men, Paul thought then afraid of the sharp-voiced rebuffs of women transfer their desire to the soft child.
In prison Paul met with the nonces capable of committing such atrocities. And they were largely pathetic men monstrous only in the pain they had inflicted. Paul despised them; but knew too that he, as a man, was capable of just such a crime. As every honest man must suspect himself capable of it. Thus the general male desire to push the topic aside, to not confront it, this sundering of children being the sour aspect of their otherwise proud priapic maleness.
Paul had guilts enough already over the lack of toys and holidays that Michael and Alice suffered, when compared to their credit-happy neighbours to add the guilt of abuse to his burdens. Indeed the very idea of that pain and anguish being inflicted on little Alice was almost too disturbing an image to hold in his mind.
Paul discovered too that he did not know, being an only child, how to feel, how to show, how to act familial affection. He had learnt only, by intimate touch and gesture, how to demonstrate his fondness for his sexual partners. Any affection he had felt up to becoming a parent had thus been firmly associated with sex. But now he had children and he loved his children. He didn't want to have sex with them, yet sensuality is associated with warmth and he has felt himself becoming aroused. The idea of doing 'that' to their little frames, though, appalled him. If another man were to do that he'd tear that man limb from limb. He hated his own mind that could even imagine it, and he worried that one drink too many might have him giving into the fascination of the moment.
Men who have had solitary childhoods have this difficulty in disassociating the desire for physical closeness from the desire for sexual congress. Women can easily indulge in the idle sensuality of their own warm skin being in contact with the warm skin of another, and women can take satisfaction from that closeness without a sexual thought entering their heads. For many men, though, that wanting to be physically close has become tangled up with the desire for sexual gratification, is an echo of their prepubescent sexual fantasies where, when they didn't know the aim of their longing to touch and to be touched, they breathlessly imagined only the warmth being given off by the unclothed skin of another. Adulthood teaches these men what it was in their innocence they desired. Physical closeness, therefore, denotes for them now only the likelihood of sexual gratification; and when it's not obviously forthcoming from that source it leads often to sublimation in perverse practises of one kind or another.
For a while, lest his own body so tempt him, with stiff arms and frowns Paul had pushed Michael and Alice away from him. As his own self-preoccupied mother had to him with the consequence that the only love he had learnt was sexual. His children were not going to suffer his confusion. Telling himself that sexual attraction need not translate into sexual action, he made himself relax towards them. (A man may only have limited control over whether he has an erection or not. He has absolute control over what he does with it.)
Even Paul's hatred of cats is not without its history. He enjoyed the sight of wild creatures going about their lives, delighted in their different ways. He despised pets.
"Show me someone who is sentimental about animals," his grandfather had said, "and I'll show you someone who hasn't thought about animals and who, through their thoughtlessness, maltreats them." His grandfather's was another, not always welcome, voice in Paul's head.
Another voice was that of Julie. She had so often justified solely to him her hatred of being indoors that he too now felt uncomfortable being inside with the windows and doors closed. So he transferred that vague discomfort to Alice sitting on the sofa blithely watching television inactivity indoors was wrong and he decided that she should go out.
True Stories
In July 1985 vandals ripped out the Silver Jubilee tree that had been re-planted by MP Tom King in April 1984. The tree was torn up by its roots, leaving only the inscribed plaque that recorded the planting and the first re-planting.
After a party in 1989 Andrew Munn, a postman, slapped his wife Geraldine because he was tired and she wouldn't come to bed. 29 year old Andrew Munn said that he did it because he had been drinking and had financial worries. Geraldine Munn had swellings around both eyes.
On July 13th 1989, in Bridgwater, 1998 people were registered unemployed.
In March 1990 Keith Watts, of Thorncombe Crescent, Bridgwater, was attacked by two stray alsatians and a black labrador as he took a short cut across fields to his home on the Sydenham Estate. 29 year old Keith Watts was bitten on the arms and legs and required stitches to a chest wound.
