Of People and Things

ONE-1

ONE

This is true. I was witness to it all, after a fashion. I was there, or was told things if I was not there to see for myself. That other stories could be told I have no doubt, but this is the one that strikes as the one to tell now with the desk before me, the books about me and, outside, the cloudless skies and the inexorable sun, like Ixion, beginning his round again.

Still.

“She’ll have my balls, for Christ’s sake!”

That day was very much a day like today; the same cloudless skies, the same sighing of the flora steeling themselves against the heat of the day which had not yet arrived but which was inevitable. As to a month, I could make a stab, but they tend to blur into the same heat-haze these days so I’d be hard pushed to tell, although it wasn’t December, that I do know, for he always left the country in December to get in a bit of skiing and escape Christmas. That still leaves the field quite open.

Where was I? I was pootling in the house, or what I say was a house, although some might disagree, possibly rummaging in a cupboard to find something to tempt me into eating. He had a habit of coming upon me when I least expected him, and when I did expect him, he never arrived. It is fortunate, then, that I had given up m**********g for good, for that would have been a spectacle neither of us would have enjoyed, greatly. So I didn’t much mind when he came, for I was always going to be innocently doing whatever it was I did, from moment to moment. I minded that he came, in truth, but, given that he was bound to come, I didn’t mind when.

Yes, I was in the kitchen. He pushed past me to reach a whiskey bottle on the counter. I always have whiskey in the house, not for myself, but for him as he couldn’t seem to be too far removed from the stuff so he makes sure I have a bottle in, waiting for one of his visits. He whipped off the screw-top and then glared at me.

“My f*****g balls! On a plate!”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Like what? Say what you mean for once in your life.”

Frankly, this piece of advice is one I would normally ignore. The dangers of saying what you mean are legion, in my opinion. It seemed innocent enough, though, but where would it all end? That is what troubled me; where would it all end, in the end?

“A drinking glass for your whiskey.”

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked at him.

“What do you see?”

This time I thought it better not say what I meant, for if I was to answer truthfully, I would have had to say an overweight, slack-jawed, shaven-headed man of an uncertain age, who was turning a very alarming shade of puce. So I said nothing. His age was uncertain because I did not know what it was. Whilst I had been alive he had always been there, or thereabouts, and always seemed to be the same age. He could have been fifty, he could have been seventy, for there are men of advanced years who can still make a fist, physically speaking, of vigour. Undoubtedly, I was the younger, but by how much I couldn’t say, save for a generation, or thereabouts. Maybe I will come to look more like him as I grew older, or do all men grow old in their own special way? Time will tell. If I make it to old age, of course.

“You see me standing before you with my balls at stake and an open bottle of whiskey in my hand. Course I want a f*****g glass.”

I gave him same. He poured from a great height and freely. Drops of whiskey flew, staining the already stained Formica. I averted my eyes whilst he drank. The noises were enough to tell me that the vision of him drinking would not have been a pleasant one; Adam’s apple bobbing, whiskey slipping from the corners of his mouth, the wipe of the back of his hand across his lips. When I heard a final theatrical gasp, I knew it was safe to look at him again, although I was more tempted to look at the drying of the drops of whiskey on the counter, for the new stains had brought the other, older stains into very pleasant relief, as if I were seeing them anew, although now I couldn’t name them. True, many of the stains had been there when I moved in, but some were of my own making and amounted to a little record of me in my little kitchen, which may have been more of a kitchenette. Nevertheless, I did look at him and fixed my face in attention.

“She?” I asked.

“That bony old b***h of a w***e,” he barked before muzzling into the glass again.

“Ah,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, but not in the same way. It was another theatrical post-drinking gasp. “You haven’t got the first idea who I’m talking about, have you?”

“No,” and I meant it.

“Cass-f*****g-andra.”

Parents do such awful things to their children. Everyone called her Cass. He called her everything under the sun apart from Cass, which, I suppose, was his prerogative.

He poured himself another whiskey and barged passed into the other room where my sole armchair sat. He sat on it and humphed. I hovered behind and saw once more the reason for the shaving of the head – a large area of hair-free pate. If he had not shaved his head he would have looked like a monk. Well, his hair would have looked like a monk’s hair. The rest of him was far from being suitable to take the tonsure.

“Do you know what she said to me? Where the f**k are you?”

“She said that to you?”

“No, you, where are you?”

“Behind you.”

“You won’t understand a word unless you look me in the face. Behind me! Get around here.”

I got around there and faced him. There was nowhere else to sit, save the floor, so I stood, so at least we were not face to face, but I saw his face well enough, well enough for him, anyway.

“Now, let’s start again.”

“Let’s start at the very beginning,” I said hopefully helpfully.

“We will start from where I left off. I’m not the sort of man who has the time to go around repeating himself. You won’t get me beating around the bush either. If I’ve got something to say – and I have, Oh, you better believe I’ve got something to say, if you think I’ve got nothing to say then you’re making a serious mistake.”

He took another gulp and sat there in silence. I didn’t like his silences; they invaded my own too much. If I didn’t know that he was not a man capable of reverie I would have said that he was in reverie.

“You were saying?” I said.

He came back from wherever he had been.

“Ah. Do you know what she said to me? Don’t think I don’t know, that’s what she said.”

“Don’t think I don’t know.”

“Exactly! To me!”

“Don’t think I don’t know what?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And what did she say?

“Never you mind.”

“Sorry.”

“No; she said never you mind, fuckwit, and flounced off.”

“She called you a fuckwit?”

“No, fuckwit, I called you a fuckwit.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Now, right here and right now I called you a fuckwit. Is that clear now?”

“As the purest stream.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

I don’t think I was helping his complexion. He had begun puce and was now a rash of competing colours, albeit all within the pink to purple spectrum. They swarmed over his face.

“I can’t think with you standing over me,” and he aimed a kick in my direction. His pudgy legs were not long enough to reach me. “Get over there,” and he gestured with his glass to a corner. I looked at the corner and it seemed as good a place to stand as any, if I was going to have to stand, and it seemed as if I was. So I shuffled over. It was true, once I was safely out of the way, the words came more easily to him, although at the greater risk of my not understanding, for I find that when you really want to understand someone then it is best to fix your attention squarely on the face and watch the lips go through their motions. Corners, though, are fine places to be, if properly jammed in and especially if the corner is a true ninety degrees or thereabouts, for then you are effectively covered on three sides and you can channel all the necessary concentration in one direction, not having to worry about what is going on behind you or to your left or to your right. My bed, which is more of a cot, perhaps, is jammed into a corner in much the same way, but with a different aim, for when I’m sleeping I am not concentrating on anything, save for the revelries in my own head, but I still like to feel that I am not entirely open and vulnerable and that the hazard of rolling out of the bed and crashing onto to the floor in the throes of a nightmare is diminished by a full fifty percent, if my maths is correct.

“So there you have it,” he said.

There was a pause of some duration.

“You haven’t been listening, have you?”

“No.”

He tried to get to his feet, and managed on the second attempt. He walked as he talked; heavily.

“Me shagging around. Me think Cassandra knows. Me need to know if Cassandra knows. You f*****g well find out.”

To give him his due, his timing was exquisite, for he had accurately measured the distance from his chair to my corner, precisely calculated the distance of each step and paced his words accordingly in order to grasp me by the throat at the very same moment as he spat out the expletive. It really was a very fine example of mind and body working in utter harmony. The whiskey on his breath was not as unpleasant as one might imagine. It had almost a sweet tinge to it, and I noticed too that his latest dental work had been a roaring success. He let me go and ordered me to get another drink.

The kitchen was still heavy with his presence, but this did not deflect me from the growing realisation of what he had said to me. How, I wondered, was I to find out if she had found out, presumably without my letting slip that I was working on his behalf? Surely it would be forbidden to simply go up to Cassandra, assuming I was capable of such a thing, and saying in the simplest language: “Do you know that your husband is shagging around?” I wouldn’t use the word shagging, of course. Cass is not the sort of lady to whom one can say shagging. Could one even talk of shagging with her at all? By which I think I meant, can one talk to her of matters of a s****l nature, and not can one talk of having s****l relations with her. That would be unimaginable, to say. No, I had the feeling, although he hadn’t stated it, that the whole thing would have to be done stealthily. Which begged the obvious question: if stealth, delicacy and discretion were demanded, why had he commissioned me? Discretion I could manage, as I talked to no one, but delicacy? Stealth? Once, perhaps, when I had had more practice rubbing up against the rest of humanity, but I was, I feared, rusty. Now, I can use stealth to avoid people, of course. But that is far from being the same thing as using stealth with people. I was quite sure of that, even at the dawning of the affair. To which I felt the need to further consider that whilst his final instructions had been clear they were not complete, for in order to know if Cass knew I would have had to know precisely what it was he feared she knew. I would have to know with whom he was shagging, to at least have a target for any subtle searches I might undertake. But I didn’t want to know with whom he was shagging. I was having a hard enough time accommodating myself to the fact that he was shagging at all, and the thought that in order to fulfil my brief I might run the risk of forming a complete mental picture of said shagging was enough to shudder me, like someone walking over my grave, as they say, although I’m not dead. That I managed all this in the time it took to pour a whiskey demonstrates the state of my mental capacities, at that time. Inevitably, this now makes me doubt that I thought anything of the sort, at that time. But I must have thought something, for on my return and once I had handed him his whiskey and re-occupied the corner, I ventured the following: