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A Bloke's Life
...THERE'S ALWAYS HOPE... (I HOPE...) THERE'S ALWAYS HOPE... (I HOPE...) THERE'S ALWAYS HOPE... (I HOPE...) THERE'S ALWAYS HOPE...
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A Bloke's Life
"Tell me about yourself."
Bloke sat, head in hands, on the edge of his bed and heard the voice.
"Tell me about yourself."
Some wraith still said these words occasionally: still teased him. And his only consolation was to remind himself that when the words had first been uttered, that night in the Old Ship, she, Diane, had never expected an answer, and would have been surprised had she got one.
The phrase was, he now realised, after all only a QED dreamily appended to a longish silence.
Then, however, that distant night, away in a danger, a shifty Spenserian pageant of cock-eyed Ulterior Motives (somehow shadowed forth by knots of drawling student punters at the bar) flitted through Bloke's mind as he cowered behind his beerglass in the corner of the pub: but none seemed to account for this apparition, with her keen eyes and petulant mouth and jetblack curls, who had materialised in front of him and now leant forward across the table and quietly spoke and asked strange questions.
Could this be?
Now, years later, Bloke still remembered his confusion and embarrassment at being able to respond only with mumbled banalities; for the first time in his life he wanted to be able to give something of himself in words, to fence off his enclosure amid the arid common land of pointless utterances and fill it with his own livestock. But he couldn't.
He could think of nothing meaningful or significant to say - at least, nothing which arose naturally out of the situation and circumstances. He could at the drop of a hat blurt out a series of oneiric sequiturs, the kind that habitually crowded his mind, but was that what she wanted? No, she would learn nothing of him that way - at least not here, not now, not until something happened to break the stale spell of circumspection he still breathed...
She looked at him enquiringly and said "Do you want to kiss me?"
"I'd love to. But... well, in fact, yes."
Bloke had never understood kissing. He did now - or at least, he understood that a kiss could serve a purpose, although when their mouths docked, as carefully as orbiting Apollo modules, he realised that the literature he had read on the subject had been quite wide of the mark: this kiss didn't taste sweet; it had more of agape than Eros; as a means of achieving communication let alone gratification it wasn't up to much.
He was too inexperienced to be able to tell whether her style of kissing was more or less passionate than the norm. The only thing he learned about Diane as a result of gluing his gaping gob on hers was that she had just now been drinking gin and coke in a ratio of roughly four parts to one.
But that wasn't the point. The point was that, apart from giving him time to think about what he was going to say next ("tell me about yourself" - ?), the kiss, the sheer tonguetwist and pull and suck and blink of it, meant he could say almost anything. With another no; but with Diane?, yes.
She had not insisted on finding out his age, provenance, shoe size or marital status before making the leap of faith into his mouth: and this Kierkegaardian stance on her part called for an answering act of faith on his: he had no proof of her either but to place his hands on her arms, then on her shoulders, then crossed behind her back, to press her body tentatively against his; and when their mouths separated he could jabber a volley of admiring obscenities at her in Spanish, New Testament Greek and any other languages that came to mind.
Being tall, he had always been conscious of having drawn the short straw when it came to kissing: how much more significant it must feel when you have to reach up, throw your head back and close your eyes as if in prayer! But whilst kissing left him cold, to hold and be held was his idea of heaven. Diane sensed this.
Soon Bloke seemed to find the happiness he sought. Their mouths separated.
"Bloke."
"What?"
"I need your help."
"Why?"
Bloke, on hearing this unexpected plea, had squashed her tightly against him like a child with a rag doll, glowering jealously around the bar.
The moment was to be later remembered with an increasingly desperate fondness, a bottomless nostalgia.
"There's someone here I want to avoid," Diane gasped unclearly over his shoulder. "If you left this place with me, I'd be able to get rid of him."
Bloke suddenly visualised a large fist hovering in the air about eight inches from his nose. Whichever way he turned his head, it still swam back there in front of his face, putting everything beyond it out of focus, like a certain vindictive wasp he had met in a nightmare. So Bloke was to play the punchbag for some jealous lover. Right. Fine. He'd just stolen a few unscripted moments of bliss. You don't get something for nothing.
"Let's leave then." He released his grip on her and downed the rest of his pint in one go. Alcohol, he had heard, alleviated the pain of a broken nose.
"Hang on. I've just got to go and talk to someone."
And later, while he was sitting next to her in her car and gingerly touching :his bruised eye and cheek:
"Shall I put it another way?" she said.
"I've been using you. Using you! Do you understand?"
"Yes, of course. So what? If you're saying you want me to go now, I will. Just tell me."
"Aren't you angry?"
"Why should I be? Everyone uses everyone. Fact of life. Hardly worth getting hot under the collar about. I knew all the time, anyway,"
Bloke reassured her, uncertain whether this was true or not.
It seemed the right thing to say.
Diane stared at him with renewed curiosity. "I don't understand you."
"Of course you do. I was using you, too. Or didn't you notice?
So are you angry with me?"
This was meant by Bloke as a rhetorical question. But the kiss she suddenly planted on his mouth did seem to be a very angry one. It went on and on.
Soon they were lying across the front seats of the car, Bloke had recanted on his former heresies vis-a-vis kissing, and his hands were on her breasts.
"I knead you," he observed.
"I've got the painters in," said Diane with some compunction.
"I... well, I'm afraid it might spoil things a bit for you.
Some other day. I promise."
Bloke had never heard a period used as an excuse for not having sex before. But he did not have the requisite experience to be able to assure her that it didn't matter. Perhaps in some way it did. Perhaps a period really did mean a full stop. Perhaps to claim otherwise might be a terrible faux pas which would demonstrate his total lack of savoir faire. Or perhaps the period was a polite fiction, and she just didn't want sex. After all, who in their right mind would? With a mighty effort, he sat up and lit up.
"Don't worry." Telling people not to worry had lately become, he reflected, a kind of hobby of his.
Now, looking back, Bloke only remembered at that moment raising a cigarette unseeingly to his mouth.
He had listened politely, that evening in the Old Ship, as she explained how she had, when a child, murdered her father; when it seemed that subject had been exhausted he had kissed her, and she him; she had then got him beaten up; after that they had driven off to some country church, she had tended his wounds, they had kissed again, he had said "Don't worry", and there had been a moment of surprised silence, a look exchanged between them that said "Well, here we are on the fabled edge of the world, here we are looking down into that chasm."
Bloke had ended up telling her about himself. He told her secrets to make even a parricide pale. She listened attentively, watched while his bruised one-eyed face was crawled over by one insect first, then many. He made a general confession, the first in years. Then he had declared undying liking for her. Locusts and honey. Outside the dusty window of the car, some old church rose grimily up, the painful erection of slaves, the opiate of hardly anyone these days.
"I don't know what it is. Maybe it was that smack in the eye. Maybe I've suffered a temporary loss of binocular vision or... perspective. But I can't seem to see any distance between us. You seem to me to be me - the good bit, the bit that was missing, the bit that makes sense of it all."
"I bet," she said with teasing evasiveness, "you say this to all the girls."
What was the use of remembering? What was the use of nostalgia and regret? A maudlin maundering meandering. Was that all there was to be? He got up from the sagging bed and wandered across the room, finally deciding to head down the narrow wooden stairs to the bathroom on the floor below.
Did so. Good. Had bath.
Drying himself afterwards with a filthy communal towel, he caught sight of himself in the cracked bathroom mirror, naked, a horrible sight, one that made him want to weep.
Thine hair is like strands of finest copper over which a cauldron of melted lard has been poured.
Thine eyes are like two pools. They are all muddy and full of dead fish.
Thy ribcage is a birdcage.
Thine ears are like dried figs.
Thy breath stinks to high heaven.
Thy neck is like a tower of ivory: stiff and yellowish.
Thy legs are like two gazelles. Thin and hairy and passing shy.
Thy shrunken dong looks like an inveterate boozer's shrunken dong.
Thy feet are like two maiden aunts living in Dundee. They are full of aches and pains. Thou never goest to see them. Thou hast forgotten what they look like.
No wonder, Bloke said aloud before shrugging on his sweat-stiffened clothes, you can't hold down an unsteady girlfriend.
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