Time Together

I am standing in the field behind the Barnardos Alcatraz, supposedly attempting to retrieve an over the fence escapee, but he has gapped it: absconded being the official term to be entered in the notes this evening when the boys are locked down behind their individually alarmed bedroom doors. So I am just taking in the knee high grass sway, the wildflowers, the unionist bees and talkshow sparrows…Being a Saturday, the HEB guys aren’t around, their portaloos and earth-rending diplodicuses keeping silent vigil over their half completed doings until Monday morning. A King Lear remix suggests itself, one in which Edgar promises to lead the blind Gloucester, at his bidding, to a soft and shaggy meadow such as this, where he can collapse on a bed of heather and catch some much needed zs. But he actually leads him to a precipitous cliff top and dad falls willingly not ‘in the flat field’ but all the way down to ‘the murmuring surge’ and a rocky death. That is who we are looking after, back there in the house: the bad Edgars. Ah, wouldn’t that be Edmund then? No, because they aren’t any good at being bad, like that little bastard - they don’t have any kind of hustle on. Just a bunch of Poor Toms who would have kept on wearing rags and going hungry and devouring any porn they could get their hands on were it not for the interventions of our gleaming new Barnardos credit cards and Hiaces. But it is not their fathers that the bad Edgars - shall we call them badgers? - want to do things to: it is their sisters, and their brothers, and their pets. Because their fathers, and everyone else, have already done things to them.

I haven’t written a song in five years. I haven’t written anything at all for two, not since I checked my email at work one morning and got the bad news on the fourth novel, necessitating an impromptu road trip and a change to my current employment over the fence. Maybe I won’t head back there just yet…the sun has come out…maybe when I get out of here at the end of the week I will pick up the guitar again. But what shall I feed the badgers for their dinner? Anything they like, as long as I don’t have to let them help me make it. One badger insists on me helping him with his baking, and when things don’t work out (it doesn’t help that the house oven appears to be fired by a fusion reactor, so ‘30 minutes in a hot oven’ should actually be seven), or the recipe is not followed EXACTLY, or (the worst) an ingredient is MISSING, things get very, very bad. Oh dear. I once had to ring Sally in the middle of a nail shredding flan or muffin sortie to find out what ‘zest’ was, and she didn’t know either and things got very, very bad.

The ingredients for a lot of bad stuff that has happened seem to still be just lying around, innocently. I think of the uniforms, the power structures, the iconography of the schools I appear to have left behind me. That spooky owl with its jangling set of gaoler’s keys (oh yeah, the keys to wisdom). The rallies, held under the guise of ‘assemblies’. The planes, the skyscrapers, the trains, the prisons, the hate. It all seems to be in pretty good shape, this particular pantry - nothing past its use by, just waiting for the slight realignment, the rogue cell, the infinitesimal DNA percentage that separates a chimpanzee from a spoodle. And then there’s the internet. Some very bad baking went down without it; what will it get up to when it puts its mind to it? Amis is great on the olfactory in Money: pornography is ‘arid, acrid, the smell of headaches and wax’; money itself is ‘little boys’ socks and a porno headache tang, old yeast, batch, larders, damp towels…’ What does the internet smell like? It smells of stratosphere, of ICBM trails, of the oxygen leaving a room. The badgers aren’t allowed the internet, but they don’t really need it anyway. They just have to close their eyes and their worst imaginings are right there where they left them.

The school that the fourth novel was based on was very much the stately pleasure dome in real life, but of course I made all manner of bad things happen there. My suited senior management team emerge from some crisis meeting or other looking like ‘an angry Beatles, or a corporate Metallica’. Now, I ask myself: an ANGRY Beatles? A CORPORATE Metallica? Were there any other kinds? There was a river running through the real school, where the occasional truant was swept to their death and in which, on days when conditions were presumably more favourable, baptisms would occur. Although, if you have just been saved, what does it matter if the current of the Lord chooses to take you right then and there? I had thought I was immune to the attractions of being born again - I check myself against Shea Whigham’s revivalist spiel, in the tent there, in True Detective: ‘YOU are a stranger to yourSELF but HE knows you!’ And I think, well, I may be a stranger to everyone else on the planet, but I think I know me pretty well. And HE doesn’t exist, so…Even the language of being ‘born again’ seems a bit off. Who came up with that? It feels like a trivialisation of a very difficult, often protracted process that the better half of the world have gone through on your behalf; a couple of seconds in the river doesn’t quite stack up. And they are often just not very nice people - their poster boy spilled so much blood in the enhanced interrogation methods he deployed against the early Christians that he was known as ‘Paint’ Saul. A little water and a spoonerism clears us of the deed.

But actually, that is exactly what I need right now - I need to be born again. I have used up too much of my time, and it hasn’t worked out how I wanted. Cut me a Faustian deal, give me a contract - I’ll sign anything. I want to continue my quest to write the song with the perfect coda - which has been an obsession ever since the keyboard made its entrance at the end of ‘Hardly Getting Over It’ one night in 1990 when I was sitting in some student dive in North Dunedin trying to impress a very beautiful stranger with my proficiencies in chain smoking, and falling in love to the sound of a haggard 24 year old singing about moving into a hotel cell and dying away seemed strangely intoxicating. She was about four days worth of impressed. Still the bees, here in the meadow. They are in the book too. My antihero is getting pissed in his fiancee’s parents’ garden, watching them feasting on a lavender bush, and he wonders: would they make purple honey? Right, that can be the first song. I would write one called Born Again, documenting this field epiphany, but I already have. That one was about Macbeth reaffirming his commitment to the dark side. Hats off to you, worthy thane: you’ll be OK.

What has worked out, what I don’t want to be reborn out of, is our Sally. I can see the porch light of her, our, house across this very field after I have finally put the badgers to bed, read them their bedtime stories, confiscated their knives and taken them back to the kitchen and enabled their door alarms. Seven days on, seven days off: it is a long time for her to be just a beacon in the darkness.