1982 Janine (43 page)

Foxy little Sherry has a wrinkled face which could be any age between thirty-five and sixty. Her wrists are both handcuffed to a handgrip near the roof of the car, she keeps wriggling against that point of bondage by twisting her body from side to side while ostentatiously crossing and recrossing a pair of unexpectedly beautiful legs. These are almost completely exposed in nearly unbuttoned denim miniskirt and under the torndownoffbothshouldersseethroughsilkshirt her small breasts are made perky by a black brassiere (could Sherry be a man in drag?) stop confusing me, she also wears whitewedgesoledsandalsnetstockingssuspenderbeltblack
Cleopatrastylewigbigsilverhoopearrings (come out of the sexy accessories Jock McLeish! We know you're hiding in there) GET THEE BEHIND ME GOD AND
PUSH
for Christ's sake if you psychoanalyse me you will discover you too are nothing but my imagination. Sherry says gleefully in her throaty stagewhisper, “Just see the mess I'm in! When they came for me I freaked right out, I yelled and struggled, they slapped me silly and dragged me here and tied me up like this. I admire how you can take it all so calm. But of course this is your first time so you don't know what's in store. Believe me these brutes will do everything they want to us when they get us to the Cattlemarket.”

Keyword. Shift back to Janine reading it. Janine in cowhide britches in Cadillac driven by Frank to a place called the Cattlemarket realises she is reading about Nina in Cadillac driven by Frank to a place called the Cattlemarket where Nina will at last stand in a line beside a woman who is Janine. Vertigo. Janine feels the delicious exotic helplessness of being gripped and carried along by my imagination. She also feels great dread. If this is a dream she wants to wake but cannot. She stares at the back of Frank's head wanting to ask him a question, but not wanting him to know she perhaps has information of a matter he perhaps does not want her to know. He says, “How goes the story?”

She pretends to yawn. She says, “The usual sexist crap. Is this place you're taking me to a restaurant, a nightclub or a hotel?”

Frank says, “None of them and all of them. It's a comfortable ranch where a few likeminded acquaintances can have themselves a ball with no holds barred. You'll enjoy it.”

“Good,” says Janine in a small dry voice and reads on.

Sherry babbles, “Tell me, Nina, how easy do you come? Tell me truly because it's important.”

Nina decides the whole thing is a joke she had better play along with. She says, “It depends on how much I like the guy, I guess.”

Sherry says, “Then you'd better like the guys at the Cattlemarket! New girls are always popular and these guys fuck with their eyes wide open and they just won't let you go
until you come. And they have all the devices. They really do teach a dame how to surrender. My marriage has acquired a whole new dimension since I started going to the Cattlemarket. Tom and I would have separated long ago if a friend had not introduced us to it. Tom used to be so
feeble
.”

Sherry is turning this into a comedy, I no longer feel strong and wicked as I approach what should be the POINT, CRUX, CLIMAX of the story, press on regardless. Nina says, “I'm sure Frank will keep me all to himself. I mean, that's why he arrested me.”

Sherry says, “You've made a bad mistake, honey. Frank is no sheriff, Frank is a RUSTLER, a THIEF. Didn't he tell you? When he gets you to the market he'll either auction you or rent you to the highest bidder, Frank is cash-crazy, not cunt-crazy. But he supplies to the cunt-crazy and tonight he is supplying you.”

At which words a chill of horror seizes Nina's insides what a cheap cliché stop talking critically don't divert me from the POINT CRUX CLIMAX, Frank says loudly without turning his head, “Pay no attention to anything Sherry says, Nina. Enjoy the ride.”

Tom has turned round in his seat to stare hard and long at Nina which he does with evident enjoyment, and he says, “What I like about Frank as a supplier is, the dames he brings in just can't believe what's happening to them, yet he gets them delivering themselves in such very cute parcels. Remember the last dame he got for us, Sherry? The rich bitch in the leather britches. What was her name?”

“Janine,” says Sherry, at which word – although I had intended to have Janine reading a description of herself standing half naked with her breasts, hair etcetera being fondled and lifted by various hands while various people discussed how, and how much, they were going to enjoy her – at which word the story must stop, because Janine has now been forced to see she is a character in it.
She realises it is
her inescapable fate to be a character in a story by someone who
dictates every one of her movements and emotions, someone she
will never meet and cannot appeal to
. She is like most people, but not like me. I have been free for nearly ten whole minutes.

For more than twenty-five years before these minutes I was a character in a script written by National Security. That script governed my main movements, and therefore my emotions. How could I learn to love my wife when for half the week I never even slept with her? I made myself completely predictable so that the firm could predict me. I stopped growing, stopped changing. I helped the firm grow, instead of me. I became a damned chilly gentlemanly mildmannered selfcrushing bore like my father. No wonder Helen had to leave me at last, even though she loved me.

Helen loved me. I've just noticed that. She married me because she loved me. Partly consciously, partly not, she took great daft risks and told lies until she had so manipulated her father and my family and me that she and I were well and truly married. Nobody could do that without a power of love in them, why did I never notice it? When she turned away after we had made love, as if I had defeated her in a sullen combat, why did I never kiss her shoulderblades and say gently, “That was not all I wanted from you, though I liked it a lot. Turn to me again. Let me hold you.”

That never occurred to me. I was too busy thinking, ‘That was all she wanted, damn her, and now she has it, and I hope she's happy. Thank God I've work to do tomorrow that needs SERIOUS attention.' She must have been thinking the same thing but I was too rotten with pride to see it. Would she have refused affection if I had wept because our sex together was so quick and poor? Maybe not, because she loved me. Why did I not notice that? Why did I think I was cheap when Denny Helen yes Diana in her way yes Brian yes Alan yes Sontag and the editor were living proof that I was far more valuable than bastarding MONEY? I used to be surrounded by love, I floated upon it without seeing it and rejected it again and again. Now there is none left I can see it, distinctly. Or perhaps I now see it because for the last ten minutes I have been free. I am not predictable now, even though I have money and a tidy home of my own.

Will I start my own small business, if so what will it be? Will I buy a partnership, if so with who? Will I found a co-operative, start a theatrical company, join a commune?
Will I invent something? Will I retrain myself to be a farmer of cattle and crops, a farmer of crabs and kelp? Will I join a political movement? Will I get religion? Will I hunt for women through contact magazines and singles clubs? Will I marry again and have a family this time? Will I emigrate? Will I roam the world with or without a companion? Will I discover that I am a homosexual, a cool-eyed gambler, a carver of clock cases, a psychopathic killer? Will I die in a war, a brothel, a famine, a bar-room brawl or beachcombing in Sri Lanka or in the Falkland Islands or in some other remote souvenir of the Great Britisher's Empire? For I will not do nothing. No, I will not do nothing.

I see you, God, in my mind's eye. You are a naked old man stooping down from the middle of the sun, your beard and hair stream sideways like the tail of a comet, you are based on a print which became popular a few years ago. In the print you probe the space below you with forceps or calipers, but in my mind's eye your hand reaches down to me with the palm open. No wagging finger tells me what I Shall or Shall Not Do. You are saying, “Stand up son. You've fallen and hurt yourself, but we all make mistakes. Regard these thirty or so mistaken years as the end of your schooling and start anew. There's plenty of time. You're not dead yet. You're not even fifty.”

God, I wish I could weep. I am free but miserable because freedom is useless to a coward. Bound or unbound, a coward is incapable of doing good to himself or others. My life has passed without one single brave good unselfish action. (You stopped Hislop.) Indeed I did but he was very frail at the time.

In the weeks after his wife's death he grew strange and shrunken. We would enter his classroom and find him sitting at his desk, elbows on lid and hands covering face. We would settle in our seats as quietly as possible and wait. Was he keeking at us between his fingers? Impossible to tell. We sat like stones until he cried out, without moving, “Take out your books!” and that was often the only thing he said to us before the bell rang for us to change classrooms,
though we sat more still and silent than seemed possible for a class of forty-five children. We were terrified. We knew he was on the edge of doing something really mad, yet there was nobody we could tell. We had no evidence which would make sense to an adult.

One day he got up and wandered around the classroom spouting fine language like in the old days, but the words were jumbled together without sense.

“These I have loved, the rough male kiss of blankets, the moan of doves in immemorial elms, good strong thick stupefying incense smoke and jellies soother than the creamy curd who said that Mary?”

In a small voice the girl at the top of the class said, “Keats, sir.”

“No, Mary,” said Hislop with a sigh, “Keats did not say it, or Browning, or Tennyson, or Brooke. Mad Hislop said it. Poor old mad Hislop. Who said it, Anderson?”

“M-M-M-Mithter Hithlop thaid it, thir,” said Anderson, who had a slight lisp when he got nervous.

“Stand up, Anderson. Say my name again,” said Hislop, walking over to him, “Not mister. Nor sir. Just my naked name.”

“H-H-H-Hithlop.”

“Break my name in two,” said Hislop very gently, “say Hiss and then say Slop. Say Hiss first, all by itself. Press the tip of your tongue tight against the base of your teeth and hiss like a snake.”

After a silent struggle Anderson managed to say, “Hith.”

Hislop sighed, produced his Lochgelly and flexed it between his hands. He no longer looked shrunken. Some gland was putting new blood and energy into him. He said, “Anderson, I am about to do something beautiful. Something that you will one day thank me for. Something that will make my name live for ever in the annals of the long town. On my gravestone I will order them to chisel the words, ‘Here lieth the man who cured Anderson's lisp.' Lisp for me. Anderson. Say
lisp
. Distinctly.”

“Lithp, thir.”

“Oh dear. Say
stop
, Anderson.”

“Thtop, thir.”

“Worse and worse. I will not ssstop, Anderson, until you distinctly tell me to ssstop. Hold out your hands and double them.”

Anderson did as he was told. Hislop did what we expected then said, “Say
stop
, Anderson.”

“… Thtop thir!”

“Hands out again, Anderson.”

Etcetera.

He went on and on doing that foul thing while Anderson, face contorted and tearwet, sometimes whining, sometimes muttering, sometimes yelling, kept on saying it wrong
and
kept on holding his hand out afterwards
. The rest of us sat petrified in a nightmare from which no awakening seemed possible because a teacher had gone mad. He had become mechanical. He was a machine whose governor had broken and which could only work by going on doing more and more of the same vile thing until I could no longer bear it and stood up and said, “He can't help talking like that, sir.”

He gaped at me, did Hislop. He came over to me, the Lochgelly swinging by his side, and he stood in front of me and said words I could not hear because I was too occupied with my trembling. I think he ended with a command or a question for I suddenly felt the pressure of a silence which I must fill with some action or words of my own. Having no new ideas I said again, “He can't help talking like that, sir”, and sat down, and folded my arms, and immediately felt a lot safer. Another teacher might have seized me by the ear, dragged me into some store cupboard and used the belt on me at random, but Hislop never touched people with his hands, only with the belt, and when this occurred to me I felt safe enough to become angry. I said, “You shouldnae have done that. You shouldnae have done that. You shouldnae have done that.”

Each time I said the words it became more obvious that they were true, for Hislop should never have belted Anderson, and suddenly others were saying the words with me in a chant which got louder and louder, even the girls joined in and then we too turned nasty and mechanical. Our chanting accelerated, we lashed him with it. He retreated to his desk, cowered behind it in his chair, pressed his face on to the
wooden lid and started punching the back of his skull with his balled fists, trying to smash himself out of existence. We fell silent at that. The door was flung open, the headmaster entered breathless, followed by the teacher next door. And Hislop looked up with a trickle of blood coming from a nostril and said in the voice of a tiny weeping boy, “O sir they wullnae lea' me alane, they wullnae lea' me alane.”