The Black Halo (68 page)

And here I am making money out of his wanderings. By means of this story. Whereas he . . . I imagine the boy in a hospital in America. He is being watched over by doctors, surgeons. They are all
looking at a clock. ‘Soon he will come with the money,’ they are saying to the boy. ‘You must trust him. Till then we can’t treat you.’ And he swims across the
Atlantic with his bag of cheques. He fights waves, he pacifies the ocean with his bad poems. Out of the green water he coins green dollars. And the boy’s breathing becomes worse and worse and
the doctor says, ‘He won’t be long now.’

It has begun to snow. He is perhaps out in the snow in the Highlands, perhaps at John O’Groats with his bag. The snow is a white prison round him: he can’t even take a nip of whisky.
I feel sorry for him. He should come in out of the cold, he has done enough. He has had more courage than me. With his bad poems he has done more than I have with my good ones. I can see that. And
he was just as poor as me.

My writer’s block has persisted. I think I am finished as a writer.

The snow is falling very gently. A ghost tree clasps the real tree like a bridegroom with a bride. They have had the worst winter in Florida in living memory.

What a sky of stars. And yet I see them as if I was a spectator. I’d better shut the door, he’ll never come, my muse in her girl’s dress will never come again. I shall have to
take account of that.

I heard a story today about a villager. He has run away with a woman much younger than himself and left his wife. It is said that he was the last person anyone would have expected to have done
anything like that. What does he hope to gain?

What energy, what a strange leap. Will there not come a time when he will make a third spring and then a fourth one? As if Romeo and Juliet were still alive . . .

Last night I thought I saw him emerging out of the snow with his bag. When I went to the cat’s dish there was a snail eating the food. Unless I take my bag on my shoulders I shall never
write again. Unless I am willing to accept the risk of bad poems.

The phone rang but it was a wrong number.

Imagine first of all surviving in girl’s clothes and then in bad poems.

I am sure that when the spring comes he will be happier. I can almost hear the ice breaking, the sound of running waters, the cry of the cockerel. The fox shakes itself out of its prison of
snow. Meagre and thin. It laps at the fresh water. All around it is the snow with its white undamaged pages.

The play lasted about an hour and took place in a small theatre off the High St in Edinburgh. The story of the play was not complicated. A prison had been burnt down in the
night and there was an enquiry as to who had done it. The cast was as follows:

The audience liked the play. It started slowly and then built up to a claustrophobic denouement. But the enquiry didn’t discover who had burnt the prison down. The part of the homosexual
was acted by Jeff Coates, a young actor from Cambridge. In the pivotal scene he was fitted up with electrodes while the two guards tortured him.

One of their lines was ‘the poof of the pudding is in the eating’. For the two guards were intellectuals too, clever, cunning, able to switch from viciousness to calm collected
discussion especially when the Governor appeared, the Governor, tortured by moral doubts, whom they despised. After all what was a prison for but to convert criminals to goodness by torture?

Jeff Coates was changed by the play. At first he had not liked it very much. He thought the dialogue at times brittle, its poeticisms brilliant but perhaps esoteric. But gradually it took a grip
of him, he felt himself inside a world of almost total evil. At coffee breaks he would speak only to the Governor and never to the guards. In the crucial scene he screamed a high piercing scream
though of course it was only a pretence of torture he was suffering. At times however he felt he was being really tortured.

The trouble was that he was really a homosexual and that made it worse – or did it? He couldn’t make up his mind. Was it indeed worse to be a real homosexual in that scene? (Also in
the play he was attacked by prisoners.) He sometimes felt that the two guards really hated him, for neither was a homosexual. They made comments about his walk and these comments he accepted as
belonging to the play. The women in the cast befriended him more than the men did, though of course he was not interested in them sexually. In the scene where he was being tortured he felt real
hatred emanating from the two guards as if they were his most bitter enemies. Of course he had experience of being beaten up in real life, particularly in a public convenience in London, about two
years before.

His scream was real, he thought, because it came from the centre of his being. And yet it was happening in a play. These men didn’t really hate him, he told himself, they were merely
acting, they obviously had to act as if they hated him. The Governor too in real life was stingy, sarcastic, embittered, not at all attractive. The two guards in real life were not at all
intellectual: in fact he despised them. For he himself had read Artaud on the Theatre of Cruelty. The stage became very small each night. It shrank. Every night he waited to be tortured. It was
almost as if that was the reason for his existence.

As time passed he became more and more solitary, arriving late, leaving early. He didn’t want to see these contemptuous eyes nor did he wish to listen to the banal conversation of the
guards. The scream was taking a lot out of him, he had to prepare himself for it, it shattered his whole being so that if there had been glass near him it would have cracked. He didn’t wish
to discuss the play with the others since in his opinion they didn’t really know what it was about, they did not know what suffering was. Of course none of them had ever suffered except in
fantasy. That at any rate was what he thought. He himself had suffered, especially on the day that his mother had discovered him in bed with a male friend of his. That was the worst. Her whole face
had disintegrated: he would always remember that moment.

O none of them had really suffered. He himself had suffered, however. He was the one who was in the prison. The suffering was disguised by talk about morality, about Marx, but nothing could
disguise the torture. And his scream, was it real or not? For after all he wasn’t really being tortured. In fact the two guards used to make a point of asking him over to take coffee with
them He was probably making a mistake in thinking that they hated him.

And he loved acting. He had acted many other parts as well as the part he was acting in this play. That was the awful and marvellous thing about actors, that they took on themselves the pains
and sufferings of others. They brought to audiences the calmness of art at the expense of their own tortured spirits. He had acted kings, drunks, and most especially the dark blind figure in
The Room,
by Pinter. And in all these instances he had sought determinedly for the meaning of the text. When he was acting the part of Creon, he had thought, This city of Edinburgh is
Thebes, we shall show it its plague, though there was in fact no appearance of plague in Edinburgh’s theatrical façade, with its green light shining about the castle at night

To be an actor was to be a healer, a doctor. And the scream waited for him every night. In fact he had become obsessed by it.

He stayed in lodgings on his own. Every night he left the theatre and walked to them through the throbbing festival city, through the slums of the High St. After the scream he strolled through
the streets, emptied of emotion, solitary. And he thought, the guards are at least uncomplicated. They are brutal, they have assessed the world as it really is. They had no imagination, they could
not put themselves in the position of the weak, nor did they want to. He found himself hating them in return. Why had they taken these parts unless they were in a deep way suited to them? And this
in spite of the fact that such an idea was stupid.

And as for the Governor, he despised him. The Governor had never protected him. There he was tortured every day while the Governor stood around like a moral priggish Brutus and the guards like
Mark Antonies ran rings round him. They would spring to attention while prisoners bled in the cells. O how they laughed at that poor tortured libertarian in the burnt prison under the open sky! Who
had burnt the prison? Was it perhaps the Governor himself? Or his wife? Or the cleaner who could discuss Marx.

And every night his own high scream was the peak point of the play. It rose to a crescendo, then died away to a whisper, to exhaustion. And the audience winced (or perhaps they loved it. Who
could tell?) But none of them was unaffected. He saw to that. And when the play was over and the audience had left, he and the other actors would have their coffee and discuss the effectiveness of
the night’s work. And it became more and more demanding to create the scream. It wasn’t easy to scream like that every night.

One night he waited behind till the others had gone. Then he went out into the street. It was a Saturday night and the air was mild. All round him he sensed the delirium of the Festival. There
were lovers strolling hand in hand, there were men in strange colourful costumes, the world itself was a theatre. It was Romeo and Juliet he saw sitting on a bench, it was the old woman from
Crime and Punishment
who staggered drunkenly down the street. The city was a theatre at which the plague had not struck.

He walked with his usual mincing walk. He had never been conscious of it himself but he had been told of it. Actually he was still wearing his prison clothes for he hadn’t bothered
changing. Well, why shouldn’t he? One night he had seen a tall man in a black gown walking towards him on stilts, with a skull instead of a face.

He now entered a street which was quite dark. The council was dimming its lamps in certain areas even during the Festival.

And then they were there. There must have been about six of them. They were wearing green scarves and they were shouting. They owned the street. They were like members of a crowd in one of
Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps
Julius Caesar:
but they were really vicious. It might be that their team had lost. Who knew? He and they were in the dim street together and they were
marching towards him. Perhaps he should run? He thought about it but he didn’t run. They were chanting. Their heads were shaved.

Poof, they shouted, poof they shouted again. They danced around him. Poof in his theatrical clothes. And they with their shaved heads on which Union Jacks had been painted. (One light in the
alley like a spot light showed this to him.)

It had happened before. It would happen again. Those without imagination were upon him. The animals with their teeth.

Poof, they shouted, bloody poof. And then they were on him and beat him to the ground and trampled on him. And his glasses fell off and cracked, he could feel that. He looked upwards but he
could hardly see them. All he could see was a kaleidoscope of colour. And he could smell the smell of alcohol. And then he screamed. And as he screamed the high piercing scream they ran away and
left him in a quick scurry.

And he lay there on the street alone, listening to the noise they made as they left, and he thought, That scream, was it different? Was it different from the one in the play? Which was the real
scream and which was the unreal one? The prepared or the unprepared? The, as it were, artistic one or the real one? And he thought, the artistic one was the real one. This was only an accidental
one. This was not the scream of art, this was the one he had attracted by walking like a poof and taking that lane which he should not have taken and continuing to walk towards them as perhaps he
should not have done. Had he been trying to learn more about the artistic scream by this one? He felt naked in the dim street without his glasses.

He would have to make his way back to his real landlady. And with his real face. And put ointment on his real bruises.

He staggered a little as he stood up, coming out of the scream. Everything was silent around him. No one had heard him. There had been no audience. How therefore could his scream have been more
real than the theatrical one?

How?

The fact was that the old woman wanted to live. All her faculties, her energies, were shrunken down to that desire. She drew everything into herself so that she could live,
survive. It was obscene, it was a naked obscenity.

‘Do you know what she’s doing now?’ said Harry to his wife Eileen. ‘She keeps every cent. She hoards her pension, she’s taken to hiding her money in the pillow
slips, under blankets. She reminds me of someone, I can’t think who.’

‘But what can we do?’ said Eileen, who was expecting a baby.

Harry worked with a Youth Organisation. He earned £7,000 a year. There was one member of the organisation called Terry MacCallum who, he thought, was insane. Terry had tried to rape one of
the girls on the snooker table one night. He was a psychopath. Yet Harry wanted to save him. He hated it when he felt that a case was hopeless.

‘She won’t even pay for a newspaper,’ said Harry.