Had it been Death that had called that day everything would have been all right. After all, he had been waiting patiently on death for some time and, by his calculations, The Grim Reaper was well and truly overdue. All his affairs had long been in order, down to the milk money put aside in the saucer souvenir on the kitchen window sill, a piece of memorabilia from the past, once perhaps a vessel for an honourable purpose, but now simply where he kept the milk money. Not that he had a particular reason to die, he simply lacked a decent excuse to keep living.
Everything in its place and a place for everything. Or was it the other way around? He supposed it amounted to the same thing in the long run, but he couldn’t be troubled thinking about it. For a man ostensibly given to an orderly life, his head was a fairly cluttered place with its unsolved problems and issues frequently swept under carpets of convenient forgetfulness.
A shining example of male utilitarianism, everything in his home had its prescribed place and its assigned duties: the cooker was there to cook, the seats to be sat upon, the doors to hide behind; paintings were there to satisfy some sort of aesthetic need, not to blend in with the bedspread. Hence his decision on taking over the flat to replace the tastelessly framed print of ‘Poppies’ above the mantelpiece with something more suitable of his own; it was clichéd in any case and clashed with the decor. Besides it was a woman’s picture and his life had been devoid of any hint of femininity for many a long weekend. For the record it should be stressed that Jonathan Payne was not in the least bit misogynistic. He liked women. Indeed they were a constant source of delight to him as long as the staples didn’t get in the way.
Not that things had not always been so. Lives rarely are. People in particular seem to glean such pleasure from never being so as often as humanly possible; in no other instance is Nature so consistently contrary. But, drawing from the various episodes that comprised his life, he had learned the hard way (as if there were any other) what its essence was for him. Oh, he was no King Solomon and, if truth be told, he was quite vain. Everything though, he’d concluded, was a nuisance, not a vanity. Marriage was a nuisance as were children, chores and getting up in the morning; not vanity nor a striving after the wind. He’d always regarded himself as one of the lucky ones never getting caught. But it was more chance than circumstance. In the past he had been keen enough but it never happened and now, looking back on other people’s mishaps, he was quite content to have remained single if not entirely celibate.
Really! For a while, as he grew up, he struggled to understand both women and algebra sure that there was a place and a purpose for all of them in the world. Though perhaps maybe not with him. For all that, sometimes he thought it would be nice (homey even) to walk into the kitchen to the sound of bacon crackling and with a comfortable wife bent over the sink begging to have her rump slapped affectionately. Sometimes. But not very often.
Actually, Jonathan’s experiences with the fairer sex were limited, short-lived, fairly libidinous affairs forming a sort of sexual archipelago throughout his life. The list was surprisingly long considering all the aspects of his character that were continually conspiring against him in this regard: a Thelma who worked in the creamed biscuit factory who was into older men and something he couldn’t pronounce too well but had definite Latin roots—she put him off custard creams for life; an Allison, a waitress, overweight and eager to please but hard work with it; June, once a regular, who did it to spite her husband (thankfully he never found out who the third party was (“person or persons unknown”)); Rose, a brief holiday romance (well, she thought it was romantic), who wrote to him care of the shop for months after, before taking the hint; Gillian, with the four cats, one called Widget he remembered, who simply wanted to footer around; Maycaroline—“all one word”—with her social worker’s eyes—they met through a computer dating agency (his one and only foray down that path); and, last, but by no means least, boozy Eileen—or, more specifically her breasts, Pinky and Perky (he never knew which was which)—she dozed off while he was doing it—but he did it anyway. There was the girl in the alley too, but that one didn’t count. And there should’ve been Janet only there wasn’t. Goodness knows where any of his ex-loves were now. Well maybe Goodness wouldn’t know but somebody would. He never gave them much thought out of bed in the real world.
Only once had marriage crossed his mind and even then it was half-conceived as a means to get him out of his mother’s house. At first he excused himself with false reasoning but pretty soon was willing to admit—to himself at least—that he was simply too selfish. Why he bothered with women at all was the real poser. Actually it wasn’t that much of a puzzle: it was for the hanky-panky. When he finally did get round to sex, what struck him more than anything was its raw physicality. For years he’d read about this incredible shared experience but, in practical terms, it turned out to be awfully anticlimactic, if not downright awful. The act of orgasming is generally referred to as ‘coming’ (except in the Orient where they ‘go’ for some strange reason) but Jonathan was not one for travelling at the best of times and, when he finally did arrive at his destination, he often wondered if it was worth the effort as he lay there, exhausted and panting and sweaty. He didn’t like ‘sweaty’. And then there were the mating rituals to be gone through, the meal and/or drinkies, the small talk, the flirting, the ruddy smiling. It was like stalking something. Something that wanted to be caught so why go to all the trouble and expense? He disliked games of all sorts with perhaps the sole exception of word games—to stretch the mind and improve one’s vocabulary (though he lacked the confidence to use half the big words he knew for all that). And you got to play them on your own.
Oh the chore of it! So much easier to travel alone.
And this is where we find Jonathan Payne. He had been lying in bed reliving an experience he’d never quite lived to the full in the first place, but one which had been re-enacted so often from memory that he no longer worried about the fine detail. He ‘remembered’ his hands on her and the sensation of her breathing close to him; he ‘felt’ her moist flesh give way to him—these were very real. He arched his back as he’d had to do then but as he had not done for fifteen years. Remembering made things matter so he remembered more than really happened—because it mattered to him. Some things weren’t so clear, like where they were but they were somewhere—everything’s somewhere. And he moved inevitably toward the edge of himself—and quietly slipped over. Now he was lying feeling the shadow of oncoming dread descend over him like a shroud, and he drowsily wondered where the sensation had come from and how to rid himself of it. Perhaps it would vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared. Then perhaps not. So the day began like it often began. And beginnings are usually small but not to be despised.
He owned a bookshop, a second-hand book shop, the kind full of odours of other people, laden with atmosphere. He liked that. He liked—loved—books: books were good—you could learn things from books. It was not a very big bookshop but he was uncomfortable with big shops, superstores, hypermarkets, full of space and no atmosphere with machines in the roofs to take it away. And Muzak. Always Muzak, the sort of stuff that could be found masquerading as wallpaper in lifts. Besides he couldn’t afford bigger. He bought over the shop when his mother passed away, with his share of the estate—which turned out to be a lot more than he’d imagined. Quite a tidy sum, thank you very much. But not enough to take over Selfridges. How his father never got his covetous hands on it he never knew, but it was a fact for which he remained eternally grateful.
The job afforded him a lot of time for thinking. To be honest his whole life had. Contemplation, rumination, pondering, deliberating—he’d had a crack at the lot. He wasn’t too sure if he was any good at any of them but he was well practised. They say that ‘practice makes perfect’: what they forget to tell you is that it takes a thousand years of practice which is a fat lot of good to anyone when you’ve only got three score and ten to play with. How does one measure one’s cognitive abilities anyway? By the number of thoughts thought per second or by the enjoyment factor or what? In both of these regards he failed miserably but, like a weekend painter, he pottered away here and there, never quite getting round to that magnum opus wherein he might put a bit of meaning into his life. No, he was quite happy doodling in the margins. The look of it all appealed to him but it’s like pointillism when you get close up—it’s nothing but a load of coloured dots.
He had not needed to get up in the night, which was rare nowadays. It would be something to think that, at his age, he was at least in control of when he lay down and when he got up, but not so. His bladder exercised its power of veto frequently and often just for the hell of it. Jonathan didn’t believe in destiny but he did in inevitability and it was becoming increasingly inevitable that his night’s sleep would be broken at least once by the need to answer the call of nature no matter how timidly.
Awkwardly he got up and set about the morning ablutions with his habitual disinterest though he did take longer than usual trying to clip a white hair out of his moustache without ruining it. A round tired face presented itself to him in the shaving mirror—with the same flat nose that had plagued him for the past fifty years. It was clean—he’d just washed it after a fashion—but he didn’t feel clean; cleanliness has as much to do with what’s on the inside as it has to do with the outside. God, he looked done in. He couldn’t think of a time when he wasn’t tired, he was always tired, terminally tired; he’d been born tired. That aside, actually he bore not a passing resemblance to the late Arthur Lowe (a fact which did not entirely displease him) but, thankfully, re-runs of Dad’s Army were becoming less frequent. He looked as if life had given him a good doing. It was not a happy face either by any manner or means. He smiled falsely to check his teeth before letting his features return to their familiar sedentary position. He was not one of life’s smilers, indeed it was an almost redundant mode of expression to him. It says a lot about a man when he’s best described by what he’s not.
Then, a coffee. He did like his coffee. Especially the caffeine. Coffee without caffeine was like a pencil without any lead—he could see no point to it. He was particularly fond of Java, when he could lay his hands on it, which he always drank out of a continental cup with no handle (they all used them over there, so he’d heard). He’d found it down at Peckham’s who was all for tossing it out thinking it an odd sugar bowl, but what did he know? How you drank your drink was as important as the drink itself, someone once said, in a film or something, as if it mattered. And it was a belief he held to dearly. In fact, being devoid of a faith, his beliefs (trite and trivial as they might seem) were all he had.
Faith had always been a difficult concept for Jonathan to grasp. He’d been told he’d have to have it to believe in a Trinity so he found himself lost from the start. He’d heard the one about the shamrock a dozen times from the lips of Father Leary but it never quite took root in him. It took a head stuffed with old Daily Mails or something to believe in that kind of nonsense and he really had hoped the explanation would give him something to build on in the first place. But that never happened. If it had, then he might have become a monk—he had the disposition if not the habit. He had a bible too, of course. What’s the point in working in a bookshop and not being able to pick up a bible or two? It filled the space on the shelf between Also Sprach Zarathustra and Das Kapital—out of a comforting sense of perversion. And he’d read all three—well, bits—so he could say that he had. But it was an empty gesture. Who ever came and perused his little library to marvel at its diversity? Not Mary. Now that was bitchy and not altogether true. She had visited a few times over the years, birthdays or Christmases usually (never both) but she and her husband now—a born-again materialist if ever there was one—were forever in the middle of something. And he was always going down for the third time in his filofax. So they never had time to sightsee. There was little love lost between them anyway.
No letters again. Not even a bill. He never got a paper so that was about it. He stared at the old mat with its faded WELCOME emblazoned across it as if, if he did look long enough, something might appear there. A bit like a cat contemplating its empty bowl. He’d even have settled for some junk mail. He kept the rug inside the flat—outside felt too much like an invitation. This though was not the time for an exercise in mind over matter and he was not one for faith. Now was time to sup coffee. So he shuffled into the kitchen and set about breaking his fast. He didn’t read papers; he didn’t care about people he didn’t know nor likely ever would. A radio played faintly somewhere—molto piano—Offenbach possibly though it might as well have been Schoenberg. The day was its usual Tuesday self. He squinted out of the window. Not a drying day; thin cirrus clouds—‘mare’s tails’—hung high up above, pale and streaky. There would be a change in the weather. He remembered that from his Observer’s Book of Clouds.
It was a Tuesday—and nothing ever happened on a Tuesday.
It was then that he noticed him.