Love + Hate: Stories and Essays Read online

  Now the two of them strode out through the house to the pavement. The kids and their friends, excited and bewildered by the eccentric behaviour of the adults, banged at the windows and waved them off, before going back to playing football in the echoing rooms which were empty now, apart from packed boxes marked with his and hers stickers.

  He was aware that none of them would forget this day, and he wasn’t taking it lightly. For a start, he realised they had seriously underestimated the distance. Based on the course they had agreed, the whole race would probably take an hour and a half. This was, for them both, more than an effort.

  Ever since they’d finally agreed to the ‘death match’, he had started to practise, running about thirty minutes most days, exhausted at the end. The previous evening he’d attempted ten press-ups, drunk little, worked out, and at nine thirty retired to his room, where he’d imagined himself, the next day, crashing into the house ahead of her, with his arms upraised like Jesse Owens in Berlin, but with a rose in his teeth.

  Central to his hope was that fury would inspire and carry him through, particularly after she’d said, ‘Truly, I hope I get home first. Then I can call you an ambulance, and you can see me wave from the pavement, flat on your fucking back, you gutted loser.’

  The kids, he noted, were keen to know what he’d put in his will.

  Outside on the street, he bent forward and backwards, and jiggled on his toes, churning his arms. She stood next to him impatiently. He couldn’t bear to look at her. She had said that she was eager to get on with her life. For that he was glad. Surely, then, he couldn’t take this ridiculous bout seriously? The two of them must have looked idiotic, standing there glaring, seething and stamping. Where was his wisdom and maturity? Yet, somehow, nothing had been as important as this before.

  He concentrated on his breathing and began to jog on the spot. He would run to the edge of himself. He would run because he’d made another mistake. He would run because they could not be in the same room, and because the worst of her was inside him.

  When he thought she was ready, he said, ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s start then. Are you sure?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Ready?’

  She said, ‘Say “go”, not “ready”.’

  ‘I will. When you agree it’s time to say it.’

  ‘Just say it now, please,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘Okay?’ she said.

  ‘Go!’ he said.

  ‘Right, thanks,’ she said. ‘At last. You made a decision.’

  ‘Go, go!’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Go!’

  And they went.

  He started first, taking a few careful paces to try his knees, only to see her hare off, flying past him, and turning the corner a few yards away. Soon she was out of sight.

  He kept to his plan; he was slow, as he had intended, conserving his energy for the final fifteen-minute burst. Turning the first corner himself, he slowed down even more. He’d felt a tightening in his left calf. Something stringy must have pulled. Could it be multiple sclerosis? Or perhaps cramp? These days he even got cramp reaching to cut his toenails. Not that anyone was excused: you’d see them before extra time at football tournaments; on two hundred grand a week, the world’s greatest footballers lying on the turf as if they’d been shot. He knew their agony; he shared it, this hopping devastated fool in luminous running shoes, with linen shorts over scraggy legs.

  On he went towards the Green, believing he’d either run his twinges off or become accustomed to the pain. Much worse than this, he soon learned, was the public exposure, the panting parade of shame. Many pedestrians seemed to be walking faster than he ran, but he did get past a banker’s au pair pushing a child. A Polish builder he knew was unloading his van, and the Hungarian waiters from his local cafe, on their way to work, were keen to smile and wave, and offer him a cigarette. His neighbours, a lawyer, a madman and a journalist, were easy to pass. The dry cleaner, contemplating eternity outside his shop, didn’t see him.

  He noticed couples who could abide one another all day, who would eat breakfast and talk together in holiday hotels, and felt like a man who’d opened a pornographic website only to see awful images of consummated happiness and joyful love-making among the married, more obscene than obscenity.

  He ran past the private school, the state school and the French school, as well as the Chinese church, the Catholic church, and the mosque which occupied the ground floor of a house. He flew past Tesco’s and several corner shops, as well as an Indian restaurant, a Moroccan coffee shop, and several charity shops. In the window of one, he saw a display of the books he didn’t have room for in his small new flat where, he believed, the nights all lasted a hundred years. He would wake to no family sounds. He had to learn to live again. And why would anyone want to do that?

  It was some relief to make it into the park, and to see other grimacing self-scourgers, many even older. This was where he spotted his rival again, the wife he couldn’t love or kill. There she was, a tiny figure pumping strongly into the wind, across the far side of the grass. She disappeared through the trees, apparently untiring.

  After a concentrated circuit of the park, he came out onto the pavement for a bit. Dodging the commuters, he headed down into a fetid underpass where his footsteps were loud, and up and out onto the towpath beside the vast surprise of the river. Public schoolboys and girls in wellington boots, with their lives ahead of them, pulled long boats out onto the water.

  He skirted them and, after about fifteen minutes, came to the bridge. He looked up and ran half the steps. It would be wise, he thought, to plod the rest. He was breathing heavily, and coughing, being not a Cartesian vessel of higher consciousness and rationality, but rather a shapeless bag of bursting tendons, extruding veins and screaming lungs.

  Yet some spark of agency remained, and on the bridge he jogged again, glimpsing the wide view, and the eyes of the lovely houses overlooking it, places he’d never afford now. Home is for children, he thought, tossing his wedding ring over the side. Perhaps there was a pile of the golden ones down there, just under the surface, the bitter debris of love, and a tribute to liberation.

  Holding tight onto the handrail for fear of plunging down headfirst, he reached the bottom of the steps on the other side and turned, with a madly confident kick of speed, onto the street. After another hundred yards he took a breather. He had to.

  It would be a lengthy final stretch now, along the avenue of loss, with the tree-lined river on one side and the reservoir on the other. Further along this path, if he didn’t have a heart attack, he would find his wife collapsed and whimpering, or perhaps even vomiting, with only sufficient energy to claw at his ankles, pleading. Not that he’d stop. He’d leap over her, maybe giving her a little accidental kick in the head, before firing on to victory.

  After slogging up and down those steps, he knew he was tiring, or else could die. He’d had enough of this run, and required all his reserve power. Where was it? He tied and retied his shoes and then ran on the spot, afraid of stopping, as he contemplated the wet vista of mud, trees and clouds ahead of him. And all the while his mind whirled and turned, counting his losses, until the search for suffering came to a stop. He’d had a better idea. He took a step.

  Instead of following her, instead of perhaps catching up with her at last, he turned and faced the other way. He took another step. He took several steps, a little off balance, as if he’d never walked before. He was away. Going in the other direction.

  Like Zeno’s arrow, shot through the air forever, he would never get there. He would get somewhere else. Weren’t there other places but here? He would be a missing person. Sometimes you had to have the courage of your disillusionments. No more the S&M clinch, the waltz of death. Ruthlessness was an art. He regretted everything, but not this.

  The sky was darkening, yet he felt a new
propulsive energy, formless and uncompetitive. Run, run, run, said all the pop songs he’d grown up on. He would take that advice, while never forgetting that anyone who is running from something is running towards something else.

  I Am the Future Boy

  I say to my youngest son, please, let’s run together this afternoon. Sitting down exhausts me; some movement would do me good, we will feel the better for it – just twice around the Green, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. I want to add: I’m losing strength, and boredom is worse as you get older. Mixed with sadness and regret, it seems heavier and more final; sometimes even music doesn’t temper it. I wonder if a jog might dislodge some of my gloom.

  For him this is a cue for sighing. It will be an effort; he will have to rise from the sofa and even leave the house. This short run could also be – this is his fear – an opportunity for me to lecture him on philosophical or psychological matters, or worse, politeness, sex or tidying up the house. Often he regrets that I exist at all, and that he has to deal with me.

  But, miraculously, and to my surprise, he agrees.

  We have done this before, and sometimes, as I trot along, he walks or even strolls beside me, rather patronisingly, in my view. But today, to equalise things, to make them more of an exertion and challenge, since I am so slow for this quick fifteen-year-old, he decides to strap on his ankle weights. They are heavy, pull at the muscles of the legs and cramp the ankles. For me, to wear such things would be like trying to cook while being crucified, but he has heard that this is how Cristiano Ronaldo practises step-overs.

  Now, today, as we jog easily along the perimeter of the Green, I decide to give the little shit a shock, by kicking off a bit, insofar as I can. So I go a bit faster, and feel him fall behind me. I still have it, I think. I will sprint home in triumph, showing him who is boss.

  In India, according to family legend, my father had been an excellent cricketer, boxer and squash player. I’d always run with him in our local park in the suburbs, until one day in the late 60s my father and I raced across the park to the open-air swimming pool, which was, more or less, the only other entertainment in the area. When I finished, and turned to look for him, his hands were on his knees and he was puffing wildly. I’d beaten him, and suddenly he seemed frail and vulnerable. I guess he might have been ill already, and he was to be sick for most of my teenage years. I ascribed huge and mysterious knowledge to my father, and still do. I didn’t want to be disappointed. But I was at an age when I had to look forward. It is, however, a shock to learn that not only are your parents not the only people in the world, but that they are not even the most important to you. And it is a shock for them when they see that you have seen this.

  *

  My youngest son runs easily beside me as we go. Once small for his age, this summer he has begun to develop a wide chest and long legs. Neighbours are startled by how tall he has suddenly become. We can look one another directly in the eye. Despite still having some of his baby teeth, he will soon have the body which every adult will spend his life trying to regain. His hair, until recently cut with some inaccuracy by his mother, has become a matter of interest and concern. I have started to take him to my barber, Luka, who works nearby out of a shabby cabin under a disused garage where my older teenage sons have their hair cut. Now and again they are also shaved by Luka, a man we consider the Lionel Messi of the razor, though we all tend to look a little Luka-like now. My youngest had Luka shave a sharp parting into his head. The boy is keen to look good now, and he gives Luka instructions, returning if the parting doesn’t hold and having it recut.

  D. W. Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality about a ‘string boy’, who ties everything together because of his terror of separation from his mother. I recall that one of my older sons went everywhere with a lasso for a long time. My youngest was once obsessed by string, until the house resembled a cat’s cradle, with everything kept both together and apart, joined and not joined – just so, or carefully mediated, in terms of distance. Even now Bob the Builder still swings in a rope noose from the banisters. Eventually the kid gave up the string, and, as we scamper along, I wonder if this important transition to individuality is managed by an umbilicus of invisible elastic. He is slowly increasing his distance from me. My fading, and his rising, make life possible.

  *

  For a bit I am left behind. I stop to tie my shoelaces and regain my breath. At my youngest son’s age I was a scrawny mongrel kid struggling in a rough neighbourhood. Nervous, inhibited, insecure, moody, I could barely live with myself. But there was pop music, and books in the local library: the efficacy of words in joining things up – but only if they were written down. I could barely speak to anyone around me. I felt fortunate that near-silence was fashionable, and everyone was so stoned they could barely speak. I was beginning to write, and I had found a good teacher, an editor at a London publishing outfit who came to my house on Sundays to work with me on the novel I had begun writing. I got on with things, and was serious for my age; somehow I knew I had to be if I were to go out and find more life.

  I recognise that writing is an altogether different sort of thing from speaking. I wonder if it’s a protection against having to speak. If writing creates an intimate relation with a future reader, it changes little around you. But speaking – the ability to ask for what you want, and directly to modify others – has to be a necessary form of power. There’s no use in keeping your words to yourself. For me, however, parting with words was almost an impossibility. When I tried to open my mouth authentically I fell into a kind of anguished panic. Speaking would be a disaster, turning me into someone I no longer recognised, as if I didn’t want inevitable change, or to become the new person that saying real words can make you into. And if I couldn’t speak, I felt blocked and distant and angry. In silence you rot.

  I needed, as the young do, to escape, and I went to work in the theatre. Silent and anguished or not, I would be a writer. Fuck everything else: it was art or nothing. Artists did whatever they wanted. I thought then, and probably still believe, that to be an artist was the finest thing anyone could be. I had pretty much failed at school. I blamed myself for the fact the teachers there couldn’t entertain me. They hated the pupils, and the pointless system ran on threat, fear and punishment. We were being trained in obedience, and to be clerks. After, I worked in offices, and didn’t fit in there either. What sort of future would I have? If I couldn’t imagine having a conventional job, I would make things much more difficult for myself: my future, everything, would depend on one throw of the dice. Looking back in puzzlement, it seems like blindness, stupidity, arrogance and very good sense. It takes a sort of mad courage to want something truly absurd.

  Not that there hadn’t been examples. At home I’d study photographs in magazines: Jagger and Richards swaggering and smoking outside some court or other; McCartney and Lennon in Hamburg and just after; Dylan around the Blonde on Blonde period. Defiant, original young men convinced of their own potency, desirability and immortality. Not only do these boys look as if they have just joyfully killed the old and now have the world to themselves, but to be a young man in the 1960s was to glimpse the view from a briefly opened window, to grasp an opportunity between two dependencies and enjoy a burst of libidinous freedom, of self-wonder and self-display.

  These kids look free. But of what? Of the fetish of renunciation; of the dull norms and values of the day – whatever they were. Hadn’t there been two relatively recent world wars through which our parents and grandparents had suffered, and for which generations of young men had had their natural aggression taken advantage of, and for which they had been sacrificed? You cannot forget, too, the sheer amount of daily fear, if not trauma, the child – any child – has to endure. You could also say that the teenager’s life so far has been a cyclone of outrageous demands: to eat, shit, shut up and go to school; to behave well, to be obedient and polite while achieving this, that or the other; to go to sleep, wake up, take an exam, learn an instr
ument, listen to one parent, ignore the other, get along with one’s siblings and aunts, and so on. And these compulsions and demands: one succeeds in obeying them, succeeds in failing them, or evades them altogether. But each of them will generate anxiety since they are all combined with punishment, fear and guilt. Stress will be the common condition of adulthood if the demand has been the constant of childhood.

  Of course, the demand is the currency of all intercourse, and not all demands are impossible, pointless or demeaning. One wouldn’t be a person unless one received or made them. These demands never end, either. At least in the West since the 1960s there might be fewer moral prohibitions than before. But there are more impossible demands. What isn’t forbidden is almost obligatory: the prescription that one should be wealthy, or always active, or successful, or have frequent high-quality sex for all of one’s life with someone beautiful is as likely to cause anxiety as any prohibition.

  *

  Anyone will notice that adults can lose their modesty when describing the achievements of their kids. Since the child is them but also not-them, the parent is free to brag. What sort of strange love is this, the parent’s for the child, or what sort of possession is the child for the parent? Who or what does the parent want the child to be? What sort of ideal image do they have, and how can the child escape being devoured by the parent, or respond to them creatively?

  Both my parents had fantasies of being artists of some kind, in writing, theatre, dance. But they were vulnerable emotionally and financially, had few opportunities, and seemed to stew in frustration, particularly as they got older. It was all talk, the dream of a life. They couldn’t take any risks, and since they could afford to give nothing up, nothing was ever accomplished. Confined and restless, I saw I had to take their dreams for reality – and quickly, before I was done for. I liked to read and work; I wasn’t afraid to be alone and I wanted to go far into England, to see what kind of country my father had come to and what we new arrivals would make it into. It was as an artist that I felt most individual, competitive, alive and envious of others’ successes. If we are forged and made in difficulty, writing was a problem I wanted to take on. I barely thought about money or survival or security. We were hippies, and ‘bread’, at first, was never the aim of my very politicised generation, even after the deprivation of the post-war period. However, during the latter part of my lifetime it seems to have been decided that economic productivity and materialism are the ethics of choice, as the virtuous end of life. Now the teenager might be free sexually, but the neo-liberal project of open-ended economic success makes for scarcity, and for a severe form of insecurity and servitude.