AN ARITHMETIC ANGST
When the saviour was due to conduct a sermon on the Mount, he had been warned in advance by the almighty that this was going to be the most important one of all. The sermon on the Mount, in fact, so he'd better have something pretty good up his sleeve to deliver. Imagine the saviour's consternation, then, when he arrived on the Mount, only to find just a bedraggled couple of non-entities waiting for him. You could not even call them a tête-à-tête, let alone a crowd. Although the saviour had blessings up his sleeve, he produced a rabbit instead.
"Go forth and multiply!" he commanded the audience.
And in the circumstances that was a very wise thing to have said.
I forgot I had a pen. If I hadn't, why would have I tried to commit all this to memory? Nothing short of a dictaphone or cassette player or reel-to-reel recorder was needed. Or even an answer-machine somewhere at the end of a telephone line. Yet, why did posterity need to be told in the exact words conveyed to me by the potential corpse's mouth?
Then, I suddenly recalled the pen—lying in its case's bed of silk—my old school prize, nib still sharp, barrel hopefully brimming with indelible ink: its steel lever at the side prime for the pen's plunging into another black bottle, if the need should arise during my interminable scratching, scratching that was guided by the narrow feint lines of the foolscap.
I could have killed myself for such an act of stupidity. The parrot fashion grappling with the corpse's last message, the tussling with the long words, trying to get my tongue into gear, switching on hidden vocabulary sumps in my mind, rehearsing the rhymes and wherefores of each mysterious syllable—finally, giving myself elocution lessons for fear of the curtain rising and the audience sitting in silent expectation for my recital as a corpse's understudy.
All this time, there lay the pen and there leafed the paper in the untidy draughts of the concert-hall and, what was more, there grew the empty space of time in which to start my scrawl.
Now, as the corpse’s apotheosis draws closer, I'm still struggling to recall the very last words, before it became the swordthrust's victim amid the weltering blood's blackness. It grasped my wrist with a paralytic's last gasp—and asked: "Where is the pen?"
As if it knew my memory played it false.
I smiled and answered: "The murderer has it."
I would not have smiled, had I heard the whirring camera.
The saviour's moustache had taken well, despite only having recently stopped shaving. The mirror certainly did it justice, judging by the reflection. After his day on the Mount, he twiddled the upper lip to and fro as if he were a cat who had suddenly discovered that the spiky itches that had irritated him—since Christianity began—were whiskers. But the face was his own, with pitiful eyes that spoke terrible memories.
A boy raised his desk-lid and took out his Scripture books, trying to watch the teacher watching him trying to be unseen. He'd forgotten his most important item: the neat-writing exercise book which he'd inadvertently left near the oven at home when his mother told him to turn the gas down for fear of the roast charring. He remembered forgetting it there.
Well, of course, there was the rough-working book still in his desk—a book of thick wood-knotted pages upon which he was meant to work out ideas, to practise joined-up writing, to test sums for answers and, most importantly, to exercise his faith in a narrow and faint Creation.
Well, this rough book had been issued to him at the beginning of term, along with the neat-writing exercise book, the latter sporting a red glossy cover, an allotted space on the front for his name and class, together with times-tables and weight-equivalents printed on the back. So, today, he had to pretend his rough book was this glossy red neat book, or else the teacher would come down on him like a ton of bricks. Or was it a hundredweight?
He riffled in mock bravado through the bulk of his roughwork that sprawled between a good number of the thick-sliced pages. Doodlings, in the main. Pretence at practice made perfect. Rehearsed religions. Regurgitated arithmetic. Random numbers masquerading as difference, division, product and aggregate. Graffiti in the shape of someone raising the whole arm at an impossible geometrical angle of salute. It was, after all, during the war years that memorabilia of his schooldays scrawled themselves thus on blotchy narrow-lined paper, rough to the touch as well as to the rough end of a lacklustre pen. A scratchy nib and exploding blots. Cartwheels. End-to-end stick men. Star designs. Instinctive rules-of-thumb. Monstrous concretions of back-of-the-mind abstractions. Scribble become a nightmare with just one last intuitive stroke of the crayon to create another stick man stapled upon a cross of sticks.
But, then, there were the spit-smudged pencil portraits of the girl he loved in the next desk—portraits looking more like her insect sister.
He came unto my dream, a real jaws of a man. Toting six-shooters, he came right up to my face with not even a bye or leave; he leered into my mouth as if he were a dentist.
"Hey! What you want?" I spluttered. "Step outside if you want to sort something out."
I had forgotten we were already outside. Infuriatingly, he failed even to deign a single reply.
"WHAT YOU WANT? WHAT YOU WANT? HAVE SOME RESPECT!" This my splutter had turned into a full-blooded screech.
He showed his own sharkfin teeth in a silent version of a smiling reply.
"What are you doing in my dream, anyway?" I whispered, having decided that low profiles were all the rage—and no doubt the best policy with this ugly customer.
He spoke with a slickness: "Perhaps, I should ask you that particular question, as it's your dream, after all."
Evidently there was a lot of soul to search since, if I could not take responsibility for my own dream, I must have lived in a poor world disguised as rich reality.
I spoke again between gritted teeth: "Well ...errr ...what I mean to say is, you look like a man who knows his own mind—but, thinking about it, here you are claiming to be a mere pawn on the chessboard of my dream."
I was sure that he would have no answer to that little conundrum of a dilemma. Indeed, he beat a retreat, accompanied by a Red Indian; the latter, in full war-dress, had been previously unnoticed by myself: evidently stalking the cowboy and myself amid the scrubroot desert. Yet I had also failed to notice the desert itself—but that was surely too dreary for a resplendent dreamer such as myself to have dreamed as the dream's backdrop. Perhaps it did not matter, because I hoped to wake up shortly—with at least one white shard of wisdom removed from my gum-holster.
What was that corpse's name? He turned from the mirror, still finger-testing the moustache he was growing beneath his nose. She'd been dead now for ages. Many of her sort were killed during the war. In ovens.
He examined his hands and the arithmetic agony redoubled. Only two hands. Non-entities, both. Lines of life palmed off on ill-considered futures. An aggregate of near-miss digits. Fingers bent like claws. Tens without units. Stars without shape. Decimalisation. Decimation. The rough with the smooth. Pitiful eyes like a cat's as it was about to be put to sleep. Whiskers still flicking after death. Numb numbers in subjection.
He had really taught the girl, hadn't he? The arthritic age. Semitic sums of subtraction. Mere semantics. Whatever the case, the teacher shouldn't have smacked him for proving that religion was never neat.
It was such a stinker of a cold, it felt as if I were sniffing cowshit all day long. I decided to leave the office at lunchtime, to give myself a breather. In fact, surrounding the building, there were some quiet country lanes that were rather pleasant at this time of the year. Despite the proximity to the M25 Ring, it was easy to imagine being in the depths of the Welsh hills—so peaceful, so lonely, so...
Abruptly, I spotted a large crane in the distance, one of those huge monstrosities which swivelled their T-crosses in slow swathes. It seemed to be constructing next to nothing in the middle of next to nowhere, since the base of the vertical stalk of girders was concealed by a meadowy ridge.
There was no sound of an engine (or whatever was used to drive such outlandish contraptions) but the grinding clatter of the turning tower was clearly audible, but only as if I were hearing the echoes rather than its source. My stroll was by its very nature a circular one: well-trodden by those occasions when I'd built up sufficient hours on the flextime clock at work. I usually chose sunny lunchtimes ... but today was a little overcast. I was, however, trying to pump the bilge of my head rather than obtain an all over tan! And what was more, there was the added advantage that the endemic cow stench of the countryside was not noticeable, since I'd been snorting a home-grown twin nostril version of it all morning, whilst goggling at the office VDU screen...
I laughed out loud. I was not an office worker, but a murderer. I couldn't even convince myself as to my innocence. I had pointlessly told myself that the crane was somehow peculiar, mysterious, uncanny, ghostly ... knowing all the time it was actually employed by the corpse I had murdered and her camera crew, all of whom were close-by over the ridge.
And a corpse murdered is more than just a corpse.
But, surely, the crane's revolving crucifix arm had for some time been a customary feature of my mini-rambles, spoiling the otherwise idyllic ambience of lunchtime. I returned to the office with my back-brain snot reasonably uncurdled. After slotting in my flextime key for the duration, I spent the afternoon pretending to be a whole load of numbers on a screen out-staring a dull-eyed female corpse who was pretending to me.
I find it more difficult to say thank you than goodbye. But what I find always impossible to say is never.
It's OK where there're no speech marks to spotlight such words' sayability. But when I'm called upon to stick a chest, throat, tongue, teeth and lips into the fray, I think I'd rather choke on my last dying words: "I love you."
Life's fragility centres on one's head. Even the best of visored crash-helmets cannot expunge fears of toppling cranes, head-on collisions, earthquakes, metal girders slipping off backs of lorries straight into one's windscreen, sharpened pen-nibs slipping into the eyeball...
For some people, it is easy to put such fragility concerning their heads out of their minds, simply by means of the rough and tumble of normal existence—but resulting in the wear and tear of mental processes to the extent that they cannot even worry about such matters, let alone think straight.
Once, I saw a person staring blankly into the distance, with tiny serrated nib-blades being wielded from inside the head, cutting round the eye sockets...
It was a pity that I was too senile to notice it was a reflection on blank a computer-screen. Thankfully, though, I did not need to fret about my murderer since the crane let my face fall to the narrow feint paper and eye-lined a last incriminating message. I loved you. With no speechmarks. Nor blessings.
