MURMUR

‘I haven’t felt any love for her for a long time. Yet I’m always thinking about her dying. Like that’s going to be the real test. Maybe then I’ll feel a bit of the love that has to be down there somewhere. I’m afraid that it will be a poison when it does resurface, and I’ll drown in some ocean of toxic regret. Mostly there’s this unnatural sense in me when I think about her, as though you really can’t feel nothing for your mother.’

‘But you bringing it up—doesn’t that say something?’

‘I’m not saying I don’t think about her, but my thoughts never go anywhere. I’m like a goldfish in a little bowl, circling the same object in the pebbles at the bottom, but it’s not a little plastic castle—it’s the body of my mother, and I’m just waiting for something to happen. I want to feel something for it, but I don’t. I just go around and around.’

‘And here I thought we’d had a good time tonight.’

‘We did. You know we did.’

‘I was lying here thinking, you know, I think she’s starting to like me.’

‘I’m not talking about being in a goldfish bowl with you. That’s not what I’m saying.’

‘But the image of your mother, dead in the pebbles. Doesn’t exactly speak of growing fondness.’

‘Not dead. I think, more like some kind of stasis.’

‘Mmm … Still morbid.’

‘Yeah, it’s morbid. But you know, neither one of us has farted yet.’

‘What!?’

‘You know what I’m talking about?’

‘What are you talking about? I can let rip any time you like. But that one’s like Pandora’s box—you never get to put it back in.’

‘I’m saying, we’re still polite. We fuck and we go to a movie and have dinner, some nice wine, we fuck again but it’s still all our Sunday best. What about a real conversation? Not an interface—the usual presentation as we want the world to see us.’

‘Really? But I’ve spent years perfecting my simulations and projections. An occasional sneeze is the only glitch in my program. What’s real and honest-to-goodness now? I’m not sure any more. I can still leak fluid from my eyes, I think—you just tell me when.’

‘You’d do that for me? Let your colours run?’

‘No babe, I’m waterproof. Fade-proof. I eat paper for breakfast.’

‘I don’t know if that makes sense.’

‘It makes sense. I’ve breakfasted on War and Peace. Had dinner with Pushkin and then Crime and Punishment for dessert. The ink runs, but not quick enough by a long shot. Let’s say “metasense” like some say “medicine”.’

‘I didn’t know you even read. No sign of books at your apartment.’

‘That’s because everything important is invisible.’

‘Nice line.’

‘Line? I believe it to my soul! Not that I lay any faith in a soul of course, but another trick of a brain is the mind. A book is just a stack of paper as well and yet I keep seeing things in them.’

‘Are we surrounded by books as we speak, teetering towers of them about to come crashing down on us?’

‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

‘Hmm?’

‘I don’t like the clutter of that image. I like to think of all of those books stacked on mahogany shelves. No dust.’

‘No dust—that’s a nice thought.’

‘You know it’s mostly dead skin—all the dust you see. We leave layers of ourselves over everything.’

‘Makes me think of dust to dust in a whole new way.’

‘You’re not going to go back to the dead mother.’

‘Stasis. Not dead.’

‘Floating. I understand.’

‘And ashes to ashes. Why is it ashes to ashes? We don’t cremate—not traditionally. Where are the ashes?’

‘I think there’s a metaphor of fire in there. Like, the fire we build with wood and coal, burns down to embers, and then a new fire is made out of the embers.’

‘So it should be embers to embers.’

‘The point for the guy in the coffin is that he came from a long line of death, and he returns to it.’

‘The point for him?’

‘The point for anyone looking at him, then—thinking about their own ashes and dust.’

‘What’s the point for him? Standing invisibly amongst them and the teetering towers of books all around the mourners.’

‘I don’t know. I saw my mum dead in a hospital bed, and all I could feel was that she was already gone, out of that body, and far away from me. Away from all of us—a lost group of people standing around her bed that day. The family my mum made, which only made sense because of her. Yeah, I don’t know about the embers and ashes either. We just seem to evaporate one day.’

‘Well, this sounds like a real conversation. But we don’t need to talk about dead mothers.’

‘I might fart any moment now.’

‘What if it’s something atrocious? Ideally you’d start off with one of those farts that doesn’t smell too bad, that reminds you of home like something burnt on the stove, and then maybe—way, way, way down the line somewhere, you can bring out the stomach-turning stuff, like you’ve just found a dead possum in a cupboard.’

‘Used to be a time where you couldn’t burp. It was impolite. But now people burp. You reckon there’ll ever be a time where we can freely fart, and be okay with that? Acknowledge our common humanity in it, like we do the dust and ashes?’

‘Where do people burp? I see people stifling them all the time.’

‘Maybe I’m thinking of yawning.’

‘People raise their palms to their mouths.’

‘I’ve seen the fillings and tonsils of strangers. I’m sure of it.’

‘Do you advocate sneezing without tissues?’

‘I can imagine a world of such freedoms, yes.’

‘I can tell you don’t use public transport often.’

‘You ever find yourself arguing a case you really don’t believe in? Honestly, I’m pretty draconian when you get to know me, if only because the word sounds so cool.’

‘I think you’re too old to use “cool” as a valid term of approval.’

‘Dude!’

‘Ha ha ha.’

‘I’m Miles Davis cool, not hippie-pothead cool. I could eat fifty hardboiled eggs in a row and still be Paul Newman cool.’

‘See, I’ve always wanted a man who could distinguish between shades of cool.’

‘I’m like an Eskimo with snow when it comes to cool.’

‘Or a proctologist with shades of brown.’

‘Mmm … I’d rather light a candle than curse the darkness.’

‘Ha ha.’

‘The birds are going to start singing soon. We should probably go to sleep.’

‘We’ll call in sick. What are you worried about?’

‘I wasn’t planning on going to work tomorrow. I’m not worried about anything.’

‘Are you tired of talking?’

‘Not really. It’s strange to go on and on like this into the night and keep going into the morning. We might run out of things to say. Tomorrow you’ll look at me and only be able to nod. And I’ll nod back and have nothing more to say either.’

‘That’s never going to happen. People can’t help themselves. You ever work with someone who keeps telling the same story over and over to different people? This one paralegal I work with, sits on the other side of the partition, went out with his buddies on the weekend. Had a high old time, apparently. Gave everyone the same details, and ended it every time with, “God, we were so shit-faced.” I hate that expression. Like being shit-faced was some decadent high point of pleasure. And then I’m looking at how often I do that, and I wonder what I get out of telling the same story to different people. Why do I want to tell someone a story? I mean—at all! Why do I even want to speak to anyone at work, or anywhere? Like, I’m wondering, where’s the satisfaction in telling someone anything when you know a few minutes later they’re going on with whatever else comes next? What I’m thinking is that this guy we call Not-John— because it’s Jonathan, never John, he doesn’t allow John—does nothing but work or think about work when he’s not at work, and dream about work when he’s sleeping, needs to get shit-faced to forget about work for half an hour.’

‘So, tomorrow you’ll tell someone else the story of Not-John again?’

‘Shoot me if I do?’

‘Maybe I’ll be too shit-faced.’

‘Don’t! I really fucking hate that expression.’

‘Alright. But you’re saying you don’t know why people bother telling the same stories, or even talking at all, and I reckon it’s because there’s nothing but stories. Everything is a story. From the Bible to the American president, Not-John to the mother in the pebbles, the mother out there in the flesh, to you and me right here on these sheets, in this bed. In this darkness. It’s all part of a story, and I reckon it’s a lie to think any one person, priest or scientist or whatever, can tell anything but a little part of it. And more than that, the story is like water to a fish. Beyond the story there’s nothing but gasping and a vacuum. Which is why we speak. And why we listen.’

‘Wow. Now I’m in the mood for a story.’

‘I’ve got one, actually. And I might have already told this story to one or two people, but the thing about doing that is that usually you get better at telling it. It’s like a joke. You work out the timing of the thing. What the punchline is.’

‘Give me one of those as well.’

‘I will if I can find the lighter … Alright … So this is set in Serbia. There’s a guy from a small village there. He goes over to Austria to work. Comes back on the weekends, to see his wife. By Monday he’s back in Austria. Doing this for over two years and he’s still only got a Serbian passport and maybe something that gives him permission to work over there.’

‘This is true?’

‘This happened last year. And this is a regular guy, from a place called Jabukovac, which is like being from somewhere called Apple-ville. Jabuka means “apple” in Serbian. So I imagine apple orchards all around his village.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Nikola Radosavljevic. Just a few years older than me. Not forty yet. Working hard. But then one day, he’s coming back, and something goes wrong on the bus. He’s so wild with anger that the bus driver had to stop the bus and help hold him down. They didn’t kick him off, and eventually Nikola got back to Jabukovac. Next day at about five in the afternoon he and his wife get into a terrible fight, and despite never having laid a hand on her in their whole marriage, he pummels her to the ground. What he does next is jump down a well.’

‘He jumps down a well?’

‘Yeah. This ashtray is full. I’ll just be a sec.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I want to get some water anyway.’

‘What kind of way is this to tell a story?’

‘It’s a story with an intermission.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Where was I?’

‘The guy threw himself down a well after beating his wife.’

‘That’s right. So … he’s down the well when someone comes walking by an hour later and pulls him out.’

‘It must have been filled with water. Or maybe it wasn’t that deep.’

‘The point is, after being down there for an hour he goes and gets a hunting rifle. He walks into his village and starts shooting. He goes house to house, to the homes of people he’s known his whole life. Village folk just walking along. Eight in all. Finally he comes across this Romanian woman, puts the rifle to her chest, and asks her in her language if she knows how to make magic. When she says no, he lets her go.’

‘A question you’d want to answer carefully!’

‘And then Nikola disappears. They look for him throughout the night. Two helicopters, anti-terrorist units, police from all over. But they can’t find him anywhere.’

‘I know where I’d look.’

‘No, he wasn’t down the well. It’d be interesting if he disappeared, though, wouldn’t it? Never heard from again. But the next day, a helicopter spots him in the village cemetery. He’d shot himself in the chest, but was still alive when they came for him. Serbia’s Minister of the Interior said this was a tragedy the likes of which he had never seen. Said, “There can’t be reason enough to kill eight people. This is not in the realm of the rational.” And for some reason that struck me, that this was not in the realm of the rational. I don’t know why.’

‘Maybe it’s because it poses a question. If there’s the realm of the rational, there’s somewhere else we live sometimes, and who knows, maybe most of the time, for a lot of us.’

‘Another realm altogether. Nothing to do with the rational.’

‘Because he threw himself down a well first, hey.’

‘He was down there for an hour.’

‘Makes me think he knew what was coming so he tried to stop it from happening. Like a demon was whispering in his ear, and he knew he was getting weaker, and the voice was getting louder.’

‘Then he goes to the cemetery and shoots himself like he’d like to save everyone the trouble of killing and burying him. But they took him to a hospital in Niš. Two of his victims were already in that same hospital, recovering.’

‘What did they do with him then?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s gone to trial yet.’

‘Will they execute him?’

‘I don’t know if they have execution over there. Last thing they said about Nikola Radosavljevic was that he was recovering well.’

‘You mind passing me my mobile?’

‘You need to make a call?’

‘I need to make sure it’s off.’

‘You know, when I came back from the kitchen just then, with the water, it struck me, looking at you from the doorway, how good you look lying here in bed.’

‘I think it’s the little bit of moonlight coming in from the window flattering me. In the full light of day you’d see a tired woman, creased and ruffled like someone’s lost coat. And you without your glasses. It’s almost an insult.’

‘What is it with chicks? You have to be careful how you even compliment a woman. But I don’t mean beautiful anyway.’

‘You’d better mean beautiful. If I can’t make it by moonlight, I don’t like my chances.’

‘I love your chances. Your chances couldn’t be better.’

‘Chances for what?’

‘You know what.’

‘No. What?’

‘Anyway … what I was saying, about looking good in bed. You want me to explain?’

‘Okay. Explain.’

‘It suits you.’

‘How does it suit me?’

‘You see a cat, napping in a puddle of sunshine, yawning. Or a child on a swing, kicking her legs and laughing. Or an empress taking her seat on her throne. There’s some kind of relaxed opulence in this bed that looks good on you. Most of the time I get in and out of a bed like I get in and out of my car during rush hour. I get in because I have to and I get out as soon as I can manage it. But you make me feel like there’s something almost regal about being able to find comfort and ease here.’

‘Can I tell you something I like about you?’

‘Tell me.’

‘You lie beautifully.’

‘Am I lying?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m just lying here, and about the only thing romantic I can think of is that I wish I didn’t feel so tired and that soon we’re both going to have to close our eyes and let this night die. Because a new day can be like a new life. And I like this one, right now.’

‘Let me tell you how much I like how you kiss.’

‘Tell me about that.’

‘Alright, I will. I was thinking about it when I went for the water. I’ll tell you about it after I go and get us the Haigh’s.’

‘I completely forgot we had chocolate in the house.’

‘It’d be gone already if you hadn’t?’

‘I’m a regular Cookie Monster, honestly! If it’s there, and it’s chocolate, it’s getting eaten.’

‘I don’t know how you’re not fat. Or covered in pimples.’

‘I’ve got a fat girl trapped in me. I keep her manacled to the basement wall, and have three locks on an iron door. Besides which, I am fat. I’ve got to start swimming every morning again. I’ve got to go walking every lunch break. I should go running in the evening. Get a dog and take him walking.’

‘Why a dog for walking?’

‘Because he’d probably bark at me if I got lazy. And I’d still feel guilty if he wasn’t a barker.’

‘You hear actors say that the screen puts ten pounds on you. Maybe every woman is an actor with that kind of screen in her head. Or it’s too many magazines, and an airbrushed, glossy life makes everything else sag and seem crude. Since you don’t have a backyard for a dog …’

‘Go get the Haigh’s.’

‘I won’t be a sec.’

‘You’re a prince.’

‘What I like best about chocolate, almost as much as the chocolate itself, is the taste of water afterwards.’

‘I won’t talk with my mouth full. Tell me what you like about kissing me.’

‘I don’t know if I will now. I’d rather talk about what you were thinking when I left the room.’

‘Wasn’t I thinking about kissing you?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Tell you what? Do you think I ponder and dwell on one thought for hours on end? My honest answer is, I don’t know, and if I think back, then you as a bewildering naked male animal prowling around my apartment was one of them, but when I say “animal”, I mean some kind of being from a sci-fi film beamed down to me, or teleported from a book of mythology, and a stranger as well, because just three weeks ago you didn’t exist. You might think you did, have some flimsy evidence to back it up, but I’ve got to tell you, there was only an inkling in my mind that wasn’t much more than a maybe. That was you then, and now, full flesh and warm blood, speaking and more alive than me, and more real as well.’

‘Why more real?’

‘I don’t know. Because everyone else in my life, I like. They’re all very likeable. They might like me as well, and think I’m very likeable too. But I get sick of liking and disliking things. It’s been too long since I felt anything but mild. And I think I want an overwhelming reality. I want to dwindle before something that is worth sacrifice and devotion, and that might fill me with exaltation and possibility. And what you are, I don’t know, but you exist, and what I feel for you is beyond mild, and it’s been too long. Do you know that feeling when you pick up the phone and you feel a thrill in just hearing someone’s voice? I felt that when you called this morning, and felt that again and again tonight.’

‘I thought you didn’t know what you were thinking.’

‘Things just go through your head and if you don’t think about them, like, try to get a hold of them, they just evaporate. I was looking out that window, at those branches and those leaves, and imagining what cold and darkness feels like for something that has nothing but dreams of light and the sun’s warmth. And I was thinking about what I said, but just on the surface. Only talking about it now do I get to see what was in the shiver I felt looking outside the glass as I heard the soft shuffle of your bare feet on my kitchen tiles. The light coming through the hall, all the way through to the doorway. And I was thinking about my mother again. About the poison I have in my heart because of that woman. Not enough to kill me, but enough to linger in my blood the rest of my life. Some toxic residue that will always make me feel that love is like some kind of death.’

‘I once heard someone say, we’ve got the rest of our lives to get over childhood. Maybe that’s true, but we never grow up in the ways we think we do. Doesn’t matter what we do, we’ll never escape being vulnerable. We can always be hurt. We need things around us to feel safe, but all those things can be taken away. And we never understand everything that’s going on around us and why it goes on the way it does. Getting older, most of the time, is about telling ourselves that there’s no bogey man out there, and no monster below the bed, and believing it, when we know there’re all kinds of people out there a whole lot worse than bogey men. If your mother never made you feel safe, it’s not the worst kind of lie. What’s worse is the lie which tells you you’re not worth the love she should have given you.’

‘Which might make you feel like throwing yourself down a well.’

‘Not that I’m saying it was like that for you.’

‘It’s never that black and white. Or cut and dried. You might find yourself on a bus, bleeding for no good reason. Not cut and dried at all.’

‘What do I know? My father’s an arsehole. My mother was a tad on the cold side, but good at her job—of being a mother. And I miss her now that she’s dead, not every day, but often enough. It’s luck, when at least one of your parents is what they should be. Having two loving parents, two or three caring siblings, is about as rare as having only one coin and pulling the handle on a slot machine and everything lining up cherries.’

‘Not frogs at the bottom of a well.’

‘I hope you’re not seriously listening to anything I’m saying. I’m delirious, honestly.’

‘No, it’s fine. But pass me that glass. I need some water … thanks.’

‘Should we go to sleep?’

‘We probably should.’

‘I don’t think frogs are the best company, though. Imagine the language of the croak. Like us right now, at the bottom of a well, in the darkness. And the mud, for a frog, is so much better than a bed. Darkness and wet mud must be like a heaven we can’t even imagine. We’re so much divorced from out natural habitat as animals, there’s no idea of what an afterlife might be like. Does anyone really imagine sitting on clouds? Did they ever? Harps and angels. Singing the glory of God in celestial harmony. Or croaking down at the bottom of a well. And what does he say in his croak, the contented frog? I’m here. Another one croaks, I’m here. And another, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. Ribbip, ribbip, ribbip. And I wonder if that’s all we’re ever saying too. With everything we say. Frogs at the bottom of a well—all of us. No-one able to imagine heaven any more but we keep on telling the same stories over and again.’

‘A bed’s better than mud. The darkness and you is pretty close to where my soul could expire, croaking happily ever after.’

‘I’m going to give you a kiss worth ten bluebottle blowflies to a bullfrog for that.’

‘Ribbip.’

‘Wowee. Didn’t know you had it in you.’

‘I didn’t. I thought I was empty of everything—my bell, wrung.’

‘I’m not sure if that’s beautiful—or gross.’

‘You could probably say that about sex in general.’

‘Would you say that about sex?’

‘Let me tell you about my favourite word—by way of an answer.’

‘OK.’

‘Voluptuous!’

‘Careful now.’

‘Why careful?’

‘Because it’s real-estate speak for fat.’

‘This is what I’m saying about women! Anyway—my favourite word.’

‘Voluptuous.’

‘Yeah. It comes from an Ancient Greek idea. It wasn’t real-estate speak for big tits and a fat arse. It wasn’t that at all. The word refers to a person full with pleasure. Like a woman possessed of paradise.’

‘“Voluptuous”. Makes you kiss just to say it.’

‘We should go to sleep soon. That’s birdsong outside. Daylight’s not far off.’

‘Are you sleepy?’

‘I can’t keep my eyes open.’

‘We’ll have to sleep soon.’

‘Before, when you were talking about the natural habitat of the human animal—we’re creatures of the forest, aren’t we, like apes and monkeys. Or do I mean the jungle?’

‘The caves really. I think we came out and did our hunting, but we needed a place to keep our fire. I don’t know if you’ve seen those cave paintings, but I mean they’re all over the place—on the European continent, Africa, the outback. In our ancestral caves back in Europe, there are these amazing paintings. I mean, really incredible. As much imbued with genius as anything you’ll see anywhere. When Picasso saw them, he said we haven’t learned anything for the last ten thousand years. So many caves filled with these paintings. Which must have taken days, weeks, months to paint, and been part of a tradition that went on for generations. Those caves were our first homes. Everyone you knew around a perpetual fire, tended day and night, yawning and farting, laughing with wide-open mouths, eating together from the same bone of meat, sleeping together, body to body, murmuring and dreaming together, breathing each other’s breaths. Talking in the darkness of that cave with its painted walls. For hundreds of generations. Thousands of years. Talking in the darkness until the world began to thaw out.’

‘Mmm.’

‘You’ve fallen asleep?’

‘Mmm … maybe.’

‘The sky’s starting to glow.’

‘Murmur something into my ear.’

‘Murmur what?’

‘Just murmur. It doesn’t matter what you say.’