The time is drawing near when I must leave you. No, do not weep – it is the way of all things. The rose loses its bloom, beavers chew down trees that dam the mighty river, one day Graeme Hart will no longer present the weather after the 8 o’clock news. To all things there is a season, and already I feel the first stirrings of the gentle autumn breeze. Plus, I didn’t get much of an advance for this book, and I have to start doing some other work, before the men from the corner cafe come around to repossess my cigarettes.
Sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways. There is an old man who lives next door to me. He is not the neighbour I borrow ice from and whose Sunday newspaper I sometimes steal – those are the Katzes in number 27. The old man who lives next door to me doesn’t take the Sunday paper.
I had never had an extended conversation with the old man. I have always considered him a little creepy, to be honest, because he keeps a collection of life-sized plaster geese standing in the bottom of his garden and occasionally I see him taking them plates of cookies and, on winter nights, a thermos of what I have always assumed is coffee, although it may very well be soup. Sometimes when I have been working too late I sneak over the garden wall and hide his plaster birds under a bush, or arrange them in humorously obscene positions. It gets him no end of riled up. He jumps up and down and yells: “Who has been tampering with my birds?” It’s not much, but it amuses me.
Other than that, there had not been much contact between us. Sometimes we would nod to each other over the garden wall, and he would say, “Did you hear those cats fighting in the street last night?”
And I would say, “No.”
And he would narrow his eyes and say: “Oh, well, perhaps it was just that music you play till all hours.” Then he would stalk inside and close the door. In fact, now that I come to think about it, I have never really liked that old man. But while I was writing this book, a curious thing happened. One afternoon I saw the old man out in the garden, thumbing through a tatty paperback and reading aloud to his geese. I saw the title of the tatty paperback and my blood ran cold. It was Tuesdays with Morrie.
I took to staying inside after that, but I couldn’t hide forever. The old man next door – let’s call him Bill, because that’s his name – took to lurking near the garden fence, waiting for me to emerge. One day he caught me as I was carrying out a cardboard box of empty bottles.
“Ahoy, young man,” he said, “how would you like to come over for tea?”
“Tea?” I said.
“Oh, all right,” he frowned, squinting at the empty bottles. “Bourbon then. Shall we say Tuesday? I think we’re Tuesday people, don’t you?”
I wasn’t planning to visit Bill, but then Tuesday rolled round and I was moping around in my garden, wondering how in the world to write this conclusion. Conclusions, I have always felt, demand solutions, or at least resolutions. But I had no solutions or resolutions, not because I am too lazy too think them up – or at least, not only because I am too lazy to think them up – but because solutions and resolutions are what got the world into this mess in the first place. When you put your ear to your inner ostrich egg, that faint and reedy voice you hear echoing back to you, like the waves lapping at the sides of a whiskey tumbler, is saying: “There are no answers! There are no answers!”
(When I put my ear to my whiskey tumbler, the waves tend to be saying: “Drink me! Drink me!” but I guess that is much the same thing.)
All that moping and thinking about whiskey tumblers began to work on my mind a little, and, before I knew it, I found myself standing on Bill’s doorstep. He came to the door wearing baggy clothes and carrying a walking stick that he sometimes forgot to lean on.
“Come in,” he said. “Did you bring a tape recorder? No? Never mind, you can take notes.”
Bill’s plan was clear. Bill was intending to pass his wisdom on to the world. He settled back in his chair and steepled his fingers and looked at the ceiling as though deep in thought. Then he would say things like: “You know what I have always thought? I have always thought that we should learn to forgive ourselves before we can learn to forgive others.” And: “It is my opinion that we should accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.” And: “Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.”
At first I just nodded politely and said “Mmm”, and “Very true”, and similar things that people say when they don’t know what to say, but when he said “Love is the only rational act”, I just couldn’t bear it any more.
“Bill,” I said, “didn’t Morrie say all of that?”
So Bill decided to pass on some wisdom of his own. Most of what he had to offer I had heard before, mainly from my own father. My father was a font of good advice. “Never mix your drinks,” my dad used to say, “when you can get the barman to mix them for you.” Plus: “Do not wear white socks in public, unless you are a tennis player or a newborn babe.” And also: “Never trust a short man.”
Soon Bill was running short on wisdom, and I was running low on bourbon. I started making motions to leave. “You know,” said Bill with a hint of desperation in his voice, “sometimes the universe works in mysterious ways.” I pondered that. It is true, in some respects. I still don’t know how light can manage to be both particle and wave at the same time, and I have never managed to find out what direction water goes down a plughole if the plughole is directly on the equator. Perhaps Bill would be of some value after all.
“Go on,” I said, taking out a pen and pretending to take notes. That stumped him again. The universe does work in mysterious ways, but it is generally easier to say so than to give concrete examples.
“How come your phone can go all day without ringing,” he said, “then the moment you make a call, you get two incoming calls at the same time?”
“Hm,” I said.
“Uh, and, uh, have you ever wondered what the water level of the ocean would be if sponges didn’t grow in it?”
I suddenly took pity on the poor old guy. I rose from my seat and placed my hand on his shoulder, but neither of us liked that, so I took my hand off his shoulder again and sat down hurriedly.
“Bill,” I said kindly, “there is no law that says being old means you have to be wise. Wisdom is for people trying to sell books.”
He looked at me with mute and grateful eyes. We sat there a while, looking at each other. “The Massagetae, Bill, were a tribe of the Scythian people who occupied the land to the east of the Caspian Sea around 600 BC,” I told him. “They venerated old people, Bill. They looked after them, and doffed their caps to them, and they never demanded that the old people contribute anything by way of wise insights or clever maxims. They accepted that old people had done enough just by getting old. Oldness is enough of a good example.”
“The Massagetae, eh?” said Bill, nodding thoughtfully. “Maybe I should have been a Massagetae.”
“Well, not necessarily, Bill,” I had to confess. “They venerated their oldies until a certain point, then they would throw a big birthday feast for the ancient fellow, swing by his house and at a certain stage of the evening – I would imagine sometime after the speeches, and after the first round of drinks – they would kill the birthday boy, boil his flesh and add it to the stew.”
“Oh,” said Bill.
“Yes,” I said, “it wasn’t all fun and games and tribal wisdom, living in ancient times.”
“Savages,” said Bill gloomily.
“You should see the Mayans,” I said. And then I said: “Life is simple, Bill. It is enough that you are alive, and you seem more or less continent, and you can watch television whenever you want, and you are not actively participating in the commercial hunting of minke whales. Plus you have your geese, Bill. Don’t forget your geese.”
He nodded thoughtfully.
“Don’t put so much pressure on yourself,” I said. “Leave wisdom for the people who feel their lives are empty without it. They are sad people, Bill. They are desperate people. You and me, we can get along just fine without it.” But then I remembered that these days people only really listen to aphorisms, so I said: “You know, Bill, when you think about it, wisdom is just another word for living well.”
I don’t really know what that means, but it seemed to make him happier. We got along just fine after that, and when the bourbon was finished and I weaved my way to the door, it was just like we were old acquaintances. As he waved me goodbye, I turned and looked him in the eye and said: “I’m okay, Bill, and you … you live next door.”
It was one of those moments that you never forget, no matter how you try.
But perhaps Bill was sent to help me write this final chapter. (If so, it is a very depressing thought. Imagine living an entire life, complete with its full allotment of heartache, trauma and bad haircuts, simply so that some mouthy fellow next door can finish his book in time to make the Christmas sales list.) After I arrived home, once I had buried my keys under a loose tile in the kitchen, I fell to musing. You and I have come a long way together – well, longish – and I am afraid I may have been doing us a disservice. I know I have been referring to us as “lazy” all through this book, but maybe “lazy” isn’t the right word. We may not want to go to unnecessary exertion, but the important word there is “unnecessary”, not “exertion”.
This world is awash with guff, with humbug and bushwah and just plain dumbness, and it is a full-time job to wade through it all without becoming so tired that you just lie down and let it roll over you and become one with the dumbness. Stupidity clothes itself in many outfits – the postal services, Spice Girls pursuing solo careers, that little bastard Jamie Oliver – and one of its current looks for this and the next few seasons is to dress up like wisdom.
Our job – yours and mine – is to shrug off the stupidity, to push it behind us, and above all to enrich ourselves while we’re about it. I’ve held up my end of the bargain by writing this book, and hopefully by selling it too. How you do your job is up to you. I have no ideas off the top of my head, but do let me know if there is anything of a practical nature I can do to help.
I was going to wrap up with an explanation of the title, but I don’t think I’ll bother now. There was never really any cheese, was there? And even if there had been, I would probably have eaten it, rather than moved it around. The cheese was just a cunning device to get you to read to the end. And here you are, so I suppose it must have worked.
Bill and I are good neighbours now. There is warmth in our good-morning nods. But of course, old habits die hard. When I work too late I still get the urge to shinny over the wall and tiptoe across his lawn and rearrange his plaster aviary. Just this morning I woke to the sound of Bill shouting and cursing and rooting around in the shrubbery for one of his birds.
I opened the bedroom window and I leant outside. I yelled across the wall. “Relax, Bill!” I yelled. “Relax!”
Bill looked across to me, and our eyes met once more. “Don’t worry, Bill,” I said. “It was me, Bill. I moved your geese.”