5

Barny approached the overflowing park bin with an air of half-defeated curiosity. Scattered on the downtrodden mud of Clapham Common, polystyrene fast-food cartons trembled in the chill breeze.

‘Barny!’

Jason tried to sound angry but he was cut short by the faint wagging of Barny’s tail as he sniffed at the nostalgic odour of something like meat.

Poor Barny, did he dream of butchers’ shops? Was he kept awake counting uneaten sheep? Did he dangle all night from the meathooks of memory? Some memories had to be searched for, thought Jason; others find you wherever you are.

Haley had said that they were responsible for Barny’s ‘spiritual welfare’. After a long debate about what a dog’s spiritual welfare might be, she had triumphed as usual, and Barny had been put on the Veginugget Vegan dog-food diet. A once happy hound who used to bark excitedly in the hall, his nails scratching the Victorian tiles and his black Labrador’s tail beating loudly against the door frames, Barny now moped about, his forehead ridged with fleshy furrows of self-pity and bewilderment.

‘He looks fucking miserable,’ said Jason. He realized he’d grown used to being consoled by Barny’s foolish eagerness when he returned empty-handed from another record company.

‘That’s because he’s getting the toxins out of his system,’ said Haley. ‘You can’t imagine what they put in the average can of dog food.’

‘Toxins?’

‘Yes, horrid toxins for a nice doggy. Poor Barny’s addicted to toxins, aren’t you, you silly doggy?’ Haley grasped Barny by the ears and shook his head. ‘If we put him on Vegginuggets he’ll probably come back as a human being in his next lifetime.’

‘Now you’re really making me feel guilty.’

‘Don’t be so cynical, he might be the next Gandhi. Yes! Who’s a clever Gandhi-doggy?’

‘But Gandhi’s dead already,’ Jason protested.

‘Poor Gandhi-doggy, living with such a boring old pedant,’ said Haley irritably.

Barny drifted away from the park bin and Jason’s thoughts returned irresistibly to the frustrations of his career. In his twenties, driven on by the belief that bad news was infectious and optimism self-fulfilling, he’d been in the habit of saying things like, ‘all the signs are good … the record company is really interested … we should close the deal before Christmas’. The discovery that he was known as ‘all-the-signs-are-good Jason’ put an end to his assumed cheerfulness. A period of tight-lipped silence was soon followed by his present policy of talking very generally and bleakly about ‘economic conditions’.

At thirty-two he was getting too old for a big break in rock music; perhaps he’d been too old for a long time. It was his birthday soon. As an Aries he was supposed to be explosive, ambitious, driven and shallow. Haley said that even Jung thought there was something in astrology. Jung thought there was something in everything. He even talked encouragingly to his kitchen equipment, just to be on the safe side. Haley also said that thirty-three was a really crucial age, when Christ had been crucified and Buddha enlightened, but Jason didn’t want to start a world religion, he just wanted to make a record – and then start a world religion.

He frowned sensitively and sang into an imaginary microphone. Like phosphorescence in a churning sea, bulbs flashed from the adulatory crowd beyond the edge of the stage. His face caked in make-up, his eyes blinded by the sting of sweat and the glare of spotlights, he no longer shifted about restlessly in his diffident and troubled skin but blazed with the certainty that he had become a turbine for momentarily transforming the frustrations and desires of a million raw souls. He closed his eyes and inhaled the exhilarating liberation of fame, and his new identity, a mirage of falsehood and calculated carelessness, stood up and walked away like a confident ghost from the corpse of his old uneasy self.

Yes, yes, he wanted it so badly. He kept his eyes closed to sustain the vision a little longer. To become completely phoney and to be worshipped for it, and then to be thought ‘real’ because he gave in to his wildest vices. He threw back his shoulders and felt himself grow taller. Bliss, it would be bliss.

Barny, who could not be expected to know that his master had transformed himself into a global icon, one of those truly famous people who are recognized everywhere, in Vanuatu and Kathmandu as well as the King’s Road and Fifth Avenue, barked feebly by his side.

Jason, realizing that he was on Clapham Common rather than the stage of the Hollywood Bowl – he thought fondly of Johnny Rotten saying, ‘Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been ripped off?’ when the Sex Pistols left after playing only two songs – started running homewards clapping his hands and shouting, ‘Come on Barny!’ to his exhausted pet.

Tomorrow, he and Haley would be flying over the Hollywood Bowl, not in order to gulp down the nectar of his stupendous popularity, but on their way to a workshop to repair their ailing relationship. As soon as Haley had suggested the workshop, Jason had started to feel that things were really about to happen for him musically, but he was in no position to refuse. She might throw him out of her house.

She had recently declared that their relationship was ‘totally sick’ after going to a Co-dependency Group on three successive Wednesdays, and returning home with a grisly new friend, Panita, who believed that ‘self-satisfaction’, as she called it, was the aim of life and that it could only be achieved by violently breaking off relations with everybody she had ever known, including ‘old selves’.

‘She should break with her new self while she’s at it,’ he had commented sourly.

‘I think that’s a really abusive comment,’ Haley said.

‘Oh, piss off,’ said Jason.

‘No, Jason, it’s typical: I make a new friend and so you have to put me down. Is it because you find it threatening? Jason losing control of Haley, is that what you dread?’

‘Oh, go abuse yourself,’ he’d shouted, slamming the door.

‘King Baby!’ she screamed. ‘You’re the archetypal King Baby.’

The terrible truth was that he did find it threatening, knowing that the price of admission to the inner circle of self-empowerment and ill temper was the freshly dripping head of an ‘abusive’ lover or parent or employer.

Nowadays, when he reached for his Nirvana Unplugged tape in the car, so he could sing along in sweetly tortured emulation of Kurt Cobain, his hand had to push aside a clattering heap of Pia Melody tapes, about chucking your boyfriend on to the street, as he paranoiacally imagined, not having heard any of them, but just knowing that they were muscle-building exercises for Haley’s determination to boot him out.

He would willingly have donated his dole cheque to a minicab in order not to be driven to the airport by Panita. She was arriving in a couple of hours and that morning he’d been unable to resist complaining to Haley.

‘Don’t you think it’s “totally sick” of her to want to drive us to the airport when you’ve known her for less than a month?’

‘No, Jason, I actually think it’s typical of the sort of kindness you can expect from a person who’s really trying to get their life together, not that you’d know much about that…’

And so another argument had started, and he’d had to take Barny out of the house for another walk.

*   *   *

‘Your partner doesn’t seem to understand what you’re going through at the moment…’ Haley read the words with mixed satisfaction. The trouble with finding her private thoughts figured in the dance of the planets, as reported in Aromatherapist, the magazine for professionals like herself, was that Jason had the same Sun sign as her. It was so true, he didn’t understand her, but if the horoscope was true, she didn’t understand him either. Anyway, Sun signs weren’t real astrology. Mars and Venus, morbid Pluto and dissolute Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon all told their vast symbolic stories. The Moon was enthroned beside the Sun, Mercury was their chamberlain and Mars their chief of staff. So many influences, cardinal, fixed and mutable, evolving through their progressions, blocked and amplified by their aspects, acting through different signs in different houses, could describe the potential and the waste, the weakness and the strength, the obsessions and the ignorance of any shade of personality. When a fiery sign could be in a watery house, or an earthy house filled with planets in an airy sign, anything was possible. Her own chart afforded moments of solemn reflection. Her Saturn was conjunct her Sun. Either she would crumble completely or develop a strong identity through overcoming Saturnian challenges and frustrations. Saturn was also conjunct her Mercury, which might mean that she was very stupid or – like Einstein, whose Saturn was conjunct his Mercury – that she would prove to be a deep thinker. Haley tended to favour the second interpretation.

They were both Aries, but Jason had Libra rising, that mask of facile charm hiding the thoughtless and immature energies of spring. If only she could persuade him that he needed a radical change to get his career going, an internal change, a – yes, she was going to use the word – spiritual change.

She knew it was humiliating for Jason to be living in the house that her father had bought her and off the income she made from her aromatherapy business, but it was annoying for her as well. It was certainly a confusing time to be a woman. Of course she was into challenging stereotypical gender roles, but it would be nice to be taken out to dinner for a change. In any case, challenging gender roles seemed to have become a stereotype of its own.

They argued about everything, without either of them knowing what could be gained by arguing; they just couldn’t stop. That’s why she was taking them to Esalen for the ‘Letting go and Moving on’ workshop. She was blowing most of the five thousand pounds her father had given her for her thirtieth birthday. The packaging business had been good to him, as he never tired of pointing out. What Jason didn’t know was that his birthday present was a further weekend in a Tantric sex workshop. Haley had secretly decided that this was a make or break week. Either they were going to have a really deep transformational experience, or she would flood the stage with arguments about their relationship being totally sick. It wasn’t as if arguments would be hard to find, and she knew she had the support of her friends in CoCo: the Co-dependent Co-operative.

Jason slouched home apprehensively. He didn’t want to argue all the way to California; on the other hand he resented being terrorized by Haley’s new habit of exhuming incidents from the graveyard of their past, and carrying them off with bitter triumph to the pathology lab of her meetings. She used to show the same amnesiac brio which characterized his own approach to life, but now he felt that there were thousands of labelled jars in which these diseased moments were murkily preserved.

‘We’re on the way out,’ he said to Barny, and Barny whined as if he understood the pity of their situation.

Panita arrived half an hour early. ‘In case you have plane fever,’ she explained.

‘If we had plane fever, we would have asked you to come half an hour early,’ said Jason sarcastically.

Orphaned, single, friendless and unemployed, Panita was an almost discarnate co-dependant, not weighed down by the actuality of a relationship, but perfectly englobed within her self-diagnosed anxiety. She was the concentrated essence of what Jason hated, floating free of the compromises made by ordinary co-dependants with other states of being, and existing in a pure state of passionate psychological handicap.

‘Weird route,’ he commented on the way to the airport.

‘I’m just going the way I know,’ said Panita.

‘Back-seat driver,’ said Haley, sensing trouble.

But Jason couldn’t be stopped, and after the briefest pause he leant forward and asked in a voice of mock concern, ‘Is there anybody you’re co-dependent on at the moment, Panita?’

‘I hope not,’ said Panita.

‘Haley, for instance?’ asked Jason.

‘I think I’d know the signs by now,’ said Panita with grim expertise.

‘What are the signs?’

‘My eating, for a start.’

‘Oh, have you got an eating problem?’ asked Jason with undisguised delight.

‘Not at the moment, my recovery’s very solid.’

‘You had a healthy breakfast, did you?’ said Jason.

‘Oh, give it a rest,’ said Haley.

‘I’m worried about our new friend,’ said Jason. ‘I couldn’t bear it if you girls turned out to have a totally sick relationship.’

‘Calling us “girls” is really patronizing,’ said Haley.

‘Yeah, really patronizing,’ said Panita.

‘What would you like me to call you? Old hags?’

Panita drew over to the side of the road.

‘Get out of the car,’ she said.

‘What?’ said Jason.

‘You heard me,’ said Panita, suddenly empowered. ‘I’m not having any inappropriate behaviour in my car.’

‘Oh, gimme a break.’

‘Get out!’ screamed Panita. ‘I’m sorry, Haley, but I don’t have to take inappropriate behaviour in my own space.’

‘Yeah,’ said Haley, disconcerted, ‘but we’ve got to get to the airport.’

‘He can take the Underground, I’ll take you and the luggage.’

‘Can’t you just apologize?’ said Haley.

‘It’s gone beyond apology,’ said Panita. ‘I’ve been abused.’

‘But isn’t that what you secretly want?’ said Jason. ‘So you have something to talk about at your meetings.’

‘Jason!’ screamed Haley.

‘Get out of my car, or I’ll call the police.’

‘Officer!’ screeched Jason hysterically. ‘This man said I was co-dependent, I’ve been inappropriately abused.’ He clambered out of the car, laughing at his own joke. ‘Right, son!’ he went on in his PC Plod voice, leaning back through the open door. ‘I’m apprehending you and taking you down to the station to listen to some inappropriate tapes.’

‘I’ll drive you to the airport if you like,’ said Panita to Haley.

‘Oh, God, I’d better go with him or he may not turn up,’ said Haley.

‘You do think I did the right thing, don’t you?’ said Panita. ‘I really need your support on this.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Haley, ‘but it’s a real pain in the arse.’

‘I don’t want to make judgements,’ said Panita, ‘but I think you two have a really sick relationship.’

‘Well, at least we’re in a relationship,’ said Haley slamming the door. ‘You stupid wanker,’ she said to Jason, ‘you can carry my fucking case.’

‘I’m being abused!’ cried Jason facetiously.

‘You think you’re really clever, don’t you?’ said Haley. ‘You get us stranded in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway and all you can do is make stupid jokes.’

They struggled to the Underground station together, Haley’s indignant voice battling like a furious swimmer against the roar of the traffic.