Suzy did not begrudge me the foolish indulgence, and grew used to the diminished space, but what she couldn’t tolerate was the fuss. The grinding of the beans, just so, the full but delicate pressure as you put the coffee in the professional filter holder, the heating and frothing (by hand) of the milk – press the plunger one hundred and twenty times at a steady and regular pressure – the gentle stirring of the resulting liquid with a spoon, the slow and even pouring onto the one-third full cup of crema-rich espresso. The unhurried process is soothing, though the resulting coffee is anything but.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Suzy would say, ‘it’s like a religious ritual.’
‘Better. If Jesus had blood like this, I’d go to church.’
In the mornings Suzy drank hot water with a slice of lemon. I was so in love with her, I forgave her the sheer insipidity of this, for she was distinctly sipid in many other ways. During the day she would drink some herbal tea or other – boysenberry with extra digitalis – the kind of tasteless stuff imbibed by vegetarians, Buddhists, neurasthenics, homeopaths, organic food faddists, faith healers and members of the Green Party. Stupid tea for stupid people.
And this is the worst part: her bowels were as reliable as a clock. Hot water with lemon, piece of sourdough toast with her home-made Seville orange marmalade, off to the loo. And I would drink my double-shot flat white (the only great invention to issue from the southern hemisphere), eat my seeds, and continue to swell inwardly, discomforted and discomfited, morose.
The poor old body can hardly keep running. Sooner or later there will be a Tube strike: the tunnels get blocked and the trains can hardly get through. And when they do, they’re more and more likely to have suicide bombers within: tumours, viruses, bacterial infections of every sort, so intent on mayhem that they willingly kill themselves too.
It’s not just the bowel that is a reluctant worker. Arteries fur up, the large intestine grows polyps and muddy protuberances, the throat will not disgorge, the nose ceases to release its blockages. Even my penis, such a reliable ejaculator for so many decades – I once got sperm in my eye – can hardly be bothered to release its pitiful discharge. Having indulged myself with a very occasional wank – Think! Reminisce! Fantasise! Pray for Rain! – I am aware of having come, however mildly, only to notice that the tip of my penis bears no sign of the release of the (previously) essential body fluid. If I give it a post-orgasmic squeeze, upwards and firm, sure enough a little trickle of semen will appear at the tip, hardly enough to wipe off with my finger.
I can accept that. It’s in the natural course of things. Ejaculations are for the young and pious. But I can’t even piss any more. Unless I constantly top myself up with water, making sure my kidneys have something to work with, charged like a tank of petrol, all I can release, however urgent the imperative, is a series of effortful dribbles.
It’s not just my pants and trousers that I stain. I bleed. I get blood on my socks, the cuffs of my shirt, my pants, the insides of my trousers. My face bleeds, and I put tiny swathes of tissues to mop and staunch it. It comes from my scratching. I bleed less but more frequently than a woman, and I scratch more often than a baboon. I have eczema on my psoriasis, my skin itches as if infested by insects. I scratch and scratch, apply ointments and then scratch in the wetness, humid furrows plough my skin, and when they dry, patches of red sores mature into tiny scab fields, which I pick, which then bleed, and itch.
But my scratching of my multiple itches is also recreational. The satisfaction of this has to be experienced to be credited. I moan, I prance, I gibber – though I am not entirely sure what gibbering entails.
My pants, my shirts, and most of all my sheets bear the brown – again! – residue of this frantic activity, and the stains are hard to shift. Though she was in charge of laundry matters, Suzy finally refused to clean up after me somatically: if I was going to ooze into the sheets and shirts, she said, I’d have to deal with the consequences myself.
I cannot send the sheets to the laundry, for they come back still stained. When the laundry lady returned the ironing and washing, I could feel her regarding me peculiarly. That bleeding man . . . No, I need to put stain remover onto the offended garment before putting it in the wash myself. I’ve never done this before. I’d say it was therapeutic, creating cleanliness where there was dirt and disorder, but it’s not. It’s just another choreful humiliation.
It’s enough to break your heart, life. It breaks it, the sheer ghastliness of decline, best not to speak of it, as women do not tell expectant first-time mothers of the pains of child-birth. What’s the point? Which brings me back to Mr Eliot, doesn’t it? Youth, fleshiness, emptiness, loss. Waste:
Electric summons of the busy bell
Brings brisk Amanda to destroy the spell . . .
Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,
Fresca slips softly to the needful stool . . .
Needful? Shit will out. Consider Spikedog, who was once handsome and tall as you.
I’ll be damned. Is there a book lurking in this? The Needful Stool: Sitting at the Feet of the Master.
I had begun our first session for this select group of boys – before they sailed through their A levels and Scholarship exams – begun by making a plea. I enjoined them like a vicar intent on saving souls, only employing an unpriestly lightness of touch (I hope) and mild irony designed to penetrate the carapace of their cynicism, begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open – it takes an effort of will – the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better – a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet – and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould.
Boys are not unregenerate monsters of solipsism. There is hope for them – some of them at least. I could sense at first some interest, then a sort of attention, however grudging. I am not sure, recovering this now, whether they were listening because they were moved by my ideas, or because I was. Why would someone feel so passionately about books, and the act of reading?
Otherwise, I would observe tartly (a number of them rather resented this), you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner – a product of a good London address or of an estate in the West Country, nothing more than a function of your upbringing – a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.
It is literature and only literature that can do this. The Church can’t help us, not any more. (I got a visit from our rather aggrieved chaplain the first time I said this, when one of the boys snitched on me.) But good reading of good literature, I insisted, both to him and to my boys, interprets life for us, sustains and consoles us.
Whatever even the most cynical of those boys might have felt, none could deny that I said so with a full heart. I might have appeared a zealot, a wanker even – I rather hope not, even all these decades later – but I was not being teacherly, this was not by rote, it was sufficiently real to be embarrassing, rightly, to many of them, and year after year, to myself.
We met once a week, my chosen group of boys, slouching to Oxbridge to be born. I gave them their head, which was dangerous, for a couple of them loved showing off their literary wiles, trying to amuse and to subvert. But any form of engagement, I counselled myself – and them – is better than sitting there looking bored.
‘Next week, choose one of Yeats’s poems,’ I suggested, ‘and then read it aloud, and we can discuss it.’
The first couple of boys, biddable and unimaginative, wanting to please by a demonstration of sensibility,