All the Materials for A Midnight Feast E-Book

Gary Dexter

• Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A story of love, nuclear terror and Philip Larkin Born at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 'at the very moment when the world looked most as if it were going to blow itself up', Nicholas has spent his life in terror of atomic meltdown. Now, on the eve of his 48th birthday, he is on an overnight coach ride to join an anti-nuclear rally at Faslane in Scotland. His fellow travellers remind him of his younger self at Hull University in the 1980s -- a time he spent under the twin clouds of unrequited love and apocalyptic terror. As the coach rumbles through the night, the floodgates of memory open, and Nicholas begins to scrawl episodes from his past into a notebook. At first these memories -- sometimes poignant, sometimes comic, and often involving Philip Larkin -- appear almost random. But in time a picture emerges: of a thwarted first love, and a fragile mind struggling to keep hold of sanity in a world that seems headed for annihilation. This delightful, eccentric novel and its tragi-comic hero will be relished by mavericks and misfits, rebels and renegades the world over.

Leseprobe

ALL THE MATERIALS FOR A MIDNIGHT FEAST orZagira

To Richard, Mowt and Geoff, who are not represented, even heavily disguised, in this book

Swift was then about forty-seven, at an age when vanity is strongly excited by the amorous attention of a young woman.

– Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets

Walk by my side in the garden

Turn off the road; it’s there

For those who wish to find it.

Walk with me in the cool of the evening

Marvelling at the beauty of the garden

And the scents of its flowers.

– Anon, Chinese, 11th Cent.

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphAll The Materials For A Midnight Feast Or ZagiraAbout the AuthorCopyright

All The Materials For A Midnight Feast Or Zagira

PART ONE

Saturday 23rd October, 2010. Hull Bus Station. About 3.30 pm.

GUY’S VOICE is extraordinary. Tender, soft, low… When she phoned this morning I was quite taken aback.

‘Nicholas,’ she murmured, ‘I’m organizing a coach to Glasgow today, and I still have some seats left. Would you like to come? It’d be really nice if you could.’

What a voice! I felt almost like a baby having its toes tickled. At the same time I was conscious of being quite shamelessly manipulated.

‘If I could put you down,’ Guy continued, ‘that would be really great, because we must pay for this coach.’

‘Oh all right, Guy,’ I said.

‘Thank you, Nicholas,’ she said, and rang off.

Guy’s full name is Gaia, but her friends call her Guy. Her last name is de Courcey, which means she has the sort of name found only in books about knights – Guy de Courcey. Her mother is Mrs de Courcey, the Liberal Democrat councillor.

Of course her extraordinary voice – like warm honey – is only deployed on certain occasions. On other occasions she can be quite curt, even rude. I met her in the street a couple of weeks ago and she cut me dead, as if I wasn’t even there. She walked right past me, arm-in-arm with some girl. I’m sure she must have seen me.

Still – I didn’t say hello to her either. So perhaps she thought I was snubbing her. Who knows what was going through her mind? What do the French say? Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner?

And so here I am on this coach to the submarine base.

•

It is a dispiriting thing to fall in love during an epoch that is certain to see the end of the world.

Perhaps I should explain.

I was born on the 24th of October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a Saturday. It was on that Saturday, in fact, that Robert McNamara, the United States Secretary of State for Defence, left his home in the suburbs of Washington, DC, for his office in the Pentagon, and, as he kissed his wife and children goodbye, wondered if he would ever see them again. At that very moment, as Robert McNamara was kissing his wife, my mother went into labour. If this seems fanciful, I assure you it is not. I have looked into his autobiography and checked the time, and of course I have the testimony of my mother. I have worked it out to the hour, accounting for the time difference.

My arrival, then, was not merely during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but at its very apogee, at the point when the world looked most as if it were going to blow itself up. My mother told me, many years later, that thoughts of the end of the world had been drifting through her mind even as she was giving birth to me. What sort of a world was this to bring a child into? What was the use of going through all this pain and suffering? What was the point of it all?

Is there not at least a possibility that those thoughts were transferred to me in that terrible moment of nativity?

•

My early years were spent in the most unrelieved gloom.

I remember one incident that took place shortly after I left school. I was, by then, much haunted by a sense of impending catastrophe and was beginning to wonder how people could just go about their business as if nothing was happening. My mother and father were quite extraordinarily bluff and jovial, and appeared to be enjoying life, my mother having shed any real doubts about the future of the world when the radio ceased reporting its imminent destruction.

I was in the public library reading a newspaper. I was, I suppose, about sixteen years old, and it had not yet been decided whether I would take my A Levels and go to university. This was during the late 1970s, and the cold war was in a particularly nasty phase.

It was very quiet in the library, and there was a smell of floor polish. As I flicked through the newspaper, I came across an article. An early-warning siren had been installed on the village green of Inwardleigh, not very far from where we lived. A nice little village, with a duck-pond. Unfortunately I don’t remember the headline – it must have been something like: ‘Mayor Unveils New Siren’. But this wasn’t what caught my eye. It was the first sentence of the article. I remember that first sentence with crystal clarity. It read as follows:

‘Nuclear war will not go unnoticed in Inwardleigh.’

I remember reading this and being gripped by a fury I have rarely experienced before or since. I felt literally possessed. I rose from my chair with the newspaper in my hand, my scalp boiling.

‘IDIOTS!’ I shouted at the top of my voice.

The old man at the table across from me, who had been furtively eating a sandwich, stopped, his mouth hanging open. Inside was something unpleasant.

‘IDIOTS!’ I screamed once more, taking the newspaper and hysterically crumpling and ripping it up. My voice, and the ripping newspaper, were very, very loud in the quiet of the library: everyone, from the oldest librarian to the tiniest child, were, I imagine, startled out of their wits. But I didn’t care in the least. I felt that they all had it coming to them. I felt full of a godlike rage as I flung the remains of the paper away from me, not caring who or what I hit, and walked to the door, unfortunately leaving my coat behind on the back of the chair. I had still not yet said anything beyond that one repeated word, ‘IDIOTS!’, but as I got to the little counter with its glass partition, I realised what it was that I wanted to say. I turned to address the whole library, and, with great profundity of conviction, and not without a malicious glee, spacing my words carefully and precisely, announced:

‘YOU – ARE – ALL – GOING – TO DIE!’

And with that I walked out.

This was very bad behaviour, girls, but I was very young.

•

I did, as it happened, go to university: to Hull University. I hope that you too will attend university. Unfortunately I left the university itself during the first term, and did not, in the end, get a degree in oriental languages as I had planned. My studies were curtailed due to illness.

However, instead of leaving Hull immediately and returning home to Bournemouth, I stayed on in student digs with some friends of mine, most of whom had similarly dropped out for one reason or another.

This is not a course of action I would now advise taking, unless it is for some very good reason.

Beverley, around 4.15 pm.

THE COACH has just stopped and a very handsome young man has just got on. I vaguely recognize him, though I have never spoken to him. He calls himself ‘Beaver’. Why any young man should be called – or call himself – ‘Beaver’, is a little perplexing.

Whatever the reason, ‘Beaver’ is something of a character. He is tall and burly, has a small beard, and is wearing camouflage trousers. He is one of those persons who, despite not being of Black or African origin, has managed to grow dreadlocks. It must have taken great effort to persuade his fine hair to assume those shapes. Some of the shapes, however, do not look much like dreadlocks. They look more like knots. His hair is very fair and silky, and many months or years of assiduous non-combing has allowed it to grow freakish knots, almost like eggs. I am reminded of the king rat, or rat-king, that forms when several rats are confined in some deep and smelly place from which they cannot, or do not wish to, escape. Their tails combine together – get knotted up – and they have to move as a single entity. I believe the largest king rat or rat-king ever discovered was composed of some forty rats – in Holland, I think.

But this isn’t the most remarkable thing about ‘Beaver’. The most remarkable thing, to my mind, is the camouflage fatigues I have already mentioned. This young man is an anti-nuclear protester. He is not a soldier. In fact, at our destination he may well find himself in confrontation with soldiers. Or policemen, at any rate. So the trousers seem to me to be utterly incomprehensible. Why on earth is he wearing camouflage fatigues? Does he feel that the trousers signify ‘rebellion’ against society’s norms (despite the fact that the army is surely the most normative of all society’s institutions…)? It is impossible to say. It is impossible to imagine asking him.

Another thing that makes the trousers remarkable, to my mind, is that the coach is full of young women. They are all eighteen, nineteen or twenty years old, mostly from the university. And these young women seem to have very little to say about his trousers. They seem very friendly with him… though perhaps they are only friendly on the surface, and underneath they despise him. Is that likely? After all, we are all bound on the same endeavour, striving for the same goal… If they don’t see the trousers as an existential problem, or a problem in logic, or ethics, or, more to the point, politics, then why should I?

As above.

WELL, YOU probably want to know what this is about.

You know me for who I am now, a funny daddy with a tickly chin, a daddy whose job has something to do with Chinese people. I hope you too will have my interest in China when you grow up. Katy dear – you seem at the moment to be the one most interested in the Institute, but then you are the elder.

Your daddy, however, was not always what he is now, and that, I suppose, is what I’m trying to get at. I want to tell you a bit about myself as I was when I was younger. Some of my behaviour – such as what I’m doing today, on this coach – will doubtless seem a bit strange to you.

Perhaps I should continue where I left off, that is, at Hull. My memories of that time are now a little hazy – it was over a quarter of a century ago – but I remember a few things very clearly. For instance, the house.

It was a terraced property on Christiania Street, near the centre of town. The house was on three floors, and always seemed very cold and dark. I suspect that some of the bulbs had blown out and nobody had bothered to replace them. Only the individual rooms were ever heated, so that the communal areas were always freezing. There were clouds of little black flies in the kitchen in summer. It was, by our present standards, rather basic. (I think you will agree that our present house is nice and warm, and always clean and bright.)

The house was shared between five of us: three young men and two young women.

Soon after I first moved in I decided to decorate the house, and so I painted my room, as well as the hallway, the dining room and the kitchen, with pictures of dinosaurs. I did this in consultation with the other tenants, of course. But one young woman – her name was Madeleine – was overlooked: she came very rarely out of her room at the front of the house, and had been missed, I suppose. One afternoon I discovered her standing stock still in front of a seven-foot-high iguanodon in the dining room. Her expression suggested that she didn’t like it.

‘Who did this?’ she asked.

‘I did,’ I said.

She paused. It seemed she was having trouble saying what it was she didn’t like about it.

‘It’s a bit sexist,’ she said finally.

I was dumbfounded. However, I did see her point. The iguanodon was an expression of some perhaps not very feminine energy. The odd thing was that while I was painting it I had no idea in my mind whether the iguanodon was male or female. It could easily, I thought, have been a female iguanodon.

•

Strangely enough this was the girl I later fell in love with. This was the 1980s, you understand, and it was not a very easy time to fall in love, as I have already said. The problem was not simply the prospect of nuclear annihilation. In those days it was not considered polite to attempt to initiate any relationship between the sexes. Such a thing could easily be interpreted as an affront. That, at least, is how it seemed to me at the time. Of course, there are still some people who feel like that today. Guy, for instance.

At any rate, in the 1980s, certain things were not done and certain things were not spoken of. One of the things that was not done was approaching any young woman and slyly putting your arm around her, while very, very drunk; and I admit I was drunk or I never would have tried it.

This occurred some time after the iguanodon incident. Madeleine and I were in the kitchen, where I had been boiling mussels. Hull is a fishing town, of course, and seafood of all types is cheap and plentiful. Madeleine had just made it clear that she disapproved of what I was doing – that is, boiling the mussels – and in fact had gone so far as to accuse me of being a ‘cannibal’; and it was at that point that I put my arm around her. She wriggled free from my grip, and I was too drunk, I suppose, to see that she was very displeased indeed. I laughed, and must have made some attempt to apologize, but the next thing I knew, a heavy boot – young women in the 1980s all wore boots, of the type more commonly seen today on fell-walkers – was heading on a trajectory straight for my groin. I should say to you, girls, that the groin is that part of a man’s body between his legs, and it is very painful if kicked.

Now, it has been proven that the unconscious regulates nine-tenths of all human behaviour; and in this case my unconscious served me very well. Despite my being drunk, I managed to take a half-step back – I could not have gone much further back, because the cooker with its pot of boiling mussels was behind me – and my hands shot down to the area where the boot was scheduled to arrive. The result was that boot and hands met. I found myself, in fact, tightly clasping Madeleine’s ankle. Madeleine had not made contact, as she had expected, with the region she had aimed for, and instead of the result she had pictured – that of me folding up and collapsing – found herself gripped tightly by one ankle.

We were both, as you may imagine, utterly shocked by the turn of events. I was shocked to be suddenly gripping her ankle, and she was shocked to be, instead of my vanquisher, my abject prisoner. Only fifteen seconds earlier, we had been talking about mussels. Madeleine was now hopping slightly on one leg to stay upright. At that moment I felt more than ever apologetic, but considered that it would be unwise to let the leg go just yet: she might wish to resume kicking.

I should mention at this point something I have omitted, though it is not really relevant – there were several other people in the room. One was Henry, a co-tenant, and the other was a young man whose name for the life of me I can’t remember, the other male co-tenant; and there may have been some other girls, perhaps friends of Madeleine’s. They were all watching with interest as events unfolded.

Madeleine didn’t say anything, and instead simply regarded me with a look of disbelief, breathing heavily through her nostrils. Her ankle felt quite delicious, I will admit, even in that heavy boot. I felt I had almost a right to touch it, since she had so recently tried to deal me a blow in the groin with it – I felt a moral right to it, I might say. And so, feeling my moral right to its continued possession, I pushed Madeleine a little backwards, with the result that she was forced to hop backwards on one leg. This seemed to me highly amusing – which I can see now was reprehensible – but I was, as I have said, very drunk. I made her hop back, then to one side, then to the other, all the time without either of us uttering a word (that I remember) and then I’m afraid I shoved her down, like a heap of dirty washing, into the corner by the sink. She went down with a great thump in a heap of orange dress in the corner. I thought to myself: ‘I’m in for it now’ – I had made up my mind not to defend myself in any way, and was ready to submit to any kind of punishment – when Madeleine simply picked herself up and walked out of the kitchen door, and into the night. It was winter and she had no coat on.

As you might understand, I was rather glad to see her go. I was also rather astonished. That sudden exit, without a word, without looking at me, without any expression I could decipher. What was going through her mind? Impossible to say! One moment she was in the corner like a rag-doll, and the next she was gone, and Henry’s laughter was echoing around the small kitchen smelling of mussels. I, however, had no desire to laugh. I was, I suppose, beginning to fall in love with her – if I had not already. Yes – I certainly had already fallen in love with her because otherwise I would never have attempted to put my arm around her waist.

•

Certain passages will need to be cut out of this diary as unsuitable for children. I will flag the passage above for possible deletion. It’s difficult – in fact it’s impossible – to know what age they will be when they read it. They might be fifty, or they might be fifteen – or, I suppose younger than fifteen. Or maybe we’ll all go together, in which case no one will read it.

I think near Market Weighton. Unfortunately I haven’t brought my watch – but about 5.45.

NOW, I have said already that the 1980s were distinguished by the fear of nuclear war. That statement could equally apply to the 1970s, the 1960s and the 1950s – even, I suppose, the 1940s. But I am qualified only to speak of the 1980s.

In the 1980s there was none of the current concern, perfectly justified, for the future of the planet, due to the release of certain gases. Nor were we preoccupied with ‘terror’ wrought by agents of foreign powers. Instead we lived in a permanent state of terror brought about by our own governments. Everyone expected the whole globe of the earth to be destroyed, suddenly, perhaps while we were in our beds, and completely, irrevocably. We were all convinced, my friends and I, who were all young, that the destruction of our world, our friends and family, and all our loves, was more or less assured, and that if there were any survivors they would eke out their remaining lives in the most horrible of circumstances, injured, sick, poisoned, cold, hungry, grieving, so that ‘the survivors would envy the dead,’ as someone said. Yes… It was not very nice in that time to be alive, and to be young was worse. Imagine our own idea of our own future! There was simply none… We expected to die at any minute. If not today, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then next week.

I remember that a young woman of my acquaintance – a really very remarkable and beautiful young woman – once told me – this would have been in 1981, in the first few weeks of my university course – that the world would in fact end in October 1982, when all the planets would be in alignment. When I heard her words, I remember, I was filled with an unreasoning joy. If she were correct, and if nothing else happened in the meantime, then we had a whole year before the end of everything, at which time I would have reached the quite advanced age of twenty. This was much more than I felt I had a right to expect. The idea that I might get to the age of forty-seven, or even see the year 2000, let alone 2010, I would have thought quite ludicrous, and perhaps even undesirable. In any case, even if by some miracle I did survive, I would, I presumed, by the year 2000, be so utterly changed that I would have nothing to do with myself as I had been, as a teenager. I could not really muster any interest in that remote figure, my future self. After all, it was I, as a teenager, who was in present danger, not that future self: it was I who expected at any moment to be buried in a collapsed house, or have my skin flayed off by a blast wave, or be blinded by a sudden bright light, or have my bones ground into the pavement by falling masonry… yes… luckily for you girls, that worry is now a thing of the past.

•

I must just tell you a little about this young woman, the one who informed me about the alignment of the planets. Her name was Hannah, which to me even now remains a very melodious name. In Japanese it means ‘nose’. She was only seventeen, but was already a talented artist and musician. Her remark about the alignment of the planets – which was made very early on a warm, dusty, aromatic July morning, as we walked together in Winterbank – will lead you to think, perhaps, that she was rather empty-headed. But she was nothing of the sort. She was a quite remarkably intelligent person, with a style of beauty so severe that it would have been… Well, let me say merely that I can’t imagine what sort of man would have been able to find within himself the temerity to…

I think she felt something for me, however, because she once appeared in front of me wearing only her underwear.

This took place at her parents’ house. Hannah’s mother was my tutor at the university, a woman by the name of Dr Closer. Dr Closer always used to kiss me hello and goodbye, not on the cheek, but full on the lips.

On this occasion I was in Dr Closer’s living-room, deep in conversation with Dr Closer – just the two of us – when all of a sudden Hannah sauntered into the room dressed only in her underclothing. She walked past us, towards the sofa, as if this were quite normal, and sat down. She then began reading a magazine. She had a very nice shape. Dr Closer seemed quite scandalized by her daughter’s behaviour, and told her sharply to go upstairs and put something on: Hannah gave her mother a cool look, got to her feet, and went back up the stairs to her bedroom. She didn’t come down again.

A little after Hannah had gone, I said goodbye to Dr Closer – receiving a kiss on the lips – and left the house. I pondered Hannah’s behaviour as I walked home. I don’t believe I came to any immediate conclusion that night. I realised that Hannah’s appearance in a state of near-undress was some sort of communication to me personally – she knew I was downstairs, alone, with her mother – but, unfortunately, I could not decide what that communication consisted of. I inclined at the time – and in fact still do – towards the idea that she had been making some sort of statement of a primarily intellectual nature. This statement was obscure, but might have been something such as the following: ‘You and I, Nicholas, are not man and woman, but repositories of a spark implanted in us by the One to whom we must return, and thus conventional propriety does not apply to us.’

•

Unfortunately the passage above will have to be considered for deletion, though, as I have suggested, there was nothing impure involved, at all: quite the opposite.

•

Guy – what was she doing with that girl?

As above.

FOR SOME reason the phenomenon of nakedness, or semi-nakedness – your father apologizes, girls – seemed to me, at the time, to have a theological or philosophical dimension. The encounter with Hannah Closer in her underwear was mirrored by another event at around the same time. I have mentioned Henry, our housemate at Hull, who was there that time when Madeleine and I danced around the kitchen. Henry was a short, stocky chap, quite good-looking, with curly fair hair, an ex-student of history, I believe. Well, he became quite drunk one evening – there was a party going on – and began holding forth to a small crowd of people in the little dining room with the iguanodon. Houses in the 1980s – I haven’t been in any similar since – used to have a dining room of quite unimaginable smallness between the hallway and the kitchen at the back. I have no idea what the architect was up to designing a room that small. It was only a little larger than the size of a double bed – it would certainly have been impossible to have put a double bed in it without having to bounce on the bed to get to the kitchen. The iguanodon was very conspicuous in so small a room, which is another reason why Madeleine had objected to it, I think.

Anyway, Henry was in this tiny room, drunk, and he looked at us, and said in his pleasant Humberside accent: ‘We are the last generation ever to exist on earth.’