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THE FUTURE’S COMING EVERYWHERE
CANDICE
it’s hard to find a library. They’re
not burnt – but if you find one, they are warm. Conrad spends his days there,
sleeps, reads manuscripts and eats. Better than a hostel, better than the
street. What
fun the old guys had – proud and sneaky, cynical and loyal. The name, the
place – it bound you, gave you a side ... to be on, or to plot against.
Plotting – that makes you, most everyone, a spy: the boss needs you, so you
can scream at him, have huffs and loves, sleep on the heather, drink the
hooch, take a musket ball full in the face.... The causes? Here, all are
obscured, abstruse, odd: labyrinths. In other worlds, it still goes on, the
monarchy, the faith, heads lopped and bodies hung. That’s
our past, as we read the record – and someone’s future. * The journal,
the manuscript, says: ‘I must acknowledge that I have not been brede a
schollar; nor can I put this in a true stile...’ ‘That’s
the so-called Major, so-called “of Castle Leathers”: really, neither rank nor
house. Can’t make much of that,’ Conrad thinks. ‘No new edition there, no
masterpiece ... those wordy Scots! the Latin, the bad French, intrigues....’ ‘An
amateur spy, like almost all of us, for little money, just to live, to be
near a secret, a confidence, false friends, carrying something dangerous – a
packet, our mortality, juggling with it and what we might not discover, since
it probably won’t exist.’ * ‘Politics?
Sex? Drugs? We’re supposed to have had all that, and now be connoisseurs of
booze,’ says Conrad. ‘Where are we headed? No one believes in anything their
parents did. No heaven and no hell. No nation and no friends. A false nation,
rather – invisible, voices bodiless. People with other origins – they have
someone to cling to, maybe.... But even they – there’s so many villages, so
many clans to come from, indelible sticky stuff, custom-designed bird-lime
... they don’t adhere to any of the rest.’ ‘The
tolerance we claim – it’s a veneer, a way of making vapid gatherings,’ says
his pal, Paolo. ‘When some threat appears – they’re all getting ready for a
Hitler: a good death in a structure, whether it’s a regiment or a hospice.
Everybody dies, the song says: so long as your side has an anthem, a
parade.... Someone to hold your hand and tell you you’ve done good.
Everywhere – it’s the same. The Russians and the Yanks – it’s “me first”
everywhere.’ He’s gripping Conrad’s arm in case he moves away. ‘Yes,
I agree. It’s the coming of the end. The candle flares before the finish,
brighter, quicker – dies. If it all can’t go on, can’t go further – it’s best
call it a day. Enough. Start selling off, and pulling down,’ Conrad says,
looking for the door. * It’s a
little false. Everyone says these things, everyone agrees. There’s no impact.
After, Conrad goes with Paolo to what they call the ‘gym’: for mental
press-ups. ‘We
should wear our togs, our togas, tonight,’ the organiser says. ‘Let’s try to
get to that deeper level.’ They
stand around, draped. Could be desert Arabs, or kids playing with some
sheets. There’s a coloured ball – you bounce it to someone you want to hear
speak, or you throw it at someone who interrupts. That’s copied from
somewhere where that’s done. ‘Your
husband – he was inarticulate. That’s why he did those paintings. They say
nothing,’ Conrad tells his old friend Émilie. ‘They’re
much admired, and beautiful. Significant people have written tributes,’ she
says. ‘What’s
more to say? Tributes? He escaped, he isn’t dead. He’s gone on being
beautiful, and staging all the past, as if it really matters, running it all
through again. This time, with a knowing smirk,’ Conrad says. ‘All painting
now’s a requiem and an exhumation.’ ‘Well,
what’s new? Secret services and new age stuff. It’s all the rage. Lovely
bodies turning to spiritual perfection, swapping brains. What a bore,’ she
says. ‘Everything’s a dull party – like this one.’ * Get someone
in the bed, a body in all its seasons. You play the animal to show you
aren’t, that you are human. Another body, a different taste and smells, lies
down beside, too tired to sleep... * ‘Dance!
Dance with the person beside you, we’ll all twist and twirl,’ the organiser
shouts. ‘Spin! Spin like cotton bobbins! Things will go wavery, dissolve ...
it’s good! That’s how it should be. Keep it up there, as long as you can.’ ‘You
work for nothing,’ Conrad says to Émilie. ‘And then perhaps it turns into a
job, and you get paid. But then you have to put out lies. I read old stuff,
and broadcast the odd bits. There’s this spy, centuries ago, a bendy trail
... then stories of a boozy trek – people love that... They were all naive
then, like dogs.... Then, it all took off. It got to where we are: the
massacres and the inventions, long lives, boredom … short lives and oblivion.
Now we know: it speeded up, too quick, too desperate. It’s like way back –
you knew the play was ending because the horses snuffled outside – the
carriages, drawn up for home....’ Conrad knows he can say anything to Émilie
– she doesn’t listen, doesn’t care: ‘The play ends anyway,’ he says, ‘The
horses aren’t a part.’ * ‘If you’re a
fugitive, the countryside looks vast, the people indifferent and uninformed.
It isn’t so,’ Conrad tells Paolo. ‘There’s spies everywhere, ready to tell a
tale, and fetch a party, a militia.... You should assume that everyone’s a
spy, outsiders, insiders too. Best turn everybody in, strangers, or just
neighbours absent for a while.’ ‘Then
came roads and telephones,’ says Paolo, playing along. ‘This century, running
doesn’t work.’ ‘Real
voices, they existed already, and much better than a telephone,’ Conrad says.
‘They’d cut your head off, and no “ahh and ugh”. It was the only way you wouldn’t
rise again. No mark set upon your grave, if grave you got.’ ‘There’s
always a regime. Those are the oldest things,’ Paolo says. ‘That
country, that Scottish countryside – was a history of hamlets, of places with
no one; but to sell land it has to have a name; mills and their streams,
forced betrothals, early deaths ... the crows, who know the future. Then the
rest, the other birds,’ says Conrad. ‘It’s the northland – there’s water
everywhere. A tiny settlement is possible, is best. The south is different,
they had cities, round a well, a river. Another kind of planet.’ ‘Going
for centuries – all you needed to know at the start, and then at the finish,
just the same. Unless you were invaded,’ Paolo says, tagging along... ‘It
was terrible, of course,’ says Conrad. ‘A tyranny of little things, small
lies, tiny people – a priest, a fear, a lord, a usurer, a husband, father,
crazy crones and seers ... you fell down in the field and died, or a cow
breathed in your face, gave you idiocy with boils... See the corpses in
chains at the crossroads ... looks like you, Paolo. And me. Reactionary? you
say. Returning somehow to what was? That has no appeal for me. We’re moiling
in the spate, Paolo, it’s useless wishing you could die of thirst...’ The
old villagers can’t do poetry, they must put it in their lives. No old movies
left, no sound, no sepia. You find the treatments, the sketches, in the court
record, the land registry, no one knows who they were, poets, assassins, what
they looked like, they’d be a few frames, no continuity, no character, no
context, no lapse of time, no whiting of hair, the clothes change while you
glance – families, expedients, a dash for somewhere like a vole, a stoat, a
flash in the undergrowth – if you don’t get eaten, you’re disappeared for
ever. They
did nothing for themselves – there was deportation. Clearances. Epidemics:
joining a regiment to go and kill southerners, mostly. Where there are
battles, not wars, things end quick. But, there’s civil massacres ... after
battles lost. * ‘You’re not
getting into depth,’ the organiser tells Conrad. ‘Maybe
I’m getting whatever’s the opposite,’ says Conrad. ‘Is it as precious? You
know what you want of us, Lidia, but not what we want. I for one – have no
idea. When I stop bothering, I’ll say, “that’s it”. That’s experience, the
common state, known, done with, finished. We speak, communicate – we
understand, and so – nothing we are or say is ours, special, unique. Then –
you go “croak”. Made in someone’s grinning image, a toad’s grimace, squashed
by the years.’ How
can you react to that? Lidia doesn’t try. ‘We
have partners now,’ says Conrad, ‘as if we’re panning for gold or founding
Macy’s. My partner’s gone. She said, “You’re a person, Conrad, who’ll never
get a medal for anything. Not for anything at all. Not even ‘best dog in
show’.”’ ‘Oh,
I see what she means,’ says Lidia. ‘It’s her turn now, so off you go! You
should be a big monster, Conrad. You’d know then why people treat you as they
do – but you’re a small monster. The treacherous kind.’ ‘I
need a bed,’ says Conrad. ‘With electricity, where I can stay for months,
then leave, not paying.’ ‘No,
Conrad,’ Lidia says, ‘staying with me would not be ethical.’ She
softens her voice, avoids the hand touch that should come with that. ‘You’re
full of anomalies, my dear,’ she says. ‘Your search for justice: that follows
great unpunished violence. Equality – comes after wars. Fraternity – found
only in war, in the trenches, in flight, in marching in allegro time.... Your
unchanging village – repressive – perpetuates the disasters you deplore – the
famines, the rivalries, the sickness, the ignorance unto death, the
bullying.... You must look elsewhere, Conrad – not in what you think you
know, desire.... That only brings its opposite.’ ‘I
didn’t know that’s what I want,’ Conrad says. ‘I’m thirty, Lidia – the good
days are past, the brain, the heart – they are mature, ready to drop off the
tree. I’ve a biography: already I’ve a past, I can look back, as if there’s
been an itinerary... That’s what my parents thought – they wandered. Before
that – no journey, just heads down for the struggle. Now – you can’t do
anything with us, Lidia...’ ‘That’s
your problem,’ Lidia says. ‘Not mine. I don’t touch you. Think! Think about
the future...’ ‘It’s
always being talked about,’ says Conrad. ‘The experts! But that’s not the
future – it’s the present; that is all we know ... it always is. Anyway,
Paolo will stay with you. He loves the music – “waiting for the golden light”
– that’s the line, that’s what he wants.’
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