Journey IV – Fuddy-Duddy

As time went on I was further disappointed to discover that the conversations I’d been so intrigued by simply revolved around what the people they knew had been getting up to. As I got to know more of them, so I was included in the conversations more. Maureen and Jo had apparently been sleeping together at first but then Jo got off with a guy called Graham at one of the parties and brought him back. Maureen seemed to be interested in Ian for a while after that (the guy with the shaved head) but he wasn’t all that keen and she disappeared soon afterwards.
To be fair, Darren’s contribution could be very entertaining but it was all incredibly trivial. Occasionally there’d be a long discussion about the music we were listening to or, among the girls, something daring or unflattering that had been worn at the last party. Very occasionally someone would start talking about something philosophical or spiritual but it was all very woolly and pretentious. There was vague talk of missed lectures and overdue assignments, and a suggestion that I enrol in something but I never came across anything even remotely resembling a college or university. Other times there’d be a brief but pointless argument over some trivial matter, usually started by Chloe – the short haired girl whose bottom I’d seen that first morning. Nobody really paid her much attention and she usually stomped back to her room and slammed the door, which was at least a refreshing display of genuine feeling.
Early on I had tried to talk a bit about the meaning of all this and why we were here, as we had on the boat, but it was impossible. They didn’t exactly avoid the subject, and sometimes some anecdotes and vague hypotheses were put forward but nobody seemed to want to pursue the subject. Sometimes I persisted but I got the impression that they thought I was being a bit too “intense” or “paranoid”. They thought I analysed things too much, as if thinking was the cause of the problem rather than vice-versa. I came across a similar argument when I was alive, as if my trying to work out what was wrong with my life was the cause of my problems.

And, as time went on I got used to the inconsequential exchanges, the shifting, superficial relationships, the unmemorable conversations. Most of the people were friendly, many were indifferent, few were hostile but there was no sense of any developing connection with anyone in particular. This made life casual and relaxed on one level but made me feel horribly vulnerable on another. If anything happened would anyone come to help me? Would I even be missed? Would any of us?
And there was a feeling of menace about the place, although I couldn’t begin to say what or who the menace was exactly. To me it was palpable in every empty doorway, in every darkened window, in the night time itself – not hostile or predatory exactly. I couldn’t imagine their motives, whoever, or whatever they were, living in the shadows. Sport perhaps? Fun?

Eventually though I found myself going with the flow. I shut up about my worries and my thoughts and found myself surprisingly content. It was a weird situation in that I looked and felt about thirty but still had all the memories of an old man. I was amazed every morning to see my flat, hard belly back again. I wandered about in just a pair of worn army surplus shorts, vest and para boots and looked, I thought, pretty good. It was exactly like life in fact, except without the worry of where the next meal was coming from and whether I was going to die of cold next winter. And thirty had been a good age for me, relatively speaking. I’d been to raves and festies and gigs and parties, I’d danced all night and hugged scores of strangers. This place was a bit like that, and it made me wonder just how old all these others (average age about twenty-two on the face of it) really were. Or maybe they’d all died young, having too much fun and this was their idea of heaven. In which case, what was I doing there?

And for a while it even came to seem quite interesting – or at least – it came to seem that it might get interesting. I enjoyed the music and no longer felt too old to get up and bop about. Also I no longer felt I was old enough to do without sex. I gave up on meeting anyone at a party and I stopped going to a lot of them (it was just too frustrating) but some of the girls at the house were pretty and seemed approachable and available, so I remained quietly optimistic on that front.
The menacing atmosphere of the town at night too, secluded as we were in our little island of music and warmth, provided an interesting backdrop. Sometimes, when the conversation drifted off and I was bored I would think about our isolation and vulnerability there in that little kitchen and when the evening became too sleepy and giggly I’d go and stand behind the sofa at the window, drawing the curtains behind me and look out at the street and the darkness, feeling the draught on my body, and I’d be sure I saw strange beings moving about out there. I accepted that I was probably just being paranoid but I couldn’t be sure. I felt fairly safe moving about during the day, and to some extent in a noisy group at night, but nothing would have made me go out there alone after dark. Nobody did. Even my route past the entrance to take the steps up to my room was something I preferred not to do alone and I always made sure the lights were on. My room I kept locked, and once I was up there I didn’t go out again until it was light.
I’m not sure how much the others felt the same way. I noticed they didn’t tell me there was nothing happening, only that they didn’t seem to think it was worth talking about.

Eventually though I had to accept the fact that I was trapped and furthermore that I probably wasn’t going to find a girl who was interested in me at any time in the near future. This was particularly frustrating since many of the girls went around the house only slightly dressed, casually falling out of their tops on a regular basis. Quite often we would be sitting around in the kitchen, in the afternoon or late into the night and the conversation would get a little more charged and there’d be maybe a game with forfeits leading to some playful exhibitionism or the girls would dance erotically together and pretend it wasn’t for our titillation. Sometimes a rather intense flirtation would develop between people who were otherwise ‘just good friends’ and we’d be sitting right next to them on the sofa as they embarked on some fairly advanced foreplay. Next day they’d be slightly flushed, but still ‘just friends’, as before. Sometimes the heavy fumes of sex were all but unbreathable. I never got used to it. In some ways I didn’t want to – I wanted more than casual sex, certainly, but I wouldn’t have turned it down. I thought about Andrea’s advice but it didn’t seem to apply. They were just girls after all, and as she had warned me, they just wanted to have fun. In retrospect I realise my age – even looking just thirty, didn’t help but I wasn’t like them. There were the guys who looked even older than I did but I wasn’t like them either. It wasn’t that I was rejected so much as that no one saw me that way. The girls seemed to like to think of me as friendly and nice but perhaps a bit too serious. Some of them took to calling me Mr Giles who I understood to be some sort of fuddy-duddy librarian character on the telly. Once or twice I tried a flirtatious comment but was made to understand that I was embarrassing them so instead I went for displacement activity – dancing until I fell over.

So as autumn became winter I spent more and more time in my room or wandering the streets, looking for a way to move on. I found a storeroom with a lot of old magazines and books in it and that kept me occupied for a while. I can’t say my room was a particularly attractive place to spend time in, what with the mushy pea paint job, but I kept it warm, and I cleaned the window and washed the bedding so it wasn’t too bad. A girl called Kim came and joined me sometimes saying she just wanted to relax away from the others and liked me because I didn’t see her as a sex object. I didn’t have the heart to correct her on that. She was a pretty girl who liked to wear low cut tops and short skirts and I found her company rather unrelaxing, but it was good to have company. Alone, I fantasised about her mercilessly.
I did also notice that there were other quiet, sexless souls about the place that rarely or never came down to the kitchen, keeping themselves to themselves. Something about them though discouraged conversation.

Voyage II – Rastus & Bessie

My fellow voyagers seem friendly enough. I haven’t made any particular efforts to strike up a conversation but they come along and ask what I’m reading and I’m not unwelcoming. It’s not that I don’t want to socialise. It’s just that I’ve never really known how to do it. I can spout politics or art or religion until the cows get sick of it and go out again, but I can’t chat. Never could. Don’t know why. When you see a group of people – any age, any sex, out together, relaxed in each other’s company, getting pissed, flirting, “having a laugh” as they say, that’s the thing I envy. God, I want that. The only time I ever really felt any real closeness was in bed with a woman. I could have done that forever.
I like that no one can tell what age you really are here. I look about thirty I suppose. I don’t know why particularly. I asked Andy about it and he said ‘What age would you have chosen to be?’ and I said ‘About thirty.’ and he said ‘There you go then.’
That’s enough about me. The sky is pale, the sleet has let up and I’m togged up in my favourite lounger. I have a book on cinema from the library in my lap but it’s too cold to let my hands out so I sit and watch the waves go by. I could do with a coffee but I’m just too damned comfortable here. I think it’s best if I keep myself to myself as much as possible. It’s better that way. Maybe it’s too soon. Maybe we all need time to adjust.

I was sitting near a group of people at a table in the bar yesterday and I happened to overhear one of the women ask one of the men if he thought her dog, Bessie, would be alright. Her face looked empty and loose, like a collapsed balloon. She looked to be in her early twenties and yet at the same time she seemed like an old lady. I thought of my old dog Rastus. He was a handsome collie cross – like a black and white Alsatian. Wonderful dog – not wildly adventurous but fiercely independent, undemanding but never averse to a bit of fuss when it was on offer (much like myself, I like to imagine. Ha ha). I’m not one for intruding on other people’s misery, but this woman looked so sad, and I suppose I wanted to show some solidarity so I turned around and told her about Rastus. None of them seemed to know how to take this. They just looked awkward and somewhat suspicious. I thought the woman might want to talk about Bessie but she just looked even more upset. Why do I always have to say something? I should just keep quiet.
I go along to the forward lounge, where it’s quieter, but close and humid. The cold outside fogs the windows up and consequently there’s a dense, muffled atmosphere in there. I quite like it. I take a book and sit with my coffee and my mind drifts. I feel oddly at ease – disconnected, free.

Another time I was at the bar and a chap came up and ordered some wine. I made a comment about the good stuff on offer here, just to be sociable, and he looked me up and down and sneered slightly. ‘Someone like you would think so I suppose’ he said and headed off.
‘Not as good as his cellar at home I don’t expect’ said the barman.
I suppose I still just look like some old crusty to them. You’d think being dead would make people a bit more insightful, wouldn’t you. Some people just seem to be pissed off that they haven’t got their money with them. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians turned up here with all the stuff they’d been buried with, as they expected to or, if not, how outraged they were.

So I stay out of the way for the most part. I look forward to seeing Andrea every few days and that, dear friend, will have to do me. I spend a lot of time in the library – partly because nobody expects conversation there, partly because it feels quite homely. I spent an inordinate amount of time in the public library at home, when I was a kid and then later on too, and not just to get warm. I read art, philosophy, history, psychology, ecology, some novels too although I preferred non-fiction. I used to go to the university library too, until they stepped up security in the nineties. I always tried to look more like a penniless student than a hobo anyhow so they never challenged me until I didn't have an ID card.
I always wanted to go to university – not for the qualification so much – I just wanted to be a student. I wanted to go to student parties and hang out in student bars and go see local bands and, most importantly, I wanted to sleep with student women. It all seemed very glamorous at the time. They used to take the piss, my sisters – said I was The Rebel Without a Course.

The titles at this place are unfamiliar and by authors I’ve never heard of. I study the illustrations – exquisitely detailed or savagely expressionistic pen and ink drawings, woodcuts and watercolours (never any photos) – plants and invertebrates, and buildings and maps and landscapes that I’m sure have no equivalent in life. I find myself concentrated, lost in the evasive reasoning and subtle design. In retrospect I can remember nothing specific of what they’ve told me and couldn’t begin to explain it. Nevertheless I am left with powerful new perspectives that sit deep in my consciousness – like a strange new filter on my vision in a hitherto unknown primary colour, or drawings made using a completely new spatial dimension alongside the usual three. By comparison, the insights I gained from books in life seem of thin and insubstantial stuff.

I saw some sort of giant squid today – at least I think that’s what it was. I remember a passage in ‘The Voyage of the Kontiki’ where a huge eyeball passes under them during the night, peering up at them through the dark water. It was the fifties of course, so inevitably they chucked a spear at it, as one did in those boy’s own days, and it disappeared – they never did find out what it was. That’s what I saw here – a bloody great luminous eyeball, big as an umbrella, peering up at me. I could see the green phosphorescent cells racing about its perimeter, turning electric blue and shocking pink. I didn’t tell anyone. Nobody I know here would be interested. Justine might have been.

Journey II – A place to crash

By the time I found somewhere to stop it was very dark and the others had all vanished. I left the street and crossed a patch of neglected lawn under some trees. It was a very still night, humid and heavy. The fresh scent of balsam poplar wafted past. The lawn sloped down steeply ahead, down toward a wooded gully. I didn't know where to go next. I’d been wandering the lamp-lit streets for what seemed like hours.
All the while I’d not been alone I’d been able to be strong, stay focused. The others looked a lot younger and more nervous than me and I took the lead, but when I realized I was down to my last companion – a morose, hunched, be-hoodied teenager, his chin barely covered in straggly black bristles, I began to feel a panic. I couldn’t make out anything he was saying. He seemed to be talking to himself. He mumbled that he needed a toilet but had no paper. I watched him standing, fidgeting. ‘Come on’ I said, heading off across the road and past some trees into a deserted market place. I don’t know where I lost him.
So I headed for the building across the grass on my left. It was a long, low, two storey place, with windows all along the side. There were lights on in one or two windows and music coming from one of them. I could see someone moving about inside. There was a little laughter. I moved cautiously across the wet grass to a shadowy stone archway. Inside there were doors opening left and right onto a corridor and in front of me a winding stone staircase to the first floor. I turned left. All along the corridor there was random stuff lying about – bikes, posters fallen down, cardboard boxes, and the smell of fetid sportswear, stale food and patchouli – the unmistakable ambiance of university accommodation. Further up I could hear voices and muffled music coming from a room on the right and I decided check it out. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t just wander about all night. I got to the doorway and took a deep breath.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting exactly but this was a little disappointing. It was a kitchen basically, dimly lit by a low watt bulb hung low from the ceiling and covered by a reddish shade and a piece of tatty Indian silk. There was a table in the middle, largely covered in bottles, smoking paraphernalia and bits of paper. To the left of the door under a window was a sofa, also tatty, also hidden with bits of ethnic fabric. There was a fridge freezer covered in stickers and magnets opposite, and with more miscellaneous stuff on top, and a sink at the end to my right, behind the door, heavily loaded with unwashed crockery. Every corner of the room, shelves, floor, back of the sofa had stuff on it – magazines, clothes, books, more bottles. There was like a drift of it in every space that was not needed to walk through to get to the sink or the fridge or around the table. Then there were the inhabitants, who hardly seemed to notice me. There were two guys chatting at the table, one with long floppy hair and a goatee, in a paisley shirt, the other in black with his head shaved, and mostly involved in rolling what was obviously a joint. There were a couple of girls on the sofa, one in a dress with leggings underneath and with beads in her hair, and the other in jeans and a vest with TALK TO THE FACE ‘COS THE TITS AIN’T LISTENING written across her enormous boobs. They were also chatting and smoking. The latter smiled and waved at me casually. Two other guys were sitting on the floor by the fridge in deep discussion and there was a girl with short spiky hair over by the sink looking exasperatedly for something. The room smelled, not unappealingly, actually rather cosily, of hash, incense, wasted food, damp, and barely adequate personal hygiene. The music was some sort of dub hip-hop compilation I vaguely recognized from the 90s. It was all very familiar. One of the guys at the table grinned at me and offered me a smoke, which I took, to be polite, and asked how it was going. I got some wine from the fridge and squeezed in at the far end of the sofa. Nobody seemed to object.

I was still there when I woke up in the morning and one of the guys came to look in the fridge. The day was overcast and not helped by the grime on the window and the attempt at a curtain strung up there. I looked around. It all looked very grey and dingey in the daylight. The bulb was still on but that only made it worse. Every surface was dusty and ringed with drink stains. Later on, the guy with the floppy hair came in and made tea. I saw a pair of red football shorts, a stained white tee-shirt and pale pimply legs where his robe fell open. He made some toast and coffee and left. Later on, when it became obvious that nobody cared if I was there or not I went to have a look around to see if there was somewhere I could crash. I found my way up the stairs near the entrance where I’d come in. On the corridor above, the girl with the short hair, apparently wearing nothing but an extra large tee shirt came out of her room rubbing her eyes, yawned and headed up to what I guessed was the bathroom. Going up the steps I could see her little white bottom under the hem. I looked out the windows and across the uncut lawn and over some small trees to the road and the houses opposite. Blackbirds were hopping about down there. I could hear the bass of some music coming from one of the rooms up ahead. The whole building had a faded arts-and-crafts feel to it with lots of mouldings on the stair well and window frames, but seemed to have been badly decorated and furnished in the 70s. Nothing matched, everything was scruffy and stained and discoloured, but felt strangely familiar and oddly comfortable.
I found an empty room not far from the stairs. It had a small Victorian cast iron fireplace (long unused) and a single bed took up most of the rest of the room against the wall under a window. I put my bag on it. Everything, including the fireplace, was painted an unpleasant pale green, and most of the daylight was excluded by a brown cloth. I took it down. The room was cold and smelled damp but the door was lockable. I sat on the bed and looked around. I’d definitely stayed in a lot worse places in my life, squats and hostels, and my house mates seemed harmless. I got my belongings out and put them on the shelves and tried the bed. The sheets felt cold but we’d been issued with sleeping bags on the boat so I got into mine and quickly fell asleep.