D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

Finally he stood up and made some excuse and got a flashlight from his duffle bag and wandered away up the beach. The sea hissed and sucked. She watched him go, remembering her bravado of the morning. I clean up after myself. And when I don’t you leave me. It had been cruel to them both, and ridiculous. The bright inhumanity of the woman she had grown out of. The woman, if there was any hope at all, she had to have grown out of.

The old Punch and Judy man hardly seemed to notice Rod’s going. He was telling a story about an escapologist done up in chains and put in a gunny sack on the cobbles outside the Tower of London. Sacks she knew, but gunny was a word from before she was born.

Vincent’s man was waiting for me under a street lamp. He gave me another of NTV’s thick brown envelopes. The ease with which Vincent poured out bank notes revolted me. The man and I had nothing to say to each other. I opened the envelope and took out two fivers and handed the rest back. Katherine wouldn’t mind. She had things to concern her other than where money came from or went.

‘You sure that’s enough?’ I said I was sure that was enough. He put the remaining money away in a briefcase. ‘Mr Ferriman said to tell you you’re doing a great job. And to keep on with the good work.’

I stared at him. I needed Vincent’s encouragement like I needed typhus.

‘And he’s fixed tomorrow. He’s rented a caravan along the coast a bit. It looks beat up and you can find it by accident like. The way the lady’s going she won’t ask too many questions.’

He gave me the address on a piece of paper. The way the lady was going Vincent stood to make a considerable loss on his investment. Twenty-six days he’d paid for… Maybe that was why Mason had been in the monitoring room. Maybe he had plans to sue the nice doctor. Three hundred thousand pounds for three or four or five half-hour shows was a lot of money.

I put the address away in my back pocket. ‘Tell Mr Ferriman thank you. No -1 can tell him that any time. Tell him you saw me, and I was looking fine, and—’

‘I can’t say that. To tell the truth, you’re looking terrible.’

I left him under his lamp post. It was time he learned that the last thing the Man with the TV Eyes wanted was the truth. I didn’t go straight back to Katherine but on, with my fivers in my hand, to the nearest pub. I had no intention of getting drunk: I merely was putting off, in the ritual, male fashion, the eventual homecoming.

Some people are fascinated by chance decisions. The history that would have been changed if only so-and-so hadn’t stopped to pick his nose at some apparently unimportant moment. Me they bore stiff. All the same, chance decisions and unimportant moments and unimportant places sometimes come together like you’d never believe. That particular evening the unimportant moment was eight-thirty and the unimportant place was an unimportant pub with an unimportant telly.

This telly showed me Katherine Mortenhoe in her own, sensational, one and only, never-to-be-equaled Human Destiny half-hour.

I left that pub even soberer than I had entered it. Colder and soberer. And wiser too… You see, beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder. Neither is compassion, or love, or even common human decency. They’re not of the eye, but of the mind behind the eye. I had seen, my mind had seen, Katherine Mortenhoe with love. Had seen beauty. But my eyes had simply seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Had seen Katherine Mortenhoe. Period.

I couldn’t even blame Vincent. He hadn’t cut the footage for shock effect. He hadn’t changed the emphasis. He hadn’t even cheapened it with sob-stuff narration, or music over. The sound track was mine and the sequences were mine also. It was Katherine Mortenhoe as my eyes had seen her.

And my eyes had seen a dribbling, palsied wreck. My eyes had seen a ponderous, middle-aged woman capering unsuitably about a beach. My eyes had seen her filthied clothes. My eyes had seen her lumpy, graceless body lumber naked out of a pretty-pretty stream and stoop for the towel so that her breasts swung like pale, water-filled bladders. The sarcastic wolf whistles of my fellow-drinkers are still with me. This was how they saw her. When she wasn’t repulsive she was pathetic. I knew her to be neither.

But it was I and I alone who had assembled through the medium they tell us cannot lie definitive evidence that she was just that: either repulsive or pathetic, and often both. Evidence that had been seen and believed by maybe sixty million people.

I loved her. If that was the word. And there was no other.

There are times when self-disgust is a luxury, when you can scrooge around in it and feel delightfully unclean. There are other times when self-disgust is simply a destroyer. And there are yet other times, I know now, when self-disgust is a challenge. I paused on the promenade by the entrance to the old pier. I could go down to her, and vomit up my guilt, and feel better, and vanish into the night. But she didn’t want my guilt. I could instead simply vanish into the night, keeping my guilt to myself, and pray that she died before Vincent got other men to her. But she wasn’t going to die, not in the few hours that I could win.

I walked out onto the pier. The sea and the sky were utterly dark, and as I left the street lamps behind me I switched on my flashlight. The floor of the pier was made of thick planks, caulked with tar like the deck of an old barge. I walked along the side of the windowless dance hall to the very end of the pier. There was a high protective railing, and signs warning of the danger. I climbed up the railing and sat astride it. I could hear the sea below, and the creaking of the dance hall shell behind me. I shone my light down, but the sea was too far below and the beam died in the void. I had never in my life thought of suicide as a viable course of action and I didn’t then. In fact the idea never entered my head.

I sat on the rail and considered the options. A new one occurred to me. I was, I insist cold sober. I was not reacting with panic or hysteria. I suppose I insist on this because I am in many ways proud of the detestable, self-mutilating thing I did, and won’t be given excuses. I took my flashlight and threw it as far out to sea as I could, watching it flash and swing and curve down till it disappeared. It was a heavy flashlight and it went a long way. I watched it because I didn’t want there to be any suggestion later on that I might have dropped it by accident. If I was to spit in Vincent’s face I must do it properly.

I took off my sound gear and threw that away also. The gray, overcast day had darkened uncomplainingly into a starless, sightless night. I stayed looking out to sea, staring into the impenetrable black. The pain soon began. When I couldn’t go on looking I closed my eyes. I’m not good at pain. All I could do was hang on.

I’ve been told that I made noises, and that it was these noises that got people up from the beach below to help me. I’m afraid I don’t remember, I only know that by the time they got to me the pain had stopped. I had bought back what I had sold. I was free.

Roddie had turned in a winner. Vincent was never wrong about these things. The show had everything: fine art-work, a strong narrative line, pathos, suffering, excitement, humor, offbeat characters, even some magnificently earthy female nudes. The telephone calls started coming in even while it was being screened. The public was siphoned off by Public Relations, but the others he tried to speak to each and every one. It was natural to value most the praise of his fellow professionals. Inevitably an invitation or two snowballed into an after-the-show party in the Reception Lounge. It was a shame Roddie couldn’t have been there. Everybody said the show was a certain award winner. And to prove it several NTV directors were there, and champagne was authorized. Although modest to the last, privately Vincent agreed with them. And Vincent was never wrong about these things.