Tim Parks - Goodness

Where the hell is Mother? I don’t want her holed up in a bedroom somewhere praying. That would be typical. And I quickly move along the two passageways that meet at right angles at the top of the stairs, opening doors, checking the bedrooms, the linen cupboard, the bathroom, even the tiny laundry room. Which paranoid activity inevitably reminds me of last night’s dream again, and I pause a moment at the top of the stairs as it all comes back.

I knew it had been a bad one. Of course, essentially, it’s just the same old mutilation fare. The new twist being that this time I was looking for my face. All over the house opening doors, looking under furniture, searching for my face. Unusually, though, as anxiety mounted, as I desperately hunted for and equally desperately hoped I wouldn’t find my nose, my eyes, my mouth, and worse still the expression those features must form, I came across Shirley brushing her hair in the bathroom the way she does, tossing it this way and that with a lovely sensuous motion. Instinctively I lifted my hands to cover myself, but she says calmly, ‘Nothing wrong with your face, love,’ and immediately I’m calm too. At least no one has noticed, I think, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. One can perfectly well go through life without a face if nobody notices. But now she frowns: ‘You really should get your arms looked at though, George.’ As though changing slides on a projector, attention switches in a flash to my right arm where strange pink rubbery outcroppings of flesh are forming just beneath the shoulder. I run a finger across them. ‘Age,’ I say, in the way one might of the dry fatty skin one tends to get above the elbow. But these jelly-like protrusions are gross. And then I see my forearms. They are bristling, bristling, with long, maybe four-inch lobster claws, blackish, as if burnt, unutterably ugly as they wave and grope of their own accord. I open my mouth to scream. To find I haven’t a mouth, for there is no face of course. At which point one wakes up to find that all is perfectly okay.

Downstairs I check out the lounge. Maybe fifteen people. Almost everybody is busy dancing or at least deep in conversation. Gregory’s girlfriend is writhing particularly wildly, though always stony-faced. Very suggestive contortions, and not near Gregory either. No sign of Shirley, or Mother. Where is she? In the breakfast room Charles is at the buffet table with a leg of chicken in his mouth, defending Liverpool local council against the robust good sense of Susan’s man, Eric. One of the karate guys splits his trousers showing how important it is to assume a low centre of gravity.

There is something very stable about the hum now, as if this buzz of alcohol-fuelled voices will go on for many hours. And checking my watch it is indeed time. I planned to do it now, when in the general tipsy hubbub Hilary will be forgotten. Sensing that if I stop to think, the cold sweat which is already coating face and hands will turn into violent shivering, I move to the sideboard where the spirits are. A well-dressed, clean-shaven boy who doesn’t know who I am, offers to do me the honours. ‘Fill it up,’ I tell him. He grins as if at a fellow freeloader. I take a gulp, light myself a cigarette, and armed, as it were, to the teeth, push through people down the hall, down the passage by the stairs, round through the cloakroom, past the bathroom and the door to the cubby and into the secluded study room.

To find Peggy and Gregory.

Why, after my silly, automatic, ‘Oops, sorry,’ closing the door on them, do I have such an overwhelming sense of frustration, and more precisely of déjà vu ? My childhood. Hearing, finding, knowing of Peggy with her lovers, feeling excluded, feeling somehow that my bubbly sister has a monopoly on life, on gaiety, that I am always to be in outer darkness gnashing my teeth. It’s only a couple of months since she had her abortion for heaven’s sake.

I hesitate in the cloakroom where hooks are overloaded with rain-scented jackets, duffles, macs, mohair. In the bathroom someone coughs. An explosion of laughter comes from just round the corner in the hall. My cigarette is more than half burned. I take a good gulp of the whisky, knock brusquely on the study again and push back in.

‘George, really!’

‘Sorry, I don’t want to bother you guys, but Charles is looking all over for you, Peg. Could walk in any moment.’

They’re still at the stage of fumbling in each other’s clothes. They only met at most a couple of hours back. They both came with other partners. Gregory half sits, flustered, a glint of saliva on his beard.

‘Why don’t you, er, adjourn a moment and nip upstairs. Go to our room at the end of the passageway to the right. There’s a key in the door.’

But our room is next to Hilary’s room. Why on earth did I suggest this? Do I want them to burn? Or do I want them to save Hilary? In which case, what’s the point? Or was it the only thing I could think of? In any event I’m screwing up. I’m losing control. I draw the last puffs on the cigarette with my black lobster claws and tip another gulp of whisky into the place where my mouth must be. Only half the glass left.

‘Good on you, bruv,’ Peg says chuckling. The two of them are getting up, rearranging their clothes. ‘We’ll run the gauntlet of the hall then.’ And crouching down, like a commando about to storm a beach she grabs gangly Gregory by the hand and begins to hurry out through the cloakroom.

I look around. They’ve turned on the angle lamp on the desk, pointing it down at the floor near the wall. And in this would-be romantic, shadowy light, I quickly toss my whisky onto a dusty green armchair, then dislodge the dying coal of my cigarette so that it falls at the edge of the little pool of yellow spirit seeping into the cushion. Immediately it goes out. Without hesitating I pull a lighter from my pocket and try to light the material directly. An almost invisible paraffin flame appears, but seems not to touch the material itself, seems to dance, detached and ghostlike. It surely can’t be enough. But I must get out now. I can’t wait to see. I haven’t even closed the door properly. I turn to grab the ashtray I left on the desk and spill it over the flame. But it isn’t there. Why? Why not? Has some creepy person like my mother already gone round gathering and emptying ashtrays? For heaven’s sake!

The flames are biting into the material now, the metamorphosis of fire is taking place, flaring yellow and smoky. I should put the thing out at once. Any forensic idiot will be able to see it was started on purpose. But in a trance I move to the door. And at last I realise, with the sudden lucidity of revelation that I am only acting here and now so that some action in my life at last there may be. So that I won’t keep plaguing myself trying to decide what to do. The outcome is almost irrelevant. I am acting because I can’t bear myself. I find my mental processes intolerable. I am horrible. And I may very well just go upstairs and sit out the horror with Hilary, burn away my lobster claws, my jelly flesh. My mother is right. I have been damned from earliest infancy.

The light of the flames is now brighter and fiercer than that of the lamp. I must have been here five minutes. There’s the fierce crackle of a bonfire. Suddenly frightened by the common-sense fear that somebody will hear, will smell, I hurry out of the room and close the door carefully behind me. The heavy wood clicks softly on good do-it-yourself insulating foam. And in an unplanned brainwave I go and pick up the low table at the bottom of the hall, bring it back, set it down across the study door and, unburdening the hooks one by one, place a huge pile of damp coats on top. Now back to the party. My face, I feel, like Moses returning from Sinai, is glowing with heat.