Tim Parks - Europa

immediately and in order then to explain a readiness which I feared would not be understood (since when have you ever shown any inclination to fight for the cause?) , I actually went so far as to say that since others were making the very considerable effort to organize this trip on everybody’s behalf, the least somebody like myself could do was to show solidarity and come along. I could read a book, I said, during the long journey, I had a lot to read for work, for prospective work, or I could just think (just!). And standing there in the spare because institutional room where our encounter took place, amongst graceless office furniture on a stone-patterned linoleum floor indifferently cleaned by a pampered and unmotivated menial staff, standing there talking to this man whose fecklessness rivals even my own, whose only stable relationship appears to be his passion for the mongrel dog whose hairs smother all his shabby clothes, I was trying to reassure him that there was nothing peculiar in my so rapidly subscribing to his courageous initiative , that there was nothing peculiar in my eagerly adding my name to his list of scrawled signatures. I was almost apologizing, for God’s sake, for enrolling in his expedition. Or rather, I was already concealing what 1 already knew in my heart to be the real and only reason for my behaving in this extraordinary and inconsistent fashion, for — my agreeing, that is, to come on this ridiculous and pointless trip; the same reason, it should be said, why I have now, even as I sit here churning these thoughts on the back seat of this coach as it inches its way out to one of those nodal points where the motorway system plugs into the city so that one can be sucked off at tremendous speed to some other and in every way similar city — the same reason why I have now suddenly buried my face in a book the words on whose pages I not only do not see but do not even really want to see. For she has just stood up to get down her dark leather document-case from the overhead luggage rack. She is in the third seat from the front on the left.

And to think, to think that for more than six months now, or is it a year? I had been speaking of myself (to myself) as a man healed, as a man emerging once and for all from the throes and miseries, and I suppose it has to be added ecstasies, of what I can only refer to as the great crisis, the great adventure, the great collision of my life, Yes, I had begun to look upon myself as that person who has been through it all and emerges the other side ‘a happier and a wiser man’, who glances back at others crossing life’s rapids with a sort of affectionate and satisfying irony. And chattering to myself in my mind, as one does, or buying furniture for my little flat, or purchasing all those little things — my new wallet — that I suddenly felt it sensible to replace, so that life could start anew, free from every encumbering reminder, I would tell myself: Splendid, not even a whiff of albatross, not a hint of that weight and stench you have carried around with you for so long! Yes, the road to excess, I would quote to myself, and I remember doing this with a cheerful complacence that it is embarrassing to recall, the road to excess — perhaps I would be putting on a CD of Handel or of Mozart (I had been keeping very strict control on my listening material) — truly does lead to the Palace of Wisdom. Though one might have quibbled over the word ‘palace’, I suppose. But even if designations along the lines of ‘service flat or ‘hovel’ or even ‘bunker’ would perhaps be more appropriate for the species of wisdom I had arrived at, the point I’m trying to make is that prior to meeting Vikram Griffiths, our Indian Welshman, in the English Institute staffroom that day, I had felt I was cured. No, better still, I felt I had cured myself. There was pride involved. For at no point had I sought help from anyone, had I? No, I had fought my own way out of the flood, born up by the scraps of reason and self-respect one inevitably clutches at once it becomes clear one has no stomach for the darker option. And if, after what seemed a very long time at sea, the surf had set me down at the last in a place that was far away from where I plunged in and quite unknown to me and above all lonelier than any other place I had ever been before, all the same it did give me every impression once I got there, once I closed the door on my tiny apartment, of being terra firma , of being, that is, a place of arrival, the kind of place to which the words ‘home and dry’, or at least ‘dry’,might be applicable.

Yes, for six months, I reflect, sitting slightly right of centre on the big back seat of this powerful modern coach setting out across Europe, for six months you have been telling yourself that you are out of the woods, safe, even happy. Not to the point of clapping your hands and stamping your feet, perhaps, but happy enough, happy enough. Until a man for whom you have no particular respect approaches you in your loathsome place of work, an occasional drinking companion, affectedly shabby, determinedly Indian, though brought up entirely Welsh, with a clipboard and a pen in his hand and a nervous over-excited coercive manner manifested above all by his constant throat-clearing and catarrh-swallowing, his constant fingering of sideburns and baldness, and this man explains to you an ambitious initiative for saving the very job you have been trying for years to find the courage to leave, a job that is the source perhaps, when looked at from one angle, of all your woes, and what do you do? What do you do? In the space of a very few seconds you forget the resolve, for such it had seemed, of the last six months and you offer, promptly, immediately, without mediation, your — and these were the very words you used — personal contribution to the group effort . And then because you have never, but never, shown the slightest interest in the past in saving this miserable but of course well-paid, fatally well-paid job which has kept us all hanging on here in a limbo without future or return, trapped us in a stagnant backwater where the leaves of falling years turn slowly on themselves as they drift and rot, and because you are sure that this man-with the handsome sideburns and balding nervousness never for one moment imagined you would lend your support , and in fact only really asked you because you both happened to be in the same room at the same time and he with his clipboard in his hand, you start to make all kinds of affable apologies of the variety, If others are doing so much, the least I could do, etc, and even explaining to him that you won’t really be wasting the time because you can take books to read. I have plenty of work I can take, you said in a ludicrous pretence of having pressing outside interests , and Vikram Griffiths said: Oh, no need to worry about entertainment, boyo — because Vikram, who has no official role in the foreign teachers” union, yet appears to be the only person who is capable of getting anything done, has this way of calling all males of whatever age ‘boyo’, as indeed he has of calling all females of whatever age ‘girlie’, which is part and parcel of declaring his Welshness, his incongruous Welshness, which of course draws attention to his Indianness, his un-Welshness, and also his matey, alcohol-fed nervousness and above all his alternativeness , his belonging to that revolution permanente , as the French like to say, or used to, that army of special and enlightened people, who are now so much an accepted and uninspiring part of our shadow establishment — No need to worry about entertainment, boyo, Vikram Griffiths says, clearing his throat and rubbing his hands together, because almost all the students coming along will be girlies , of course. At which point this man, no doubt delighted to have found such an unlikely supporter for his imaginative initiative , gives you the kind of wink which is also a leer, the kind of facial contortion, 1 mean, that a stand-up comedian might wish to cultivate so that not a single member of a huge theatre audience could misunderstand his insinuation. Because part of Vikram Griffiths’ manner, I reject, is to assume, ostentatiously, provocatively, a renegade complicity even with people whom he suspects may be on the other side. In fact, he said, his face still untwisting from its leer, the boys are already calling it The Shag Wagon, and he laughed a throaty, smoke-and-whisky laugh, and sucking in catarrh repeated, The Shag Wagon , still laughing, and then was giving me some statistics on what he expected to be the breakdown between the students, mostly girls and numerous, and the foreign teachers, ourselves, mostly men and few, and true to the totally inconsistent and 1 think 1 ought to recognize shameful way I was behaving, I am behaving, I laughed too. The Shag Wagon! I shouted with a quite unforgiveable mirth. The flicking Shag Wagon , who thought of calling it that? It’s brilliant! And Vikram said, Georg thought of it. You know what Georg’s like.

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