Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

And suddenly it came at him like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog in which he was living: he wasn’t thinking like his mother at all, he was thinking like his father. The journey that he had feared in Petersburg was already under way. Thinking like a nasty, bullying, cowardly, small-time little bastard.

“Pablo—I’m sorry. No further argument about the changes. Just—”

“I really…” He was fighting through the tears. “I really do not respect you, Gabriel. You are a fucking fascist. A fucking homophobic fascist.”

“I’m neither of those things, Pablo. And you know that I am not.” Gabriel handed his colleague some tissues. The distress of others had always distressed him more than his own distress. He reached out his hand and put it on the other man’s shoulder as gently as he could manage. “I apologize, Pablo. You are a great designer. I mean it.” He spoke softly. “But please, can you make the changes? If not, if you still feel upset in half an hour, then let me know and I will do them.”

The fat taxi wallowed west on the Westway. All through the late afternoon he had been chasing so-called experts for quotes, opinion, insight… To no avail. Even down in the thickened sedimentary murk at the bottom of the journalistic swamp, the same rusty old rule applied: anyone worth speaking to was impossible to get hold of, and anyone free to talk or write wasn’t worth listening to or reading. He made a vow to go in even earlier tomorrow and track down at least one serious human being whom he might ask for information and guidance with his piece.

November nighttime London rolled by his window—white strip lights in the places of work, amber low lights in the bedrooms, the flickering blue of a thousand TVs.

His mind would permit him no rest.

Everyone said that it was unsustainable. Mother, sister, and the few friends who knew. But, Gabriel told himself, none of them could really understand it, or feel it, because none of them were inside the circumstances. None of them had the day-to-day experience. None of them lived it. No, Gabriel alone knew the truth: that it was utterly unsustainable. Because he alone had been sustaining it. For the past eighteen months.

Different parts of the heart—this was the way he explained it to himself. Indeed, this was the way he tried to explain it to everyone. You can love a sister and a mother, both entirely and at the same time, correct? But the love for them seems to come from different parts of the heart. One does not replace or override the other. Like the love parents evince for one child simultaneously with—yet separately from—the love for another, for son and for daughter. Or the love for closest friends. All of these loves—real, sincerely felt, ready to be tested—they all seem wholehearted in the individual case, and yet they all seem to come from a different space within the whole. I love my mother with all my heart and I love my sister with all my heart. These two statements are not mutually exclusive; one does not render the other nonsensical; rather, they are both meaningful, simultaneously. We all know this, intuitively.

But to take this a stage further, Ma, perhaps it has to be this way—necessarily, mathematically. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly human. Because, first, the human heart, where exercised, is found to have infinite capacity. (And if not exercised, then what is the point?) And second, because there are infinite infinities in just one infinity. This is the great paradox in the laws of our universe, and this is also the great paradox of the human heart. And these paradoxes are as necessary as the consistencies they defy. And that’s how it is for me with Lina and Connie, Ma: the love for one comes from a different place from the love for the other. And though I agree—of course, who wouldn’t?—that it may not be possible in practice to live like this, still, in terms of the heart, in terms of the reality of my feelings (the only terms that really count, Ma), I tell you it is possible. So please, consider deeply. We must all respect feelings. Do not say that it is not possible—a paradox, yes, a very human paradox, but not an impossibility. Quite the reverse. An affirmation of my humanity. Yes, believe me, it is possible. Different parts of the heart. I know—I live it: I am the proof. Every day of my life; every day of my life, Ma, I live it.

“Here we are, mate. This is it.”

Radio Rabbit was run from the basement of a converted Victorian school in a part of town that some people thought of as Lad-broke Grove and others Shepherd’s Bush—nobody was quite sure, least of all Gabriel. No other city that he knew of had quite so many half-secret but long-established side roads, each one of them a great tragicomic story all its own. The car came to a halt. He signed the chit and stepped out. The night was uncommonly dark; the street-lamps did not make it this far up the cul-de-sac, and the rain fell so finely that he felt it only as a gentle film.

He pressed the buzzer at the side of the shiny door. The lock sprang. He felt his heart lighten, then quicken. A security man, a stuffed bear that someone had thought amusing to dress in a suit, nodded him through. Or might not have moved at all. Gabriel was a regular, and after eleven the bear did not seem to bother to sign people in or out. Not that it mattered; they could always burn together live on air. Be fitting, in a way. He passed down the familiar corridor hung with the fifteen or so faces of Radio Rabbit, including, right at the far end, the one with which he was in love.

Honey-highlighted hair that fell straight in careless strands about her pretty brow; blue-green eyes that appeared a little melancholy and yet forever just about to wink; high cheekbones, but rounded rather than sharp, so that when she smiled (and a smile was the natural set of her lips) she had the cheekiest face of any woman he had ever met—a face full of friendship, mischief, passion, and vitality, collusive, playful, understanding, a face forever caught between laughter and a kiss… And yet there was also a distancing cool there—resolve and firmness in the rise of her chin, in the slight sideways angle of her head to the camera, most of all in the way those eyes came at you from somewhere deep and old as the pool of life itself.

He pushed open the familiar door and mouthed his hello to Wayne, the lone producer, assistant, researcher, screener of callers, or whatever it was that he titled himself. In the studio, behind the glass, cans on her head, eyes on her computer screen, Connie was absorbed in the technical business of her job. She did not see him arrive. He watched her a moment, thirsty as a hermit for her beauty and her being.

There was a song playing. Something by Tom Waits. Wayne motioned for him to wait. So he helped himself to some of the vending machine coffee (which always tasted of acorns and cinnamon) and stood sipping it—the spy about to board the plane that would drop him deep behind the iron curtain. Then the red “on air” light went out as they cut to some ads and Wayne waved him in.

Connie looked up as he opened the heavy padded door and greeted him with that smile that women reserve for men they love but cannot love, which of course makes men love them even more. He took his seat opposite hers.

“Hi, you. We have three minutes five,” she said. Then, a little softer, “Hmmm—you look tired, Gabriel Glover. Have you been sorting your life out?”

This was her perennial question—faux-comic Connie code for Have you either proposed to or left Lina? Can we therefore end the misery-exhilaration cycle of our relationship and either never see each other again or live happily ever after somewhere in the countryside?