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

“I’ve got an easy couple of days,” he said.

She made a start on her muesli. “What’s the next issue again?”

“‘Inner Voices.’” He forced himself to stop eating. “I should try to make this one better. I think… I think I lost it a bit with the last one. I’m already struggling with the whole idea, though—I mean, how can anybody trust their inner voice when inner voices are universally famous for coming and going at random? And when they tell you all kinds of contra—”

“What you should do is take a break from living and thinking on behalf of the rest of the world.” There was concern as well as humor in her tone. “Leave it to someone else for a while—the pope or the president or someone.”

“People in power can’t think on behalf of anyone else. They get cut off. That’s the problem, Lina. Power may not corrupt every time, but it always isolates.” He raised a fist to his chest in a gesture of mock heroism. “That’s why everything is up to you and me.”

She smiled but shook her head. “We should go on holiday and you should not be allowed to think about anything except pizza toppings and ice cream flavors. Have you thought any more about doing the play?”

“No. I need to call the man in Highgate again.”

“You should do it.”

Care, consideration, and total, unquestioning support.

“I know.”

“I think May is perfect,” she said. “And I was working it out on the plane this morning… If you can start everything at the beginning of your working month, like now—just after an issue is out—then you can probably get loads done from your office and sneak out for rehearsals. Then take your holiday for the next fortnight, while the issue is actually coming out—let your deputy do some work for once—and then put on the play the week after, when you are back at work but when it’s easy again. That way you get a six-week run. Have you thought any more about which play you want to put on?”

“Steven Berkoff.” He picked up his fork.

“You’ve gone off the Shakespeare idea?”

“No. Just… not the first one.”

“Shakespeare is not necessarily very commercial anyway.” She nodded. “You want something that the audience can get to grips with easily.”

Maybe that was it. Something lurking behind that “not very commercial” or that “get to grips with”—that attitude. Which, again, was fair enough.

“And if you have to take a month off unpaid, then you should do that. You know the money is not an issue. I’ll support you.”

Or maybe that was it: maybe the money was an issue—though not in the way Lina thought. He had never borrowed; the house and the holidays were strictly fifty-fifty, his expenses were his own, but she paid more restaurant bills than he did, paid for more tickets, furniture, food. He finished his breakfast as slowly as he could manage.

“You need a new coat,” she said.

“I know.”

“How come Frank managed to persuade you to go and fetch the permit?”

“It just kind of happened. The buzzer went and he let on as if I was supposed to have organized it all… and I… I said I would go. I don’t exactly know how it happened.”

She laughed lightly. “Well, don’t bother becoming friends with him like you did with Bernie. It doesn’t seem to help. You don’t have to be friends with everyone in the world. Let’s keep Frank at arm’s length. I have given him pretty strict instructions, so we’ll see… He’s doing the new sink, then he’s going to sort out the dishwasher, and I’ve told him not to fit the new surfaces until he has properly sealed them.”

“What time is it?”

“Eight forty-five. I’d better get going. I’m going shopping with Frank at lunchtime for at least two hours. I’ll keep an eye out for coats you might like.”

Or maybe there was no reason. Maybe there was no reason at all. Maybe he just did not like safe harbors. Maybe he was the sort of idiot who enjoyed throwing away the best things that he had found. Nothing would surprise him these days. They finished their breakfast and he put down money enough to cover their food.

Their lines parted at King’s Cross. She continued south. He had to go west. He kissed her and jumped off. He put on his headphones—Martha Argerich playing Bach’s Toccata 911. The Hammersmith and City train was first to arrive. He stepped inside, eyed the other madmen a second or two, dropped into his favorite seat at the end of the carriage, and closed his eyes.

Marriage, commitment, clever wife, pretty wife, dependable wife, capable wife, children, one, two, three, love and money coming in, love and money going out, security, the family breakfast table, homework help sessions, holidays, hobbies, barbecues with friends at the weekends, picnics in the summer, occasional reflections on politics, television, exhibitions, mortgage paid off, holiday home, grandparents, contentment… How had Lina come to represent these things, and why did he alone in all the world think that this wasn’t what life was all about? Why did he alone find it so nauseating and depressing and escapist a proposal? What disfigured gene of contrariety was he carrying? Why was he furious with her for noticing that pianist’s scruffy shoes? Why was he miserable because she bought him a sweater that matched his socks? And what were these minor, minor things beside his own persistent deception and monumental cruelty, which had now been going on for ages? Oh, Ma. All he had to do… all he had to do was get it together. And there it was ahead of him, the motorway through the mountains, the best of the Western human being’s life—laid out, smooth as freshly smeared tarmac in all its satisfying, fulfilling, familial glory, and yet… And yet here he sat, knuckles white, looking desperately this way and that for another route, determined to assert the other, eager and willing as a fool for love, chaos, pain, any kind of feeling that would lead him away, off this main road; here he sat, implacably ready to oppose whatever was asserted and to assert whatever was opposed, steadfastly determined to champion the antagonist, the great adversaries, the counterlifers, to ask the same questions again and again despite knowing that they were probably meaningless, despite knowing that such questions were the wrong questions to ask; here he sat, searching the rain-smothered crags, hoping for that moment when the sun might slice its brief light between the heavy clouds and show him some other way. Some steep and shining path.

The old pipes must have cracked or backed up somewhere. The stink was foul. And the sound of their squelching made him want to retch. Someone appeared to have laid a makeshift pathway of plastic carrier bags across the rancid courtyard; but, torn and thin, they were of no use at all, and the slime simply engulfed them with every footfall. Henry cursed the hole in his sole. The freeze, when it came, would be welcome here. Hard ground. A filthy gull barked as it circled in the cold gruel of the sky.

They passed into a stairwell opposite—a door banged high up above them, there were drunken shouts and then the sound of two or three coming down. Then they were out in the daylight again, into a second, smaller courtyard beyond. This one was muddy too, but not so bad underfoot, mostly broken cobbles, miniature steppingstones. The smell here, if anything, was worse. Fate seemed to have shackled them together, as if two prison friends escaped Sakhalin and slogged these three years three-legged all the way across Siberia in ever-deepening silence, all but abandoning any hope of severance.

They entered the dimness of the building on the far side, crunched on broken glass, and turned down the dark and crumbling stairs below ground level. They walked along a scarred brick corridor, under a low beam, around a corner, past a bare bulb; stepped over bags of damp cement; went past a second light, around wires that stuck out sharp and bent and crazy from the wall, like the severed tendrils of some grotesque creature whose body was trapped on the other side—wherever that was. They went further into the gloom, a jink right, a correcting jink left, and three final steps as far as the third bulb, which illuminated a Lenin-red rusty iron door square across the passageway.