Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

She splashed water on her face. She wore her last suit and forced her hair to settle. Because her shoes were grey and weathered she borrowed a clean pair from Jess’s cupboard and forced them on. When she was dressed and ready, she took a Hoover to the living room carpet. It was goodwill cleaning, an attempt to make things up to Jess. She marshalled objects in the kitchen and hoped that made a difference. She ran a cloth round the kettle. She aimed the showerhead at the bathroom and left it like a banya. Then she took all her papers and her pen and her coat and thrust them into her bedroom. Pausing only to take an apple from the kitchen, she ran out of the flat and vaulted down the steps.

Now she was brisk and urgent. It was important not to be late, or she would lose this job, like all the others. Then Mr Sharkbreath would be angry, and her father would sound disappointed again. These were immediate concerns; the rest was indeterminate. Umbrella in hand, she walked back to the station, passing along the queue of cars. IT’S NOT ENOUGH said a billboard. TEARS ARE GOING TO FALL said the next. TEMP TEMP TEMP TEMP said the writing on the red steel of the bridge. She nodded and walked on. The air was damp. It had been raining earlier, and there were puddles where the roads dipped to meet the pavements. She heard fragmented conversations, and the dulled sound of music inside cars. She breathed deeply. She could walk all day, except it made her hungry. She passed a bank of adverts by the tube. Bras, beer and butter. We are meant to be cheerful. She nodded and walked on. A man was leaning against a wall, whistling. He was a tall African, his arms folded across his chest. He ignored Rosa as she passed. A gang of kids cycled past, a few of them spitting into the gutter. ‘Fucking slag!’ one of them yelled and Rosa thought, Do they mean me? There was a poster outside the tube, a decorative frau, legs hairless and shining. Now she carried on walking, avoiding a glittering puddle like a stranded mirror and stepping round a woman with a child strapped to her body. Everything was fine when Rosa walked. She made a steady progress along the road, threading a path from streetlight to streetlight.

Despite her sense that she was quite out of synch, she was still acutely aware of the things around her. The people filing along, forming impromptu patterns then dispersing. A man in a black leather coat who was dragging a white dog along on a lead. A woman in a burkha. Then a woman walked past, pushing a pram. She was wearing knee boots and a fur coat. Further along a man was sitting outside a second-hand clothes shop, whistling a tune. He was dressed in a smart red suit. In his gloved hands he held a cane. He had a carnation pinned to his lapel and Rosa thought of him standing in front of the mirror, fixing it there with trembling hands. All to sit on a folding chair outside his shop! It was raining softly now. But the man stayed there, stroking his cane. His eyes were turned towards the street, and she wondered what he saw. The cars slipped by. The lights changed and changed again. There was the flower shop, bouquets stacked in buckets. It always lifted her mood when she saw their forms and colours.

Suddenly the clouds moved and there was a cold bright sun shining on the street. The dog-touting man moved slowly behind her. She could hear the lead jangling. The dog was straining towards a tree. A woman was running towards her, in shorts and trainers. On a pedestrian crossing a man moved slowly. Music was coming from an open window, a radio playing a contemporary tune, something with guitars and a kid singing falsetto. At the gym she saw people sitting outside, drinking coffee. It had once been a hospital, or a lunatic asylum, she thought. She wasn’t sure which. Inside she could see people running on treadmills. There was a sign saying ‘HazChem’ on the wall.

Now she passed an ancient woman who looked like a sage, quite decayed and withered, moving slowly on her stumpy legs. Propelled by something, some inexplicable urge to go forward. Meanwhile Rosa was solid and vital, not exactly youthful but passably fit, walking towards Holland Park. The old woman was moving along, trembling with each movement, and if she was still standing then Rosa had no excuse. If she had thus far failed to release her cognition from the services of the Will, and the rest, then she really had to try harder. If there were mornings when the street appeared as an endless tunnel, drawing her into a pool of darkness, that was clearly her own small problem. On St Mark’s Road, things were mostly seedy: a group of boys yelling and kicking skateboards off the pavements, laughing as they tripped, cars speeding through the narrow streets, crumbled bricks ornamented by graffiti. DEATH TO YOU ALL. FIGHT THE STATE. Slogans, the occasional cri de coeur, scrawled machismo. FUCK YOU ALL. Maxims: WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY. Pleas: DON’T LET THE LIGHTS GO OUT. Do not go gentle into that good night. She turned away and went into a corner shop to buy some chocolate. The shop was full of faded adverts for long-vanished brands. She took the chocolate from a grinning man, and fled onto the street. She saw a man in a suit walking swiftly up the hill, so she followed him along for a while, watching the regular movements of his limbs. She stalked along behind him, matching his stride. He had soft blond hair, which curled onto his collar. She couldn’t see his face, until he turned to pull his phone from his pocket. On the corner of Clarendon Road, he stopped and said a few words to someone. She craned her neck greedily towards him, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then he sped up, and waved his arm for a taxi. With a slam of the door, he disappeared.

*

Still you must get a job. Find somewhere to live. Talk to Jess — perhaps you can beg her! Talk to Liam. Beg the bank. Collate your papers. Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities. Read The Golden Bough, the Nag-Hammadi Gospels, the Upanishads, the Koran, the Bible, the Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge. Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest. Get to the bottom of this TEMP. She ducked into Holland Park tube and stayed quiet and thoughtful on the platform. She heard voices from the tannoy, injunctions, exhortations. Do not travel without a ticket. Buy a Season Saver. Do not stand at the edge. Do not hurl yourself on the tracks. Do not take the tunnels as a metaphor. Do not despise your fellow commuter. We are all human, only human. Each separate thing, regarded in and for itself, dissociated from the temporal flow of casual laws becomes, when so regarded, an epiphany of the whole, equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time. Mind the doors. There was a busker playing Bach on a flute, the music cracked and beautiful. The platform was grey and stain-daubed. The walls were spotted with mould. Above she saw lines of neon lights, and everywhere she was surrounded by useful objects, fire alarms, signs telling her the way out, should the platform burst into flames. You cannot take the tunnel as a metaphor. Because there are no fire alarms and hammers encased in glass to help you through your own private tunnel, this metaphysical corridor you think you’re in. Not a single miniature mallet to smash a way out. Not a single mallet! Now a train rocked along, scattering the mice and rats to their tubeside hideouts and Rosa positioned herself by a man with a T-shirt saying ‘THE REAL THING’ and read a poem on the wall (poetry on the Underground), which said ‘I am trapped in time/ Living without a purpose/ Waiting for the end’ — Of course not! As if they would put that sort of rubbish on the walls, thought Rosa. That would certainly demoralise commuters, as they stood crushed together, sweating onto each other. Instead, the poem said, ‘We are feverish and then we fly/ All is gracious in the sky/ Like angels blazing higher and higher/ Into a celestial fire/ Oh God — my God, your Allah, your Buddha — you understand our prayers/ They are for peace and for celestial stairs/ To reach the place beyond all cares.’ Beyond all cares. It sounded like the perfect destination. Caring was precisely the problem. She shivered and stared round at the passengers. All of them innocuous enough. Beyond all cares , she thought. She wanted to imagine her mother in a transcendent state, lyre in hand, or somewhere, in some sentient shape, but instead she thought of her mother as scattered dust, wafted across the Mendips on a windy day, having been shaken from an urn by her daughter — tightlipped, quite unaccepting — and her husband — shuddering with horror and in tears. It wasn’t too bad, to be scattered dust in the wind. That really wasn’t so terrible at all. Better than a lot of options, the circles of hell, eternal torment, reincarnation at the bottom of the wheel and the rest. Feel Your Inner Purity said an advert for Japanese beer.