A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

I really do want her to be happy.

He’d perhaps also liked the idea of standing with a fresh letter flickering in his hand and showing the models of his silent relatives how he had prospered and advanced.

I try to progress.

But all the displays on the origin of his species, that entire section, had been removed.

They’d been replaced with odds and ends about Darwin and a weasel-worded panel for the kids to read on evolution — heavy emphasis on the theory. The panel avoided ever stating whether we’ve evolved, or just been pressed out by God, like fresh little gingerbread babies. Gingerbread, rib bones and mud.

In a palace built to celebrate the scientific method and the safeguard of information in a world full of dangerous dreams … In case they offend opinions, they tucked away their facts.

Evolved human beings had thought this was the proper course to take. In the Natural History Museum.

It was like — in a small way, a tiny way …

I don’t want to see this.

It was like coming home …

I don’t want this.

Why I think of more harm when there’s so much harm loose here already …

It was like coming home that first time …

The picture of it was unfurling like a bolt of bloody cloth, tumbling.

It was like coming back to find one’s home not as it should be and a man sitting in one’s armchair in one’s living room and smirking inside an atmosphere which suggested activities had been undertaken. And the man had that particular look — that special, concupiscent, lazy glance — which he turned to your wife when she came through from the kitchen carrying two fresh glasses of beer …

I’d successfully forgotten that on occasions she did drink our free beer. On occasions when I was elsewhere.

And one would rather not believe one is a cuckold, not even in theory, yet here it is — the evidence.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out.

But Meg wouldn’t do that.

He punched his fist into his palm, caught his own knuckles clumsily — not a manly gesture, only stupid. The images didn’t stop.

Also like — in a small way — coming home one summer holiday and seeing one’s mother as one passes the bedroom door — the carelessness of limbs when the sleeper isn’t sleeping, is only passed out. The smell of sweetness and sourness and wrongness.

Post-partum depression — my fault.

She was given drugs, repeated drugs, eventually hoarded and then gorged-upon drugs — her doctor’s fault.

It wasn’t just me who ended up leaving Society Street. Mum went, too. Dad spent years there in the same house with her, but having to live by himself. She was intermittent. She was chilly. She was a ghost’s body. She was lots of things which weren’t her fault.

One cannot understand an addict when one is a child. When one is older, one reflects and analyses their inabilities, acknowledges their disease …

It makes no fucking difference.

One still feels precisely the same.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and every neighbour suddenly was able to peep in and find your mother, undignified and overcome.

Women who have wild cries inside and get dark like forests — that isn’t their fault, but I couldn’t currently stand it.

Jon stopped — inside and out.

He’d been pacing — like a captive creature — to and fro at the back of the station. He made himself angry again about the museum, specifically the museum.

I have become a preposterous old geezer, ranting and raising my hairy knuckles against the decisions of the young.

Moralfag.

Scraggy old lad.

Defending knowledge in the face of evasions and entertainment.

He realised that he’d been holding his breath for some time.

He exhaled.

This is good, this is appropriate thinking. This is better than the thinking I cannot think and shouldn’t mention, because then I’ll think it.

Fuck.

As if someone tore out a hole in the side of the building and let half its contents spill out and therefore continued the process of handing the world to the humans who have stolen Darwin and portrayed him as only cruel — the ones who feel his theory must be savage, because he describes the working out of powers greater than their own. They find such an idea cruel — these men and women who can value nothing in those around them but fitness and competition, taking and keeping and blood and bone.

Which is a generalisation of a type we would avoid unless we were making an unwise and emotive pronouncement, shouting on television, on the radio, in a paper, on Twitter.

Does it really matter where? It’s all shouting.

In media and electoral terms, shouting is a requirement.

One is reminded again of how much — in both senses — one hates.

But one really would rather love, if one could manage.

Jon — inhaling and exhaling as he should — crossed the slightly unnerving paved road now laid out beside South Kensington Station.

You take your luck here with the cruising cars. The aim is to promote coexistence between traffic and pedestrians by removing any clearly defined pavement. Survival of the fittest.

Children might be harmed here, I feel. That would have been one of the risks assessed and presumably discounted during the planning process.

Jon did not approve of harming children. He believed they should be always defended.

I’m also not in favour of risks.

He pushed himself past 20 Thurloe Street, home to the Polish restaurant where Cold War spies once met their handlers — Kim Philby tackling pork knuckle, or pierogies, poppy-seed cake — handing over the goods between courses, one had to presume.

I met Lucy in there once — a joke location that I couldn’t find amusing. He doesn’t care if I get blown. He’d think it was funny, thinks I’m funny.

Everyone, apparently, thinks I’m funny.

Or possibly Meg doesn’t and I should phone her. I need to do that. But I keep forgetting.

But instead Jon kept walking, left behind the cheerily fogged glass of the establishment where Christine Keeler once sat being stylishly traitorous, or flirtatious, or whatever else, while her Soviet lover, or client, or confidant, got down to the pierogies. Perhaps.

He went on into Thurloe Square, slipping along beside the well-maintained people carriers that would gather up well-maintained kids in charmingly retro well-maintained uniforms and then ferry them off to their well-maintained schools in the morning. Illuminated windows showed deftly arranged furniture, investment art, bright fragments of lives, meals being prepared by homeowners, meals being prepared by servants, by nannies, by au pairs: the gradations of posture, costume, comfort. Held in the dim palm of the square, a gated garden was all silences and shapes, polite leaves.

I’m sure we could have made a dead-letter drop there, somehow: got keys for access and then hidden slips of paper, little weatherproofed canisters and so forth.

It didn’t matter, not at this stage, not when everything was so near to its end.

Thurloe was Cromwell’s spymaster — appropriate to have his name salted round about.

In Thurloe Place, the pavement at his feet seeming to give every now and then, sinking. The rush of traffic as the road widened was both absurd and horrifying to him.