A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Thurloe was a survivor. Under Cromwell and then Charles, John Thurloe kept his head, because he had a necessary mind. There’s hope in that.

Jon felt like running, but did not.

One ends up with a friend, that’s the trouble with letters. One posts out slivers of oneself and gets these warm, these hot, these delicate pieces of someone else back and one is in their mind — they write and say they keep you, hold you in mind.

And if you sleep, you dream their body.

Fuck …

Jon reached a junction and peered to his left. Apparently he had to peer this evening, had to strain for the shapes of things with his perfectly serviceable eyes. Across the road was the Brompton Oratory: that high neoclassical mound of ornaments and pillars, that pretty heap of dirtied Portland stone.

Inside, it’s a bit Vegas: lots of marble, like an upscale hotel bathroom with confessionals for light relief. I never quite took to the place. And traitorous letters died there while they waited for the KGB — the communist faithful nipping up the broad front steps to slip indoors beside the holy-water stoups, carrying codes past the mother of God in her seasonally adjusted robes, tucking secrets into the chapel for St Cecilia.

St Cecilia watching.

Oh, but that’s a fucking lie. Of the worst kind — reliable information polluted by credible bullshit. If I had the strength I’d punch myself.

I have no idea who passed over what or where and St Cecilia is a statue and even if statues could see, hers doesn’t watch. She’s lying on her side with her head draped in a cloth — a very lovely model of a corpse. A victim of state torture in white marble, the cut to her throat not obvious … Slim waist and noble suffering. After an original by Stefano Maderno.

I know this because I’ve been in, now and then. I don’t visit often. The churches of my former religion always smell the same — of bad silence. It loves silent women especially. It adored my mother — in her mute phases. It was less fond when she was raucous. One would have to point out that speechless women seem popular with many belief systems.

Cecilia’s only silent because she’s working, listening. She’s tending — allegedly — to all music everywhere: Howlin’ Wolf and Dr John and E flat and D7 and every blue note and every other note. But surely a murdered virgin would have to prefer the blues.

St Cecilia, wise virgin, pray for us — that much, I remember.

The power of prayer hasn’t helped me, nor my mother, nor Dad.

I mainly have faith in wearing a good suit.

Really.

Wear a sharp suit, a whistle-clean suit, and it can hold a life together.

And it’s possible — a suit can grant this small salvation — to be wearing one’s suit in the way that Charlie Watts would, or the Kinks. One can stand out in front of the world — all silent — and no one will see that one has secrets, is a secret. They haven’t the wit to tell that one’s drape and one’s drop and one’s practical cuffs are laughing at the whole sad, bloody pack of them.

And every other secret follows on from that, the original one with the nice silk lining.

He cuddled his palm for a few paces.

But Meg knows how I’m laughing, she did notice.

Always the women.

Watching Dad trying to prove that love is suffering and suffering is love. And then I had a go myself.

As if someone tears out a hole in my thinking.

Always the women.

No.

Better to worry simply, to fret about needing a suit tonight.

Jon was loping now, fast enough to hearing the knocking of his pulse. Ahead he could see the white pimples of electric light, line upon line, that marked out the uprights and horizontals of Harrods.

The place actually looks worse than me, like what it is — a rattle bag of brassy tat. Shining out like a permanent Christmas, but locked up for the night. No more shopping. It is still sometimes possible for there to be no more shopping.

I met a woman once who, long ago, used to play hide and seek in Harrods when it was shut: sardines after lights out with the larksome offspring of the owners while Knightsbridge drew as close as it ever does to sleeping. Wild cries and hunting in the dark. Men getting bruised by complications they can’t see. Everyone, I suppose, bruising.

Everything changes and nothing changes.

The law of the civil service, one might say.

Jon tried not to think of hunting. He had quit the Tube system one station early, a habit he’d been cultivating lately. Now — also a newish habit — he was threading himself along thin night streets, into mews and sideways options. It was as if he was trying to shake off a pursuit.

Not that I’d notice if anyone really was following.

The extra walking gives me space to think.

Fuck.

I do not progress.

But I know that I don’t, I truly don’t want to hurt her.

There is shouting on an overground train. A man’s voice rises until it is audible to every passenger in the long car.

‘Do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?’ There is a pause during which no one answers, but it becomes clear that the yelling man is standing over someone, some other man, whose head is bowed, though perhaps not penitent. ‘Do you know where you are? You’re in South fucking London, where cunts like you get served. You treat a woman like that …? You fucking treat a woman like that …?’ There is something lyrical, musical, about the way the standing man bellows. He is slightly enjoying himself, slightly enjoying this opportunity to make the world as it should be, sing it out right. ‘Next stop when I get off, New Cross, if you want to talk about it, we can have a word, you can get off and we’ll have a word … You want that? You want that?’

The sitting man seems not to want that.

‘You frightened her. That could be your sister. That could be your mother. Look at — her sitting there.’

A woman is, indeed, sitting amongst the other passengers, also with her head bowed — she’s across the aisle from the allegedly wicked and discourteous and certainly voiceless man. She is very still, while so much protection furies up in the air around her. It is difficult to tell how she feels.

‘If you did that to my sister, if you did that to my mother, I’d fucking kill you. You understand? You don’t do that. You don’t threaten a woman, you don’t make her scared. Big man … You think you’re a fucking big man?’ That coiling upward South London note kicks out at the end of every sentence, question or not. ‘We can talk about that, about how big a man you are.’

The yelling has an oddly gracious air. The man has the virtuous bearing of someone deciding not to be violent, beyond making this roaring noise. He’s stocky, quite short, dressed as if he may be coming back after lunch to a job of work, something dusty. With him is a younger man who nods while the lecture progresses and seems perhaps to be some kind of apprentice.

When the shouting man pauses to draw breath, the probable apprentice nudges in with, ‘I’ve got a mum.’ He is inexpert, but emphatic. ‘I’ve got a sister.’

The other passengers cannot help but overhear what has turned into a kind of lesson in something beyond the skills of a trade, or rather something which seeks to ensure that a proper man, when he’s learned a proper trade, will also know how to treat women and that such behaviour will belong to South London, and yet be extended in fellowship elsewhere.