A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

‘Jon, I’m tired!’

And this is true and you are too and this is only fair.

‘That’s not fair! You’re not fair and I … Look, OK. OK.’

And you understand — ridiculous at my age — you have come to this kind of fundamental understanding after all this time you’ve wasted in being alive, but not really alive, and in knowing so many other, useless things. All of a piece and sudden, you can see that love, that loving, that being in love is a fundamentalist’s occupation. Your beloved is your beloved and there can be no other, not like her, like this. And the world must love her also and always, for ever, and if it does not then the world is wrong.

‘You won’t be there, Jon. No, you won’t be. You’re going to make me go there and wait for you and then you’re not going to come. You won’t.’

And you don’t do ideology, never have.

‘OK.’

But now you have your articles of faith. Deep.

‘OK.’

But now you are not hollow. You are burning, you are filled with burning. Your metal heart has spilled and turned you molten and your creed is screamed and lashing in you, it is like rage and like wine.

‘Jon.’

But now you have the love you chose — the love that chose you back — the love which is a blessing in your body and upon your body and which excuses it.

‘Jon, goodbye … Goodbye. I know. Goodbye. I have to go. I will. I’ll be there.’

But …

But …

There is this possibility that opens up as soon as you can tell yourself, your world, your love, darling, sweetheart, treasure, your sweet, your serious sweet — when you can tell everything. ‘But …’

You want her not to go, not quite yet — dearsweetmybaby — and you do wish that you could have heard — allthatIcould — what you managed to tell her — allthatIam — you really do wonder the words you could have picked and offered, the ones which let her no longer hate you when you deserve to be hated. You are all unsure.

But you think most of what you said was just the one word — please.

And also the other word — but.

But and then please.

Please.

Please.

And you hear it like Stealers Wheel singing ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ — that’s the song you were thinking of before — Gerry Rafferty singing Plee-ee-eease, Plee-ee-eease in this high, long dog howl of need. It’s like that.

And it’s like sweetness and like fury.

LONDON BRIDGE.

In the end it is — please — possible to reach.

Jon had asked the cab to drop him just a little before the station, his intention being — perhaps — to catch his breath.

He steps out of the cab and pays his fare while experiencing this flapping and plummeting sensation — as if he has opened the door of a plane, stepped out bravely.

He walks up the narrow street that will lead to the station, his body progressing while other parts of him seem to be scuttling low and then lower, keeping to the cracks in the pavement — lizarding along.

The route he has to take shoves him past a succession of restaurants where it would now be completely pointless to try and dine.

Too late.

I don’t think I’m hungry.

I hope she’s not hungry.

I hope that she has forgiven my unforgivability.

The air is unsympathetic against his face. He presses the heels of both hands to his eyes and rubs. He guesses this might look to sensible observers as if he is newly arrived in a country he does not know, a country where one’s surroundings may blur and shine and turn to a wide pelt of light, spines of light.

There are no observers, not as far as Jon can tell.

At the head of the street the architecture seems almost entirely composed of glass: slabs of bright, high glass.

It’s like walking up the throat of a closing box, or into an aquarium, terrarium …

It feels clear to him that he is a clumsy-handed, apeish man, soon to be trapped in this huge and over-elaborate case. He is about to be absurd and lonely — please, Meg, do be here, be with me and see me — and then afterwards he’s going to have the memory of that — of waiting while she doesn’t turn up . And at some date, as yet undisclosed, when he’s sacked, arrested, punished, destroyed — at that point he will have nothing to sustain him.

I did the best I could in the end, but doing it in the end wasn’t quick enough. I wasn’t fastidious, not as I should be. I wasn’t who I thought, not a properly tuned man.

How to tune oneself to the relevant scale.

Usually it’s E-A-D-G-B-E. Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears …

But I tune to open G, I tune to D-G-D-G-B-D because I like the repetition, because repeating known things which have done no harm is always a comfort, or should be a comfort.

I taught myself to remember it with my mnemonic, my very own.

Do Good Do Good Be Determined.

Do Good Do Good Be Despairing.

Do Good Do Good Be Deserted.

No.

Do Good Do Good Be Determined.

I did try.

The pavement is echoing under his shoes as if it is tensed above some vast and peculiar nowhere. Still, Jon proceeds. Above his left shoulder rises the new and ardently modernistic head office of a rebranded newspaper group.

They wouldn’t let Milner over their threshold: all of those shiny surfaces he’d smear. And the place would make him look Cro-Magnon, look like me.

The building’s vast foyer — glistering and mainly transparent — does manage to have one solid wall, which is blocked across with dark, impressive letters, capitalised words that build into phrases of fugitive, yet stirring meaning. They provide just enough to occupy a reader without embarking on any kind of communication — a wash of elevated intentions.

I think I have real intentions. I think …

He tucks his head lower and pictures the shades of all the pubby, grubby, digging old hacks gone on before, the ghosts who still knew about subbing and sources, there to doorstep the premises and haunt — if they could be bothered — chucking about lead type and pissing into corners.

At the end of the high-concept, low-content display are four last words.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING

The Four Last Things, I was taught, are Death and Judgement and Hell and Heaven. I like to close the list with Heaven, although others may not choose to.

The foyer gives itself a dashing exit line, truthful as death and judgement and nobody’s ever too clear about the hereafter so never mind.

Here it is.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.

Which is now all the business there is, all the truth there is. No goods, no services, nurses, teachers, doctors, artisans, soldiers, warders, guardians, leaders, technicians, experts, knowledge, justice, privacy, safety, dignity, mercy and so forth.

This is what we have instead.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.

And I am in this business.

I was in this business.

I think I have decided to retire.

Fuck the lot of ’em, I say.

Yeah.

Shining directly ahead is the tower that blades up into the soft sky above the station: overmastering height and bleak windows, illumination that gives an impression of festive threat. The thing is too big to be comfortably visible, even comprehensible, once you have drawn this close.

Here it is.

The open piazza beneath it is blighted by its influence and even on a sunny day those who pass under its glimmer and shadow tend to scuttle anxiously, rather than linger, rather than wait.