Graham Swift - Out of This World

If I sit in Mario’s and there’s a group near me at a table or the bar, and they’re laughing, their talk is warm and flowing, that makes me feel good too. True. It’s enough isn’t it? Voices. Laughter. The chink of glasses, smell of food. The cars and people passing on 38th. Sometimes it reminds me of Greece. That’s what I loved about it out there. The life on the streets. The brightness and colour and chatter of it all. It’s true, I never cared much about ruins and temples and statues. Or even cypress trees and olive groves. Until I met Sophie I was always embarrassed by the word ‘beautiful’. She taught me about all that. The twelve gods of Olympus, the nine muses. Let me see now, Mario, if I can remember the nine muses …

I’m a surface person. I like it to sparkle and ripple. ‘Buoyant’ is the word they use. I float easy. And you can go on floating even when you’re way out of your depth.

I used to love it when I first started coming here. On hot evenings. With my tie loosened and my copy of the Post . Just like a real New Yorker. Give me the settings, give me the props. Joe Chameleon, that’s me. Spelt: Carmichael. Joseph of the rainbow-coloured coat. I think I could have been an actor once. Easy. When I was a kid in the boy scouts, we did this Christmas Show, in the Church Hall, Stapleton Road. Our troop and another. There was this spot where I had to step out to the front and do this monologue (written by the assistant scout-master). Real corny jokes. I thought: I won’t make it. They’ll stare right through me. They’ll think: This kid’s a flop. But I was a hit. They laughed. I loved it. Even added a line or two of my own. I can still see those laughing faces behind the dazzle of the lights. I’m making them laugh! Me! And I can still hear the scout-master saying to my parents, ‘It seems young Joe has quite a talent for the stage.’ And Dad saying, ‘My son’s name is Joseph.’

It’s changed, Mario. It’s changing. Is this how it is for everybody? I used to think that happiness was out there . All around. All I had to do was get to it. Now — I know, I can feel it — I’m becoming this sort of sentry on duty. Like happiness is inside , hidden away, and I’m trying to keep out all the bad things. Those letters I write to Harry. Like a loyal, clandestine son-in-law. Sophie’s fine. She’s fine. Meaning: Stay out of it, Harry. She’s safe with me. I know what you thought of me I know the only person you wanted to marry Sophie was someone just like yourself. But she belongs to me now.

She’s not fine. Not fine at all.

Jesus, Mario, I wanted to see the world, but there was always part of me that wanted to be this cliché, this jerk: this guy who gets out his wallet with the photos of his smiling wife and smiling kids, and says: There, that’s my ticket! That’s my little stake in humanity, my little bundle of joy!

Make her safe, make her happy again. Please, Doctor Klein.

‘Hey, but those are two big guys, Mr Carmichael. Now, don’t tell me, this is Paul and this is Tim. No? I got it wrong again?’

Nearly ten years now, but when I look out of my office window I still get that feeling I got when we first came here. New York! Wow! Is this real? It’s just like in all those films. But now I’m going to step through the screen.

The strange thing is, after all this time, I still haven’t stepped through the screen. There’s still this — gap. But maybe that’s how I like it now. A dream city. Step through the screen and you lose the picture.

When I was twelve years old, in ’53, my parents bought a television so we could watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I never understood this, since, living in Tottenham, there was nothing to stop us catching a bus to Westminster and watching the real thing. But I think I knew even then that the real reason for getting that TV was to fill the gap between them and me. Even today, Mario, I can’t look at a TV without feeling a twinge of rivalry. You know, like the TV was a favoured brother. Like it was this perfectly charming, perfectly obliging lodger. But I have to be thankful too. Because to me it was also like a little chink in the cell wall, showing me what lay beyond. And if to them the pictures were just pictures — it didn’t matter what they were, so long as they kept coming, filling the vacuum of our living-room — I knew that one day I would show them you could make the pictures real.

If they could see me now. In New York! In America! If they could have seen me in Greece. Driving a white Merc by the blue Med! If they could have seen my wedding. Hyfield. Chauffeurs! Silverware! Champagne!

I was even on TV myself once, wasn’t I? Sophie Carmichael, with her husband, leaving Dorking General Hospital … Though I wasn’t in a position — in fact it was terrible, bloody terrible, being the wrong side of the screen — to wave. Hi Mum! Hi Dad! This is me!

Remember me?

What the TV said was that a good time was coming. There was our new Queen, in a gilt coach, riding to be crowned. And there was Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing looking like spacemen, standing on the top of the world with a Union Jack stuck between them. What the TV said was that there were people who weren’t like Mum and Dad. That you could tune in and latch on to things the way I latched on to Terry Gray. His sister was the second big love of my life. (Who was the first? You want to know, Mario? Queen Elizabeth, of course. Black and white and blurred though she was.) Not that I got anywhere with Gillian Gray. Never even ruffled her six — or was it eight? Or twelve? — stiff petticoats. But this chaste and honourable behaviour put me in with her brother. And Terry Gray’s father ran this tidy little business called Riviera Travel. And Gillian Gray had friends.

Dad said the Army would beat it out of me. The Army would teach me a thing or two. And so it did. It taught me to drive. And it taught me to wait. And even month after month at Catterick Camp was preferable to being eighteen and still living with Mum and Dad at number thirty, Davenport Road. When Terry and I were both back in civvy street we celebrated, on his father’s money and his father’s business card, by motoring to the South of France in an Austin Healey 3000. Paris! Nice! Monte Carlo! Bonjour Mesdemoiselles! Mais oui! C’est bon! Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? But by then it was all starting to happen with a Whoosh. Right through to the magic mid-Sixties. By which time there was money and clothes and sex and travel and being English suddenly meant you were swinging, and I was old enough not just to be enjoying it all but to be making a fair whack out of it and helping it along, a canny step or two ahead of the tide, in the direction of sunny Spain, Italy and Greece.

Argosy Tours. The new child of Riviera Travel, about to swallow its parent. Terry divided the map like a general. I got sent to Greece.

You know, Mario, I still find it hard to say the word ‘vacation’. ‘Holiday’ sounds to me like fun. ‘Vacation’ sounds like a bowel movement. If you say the word ‘holiday’, what I still see is a table. Some wine. Raffia-backed chairs. A table outside, under an awning or a sun umbrella, or just under the warm stars, in some place where there are palm trees and cicadas and vines, things that will always seem exotic to someone born in England.

And yet for ten years now I have been busily sending people to the country I once so wanted to leave. Where it can rain all summer and where they have never discovered the café. But people want to go there. Americans above all. They have dreams of sweet old England. Oh yes, I don’t deny it, I sell dreams.

But I still think that it’s a good business, a happy business. It ought to work that way, oughtn’t it? The trade rubbing off on the trader. No dirt, just people’s holidays. We watch them come through the doors and we show them the pictures. And then we send them off, through the screen, and who knows if the pictures aren’t going to come real?