Part 2

So just like that, as they say, I set my sights on becoming a writer, a writer would not have to stand up in front of anyone and say anything, I had thought, I could simply write the words that I would be unable to say standing up or even sitting down, it not mattering whether I stood or sat, the point being that I just couldn’t speak in front of people, not without having multiple debilitating panic attacks in any case, but in order to be a writer I actually had to write and that, it turned out, was far more difficult than I had expected it to be, many times I sat down to write and many times I wrote nothing, there being nothing to write, or nothing I could think of to write to be more precise. Sometimes, however, I would manage to write something, not much but something, a start that I could perhaps build on I had perhaps optimistically believed, but when I came to review what I had written, I realised it was diabolically poor writing, writing that would never get published in a million years, rank awful, vomit-inducing writing in other words, writing that should have been immediately expunged from the record, but which I invariably and masochistically endeavoured to edit into something better or less egregious in any case, wasting many hours on labours that would always and ultimately prove fruitless, until I eventually came to see that the only possible course of action was to expunge the writing from the record and to start all over again, from fresh, as it were, at which point I would tell myself that this time it would be different, that the right words would effortlessly flow out of me and onto the page where they would be preserved for other people to read, maybe many people, I dared to think. I allowed myself to dream in other words that I could yet become a good writer, or at least a published writer, which is all I really wanted or thought I wanted, but the words didn’t flow, they only sputtered out of me, moreover they were the wrong not the right words, arranged together in a syntactically mangled fashion in sentences that rambled on about things I knew were innately uninteresting or if they were interesting, they would only be interesting, I strongly suspected or deep down knew, to a very small section of the reading population, a section that itself was a very small section of the largely illiterate wider population, hence hardly anyone would be interested in reading the stuff I had written, which was prolix and self-indulgent and all the things writers are supposed to avoid in crafting their prose. At bottom, of course, as with all aspiring writers who lack the talent to realise their ambition of getting published, I had nothing to say, even though I wrote thousands, hundreds of thousands of words, I said nothing, not once in all those words did anything remotely close to saying something emerge, rather I just blathered on about things that were completely routine, obvious, humdrum, clichéd and so forth, even though I felt at the time I was writing something profound or at the very least original, when I came to read over what I had written, I quickly realised that that feeling of having been writing something profound or original had misled me into thinking that I had actually written something of worth, which was never and could never be the case, given that I was fundamentally incapable of writing anything worthwhile, interesting, edifying etc. I am either not ashamed or deeply embarrassed to say that this wanting-to-be-a-writer thing went on for a while, or as long as I could make my money last for, which was quite a long time since I needed and wanted very little that required the exchange of consideration, but in the end, as frugal as I was, the money ran out and I was forced to consider the only possibility left open to me, namely to find a so-called proper job, at which point I sought advice from my uncle, who, unlike my parents, was a professional person, a management consultant of some sort, and so I thought a good person to turn to for advice on how to go about obtaining my first proper job, a career job in other words, my parents not being professional people were not the right people to ask for advice, whereas my uncle being a professional person was, not that I wanted a career, far from it, but nonetheless I felt compelled to get one when I finally admitted to myself that the wanting-to-be-a-writer thing hadn’t worked out, even though I still felt that one day I would return to writing and still foolishly believed I would be able to write something good enough to be published; I had to get a career job, I realised, and my uncle being a management consultant, a bona fide businessperson with decades of experience of the so-called real world under his belt, was the right person to ask for advice, my parents, on the other hand, being blue-collar workers with decades of experience of the blue-collar version of the real world would not be the right people to advise me, having only blue-collar-related advice to give to me, and I categorically did not want to be a blue-collar worker, having valiantly resisted my parents’ insistent, continual, relentless and blatant attempts at acculturating me into the mores of blue-collar society; the simple fact of the matter is I loathed the vulgar boorishness and xenophobic mentality of blue-collar workers, even though I also disliked white-collar workers, probably despised them more than blue-collar workers, whose uncouthness paled into insignificance against the monumental priggishness and entirely unwarranted certitudes of white-collar workers, I thought to myself as I began to ascend the hill that would complete my circumambulation around the Devil’s Punch Bowl, over which a gluey grey mist had settled, blue-collar workers, I thought, stick to blue-collar workers and white-collar workers stick to white-collar workers, even though my parents were blue-collar workers, I was definitively not a blue-collar worker, having steadfastly refused to become a blue-collar worker even though my parents had wanted nothing else for me, and were in fact deeply disappointed that I had not become a blue-collar worker, though they never said this to me, they very obviously were disappointed. Not that I wanted to be a white-collar worker, far from it, the thought disgusted me to my core in fact, made me want to vomit, self-flagellate etc but I had no choice, failed writers have no choice, I thought bitterly, failed writers must either sink into the oblivion of their failure or accept it for what it is and move on, must either give up on life or give up on their writing, must either confront the awfulness of their writing or deny its awfulness and thereby allow it to consume and destroy them, which I did not want to happen, could never permit to happen, hence why I swallowed my innate revulsion for white-collar workers and turned to my uncle for career guidance or counselling or whatever, whose advice, strong advice, his words, was that I should take a course in business studies, specifically a so-called master’s in management, you won’t get anywhere with a history degree, he said to me, you need to get a grounding in the disciplines of business, he declared with his characteristic and somewhat discombobulating assertiveness, which meant nothing to me at the time and still means nothing to me now, you need to understand the different facets of business and the interrelationships between those facets and the sub-facets within those facets and the interrelationships between those sub-facets, my uncle’s words, which made no sense to me then and make no sense to me now, nonetheless I found myself agreeing that it sounded like a good idea to me, hence why I took out a loan to finance the master’s in management, which incidentally I passed with flying colours, the academic rigour of the master’s being questionable at best and so therefore it was easy for me to pass the master’s with flying colours, without even really trying I found myself doing very well in that master’s, after which or at the tail-end of which, I started hawking my CV to prospective employers, even though I had nothing to put in that CV, I still managed to put things in that CV, even though I had no idea who I wanted to work for or what job I wanted to do, I simply emailed my CV to as many graduate employers as I could find listed, without any thought for whether I wanted to work for those employers I applied to those employers, indiscriminately and without any method or strategy on my part, without any regard to what these employers did that required them to employ people, without any regard to how much or how little they were likely to pay or the other benefits they were likely to provide or not provide as the case might have been, I simply applied to as many as I could find, all of the graduate employers that were listed in other words, the vast majority of whom regretted to inform me that I had not been successful on this occasion, implying there might be another occasion on which I might be successful which clearly was not and never could be the case, though some employers, not many but more than just a few, perhaps about ten percent of the employers I had sent my CV to, did invite me for interview, which is how, of course, and when, of course, I discovered how lamentably, embarrassingly, shockingly bad I was at interviewing, ergo no job offers, not one job offer, just wall-to-wall rejections, regret to inform you etc, not on this occasion etc, wishing you well in your job search etc, meanwhile the repayments on my loan were about to kick in and I realised, with a mounting sense of dread, that I might soon find myself becoming an insolvent debtor, an ignominy that I could do without and anyone could do without; the repayments, I kept thinking, the repayments, what am I going to do about the repayments? What am I going to do about the repayments? I remember asking Ludwig, who was by this time ensconced in his career at Oxford University, having realised his ambition of becoming a teacher of philosophy, although not a writer of philosophy, although of course his note-taking had begun by then in earnest, which was a prelude he thought, and everyone who knew him thought, to writing his philosophy; all of my attempts, I confided to Ludwig, to secure employment had been for naught, that on account of my uncle’s advice, I confessed to Ludwig, I was now in hock to a bank, a ruthlessly usurious bank that had lent me the money to pay the fees for my master’s and to defray my living costs as I studied for my master’s, a bank that had lent to me solely on the basis and the strict understanding that my obtaining of a graduate job would serve as collateral, a job that had thus far failed to materialise, meaning I would be unable, I explained to Ludwig, to make my first repayment, which was due all too imminently, meaning the bank would almost certainly instigate proceedings against me to recover their loan, proceedings that would inevitably lead to my being declared bankrupt by a functionary of the state whose function it was to brand the forehead of my life with the stigma and the shame of financial ruination, and Ludwig had helped me then, just as he had at other times helped me, being the sort of person who was predisposed to helping me and I being the sort of person who needed to be helped by him, not frequently, in fairness to myself, although more frequently than was salutary certainly. On this occasion Ludwig helped me by speaking to his father who spoke to someone who spoke to someone who happened to be a partner of a mid-tier audit firm, who was happy to give me a job, sans interview, and the rest, as they say, was history, the history of my training as an auditor and then, after studying for and passing many exams, my qualifying as a chartered accountant, and then of my moving to a larger audit firm, one of the so-called Big Four audit firms, and then, after not enjoying it there any more than I hadn’t enjoyed working for the tinpot mid-tier audit firm I had come from, hotfooting it into industry to work as an in-house accountant, a job I had been doing in one form or another ever since, although not now, now I found myself without employment, through my own choice, or rather because I had been obligated to say yes to Elda’s request vis-à-vis Ludwig’s notes, which was the least I could do for her and for Ludwig, having never forgotten and never not appreciated the help that Ludwig had given me on various although not numerous occasions, help that was given on a strictly no-strings-attached basis, which was the best basis, the most morally acceptable basis to give help on, even though deep down I felt and always had felt that invisible strings were and always had been attached, hence why I now found myself with the frankly overwhelming task of sifting through, reading and making sense of Ludwig’s notes, I thought to myself as I sat in the kitchen in Ludwig’s wing at the oak table staring at the wall clock, even though Ludwig had given me help, he had unconsciously always wanted something in return, even though I had accepted that help on the basis that it was given, which is to say gladly and freely without any encumbrance or expectation of reciprocity, I knew I had also accepted it on the basis that I would one day have to repay Ludwig, with interest, as they say or as I think they say, and that day had now come, although my mind was at this precise moment too febrile to do what I had committed to Elda I would do and implicitly had committed to Ludwig I would do, the walk having done nothing to calm my mind, quite the opposite in fact, the walk having led me to ruminate about the past and the people from my past, having dredged up all manner of unpleasant memories and speculations that perhaps wouldn’t have been dredged up if I had never gone for a walk, not that I could run the counterfactual of not having gone for a walk. If something happens, I thought, it cannot happen another way, even though philosophers want us to believe that it can, it simply can’t, if one goes for a walk and it leads to a profusion of dysphoric thoughts, I reflected, that walk cannot be taken back, just as the dysphoric thoughts cannot be taken back. I stood up then, with alacrity, and not really knowing why, or without having an explicit aim, I walked over to the fridge and opened it and looked at its contents and finding nothing there to pique my interest, I closed the fridge again and went and sat back down at the oak table, but immediately I felt as if I didn’t really want to sit down, so I stood up again and walked back to the fridge, which I opened and then closed again, without even giving myself time to observe its contents, then I went and leant on the island, in the polished granite surface of which I could see my reflection, a reflection of me that I recognised all too well, the acne scars snagging the light, the sunken drug-fucked eyes, the beak-like nose, the too-prominent forehead, a downright ugly face that I could barely stand to look at, a face that I felt I didn’t deserve yet was lumbered with for life, a face that would one day crumble into dust or more likely be eaten by fungi, which gave me some comfort, but not much, since as long as I was alive this would be my face and therefore I would always have to have this face, which I tried my best not to look at in reflective surfaces, but which at that very moment I did find myself looking at, or gawping at really, having been morbidly drawn to its reflection. At some point, as I stood staring almost in spite of myself at my own inherently ugly visage, my phone started vibrating in my pocket and with a jolt I came out of my trance, if that is what it was, and I pulled the phone out of my pocket. I could see it was Elda calling, Elda had in fact called me a few times since I’d moved into Ludwig’s wing, to check in on me, as she put it, to see if I was okay, is how she couched it, when in fact what she really wanted to know is if I had gotten started yet, on the notes, on the reviewing of them and so forth, hence why when I answered I was naturally a bit wary, seeing as I had nothing positive to report yet on the note reviewing front, not that I needed to be, since Elda was the last person to come out and say something as crude as ‘have you started yet on the notes?’ or ‘how is the reviewing of the notes going?’, that was simply not and never had been her style, her style was more along the lines of checking in and making sure I was okay, which I assured her I was, and after a little bit of small talk, Elda suggested we go for a meal together, a meal, I said, together? yes, she said, together, not two separate meals partaken of separately, but one meal partaken of together. So that is how I found myself with Elda at a restaurant in Haslemere, which we drove to in her car, my car not being the sort of car one uses for ad hoc trips, eating a meal in perfect silence, not once saying anything to each other, even though I wanted to say something I didn’t, and even though I strongly suspected Elda wanted to say something she didn’t, instead we simply sat there stolidly eating our food, which in my case consisted of a mushroom risotto and a crusty roll and in her case a bowl of mussels and two slices of white bread, saying nothing and either looking intently at each other or otherwise intently at the other diners in our proximity, who in complete contradistinction to our studied silence were engaged in lively conversation, conversation which filled the hiatus that for some inscrutable reason existed in the conversational sense between myself and Elda as we ate our food, a hiatus that was more than adequately filled by the inanities and banalities of our fellow diners, who seemed to me to be preoccupied and concerned with matters that didn’t strike me as warranting or worthy of their preoccupation and concern, being matters of the most trivial and insipid kind, the kind of matters that no self-respecting person, I thought, would entertain in private, let alone articulate in public. I was in a lackadaisical mood, having earlier been in an agitated mood, now that I found myself in the restaurant eating silently with Elda, my mood had changed, palpably though also imperceptibly morphed into a subjective state that was entirely different to the one I had earlier been gripped by and was now relieved to have been released from, which is perhaps why I found myself listening to my fellow diners with a kind of passive alertness, knowing all the while that their discoursing was of the basest and most meaningless variety, nonetheless I forbore it with an equanimity I almost found surprising, so surprising that for a moment I almost felt compelled to say something to Elda about how surprisingly equanimous I was being in spite of the provocatively shallow and trite conversations taking place amongst the diners in our vicinity, and likely amongst the diners who weren’t in our vicinity who I couldn’t hear but strongly suspected of being just as loquacious as the diners in our vicinity, but then the feeling of surprise passed and I found myself continuing to sit there in silence, finishing off the last of my risotto, which though gloopier than I would have liked was also unequivocally the tastiest risotto I had ever eaten, the gloopiest and by far and away the most delectable risotto, an observation that I shared with Elda in the bar we went to after our meal, our spell of silence having been broken by then; as soon as we entered the bar we started talking, in such a natural and convivial manner that it was as if there hadn’t been a silence between us at the restaurant, or rather as if we had both decided to pretend to ourselves and each other that there hadn’t been a silence, as if, I thought, we were perhaps ashamed of what had transpired (or not transpired) between us conversationally speaking at the restaurant, although there was nothing to be ashamed of we acted as if there were something to be ashamed of by virtue of the ardour and candour with which we now wholeheartedly addressed each other in the bar, which for some reason was strangely empty even though it was a time of day when people were ordinarily predisposed to socialising in bars and pubs, yet there was no one in the bar, save for myself and Elda, that is, and one sullen-looking man drinking his way to oblivion, and the barmaid, a youngish woman with large, diaphanous eyes and a rope of hair hanging from the back of her head, a rope that on more than one occasion I felt the urge to tug, an urge that I nonetheless resisted, even though it was a strong urge I resisted it, since I knew very well that it would be socially unacceptable to pull the barmaid’s hair for no reason other than it seemed so eminently pullable, it would have been entirely inappropriate to yank her hair in fact, hence why I resolutely repressed the desire to do so. When we got back to the house in Hindhead, another urge arose in me, an urge I knew as soon as it revealed itself I would not be able to resist or repress, that urge being of a sexual, primitive nature, which is why although Elda invited me in to her wing for a nightcap, I declined the offer, since I knew the sating of this urge would involve Elda if it were sated in her wing, whereas in Ludwig’s wing I could sate the urge myself without involving Elda, and although I sensed that Elda maybe wanted to be involved in the sating of my sexual urge, that she very likely had the same or similar urge that needed sating (certain signs in her behaviour led me to believe so and had always led me to believe so), I felt it was inappropriate for us to mutually sate each other’s sexual urges, in view of Elda having been Ludwig’s wife and my having been his best friend, even though I knew Ludwig and Elda had had a so-called open relationship and frequently attended swinging parties together and that in all likelihood Ludwig would not have minded one bit if I had had sexual intercourse with Elda when he was alive, and that he would certainly not mind now that he was dead, in fact, I thought, he would probably be happy for us, his two closest confidants, to fuck each other senseless, as they say, still I didn’t think it was appropriate and so I declined Elda’s offer of a nightcap, proffering my tiredness as an excuse, telling her that as much as I would have loved to have had a nightcap just then, regretfully I was just too tired to do so, it had been a long day, I told her, and I needed a good night’s sleep, although that was complete humbug of course, since I felt wide awake, which is the precise state of consciousness that must prevail in order to sate a sexual urge, a sexual urge that once it has revealed itself must be attended to, acted upon, dealt with etc in a fully alert, wide-awake state of consciousness rather than a sleepy or hypnagogic state of consciousness, I thought as I lay naked on the bed in Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom, having not yet touched my penis, which was as erect as it had ever been, erecter in fact, although it was just a matter of time before I did touch my penis, take it in hand so to speak, I had not yet done so, perhaps because I still felt it might yet be possible to obviate my sexual urge, even though deep down I knew that it was impossible for me not to satisfy that urge, although I hadn’t as yet, for reasons or maybe just a single reason that I had chosen not to fathom or had been unable to fathom or had fathomed and immediately forgotten, I thought as I moved my right hand, my masturbating hand, belatedly to my penis, at which point I gave up on the pretence of holding out against my urge and I succumbed to it instead, as I knew I would, as soon as I became aware of the urge I had known I would give in to it, I thought, as my right hand first gripped my penis and then moved up and down it in a rhythmic toing-and-froing fashion, slowly to begin with, but then faster and faster until the hand was moving up and down so fast it became a kind of whir of tactile sensation (along my entire penis), and before too long, I found myself orgasming and therefore ejaculating, my breath coming in the kind of big stertorous gasps I imagined accompanied a heart attack, although I wasn’t having a heart attack as far as I could tell, still it sounded as if I was having one. It had been a long time since I’d ejaculated, far too long I thought bitterly to myself, and there was a lot more semen than I remembered there normally being when I ejaculated, semen that I quickly wiped up with a sock, a sock I then stowed away in the top drawer of the bedside table, whereupon I immediately felt like vaping, something that I continuously berated myself for doing yet continued to do, even though I had been diagnosed with calcified arteries and the doctors had warned me against it, I continued to vape with seeming yet entirely delusional impunity, knowing full well that I was killing myself, however slowly or quickly, I could not stop myself I told myself as I walked around Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom inhaling the nicotine-infused vapour from the ergonomically agreeable vaping device and then exhaling that vapour and immediately feeling the tell-tale dizziness of the nicotine entering my bloodstream through the alveoli in my lungs, a dizziness that amounted to the quale of one’s central nervous system being stimulated by nicotine, a dizziness that was in fact the entire raison d'être of vaping, the sensation of dizziness, I thought, is the reason I am vaping and hastening my demise simultaneously, which was crazy, I knew it was crazy, dizziness not being remotely a good enough high or altered state of consciousness to jeopardise one’s health for, but after all I was crazy, had been crazy for a long time and would probably continue to be just as crazy, not psychotic crazy, but neurotic crazy, which is in fact crazier than psychotic crazy, although it is precisely seen as the other way around by most people, who only truly believe someone is crazy if they act crazy in the psychotic sense, meaning in the sense of being incoherent, delusional, paranoid, wilfully reproachful of so-called consensus reality and so forth, in that sense I was not crazy, in that sense I was as sane as the next person, but in the neurotic sense I was entirely unremittingly crazy, although most people would not have perceived it as such, since I was not incoherent or delusional most people regarded me as a completely sane person, only my wife, my son, Ludwig and to some extent Elda knew the real truth about me, saw me for what I was, namely a complete and utter neurotic mess, I thought to myself as I exhaled a mushroom cloud of vapour.