Part 6

I stood up and left the house, got into my car and drove off. I went straight to Haslemere, parked up in the station carpark and bought a ticket for the train to London. I waited on the platform with the commuters and when the train pulled in, I dutifully queued up to get on. Once I was on, I sat down in the nearest available seat next to a man in a greatcoat who gave me a sidelong glance, a glance that appeared to suggest he was none too happy about my seating myself next to him. I feigned an air of nonchalance and got my phone out, scanned the newsfeed for news that might interest me but found nothing, naturally, so I opened a browser and googled the names of various famous writers and read their Wikipedia entries lackadaisically, until I found myself getting drawn into the biography of one particular writer, who had, it seemed been quite a lothario, womaniser, philanderer etc, not something I could personally relate to, but which I found intriguing all the same. I looked that writer up on Amazon and purchased one of his works in the so-called e-book format, which I immediately started reading on my phone. After a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs, I nodded off. I dreamt about my wife, as I always did. She was accusing me of being a no-good love rat, an unfaithful scumbag, a two-timing tosser etc. I insisted I hadn’t been cheating on her, even though I couldn’t be sure in fact whether I had been or not, but she wouldn’t listen to reason. You disgust me, she kept saying. Again and again, she said it, until inevitably she worked herself up into such a fury that she reached for the nearest sharp implement and plunged it into my abdomen. At which point, I woke up to find the man in the greatcoat was no longer sitting next to me, had been replaced by a woman in a puffer jacket. I stared out of the window as London blurred past me and pretty soon the train arrived at Waterloo. It was at this moment that I realised I had no clue what I was doing, not just in life generally, but here and now specifically. Why had I come to London? I thought. What could I possibly hope to achieve by coming to London? I had no idea, but I was here now and so I might as well meander about for a bit, I reasoned. I had no idea why I’d come, but I felt it was right to at least give London a chance. Even though part of me wanted nothing more than to return immediately to Hindhead, I opted to stay in London and walk around for a while, see what I could see, maybe figure out a few things into the bargain. I walked from Waterloo to Leicester Square and then made my way to Chinatown, where I picked out a restaurant at random and went inside. Immediately I was shepherded upstairs by a waiter who seated me at a table by a window with a view of a fuming ventilation shaft and handed me a laminated menu, which I carefully surveyed as the waiter hovered by my table. Even though I knew exactly what I wanted, I went through the motions of reviewing the options on the menu, until after a long enough time had elapsed to convey a real sense of having properly evaluated the options, I told the waiter what I wanted by referring to the numbers of the relevant dishes, dishes that I had had the intention of ordering ever since I set foot in the restaurant, being very much a creature of habit when it came to Chinese food. The waiter walked off to deliver my order to the kitchen and I surveyed the scene. The restaurant, or the upstairs section of it anyway, was moderately busy, meaning about half of the tables were occupied. On the table nearest to mine a woman was sat with what I took to be her daughter, a young girl of eight or nine. The woman had a lugubrious demeanour, a common enough demeanour for any parent of a young child, I thought, whereas the girl had a vivacious demeanour. No doubt the child’s vivacity was the cause of her mother’s melancholic mien, I thought, no doubt the child’s incessant exuberance has leached the life out of her mother, just as all children leach the life out of all parents, children having an insatiable appetite for the life of their parents, just as parents seem to have an unlimited supply, until, that is, I thought, they inevitably run out of the stuff, at which point their children, having sucked as much life out of them as they’re going to get, move off into the world, leaving their moribund parents behind (without so much as a second thought for their sacrifice or a scintilla of gratitude) to live out the rest of their days as husks of their former selves, as so-called zombies, a state of affairs that can, and frequently does, endure for a surprisingly long time, even though these parents have, to all intents and purposes, been lobotomised by their children, they nonetheless go through the motions of existing, compelled to do so by the remorseless demands of the so-called will to live. That is, I reflected sombrely, just how it is with children and their parents, how it has always been and how it will always be. At another table, two men were busy having a heated conversation. One of the men was insisting that he hadn’t done what the other man had accused him of doing, whilst the other man was denying that he had accused him of doing anything. Or so it went for a while, but then the man who had been denying what his interlocutor had accused him of suddenly admitted that he had in fact done what he’d been accused of. I didn’t catch what his interlocutor made of this development because my food arrived just then. Or one dish did, the Peking duck. By the time I had made and eaten the last duck pancake, another dish was on my table, the Kung Pao chicken, which I waited to eat until the Yangzhou rice accompaniment had arrived. As I waited for it to arrive, I suddenly thought about a woman I had met and had a brief affair with a number of years ago, a Chinese woman who professed to be a poet and a denigrator of so-called conventional reality, who had been just my type in other words. I forget how it ended, I thought, I forget her name even. The rice arrived and I mixed it with the chicken and then I ate the resultant admixture with chopsticks. I didn’t like eating with chopsticks, but I felt I had to. Even though I could have used the cutlery, I opted to go with chopsticks, which I was far from adept at using and detested using for that very reason, nonetheless I used them anyway, probably because I felt it was gauche to use the cutlery or perhaps vulgar is a better way of expressing it. Once I’d eaten, I felt nauseous, just as I always did when I ate Chinese food. I promptly paid my bill and left the restaurant. Seeing as it was close by, I felt the logical thing to do was to pay a visit to Soho, I didn’t necessarily want to go there, but seeing as it was just around the corner it made sense to do so. When I got there, I immediately descried one of the sex shops. I thought they had all gone out of business and that Soho had cleaned up its act years ago, but apparently that wasn’t the case. I went into the sex shop and browsed the artefacts for a while, but I could feel the shopkeeper’s gaze boring into the back of my head, a sensation that was discomfiting to say the least, which is why I soon left the sex shop. On the way out, a man who happened to be walking past gave me what’s known as a withering look. I walked briskly away from the scene of my humiliation and took the next left into an alleyway and here I found two women dressed in sex outfits smoking by a doorway. Don’t make eye contact, I told myself, whatever you do, don’t make eye contact. One of the women asked me the inevitable question and I shook my head to make it clear that, no, I wasn’t looking for business; I hurried on past, got to the end of the alleyway, turned right into another one, which took me to a main road. A bus happened to pull over just then and I got on. Where to? the driver asked, reasonably enough. I had no idea, of course, so I just handed him a note, told him to keep the change, which wasn’t like me, being a so-called skinflint, I was ordinarily averse to not getting my change, but in this situation and strictly on a one-off basis, I felt it was the expedient thing to do. I made my way to the upper deck and sat down. My heart was beating very quickly and loudly and it seemed to me as if I might be having a heart attack. The vaping, I thought, it’ll be the vaping that’s led to this, as I always knew it would do. Seeing as I was the only passenger on the upper deck, I got my vape device out and started vaping. If I was going to have a heart attack anyway, what difference did it make? I might as well vape if I’m going to die anyway, I thought, fully aware of how fatalistic I was being. I was suicidal, I thought, vaping was suicide, not a quick suicide maybe, but all the same, continuous vaping was bound to finish me off sooner or later and therefore it was an act of suicide, a long-drawn out act maybe or rather a succession of acts, thousands of acts, hundreds of thousands of acts that would ineluctably lead to my demise. I couldn’t stop myself from vaping, but I didn’t want to stop either, even though part of me did want to stop, I couldn’t stop, the part of me that wanted to stop clung to the mistaken belief that life was worth living, thought the other part of me, the part of me that felt it was demonstrably the case it was not worth stopping vaping, and which comprised four fifths of who I was as a person and therefore preponderated over the other part (which accounted for merely one fifth of who I was as a person) and always would do, until, that is, it got its wish and I died of some awful vaping-related disease, at which point there would be no me for there to exist parts of. I got off the bus at Camden and walked around the market for a while, shaking my head intermittently at the chthonic drug dealers who wanted to know if I was interested in buying whatever they were selling, which I wasn’t, knowing full well that these street dealers only ever sold the most adulterated drugs, cut with God knows what, to the most naïve, desperate, stupid people, I thought, as I worked my way deeper into the thronging chaos of the market, the stalls of which were bursting with useless tat that, needless to say, I had no interest in procuring, hence why I shook my head at the stallholders, many of whom called out to me as I passed, trying to ensnare me in the net of their sales patter, as if I were nothing but a hapless fly of a consumer. Little did they realise, I thought, that I was very far from such a thing, that I was in fact the antithesis of a hapless fly of a consumer, that I despised consuming things for the sake of mere consumption, that I would never in a million years so much as look at the worthless wares that these stallholders made their dishonest living from selling. Just at the point I thought I might not be able to take any more of the stallholders’ wheedling entreaties, I found a way out of the maze-like market, finding myself adjacent to Camden Tube station, the entrance to which was occluded by a man preaching about God, specifically about how God’s wrath would be cataclysmically unleashed on all those who continued to live sinful, depraved, licentious lives, who refused to repent and atone for their misdeeds, selfish materialistic cravings, contemptuous disregard for propriety and so on. For God will hath no mercy, the man shouted into his megaphone, for those who refuse to heed his –. Yeah, yeah, I thought. I stepped around the lunatic and bought myself a travel card from the ticket machine. I took one last lug on the vape device and then I descended down into the bowels of London. I cruised around on the Tube for a while as I contemplated whether I should go and see my wife, possibly my son if he was still living at home, which I doubted. I could posit many reasons why I should do so, but just as many countervailing reasons why it would be completely inappropriate, ridiculous, wrong-headed and so forth for me to rock up on my wife’s doorstep, technically our doorstep, since I still owned half of that doorstep, just as I owned half of everything else the house consisted of; the reasons for going to see my wife, and possibly my son in the unlikely event he still resided in the family home, were highly persuasive but the reasons for not going were just as dissuasive, I thought; on the one hand I probably still loved my wife, missed her, needed her, had a duty to make things right with her, just as I had the same duty in regard to my son, who I also loved and missed (terribly in fact), but on the other hand, I had no right to swan back into their lives, which no doubt they had moved on with: how could they not have?, no one can help their lives moving on, it’s just what lives do, I thought; from the beginning, lives have always moved on, never stayed the same for more than the briefest span of time, no matter what the liver of a life may want, they have no choice in the matter, their life will always move on, even if their life is working out very well and they have every reason to want it to stay exactly as it is, their life will nonetheless, and with brutal indifference to the liver’s feelings, move on to the next phase, I opined. I had no right to expect that they (my wife, my son) would want me to make things up to them, having walked out on them completely volitionally, even if I had been provoked into doing so, nonetheless it had been my choice to leave, or it seemed like it had been my choice, even if there was in fact no one doing the choosing, even if all of my so-called volitional actions had been predetermined by a chain of causation that was and always would be hidden from my purview, including the action of walking out on my wife and my poor son, who had needed his father to stay put, as it were, just as every son needed their father to stay put, even if my wife, his mother, had provoked me into leaving by stabbing me in the abdomen, which she had had every right to do, given how badly I had treated her, how intransigent I had been over many years, how derelict in my duties as a husband and father, all the same I should have stayed put for my son’s sake, but I hadn’t stayed put, I had done the precise opposite of staying put, and so how could I now, after x number of years, simply turn up out of the blue, as they say, and expect that I could somehow make things right? I couldn’t, I realised, it was just a fantasy, a selfish delusion. My wife and my son very likely never want to see me again, I thought. My wife and son hate me and will never forgive me. I had been profoundly delusional to think otherwise, I concluded. I got off the Tube at Waterloo and took an escalator up to the main concourse. I should get back, I thought, to Hindhead. What am I even doing here? I wondered. Why had I come to London, a city I once loved, but which I now found disorientating and disagreeable? I should get back to Hindhead tout de suite, I told myself. But at the ticket machine, I found myself dithering. Did I really want to go back to Hindhead? What was there in Hindhead for me? Elda, yes, there was Elda, who I was fairly certain of being in love with, and Ludwig’s notes, of course, but I’d already read them and therefore knew with absolute certitude that I would not be able to bring to fruition Ludwig’s aspiration, namely that the notes be written up, so to speak, into a work of superlative philosophy. He had not been able to do so in his own lifetime, and I would not be able to do so in mine, of that I was quite sure. Maybe no one would be able to. Perhaps that was defeatist of me, but that’s how I saw it, having read the notes, I could not think any other way about them, not unless I lied to myself, which was something I was more than capable of doing, but on this occasion, I didn’t want to, didn’t have the energy for the mendacity that would be required to envisage a work of philosophy being created out of these notes that Ludwig had left behind. No, the notes were an irrelevancy, certainly did not constitute a reason to go back to Hindhead. Which left Elda as a reason, perhaps a compelling one in view of my undoubtedly deep feelings for Elda, to go back to Hindhead, where I would at least be able to get away from the infernal hubbub that was presently swirling all around me and had been swirling all around me ever since I got to London. I was about to put my debit card into the ticket machine to purchase a ticket to Hindhead, when I suddenly realised I couldn’t go through with it, that as seductive as the proposition of returning to Hindhead seemed, there was equally something about it that perturbed me. I’m not saying, I told myself, I won’t go to Hindhead, I just won’t go right now. The truth of the matter was that at that moment it just didn’t seem like a propitious time to go to Hindhead. As much as it galled me to spend more time in London, I nonetheless had to accept that that was my only option. I strode across the concourse, exited Waterloo station and made my way to the South Bank, which had changed beyond all recognition (and not in a good way), except, that is, for the South Bank Centre, which was just as starkly modernist as I recalled it being, just as reassuringly monolithic. I went inside and ordered a lager from one of the bars and went and sat down to drink it at a table by the entrance to a cloakroom, which I soon realised had a foul odour emanating from it, hence why I moved to another table, this one close to the entrance to one of the auditoriums. I took out my phone and scanned the newsfeed idly, not really paying any attention to what my eyes were registering, since I was listening to the man on the table adjacent to mine, who was speaking into a mobile phone, animatedly recounting a story to whoever was on the other end of the line, the type of story that one could pick up the thread of without having heard the beginning and which provided a good deal of entertainment for me as I sipped my beer whilst staring empty-eyed at the newsfeed on my phone, until, that is, perhaps because he had sensed I was eavesdropping, the man all of a sudden lowered his voice, basically started talking in a whisper, at a point in the story, moreover, where I sensed the denouement was not far off, which I found frustrating of course, but not that frustrating, the story having, in fact, run out of steam long before the denouement. I finished my lager, debated with myself whether to buy a ticket for a show, not that I had any idea what was on, not that it really mattered, one show being as good or as bad as any other as far as I was concerned. But I didn’t want to see a show, I reflected. I wasn’t in the mood for a show. I was in the mood for a nightclub, I thought, for dancing and letting my hair down, as they say.