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Also by Will Eaves
FICTION
The Oversight
Nothing to Be Afraid Of
This Is Paradise
The Absent Therapist
POETRY
Sound Houses
The Inevitable Gift Shop
First published in Great Britain in 2018
by CB Editions, 146 Percy Road, London W12 9QL
This edition first published in Great Britain and Canada in 2019
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Will Eaves, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 938 5
ISBN 978 1 78689 937 8
He roves not like a runagate through all the world abroad;
This country hereabout (the which is large) is his abode.
He doth not, like a number of these common wooers, cast
His love to everyone he sees. Thou art the first and last
That ever he set mind upon. Alonely unto thee
He vows himself as long as life doth last. Moreover he
Is youthful and with beauty sheen endued by nature’s gift,
And aptly into any shape his person he can shift.
Thou canst not bid him be the thing, though all things thou shouldst name,
But that he fitly and with ease will straight become the same.
Besides all this, in all one thing both twain of you delight,
And of the fruits that you love best the firstlings are his right,
And gladly he receives thy gifts. But neither covets he
Thy apples, plums, nor other fruits new gathered from the tree,
Nor yet the herbs of pleasant scent that in thy gardens be,
Nor any other kind of thing in all the world, but thee.
– Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book xiv, trans. Arthur Golding
The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected.
– Erwin Schrödinger, ‘Mind and Matter’
Contents
The Class of All Unthinkable Things
PART ONE
JOURNAL
Murmur
Fear of homosexuals is never far from the surface. The few people who have supported me after my conviction must be very strong-minded. I do not think most people are equipped to associate with pariahs. They have a shadowy sense of how frail they themselves would be in the face of institutional opposition and stigmatisation, how utterly cast down if they lost their jobs, if people they knew stopped serving them in shops or looked past them in the street. It is not hatred that turns the majority against the minority, but intuitive shame.
*
Do I need to set down the circumstances? The results are in the papers, and once again I am disinclined to ‘show my working’. It is strangely more instructive, for me, to imagine other conditions, other lives. But here they are, so that my friends, when they come to these few thoughts, may do likewise.
I had just finished a paper and decided to award myself a pick-up. I met the boy, Cyril, on the fairground. He seemed undernourished and shifty but not unengaging; living, he said, in a hostel, working casually. I bought him pie and chips on the grounds and invited him home for the weekend. He didn’t turn up, so I went back to Brooker’s, waited for the fair to close that night, and took him home soon after. He was not unintelligent, I found – he’d liked the boys’ camp in the war, did some arithmetic there, and knew about Puzzles and Diversions. Cyril was, I’d say, the product of natural sensitivity, working-class starvation and nervous debility. He wouldn’t kiss. We treated ourselves to baths and listened to the late repeat of the Brains Trust programme on learning machines, with Julius Trentham opining, not implausibly in my view, that the human ability to learn is determined by ‘appetites, desires, drives, instincts’ and that a learning machine would require ‘something corresponding to a set of appetites’. And I said something like, ‘You see, what I find interesting about that is Julius’s suggestion that all these feelings and appetites, as he calls them, are causal, and programmable. Even these things, which we’re so sure, so instinctively certain, must be the preserve of freely choosing and desiring humans, may be isolated. They can be caused, and they have a cause.’ And Cyril was fascinated. He was listening and nodding. I felt so happy and so peculiarly awful. We went to bed and in the morning I unthinkingly offered him some money. He was offended and left in a mood. I then discovered £3 missing from my wallet – he could have taken it at any time, I put nothing away – and I wrote to him at the hostel, calling things off. He turned up on the doorstep the next day, very indignant, making obscure threats which I did not take seriously. He mentioned an unlikely sounding suit hire debt, for £3 of course, and some other outstanding sums and then ended up asking for another £7, which I reluctantly gave him.
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