Even
by
Nigel Barley
Copyright © 2013 Nigel Barley,
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Cover Kitchen
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2019-6
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Chapter One
‘What’s the best way to get revenge on buzzards?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh go on,’ I urged. ‘Take a guess.’
Kevin sighed and frowned, twanged the Dan Dare buckle pensively on his elasticated belt. ‘I don’t know. Oh go on then. Tell me.’
I smirked triumphantly. ‘Glass eyes!’
All right, it’s not very funny. At ten years of age your sense of humour is not at its best. Bodily functions are a bottomless pit of mirth. The fact that every sport involves mention of “balls” is hilarious. And a plastic, fake boil that you can stick on your neck is the height of sophisticated wit. No, I mention the joke simply to show that even at that age I was concerned with living in a just universe.
It’s not just glass eyes that roll up from the depths when you’re in therapy. We are all like those ancient, scarred objects you see in the glass cases of museums, trivial but made portentous simply by having survived so many vicissitudes of life. There’s all kinds of stuff that comes out, as if you’d just lanced that boil. Rhodda, my therapist, has led me to a view of my mind as carefully constructing a secret plan, kept even from me, that explains my whole life. Once you see the plan, she says, you are free from it. Or maybe, I think cunningly, you can follow the plan better, make it explicit and focused, make it control simply everything. She is sitting, as always, in her box-like armchair, turned slightly to face me, sucking her pencil and taking the odd note. Behind herself, she has arranged white lilies in a glass vase like a 1950s TV announcer. Perhaps she has just been to a funeral and they gave all the guests a free bunch as they left. How I wonder about those notes. Why a pencil? To me, pencils imply provisionality, the need to change your mind. Does she sit up all night rubbing me out, revising me? Then, there’s the way she takes the notes. It reminds me of that scene with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator where he is dictating not to a country but a typist. He produces a great, long sentence and, in response, she hits the keyboard just twice, then a single word that causes her to type furiously for thirty seconds.
‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ I say, irritably. ‘I’m paying you to listen to my bad jokes.’ She has no sense of humour but that doesn’t matter. She once asked me what I did when I came to a fork in the road and I said, with my best boyish grin, that I picked it up as you could never have too many forks. She still doesn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But better a literalist than one hooked on iridescent metaphor. You wouldn’t want a guide dog with an overdeveloped sense of humour leading you through the traffic. That last sentence produces a near minute of writing. I know full well, of course, just why I’m telling her this, sitting here – dramatically reduced - on that great raft of a sofa, like some prop from Alice in Wonderland, my feet barely reaching to the floor. Therapy is a chance to talk endlessly about yourself but I have been doing this for months and have long run out of anything of interest to say. I’m boring even myself. What I thought would be a bursting cornucopia has turned out to be, at best, a half-filled cornetto. But she is a kind woman who wishes me well and I don’t want to disappoint her, eager to please. She is happiest when you can throw her some repetitive nugget of dysfunctional behaviour that she can laboriously point to, so, over the past few weeks, I have fed her “obsessive negative thoughts,” “catastrophic reasoning” and “low self-esteem” and she has gobbled them down like a dog eating toffees. Now she sucks her pencil and gives me a look like a goat looking over a fence.
‘When you say that, what picture comes into your mind?’ The picture of me going home. I look at the clock, the way I looked at the clock during those endless P.E. lessons in school where I deliberately ran into the vaulting horse every week, inviting the sneers of the master, for fear of landing astride it and doing myself and my heirs permanent damage.
‘I think of school,’ I say in a big, clear voice.
She nods wisely and makes a long, complicated note that involves her turning her head sideways, breathing the whole time ‘Aaaah!’ as if I have given myself away and she has scored a crucial bullseye.
‘We’re all scarred by school,’ she says in an irritating, consoling voice. ‘That’s what it’s for, to deliberately mark you for life but the consequences are mostly unforeseen. That’s why we keep coming back to it in these sessions. That’s why we have to work through these issues slowly, one by one, to undo the harm that’s been done. Pain minus acceptance equals suffering. Of course, you may have your own opinion. If you like, we could discuss it until you agree with me.’
‘But that’s unfair.’
She looks up and blinks her Dame Edna-ish glasses back up her nose. ‘Life,’ she says, ‘is unfair.’ Said with pursed lips and undue satisfaction. I see her draw a prim little line across the page, then a box, turning it into an epitaph. ‘And now, I’m afraid, our time is up.’
***
It took me a while to come up with my webname, wrathofgod.co.uk, a wholly-owned subsidiary of my holding company, Expanding Galactic Enterprises. At first I inclined towards Revenge!.co.uk, the most important part of that being the exclamation mark! Then SweetRevenge!.co.uk. But wrathofgod.co.uk it had become when I suddenly caught sight of myself, one late night, in a careworn pub mirror. The theological dimension was initially a problem. Perhaps it limited the range of my clientele and Rhodda would see it as a mark of paranoia - were I ever foolish enough to tell her about it - but it carried the pleasing idea of an implacable, personal force and I could see the commercial possibilities of it splashed across T-shirts and maybe, one day, even as an aftershave in embossed bottles with heavy-metal overtones. It would have been nice to hang the sign somewhere outside a glitzy office with an unsuitably youthful, plausibly blonde, receptionist who would droop languidly over my every word. I would make jokes. ‘The Invisible Man is in the outer office, Miss Brown? Tell him I can’t see him now.’ Or. ‘The Seven Dwarves are waiting outside? Tell them I will see them shortly.’ At which she would giggle and rub her rump on her chair and then... But no. For the moment, my corporate headquarters lay down the hall in the back bedroom, amongst the boxes of rejected memorabilia and back issues of discreditable magazines, just a short, grey-carpeted shuffle from all the comforts of home. I fired up the computer that rumbled and thwacked, then twittered in blue light. It has discothequish aspirations. Ping! I have mail.
How shall I explain the mission of wrathofgod ? Quite simply, it offers a vision of a more perfect reality and a corrective to the world of experience. Quite simply, it douses the fire of rage. It goes back to my objection to Rhodda about the unfairness of life. The modern world is full of suppressed rage, smouldering just under the surface, always ready to burst into flame. Ask anyone – but carefully. Life out there is crammed with resentful women, kids with an absurdly bloated sense of entitlement, terminally greedy OAPs and bosses who are trapped in the space between their own forward job plans and retrospective peer reviews. Expectations are raised but the bar is set ever higher, so that to have everything is no longer enough and we all go around feeling cheated. Some few of us blame ourselves and go into monasteries where we are further done over by the fat bastard who calls himself the abbot as we ruminate on the mystery of divine grace. The rest of us blame others but there’s nothing much we can do about it because of the way the world is set up. Wrathofgod.co.uk promises justice to the oppressed through revenge.