carpe noctem

Let me put forward a memory: I am in bed with a woman. I am reading a book and then I start to feel a fingernail engrave a lascivious suggestion down the middle of my back. I don't react as I am in the middle of a paragraph, although a part of my body was already receiving and translating the message. The anatomical part to which I refer is an involuntary organ which is detached but still capable of overwriting common sense and ruining my life. The scratching continues. The paragraph is nearly spent and my mind is now split between unbridled ravaging and the journey of the protagonist in my novel. But as the last word is devoured I hear a sigh followed by a loud thump as she turns away.

"There was a time you couldn't keep your hands off me."
"I'm sorry, I was just finishing the chapter."
In that last word I felt the weight of her final judgement before it was even delivered.
"So, the book is better than me."
I was reading Milan Kundera and for a nanosecond my brain regained control and held back my "of course not" reply.
"I was just trapped in the flow of the page. I'm sorry."
"Do you still love me?"
At this point I realise that I am playing a tiresome game that only the inexperienced and emotionally insecure love to play. No matter what happens now the sex will be boiled down to an empty involuntary reaction. It will lack spontaneity and it will lack love.

I loved her. In fact I adored her. But a few months later the rot had started and within a year we had finished sleeping together. To this day I can still look at the cover of the "Unbearable Lightness of Being" and vividly recall the moment. There were obviously other reasons why we parted. The most amusing one that I surmised a week after we parted was that she was a Scorpio, a water sign, and I was a Virgo, an earth sign. Basically, we were mud.

However, my point is this. I loved her but my brain was engaged in a book. I was wrestling with Parmenides and Nietzsche. I was very willing and equally able to wrestle with her beneath the duvet but my mind needed to separate itself from sixties Czechoslovakia first. Maybe, I was guilty of lust in the beginning and maybe it had died off a little. However, to find doubt in a man's love because he didn't throw down a novel as you ploughed his back is nonsensical and slightly ludicrous.

I am now in my early fifties. Divorced. Single. Borderline bitter. I still read in bed. But my back is free of scratch marks and my libido a little dustier. So would I close a book quicker if I had company tonight? Would I risk losing carnal pleasures again? Well, with age comes wisdom and a richer love. I like to think that today I would be reading to her and that the punctuation would dictate the best time to scratch.

malcolm

He was cremated at 9am this morning. That's the slot in the crematorium that nobody wants. So, he had no mourners to recount tall stories and no high praise for his charitable acts or simple acts of kindness to strangers. But in truth there couldn't be any stories or praise as he was a self-absorbed recluse. A man who lived apart. A man who was and will be easily forgotten. In his past, he had loved and she had tragically died. They said he never recovered. He then blamed his parents for imagined sins and found solace in alcohol. He lost years of his life to this self-abuse and finally ended up in a flat in Brixton. Alone and surrounded by music that he never listened to and books that he never read.

This morning they slid him into the cremation chamber, locked the door and at the flick of a switch, incinerated his flesh to ash. He is no more. His evil, for there was some, lives on. His good is lost and unrecorded. But he was no Caesar. He was just a man. Troubled by a life that never caught a dream or found a love. Yet he was a story that is often told and a life that is duplicated by millions. I didn't know him and I never met him. I can only wade through the detritus of his life and bear witness to the squalor in the rooms he inhabited. I can only formulate a theory as to how he lived and know with absolute certainty that he died alone in a park.

But he was an artist. He had an eye for capturing the essence of a skyline or the gentle curve of a woman's lower back. And he was also a writer haunted by deep black depressive thoughts which were wrapped within a desperately lost soul. Yet he was still someone's son and he was loved by a woman he called, Mum. So, in my heart I put aside the sins and the crimes he visited upon others and instead imagine a newly born child in his mother's arms. Then in that one perfect moment I whisper a silent prayer for them both.



(For Sue and Malcolm)