The Anarchist

Jayne and Yantra sat in Biddy’s doorway, devouring hard-boiled eggs, today’s bread and apples. They’d arced the van round to watch the sunset and deflect the outrageous north-easterly that was lashing across the Cheviots. Yantra was in two minds: should they clear out of the wasteland and roost ten miles on in the shelter of the Redesdale Forest? Or should they risk the wind shifting direction and Biddy going over in order to make love with the oncoming gale rattling agreeably outside? Of course, it was highly unlikely that the van would take a tumble. But he always felt unnerved in this grey, desolate part of Northumberland. Even when the weather was good this place was as strange and dark as the moon.

Yantra had another problem. He wasn’t sure whether they had enough petrol to make it to Newcastle. Or, more precisely, one of the poorer districts of Newcastle. If it was a toss up between dealing with petrol-cap locks, alarms and the pigs or the irate inhabitants of an inner-city estate and their dogs, there simply wasn’t a choice. A fight was generally avoidable, an arrest hardly ever was.

The wind picked up and the doors began to slam against their legs so they moved back inside.

Jayne saw something move on her coat and squealed. Yantra smiled calmly at her and remained silent.

‘Look, it’s a … flea,’ she said with disgust, attempting to move back from her arm.

Yantra pinched it from her sleeve, gave it a brief scrutiny and satisfied himself that it was of the dog variety. He crushed it with a tight twist of his thumbnail.

‘You killed it!’ she squealed.

‘I karma-ed it. It’ll reincarnate as a beetle and thank me,’ he laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. She flinched. ‘Come on Jayne. Don’t go all Monophysite on me.’

‘Call again?’

‘The Monophysites. A cool bunch of fifth-century Christians who abhorred cleanliness and referred to fleas as pearls of God.’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Switched on, sure, but not half so wired as the Pythagoreans. Now old Pythagoras, of triangle fame, was also the founder of a religion based on the transmigration of souls.’

‘So?’

‘And the iniquity of bean eating.’ Jayne smiled. ‘Want more?’ She nodded. ‘Other sinfulness included, sharing one’s roof with swallows, walking on highways, picking up things that had fallen, stepping over crossbars, stirring fire with iron and plucking garlands. And woe betide the Pythagorean who, when he got out of bed in the morning, didn’t roll the blankets up and rub away the impression of his body.’

Jayne hooked an arm around her man and kissed his cheek.

‘Unadulterated bollocks,’ she told him forthrightly.

‘It’s true. Monophysite’s honour.’

‘Go on then, tell me some more things I don’t know?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well if I don’t know I can hardly say, can I?’

‘’Tis true, my dear.’

‘I know, five minutes life-swap you first.’

‘Mmmm. Where did we leave me?’

‘You were dating Astarot and taking your finals.’

‘Indeed. Well, having read my dissertation on Sir James Murray, the University of Serendipity duly awarded me …’

‘Who?’

‘You jest? Sir James Murray. The man was on a par with Sir Albie himself. Author of Electricity as a Cause of Cholera or other Epidemics, 1849. No? Well, the central thesis of the book was that germs didn’t exist and that all malaise was the direct cause of electrical disturbance. Cholera, malaria and influenza resulted from disturbed electro-galvanic currents. Thus the cure for illness was to lighten the density of the atmosphere around patients. So to ward off the mysterious and all perverting currents of irregular electricity, one should first cover the patient with silk then position buckets filled with quicklime in propitious locations around the house. He also recommended that houses should be constructed on nonconductive platforms and that cities should be surrounded by massive batteries to abate untoward galvanism. The point of …’

‘Yan, you’re doing it again. You. You’re supposed to be talking about you.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Jayne,’ he held his head in mock frustration. ‘You don’t seem to appreciate my difficulty in using the first person singular. The Zaparo have no word for I. It’s either you (uamsca) or everything (ahpikondia), which incidentally also means paradise. I’ve,’ he feigned pain at uttering the word, ‘told you this before.’

Jayne was an utter hog for the man’s seasoned bullshit. Whether any of it was true, which frankly she doubted, she had to credit him with hermetic consistency. The snatches of Zaparo language were always the same, as were his descriptions of life in the yage-swigging, snake- and jaguar-infested forests of the Amazon tributaries. Of course she wasn’t so foolish as to believe that any Ecuadorian Indian tribe could be fair skinned and ginger haired as he maintained (canopial colouring he called it), yet she half wondered whether there actually was or had been a shamanic tribe named Zaparo, whether recherché hallucinogens such as yage and ayahuasca really did somewhere exist and whether there actually had been sects and tribes called Monophysites, Eleusinians, Tschamikuro and Piro and individuals such as Sir James Murray, Tominaga Nakamoto, Al-Ghazzali and John Dewey.

So, he was mad. He was without doubt the kindest, least vindictive or proud man she’d encountered in her twenty-six and a half years on the planet – usually. And when it was over, which inevitably it would be because – as Buddha, Heraclitus, David Hume and Yantra all said – everything changes; nothing remains constant, she would no doubt kill herself. Yet, for now, she was determined to drink as much of this fleeting moment in this fleeting incarnation as was possible.

The dharma of Yantra’s life was indeed that everything is created by a series of causes and conditions and everything disappears by the same rule. At least, as far as women were concerned it was. Before Jayne, Biddy’s passenger seat was reserved for Sylvie, a Scandinavian au pair who had wanted to see the country. Well, he’d shown her the country all right. Left her sleeping in a tent in the Brecon Beacons and if that wasn’t the country then nothing was. Still he hadn’t been all bad to Sylvie (or Hathor), he’d given her a baby. Before her there was Jill who called herself Nephthys and reckoned she could foretell the future. One thing she hadn’t foretold as the acid went wrong in her at Glastonbury was that he’d moved into Sylvie’s tent. Then there was Juliette who gave him gonorrhoea – of the tongue – and forced him into a humiliating encounter with conventional medicine and the establishment. Before her there was Wolfsbane who taught him to juggle and throw diabolo. Cecily Simpson, the journalist, who’d interviewed him and wound up a participant observer preceded her. Indeed, as far back as he could remember, he’d been able to seduce women. Yantra held that as long as one had reservoirs of patience and gentleness, unfaltering respect for the feminine principle, an off-beat sense of humour, five thousand years of potted wisdom and the most beautiful eyes in the world, very few women on this wonderful planet were immune. Not that he abused his God-granted powers. For he maintained that one of the essential secrets of seduction was that a man should display a genuine desire to give pleasure to a woman and that this desire should exceed even his own lust. What woman could possibly resist, he wondered. And, of course, once initiated in Taoist lovemaking techniques, that was that, it was the open road from then on.

Still it had to be said, Jayne was different. They’d been together for over five years now and things had cooled only slightly from the initial white-hot. To ditch her merely for ideological reasons would be a needless martyrdom. Of course, Yantra was in no doubt of the necessity of their mutual infidelities (although he half suspected that Jayne only slept with other blokes to affect a childish revenge on him). Quite simply, people were not the sort of things that could be owned. Getting uptight about that sort of thing would be like throwing a wobbler over someone pampering Endy – negative to the point of annihilation.

‘Yan, you’re not listening,’ he heard her say.

‘Yeah well, I’m sorry but, you know, suburbia bores me.’ He yawned to prove this. ‘The only good thing about suburbia is that it’s next to subversion in the dictionary.’

‘And in my biography. Would you like hear about my subversion?’

One of the problems of being stuck in a van with someone is, no matter how much you may revere them, after about three months or so, you know pretty much everything there is to know about them. And though the repeated and time-tended tales of their rites of passage may offer a vague ritualistic comfort, they can also become bloody boring.

Why she had the need to embark on almost poetic descriptions of the painful mundanities of Hemel Hempstead and her subsequent conversion to a life of the spirit through hallucinogenic chemicals was beyond him. He knew the script and would almost feel his stomach knot with shame when she paused before making the predictable aside that the decision to take that first blotter was the best thing she’d ever done in her life and express her, doubtlessly fraudulent, conviction that everyone should be made to take acid at least once in their lives by law. Still he knew that to stop her now would be cruel in the extreme.

‘Yes, tell me about your conversion on the road to the Essex University library.’ He’d said too much and she looked sadly down at the van floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sighed. ‘It’s very old ground, I know.’

He kissed her and ran his hands up inside her coat.

‘There’s little wrong in repeating a journey.’ He kissed her again. ‘In fact, baby, some journeys just get better and better and fucking better each time you do them.’

‘The usual is it, Mr Entwhistle?’ Jennifer asked with uncharacteristic verve and skipped over to the drinks cabinet. ‘Ho, ho. You romantic fool,’ she laughed glancing over at the flowers crowded into a couple of vases. ‘Expression of gratitude, five, three.’

Her husband raised an eyebrow.

‘Well now, a snifter, eh? I think that very much depends on the whereabouts of the Unspeakably Behaved.’

Jennifer went ahead and poured. She was humming and, perhaps, vaguely ecstatic. This was more than flower power. Doubtless something to do with the Telegraph cryptic, he concluded, and submerged into his armchair.

‘Guess.’

‘Joined a hippy convoy in Wiltshire?’

‘Nope.’

‘She hasn’t … Not bloody Boston?’

Jennifer handed her husband the glass and grinned. Still, she was humming. ‘Nope.’ She pointed at the ceiling and slinked into the adjacent chair.

‘Unwell is she?’

‘I think she must be. She’s actually revising, cramming, with real books and notes, Sherry. On a Friday evening.’ Sheridan took a slow, thoughtful draft and nodded.

‘Revision, eh? Right. Best leave her for the time being.’

Once more Jennifer was humming. Over and over the same infuriating refrain. Sheridan attempted to identify it but couldn’t and this incensed him all the more. Then he remembered. The song was popular in the fifties. He’d loathed it at the time and, though he couldn’t explain it, was shot with a fury each time he’d heard the song subsequently. Its daft tune seemed to follow him into lifts, shops and once even, he seemed to recall though he could scarcely credit it, he’d heard an instrumental version on a corporate telephone hold. The song was about a bikini. And the reason he detested it so was because the chorus contained the expression, itsy-bitsy. Itsy-bitsy – he grimaced.

‘Sherry! I do believe you’ve got a tick.’

‘Tick, eh? Done something right for a change have I?’

‘There, it happened again. Your cheek muscle just twitched. Unless, you were winking at me, of course, ho ho.’

Sheridan wiped a palm over his cheek and kneaded the flesh upwards. He sniffed. ‘Tired, that’s all. Work … summer bloody madness. Never really noticed it before. Remember me telling you about a lad called Ashby? Ashby Giles?’

‘The upstart.’

‘That’s the man. Anyway, I got back from a lunch and the lad had only seen fit to don a pair of bloody shorts.’ He began to laugh. ‘Wearing them, bold as you like, around the office he was.’

‘Ooh. Sapid, nine.’

‘Quite. I mean for all the lad knew I may have been expect …’

‘Bread and butter, six.’

‘I say, you are quick this evening.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, grinning monstrously.

‘As it happened I wasn’t expecting a client.’

‘Still, you upbraided the lad?’

‘I did indeed.’

‘And he accused you of sexual discrimination because naturally you passed no comment on your bare-legged female staff …’

‘How in God’s name did you know that?’

Jennifer laughed and slapped a hand down on the arm of her chair. ‘Because, my dear. At times you’re what can only be described as a predictable old … um … light brown oon, seven.’

‘A what?’

She didn’t answer and went back to her humming.

More to move out of earshot than further inebriate himself, Sheri dan rose and wandered across to the gin bottle. He hadn’t the faintest idea why the expression, itsy-bitsy, enraged him so. It just jarred inexplicably. Like executives in shorts. Like sneering women. Like politically correct language. Like much on this increasingly unsatisfactory planet.

The sitting room door opened a fraction and Folucia’s head peered round. She addressed them with exaggerated boredom.

‘Going out now. Where yer going? Ask no questions, hear no lies. What about your revi-jun? Fi-nished. What about su-pper? Not hungry, thanks all the same? Just a minute young lady? Minute’s too long, life’s too short …’

‘Folucia!’ yelped her mother.

‘Folucia, please,’ entreated Sheridan. ‘Before you go, could I please just have a very short word.’

‘Tit!’ she chimed. ‘Short enough for you, Daddy? By-ee.’

Jennifer said nothing. And, although Sheridan was swallowing a chortle, he shook his head solemnly and said nothing in agreement. That was it then, he thought, the evening’s agenda had just been written. Silent supper followed by reading the paper, occasionally glancing up to look at whatever was happening on the television, then up to bed for another bout of insomnia. If he was lucky, she might get stuck on the odd clue and be forced to speak to him. But he doubted it.

Sheridan tried to imagine what Jennifer’s reaction might be if he suddenly announced that he was going out. He couldn’t. Not that after twenty-three years of marriage he didn’t know her, rather, in the last decade or so he’d more or less dried up on the surprises – just as she’d virtually dried up on the lovemaking.

Jennifer sat motionless staring at the blank television screen. And Sheridan, though he had nothing much to say, experienced a colossal urge to break the silence. Like a child who’s taken on an adult’s bribe to remain silent for a time, he felt a stream of iconoclastic statements jostle up into his larynx. It reminded him of these last six weeks, when being in the paradise state between waking and sleep, he’d detect the vaguest of urges to get up and pee. Invariably, he would attempt to sublimate it and succumb to the delicious gravity of sleep. Yet in his heart he’d know that, having acknowledged the urge, all hope of sleep was absurd, and sooner or later he’d be forced to capitulate.

He glanced over at her. And, perhaps, there was something unusual about the light but she appeared suddenly as she might have two and a half decades ago.

She twitched.

Still he glared at her.

She looked away.

He smiled.

*

As was usual, Sheridan had pulled into the Lloyd Park car park. And, as was usual, he’d turned off the ignition, clicked off his lights and pushed his face into Jennifer’s. Yet this night she did not respond with her accustomed ardour.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

‘Nothing … I s’pose.’

‘No there is, I can tell.’

She cupped his cheek and murmured a small kiss onto his mouth. ‘Can you tell?’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘How’s that then?’

Though Sheridan may have been an expert at the games played over telephones and in the meeting rooms of the major pharmaceuticals, he was clueless when it came to this sort of thing.

‘I dunno.’

‘Maybe it’s because you know me quite well. Sherry.’

‘Right.’

‘You know, Sherry.’ She tightened her hold on his cheek and began to wipe awkward, wet kisses over his face. Her mouth progressed round to his neck, practically panting at his ear. Then she whispered something to Sheridan Entwhistle.

‘Sorry?’

‘I said,’ she spoke with a slightly louder frustration, ‘you can do things to me if you want.’

*

Sheridan laughed out loud.

‘You can do things to me if you want,’ he blurted.

Jennifer looked up at him.

The sternness of her expression made him laugh again. How that face could have once uttered those words was beyond him now.

‘Sherry?’

‘Nothing, sorry.’

*

At work Sheridan was not reticent about the fact he had a girlfriend. And when people asked, Have you had her yet? – which was the way people put things at the time – he’d reply, ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’ Then when someone quipped, Is that bald for no? and everyone collapsed, he considered it perhaps time to put it to her. After all, he reckoned, the worst she could do was decline.

Prior to the ecstatic rummagings Jennifer now permitted him, Sheridan had had but one sexual experience.

For half a crown, Hilary Parish had let him snog her and allowed him access to her right breast in Edingley Hills. Before the transaction took place, she’d insisted that Sheridan ask her to go out with him (otherwise she’d be a slag), accepted and then formally chucked him after the drama. This is how Sheridan could legitimately claim that he’d had a girlfriend at seventeen.

When Sheridan arrived home and clandestinely kissed his mother’s nurse in the hall, he knew that even the asking was impossible.

And so he tarried, part curious, part terrified and part famished, stealing away for auto-satiation when impropriety threatened, and returning the gentleman.

At eleven-thirty on the night of the thirty-first of December, 1969, his mother upstairs in bed, Jennifer pulled her mouth from Sheridan’s and said, ‘Let’s open the champagne now, Sherry, and do something really special to see the sixties out.’

Sheridan looked at her nervously. The timing, it had to be said, was less than immaculate. He closed his eyes and listened to the groan of the WC refilling.

*

At perhaps two o’clock, Sheridan was abruptly woken.

‘What is it?’

‘She’s not back,’ Jennifer whispered anxiously.

‘Who’s … Oh right.’

‘And you’re snoring like a geriatric.’

‘Sorry.’

‘If you hadn’t drunk so much, you’d be awake and at your wits’ end too.’

‘Wrong,’ he said, somewhat irritably. ‘If you’d have joined me in a drink you might be asleep and not at your wits’ end. Goodnight.’

He dug his head defiantly back into the pillow and duly Jennifer snapped off the lamp. But it was too late. He was awake and remembering things about hearts and secretaries and bladders.

Jennifer coughed and turned, then coughed again. He tried to force things from his mind and fill it with sleep. Of course it was useless and the frustration made him more awake than ever. Jennifer shifted again. He waited for the cough.

‘Why is my life so consistently infuriating?’ he growled, flinging himself from the bed and swivelling into his dressing gown. ‘I suppose you want a f … f … flaming cup of tea?’

Ten minutes later Jennifer came out to join her husband in the garden. He ignored her.

‘Come on, there’s a good girl. Get it all out. I’ll fetch you some more water.’

‘Good girl!’ exploded Jennifer. She tailed him into the kitchen. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’

‘She’s not well, Jennifer.’

‘I can see that much. And why do you suppose she’s not well?’

‘Tell me you’ve never had one over the eight and I’ll listen. In the meantime, I am attending to my daughter.’

‘For God’s sake, leave her. You can’t give her the idea we approve of this sort of thing.’

‘Please, Jennifer, let us argue about whether this constitutes a cardinal sin or is merely part of growing up in the morning. For now …’