What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ letter promising him ten rand if he would just stop “throughing paper balls at the teacher’s back”.

      At bedtime tonight she was less upbeat. I asked her whether she’d finished her homework, and she listed all the tasks she’d completed. Then: “There’s just one more thing: I have to examine my conscience,” she said. She sat silently, bolt upright for a while. I sat next to her, as perplexed and wistful as only a lapsed Catholic can be.

      I read to her. When I thought she was asleep, I started to creep away from the bed. I felt a steely grip on my arm. I understood that I should lie next to her until her breathing was deep and even, past the first light phase, the one that ends with an inexplicable shudder, or jerk, past the false start that precedes true dreaming.

      All I could think about was how I really wanted to be on my own, reading my own book in my own bed. I have no gift for this. I’ve met nurturers before; never imagined I’d have to be one.

      Monica used to complain that I never looked after her, never tucked her into bed when she was sick, never took her car to the mechanic when it needed fixing. How do I want to defend myself against these accusations? Firstly, Monica was always in charge, always announcing how things would be and then monitoring them so that they met with her blueprint. Secondly, I frankly don’t remember her ever being sick. She was frighteningly robust. I was attracted to her strength, which seemed a good foil for my passivity.

      My passivity, yes. As you get older, you grow accustomed to yourself. What I mean is that as a child, I kept expecting to turn into someone else – a rugby player, an academic achiever, someone who copes easily. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t become those things, that they required internal and external qualities I didn’t have. It took ages for me to cotton on that my interior life was in fact different from that of my friends. Only gradually did I apprehend that I was experiencing the world differently from other people.

      Commonplace objects are for me like old books I have read before, and in which I have left a distinctive bookmark, an envelope, postcard, bill, ticket, shopping list, letter, or photograph that forever reminds me of the circumstances in which I first turned those pages. I move slowly through a world that is bookmarked with meaning. I can’t get ahead, as other people do. The others have gone on ahead, are waving at me from their established careers, while I linger here, thinking about the broken handle of the handsome old Monarch fridge that once graced our kitchen. I feel there is something about that fridge and its absent handle that needs commemoration. The way the fridge only admitted those who knew the secret curved finger hook that opened its mechanism. I’m using the fridge as an example, you understand. I’m reluctant to instigate new experiences because I have a backlog of old fridges to process.

      Poor Monica. Just as I, in our early cohabitation, thought I might still metamorphose into someone else, she too doubtless hoped I would change. Happy are those who fall in love at fifty, after all this fruitlessness.

      Thursday 15th August

      11.33 pm

      Last night, when I finally did get to my own bed, a large mental doorstopper kept my sleep ajar, still linked to waking. The sound of the boats going out, the puk-puk-puk of their engines, is the theme tune of my insomnia.

      I know you think of me. Often I feel and even rely on the warmth and steadiness of those thoughts. But I also suspect that I am not completely real to you; that you don’t expect me to respond as a real person who is overpowered by jealousy and urgency. I wonder if, to you, I am a dream, ether-real.

      I have been thinking about your mail last month where you said that Theo would probably be joining you when you come to the Kirstenbosch sales, when you go birdwatching up the coast, when you come to town to do your Christmas shopping. You used to do those things alone: we used to be able to see each other under the cover of those expeditions, however briefly. Now you say Theo will accompany you.

      I wonder why you say that, write that, and then make no further comment. Because in effect what that letter says is, we may never, probably will never, see each other again, or certainly not “see” as in “touch” – however chastely. I receive the message, express my great regret. You reply, yes, you feel my sadness. Then it’s over and we carry on chatting mindlessly – heartlessly – about our daily routines.

      Or am I just slow to pick up a long-extant truth? This is what you meant last year, when you said, after Theo’s discovery, that you had nothing to offer me unless I would join you in unrequited love. You were so remorseful. I thought that once Theo had stopped making you feel guilty, you would write again about an opportunity to meet. But you didn’t; you haven’t.

      I think you never look forward, as I do, as a matter of course. You’re happy when things turn out so that we see each other, but quite easily resigned to the other. It is this stupid optimist in me that is the problem. I think: I have this much of Theresa, this three-times-a-year thing, and the letters. It can’t get less than this. And then it does. In fact, it could all go, letters, everything. And I wonder what it really means that Theo goes along with you now. Does it bring you closer, heal things, bring intimacy, trust, happiness? And if it does, you wouldn’t let me know, not because you are deceitful, but because you believe that each relationship is completely separate, autonomous. And I will end up knowing less and less, understanding less and less. As Dylan says, It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. Though writing this, setting it down, has helped me to understand.

      Today Sal asked me, “Have you ever been into space, John?” I felt touched that she ranked her uncle among the astronauts. Would I keep something like that from you, I asked.

      This exchange was after a day in which she played her first netball match, against the chop-fed giantesses of Laerskool Jan van Niekerk. Sal was supposed to be a reserve, along with the morbidly obese girl in their class, but they each got to play half a match as wing-attack when Harriet’s nerves got the better of her and she decided to stay on the sidelines. Sal loved the newness of netball, the fact that her uncle “lifted”, the freshness of the day, the camaraderie, the bib saying WA, the eminent reportability of the event, the way her opponent said “Kom hiersô” and showed her where the drinks were after the match.

      Angie stood on the sidelines in her castration-issue boots, bellowing encouragement at her twins, to no avail. Holy Cross lost 0–16. On the drive back, Sal cheered up the despondent shooter-defence. “At least we went and showed them. We are Holy Cross Girls. We did what we had to do. Even though they’ve been practising for four years and we’ve only been practising for four hours.”

      Monica phoned tonight, just as I was tipping the fish fingers onto brown paper to drain. She was in town and would I like to meet for a drink at her hotel and “catch up”? I told her I was babysitting. “Isn’t that what teenagers do for pocket money?” she asked.

      There is a James Thurber cartoon that aptly sums up my life with Monica: the little man coming home nervously to a house that is encircled in the arms of a monstrously overbearing housewife. But the same way as you want to shake the little Thurber man and tell him, Get a life!, so I was unformed, waiting for life to happen to me. And Monica was no housewife.

      While Monica was out resolving conflicts between worker organisations and big corporations for increasingly impressive remuneration, I went steadily and unambitiously back and forth to my job at Karoo Books. One year when the company was failing or, rather, doing worse than usual, I even took a cut in salary. Monica never understood my attitude to money, that it wasn’t important. If you think how all the luxuries I enjoyed those years in Johannesburg – meals out at restaurants, weekends in game reserves – were thanks to her job, you’ll see how hypocritical I must have looked.

      I met Monica when she СКАЧАТЬ