Well Done God! Read online

  The father appealed for witnesses to his son’s death to come forward, not expecting to be overwhelmed by numbers. What had happened as far as they knew was that on Furse Bend he had crossed the inner edge on to the central reserve and in the resulting spill (which was not particularly dangerous in itself) the point of the clutch lever had entered his brain by way of the base of his skull. The father wished to know how designers of safety helmets had not taken this possibility into account. His colleagues said he should have had a ball on it.

  But I am trying to be benign.

  A rusty charlatan stated dogmatically that a discussion was an argument in which no one was particularly interested. He was reminded that every good deed is followed by the punishment of God. But, he insisted, one must have a proper regard for the ordinary.

  The continuous process of recognising that what is possible is not achievable.

  A man taking pictures of a man taking pictures : there must be something in that.

  At a wedding reception everyone was drunk, including the children. Indeed, one of the children became so affected as to seem ill, and it was considered advisable to take him to a hospital to have him seen to, stomach-pumped if necessary. They chose the receptor who seemed least drunk to drive the child, quickly. On the way the car was stopped by a policeman on a horse, who invited the driver to puff breath into a plastic bag. Crystals in the tube attached to this bag turned a certain colour which convinced the policeman that the driver was under the influence of alcohol and he informed him that he would be charged with an offence. “Oh no,” said the driver, “Your bags must be faulty. Perhaps indeed you have a batch of faulty bags. Why don’t we test them by trying one out on this innocent child ?”

  A bard’s land shall be free. He shall have a horse when he follows the king and a gold ring from the queen and the harp he shall never part with.

  Do I want that to be the truth ?

  The Vice-Chancellor was killed when inspecting the progress of the building of Senate House. A technician was pushing a loaded wheelbarrow across a plank spanning a liftshaft. He saved himself, but the wheelbarrow was lost. The Vice-Chancellor was standing at the bottom of the liftshaft. Accommodate that mess.

  Most of the time they look for things to want, schoolfriends.

  Miceal and I would play snooker. He would generally win. His was always the same remark when he sank the green or the brown which would put him beyond being caught unless he gave away an unlikely number of penalty points : “Now you haven’t got enough balls. You’ll have to put your own up.” I cannot say I laughed more than the first and second times, despite tradition. And “No points for hard luck” was another saying of his that stuck.

  —Who was there ?

  —The usual mess, of course. Baldies, hairies, collapsed faces, fallen women, who would you think ?

  Life.

  Someone has to keep the records. I may even be thanked, in time.

  Instructions for the Use of Woman; or Here, You’ve Been Done !

  Let me try to set this down with an exactness you may or may not find curious.

  The only point of precision (as distinct from completeness, to which I feel incapable of aspiring) on which I am undecided is the disclosure of her name. This indecision is principally occasioned by the existence of libel laws of a surely unnecessarily harsh character : for I am, after all, only telling the truth as I see it now, remembering to the best of those faculties I have what I felt reasonably sure happened at the time. If you are not an acquaintance of mine (which you are almost certainly pleased not to be) her name can mean nothing to you; and those who do know me will already be aware of her name or be easily able, from their special knowledge, to identify her. So how could she be harmed ? Why should our lawgivers think that she needs protection ?

  But in their circumstances I shall call her Winnie, or Rachel, or Stella, or any other name that reasonably preserves her gender, as the mood takes me, or rather as whatever comes to mind at the time a proper name seems to make the rhythm of the sentence a little less of a failure. And I shall make unthrifting use of the feminine personal pronouns. But, whichever, no burden of universality is to be laid upon the appellative; or on anything else, either.

  I wonder is anyone still reading ?

  This girl (as she then was) Millie. First eyesetting must have been at our college, at some time, she was a year or so behind me, was it two, no, she was in the same year as Patrick, Neilsen, and all those, the heroic young. A snobby lot, she told me, at the time I am really writing about which was much later, several years after we had both become post-. I could astound you with an amount of stunning trivia at this point, if I did not wish to avoid boring myself. By beginning at the beginning I am doing that however, so how about some sex ? That I know you will enjoy: so many commodities sold through sex testify to the stone certainty of that truth !

  At some early point in the post-college period, then, I must have invited Daphne to count the short rosary of my balls : one, two, one for luck, three ! This must not be misunderstood as a conceited metaphor, but read again, perhaps more carefully. But the invitation went unanswered for some time, and no speculation can be more likely to show a slight profit than that this had much to do with a boyfriend of hers who said he had cancer. More of him later, if I can be bothered, for I am having enough difficulty fulfilling my word and getting to the sex soonest as it is.

  How to express it ?

  Ah!

  There blew up this very disturbing bubble under my foreskin (for my parents did not follow the fashionable organ-scalping of their time, for reasons into which I have never felt competent enough to enquire). It was after the second (I think) time that first night, and this bubble I can only liken to that which can often form, suddenly and almost remarkably, when a half-fried egg is basted with overheated fat : something to do with surface tension, perhaps, though I am no physicist, ha ! But my bubble was larger, though perhaps fingering in the dark made it so, or seem so. Obviously it was a blister, but why it should be so large worried me. The cause was almost as obvious : Dora was dry, desiccated, and did not let down her dew, Freda’s fanny had not let flow the sweet juices of fornication, Sonya’s sluicegates of soft desire had remained shut, Wilhemina’s weirwaters had become a wadi of waste land, waste sand — and similar imitations of the euphemisms of the good old pre-permissive writers.

  But I am the first (and who could challenge that ?) to admit that there was another cause, too : I was not (like any of us) as young as I used to be. I was, indeed, as late in the twenties as it was possible to be in those days, and I had been, moreover (and this may come as a shock), in an unblessed state as regards actual penetration of a female for something approaching four years. Not that, you must understand, I considered myself celibate : like an athlete I had kept the appropriate muscles in fine fettle by regular (for periods, indeed, nightly) exercise. But no, on this occasion it was, I am sure, or feel, the remarkably high friction quotient generated against not an unreceptive (for it was well enough received) but an insufficiently lubricated receptacle for an unusual length of time. This latter point is of major interest (for me, anyway) as this second time, following at who knows (since it was dark) what interval, it took me an unprecedentedly long time to discharge my duty, if such it was, and if not it ought to have been. Indeed, to tell all, I did not go off with that splendid, satisfying splott at all, but (the method used being timely withdrawal with Gynomin for additional safety) dissembled by gentle histrionics. I do not know if she was deceived; she gave no sign. For this only I feel guilty about the whole affair : and that only for my own sake, certainly not on account of her. It is the only occasion on which I have found it necessary to feign in this connection.

  But the bubble I kept fingering, after the coitus had been interruptus, being aware of, for a long while, in the dark there. Eventually I fell asleep, and when I awoke it had almost disappeared : though the soreness remained, so there was no dismissing it as a dream, wet or windy, or
a nightmare.

  I would like it to be borne in mind during the following attempt at description that my appearance too has not been known to cause gasps of admiration or envy, nor to stop traffic in even the less busy streets.

  She was a big girl, Harriet somewhat masculine, I suspected, big except for her breasts, tits, dugs, or mammaries, that is, which somehow protruded less than her stomach, looked at from either side elevation. Yet she did not appear to be fat, exactly, had a waist and good gracile legs. It was her hips, she was very heavy in the hip; I wish I could demonstrate for you with some anatomical model or machinery the heavy, curious articulation of her hips. If I had to sum her up in a cheap phrase, and why I do so when I am under no such compulsion causes me some surprise, I would say she was an incipient trout, a budding if not archetypal trout, even at her age (which at that time was about twenty-five) manifesting distinct troutiness. And ah, again, I would not have you thinking (if you were) that I am envious, or even taking some kind of revenge : for no doubt to her I also was archetypically pisciform, for instance, perhaps clearly seen as a rock-salmon (dogfish, Scyllium catulus), or as the grotesque camerafish, I am a camerafish ! No, my only concern, as I have too often said, is to set down what I thought, think, and remember with some exactness. If she wishes she may attempt to do the same : that I allow is her troutish privilege.

  Perhaps she was all that I deserved, if in spite of everything there is justice, at that time, and I am very pleased the time is past.

  Did you find the bubble bit interesting ? I doubt you can have read anything quite like it before. And it is true, however it reads to you. By ‘quite like it’ I mean anything so curiously comic and uncomic, in just that way. Or perhaps you were embarrassed ? In that case it may have been good for you : have you thought of that ?

  Her character. She had a marked capacity for setness. She would punctiliously leave me to catch a train for no other reason than that she had at some time set her mind on catching that particular train. There was no real reason to go home then, or at all, except the setness, the execution of an arbitrary but pre-determined decision. I thought this was very near to being a mistake, but that is surely natural.

  It was a wet summer, poor by popular standards, but popular with me because the number of creepy-crawlies was noticeably diminished. Or perhaps it was just that there were fewer occasions on which I was tempted to sit on the grass.

  This was at her flat, in a late Georgian house facing on to Blackheath. She paid a high rent for it, for her. She was a schoolmistress. In the morning she would not let me be seen by the colleague who came to pick her up for school. I watched from an upstairs window, Morris Traveller, woman about forty, and troutlike Doris swinging in her two fine legs, never a romantic glance up at the window of her flat, smiles for the colleague, talking about something from which I was excluded. Do not imagine I did not resent it.

  For the rest, or part of the rest, the notes for a failed poem of the time or thereabouts :

  Just as though nothing had happened/Cars still crossed the rain. . . . of Blackheath/Houses proudly primly bowfronted as day night before/WORMS were stranded across the asphalt paths/just as they always are by heavy rain ?/a fishmonger laid out stiff mackerel/ticket office efficient/the commuters soaked and drily surly/and the tube so packed as to suggest a grotesque echo of our closeness/Just as though I had never lost my faith belief/in loving making love and you had not restored it/

  At last, you must be saying, or thinking, rather, the point, or a possible point, at any rate : the unsatisfactoriness of the relationship is being reflected or refracted in what it would be a joke to call the narrative. A suicidal point : make it as unsatisfactory as possible for the reader in order to convey more nearly the point of unsatisfactoriness.

  There ! A reward for reading this far. Another joke is promised before the end.

  There are two ways of taking what has gone so far : your way, and my way. And you are no doubt going to take it your way.

  Mind you, in those days I used to be worried about on to and onto, as well, ha !

  Yet I have told you nothing about her, really, Anne, Betty, Celia : nothing that could be shown to you in any meaningful sense to be true. But at least pyrronism may be true, paradoxically ?

  Shortly afterwards I met my future wife and lived happily ever afterwards.

  I am going to give up this style soon. Perhaps after this. I mean, it is well understood that a man cannot stand still. Change is a condition of life, I remind myself. Perhaps the most admissible one, too.

  Nor is this the piece I wanted to write.

  But always end with a song and a giggle . . . so sing the following fescennine joke to yourself :

  The usual young man was shipwrecked on a desert island. Fortunately for him he found there others, though only men, who had met with a similar but earlier fate. When he had eaten and drunk of such as the island provided, he felt recovered from his asthenia sufficiently enough to enquire into how this all-male society fared for the other. “Ah,” said one of his companions-in-distress who recked not of ending sentences with prepositions, “There we are very well provided for. In the south of the island is exposed at low tide the mouth of a cave at the back of which is a vast store of dried fanny, provenance unknown but highly regarded, and you are most welcome to avail yourself of it as the need takes you.” Our hero was of course at first inclined to regard the fellow as a barmecide, but, having nothing to lose, soon sought out the delitescent cave and was surprising and pleased to see that the man had indeed been speaking the truth. So, choosing circumspectly from amongst the neatly stacked piles the least hispidulous of those in the front, he was soon enjoying himself with a properly apolaustic fervour. Over the succeeding months and years he came to value this handy dehydrated convenience product so much that when the time came (as it must for the purposes of this anecdote) for the castaways to be rescued he resolved to take back a dozen or so with him : what he had in mind was to produce them triumphantly if any of his acquaintance should accuse him of gasconnading, as they naturally might. Jauncing off the boat into the Customs Shed at Falmouth, however, he met with an unexpected setback. “Anything to declare ?” enquired a ventripotent Customs Officer; to which, determined to be truthful, our hero replied : “Yes. Dried fanny, as a commodity, or, if you prefer the plural, fannies.” The Customs Officer did not laugh, as he found it unsettled people. Instead he expressed a desire to see the objects declared, and was immediately convinced by a glance into the sailor’s kitbag. “How many are there ?” he required to know, as though dried fanny were part of the everyday life of the Customs Officer. “About a dozen,” hazarded the succoured castaway. “About ?” queried the civil servant, “In that case I’d better count them.” And, licking his enumerating finger, he began to do so. All went well to seven, mere routine, but then he paused, licked his finger again, reflected for a long moment, and said firmly : “Here, mate, you’ve been done : this one’s an arsehole !”

  Broad Thoughts from a Home

  Robert said :

  A poem is a poem is a poem is a ragbag.

  Description of Robert :

  Height :

  6’ 8”

  Weight :

  14 st. 10 lbs.

  Eyes :

  honeybrown

  Complexion :

  pallid

  Hair :

  fair, riotous

  Features :

  mobile

  Collarband :

  15

  Disposition :

  agitated

  Bearing :

  all over the place

  Age :

  twenty-two years

  Sex :

  unimportant

  Spectacles :

  worn, horn

  Teeth :

  irregular

  Apparel :

  eccentric only in colour

  Overall impression :

  long

  Nature of statement : exploratory-aggressive.r />
  Samuel said :

  Crap.

  Description of Samuel : large.

  Description of description : pithier.

  Nature of reply : somewhat obscene.

  Robert said :

  A poem is a poem is a poem is crap.

  Tone of remark : unconvincingly flippant.

  Expression on Robert’s face : baulked-abashed.

  Samuel said :

  Agreed.

  Tone of reply : sharp.

  Purpose of reply : to end conversation, and to secure a modicum of peace in which he might be enabled to concentrate upon the effort of leaning out of the window to observe the hour of day indicated by the clock on the tower of Their Lady of the Assumption in Rathmines, suburb of Dublin.

  Samuel said :

  If I fall out of this window, you are to inform the nearest Garda immediately.

  Tone of remark : largely serious.

  Action on part of Samuel : to reach out a little farther.

  Portion of anatomy poised on windowsill : loins.

  Physical state of Samuel : uncomfortable.

  Successful climax of action : Samuel glimpsed the clockface.

  Method employed : a supreme elongation.

  Subsequent necessity for treatment : Samuel pulled himself in and relieved his impressed loins by gentle and appropriate massage.

  Samuel said :

  Twenty to five, if one can believe the Church in oh at least this one small particular.

  Robert said :

  Time to eat.

  Nature of remark : gluttonous ; indicative of hyperfunction of digestive organs.

  Samuel said :

  You’re always byourlady hungry !