Breaktime Read online

  The room walls: painted mat sand-brown, the ceiling mat white, the door and other woodwork gloss white. On the walls: pictures, clippings from magazines, posters, record sleeves, bookjackets. Ephemera in profusion. Mostly browned from age and sunlight (which achieved some sort of penetration between the hours of two-thirty and six, post meridiem).

  The flat-faced window, two-sectioned. One section opening outwards gives view and vent on to arterial road leading to town (or, from, depending upon one’s need), centre of town two miles distant, edge of town one mile. His father cannot tolerate noise of traffic, preferring duller, but larger and quieter back bedroom, hence this front room Ditto’s. Window veiled by crisply starched net curtains, insisted upon by his mother (you never know what people outside might see inside). For night-time privacy, heavy chocolate-brown curtains drape the windows, floor to ceiling.

  The seats. One kitchen chair, uncomfortable, at desk. One old, small, poorly stuffed armchair covered in synthetic fabric stretch-cover, bile-green, bought in Co-op sale and looking it, with bright red loose cushion for highlight. If you slouched across the thing, sitting was bearable.

  Letter

  He laid the letter on his desk blotter, stood staring at it a moment, savouring its possibilities. Its arrival was entirely unexpected; not even hoped for.

  Then, anticipation weakening him so much his hands trembled, he took off his school jacket and tie, heeled his shoes from his feet, unhitched his trousers and stepped out of them, took up the letter again carefully, threw the candlewick coverlet aside, and lay down on his bed.

  While calming his breath, he gazed closely at his name and address in the unmistakable handwriting: fluent, firm, yet still echoing a child’s awkwardnesses.

  The letter, when he slit open the envelope with his right forefinger and eased the page out, was written on one side of a single sheet of school exercise paper. As he unfolded the page, a photograph fell like an autumn leaf on to his chest, picture side down. Deliberately he left it lying there while he read the letter.

  Picture

  Her of course, the picture is of her, of course, in colour and my god it’s her in swimsuit strip but not stripped enough, must have been taken last summer before she left while she was still here and I was lusting after her then and didn’t attain what I dreamt of feeling too cloddish when face to face with her but she must have known mustn’t she Morgan wouldn’t have dithered the sod not he and she would have aided and abetted him I’ll bet would she me those legs what legs what tits and a face to go with them a bit knowing though and maybe that’s what held me back though it doesn’t now you brute but this letter now maybe all the time she was waiting was wanting was after it me me her after it was she me her me her legs breasts skin face legs legs o legs her her her there there there there there there

  and it’s gone all over my frigging shirt and my hanky’s in my pocket in me trousers on the frigging floor should have thought prepared but didn’t think didn’t expect her to send such a provocative picture the slut

  But she is okay, could almost shoot off again just looking at her, certainly could in the instant flesh instead of the instant Kodak, and that’s what I’d like, what I need, her in the flesh and willing.

  Does Morgan succeed in all he claims?

  I bet he doesn’t, most of it plain rodomontade. Randy he may be but a rodomont he is too by nature. Though even if he has had only one or even two of the adventures he claims, his rodomontades are but decoration to the truth, cos then he’s had it, with his willy or nilly, and I haven’t.

  What a thing to have to admit at seventeen years plus.

  Afterbath

  Ditto rose from his rumpled bed, straightened the cover, examined the scene for clues of his concupiscence, pulled on his trousers, replaced his damply soiled handkerchief in his hip pocket to dry in his fleshheat before discarding it in the laundry basket, and sat at his desk, the better to frizzle his eyes on the tormenting photograph while musing on his unexpected letter and the inexperienced nature of his being.

  Suddenly, in the afterbath of his self-abuse, his room seemed tediously dull, embarrassingly naive. There he was for all to see who had gump to perceive. The inside Ditto. Himself, as he would hide himself.

  The furniture was all his parents’ except for the rickety bookcase, rudely cobbled product of boyhood, and his desk-table, throwaway acquisition from a rubbish dump. The pictures on the walls, like his bookcase, were stuck there three, even five years ago: expressions of crazes and passions now vestigial only: birds from his nature-spotting days (circa 11 yrs), planes from his flying period (circa 12+), authors and singers going back into primary school years, and finishing up lately with Orwell, Lawrence, Joyce and Richard Brautigan (the authors), Fineguts, Razor, Towlake and Prinwell (the singers).

  Even his books were half boyhood favourites, half recent purchases mostly inspired by Midge and bought more—could it really be the truth?—because he believed they were what he should read and possess rather than simply to please himself.

  And that damned Spitfire arrested there mid swoop on its transparent stand, motion miniaturized and simulated and made safe for childish hands: another pubic hangover.

  All toys, the whole lot, or received possessions of other people. Where among it all was he? Where was the present Ditto, the real, bloodflushed Ditto? WHO was the present Ditto? Was this he? This neatly precise collection of outgrown junk and second-hand propositions? Loads of it crammed into this little box of a room, yet featureless somehow. Absent in its presence.

  Was that what Morgan was getting at?

  Remembering Morgan, he took from his jacket the Charges Against Literature and laid the page out, open on his blotter. By its side he placed Helen’s letter and her photograph.

  They lay silent there. Together.

  Words on paper cheek by jowl with colours in a pattern (a reflexion of light and shadow captured months ago).

  Mute. Yet eloquent.

  Witnesses come to accuse him.

  Opponents in some unlooked-for battle.

  Challengers.

  Perturbed in the face of his documentary friends, Ditto went to the window, pushed aside the obscuring veil, and glared out at the street.

  People and vehicles programmed for home ignored him.

  Ditto’s Mother Returns

  Hello, love.

  Hi.

  You all right?

  Sure. You?

  Tired.

  Course.

  Been home long?

  About an hour.

  Your dad seems a bit low.

  O?

  Did you give him his tea?

  A cup. All he wanted.

  Have a chat with him?

  A few words.

  You haven’t been rowing, have you?

  No, not yet anyway.

  You should talk to him more.

  I had something to do.

  He likes a chat with you.

  Yes? You wouldn’t think so sometimes.

  It’s his illness.

  School all right?

  The usual.

  I wish you’d spend a bit more time with him.

  Ma, you know how it is.

  But you could try.

  I do.

  You know how ill he is.

  I know.

  It’s the illness makes him . . .

  It’s more than that.

  Did you change your shirt this morning?

  Can’t remember. Think so.

  Looks filthy.

  Well, I’d better go down and get supper.

  Anything I can do?

  Lay the table, love, in a minute, eh?

  Sure.

  I’m worn out.

  You do too much, Ma.

  Somebody has to, love. But I’ll manage.

  Set-to at Supper

  Father and I had had fights before. And frequently at meals because that was when we spent longest together. At other times, to save the conversation from turning fierce
, I could leave the room, or he would feign occupation in a newspaper or the television, or, in desperation, in reading a book. But round the table at meals we were both trapped, literally facing one another, with Mother between, referee, judge, wearied peacemaker.

  This evening the conversation began with the topic of my day, a sure-fire success for Father’s satiric irony and my tetchiest self-defence.

  I had, said Father with a sour chuckle, been lounging around all day talking about a dead writer. I think he intended only to be playful: to tease, not to wound. I sensed the danger, of course; my antennae were by now well trained, and Father’s chuckle not exactly deceptive. Mother sensed it too, and her quick glance as she handed me my plate pleaded for neutrality.

  I wished no combat; my reply was likewise intended simply as a jest returned in kind. Was apparently received so. Father smiled; Mother laughed (too gustily however; hers was not a response to my wit but an attempt to ensure the conversation was taken at its lighthearted face value).

  And now we reach that significant truth which detailed description would only obscure. Despite our mutual intentions, we—Father and I—were soon spilling emotional blood. Even as I snapped pert replies to his gutsy blows, I regretted—more, resented—doing so. But could not restrain myself. I did not mean what I said. I did not hate the man I said it to. I knew what I said to be clever but hurtful, witty but churlish. I knew this even as I spoke the wounding words. Nor did saying them give me any release. Unlike an explosion of temper, or an unlooked-for row, or some final show-down in which the event brings satisfaction, there was no easing of tension. Just the opposite. The longer we continued, the greater the tension became.

  Father was bulged and red of face, squared to me and by the end near speechless with rage.

  I felt like a twisted elastic unable to stretch any more.

  Mother sat slumped, head bowed, defeated.

  We reach this point every time we argue without interruption and it is this I resent more than anything, that the tension is a separating wall between us, Father imprisoned on one side and me on the other, and our only means of communication to shout insults at each other across the unyielding density. At least by that one exhausting means we each know that the other is still there.

  Of all my father’s assaults that evening, only one requires record. I was, he told me, not just lazy, not just ungrateful, not just loutish and arrogant. No. I was far worse: a twit. I knew nothing except from books, had learned nothing of life from living it. I was a ponce, a parasite. Clever, I might be, but, he concluded, using a favourite phrase of disparagement, if I were faced with a real life problem, I wouldn’t know whether to have a shit or a haircut.

  Perhaps this evening matters went further than usual; or perhaps I reached the edge of hysteria. Whatever the explanation, I suddenly saw what seemed to me the comic stupidity of this fruitless exchange. Here were a father and son, for no explicit reason, lashing out with sharpened words at each other across a table of neglected food, spectated by a tearful wife-mother. Is that funny, comical? Not so presented. That is why I so present it. But through my eyes at the time it appeared quite bizarre.

  And I laughed. Laughed as I used to do when a boy and watching some slapstick farce on television. Laughed uproariously. Side-achingly. Uncontrollably.

  Father, finding not unnaturally nothing whatever to laugh at, nothing in the remotest funny, glared across the burdened table at me a moment and then collapsed, unconscious, burying his face in his untouched sausage and mash.

  Morning After

  ‘You mean,’ said Morgan, ‘he flaked out, right there in his mash?’

  ‘Indubitably,’ said Ditto, passing off his slopping coffee as nothing worse than yet another accident of the inadequate plastic mugs.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Memorial Hospital. Mother in evidence and playing at nurse—of course.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘He had not arrived when I left.’

  ‘You are tasteless, not to say unoriginal this morning.’

  ‘Put it down to the coffee.’

  ‘Or the shock.’

  ‘Let’s walk the perimeter.’

  The day was a wrung-out dishcloth.

  We stalked the fence that bounded the school playing-field for some yards before either of us spoke again.

  Then, ‘Is he very ill?’ asked Morgan.

  ‘Doctor says he’ll be all right in a few days,’ I said. ‘But that we must realize this collapse is another of the inevitable steps in the deterioration of his health and an added complication.’

  ‘You use language like a civil servant.’

  ‘I use the medic’s words exactly.’

  ‘Whatever could have possessed the man?’

  ‘A desire to avoid the words disease and death, I suppose. They aren’t fashionable. Besides, nowadays doctors are civil servants.’

  We had reached the sports shed where are stocked grass cutters (various) and equipment (assorted) used by the plodding groundsman. Against the south-facing wall of the shed (which happened also to be the wall hidden from view of the school buildings) was set a wooden bench upon which the groundsman himself usually lazed. Today he was not there.

  Morgan and I sat.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it any more?’ asked Morgan.

  Ditto glanced at his friend stretched at his side, back to shed, hands buried deep in trouser pockets, legs stuck straight out in front, feet crossed, and had a sudden intuition that explained something of Morgan’s success with others. Girls especially. He was unafraid to ask questions, to touch on raw nerves, but to ask and touch gently. It was a quality Ditto had not recognized in Morgan before and admired the more for wishing he possessed it himself while knowing he did not.

  Morgan caught his glance and smiled.

  ‘There is little to say,’ said Ditto, turning his gaze on to the backs of the houses whose gardens ran along the other side of the wire-mesh perimeter fence. Were they being spied, he wondered, as others had been before, by one of the unoccupied occupants who would report to the Headmaster by telephone that two of his pupils were lurking behind the sports shed and why weren’t they engaged more fruitfully in scholastic activity. ‘I do know though that home is claustrophobic.’

  ‘The suffocating womb.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘There’s an answer to that.’

  Ditto took from his inside pocket a twice-folded page from a school exercise book. ‘Which brings me to the business of your Charges Against Literature.’

  ‘By what unlikely route?’

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ said Ditto.

  Ditto’s Progress from Collapse of Father to Moment of Previous Conversation

  Course of Events: Collapse of father. Summoning of ambulance. Father, accompanied by Mother and Ditto, rushed to hospital, where treated for heart attack. Ditto and Mother remain until Father reported ‘out of danger’, when, at 10.30 p.m., persuaded to return home. Mother sits up all night, unable to lie down or to sleep. Ditto goes to bed, sleeps fitfully, but wakes finally at 4.45 a.m. and cannot sleep again. So gets dressed, has tea with Mother, then sits in own room coping with Emotional State (see below). During this time sees possibilities explained in Some Truths about Ditto, para 6, below. Writes Replies to Charges. Has breakfast, 8 a.m. Leaves for school. Sits through first two lessons distractedly. Meets Morgan for coffee during break.

  Emotional State: From supper at 6.30 the previous evening till conversation with Morgan, suffers succession of assaults:

  SHOCK at father’s sudden collapse;

  PANIC while waiting for ambulance;

  HORROR at sight of emergency treatment—efficient, fast, crypto-violent—leaving no doubt that father in danger or of prospect of father’s imminent death;

  GUILT at his part in bringing on the attack;

  SORROW for same;

  RESIGNATION: What could he do now? What would be would be, etc;

  DESIRE to amend;

/>   RESOLUTION to effect amendment;

  RELIEF when told by telephone that father likely to recover, even if in no better state (and, so implied, perhaps even worse state) than before;

  NEED to talk to someone about it all: thus conversation with Morgan.

  Physical Effects: Intense activity, followed by trembling debility, succeeded by aching coldness. Sleep, fitful. Early waking, feeling washed out, listless, discordant, nervy. Remained thus throughout morning, with aching tiredness slowly drowning the discordance till afternoon when body felt hot inside, cold out, and filleted.

  Intellectual Effects: Mind at first unable to cope. A tumble-drier of pictorial images passing chaotically before inner eye. Psychedelic derangement. But after early waking, begins to reassert some semblance of control. During this period, physically cold and uncomfortable, begins to see connections in clear-minded strobe, which become by breakfast a coherent rationale. In other words, understood matters before obscure to him. As if the events of the night have somehow ‘blown off’ meaning in his head. This understanding he composes into Some Truths About Ditto and Document: Replies to Morgan’s Charges, in order to focus and record his thoughts, and give his hand some displacement activity, thus diverting himself from the horrors of the memory of the last twelve hours.

  Some Truths About Ditto

  In the past few hours a number of things have become clear to me. Reaching this understanding has been painful. It is not comfortable being honest with oneself. I have no intention of reliving the painful self-examination, nor of plodging about in a self-pitiful discussion about the things I have come to realize. Instead I shall simply enumerate the Truths.

  1. I find myself both loving and hating my father. This appals me and I wish to do something about it. Yet I know that tonight’s catastrophe is likely to be repeated—with even more terrible results—because neither of us can cross the barrier of our self-created antagonisms. We cannot, to be plain, talk to each other openly and honestly. And we both fear to show the love we have for each other. Why, I do not know. But struggling to know has decided me about: