Honey From Thorns

One of my first girlfriends, in my late teens, broke down crying once over the memory of a leper in India, and her parents who had driven past it without looking. Her dad had worked for some government agency that did business in that country, and her early childhood experiences were very different to mine, as the leper story exemplifies. Admittedly, she had been drunk at the time that she broke down, and drink, as I was learning, seemed to exaggerate emotion. Seeing her crying over the incident, though, was one of the first glimpses I ever had into someone else’s suffering—in fact into the notion of suffering itself—the notion that the world was full of horror and it was only flimsy chance which kept it at bay.

To that date the world had been kind to me. It had coddled me like an oriental princeling, swaddled me in soft clothes and introduced me into an upper-middling sort of family from where the view was rosy, the food was good, and the adults around the place were—give or take the odd notable exception—reasonably humane.

My next girlfriend, however, expanded my meager understanding of human frailty, brought me closer to Misery through exposure to her calamitous family problems and the inability of her parents to behave in a civilized manner. It was as if suffering in the form of a malignant being of some kind, was drawing ever closer, its eyes sweeping the landscape around me, swallowing things in their path, whole.

Maybe significantly, it was the year of the phantom panther, a rainy year, in which the lichen flourished and the moss blossomed and the rivers were engorged. We were students, then, when we met. I have photographs of us from that time, fourteen, or is it fifteen, years ago? We both have pink faces, flushed with each other, vulnerable, innocent. We hold onto each other in apparent fear that the wind will rip us apart and hurl us out of each other's orbit. In one photograph we sit, cross-legged, under an ancient, fulsome Oak tree. I have long hair and she is wearing her baggy, flowery skirt. I am making a face and she is smiling serenely. The photo was taken by her American friend, Drew, who seemed to be a constant in our relationship. We would joke with him when we were driving: Who is this guy in our back seat, what's he doing in our car? As if our love was its own town, its own sovereign state. I think we looked happy, really happy, and it makes me wonder whether photographs from the past always have the power to mythologize.

She was visiting from an American college, a “Junior Year Abroad” program. Each year I had seen these students come from the same college in the Midwest, a name that immediately brought to mind raw American agricultural strength and the purity of spirit, which accompanies it. They were young Americans, with whom all the English students were intrigued in an ambivalent way, the way the English are with Americans: conflicted between envy and disdain. We all remembered our parents satirizing these people as “over-paid, over-sexed and over here”—suggesting, of course, by implication that they themselves were under-paid and under-sexed, which was probably accurate—and we thought of Martinis and thick-slurring accents. But these students were not the same. They were more befuddled, relaxed and less ambitious, although they still seemed somehow crass, carrying around the standard-issue backpack, which appeared on campus with a frightening ubiquity. All of our worst fears about the generic nature of American culture were realized in this pack: just big enough to carry the course-load of books plus a pack of cigarettes, chewing gum and a hacky sack or Frisbee. It was such a concession to practicality that no English person would have even considered strapping such an object to their back.

In addition to the cultural symbol of the backpack, they all wore “sneakers,’ a word which could only be said with an American accent, rounding out the “r,” giving the word a coy ring. They wore jeans—usually Levi's unless they came from Michigan in which case they wore generic denim—and they were in the annoying habit of wearing baseball caps backwards, which, from our perspective, made them look like twelve-year-olds. But there was something about them, something else—a naturalness, I felt—that was intriguing, a straight-forwardness that was absent among my compatriots who, for their part, seemed somehow “custom-made” by comparison. I perceived that this had something to do with economics, in that we all bought our clothes from one-off stores or from second-hand shops. We didn't (yet) have vast conglomerates of chain stores and mail-order companies monopolizing the clothing market. Students draped themselves in velvet dinner-jackets which had belonged to army captains in the nineteen twenties, or silk ruffled white shirts that were hand made in a shop in Piccadilly by a tailor with a double-barreled name, or baggy, worn out army trousers bought from the thrift store. Such costume was a studied display of poverty, counter-culture and individuality (notwithstanding the conformity with which we all adopted it). But this was only the prescription for public school students, most of whom labored under a conflicted yet pervasive nostalgia for old England and the accouterments of the empire. The wearing of such almost imperial clothes, with an attitude of subversion against a past so bizarre and psychologically distant from the realities of the present, was a graphic illustration of the tangled threads of identity and history which made up the English nation.

The relationship between economics and culture, as we were learning however was subtle: a chicken and egg scenario, perhaps. University was still a rarefied environment in England; it wasn't part of the mass-education industry which seemed to exist in the States. We considered ourselves more individual than these people who came from the country which was supposed to have invented individuality. But our thoughts on America were as inconsistent as the mercurial character of that nation: While we lamented American political bully-boy tactics, CIA conspiracies, and fat children eating hamburgers, with the same breath we worshipped Jack Karouac, admired Allen Ginsberg and emulated Jimi Hendrix. Because we could relate to these heroes we didn't consider them American per se— they were international property, had somehow written or sung their way out of American culture and onto the world stage where they seemed to express something of what we felt, wanted, lacked, or simply pretended to. While the character of America was a subtle and ambiguous chimera, these young freckle-faced foreigners exuded a stolid uniformity which made us feel as if we had all crawled out of our various glens and dells and crannies from around the islands and congregated at this central watering hole—the university—to stare at each other in vague recognition and to be pulled into shape, reluctantly, as a nation.

At the time we were busy developing interesting and eccentric undergraduate images, often involving the wearing of black and the consuming of unwise quantities of drugs. We were not at Cambridge or Oxford, which made the whole endeavor slightly pointless. Instead we lived on the edge of Dartmoor, a wild province, full of the dank, mossy mythology of the West Country. The young people of the city wore clothes that looked somehow “organic,” as if they were stitched out of the heather that grew on the moors. They wandered around the cathedral green and sat on the grass smoking and drinking from jars of cider, while their dogs frolicked nearby—they always appeared amongst hordes of semi-stray dogs, wild and straggly cross breeds: dog-people we used to call them, mildly enchanted by these gypsy-like creatures who knew, better even than the Americans who invented the term, how to hang out. In that warm rainy town with its twelfth-century cathedral and its ancient memories of druids and enchanted forests, we raised our covenant of love and built our own sanctuary.

Her father died on our one-month anniversary—collapsed on his South Carolina home's back porch in a rainstorm, his seventy-year-old heart giving in.

The bastard! She had wailed after her mother called her. He can't leave me, not now! She had gone back to the States to see her mother for a week or two shortly before this, and her father, discovering that she had been in the country, had written to her, hurt that she had not visited. And now, after such self-pitying reproach, he was dead and she had not said goodbye. I had not seen intense suffering like this. Death’s rancid smell had never intruded upon my sinuses. I watched her grieve with a misery that I found almost shockingly moving, and my being there with her to share that grief made me feel useful, strong and capable, as if, vicariously, I was growing in experience, navigating a rite of passage (but as a deck hand not a helmsman).

I now remember this time as a kind of dream state, not because of its bliss (blissful it was not), but because I was asleep, or at least dozing fitfully through my late adolescent life. I had to date left my life completely unexamined. All I knew was that I was often inexplicably depressed, I had no apparent reason for these feelings—my life was secure, I had two loving parents and two loving sisters (well, kind of), and plenty of money. My childhood had a clean bill of health.

Her father's death opened up new vistas of fear and misery for her all of which revolved around being thrown back on her mother's mercy. She left town for the funeral while I lingered in my student apartment wondering what horror was unfolding itself across the Atlantic in her father's house. I read in the local newspaper about the Beast of Dartmoor, the sheep-killing big cat (the experts referred to it as an ABC—Alien Big Cat) that was increasingly in evidence. I knew the beast was out there, why shouldn't she be? A sleek, beautiful panther-like creature lending her real wildness to our otherwise tame domestic lives. I watched the rain out of the window as it bounced off the monotonous tiled roofs and drained into the bowling green in front of my house, and I imagined the house on Cardinal Drive, and her father's sixty-seven Stingray parked in the garage. Was she sitting on the porch where his old body had been found crumpled on the steps like a discarded coat? You would have loved him, she told me before she left. He played the fool all the time. He used to ride around town in his car, with a jester’s hat on his head, and his favorite dog in the passenger seat, tongue lolling. He would take me and my friends out for movies and never stop talking throughout the performance. And he used to lock himself in his bedroom and obliterate his pain with Bourbon. After her mother had left home, taking her older sister with her, it fell to her to discover his incapacitated form in the living room in the evenings; she would have to call the emergency services and have him taken to hospital. His drinking never made him violent, except against himself—the slow and deliberate march towards oblivion. It was just the two of them in the house, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl with her alcoholic sixty-year-old father.

This was like a bizarre soap opera for me. In my moorside house I sat around reading Eliot, thinking about the cruelest of months, looking at spring rain, languishing in my own memory and suffering my own desire, and wondering who this person was, from what world she came, why all this noise, chaos and misery? And like a soap opera, these events had pseudo-epic quality: lives observed in minute detail, with the bandages off and the wounds gaping, a spectacle for all to see. This, I thought, was “American:” If it is possible for a nation to have a mode of suffering then this was the American way— public, extreme, unashamed.

She came back and winter turned into spring. We took walks along the canal, drank wine from bottles in the park and lay around on the grass, bluebells and daffodils rioting around us in the weak sunshine. We felt like the dog people, even looked like them perhaps, she in her hippie Indian skirts, me in my dirty Khakis and scuffed boots. At the funeral she had rushed up to the coffin and pushed it over in a fit of rage; her relatives acted concerned, treated her like a lunatic. They had all long ago abandoned the girl and that father of her's: (He drinks, you know!) And now they had amassed for the death ritual; he didn't leave a will—irresponsible to the last. Even though he had a daughter who he knew needed supporting, needed the frail threads of love he was occasionally able to extend, he had abdicated his responsibility with the despair of the lost, allowing her half-brothers to feast upon the meager carrion of his estate before her plane brought her back from England: The house was auctioned off, the Stingray quietly slipped into the garage of a relative.

As I listened to these stories which heaped misery on top of pain, what was I thinking? How was I to respond? She had nothing, it seemed—no family; her relationship with her mother had always swung between violence and distance with nothing much in-between. Now she was forced to rely on this parody of maternity, to feel her cold and icy breath on the back of her neck once again. Sometime later, in a Californian bar over frozen Margueritas and cigarettes, this mother summarized her ex-husband for me in a voice like insect-repellent: He was dumb. Nice but dumb. And that was all she could say of him. In my innocence I experienced an overwhelming urge to crusade on her behalf; she became a kind of cause for me, perhaps because she represented an injustice over which I could, by my presence alone, influence and improve—compensate for, even. How could I make it up to her, vanquish these evils from around her spirit? For it was a task of this order with which I felt vested—an exorcism, an illumination. Out of frustration I wanted to make phone calls, send letters, issue press releases, confront, canter out onto the moral high ground that was pouring in on my emotional field of vision. The behavior of her relatives was so unacceptable, it was a worthy object of all the righteous indignation, all the rage, sarcasm and vehemence I could muster.

Soon, however, I realized I could do little to make the outside world change, to comply with a more just and less antagonistic vision. I was wrestling with things, which were not tangible, and I began to dimly perceive that the world and its vicissitudes were altogether too slippery to fasten onto and affect.

We continued our studies, moving into a new flat on the edge of town. Life moved forward in inexorable steps, every crisis finding its own natural resolution, as if time were a mountain range in which for every peak there was a valley, and all you had to do was keep walking and you would cover them all, coming to rivers when thirsty and trees under which to rest when tired and to seek shelter from the blizzard, from the hail and the snow and the wind that drove them.

She kept the flag that had adorned her father's coffin wrapped up in a bundle underneath the windowsill; it sat there throughout the Easter term. On the other side of the glass the rain dribbled downwards, the sky a stubborn shade of gray. She wrote a poem about it, about the rain and the sky and the flag and his silence, and she sat, with her knees drawn up to her chest, and her pen held tightly between her fingers, scribbling minutely. On the bed next to her was her ever-present packet of cigarettes, her chewing gum and her chapstick. And after the first poem, a second, and then a third, initiating a torrent of poetry raining down on the mystery that was her life, drumming with precise intensity on the taut skin of her experience and setting up a barrage of words, hurling them into the abyss like so many literary spears marshaled with the task of understanding the world around them, of making sense, of unraveling the meaning of the universe.

The Beast of Dartmoor had been briefly illuminated in the headlights of a Land Rover that belonged to a farmer named Tony Sutton, somewhere near Bovey Tracy. I remembered the farmer's name because it rhymed with mutton, and therefore had a connection with the endangered sheep.

“A huge tiger-like thing,” Tony was said to have exclaimed to the local newspaper. In the narrowness of the Devon lane, it had paused and glared into the lights, then, with one sinuous leap, it had cleared the six-foot hedgerow and vanished. The little village was scared but also, I suspected, a little thrilled to have their own beast: not so much an alien intrusion but more of a psychic projection conjured out of the mass unconscious. No doubt they cast knowing glances at each other as they left the pub in the early evening, then, looking up at the sky, muttered about getting the sheep in before dark.

Her father had been a World-War-Two veteran, so they gave him a military funeral. He never talked about his experiences much, except to say that he had once lunched with Chiang-Kai-Shek, and that he had been scalped in the South Pacific. He stuck to his oath of silence and never revealed what he did in those years, not even to his wife. All that was left of him now was this piece of colored material symbolizing his loyalty to an abstract political entity—the American flag. Why, I wondered, the stars and stripes? What could be less metaphysical than this symbol of nationalism, what could worse sum up a human being and his uniqueness? How gross that the government should appropriate him even in death, reducing his meaning, his worth, to his national identity, not to his character or his humanity! And for his national identity he had been scalped! And he could never talk of it because the frighteners had been put on him by some bullish higher-ups in the military who thought that his little daughter and drink befuddled lunatic of a wife would spill the beans to the Reds. He would have been better off being buried with a pair of his underpants, his famous bullhorn, or his favorite Mastiff, Fat Joe.

But I didn't mention any of this to her, it was only part of my distanced observations. Although I felt strangely close to this dead father, whose life, it seemed to me, was so calamitous, in some way I still felt objective. I watched her with a quiet but careful interest, which sometimes struck me as cold, as if one part of me was with her, embracing and consoling, while the other half was standing in the corner of the room watching, defensive of its independence. But her situation moved me subtly, it was a deep undercurrent working against my better nature; I saw myself as an even keel, a sloop cutting through stormy waters, maintaining a steady course across the ocean. But on occasion I sensed something stirring in me, which was as deep and bottomless and black as any chasm that she had slipped into. The sloop sailed on, but with a minute leak slowly filling the bilge. The only difference between her and me was that I was barely aware of this leak, and virtually never mentioned it. She had always furiously confronted the gaping hole in her hull, bailing with buckets, egg-cups, saucers, stemming the deluge, bracing against the buffeting waves, while I with my hand on the helm, staring at the horizon with all the persistence of Ahab, was content to ignore my looming proximity to water level.

The death of her father scarred her for a long time. She displayed photos of him on her mantelpiece, a little boy in Edinburgh wearing a kilt and looking sulky; a large middle-aged man bowed over the figure of a swaddled baby; a bespectacled architect grinning from behind his desk. Professional, Father, Child. But he was no lover; there were no pictures of him and her mother together, for they had experienced a very brief romance, if a romance at all, before their marriage crumpled into wasteful silence and antagonism, then fell into total and irretrievable breakdown. They lived in the same house together, separated not by plaster walls and corridors, but by the sickly sweet violence of southern society and the pressures it exerted on people to be thus and not so. Their marriage was not really a matter of choice (however you may define that), but had been entered into under watchful southern eyes in order to prevent spiked southern tongues from flapping in the breeze of non-conformity. She had chosen a man who seemed decent enough, and he had turned out to be a pushover, a deeply manipulable victim.

She smoked cigarettes with a long cigarette holder. Her eyebrows were always arched like Joan Crawford's. She was later to discover that she didn't like men, and could not tolerate the sight of her husband, his big rough hands, his jolly, foolish manner and his weaknesses. When he tried to make love to her, stinking of cheap whiskey, his fumblings disgusted her and the obscenity of his rampant penis only made her think of dogs; their occasional, desperate, expressions of need. She had rushed through medical school in record time on his bill, and then divorced him and moved to California to live in the glare and white-wash of anonymity.

Somehow she made it through the rest of that school year. The summer term came and went and, although a few grades short of her usual high standards, she finished her work. The rest of her American colleagues started drifting homeward, via Europe and their obligatory tour, backpacks firmly in place (I fancied that they used them as passports). But she stayed put. Her center of gravity had shifted. She was not the same person that had signed up for a year in England, then only a collection of associations—The Hound of the Baskervilles, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Punks and Marmalade. She was not the same timid desperada that had stepped off the plane at Heathrow and taken a cab into London to sit in a cheap hotel room in Paddington and marvel at the noise of the sirens and the traffic. The levity with which she had wafted out of her country and settled on a foreign shore had abandoned her, and she realized that when she had left, it had not been a casual adieu she had offered to her friends, but a more radical, more extreme gesture, a bid for escape, both from the guilt-inducing tugs of her old father and from the fury of her bleached-blond mother.

It sometimes surprised me that things could ever seem normal after such a spring and summer. Surprised me that she could laugh again, could write her poems and read her books and look at a plate of food with excitement. Although she could do these things, something had shifted enough to mean that her consciousness was never completely free of these burdens. There were several more sightings of the Beast—glancing encounters by the usual country types—and one or two reports of livestock with their necks ripped open or their entrails spilled. But over the summer these died away leaving a gaping hole in the local news media, which was eventually filled with stories of giant fish discovered in local rivers, or six hundred year-old trees talking. Nothing was resolved, of course, as we all knew would be the case, yet the stories had served to open up the possibility that out there, not far from where we lived, in the fields and hedgerows and the twisting lanes which scarred the ancient moors, there was something else, something other, whose essence remained obscure, but served to remind us—should we care to be reminded— that our security should not be taken for granted, that we were not, after all, masters of our destiny, we were not fully in control of our environment, and that we still lived in a very old world in which humans were like so much flotsam in the ocean.

I lived my live as if temporarily forgetting that all of this had happened. After all, it had not happened to me. I was like a dog waiting anxiously for a sign of joy from its master before leaping up and licking his face, releasing in an explosion all the energy that he was too timid to express without permission. When she was happy it was open season, yet when the wind changed, as parents had forever warned their children, an inappropriate expression was glued insultingly to my face. There was, I deduced, a difference between sympathy and empathy; I could never attain the latter.

Not exactly, anyway. But I grew and changed too. I didn't remain locked inside my sleepy dream—I couldn't. The well became too dark, the silence too shrill for my sensitive ears, and like her before me, I started fidgeting, looking for a way out, casting to and fro for signs of light. The drama was only to come later, however. Anyone who lives long enough will experience some of that intensity of misery, of pain, of the harsh edge of living. When mine came I was no longer anaesthetized by the lichen of the damp moors, and the soft south wind, I was, on the contrary, alive to it. Years later, when I am sprouting grey hairs (I can find them when the light hits my head just so, and I twist my neck to look in the mirror), I can see that my monsters have rounder shapes, prone to move in altogether more subtle and ingenious ways. I have to coax them out into the light to have a go at them. Sometimes I stay awake all night just to catch them off guard. Her father didn't do this. Maybe that's why they got to him first—snuck up out of the woods in the back garden to bid him farewell.