The Last Day

There would, I knew, be times when I would lust after death with a fervour that was almost irresistible, but death would continue to elude me, preferring to hold back until my circumstances were of a sort likely to make its intervention optimally unpleasant.

Death is no-one's friend; it hates to be welcomed with open arms, and never responds to invitations.

Only when life had lulled me into acquiescence, optimism and equanimity would death arrive, and, without knocking, force its way into the supposed sanctuary of my innermost thoughts, where it would stand, twice as large as life, grinning avariciously, barring my only escape route.

This I knew, with irrevocable certainty.

But there would also be times when I would forget, or pretend it was not so, or convince myself that death was just a myth, like God, or the equality of the sexes, or Father Christmas.

Consequently, when the Last Day in which I had endeavoured so ardently and for so long not to believe finally arrived, I failed at first to perceive it for what it truly was. There was no angelic trumpet blast, and God did not descend in majesty from on high on his throne of judgement, but the unleashing of divine wrath was in the offing nevertheless.

From the moment I awoke, I was conscious of a subtle difference in the atmosphere: the air somehow felt taut, as though being stretched to its limit like an enormous piece of elastic, and as the day went on this impression was reinforced as my physical surroundings seemingly began first to wobble, and then to flicker in and out of focus, as though in response to the strain. At some point – I knew, although not when – everything would snap asunder, releasing hell fire, or purgatorial flame – it mattered little which – to engulf, eviscerate, and purify.

During the morning I mucked around, or at any rate went through the motions of mucking around, because when all was said and done I was still a young teenager, and hence still not wholly committed to acceptance. When the removal lorry lumbered around the corner into our street, however, and disgorged a quantity of nameless, faceless men who proceeded to take away our belongings, denial became almost impossible, and although the air temperature was in the high nineties, I felt chilled to the very marrow.

That afternoon, there were two of me, one palpable and active, the other disembodied and disowned, watching from afar in a state of mingled bemusement and regret. It was the ghostly me who climbed into the car when the time came for the drive to Outer Harbour, while the tangible me regarded the process with detachment and, perhaps, a small amount of derision, before, finally, turning away and re-entering the building that would always, at least to most intents and purposes, remain home.

Unrequited Passion

It's possible to love with passion for so long that you forget what it was that captivated you in the first place but you're unable to stop loving because the passion has acquired an impetus all its own that hurtles you onwards into spaces that only exist because the things in which you used to believe have disintegrated, leaving a gap that needs to be filled. The loved object becomes entirely irrelevant, other than in the theoretical sense of fuelling a distraction, of helping you forget - indeed, when all is said and done, of keeping you alive.

And no, you never or seldom get anything meaningful or encouraging back from the loved object, which if it had a personality and/or a will would almost certainly actively despise you anyway.

The Leaving Of Liverpool

It was the winter of the Great Freeze, and our train from Liverpool to London kept having to stop for long periods in order that snow could be removed from the line. I seem to recall that we had a whole compartment to ourselves, but other than that, and the repeated delays, I have no distinct memories of the journey. However, I can imagine my mum – to my dad’s thinly concealed disgruntlement – smoking incessantly in order to camouflage the intense feelings of uncertainty, anxiety and malaise with which must have been battling as she allowed herself to be peremptorily extricated from the only home she had known in twenty-eight years.

My dad, who had religion for his solace, and whose behaviour and conversation were invariably rooted in a very stark but narrow framework of moral certainty, would have suffered no such feelings of uneasiness. In all likelihood, he would have devoted considerable time to enlightening me about various aspects of our journey, as well as about the train on which we were travelling. Since his word was never to be doubted or questioned, I would have listened with genuine curiosity and interest, consigning to my short term memory arcane details of steam engine design, the names of the home grounds occupied by football teams in the towns and cities through which we passed, and other matters, probably of dubious validity, long since forgotten.

The fourth member of our party was my sister, Barbara. Despite still having a couple of months to go before her third birthday (making her almost four years younger than me) she had already begun to exhibit considerable independence of mind by steadfastly refusing to don the warped moral strait-jacket proffered with such disingenuous conviction by my dad. Despite his best attempts to get her to contort herself into the right shape to wriggle into it, she had made it clear that she preferred clothing of a less confining nature. At the time, I regarded her attitude as exemplifying the same kind of wanton self-regard that my dad had tacitly helped me to discern in my mum. Before too long, however, I would be envious of what I would begin to see as her superior sense of selfhood.

We spent the night in a warm, garishly colourful London hotel. In the morning, we sat all sat together at a table and ate breakfast, which was brought to us by servants who called my dad ‘sir’ and my mum ‘madam’. It was as if we were rich. Once breakfast was finished, we packed our things and caught the boat train to Tilbury.

My chief recollection of the three week voyage to Australia aboard the SS Stratheden is of almost continual, vibrantly iridescent sunlight. Even the Bay of Biscay, built up in my imagination from my dad’s words of foreboding as a likely place of shipwreck, was traversed with ease, beneath a sky of ardently omnipresent blue.

Whilst aboard the Stratheden I tasted cucumber and spinach for the first time, played quoits with my dad and Barbara, and splashed about in the shallow end of the ship’s swimming pool.

We stopped briefly at Port Said, Aden and Colombo. At Colombo I got off the ship for the first time since Tilbury, and we spent an entire afternoon meandering around the multi-coloured city streets, being almost deafened by a cacophony of human voices – hawkers, traders, the almost incessant exchange of greetings and farewells – and traffic noise. We returned to the ship in a rickshaw pulled by a nearly naked man whose muscles coursed and rippled conspicuously and constantly beneath his ebony skin.

A young Ceylonese girl and her parents boarded the ship at Colombo. She was about my age, with long dark hair hanging down to below waist level, and skin the colour and (I imagined) texture of dairy milk chocolate. Within moments of seeing her for the first time I had decided that she was far and away the most beautiful human being, or indeed thing, I had ever seen. The regal way in which she moved, combined with her irreproachable loveliness, convinced me that she was of royal birth, and I mentally dubbed her ‘The Indian Princess’. A few days into our voyage across the Indian Ocean, she appeared at the pool-side in a bottle green one piece swimming costume, and I experienced an unfamiliar but not unpleasant tautness in the pit of my abdomen, together with a brief surge of indeterminable yearning, and my assessment was reinforced.

The Indian Princess disembarked from the ship, and departed from my life, at Fremantle. Today she is probably fat, world-weary, looking forward to death, and never to be seen (or even worse, imagined) wearing a bathing costume, let alone going swimming - but who am I to talk?

Afflicted With Belief

Beliefs are not born of will; God afflicts us with them, in much the same way as He afflicts certain people with club feet, or cleft palates, or hair lips - and for broadly similar reasons.

There is nothing God enjoys more than a good laugh at humankind's expense; indeed, the main reason He created humanity in the first place was to reinforce and vivify, by way of observable contrast, His own perfection, majesty and omnipotence.

Consequently, God loves nothing more than failure, disappointment, imperfection, anti-climax, squalor, crass stupidity, confusion, madness, fundamentalism, death - all of which remind Him, continuously, in palpably, eloquently, inexorably hilarious ways, of just how incomparably great He is by comparison.

Escaping one's beliefs is even harder than escaping one's sexuality. I, for instance, do not believe in luck, but I do believe in fate - despite the fact that belief in either is equally, insanely irrational.

I also believe, with irreducible convinction, in the jealous God described above, although I know beyond all shadow or scintilla of doubt that all Gods are nothing other than human inventions.

This, when all is said and done, is the greatest, most uproariously funny joke of all - that, despite possessing a sensory apparatus capable only of perceiving things in black and white, we nevertheless find ourselves endeavouring to navigate our way through a universe in which all the really important bits have been highlighted (presumably by God) in yellow marker pen.