The Twilight
Allen Ashley
David is between jobs. As usual, he is awake a few moments before the alarm buzzes. He presses the snooze button, knowing Jenny won’t need to rise for several minutes yet.
He still enjoys watching her get dressed and made-up: a dab of blusher, a streak of mascara, a pout of lipstick; tights, sensible shoes and a fashionable skirt and top all combine into suitable armour for a middle-ranking administrator. After much muttering and scattering, she settles on a mismatched white 34B bra and dark blue satin knickers. He makes a mental note to sort out a couple of loads of laundry later on.
When she’s departed, he brews a coffee then dozes awhile listening to the radio news. Later he sits up in bed reading. Beyond the curtains the world is dark and rainy. Jenny will doubtless curse the inclemency if it hasn’t cleared by five. David is trying to see his forced unemployment as a period of opportunity. There are maybe fifty novels he’d acquired as a student which he’s never had the time to get round to before. The un-shaded light bulb and mental osmosis turns the cryptic markings into if not escapism at least fictive lifestyles more dynamic than his own.
The light stutters and dims. He can still see to read. A minute later the illumination plunges again. He gets up and walks to the kitchen annexe where he keeps spare house-ware. He changes the decaying bulb. There is no improvement. He throws on a pair of trousers and goes out of the flat and down the stairs in order to check the fuse box in the shared cupboard. Nothing seems to be amiss. Maybe atmospheric conditions or “essential” repair work, he
thinks.
Back in the flat, he phones the electricity board.
“There is no maintenance work going on in your area, Mr Connor,” some bright spark informs him. He will just have to put up with it.
When Jenny arrives back from work, she moans about how dingy the flat seems. He tries to explain but she’s busy rifling through the larder.
“We haven’t got any tea bags, David,” she complains. “I mean, for goodness sake, it’s not too much to ask, is it? You could check for a few essentials when you pop out to the shops, couldn’t you?”
“I haven’t been out today,” he answers quietly. “Do you want me to get herbal or ordinary?”
“Just get some Typhoo or P. G. Tips or shop’s own brand, I don’t care!”
He remembers better times but he remembers worse as well. When she’d first moved into his bed-sit she’d still been scraping by on a student loan as she finished her last year at college. He’d been earning enough then to keep them in red wine, Jack Daniels and the occasional illicit smoke. The pendulum had swung the other way recently. Maybe it would return one day or at least reach a manageable equilibrium.
In bed, not really tired enough to sleep, he remembers a blazing late-night row during the early days of their relationship. Their elderly upstairs neighbour - Mr Fitz, a powerfully-built old sea dog who sported a walking stick for merely decorative effect - had come clomping down the wooden steps to join the fray at this nocturnal disturbance. Chastened, they’d bade him an apologetic good night and made amendments under the duvet.
. . .
The next day, David phones his mother for their regular once a week desultory conversation. Mother now has an expensive mobile phone “because of all those muggers and rapists, you know”. David wonders but doesn’t ask whether she intends to clip the villains round the ear with the hand-set. He still has only a land line and can barely afford that. He says goodbye as soon as it is polite enough to do so.
The post-basket is stuffed with flyers for double glazing firms and pizza parlours. There’s some uncollected mail for the other tenants and a brown envelope
containing his giro. He goes straight to the post office where he queues for half an hour to the sound of brats being reprimanded by peroxide mothers. The
building smells of extinguished roll-ups. These are now my kin and this my domain, he decides.
Stamp, stamp, sign here, have you any ID, here’s some low-denomination notes to last you a couple of weeks. Next please.
Outside, the day is so overcast that he gets a few visual flashes off the street sweepers’ safety jackets. Not that anyone generally gets much sunlight down here in the shadow of the tower blocks, the market stalls and the Pound-U-Save supermarket.
David buys a local newspaper and takes it home to scan for vacancies. He circles a few with a biro, takes out his draft CV and begins making some amendments. There is another ker-chunk like a heavy bag of air falling and the illumination goes from off-white to thin yellow. Even with the curtains drawn fully back, it’s now dimmer than ever indoors. There must be something wrong with the wiring. He doesn’t feel particularly confident about electrical matters so he phones the landlord. He gets the answering machine. Judging by the length of the music before the bleep, the landlord hasn’t yet listened back to David’s previous complaints about the leaky cistern and the loose hinge brackets on the door. David had eventually fixed the latter himself with a set of cheap screwdrivers from the hardware store near the station. The door is now distinctly well-hung. He wishes he still felt the same way about himself
Jenny comes home. She is as perfunctory and distracted as ever. She moans about the dim light and the leaky toilet.
“It’s making the carpet smell, David. Can’t you do something about it?”
She needs a long, hot soak after the day’s grind. She grabs the bedside lamp, rigs up the extension lead, takes her book with her into the bathroom and closes the door firmly, severely threatening the white flex trapped under its bottom edge
David realises he has yet to purchase tea bags. It’s now quite dark outside but the Asian shop two streets away will still be open.
Jenny does not notice his temporary absence.
. . .
He buys aTV guide. Although most of the afternoon programming seems to be cookery slots and American confrontational shows, he keeps the set on with the volume at zero, using the extra illumination to help him read in the solitary armchair.
The magazine holds the usual plethora of inserts. One is for a music clubadvertising the “definitive recording” of Wagner’s “The Twilight Of The Gods”.
David hums a few favourite phrases to himself whilst wondering idly just how many of the locals with their car stereos regularly pumping out a staccato cross-fire of jungle, “Ayia Napa” or nu-skool garage ever concern themselves with classical music. Then again, a recent sci-fi film had brought “The Ride Of
The Valkyries” back into popular consciousness.
“There’s no reason for anything,” David mutters aloud to himself. “Here I am struggling to think up synonyms for ‘liaison’ and ‘team-work’ so I can get some crappy little office job. Whereas Wagner has hundreds of musicians studying and playing his meister-work even years after his death.”
Death? Is that all he had to look forward to?
There are two positions he decides to apply for even though he will probably be deemed over-qualified and too many years past school leaving age. Knowledge of Nietzsche not required. Ability to sprout facial hair a distinct disadvantage.
He decides to phone Jenny and share his new-found optimism. There is no answer for the longest while.
Finally, a brash young secretary with a voice like chocolate chirps, “Winterburn Associates, how can we help you?”
“Can I speak to Jennifer, please?”
“Jennifer? Jennifer who? Oh, you mean Miss Ablett. I’m afraid she left our employment a month ago. Can anyone else help you?”
“It’s a personal call. Do you have her new work number?’
“No, sir, I’m sorry but we don’t. Would you like Mr Sparks to assist you, perhaps?”
“No. No thank you. It doesn’t matter.”
. . .
He doesn’t challenge her when she comes home. Instead, he has a cup of tea ready at the instant she pushes the key into the lock. The heating element in the kettle makes the overhead lights flicker and dim again, worse than before. He’s glad they use a gas boiler for their hot water.
Jenny waves a wad of papers under his nose. “Don’t you ever check the mail?” she demands.
“Most of it’s not ours,” he answers.
“I’m going to run a bath,” she states, ignoring his response.
There is a phone bill and a credit card commendation, otherwise the letters are all clearly addressed to the other occupants of the block. Clear enough, anyway, even in the omnipresent dimness. David stacks them neatly on the table.
She might easily have changed her job for a better remunerated position and simply forgotten to inform him. On the other hand, she might no longer be working at all, merely going through the motions of absenting herself from their cramped flat for several hours a day just to stop them getting too much on top of each other. He believes some dockers or ship-yard workers did this up North back in the nineteen-eighties.
He invents and runs with a fantasy that Jenny has commenced a torrid day-time affair with some filthy rich captain of industry who demands coquetry, perfume, lipstick and regular oral sex in return for seeing her all right financially and not a word to wifey back at his country mansion. It would certainly explain the hour spent soaking in the bath immediately she gets home every day.
Later, in bed, she says, “David, we hardly talk any more.”
“Is there something in particular you want to bring up?” he asks.
“No. Not now, I’m too tired. I just feel that, you know, communication is something we need to work on.”
. . .
Zeus threw another lightning fork into the air to briefly illuminate the dark sky around Mount Olympus. Nights were the worst. In these days of retreat and inactivity, there was less and less need of restorative sleep. Every godly day lasted a full twenty-four wakeful hours. Which made every effort to kill time as minuscule and meaningless as a solitary grain of sand upon the beach of eternity. How repetitive everything was! How many times could you go hunting near-extinct animals with Artemis? Indulge in underwater swimming raceswith Poseidon? Go boozing and carousing and get absolutely rat-arsed with dearold Dionysus? Or drink the sweet milk from the full, round breasts of the lovely Hera?
There was no real reason to do anything much anymore. Everything was so tedious. Those damned mortals - they had it easy! No time for boredom and monotony in their shallow little lives!
. . .
David had regularly drawn cartoons for the student mag at Uni. These days he barely possesses a marker pen or a sharp pencil. When he occasionally doodles, he produces caricatures of elves, dragons and legendary beings scratched out with a leaky blue biro on cheap, not entirely smooth A4 from the copy shop. He still has a supply of cartridge paper and a proper art board and equipment back at his mother’s. No doubt she will be thrilled if he turns up and takes them off her hands. But he’s been out once already this morning to buy a pint of milk and he doesn’t really fancy the long bus or train ride to Mother’s at the best of times. Besides, it had been so overcast earlier that all the cars had their head-lamps on and many people were carrying torches. London during the black-out...
Maybe he could ring and get Mother to send some of the stuff.
He looks at the music club flyer again.
Wagner’s gods, of course, were not Greek or Hellenic but drawn from Norse mythology. Woden, Odin... so foreboding! Frigg, Tiw, Thor... all the strapping heroes and heroines of Valhalla who would later be adopted as Aryan exemplars by the Nazi Party. As would the composer, also. Powerful music and imagery, if a little too over-blown for many sensibilities.
There is no archaeological evidence that the Vikings put cattle horns on the sides of their helmets. It’s just historical convention.
David’s brain is crammed full of such not immediately useful information. Maybe he should find a way to work these facts into his covering letters, make his employment applications stand out from thecrowd.
. . .
Jenny doesn’t return home that evening. David imagines that she has gone away to some conference with her avaricious VIP fancy man to canoodle the night away in a naked Jacuzzi. She doesn’t call to contradict this assumption.
David finds the electrical supply is now so bad that he can’t have a light and the TV on at the same time. Eventually, he falls asleep listening to the radio on a long-life battery. There is an SOS message just before the midnight news but it’s not for Jennifer Ablett.
. . .
She fails to come home at the end of the next dull day, too. David considers phoning some of the capital’s plusher hotels but doubtless she’s using a pseudonym so that would be a waste of time. On the following morning, he hears back from the two job vacancies. Both rejections are couched in remarkably similar terms: the shared phraseology of the high priest class controlling the creed of capitalism. They are looking for “someone setting out on a career path” and “not withstanding (his) valuable experience” they suggest he is “unfortunately, therefore, not ideally suited to this current position”. They will retain his name and address for future marketing purposes.
He has added several envelopes to the stack on his table. It is mid-morning, though still very dull. He decides to distribute the missives to their rightful recipients.
As he tries to push half a dozen envelopes under the door at the top of the next flight of stairs, he finds that the inner entrance is not locked but merely ajar. He calls, “Mr Fitz, are you in?” as he pushes into the stale, sickly-smelling air of the second floor bed-sit. He flicks the light switch. The bulb here is marginally stronger -maybe 150 watts. Bright enough, at least, to reveal the elderly neighbour face down in a pool of his own vomit, black trousers stained brown by loosened bowels and very, very dead.
David chooses not to touch the corpse. Nothing could be gained by heart massage or attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Besides which, he doesn’t wish to implicate himself in any suggestion of foul play. He wonders about wiping his prints off the door and the light switch but reasons that such evidence firmly corroborates his concerned neighbour alibi.
He phones the police from his own flat. They arrive a leisurely hour later: a portly, moustachioed sergeant and a lithe, psychotic-looking constable. The old cop / young cop routine. They ask him a mantra of questions: “When did you last see Mr Fitz?” / “Would you say he kept himself to himself?” / “Do you live here alone?” / “Are you in gainful employment?” / “And where is Miss Ablett at the present time?”
David becomes convinced that Jenny is somehow involved in the tragedy upstairs even though Old Fitz appears to have been dead for a week or so. He feels the need to protect her.
“She’s visiting a sick relative. She’s probably lodging in a bed and breakfast close to the hospital. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.”
“Well, thank you, Mr Connor. That’ll be all for now. We’ll give you a courtesy call tomorrow.”
David hopes he will be out when that happens, although given his latent agoraphobia he rather doubts it.
. . .
It’s the fourth day of absence. The police sergeant phones that morning to inform him of the coroner’s preliminary findings:
“Natural causes, Mr Connor. Nothing you could have done. Just a shame no one thought to check earlier. There’s an elderly sister lives in a nursing home. Not sure about any funeral arrangements yet.”
“I don’t think I’ll want to go,” David answers. “We weren’t close.”
Just a few feet of plaster-work, floor boards and air space.
“Well, you’ll have to excuse me now, Mr Connor. This bleeding twilight is a bit of a thief’s paradise, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
David feels relieved that the permanent twilight is not merely his own imagining, a dim hallucination of the outside world reflecting his own psychological state. He trusts his brief smile will convey his gratitude. It remains unacknowledged, perhaps unseen. He wonders if the coast is now clear for him to present the local constabulary with the missing Jennifer problem. He decides to give it another seventy-two hours or so.
He searches through Jenny’s knickers drawer, wishing the smooth twists of fabric evoked more than a few fragmentary memories. All her skimpiest, sexiest underwear is still in place which makes him wonder whether his assignation supposition is badly off the mark and she is actually in mortal danger. Maybe
he’ll phone the sergeant tomorrow if the situation hasn’t changed.
He finds what he’s been seeking: a plastic bank bag full of emergency money for unforeseen bills and the like. He stands at the window awhile. The sky is still overcast but there seems to be more light penetrating the clouds today. Unless his eyes have simply become accustomed to the all -pervasive gloom. He takes a few deep breaths of the room’s stuffy air then exits the flat while he still has the courage. Soon he is down on the street he’d gazed upon just a minute previously. He glances back at his window but there is no one standing within it.
He buys brushes and white paint because home cooking and occasional shared cigarettes have darkened the ceiling over the past couple of years. He purchases bulbs and solidly cylindrical church candles. There has lately been something of a run on both these items and the price has risen accordingly. He buys best back bacon even though he rarely eats it himself. Jenny is a glutton for a full English breakfast at the week-end. He dares not expect - but he hopes - that restoring the flat to its former condition and his own hammy version of sympathetic magic will bring her back to him.
. . .
That evening he leaves the fresh paint smell behind him and, with the aid of a stuttering pocket torch and a cheap lighter, he begins a sweep of the local streets. After half an hour he finds her crouched and shivering beneath a sodium lamp; her handbag, thin jacket, book and crushed lipstick all clutched fervently in her left hand.
“It grew too dim, David,” she says.
“I know,” he answers, helping her to her feet. One pointed heel on her work shoes has come loose, he notices.
“Life has just become too dull,” she adds.
She rests the bulk of her weight against his shoulder and right side. It takes him about ten minutes to support her back home. She shakes her brown hair at offers of hot drinks or bubble baths. He tucks her up in bed, hears her breathing relax.
He examines the contents of her bag: not suspiciously but simply out of thoroughness. She still has her credit cards, travel pass, sunglasses and a sizeable wad of cash in her purse. He takes up the book she’s been reading, shines the angle-poise lamp down onto its slightly battered cover. It’s a novel that has been on the paperback charts for several weeks. He reads the opening chapters, leaning against the bed’s wooden frame. The setting is the usual glitzy media and advertising world of Hampstead homes and West One offices. Underneath the characters’ brash, confident exteriors, however, he detects an embittered mood of doom and gloom which will debilitate them sooner or later. He reads on. There are a number of incongruous plot twists. No real reason for anything.
Jenny has started to snore. He turns her gently onto her side, switches off the lamp and slides into bed beside her.
Unusually, no silver dollar moon or muzzy street light penetrates the thin curtains.
. . .
Zeus swirled the potion around in the goblet. He had sated his lust with earthy Demeter and venereal Aphrodite. He poured the fiery liquid down his huge throat. More than enough to stun an ox, as a human colloquialism had it. In fact, enough to kill a whole platoon of Spartan soldiers. For an immortal, though, it would merely bring on a morning hang-over. Before that, however, lay the brief promise of dark, temporary oblivion: a twilight across Mount Olympus to match the prevailing gloom on the subject planet.
He laid back his head and closed his eyelids. No stars or moonlight penetrated the thin membranes.
David is between jobs. As usual, he is awake a few moments before the alarm buzzes. He presses the snooze button, knowing Jenny won’t need to rise for several minutes yet.
He still enjoys watching her get dressed and made-up: a dab of blusher, a streak of mascara, a pout of lipstick; tights, sensible shoes and a fashionable skirt and top all combine into suitable armour for a middle-ranking administrator. After much muttering and scattering, she settles on a mismatched white 34B bra and dark blue satin knickers. He makes a mental note to sort out a couple of loads of laundry later on.
When she’s departed, he brews a coffee then dozes awhile listening to the radio news. Later he sits up in bed reading. Beyond the curtains the world is dark and rainy. Jenny will doubtless curse the inclemency if it hasn’t cleared by five. David is trying to see his forced unemployment as a period of opportunity. There are maybe fifty novels he’d acquired as a student which he’s never had the time to get round to before. The un-shaded light bulb and mental osmosis turns the cryptic markings into if not escapism at least fictive lifestyles more dynamic than his own.
The light stutters and dims. He can still see to read. A minute later the illumination plunges again. He gets up and walks to the kitchen annexe where he keeps spare house-ware. He changes the decaying bulb. There is no improvement. He throws on a pair of trousers and goes out of the flat and down the stairs in order to check the fuse box in the shared cupboard. Nothing seems to be amiss. Maybe atmospheric conditions or “essential” repair work, he
thinks.
Back in the flat, he phones the electricity board.
“There is no maintenance work going on in your area, Mr Connor,” some bright spark informs him. He will just have to put up with it.
When Jenny arrives back from work, she moans about how dingy the flat seems. He tries to explain but she’s busy rifling through the larder.
“We haven’t got any tea bags, David,” she complains. “I mean, for goodness sake, it’s not too much to ask, is it? You could check for a few essentials when you pop out to the shops, couldn’t you?”
“I haven’t been out today,” he answers quietly. “Do you want me to get herbal or ordinary?”
“Just get some Typhoo or P. G. Tips or shop’s own brand, I don’t care!”
He remembers better times but he remembers worse as well. When she’d first moved into his bed-sit she’d still been scraping by on a student loan as she finished her last year at college. He’d been earning enough then to keep them in red wine, Jack Daniels and the occasional illicit smoke. The pendulum had swung the other way recently. Maybe it would return one day or at least reach a manageable equilibrium.
In bed, not really tired enough to sleep, he remembers a blazing late-night row during the early days of their relationship. Their elderly upstairs neighbour - Mr Fitz, a powerfully-built old sea dog who sported a walking stick for merely decorative effect - had come clomping down the wooden steps to join the fray at this nocturnal disturbance. Chastened, they’d bade him an apologetic good night and made amendments under the duvet.
. . .
The next day, David phones his mother for their regular once a week desultory conversation. Mother now has an expensive mobile phone “because of all those muggers and rapists, you know”. David wonders but doesn’t ask whether she intends to clip the villains round the ear with the hand-set. He still has only a land line and can barely afford that. He says goodbye as soon as it is polite enough to do so.
The post-basket is stuffed with flyers for double glazing firms and pizza parlours. There’s some uncollected mail for the other tenants and a brown envelope
containing his giro. He goes straight to the post office where he queues for half an hour to the sound of brats being reprimanded by peroxide mothers. The
building smells of extinguished roll-ups. These are now my kin and this my domain, he decides.
Stamp, stamp, sign here, have you any ID, here’s some low-denomination notes to last you a couple of weeks. Next please.
Outside, the day is so overcast that he gets a few visual flashes off the street sweepers’ safety jackets. Not that anyone generally gets much sunlight down here in the shadow of the tower blocks, the market stalls and the Pound-U-Save supermarket.
David buys a local newspaper and takes it home to scan for vacancies. He circles a few with a biro, takes out his draft CV and begins making some amendments. There is another ker-chunk like a heavy bag of air falling and the illumination goes from off-white to thin yellow. Even with the curtains drawn fully back, it’s now dimmer than ever indoors. There must be something wrong with the wiring. He doesn’t feel particularly confident about electrical matters so he phones the landlord. He gets the answering machine. Judging by the length of the music before the bleep, the landlord hasn’t yet listened back to David’s previous complaints about the leaky cistern and the loose hinge brackets on the door. David had eventually fixed the latter himself with a set of cheap screwdrivers from the hardware store near the station. The door is now distinctly well-hung. He wishes he still felt the same way about himself
Jenny comes home. She is as perfunctory and distracted as ever. She moans about the dim light and the leaky toilet.
“It’s making the carpet smell, David. Can’t you do something about it?”
She needs a long, hot soak after the day’s grind. She grabs the bedside lamp, rigs up the extension lead, takes her book with her into the bathroom and closes the door firmly, severely threatening the white flex trapped under its bottom edge
David realises he has yet to purchase tea bags. It’s now quite dark outside but the Asian shop two streets away will still be open.
Jenny does not notice his temporary absence.
. . .
He buys aTV guide. Although most of the afternoon programming seems to be cookery slots and American confrontational shows, he keeps the set on with the volume at zero, using the extra illumination to help him read in the solitary armchair.
The magazine holds the usual plethora of inserts. One is for a music clubadvertising the “definitive recording” of Wagner’s “The Twilight Of The Gods”.
David hums a few favourite phrases to himself whilst wondering idly just how many of the locals with their car stereos regularly pumping out a staccato cross-fire of jungle, “Ayia Napa” or nu-skool garage ever concern themselves with classical music. Then again, a recent sci-fi film had brought “The Ride Of
The Valkyries” back into popular consciousness.
“There’s no reason for anything,” David mutters aloud to himself. “Here I am struggling to think up synonyms for ‘liaison’ and ‘team-work’ so I can get some crappy little office job. Whereas Wagner has hundreds of musicians studying and playing his meister-work even years after his death.”
Death? Is that all he had to look forward to?
There are two positions he decides to apply for even though he will probably be deemed over-qualified and too many years past school leaving age. Knowledge of Nietzsche not required. Ability to sprout facial hair a distinct disadvantage.
He decides to phone Jenny and share his new-found optimism. There is no answer for the longest while.
Finally, a brash young secretary with a voice like chocolate chirps, “Winterburn Associates, how can we help you?”
“Can I speak to Jennifer, please?”
“Jennifer? Jennifer who? Oh, you mean Miss Ablett. I’m afraid she left our employment a month ago. Can anyone else help you?”
“It’s a personal call. Do you have her new work number?’
“No, sir, I’m sorry but we don’t. Would you like Mr Sparks to assist you, perhaps?”
“No. No thank you. It doesn’t matter.”
. . .
He doesn’t challenge her when she comes home. Instead, he has a cup of tea ready at the instant she pushes the key into the lock. The heating element in the kettle makes the overhead lights flicker and dim again, worse than before. He’s glad they use a gas boiler for their hot water.
Jenny waves a wad of papers under his nose. “Don’t you ever check the mail?” she demands.
“Most of it’s not ours,” he answers.
“I’m going to run a bath,” she states, ignoring his response.
There is a phone bill and a credit card commendation, otherwise the letters are all clearly addressed to the other occupants of the block. Clear enough, anyway, even in the omnipresent dimness. David stacks them neatly on the table.
She might easily have changed her job for a better remunerated position and simply forgotten to inform him. On the other hand, she might no longer be working at all, merely going through the motions of absenting herself from their cramped flat for several hours a day just to stop them getting too much on top of each other. He believes some dockers or ship-yard workers did this up North back in the nineteen-eighties.
He invents and runs with a fantasy that Jenny has commenced a torrid day-time affair with some filthy rich captain of industry who demands coquetry, perfume, lipstick and regular oral sex in return for seeing her all right financially and not a word to wifey back at his country mansion. It would certainly explain the hour spent soaking in the bath immediately she gets home every day.
Later, in bed, she says, “David, we hardly talk any more.”
“Is there something in particular you want to bring up?” he asks.
“No. Not now, I’m too tired. I just feel that, you know, communication is something we need to work on.”
. . .
Zeus threw another lightning fork into the air to briefly illuminate the dark sky around Mount Olympus. Nights were the worst. In these days of retreat and inactivity, there was less and less need of restorative sleep. Every godly day lasted a full twenty-four wakeful hours. Which made every effort to kill time as minuscule and meaningless as a solitary grain of sand upon the beach of eternity. How repetitive everything was! How many times could you go hunting near-extinct animals with Artemis? Indulge in underwater swimming raceswith Poseidon? Go boozing and carousing and get absolutely rat-arsed with dearold Dionysus? Or drink the sweet milk from the full, round breasts of the lovely Hera?
There was no real reason to do anything much anymore. Everything was so tedious. Those damned mortals - they had it easy! No time for boredom and monotony in their shallow little lives!
. . .
David had regularly drawn cartoons for the student mag at Uni. These days he barely possesses a marker pen or a sharp pencil. When he occasionally doodles, he produces caricatures of elves, dragons and legendary beings scratched out with a leaky blue biro on cheap, not entirely smooth A4 from the copy shop. He still has a supply of cartridge paper and a proper art board and equipment back at his mother’s. No doubt she will be thrilled if he turns up and takes them off her hands. But he’s been out once already this morning to buy a pint of milk and he doesn’t really fancy the long bus or train ride to Mother’s at the best of times. Besides, it had been so overcast earlier that all the cars had their head-lamps on and many people were carrying torches. London during the black-out...
Maybe he could ring and get Mother to send some of the stuff.
He looks at the music club flyer again.
Wagner’s gods, of course, were not Greek or Hellenic but drawn from Norse mythology. Woden, Odin... so foreboding! Frigg, Tiw, Thor... all the strapping heroes and heroines of Valhalla who would later be adopted as Aryan exemplars by the Nazi Party. As would the composer, also. Powerful music and imagery, if a little too over-blown for many sensibilities.
There is no archaeological evidence that the Vikings put cattle horns on the sides of their helmets. It’s just historical convention.
David’s brain is crammed full of such not immediately useful information. Maybe he should find a way to work these facts into his covering letters, make his employment applications stand out from thecrowd.
. . .
Jenny doesn’t return home that evening. David imagines that she has gone away to some conference with her avaricious VIP fancy man to canoodle the night away in a naked Jacuzzi. She doesn’t call to contradict this assumption.
David finds the electrical supply is now so bad that he can’t have a light and the TV on at the same time. Eventually, he falls asleep listening to the radio on a long-life battery. There is an SOS message just before the midnight news but it’s not for Jennifer Ablett.
. . .
She fails to come home at the end of the next dull day, too. David considers phoning some of the capital’s plusher hotels but doubtless she’s using a pseudonym so that would be a waste of time. On the following morning, he hears back from the two job vacancies. Both rejections are couched in remarkably similar terms: the shared phraseology of the high priest class controlling the creed of capitalism. They are looking for “someone setting out on a career path” and “not withstanding (his) valuable experience” they suggest he is “unfortunately, therefore, not ideally suited to this current position”. They will retain his name and address for future marketing purposes.
He has added several envelopes to the stack on his table. It is mid-morning, though still very dull. He decides to distribute the missives to their rightful recipients.
As he tries to push half a dozen envelopes under the door at the top of the next flight of stairs, he finds that the inner entrance is not locked but merely ajar. He calls, “Mr Fitz, are you in?” as he pushes into the stale, sickly-smelling air of the second floor bed-sit. He flicks the light switch. The bulb here is marginally stronger -maybe 150 watts. Bright enough, at least, to reveal the elderly neighbour face down in a pool of his own vomit, black trousers stained brown by loosened bowels and very, very dead.
David chooses not to touch the corpse. Nothing could be gained by heart massage or attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Besides which, he doesn’t wish to implicate himself in any suggestion of foul play. He wonders about wiping his prints off the door and the light switch but reasons that such evidence firmly corroborates his concerned neighbour alibi.
He phones the police from his own flat. They arrive a leisurely hour later: a portly, moustachioed sergeant and a lithe, psychotic-looking constable. The old cop / young cop routine. They ask him a mantra of questions: “When did you last see Mr Fitz?” / “Would you say he kept himself to himself?” / “Do you live here alone?” / “Are you in gainful employment?” / “And where is Miss Ablett at the present time?”
David becomes convinced that Jenny is somehow involved in the tragedy upstairs even though Old Fitz appears to have been dead for a week or so. He feels the need to protect her.
“She’s visiting a sick relative. She’s probably lodging in a bed and breakfast close to the hospital. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.”
“Well, thank you, Mr Connor. That’ll be all for now. We’ll give you a courtesy call tomorrow.”
David hopes he will be out when that happens, although given his latent agoraphobia he rather doubts it.
. . .
It’s the fourth day of absence. The police sergeant phones that morning to inform him of the coroner’s preliminary findings:
“Natural causes, Mr Connor. Nothing you could have done. Just a shame no one thought to check earlier. There’s an elderly sister lives in a nursing home. Not sure about any funeral arrangements yet.”
“I don’t think I’ll want to go,” David answers. “We weren’t close.”
Just a few feet of plaster-work, floor boards and air space.
“Well, you’ll have to excuse me now, Mr Connor. This bleeding twilight is a bit of a thief’s paradise, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
David feels relieved that the permanent twilight is not merely his own imagining, a dim hallucination of the outside world reflecting his own psychological state. He trusts his brief smile will convey his gratitude. It remains unacknowledged, perhaps unseen. He wonders if the coast is now clear for him to present the local constabulary with the missing Jennifer problem. He decides to give it another seventy-two hours or so.
He searches through Jenny’s knickers drawer, wishing the smooth twists of fabric evoked more than a few fragmentary memories. All her skimpiest, sexiest underwear is still in place which makes him wonder whether his assignation supposition is badly off the mark and she is actually in mortal danger. Maybe
he’ll phone the sergeant tomorrow if the situation hasn’t changed.
He finds what he’s been seeking: a plastic bank bag full of emergency money for unforeseen bills and the like. He stands at the window awhile. The sky is still overcast but there seems to be more light penetrating the clouds today. Unless his eyes have simply become accustomed to the all -pervasive gloom. He takes a few deep breaths of the room’s stuffy air then exits the flat while he still has the courage. Soon he is down on the street he’d gazed upon just a minute previously. He glances back at his window but there is no one standing within it.
He buys brushes and white paint because home cooking and occasional shared cigarettes have darkened the ceiling over the past couple of years. He purchases bulbs and solidly cylindrical church candles. There has lately been something of a run on both these items and the price has risen accordingly. He buys best back bacon even though he rarely eats it himself. Jenny is a glutton for a full English breakfast at the week-end. He dares not expect - but he hopes - that restoring the flat to its former condition and his own hammy version of sympathetic magic will bring her back to him.
. . .
That evening he leaves the fresh paint smell behind him and, with the aid of a stuttering pocket torch and a cheap lighter, he begins a sweep of the local streets. After half an hour he finds her crouched and shivering beneath a sodium lamp; her handbag, thin jacket, book and crushed lipstick all clutched fervently in her left hand.
“It grew too dim, David,” she says.
“I know,” he answers, helping her to her feet. One pointed heel on her work shoes has come loose, he notices.
“Life has just become too dull,” she adds.
She rests the bulk of her weight against his shoulder and right side. It takes him about ten minutes to support her back home. She shakes her brown hair at offers of hot drinks or bubble baths. He tucks her up in bed, hears her breathing relax.
He examines the contents of her bag: not suspiciously but simply out of thoroughness. She still has her credit cards, travel pass, sunglasses and a sizeable wad of cash in her purse. He takes up the book she’s been reading, shines the angle-poise lamp down onto its slightly battered cover. It’s a novel that has been on the paperback charts for several weeks. He reads the opening chapters, leaning against the bed’s wooden frame. The setting is the usual glitzy media and advertising world of Hampstead homes and West One offices. Underneath the characters’ brash, confident exteriors, however, he detects an embittered mood of doom and gloom which will debilitate them sooner or later. He reads on. There are a number of incongruous plot twists. No real reason for anything.
Jenny has started to snore. He turns her gently onto her side, switches off the lamp and slides into bed beside her.
Unusually, no silver dollar moon or muzzy street light penetrates the thin curtains.
. . .
Zeus swirled the potion around in the goblet. He had sated his lust with earthy Demeter and venereal Aphrodite. He poured the fiery liquid down his huge throat. More than enough to stun an ox, as a human colloquialism had it. In fact, enough to kill a whole platoon of Spartan soldiers. For an immortal, though, it would merely bring on a morning hang-over. Before that, however, lay the brief promise of dark, temporary oblivion: a twilight across Mount Olympus to match the prevailing gloom on the subject planet.
He laid back his head and closed his eyelids. No stars or moonlight penetrated the thin membranes.