We Had It So Good Page 5

  “Do you know what her father did to her?” Stephen asked him.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And was it really bad?”

  Ivan was uncharacteristically silent. Eventually, he said, “Reich may not have fully understood the negative effects of orgone.”

  “Reich? Do you really believe in that?”

  “Look, man, the sixties are a carnival of ideas, we throw a lot of stuff in the air and some of it flies. Most of the rest falls back to earth, burns out. The decade that’s coming is the one when we catch hold of all the air-bound concepts, we take them by the tail and see where they carry us. Reich I haven’t entirely made my mind up about yet, but Andrea is right in one respect, capitalism is about stimulating desire, and we have to subvert it by creating a desire counterculture, the potheads need to beat the bread-heads.”

  “What has this got to do with Grace?”

  “I’m thinking that if you put orgone into the hands of the wrong people, like Grace’s dad, you might have a problem. We have to take all the orgone in the universe away from the Man.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “I don’t see why it should be a problem. They’ll all be dead soon, and then we’ll take over.”

  Andrea returned from the periphery bearing bowls of unidentifiable food that they ate with relish because they were perpetually hungry.

  Andrea moved into Stephen’s room, bringing with her a trunk of the weird clothes made by Grace and her glass vials of patchouli oil, which he surreptitiously poured down the sink.

  She insisted he begin a dream diary. Every morning he had to write down as many dreams as he could remember. They were mainly a rehash of the mundane events of the previous day. “Perhaps I don’t have a subconscious,” he suggested, but Andrea said that if he did not, then it would be by far the most interesting thing about him. Besides, a boy who tried on a mink stole could hardly be said not to possess repressed desires.

  In Oxford people floated and drifted and spoke slowly. The word for this was languid, Andrea said. No one was languid in L.A., it was a city too vast not to be permanently paying attention. In his teens he had watched the surfers and hadn’t got what they were after, in and out of the shore, always returning to land, their backs to the horizon. He had shipped out, he had reached somewhere, and these tiny repetitive voyages on the margins of the beach bored him. Now he revolved in a gyre.

  Arriving at Oxford in jeans, sneakers, T-shirt and a World War II–era army surplus khaki jacket he’d bought in Manhattan in 1966, and which was still going strong by the time the war in Iraq started in 2003 (if slightly threadbare), because it had been made to repel Nazi bullets, Stephen experimented under Andrea’s guidance, first with a paisley scarf knotted round his neck, and then moved on to an embroidered Afghan waistcoat that stank of goats. If he went back in time to his Oxford days, he sometimes thought, he would not be able to stand the smell. No one washed enough, there were no showers, only huge cast-iron bathtubs with leaking tarnished chrome taps and a rubber hose attachment if you wanted to wash your hair.

  Ivan obtained some acid. The girls said no, they wouldn’t do it. Grace was entering a Marxist phase, which Ivan had already worked through at boarding school, and she sat in the garden, her back against the fence, reading Trotsky. She was not interested in altered consciousness; Andrea was, but had powerful instincts of self-preservation, having seen her father’s calamitous mental collapse at the time of his bankruptcy. She knew there was no safety net, no home to go to or private sanatorium if things turned weird. She would be in the public asylum, forgotten by everyone.

  Sitting on the back step with Ivan, waiting to peak, Stephen grew increasingly astounded by a dandelion. This, he realized, should have been his field of study all along. It was a massive proclamation of the sun, its vast gaseous starry being, and all the laws of geometry! Everything you needed to know about the physical world was right here in one common flower which grew between the cracks of Oxford pavements, ignored, and then transmuted itself overnight into a ball of cloudy white tendrils. The study of the dandelion was the path to the Nobel, so obvious yet he was, as far as he knew, the first person to study it. Unless, he thought, in a queasy pang of paranoia, John Baines was secretly racing toward Stockholm.

  An hour later he understood his error. Milk was a whole white floating universe and forget dandelions, milk was the answer. It came to him that he now knew that his own dissertation could be summed up in a single short elegant paragraph that he wrote on Ivan’s pale forearm, his own having too many black hairs to make a surface for a ballpoint pen. When he excitedly examined the arm the following day, all he could see was a series of wavy lines.

  Ivan looked at him as they walked through the Parks toward the river. Stephen’s hair was a huge black Afro, standing upright round his head, and a round beard covered half his face. He was jabbering about milk. Ivan had a thought of uncompromising clarity as a swan moodily swam toward them, its small eyes sending downy messages into the reeds.

  “I know how we could turn the whole world on,” he said to Stephen.

  But Stephen was distracted by a rabbit which somersaulted over a toadstool and, turning into a small boat, was boarded by a duckling with a green face and very blue eyes.

  “Could you actually make acid?” Ivan asked. “Would you know how?”

  “I guess so, I’d need to find the paper, it’s probably in the library.”

  Stephen tore out the pages and took them back to his fume hood at Dyson Perrins. Within a week he had obtained his first sample, and a month later Ivan, who appeared to know every freak and pothead at Oxford, had established a distribution network, selling it at a pound a tab. Once a week he would take the train to London and return with a shoulder bag made of a piece of Turkish carpet, filled with money.

  “Who are you selling it to?” Stephen asked.

  “Just people I know. And people they know, word gets around.”

  He had created a kind of advertising flyer which consisted of photographs of girls’ breasts with smiley faces where their nipples should be. Andrea and Grace had posed for the pictures, their tits were admired all over Oxford and far beyond. He named the tabs Mister Button.

  Mister Button bought Stephen a secondhand car, a red, two-door open-top Triumph Herald, only six years old.

  When he looks back, this is the high-water mark, he and Andrea tearing through Oxford, their hair flying, his paisley scarf whipping in the breeze, her hand on his knee and all the old things of that old city vanishing as they got out of town, driving on and on until they reached the outskirts of London and turned, abashed, not yet ready to penetrate the metropolis.

  Mister Button kept them in cheesecloth shirts, loon pants, LPs, and a monthly dinner at the Elizabeth with a bottle of Burgundy, until a don dropped his fountain pen on the floor at the lab one lunchtime when Stephen was sitting outside on the grass thinking about how to persuade Andrea to let him come up her ass. The Parker pen rolled into Stephen’s fume hood and was followed by two brown lace-up brogues until it came to rest beneath the table on which Stephen had left, propped up against a condensing coil, the torn-out pages from the library.

  “I have to go see the proctors,” Stephen told Ivan. “Am I in trouble?”

  “Do you know what they’re charging you with?”

  “Defacing a library book.”

  “Oh, man.”

  “Is that serious?”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s just a damned book,” he said, unable to take the proceedings seriously. “I’ll pay for another.”

  He was made to dress up in subfusc. Black suit borrowed from a friend of Ivan’s—he and Ivan were nothing like the same size and shape—white shirt, white bow tie and his academic gown. He looked like a crow, standing in front of the mirror.

  “Do you not understand, Mr. Newman,” said the proctor, flanked by bulldogs in bowler hats, “that the Radcliffe Science Library is a copyright library? We do not of
fer a selection of volumes chosen for the taste and amusement of our students. We receive one copy of every book published. This is not a book which you have defaced. This is the book.”

  “What, is it the Bible or something?”

  “If it were the Bible it would be the Bible.”

  “Oh, come on. This is ridiculous.”

  Then they sent him down.

  With the loss of his student status came the loss of his Rhodes Scholarship and, like the fountain pen rolling across the floor of Dyson Perrins, the consequences went on and on, hitting no obstacles to stop their progress. A letter arrived from his father. His dad wasn’t all that good with English, his writing childlike; he had learned to read and write but not fully absorbed where you made a big and where you made a small letter or how to spell.

  DeAR Sun,

  Hope this finds you fine and in GooD HealtH. Your MOTHER sends her Loving WiSHeS. This came For YOU in the mail for the GOVERMENT. I know it IS important SO I sent this REAL quick.

  Yor Loving FatheR

  For the first time in his life he started to have vivid, sweat-soaked dreams. He dreamt of being sewn alive into an army uniform, his head shaved and, like cattle, loaded up with other shaved men and shipped out to Indochina to shoot and kill small yellowy people with conical hats, for absolutely no reason. Stephen knew he was going home to America to die, he could not see himself surviving longer than the minute or two it would take for him to descend the steps of a military troop carrier, and some sniper in the trees, taking aim and then shouting, Got one! He’d make Nguyen’s day and his parents would erect a dust-gathering shrine to him in their best room and his body would lie in the mortuary for years while they argued about whether he should lie in the Jewish or the Catholic cemetery, but no, they’d burn him in an oven and scatter his sooty ashes in the Pacific Ocean. It would be all over for him, Stephen Newman, son of America. But nobody of his generation, he believed, was born to die, except by accident. Life was extraordinary, the only acceptable condition. Life is my birthright.

  So fuck Mister Button, who had brought him to this. Fuck Ivan, fuck Grace. But not sweet Andrea, who had told him she loved him, and would do anything for him (apart from that thing).

  Andrea with her terrible teeth and green fingernails, her little roll-up cigarettes, her clouds of red hair and large eyes, her plump thighs beneath her velvet dresses and her wet tongue. Who had no one but him in the world, apart from the dragon-girl, and who was surprisingly ruthless when she found something she wanted.

  The Island

  “One of the ways my father went on controlling me was by putting money into my bank account. There was no pattern to it, he never tried to contact me to say the money was there, though I don’t know how he would because he didn’t have an address, but I would go and cash a check and the cashier would say, ‘Do you want to transfer that to a savings account?’ And I would say, ‘Why?’ And they would write down my balance on a piece of paper and push it toward me and I saw that he’d put a thousand pounds in.

  “So this gave me a lot of freedom to travel, but I see now that it meant I always had this safety net, I didn’t need to worry about getting a job or starting a career. And I could live very cheaply, I became good at that because I never knew when the next sum would be deposited and I never wrote to him to ask him to put it on a more regular basis. It was like winning the lottery every few months. He must have had some plan in his head precisely because there was no regularity to the payments. He was stringing me along for some devious purpose of his own I’ve never been able to fathom. If he wanted me to be okay he’d have paid it in on some kind of system, but he didn’t. It was just about power, his power over me.

  “I don’t know what my mother thought about, she didn’t really speak. My mother was the most silent person I have ever known. If she had opinions, I have no idea what they were. She didn’t vote, she didn’t listen to the radio or watch television, she just turned brown. I watched her becoming dun-colored, like the earth, and of course my father wasn’t attracted to her anymore, why would he be?

  “She wore brown trousers and an old brown jersey and gardening boots and often she didn’t bother changing for dinner, because when the days were long she’d go straight back down to her flower beds. The flowers were her children, not me. She wasn’t cold, she wasn’t distant and she wasn’t unloving. When I was little I remember her being very warm and even playful, we would sit on the grass and sing songs. Which songs? You know, I think they were from the music halls, ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery,’ and ‘After the Ball Was Over.’ She liked that one because she’d been at balls before she met my father, she wasn’t a countrywoman at all, that was him, the scholarship boy from the hops fields. She’d been presented at court. But I don’t know the details. I saw my grandparents occasionally, they came down for the weekend, but they were snobs, they didn’t like my father, they thought she’d married beneath her. My grandfather was in the diplomatic service. My mother spent part of her childhood in Rome but it didn’t seem to have had any effect on her, unless that was where she first saw fabulous gardens.

  “I do know she always expected she would have a large family, she wanted a house in the country where she could bring up all her children and what she got was an Edwardian villa on the outskirts of Sevenoaks and miscarriages, and instead of lavishing her attention on the one child she did have, it was as if she gave up on the whole idea of being a mother and devoted all that fecundity to the garden, where she could make things grow and live. To be honest, I think she more or less forgot about me, especially when I reached my early teens, because I suspect that she was one of those women who only really like babies, and have more and more because they lose interest when the baby starts turning into an active nondependent child. And I accept that I can’t have been the easiest of daughters.

  “But I don’t want to talk about my mother.

  “Let’s get back to the question of money. These deposits my father kept putting in my account allowed me to go to Cuba after Oxford, which was a complete eye-opener because it was the first time I was exposed to a Latin culture, and they loved me, they completely got me. There was absolutely none of this Protestant bullshit, this Puritanism which infests the northern soul. They just know how to live and they live out on the streets, everything there was outdoors and in color. People drank, people ate, they made music, it was fabulous. I had this little room above a café, very simple, and I was reading a lot of Marx and Lenin, and thinking that you could only have successful communism in warm countries, hot countries. These very gray granite left-wing ideas have to be mitigated by a strong pleasure principle. The Soviet Union was the last place a revolution was ever going to work.

  “Of all the places I would love to go back to, it’s Cuba, because you can live very cheaply there and one thing it did for me was that eventually I stopped reading Marx and Lenin. When I was at Oxford it was Ivan who was the anarchist, not me, I thought those ideas were really woolly, but in Cuba I didn’t become an anarchist, I just dropped all ideology. I lost interest in it.

  “What happened to me in Cuba was that I fell in love. We moved in together, it was so crazy, this little place we had, and we spent all our time in bed. He was teaching me Spanish and I was teaching him English and we were each learning all the sex words before the words you couldn’t use with anyone but a lover. God, I was so happy. I would watch the shadows on the walls thrown by the heavy old mahogany furniture, the shadows that looked like hunchbacked women crossing the room. The dust motes in the sun beams. The torn ivory lace of the curtains. The meals he cooked me of beans and rice. The strong morning coffee. The rum in the evening. The taste of his skin with the cheap horrible perfume he used. Him playing his guitar, badly, sitting on the edge of the bed. His toothbrush drying on the cracked sink. The ceaseless sound of people in the street.

  “When I look back, that’s how I see myself. I’m twenty-two and I’m in that room and no one has the address. However hard th
ey look they’ll never find me. I painted the walls browny red, the color of an old lipstick, and the room seemed to hum and vibrate with the heat of it. We went out sometimes on the back of a motorbike he borrowed, out to the sea, to the Atlantic coast. You could see ships on the horizon, their black funnels clear against the blue sky, which was always salted with clouds. That’s what he said, a sky without clouds is like a steak without salt. I told him in England we have a roof of clouds, but he had no idea what I meant, he just laughed.

  “He could be very mean and moody. He’d go off and not tell me why or where. I said, ‘Why don’t you just admit you have another girlfriend?’ But he shook his head. So I thought maybe he was a government spy, he was spying on me, but then they arrested him. They took him away and told me I had to pack up and come to the airport right away.

  “He must be over sixty now. Maybe he’s a fat old Cuban living in Florida with his fat wife and Republican children. Or maybe he got out of jail and went back to his old life before he met me and he’s a broken-down old man who still remembers some English to speak to the tourists because he had an English girl once.

  “No. I won’t tell you his name. I feel that if I release it with my breath, I’ll lose it. I can’t explain why. I just know that he is all I’ve got, me, him, that room. The red walls. The shadows. The curtain. It’s more real to me than your fucking two-million-pound house, or however much you say it’s worth at your dinner party conversations.”

  Brown Rice, Brown Sugar, Brown Days

  This is my wedding day, Andrea thought. Sooner than I expected.

  They gathered outside the register office with Ivan and John Baines as witnesses. Grace wouldn’t attend. It was a point of principle, she said.