“Unutterable Loneliness”

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'The thing is you see...I'm so very lonely'
'mmnn'
'And that's the sort of thing that can start to bother a man'
'mmnn'
'....'
'...'
'Did I ever tell you, I had a filly once'
'...did it win'?
'...She had hair, you know'
'hair?'
'yes hair. All the way down the back of her head. Over the top as well, of course'
'well it's so often the way with women'
'...'
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1
In 1954 I was 21 years old and employed as an assistant at Richmond Lending library,
the location of which required me to leave my familial home and take up rented
accommodation nearby. After I had been given the job I took an afternoon to examine
the local boarding houses and found the most promising to be that of a Mrs. Price. A cordial
woman possessed of a nevertheless stultifying and, when I come to ponder it, implausible
vacuity. In return for the use of her basement room and Breakfast each day, I gave her
Four Pounds a week. I do not know how she saw fit to spend this windfall, but it certainly
was not on the food, which throughout my stay there, retained a ghastly pallor that still
haunts my less discrete dreams. My room was small, naturally, but it was unquestionably
and incontestably mine. Self-sufficiency, when it is achieved is truly an agent of good feeling
and, for the first month I positively o'er brimmed with good graces; at least, as close to good grace as my naturally craggy demeanour allowed. It was no doubt this state of mind that blinded me, at first, to the full
tragedy that was being played out in the other rooms of the house. Indeed, I find that it is
only now, when I find myself in a broadly similar state that its full piquancy is revealed to me.
Now and again my thoughts drift back to the problem of sadness. If this life is all that we
are to achieve in the way of consciousness (and I believe this to be the case), then to sit
in a worn armchair on a Thursday afternoon, an unmarried man of 61 years with no tangible
proof that you ever lived, must be one of the worst things imaginable. It was under just
such circumstances that I faced Dennis Radford, one of my housemates, on December the
14th, some four months after moving into Mrs. Price's rooms.

'And I think I loved her, but how is one to know these things. Particularly at the time,
you understand, when a chap’s mind is apt to wander and wonder up the skirts of any
passing flopsy...'
'What do you expect me to say Dennis?'
'I just want you to understand me. Just say it, I don't care if it's true or not'
'I understand, Dennis...'
'Is that true?'
'No'
'I see you, you know, don't think that you fool everyone with that suit and that smile. I can see the murderous heart that beats within you. There is an ungovernable rage in your bosom...am I right'?
'I am a bastard, if that is what you meant'
'Do not sell yourself short, you are more than that- you are a FUCKER!'
'I am a fucker, Dennis. But what are you?'
'I am nothing.'
'...Is that supposed to be profound, Dennis'?
'...'
'...'
'I don't care how it sounds, fucker, I am nothing. I'd rather be a fucker like you, fucker. Better to be a fucker than nothing...Are you listening to me, fucker'?
'Yes, for the time being, but unless you start saying something worth hearing then I'm afraid you will find yourself alone, dribbling this noxious rubbish into your glass, so get to the point Dennis'
'I was talking about my girl-'
-'Good God Dennis, you're crying aren't you?'
'...'
'Let me tell you something, Dennis; you could scour the globe, tread forest floors and mountain peaks and still find no-one less disposed than I to absorb your tears. They are to me as so many flung pebbles at a granite cliff face. If you see fit to tell me something interesting about your life, feel free. I can't promise I'll listen for much longer though.'


And so he unwound his story to me. He was an ungovernable romantic, Dennis, and I've no doubt the ladies liked the look of him in his youth. However, romanticism becomes pathetic fatalism in the old (personally I've found cynicism to have a vastly longer shelf-life and intend to extol its finer virtues till I am robbed of both speech and movement). I've never been convinced by those fragile souls that wander dewy glades absorbing “the visions splendid”. For all their talk they seem to give it up mighty quick when their prospect of mounting the occasional impressionable poetess in said glade begins to diminish.

Be certain that Dennis was pathetic; and be certain too that I did not, do not and will never like him. He ascended to the Dennis shaped hole in the world with what seemed reluctance; I like to think of his mother vainly plugging away for hours in labour and Dennis, digging his cuticles into the uteral wall, crippled by stage-fright. For all that, though, he could certainly talk; a lifetime of reading Wordsworth and Shelly will do that for you. Descending from the egotistical sublime to the egoistic ridiculous he told me about 'his filly', whose name it transpired was Miriam. I never discovered her surname, but why not re-christen the daft old bitch 'Trotter'. Actually she's probably still alive somewhere, laughing herself silly into her nineties with remembering Dennis' misfortunes- well, it’s served me well, and I'm now Seventy-Two.

'There was a strange set to her jaw. She wasn't beautiful. I always thought that a good phrase would be "well-drawn"; she was well-drawn by a firm hand, with a good quality paper and pencil. She stood out, you know.'
'I believe I understand the general thing that you describe Dennis. What of her body?'
'Didn't have one'
'And yet still she eluded you, Dennis, surely even you could have run down a wheelchair?'
'Quiet fucker, I know you think you're funny, but I'm here to tell you that...'
'I'm sorry Dennis that was rather below-'
'-below the belt, yes it was rather.'
'I was actually going to say "below par". From this moment I promise to only eviscerate you with the finest and most delicate tools of my wit'.
'Good God, and you're what passes for an intellectual these days are you fucker? For all your self-proclaimed wit, you still grind out your days like everyone else'
'Whatever, Dennis, whenever you find yourself ready to return to your roman à clef'
'Blast. Forgotten what I was... Ah yes, I assume you meant tits..'
'well-'
'- there were none to speak of but an intriguingly distended rear. Not out of proportion, you understand, a well-drawn arse, but perhaps-'
'-perhaps more Monet than Carravagio'
'well...perhaps'
'and what did this distended apparition of lusty boyishness do for a living'?
'for a living? what? she was just a child man'.
'-'
'- and before your foul thoughts even begin to find voice, yes, I was a child too. We grew up in adjoining houses in Walton. My parents were confirmed Upper-Middlers you see, and moved from the North some years before. They had a habit of preserving the relics of their industrial past in ornamental form. A gutted and varnished blow-torch rested on the kitchen mantle; an artfully distressed pick-axe hung on the wall...'
'a fossilised black pudding mounted above the fireplace?'
'well, that order of thing, yes. You see, it’s going out now, but people were pretty strict about class, and no-one clings tighter to status than those who are newly ascended. My father was an educated man, worked his way through university and had to do God knows what to elbow himself into the Southern scientific world'
'A man of science?'
'mmnn, never quite got to grips with that sort of thing myself. Lots of lizards and insects lying about the place in cages, I believe he was the first to mate the two together...or perhaps the first to convince them not to mate- something in that way. My mother was a gardener, wrote endless letters to dreary circulars that the green-fingered seem to subscribe to. I'm losing track though, fucker, and you'll be wanting me to get to the point.'
'intriguing though your mother's hobbies and penchant for interior decoration undoubtedly are, Dennis, you are correct.'

2

I met her first on a Monday. I was walking back from school over the river and encountered her on the bridge. When I think about the day as I get older, I become convinced that it was the most important day of my life; it was prefigured, you see. Everything was different from the second I woke up that day. Not from the moment I met her, but from the very second the clock struck midnight the night before. I feel as if destiny had spun around the outer edges of fate and locked into a new position for me that night- and nothing could remain the same because it was an absolutely different world to the one I'd fallen asleep on mere hours before. Anyhow, I'd had a rotten day, something intangible on my mind, you see. Couldn't focus and you paid the price for that sort of thing in those days. As I left the school, though, the sun emerged quite brilliantly and lit up the path I usually took that cut across a scrubby patch of field and the intangible thing that had been preoccupying me all day grew in my mind and I hurried on because I knew that something was going to happen to me- d'you see, I just knew it instinctively.

Let me think- that would have been 1905, I was twelve going on thirteen and it was May. I was carrying this small wooden box I'd made in woodwork that I intended to make my lunchbox and it was swinging back and forth against my thigh. I stopped on the bridge to massage the deadened area and when I looked up I saw her. I knew her, had met her before when her parents had moved in next-door and they came over to introduce themselves. When I think about it, I actually met her a few times after that, passed her playing in the street, talked to her once or twice through the fence. But as I say, there was something different that day, perhaps it wasn't the world that changed, but me, but as I looked at her I felt something that I had read enough poetry to recognise - it was love.

We fell in together, walked about a bit and got to talking, can never remember what about but I suppose that's why it is called 'small' talk- fairly insubstantial at the time and so, when you look back over the years it has become virtually indistinguishable. It was getting on for the summer holidays by then and we were close to inseparable. Running all over the place, climbing trees, the traditional badinage of pre-pubescent courtship. Then, as it was getting on for September and the prospect of returning to school starts to loom large again, she kissed me.

I know you'll laugh but I had never thought to try to kiss her first. I never liked to think about it, in case I'd been getting the whole situation devilish wrong and she'd run off screaming, or laughing at me. We were sat round a tree with our backs to it, me one side and her on the other. The afternoons were long and we were simply lazing around. I remember my feet were resting against some concatenation or other of root and branch. I leant forward an gradually increased the pressure on the foliage until it relented and I slid forward onto my back. Now I needed to cover my eyes from the sun. This I did, occasionally opening a crack in my fingers to let the sunlight in. One time I opened the fingers and saw her standing over me. She was leant slightly forward so the outer extremes of her hair had come loose from beside her ears and were hanging down her cheeks. She bent down and kissed me. I've never forgotten it you know. Moments like that only happen when you're a child and you've no means to understand their significance. Then, when you're older, and in a better position to judge, you're always too jaded to let them happen in the first place.

And so my relationship with Miriam continued in this fashion. Certainly we'd see each other during term-time, but covered up in uniforms and doused in rain, it wasn't really the same. At summers though we'd always fall in together again and there were several more of those perfect moments I mentioned, a superabundance of them in fact. As I grew up though, I got to thinking myself quite handsome, and my time with Miriam became something of a chore. I still 'loved' her in that childish sense, but I was no longer a child. I broke it off with her the summer before I left for Cambridge. It hurt, of course, but God if I'd have known I'd never have done it. I was ploughing myself through the few specimens of femininity that you found at Cambridge in those days. Lots of waitresses, buttoned-up frigid and timid academics go toward a limited and broadly unsatisfying diet. I was writing poetry and it was getting published in the small papers that were circulated around the colleges- making a name for myself. I was reading lots, smoking cigarettes, drinking Sauvignon and thinking myself quite the thing, which went on for a while.

You're young, but for all your lip you're clever, and you can probably fill in the gaps of my life. It isn't important, my private income allowed be to become a full-time poet, as if there are such things; but when that dried up and my father died, it became necessary to find work, which I did as a clerk. I could still publish and living an "ordinary life" meant I could still have all the women I wanted. Luckily, as I'm sure you have noticed, one of my legs is shorter than its mate, which precluded me from participating in the war and its associated horrors. My God but I never met randier women than those during wartime, and I doubt that those in Flanders field saw more action than me... that was in bad taste- the sort of thing one thinks but doesn't say. Oh I know you don't care, but I hope that I still do, no matter how much I have...drunk.

I've lost my thread again. Which is quite apt I suppose, because it turned out that none of it mattered. None of it. Not one tiny, little bit of it counted for a single fucking thing. My point is that I lived what I thought was a life, but it wasn't. Wasn't a life, I mean. I did things, said things, read things, wrote things, thought things and generally participated to the extent that I could in the world. Then, one day I was walking along Oxford Street, and blow me down if I didn't see Miriam walking towards me. Must have been ten years ago now, but there she was- still bloody well-drawn for a woman of her age. I ducked to one side and watched her walk past me. I watched the front of her face become the side of her face become the back of her head become a figure in the near-distance become a dot; and by then I'd been struck dumb, d'you see. She must have been off in a few seconds of course, but watching her walk away was like an entire lifetime- but the lifetime I could have been living, d'you see? Like a bloody great hammer that smashed everything from the second I sent her packing to the second I first made her out on the street. Worthless, pointless, useless, graceless, guileless, mindless, sexless, loveless and ultimately hopeless. A chap finds something like that hard to swallow, especially at my age. He doesn't appreciate realising that his life has been a pale facsimile of the one that he could have had if he wasn't so damnably silly. So there you go, Sixty-One years and that's what I can pass onto you, fucker. I'm afraid that is the only thing of worth you'll ever prise from my salty old carcase.

..........

3

Poor Dennis. He believed it you see, every word of it. That's the problem with poets. Never happy unless they can mould everything they see into some grand illustration of the frailty of the human condition. He couldn't bump into his childhood gallop and just shake her hand, thank her for the pleasure and cut off with the memories. No, not Dennis- he must hide and weep whilst hiding. It's also rather touching that he thought his experiences would have been of value to me, but in that, as in so many if there is a lesson to be taken from Dennis' life, then it is that, on his death bed, the pragmatist will be a damn sight more comfortable than your average romanticist. Too fragile, you see. Build their lives into towers of ephemerality and then, as years pass, look down at, well, what amounts to an invisible staircase- and because there was no substance to their lives, they've nothing to cling to.

I'm now Seventy-Two, a year older than Dennis was when the pathetic old wanker finally cut the ropes that kept him tethered to Earth, and I'm content. I can look back on my women and certainly I have regrets, but by and large I can die knowing that I got dealt an average hand and played soundly, whilst those around me flustered and arsed about until they had nothing, or close to it. Fuck them all. Wastes of space, the lot of them. It wasn't just that Dennis would deceive himself so, which would be bad enough; but he had turn his grotty encounter with that leathery old boot of his into (God save us all) "a lesson". Something that I could learn from, when it was clearly something peculiar to him and his kind (wankers, I mean). I've not mellowed, you see, I never gave in to the romanticism that begins to suggest itself as the years advance. Christ knows I felt the bastard shinning down the chimney a few times but successfully fetched it a kick up the arse and sent it packing back to the Midlands where it belongs.

Now when I think of Dennis, snivelling into his glass that December, I can laugh at it. "I'm unutterably lonely" he paradoxically said at one point. You could see every fibre of his being quivering with the emotional vulnerability you should more rightly expect of a new-born baby. Sickening really. So, yes I can laugh, and so should you. You've read his infernal story (much edited, I need hardly add) and whilst it may create a small current of sympathy- it must surely, and rightfully, occur at the centre of sea of condescension for the bewildered old cunt.

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"You realise what a damn pansy you are? Surely you must"
"I'm nonesuch thing"
"Well you're some such thing and I'm too tired to play the semiotician, Dennis"
"You must understand though, I'm unutterably lonely and I want you to be spared the same fate as me"
"For Christ's sake you ridiculous old sot, grow a beard and go live up a tree. You're not fit to breathe the same air as decent, rutting, farting beasts like us"
"You don't understand-"
“-wrong. I don't agree. A different thing entirely"
"you'll find this out, you know, you really shall"
"... Why did you never grow up, Dennis? I think that body leapt forth willingly into puberty, leaving behind the mind of a Ten year old child"
"look-"
"-Careful you don't begin to weep again, Dennis. I can see you're heading that way"
"Fuck you."
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By J.L. Cranfield

Copyright August 2005