A Personal History of Thirst Read online

Beaufort immediately stood up and continued to develop his argument, while I sat down with relief. I sneaked a look at the gallery. Daisy, grinning, had both thumbs up. In the cage, Thirst sat on his bench, hands on both knees, elbows out, legs open, leaning forward.

  Beaufort sat down shortly before one o’clock. The Chief said they would consider the matter over luncheon, and we all shot to our feet as the old men walked out in a row. The warders took Thirst away to his lunch in the cells.

  “There are a few points I want to discuss,” Beaufort said. I followed him down the long marble corridor. I was half afraid that Daisy would pop out from somewhere and tell Beaufort what a terrific fuck I was, but we managed to cross Fleet Street without ambush.

  “Appeal allowed,” the Chief told us after lunch.

  I was still young enough to look for my approval not to Beaufort or to Thirst but to the gallery. Daisy beamed at me and with huge gestures the whole court could follow signaled that she would see me at home in an hour or so.

  Beaufort sent me to see Thirst while he slipped off to El Vino’s for a glass of wine before they shut at 3:00 P.M.

  I felt terrific. There is no experience in the world quite like winning for the appellant in your first criminal appeal. It was a feeling, I discovered, that existed independently of the moral reservations I had begun to develop. To have snatched one vulnerable human life from the steel jaws of the System precipitated a thrill of boundless power such as David must have known. I knew, too, exactly what David had done with his favorite girlfriend while Goliath was still warm. I had quite forgotten my earlier premonition.

  I spent the minimum amount of time with Thirst, who told me I was a genius, then treated myself to a taxi back to Daisy.

  I thought there was a chance I would get there first, but when I reached home I found her naked with a bottle of champagne, all aglow. She was very moved by my victory. It meant a lot to her that Thirst would probably now go free a month or so earlier.

  “You’ve done something incredible today, Jimmy. Think how awful it must be to be young and in prison. I think I’d die.”

  —

  It was one of those occasions when the mysterious processes of her sexuality determined that our lovemaking would possess a holy dimension. Like any good artist, she needed only a minimum of props. Champagne lay with ice in the washbasin in the corner of the room, two sparkling clean tulip-shaped glasses waited on a table, she had combed her hair and swept it back. Her eyes were deeply vulnerable, her belly quivered when I touched it. I didn’t need to be told to be gentle. She came with a great cry, her face twisted in disbelief.

  “My God, that was amazing.” She put her head on my shoulder, took a deep breath. “Wow.” I felt her place a hand between her thighs. “I think you might have broken something.”

  “You’re hurt?” I started to get up.

  “Joking. Relax. You went so deep, though. I didn’t know either of us had that kind of length.” She whispered: “Stay still. I might not be able to walk for a while. If ever.”

  I squeezed her closer. She swallowed hard; some tears made my chest wet.

  “Can I tell you something very personal?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You’re not to use it against me, ever—if you do, I’ll just deny I ever said it.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “When I saw you in court, doing your job, saving that Oliver Thirst from more misery and strife—being so effective in the world, I mean—and then I thought of how you are with me, so gentle most of the time and such a vigorous lover, I thought you were a very complete man. I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever be as complete as a woman as you are as a man, not till I have a baby anyway.”

  To my astonishment I began to sob.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because you don’t seem to realize that you make me complete, if that’s what I am. Sometimes I don’t think I could even stand up straight if you weren’t in my life.” I dragged a forearm across my face. “Let’s have some champagne, for Christ’s sake. This is ridiculous—I win my first appeal and spend the rest of the day in tears.”

  She sniggered. “It’s just catharsis—you were very tense this morning.”

  While my cheeks were still wet, she bobbed out of bed, buoyant again, and untwisted the wire cage around the neck of the bottle. It went off like a gun, and the cork hit the lampshade. We were still poor enough to be urgent about not wasting the champagne. We managed to save most of it by pouring some into a mug. The emergency changed both our moods.

  “Crybaby.”

  “Same to you.”

  I swallowed my champagne in a great gulp so that I would have an excuse for my light-headedness.

  “I suppose young Mr. Thirst was pleased when you went to see him?”

  “More than pleased. For once that great crust of braggadocio seemed to fall away. It was a little embarrassing—he kept calling me a genius.”

  “So you are.”

  “Don’t you start; I need to keep my feet on the ground—I’m back in the Magistrates Court tomorrow, with a drunken driver. It was weird, though, Thirst’s humility. He even said he agreed with Beaufort. Said it several times, in fact.”

  “Why, what did Beaufort say?”

  “He told Thirst that his life was just a stale turd.”

  “In those words?”

  “More or less.”

  “That was very direct.”

  “You haven’t met Beaufort. If you think I’m getting hard, you should meet him.”

  “No, thanks. One heavy-duty, hyper-macho, case-winning lawyer is enough for me. What else did Thirst say?”

  “Well, he’s pretty sure Hogg can convince the parole board to give him early parole now. Hogg is close to the chairperson, apparently, a woman. He says he’ll really change his life. He kept saying he’d rather die than go back inside.”

  “D’you believe him?”

  “While he was saying it, certainly. That’s the odd thing about some crooks: they’re totally sincere; it’s just that their minds change from moment to moment.”

  “So for you he’s still a crook?”

  “You mean he might have stopped being one the minute his appeal was allowed?”

  “Don’t play dumb; you know what I mean.” Her voice had sharp edges. “I mean, if he really has decided to go straight, do you classify him as a crook still? At what point does redemption come into it in your system, if ever?”

  I swallowed some more champagne. “It’s not a matter of redemption, it’s a matter of resisting the next bent opportunity and the next and the next, consistently, for the rest of his life, like an alcoholic resisting a drink.”

  “He needs a woman.”

  “That’s what women always think.”

  “But you said something in the pub that night with Hogg—you said even if he succeeds, would it be worth it? What does that mean?”

  “Take a reformed alcoholic. Okay, he’s stopped drinking, but the despair that made him drink is still there, expressing itself in some other form. Now he lives according to all the rules, like a machine, nobody can fault him, but does it bring any satisfaction? In the final analysis, does it make any difference that he’s stopped drinking?”

  “That’s pretty bleak,” Daisy said.

  “It would be bleak if there weren’t any Daisy Smiths in the world. Daisy Smiths are the only real redemption.”

  “So he needs a Daisy Smith?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s what I said—he needs a woman.”

  “You win.”

  “Let’s make love again,” Daisy said. “It’s ages since we last made love.”

  Afterward, she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling.

  “You know, your client has an extraordinary face.”

  “Yes. I thought you’d notice.”

  “Reminded me of someone I once knew.”

  “Not your father this time, I’m sure.”

  She smiled. “No, n
ot him. Jay Katzo. Don’t get jealous—he wasn’t a lover. Not in the way you’re thinking.”

  “In what way, then?”

  “In my last year of high school I was still very much under the influence of my father. I thought maybe I’d be a psychologist like him. I asked him for some practical experience of what it was like as a profession, hands on. He pulled strings to get me time at that same hospital in Vermont I told you about. I would go weekends for maybe three months. The place fascinated me. I helped prepare the medications, chatted with the shrinks, got to know some of the patients. Not the catatonics, of course, but the others. Jay Katzo was in for life. A psycho. He’d been convicted of, oh, say a hundred counts of rape. He was considered safe by that time—I guess he was in his late thirties—and he kind of made friends with me. Of course the nurses watched him with me like a hawk, but he was always very respectful, made a point of calling me ‘Miss Hawkley’ and never looking at my tits or my ass the way most of the male shrinks did. I guess he lulled them into a false sense of security, and they had a lot of faith in the medication they were giving him. One day he suddenly pushed me into one of the padded cells and slammed the door and leaned against it. This guy is big, maybe six five, two twenty pounds. I’m scared shitless. He takes all his clothes off and stands there with the biggest erection I’ve ever seen. Something you’d expect on a donkey, you know?”

  “Not really.”

  “Hang in there—it’s not the ending you’re expecting. So there I am seventeen years old, literally dribbling with terror, not even capable of screaming for help. All I can think of is that huge thing of his will tear me apart any second now. Then he starts to speak. He has this extra-deep voice, eerie. ‘This is the message you came here to receive,’ he says. ‘You wanted to know what a man is because your father’s misled you. He’s not a man, I am. Look.’ So I look, and he says, ‘No, not at my cock, sweetheart. Look into my eyes.’ So I raise my eyes slowly, and I can’t help noticing his body, what good shape he’s in. And his eyes are deep brown and on fire, that’s the only way I can describe it, and there’s this electric energy flowing all over his face, as if he’s plugged into some power line. This naked man is extra alive, his whole body kind of glows. And I nod, ’cause my father’s eyes are dead. Blue and dead. And Jay Katzo just laughed while the male nurses started ramming open the door. I had to hear his screams while they beat him, and his long groan when they got the hypodermic into him.” She reached behind her for her cigarettes, hashish, and papers, prepared to roll a joint. “I don’t know, ever since that day I’ve wondered if he spent the next twelve months in solitary just to tell me something I needed to know. There was, like, a spiritual connection between us. He never even touched me.”

  “And he had a face like Thirst’s?”

  “Almost exactly. And the same physical presence. You know, like he had an extra male chromosome or something? And brown eyes like him, too.”

  “My eyes are blue,” I said.

  17

  Hogg sent us a Christmas card—emphatically modern, the Christian theme underplayed—and then, early in the new year, an invitation. He had the use, he wrote, of a vicarage in Essex during February, the incumbent, whom he referred to as “dear Percy,” being away at a conference in America debating hidden racist attitudes in the church. He was inviting friends down on each of the four weekends. Would we like to come? Which weekend would suit? He added a footnote: So peaceful, the stress and anger simply melt away and everyone rediscovers the art of gentleness.

  I was in favor of being rude. I hoped Daisy would feel the same way, but she wanted to go. She felt no instinctual loathing for the convivial world; for her such a weekend in the country could never be, as it would be for me, a chore. And she was fed up with the city in winter, the perpetual fug in our tiny room, the filth of the underground, the damp city cold that was impossible to keep out no matter how many sweaters you wore. Her childhood (winters skiing in Colorado, summers on private beaches or yachts in Maine or Massachusetts, belonging to her father’s friends) had not prepared her for the claustrophobia of the inner city in January. We were having arguments that had as much to do with getting in each other’s way as with our political differences. And then, she had liked Hogg.

  “Let’s go, Jimmy, please.”

  “What will you do for it?”

  “Anything.”

  And she did.

  Disagreements were often settled in this way.

  —

  And so one fine Saturday in February we took the underground to Tower Bridge and walked with our overnight bags to Fenchurch Street railway station. Fenchurch, the Tower, Eastcheap, Elephant and Castle—these names were as much a part of the territory of my childhood as Belsize Park and the Temple belonged to the present.

  “I remember when the whole of the East End went for holidays to Southend-on-Sea,” I told Daisy. “Fenchurch Street station used to be teeming with cockneys, men with suits but no ties, women in long-waisted dresses with huge polka dots, kids like me sharing boiled sweets mouth-to-mouth, all of us hoping to get burned in one day by the sea. My mum always bought me rock candy that said ‘Southend’ whichever way you bit it, and there was a little train that took you out to the end of the longest pier in the world—or so they said.”

  “Sometimes I just don’t get it with you,” Daisy said.

  “Don’t start, darling. Please.”

  We were alone in the railway carriage. I slipped my hand under her sweater and caressed her breasts through the unusually firm bra she was wearing. She made no protest but waited until I withdrew my hand.

  “You can’t get out of it with smooth talk and a grope. I want to know why you’ve betrayed your roots.”

  I fought my instant anger. What right did she have to judge me? What noble feat had she ever performed? She’d graduated with a degree far below her potential and was working as a fill-in teacher in her usual half-baked fashion. She took sick leave so that she could walk over Hampstead Heath, smoke a joint, and drift off into some reality-proof world of her own.

  “You don’t know anything about my roots, Daisy, apart from what I’ve told you. You don’t know what it’s like coming from the wrong side of the tracks.”

  She was standing up and looking out the window. I stood up behind her to put my arms around her waist, careful not to do anything that could be construed as a grope.

  “Wrong side of the tracks? Nineteen seventy-seven, and he’s talking about wrong side of the tracks! The tracks are in your head! After the revolution they’ll send you to work on a pig farm in the Hebrides for ten years until you develop right thinking.”

  “What revolution are we talking about?”

  A pout. “The women’s revolution.”

  “Ah! That one.”

  “Yes, that one.”

  “When everyone’s kind and supportive and nonthreatening and vegetarian, and we all drink Nicaraguan coffee?”

  She jerked her elbow back into my solar plexus, turned around to face me.

  She hit me with the heel of her hand. “You’re so fucking smart—it’s impossible arguing with you. The problem is you don’t believe in any of the stuff I believe in. We’re politically incompatible.”

  “Maybe, but I’d probably work on a pig farm in the Hebrides if I could be with you. After the revolution.”

  “Would you?”

  She picked at something in the fabric of her jeans, then suddenly looked me full in the face. “Am I really dumb, James? Or is it that you have a knack for making me feel that way?”

  “Let’s go to the restaurant car,” I said. “I need a coffee.”

  “You’re only allowed Nicaraguan.”

  I looked out the window of the restaurant car as the train rattled down the old bent track: East India Docks, Bow, Stratford, Barking—places to my mind as ancient, rotten, and somehow eternal as the first suburbs of Rome or Athens. A few stations after Romford, we got out and caught a bus to the little village where Hogg was stayi
ng.

  We were no more than sixty miles out of London, yet I felt the onset of agoraphobia. The people we saw seemed to be stranded in a kind of lobotomized inertia. The bus was empty except for Daisy and me and an old lady, who glared at us. The bus driver called the old lady “love” but turned away sourly when Daisy said goodbye to him with her sweet smile. Why did she need to be liked by a surly bus driver?

  Hogg was waiting at the bus stop. He was wearing a polo shirt under a thick tweed jacket.

  “Just in time for lunch.” He beamed.

  The old square tower of the church was the tallest thing in the village and clearly visible from the bus stop. We walked past expensive new cars and old stone cottages whose juxtaposition reminded me of adverts in Country Life.

  Everyone we passed seemed to be doing exactly what people in the country are supposed to do: a middle-aged housewife was cleaning a beehive, a man in corduroys was building a bonfire, a teenage girl in jodhpurs and riding boots was walking toward a gate across a field. We even saw two women gossiping over a fence.

  I thought that a vicar would know everyone, but nobody spoke to us. Apart from the two women, people did not seem to be speaking to each other, either. There was a lifeless quiet despite the careful attention to chores.

  “They’re mostly weekenders,” Hogg said. “Bankers, stockbrokers, solicitors, and their families, who live in flats and town houses in the city. Most of those houses are empty during the week.”

  He led us into the main church drive and down a small path to the vicarage.

  Which looked, oddly enough, exactly as I had imagined an English country vicarage might look. A neo-Gothic arch of molded stone was the entrance to a cloister-like alcove where you could shake off your Wellingtons. Rooms with high ceilings and bay windows all looked, on one side, up the little hill (tended lawn with cypress and oak) to the square Saxon tower. The church had been added to, bit by bit, so that it was a record of ecclesiastical architecture through the centuries. The latest addition, not attached to the building but still tastelessly close, was a garage for the incumbent’s old Morris.

  The rooms on the other side of the house looked out on a tiny graveyard, where you could weep over little Nell who was laid to rest in 1889, aged five, or wonder at the devastation of a cholera epidemic in 1903 that carried off Jack Hord, aged eighteen, and twelve others in a week.