A Personal History of Thirst Read online

  “Blinking?”

  “Sure. There’s a whole body of learning devoted to blinking. ‘Daisy, what’s going on? Your blink frequency is off the scale, honey.’ ”

  “A little claustrophobic maybe, but surely not—”

  “Let me tell you one thing about my father. He was asked to take charge of a mental hospital in Vermont one semester, thanks to some academic paper he’d published about catatonics. His theory was that it’s mostly a defense mechanism that can be broken. The hospital was full of extreme cases—criminal psychos—and of course catatonics. He saw it as a challenge—how to beat catatonia the American way. So he took six of the milder cases, told them that they weren’t going to get anything to drink until they spoke. Catatonics, as a rule, just don’t talk, right? Then he had them injected with saline solution that contained a massive concentration of salt. They were literally dying of thirst within an hour.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Five of them started screaming for water. The sixth held out until irreversible brain damage. She traded catatonia for a coma. Died within the year. My father saw the experiment as a personal triumph. Course, the five survivors stopped talking again as soon as they drank the water, but Dad used it to score points with the APA—the American Psychological Association. That’s the man who reared me.”

  “Didn’t he get in trouble?”

  “Nah. The whole hospital board was behind him. They hushed it up. Who’s gonna fight for the rights of a dead catatonic anyway? Atrocities happen every day in American nuthouses.”

  “Did he do anything like that to you?” I asked, my blood beginning to boil.

  She held up her left arm to show me a long transparent line of scar tissue about a quarter inch thick on the back of the forearm. I’d mentioned it once, but she’d refused to talk about it.

  “He did that?”

  “No, I did. His favorite punishment was solitary confinement—in the boiler room. I’m not talking hours, but days, sometimes a week. Imposed with maximum cruelty, so that he’d let you out in the sunshine to make you think it was all over, but he was only giving you a taste of what you were missing. An hour later, you were back alone in the dark. One time—I was about thirteen—I realized I was starting to lose my mind. I knew I had to scare him out of it. So I pressed my arm against one of the hot pipes until the skin started to burn. I kept it there until it was a real mess. I knew he’d be scared of any implication of physical brutality. It worked. He never locked me up alone after that, but he had other methods. I was right, though, about nearly going out of my mind. If it hadn’t been for Mom, I’d be a basket case by now. She never judged or punished. She was just there with a lot of healing love.” She smiled. “Like you, Jimmy. I’m sorry if I got in a pissy mood over what happened with Brown. See, you never judged me before, unlike any American man I ever knew. I couldn’t stand it if you started now. That has to be the deal, darling. You want me to go, I’ll go. But if I stay, it’s on a nonjudgmental basis. Agreed?”

  “Sure.” I rubbed my jaw. “But I’m a little out of my depth here. How long does it take a person to get over a childhood like that?”

  She stared at me, blinked, smiled slowly. “Oh, baby, you’re so cute. I know what you believe. You believe there’s a moment in everyone’s life when they finally grow up and everything’s all right with them forevermore. Don’t you? C’mon, admit it.”

  —

  Since there were no serious repercussions, the incident soon faded from view, melted down and purified in the heat of our passion. But to the rest of the world, Daisy was subdued for a while and went out less, even when I was working. Quite often she sat and stared. And of course the supermarket was a constant and unpleasant reminder, especially if Brown was standing near the door, with his legs planted apart, watching us.

  As far as I was concerned, I don’t believe it would have made much difference in the long run if she’d been caught robbing a bank. The fact is that my heart was full of gratitude. Her capacity for love and friendship, if anything softened and increased by the incident, was overwhelming to one who had assumed the environment to be unremittingly hostile. My nerves unraveled in her company, and she gave me what must be the greatest gift a young woman can give to a tormented young man. She taught me that I was neither unlovable nor unsexy, and as a result I became, I trust, a little less of both. I know that it is a desperately unfashionable thing to say, but in return I do not believe I have ever seriously loved another woman.

  Social conditioning is a curious phenomenon. There is a passage from Dickens I would sometimes take out and read when she was not there:

  Cast in so slight and exquisite a mold; so pure and beautiful;…the changing expression of sweetness and good humor, the thousand lights that played about the face and left no shadow there; above all, the smile, the cheerful, happy smile…

  This inner image of Daisy existed in parallel with the knowledge that she was a thief, by some definitions a drug addict, and harbored dreams of patricide. I had a client once, a delightful West Indian lady embezzler in her sixties, of Punjabi extraction, who had been one of the last indentured servants in Jamaica. She told me that the remarkable thing about Christianity in the West Indies in her youth was that the blacks really believed that the whites obeyed the Ten Commandments, despite daily proof to the contrary.

  11

  By the middle of 1976, my undergraduate worldview had crumbled. I had spent a year of hard graft studying in London for my bar exams and then served my required twelve months apprenticeship as a barrister, called “pupillage,” while Daisy had finished her degree. The need for one of us to commute, weekends, between London and Warwick had made not a dent in the intensity of our relationship, but now I found myself plunged into what as students we had referred to as The Future. None of the descriptions of reality provided by Mick, Che, or Bertrand quite prepared one for the gritty taste of the thing itself.

  I had given up my beard, long hair, jeans, sweater, and two thirds of my stoop, cynically discarded a whole identity, in fact, in exchange for a place at the bottom of a long and crowded ladder. A ladder, moreover, that seemed to be planted somewhere near the center of the pit. What my clerk meant when he described my cases as “good quality” was that I was spending more and more of my working day with increasingly vicious criminals. Gradually the incompetent burglars, the clumsy shoplifters, the sad addicts of indecent exposure, gave way to men (they were usually men) who did not care at all if they permanently damaged the bodies or ruined the lives of innocent people. To meet the victim of a violent crime can be a harrowing experience when you are representing the man who did it. No doubt I began to talk about crime, the law, and the police in a way that as a student would have got me lynched.

  My final defection came one night at the beginning of winter when I summoned the courage to walk into El Vino’s Wine Bar in Fleet Street, where the other barristers from my chambers congregated after work. A debate was in progress about the morality of prosecution work.

  “Pure prostitution,” one young idealist said. “What do you think, Knight?”

  I managed to stammer and confess that my attitudes had begun to alter radically. I gave the example of a pretty girl of eighteen whose face had been smashed and sinuses permanently ruined by my brute of a client, whom I had successfully defended because of a technical flaw in the prosecution’s case. I had told a furious judge why he could not allow the case to proceed, but was not particularly proud of the result.

  “Don’t get overinvolved, for God’s sake,” an older barrister advised. “You’ll spend the rest of your career oscillating between loathing the police and loathing the criminal. Just remember, neither of them eat at our mess or belong to our club.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  It was the most seductive phrase anyone had ever spoken to me, and I found that its warmth, like the wine, instantly began to worm its way into my heart. It meant, quite simply, that for those of us in the club, the war was elsewhe
re.

  I took to going to El Vino’s regularly after that. Within a week it seemed that I was an old hand myself, with a regular seat and a certain welcome.

  Like an Islington slum, my gentrification took place almost overnight. Scrub a cockney clean, throw some money at him, change the angle from which he views himself, and you will invariably find a would-be aristocrat all ready to rise at ten-thirty and swagger down the Strand. I exchanged my barber for a hair stylist and my Burton’s suit for something by Yves Saint Laurent, albeit still off the peg. To Daisy’s alarm, I found that I enjoyed French cuffs and bought some gold cuff links with a set of new shirts. As for my breast-pocket silk handkerchief, Daisy fished it out on the first day and claimed, afterward, to have done something obscene with it so that I could never bring myself to wear it again.

  Unlike Daisy, my colleagues approved of my newfound sartorial awareness. Within a month, gibes, camaraderie, and red wine at El Vino’s had become what Daisy called my “male support system.” In revenge, she went to assertiveness training classes and refused to do the dishes.

  Living in one room, there wasn’t a lot to wash. I had bought extra cups and tea plates, which collected on the coffee table during the week until Saturday morning, when we had a division-of-labor day. Daisy devoted some of her raised consciousness to the issue of whether it was more traditionally female to wash than to wipe and decided that it was, with the consequence that she wiped while I washed.

  12

  One night after El Vino’s, I returned to our tiny bed-sit in Belsize Park, to the familiar acrid smell of Daisy’s joint and a dope-inspired smirk.

  “It’s all over, Jimmy. The inquisition’s caught up with you.”

  “What are you talking about, junkie?”

  It was cold outside, and I was numb after the walk from the underground. For once I was glad Daisy kept our little room at a tropical temperature. She liked to smoke her marijuana naked in a semi-lotus position, one heel pressed into her vagina. This was more or less all that remained of her yoga phase, although sometimes she closed her eyes, put her hands on her knees, and chanted a mantra. Her full breasts, only slightly pendulous, pointed at me as I crossed the room toward her. There she sat, an angel smoking a joint.

  Her perfect body made a perfect contrast to the chaos in which she lived. The bed was a mess, open books were strewn over the floor, clothes left wherever she had taken them off. Loathing untidiness, I could never bear to be in the room alone.

  Her flesh felt like hot silk under my frozen hands.

  “Don’t. You’re freezing.”

  She shivered but did not try to stop me. I made goose pimples ruffle the skin of one arm; a nipple puckered under my cold touch. I knelt down so that I could continue to trace her unresisting flesh as far as her thighs. She obliged by moving her heel. I stood up again, started to undress, looked for a spare chair on which to hang my suit—there were none. I laid the jacket carefully on the end of the bed. It was a daily concern of mine, how to live with Daisy and have smart clothes to wear for court.

  “I’ll soon warm up. You know the statutory penalty for risking my career by smoking cannabis at home.”

  “Now?”

  I stood on one foot to take off a sock.

  “Immediately.”

  I took off the other sock.

  “Which way, sir?”

  —

  “That was pretty good. Are you warmer now?” she said later.

  I reached under my left thigh to remove a new feminist paperback. “Part of me is.”

  “Which part?”

  “Not sure, you’d better check.”

  “This part?”

  “Yes, that part’s quite warm.”

  “This part?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Now, what about this part?”

  “Could do with some warming up.”

  “You mean you want some more?”

  “Yes, I believe I do.”

  “Can you, straight away?”

  “I think I can tonight.”

  “My God, you must have been eating oysters at one of those swanky bars in the City.” She yawned. “You can use me if you like, you wicked man; I want to turn around. Hey, by the way….” She reached for a piece of paper, one breast dangling off the bed, the other crushed under her. On the paper she had scribbled “Reverend James Hogg” and a telephone number. I took the paper, tossed it on the floor. She lay dreamily on her side with her back to me, and only grunted when I entered her.

  Eventually I remembered to ask about the Reverend James Hogg.

  “I didn’t quite understand what he was saying—I was stoned. Something to do with Wormwood Scrubs and ring him when you get home, no matter how late.” She mimicked a fey male voice.

  She relit her joint as we lay tangled and naked. I listened to the catch of her breath as she sucked in.

  “Like a puff?”

  She handed it to me. For once I took a long draw. The drug seemed to gather together the soft glow of red wine that lingered from El Vino’s, my satisfaction at the progress of my career, my apparently inexhaustible appetite for Daisy, and postcoital contentment. For a full ten minutes it seemed to me that nothing could ever hurt me again. I expanded to take in the room, the city, the world. Then Daisy’s voice punctured the moment.

  “Are you going to call him?”

  “Who?”

  “Our man from God.”

  “What?”

  “The Reverend James, junkie!”

  “Oh, I forgot.”

  “You’re stoned.” Daisy giggled while I sleepily dragged on a pair of trousers and a sweater to go downstairs to the phone in the freezing hall. The contrast with my contentment of seconds earlier made me irritable. The receiver was cold against my ear. A tense high-pitched voice said something about Oliver Harry Thirst and parole and suggested that we meet somewhere at my convenience as soon as possible, perhaps after work the next day.

  “What’s it about, exactly?”

  “I’d much prefer to explain face-to-face. May I put it like this—that it may be an opportunity to contribute in a slightly different way to the legal process? Do bring your wife.”

  “She’s not my wife, Reverend; we just live together.”

  “Do please call me James,” he said as we hung up.

  When I returned to our room, Daisy was sitting up in bed, wearing a huge dirty white sweater that I found very sexy. Once she’d gone out to post a letter wearing it and nothing else, and I had been angry and very aroused. Ever since then the sweater had served as our equivalent of black stockings and French lingerie.

  “What was it all about?”

  “Oliver Thirst.”

  “Hey! That good-looking crook you take for walks?”

  “If you make that kind of insinuation, I’ll have to demonstrate my virility.”

  “Again?”

  “Afraid so—that sweater drives me crazy. Look!”

  Later, she said, “What did the padre say about Thirst?”

  “He wants me to help rehabilitate him.”

  She raised her head from my chest. “And you will, of course?”

  I tried to press her head back down. “We’re meeting the reverend tomorrow. We’ll see.”

  “We’ll see,” she said into my breastbone.

  13

  The next evening we walked up the hill to Hampstead, to a pub where real ale was sold and the Reverend James Hogg waited. I had come from a conference with an armed robber (he had destroyed the face of a middle-aged man at a petrol station by firing a shotgun at him) and his equally dishonest solicitor; Daisy had come from another unnecessary assertiveness training session with her women’s group.

  She tended to emerge from such meetings with the dangerous eye of a zealot and an unfocused fury in search of a cause. Her moods were not improved by what was, for her, an unusually busy timetable. When not honing her personal assertion skills, she was training to be an English teacher at a further-education college. Ei
ght hours or more per day of focused attention left her either exhausted or hyper, depending on how she had slept the night before. We walked in silence. I was careful to make sure that she led the way.

  He was already there, standing at the bar, and despite the number of people around, I knew him instantly. He looked uncomfortable, but then his was the kind of presence that would have looked uncomfortable anywhere. What one noticed immediately was a powerful physique that filled the Harris tweed jacket and open-necked checkered shirt and ill-fitting denims.

  It was a body built for rugby or wrestling. An impeccable musculature moved effortlessly under his clothes. But out of it emerged a thin neck and a small chinless head. In any other mold this would have amounted to ordinary plainness, but on top of such a body there was the strangeness of incongruity, like a bodybuilder with a withered limb.

  His turtle face was the opposite of his body: weak and inchoate, ready to assume the shape of whatever personality it was close to.

  “Two Jameses,” he offered apologetically when we introduced ourselves.

  “Not as good as two Dicks,” Daisy said, and he blushed. It was the most vicar-like thing he did all evening. We watched him gesture weakly to the barman for drinks.

  The drinks came, two and a half pints of dark beer, the two pints for Daisy and me and the half for himself.

  “I telephoned you last night because—”

  “Because Thirst wants early parole and he’s in some other kind of trouble that would cause problems with the parole board—am I right?” I had worked it out when I woke that morning and remembered the phone call. Now my armed robber had put me in a hostile mood toward villains.

  “Well, yes.” He blushed again. “Oliver did say you would need talking round.”

  “Old Jimmy’s a flogging, hanging, let-’em-rot type these days,” Daisy said. “You should have called three months ago, Reverend, when he was a civil-rights, amnesty-for-all, break-down-the-walls-which-divide-us type. He’s been remarketed. The humble workingman’s cottage that was his soul is now a ‘bijou residence within twenty minutes of the city,’ as your British estate agents like to say.”