HE WALKS AS HE WAKES:ALONE.


I think I can assert without fear of contradiction that, to speak in the vernacular, the name “Dudley” has had its day. That said nomenclature has an aspect of more than merely faded glory, is an atavism, a relic. Unpopular perhaps even reviled.

It is, for instance, an easily verifiable statistical FACT that since 1953 no children born in what we may now, more justifiably than ever, given the rectitude of this situation, call the Civilized World, have been so named.

Naturally YOU will not believe me or value my extensive research, imagining you have found a hint of prejudice rather than either prudence or preference in my prior proposals. Oh Yes! I know the modern mind, its desire to undermine TRUTH and FACT and its suicidal willingness to unpick, finger by finger, our grip upon these ideas, upon this, if you’ll pardon my conceit, philosophic ledge from which we hang suspended, the inky black and bottomless pit of relativism gaping sickeningly beneath us.

Break the world down! Deconstruct! Seek perspectives that contradict the already weak and half-hearted apologetically perspectival assertion that some palsied coward has allowed himself, full though he is of guilty trembling, to make. Tunnel through higher or lower strata of assessment in an attempt to supersede or undermine the issue! Grub about endlessly in the murky netherworld of your own subconscious or plummet, a pale and directionless speck, through a groundless, abstract Universe!

Anything but believe and assert, act or affirm.

JUST ONE DUDLEY IN THE PUB DOWN THE ROAD! ONE FRIEND OF A FRIEND WHO CORRESPONDS WITH A 17 YEAR OLD DUDLEY IN HANOVER WHOSE HOBBIES ARE SKATING AND PHILATELY! Just one such discovery and you may rub your doubter’s hands in glee as the whole edifice comes crashing down.

Search away. I’m telling you, its-a-fucking-FACT!

But I digress.

What is it about the name Dudley that makes the flesh creep so, as if the very hand of death were resting a gentle, admonitory finger upon our tender napes, when we are scarcely likely to meet a Dudley nor consequently form from experience some truly accurate notion of what such a name signifies? Perhaps the name conjures horror because of its very lack of contemporaneity. It catapults us back to some time when the enlightenments of our present technological age were in their infancy. It draws us back to, not an age of barbarism, but an age without Video and Multiplexes and Malls, without drugs or coolness or youth. A brilliantined, ration-booked world of adults, austerity and work.

Ahhh! How we feel the tragedy and poignancy of a past that suffered pitiably on without the improvements and accoutrements that make our lives so profoundly the better and more NOW. We pity the past but are disgusted by it. We
pity the past like we pity a tramp or a cripple.

But I digress.

In essence it, Dudley, is unfashionable and there can be nothing that offends us more. I use the term unfashionable in its commonly understood sense though in this context the word must be imbued with an additional gravity. We must say that it is deeply, nay, subterraneously unfashionable. If what is transcendental about, indeed the very essence of, contemporary fashion is instantaneous irrelevance coupled with a capacity at any given time to be reclaimed and lionised then perhaps even ‘deeply’ unfashionable does not adequately describe the status that ”Dudley” holds.

It is perhaps either sub or supra fashionable. I assure you that as the hand of kitsch picks its way through Late Capitalism’s various rummage bins it will never flick its winsome fingers over Dudley and pause with a smirk to consider how amusing it may be to salvage this grubby antiquity. Oh no! Even Horace or Douglas may again have their day, but Dudley? Never!

Dudley Moore cannot, of course, escape our scrutiny though doubtless both he and I wish it were otherwise. To scrutinise Dudley More is to gaze into The Pit. The ruin of
his face, the charnel fetor of his breath. A cocoon of shredded flesh congealed around the eggy, flatulent wisp he calls his soul. His dearth of talent. Truly man and name live in horrid symbiosis, the spiritual and physical ugliness of one reflected in the telling appropriateness of
the other. I have never met him but can well imagine the sibilant hiss of his laboured breathing, the weak and rheumy apologies for eyes. This last, solitary Dudley, name-bearer of a long chain of the outcast and despised.

What infernal impulse could have prompted his parents to so hobble their child with this name and send him wincing and flinching through life subjected to the righteous and proper anger of more wholesome men?

But then the eternal quandary looms vis-à-vis CHICKEN/EGG. Did they choose the name or did some unclean spirit, some nefarious other agency recognize one of its own and move through them? Did the name choose the boy? Hovering hawk-like, waiting to swoop upon its victim?

Who can speak with authority about such things?

They may, I fear, forever be mysteries.

Imagine how his flightless, insectile heart must scuttle after the possibility that there is another so named out there somewhere whom the scrupulous recording and collating efforts of the Draconian bureaucracy that sustains our Free World has missed. How he must hanker after one who has suffered as he has, a shoulder to cry on, a living mirror in whom he can see his own scars and bruises reproduced.

An impossible dream, for as I have made absolutely plain, THERE ARE AND SHALL BE NO MORE! As likely to find a Tasmanian serving behind your local Bar or a Dodo roosting in the shade of that apple tree of fond boyhood memory which, on every visit to your ailing parent’s home brings back tingling memories of Uncle Bert’s rough hands, the calloused palm, the thick, intrusive fingers.

But I digress.

Can it be any accident that the shortened version of Dudley is Dud and that this word has come to mean and I quote from the Dictionary here.......

DUD(informal) ~n 1) A person or thing that proves ineffectual or a failure.

He’s a dud, its a dud etc. May I suggest that we convert the noun into an adjective and, rather as love begat lovely, dud shall beget dudley!

If a lamp is useless or fails pathetically to conform to those standards by which a proper lamp is assessed may we not say it is dudley?

A late summer sunset sequestered in the grape arbour savouring the piquancy of young boyhood’s musky vitality as it rolls off the five strong youths sweating in their horseplay just feet away from your furtive, quivering nostrils is a delight. A pile of dogshit is dudley.

Staying at a friends house and sleeping in the warm, redolent bed of the teenage son who is away for the weekend produces a healthy, vigorous pleasure. Pushing your hand, on the first night, under his one thin pillow only to discover a soiled and viscid tissue is now adhering to ones fingers is, however, dudley.

Pain is dudley. Death is dudley. Dudley is, of course, dudley.

But not for long!

SOUVENIRS

When I was at University, quite a few years ago now, a couple that I knew well committed suicide.

They were found by a close friend of mine with whom they shared a house. He came back from late one Saturday night and discovered them sitting opposite each other in a bathtub full of warm, red water.

Romantically they had scattered a handful of rose petals into their watery domestic grave and a few pink and pearl flakes clung to their chests, arms and faces while the rest clustered around the four floating incense candles that bobbed gently in the space between their bodies, lighting them from below and sending thick, fragrant coils of smoke up to the bare white ceiling above.

The four tallow candles that had been stuck to each corner of the tub were dying down and were an inch or so above extinction. In the white plaster soap dish my friend had grouted clumsily among the neat rows of sky blue tiles six months earlier lay the razor blade with which they had opened up each other’s wrists, a tiny star of pure, white light dancing imperviously along its keen edge in time with the candles' guttering.

The soap-dish itself was latticed with thin strips of the blood that tinted the bathwater, a little of which, spilling from one of them as they replaced the razor, had smeared the tiles beneath it and spattered the white enamel on one side of the tub.

My friend said he knew instantly that they were dead, even before his eyes had taken in the whole scene. From the doorway, as he entered out of the relative brightness of the landing he saw, in a sudden flare of light among the shadows that were being thrown violently across the floor and the walls, the pale, drained face of his best friend Simon.

His head was caught between the dull chrome gleam of the taps, his shoulders rounded and relaxed, arms hung down by his side and hands floating palm up, the fingers gently curled. All that was visible of Helen was the back of her head as it lolled against the right corner of the bathtub and her long jet-black hair which draped over the edge and pooled on the grey-white floor tiles below. The angle of her head allowed him to see a pale semi circle of brow and the hairline into which small spherules of candle wax had dripped and set like a garland of white berries.

My friend, Alan, was understandably shocked. Not only because of the sudden spectacle of two of his closest friends dead in the bathtub, though that was horrific enough, but also because, and people often say this about suicides, there had been no indication in either of their manners or moods that they might have engaged in such a pact. No broken hearts or bitter disappointments, no pre-emptive traumas. Quite the opposite in fact.

They were in love and their relationship was the envy of most of the people I knew, though because they were so self-contained many found them aloof and unapproachable. Because they were happy they became a little unpopular, and because they had no need to confide in anyone they were considered distant. People were jealous of their hermetic world and, reluctant perhaps to admit to any longing for something similar in themselves, occasionally belittled them.

I felt, I believe, that jealousy more keenly than most because of recent disappointments in my own life that had led me to conclude I would never find an equivalent security. Also, I had never had a women so beautiful as Helen and felt, I suppose, that I was entitled to one.

Alan had drunk and smoked a good deal and upon finding them was plunged into an incomprehension that brought on half an hour or so of frantic, irresolute activity. He told me later that he ran repeatedly downstairs to phone the police and then back up again just to confirm what he’d seen and to persuade himself that he wasn’t about to make some stupid mistake. Every time he stood on the threshold of the bathroom he was convinced of what he saw and each time he returned to the living room doubt crept over him and made him pause.

It was an odd situation for him, knowing implacably that they were dead but requiring confirmation somehow. Instead of the police he phoned me.

In the early hours of that cold winter morning my phone started to ring. Normally I would have ignored it but this time I got up. I was drunk and generally annoyed, not by the lateness of the phone call but by a certain inconsistency in my evening. I had gone to the pub with one of my groups of friends and had expected to see there, behind the bar as always, a girl that I and a few other people I knew were lusting after. On that evening however she simply wasn’t there and even though I lacked the confidence to make any overtures to her and our interaction was limited to the familiar pleasantries of a barmaid and a customer my evening suddenly became sour and hollow. Finding it impossible to hide my mood I started, as I became more drunk and less self controlled, to argue with my friends and to snap unnecessarily at the normal teasing and sarcasm that constitutes a boys night out.

Eventually I had a tantrum and left, walking on my own through the grim little snow covered streets with my face pushed down into the collar of my coat and my eyes watering, back to my cold flat while the rest of them went off to some club and later to some promised party. When the phone rang I presumed it was one of them calling to try and persuade me to come along to the house they were currently getting drunk in.

It wasn’t my friends though, it was Alan, stoned and whimpering on the other end of the line. I had great difficulty understanding what he was trying to say as I stood there in my white toweling dressing gown, swaying a little drunkenly in the semi-darkness of the living room. I kept telling him to put his mouth closer to the phone. It sounded to me as though he were talking from the other side of the world when in fact he lived just around the corner.

All I could understand was that he wanted me to call round now and see Helen and Jason.

I said that I would and I had two motives for going. Firstly I liked the idea that my friends, full of remorse, might come knocking on my door and discover that I was elsewhere, a rebuff without the prospect of a confrontation suits my disposition, and secondly because I was obsessed with Helen and flattered myself that to a degree she returned my interest.

Up in the bathroom I prepared myself for our meeting. I dressed again in the clothes I had worn for my night out and which I’d discarded on the damp floor. I cleaned my teeth and brushed my hair even though I was venturing out, hatless, into a snowstorm. I sprayed deodorant under my arms and squeezed a little floret of sebum out of a black head on my nose.

As I walked round there I composed myself and rehearsed replies and lines I hoped might impress everyone. I had been waiting patiently for her, over the year or so she’d glided through the periphery of my life to grow bored of Simon, to leave him and to look around for somebody new. All the relationships I’d had in that time were overshadowed by my desire to be with her and I was full of fantasies and reckless plans about how I might come between the two of them.

I cannot help but feel, in retrospect, that it was the impossibility of this idea that sustained my fantasy and made it richer. Being in her presence was an exiting prospect and as I arrived my heart was pounding out of all proportion with the effort required to walk halfway up the gentle hill their house stood on.

I knocked firmly on the door and steeled myself for the prospect of Helen answering it, determined to be calm and easy. Instead it was Alan who answered and who stood, eyes raw with crying, shivering in the doorway.

"Dead," he said to me, with an inflection I can find no word to describe as we stood in the glare of the living room.

He looked down at the carpet, a plain brown carpet peppered with butts from a spilled ashtray.

"I think so, anyway." He sniffed and looked at me for a second and pulled a strange, pained face.

At first I didn’t realize what he meant and I started to ask - who? and then I thought I knew.

"Helen?" I asked him.

"And Simon," he told me. A great sob burst out of him as he said the name and he reigned it back in quickly with a strangled whine, raised his eyes to the ceiling and clenched his hands. A long strand of off-white snot had whipped round from his nose and was plastered along one cheek. After a moment or two he became aware of it and wiped it away with his sleeve.

"Helen," I said again. "An accident?"

He neither moved nor answered for what seemed like a long time and then he sat down in the armchair opposite me, pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and made no further attempt to smoke it. Eventually he said in a voice that had an impatient, dismissive edge. "Upstairs. The bathroom."

I stood and waited for more but he didn’t look at me again and he didn’t speak.

The silence between us lengthened and became uncomfortable. I couldn’t escape a feeling of incredulity. I was sure that I was the object of some practical joke, or that Alan had been. A sudden brusque and matter-of-fact attitude took hold of me, a desire to discover just exactly what was happening. I left the living room and climbed the short staircase up to the second floor, walked along the landing for a few yards and went into the bathroom.

The candles had gone out now but I could see by the light that glanced in from the hallway a few pale disconnected planes against the far wall, which, as my eye adapted to the darkness, resolved themselves into two naked bodies lying on and around each other in the bathtub.

After a moment's deliberation I reached across toward the doorway and switched on the light.

The shade was a globe of Aquamarine material stretched over a wire frame and it lent the predominantly white surfaces a cold blue tinge and made the water in the tub look blacker. I stood and gazed at them for a long time and then I took a few steps forward so I could see Helen's body better. The peculiarity of seeing them both like this, naked, was so great that it dissipated all the shock and dread I had initially felt. I giggled and then put my hand over my mouth. All the time I was looking at Helen I glanced at Simon too out of some fear that he might suddenly open his eyes and discover that I was staring at her. I didn’t look at him solely for that reason but also because I was interested in knowing how large his penis was.

His arms were floating upward in the water and I could see two long vertical slits along the undersides of his wrists, no more dramatic than two black lines drawn in ink and interrupted here and there by little flecks and crumbs of pink tissue. A rose petal clung, completely static, below his right nostril.

Mostly my attention was absorbed by Helen. I had longed to see her naked and had imagined what she would look like many times. She was lying on top of Alan and her slightly separated legs ran the length of his body and disappeared up under his armpits so that her feet were not visible. Irrespective of them, I could see every inch of her.

I reached out a hand and rubbed the knuckle of my middle finger across her lips and then quickly drew it back again. As I stood there gazing at her I became aroused and began to speculate about their reasons. They had not been personally unhappy as far as anyone knew and I could only conclude, knowing what I did about them, that this act they’d performed hadn’t been done out of desperation. It had a ritualistic and an aesthetic quality about it. As the idea occurred to me, that in some ways it had been celebratory I found it more erotic but it also incited my jealousy further and the two emotions fed on each other.

This final culmination of their love. This canceling out of every thing except each other. Running the blade tenderly along each others wrists, pressed together naked in the hot water, exchanging a last deep kiss and sitting back in the candle glow to watch each other die. Looking into their lover's face and seeing their own image slowly fading, pale and trembling in the iris of the other's eyes. The light dimming down, the pulses slowing, a soft, dark veil falling between them.

I rolled up my sleeves quickly, plunged my arms into the water and leaning over and grappling my fingers together behind the small of her narrow back I tried to lift her out of the bath tub.

She came up a foot or so toward me and then my hand slipped and she fell back again with a great sluicing of water. Below me I heard Alan stand up, walk out of the living room and call up from the foot of the stairs, asking if everything was O.K.

"Fine!" I shouted, hunched over and soaked with my arms locked round her again, her face pressed close to mine and my hot breath melting the water drops that had frozen on it.

"Don’t move anything," he shouted and I heard the pressure of his foot creak the first step in the flight. I cursed him bitterly in my mind for stealing these last moments of possibility from me. As he was halfway up the stairs the doorbell rang.

"Get rid of them," I yelled down hoarsely in a half-whisper. Outside I could hear the shouts and the drunken laughter of the friends I had deserted earlier.

I tried to lift her again and again I was obliged to drop her because her feet were wedged under Simon's armpits. I grabbed her ankles and pushed them down trying to free her feet but with every downward push Simon's unsupported weight moved down with them and there was no way to get them out.

"Bastard." I hissed at him. I took a step back and let out a sob as my eyes prickled with frustration. There was nothing else I could do or at least no time left to do it in. I stood breathing heavily between my teeth, looking at them locked together. Helen's hair had fallen forward over her face now and long black tresses of it rolled and tangled in the gentle swell of the bathwater. I pulled the hair tenderly back and let it drop over the edge of the bath where it set up a gentle, methodical dripping against the floor like the ticking away of seconds on a clock.

Outside the snow had stopped and I heard the last of my friends calling one of their more insistent party away from the door. Their voices echoed out through the empty streets telling Billy - hurry up - come on- growing more distant as Billy, drunk and belligerent, hassled Alan on the door step about the party he’d promised them.

Go on Billy, go now or you’ll get left behind I thought as I sat down on the edge of the bath and put my arm into the water that was coloured by their mingled blood so I could fish her warm, wet hand out and hold it until Alan came upstairs.

Later, on the pretext of looking for a suicide note I stole a handful of her underwear from the laundry basket in their room.

Personally, I was disappointed when the Cold War ended.

The Arms Race, Escalating Nuclear Tension, Def-Cons 1-4. All those kind of things were a comfort to me. I really thought that the world was going to end and that I’d live to see it. I hadn’t been around when everything started all-those-however-many million years ago and the fact that I’d be around to see it all disappear seemed like a privilege of sorts. I liked the idea that I was born into a time when time got stopped.

It was exciting, frankly, and it made you kind of fatalistic and vigilant because AT ANY MOMENT there could be a flash in the sky and the buildings would atomize and a colossal wall of thermonuclear heat would sweep out on all sides evaporating the seas and melting mountains down into lakes of dusty glass. Also, it gave you the opportunity to be heroic. I could well imagine the rising wail of the klaxon piercing the school playground and the monumental panic that would ensue as I bravely fought my way home through the wailing masses to be with my family.

I was only ten years old, but the prospect of Armageddon makes you precocious. I was too young to have any kind of seize-the-day, party spirit, I was just very serious about it in my day-dreamy, childlike way, pretty much awestruck and in some way oddly grateful. I’m still not sure whether I’ve adjusted to the fact that the world’s going to drag on indefinitely.

You had to die, I knew that, and here was a way that seemed appropriate. I mean your life is everything to YOU and when you die then for you at least THE WORLD ENDS whereas for everybody else nothing much changes. The Earth keeps turning on its axis, people get up and go to work and worry about the bills, clouds move across the sky, dog shit accumulates in the street and gets washed away by the rain. It’s nothing too significant.

Now, I don’t know how much it suited my temperament or how much it shaped it but there seemed to be something great about the Mutually Assured Destruction that had kept two halves of the globe locked into a tentative balance from long before I was born and which might at any second fall apart. There was no question of IF, in my mind it was only WHEN, and that meant that I was never going to be an adult, that the world existed and was huge, crazy and incomprehensible and would end for huge, crazy and incomprehensible reasons. The fact that I wasn’t going to be around to see much of it gave me an epic sense of tragedy, and anyway, I didn’t want to get old and bald and fat and flatulent and be responsible and employed. Not when I could have my molecules smashed out across the Galaxy by waves of blinding, Biblical heat.

That's the only way to go.

Spectacularly.

Imagine the sense of anticlimax that I live with.