A Cage To Hold My Dreams
No More The Fool
It has taken a long life and lots of mistakes
and heartaches to get where I am, to reach
this state of half-decency,
but take note, I have arrived, perched like
Harold Lloyd on a narrow ledge
twenty floors up. But I won't fall.
I have finished with falling, finished with
being the fool. I have cleaned up the self,
regained the initiative, and it feels good.
No, my friends, this is better than good.
Because from the day I decided to share
with the world this peculiar talent which
God, being distracted for a moment,
left with me, I seemed
to lose my head. I felt superior to anyone
who couldn't write a book or paint
or compose a decent tune. I sought smart
company, the intelligentsia, the artistic elite,
avant-garde, long-haired,
stubble-faced men in rimless glasses and
slim, brainy women.
I liked the kind of people who made sense
of Stravinsky and Leonard Cohen and
buddhism and the backstreets of sunny
Naples. As for the others, the schmucks,
tramps, wierdos, scroungers, and
looseheads ? I knew what to do. Give them
labels but no food or water, legitimise your
prejudices,
ignore them, insult them, throw the idle
scum in prison, they are dogstuff on the
shoes of the modern day saviour.
Success, when it came, gave me a bigger
nose to look down.
We became a three-car household,
we had a driveway and elm trees, and our
own box number, and a cleaning lady who
drove a Peugeot and
neighbours with gadgets in their garages
which made strange whirring noises late at
night. At dinner parties I acquired
the knack of keeping the conversation
locked onto me, until someone, jealous to
the point of suicide, tore it off me like
sticking plaster.
And I went on television to talk not of third
world debt or the plight of war refugees,
but about myself.
In ten minute bursts, I was as topical as
interest rates and global warming.
The nation recognised my genius, naturally.
There must have been hundreds
of beautiful women slipping their hands
between their thighs as
I spoke, looking at the fat, dull creatures
beside them and wishing they would roll
over dead.
I felt I could write my initials with my fingers
on any woman's skin and it would mark them
for life. Take note, dear friends,
miracles come easily when you're famous.
Everyone worth knowing knew me.
I wrote storylines for The Avengers,
swopped jokes with the silver fox named
Aspel, shared a sugarbowl with Cecile,
kissed the cute red lips
of Rosy Ryan, made Charlie Allnut's widow
laugh her socks off, and sipped beers
with a talented man who wrote and sang
about his blue suede shoes.
On Desert Island Discs for Midlands
Radio I chose Dinicu's Hora Staccato and
'Bye 'Bye Love to show my
musical growth and that I knew that most
people who listened to radio were as
common as ketchup. And I felt sorry for
for them, these dopey Little Englanders with
such narrow vision they could look through
a keyhole with both eyes at the same time,
but who couldn't, or wouldn't, shut up about
their kids' universities and their
four-wheel drives and their blessed loft
conversions and their air miles.
The perfect counterpoint to all this was,
of course, Celia, in whose arms my fight
with the world ended.
She was soft and sweet and hopelessly
concerned about others, the kind of girl
who worried about the lawn having to be
outside on a cold night. If possible she
would have dragged
the wretched thing indoors and tucked it
up in bed. Celia captivated me. I wanted
her to be my nurse, my bath toy,
my Mary Kate Danahar,
my sweet, scented angel of the morning.
It was as if God took my order and told his
chef 'cook that man a feast to end all feasts,
make it hot and delicious,
I like him, he must never experience hunger
or lonliness again.' And so it came to pass
but not immediately.
Celia was in no hurry to fall in love, she kept
me waiting, she tortured and bruised me,
it was death by indecision.
When she wasn't with me, I was like a child
in a playpen, scared and mischevious.
Sometimes I would bite my knuckles
in a cold fury, wanting to rip out everything
but her eyes.
I would spit at the ceiling and it would look
down at me, frowning, disapproving,
tut-tutting me in a prudish, scholarly sort of
way. When she phoned unexpectedly to say
that she was coming over,
I was delirious, laughing my head off at
those poor clowns she had rejected in my
favour who had wanted so badly
to kill me. But there wasn't a thing they
could do to me,
they were finished, obliterated, well and
truly neutered, and I wanted to dance on
their skulls.
Time would lurch through the afternoon,
slowly, without poise, while I waited for
Celia. But that didn't matter. I could afford
to be patient. When we kissed,
long, dreamy, germ-filled kisses without end,
I heard choirs which weren't
there and photographs on the wall talking
to me. Celia gave me the greatest gift of all,
the desire to have no-one else.
The big challenge for me was to keep her
happy, cure her wanderlust, make her love
me till her body cried out for me every night.
If I couldn't do that,
what would be the point of combing my hair
or tying my shoelaces or doing anything.
What would be the point of living ?
It wasn't I, but poor Celia, who died first,
one tiny piece at a time, nothing quick and
easy, but horribly, remorselessly, heart-
rendingly slow. She shrank and disassembled
before my eyes. I saw the one
and only love of my life trickle through my
fingers like rainwater. Pain gnawed at
my heart day and night, tireless, aggressive,
determined to finish me, too, like a beaver
at a tree-stump and it
almost did. I wept a silent river when they
said that nothing more could be done for her.
One night towards the end she said to me,
'when I am gone, darling, please
be happy for both of us, remember who
I was and what we had, but enjoy what is
yet to be yours.
Don't miss any of life's good moments on
my account, for they pass so quickly, and
once something is gone it can never be
recaptured except in dreams.'
And I kissed her gently on the mouth, my
butterfly lips almost afraid to touch the frail,
dying flower she had become,
and only the stars and the mirror in which
I saw my broken face understood the full
measure of my despair.
And here was the irony. The ones who
gathered round me, who tried their best to
comfort me, who said all the right words
were not those I had
lionised in my glory years, but people I had
blindly, stupidly, stubbornly, kept at arm's
length for far too long, people who couldn't
write well or hold a tune, who went fishing
and watched football and got their hands
dirty, but who knew how to love and open
their hearts to a man in hell.
Being clever is no substitute for being
human, I know that now, after a long life
and lots of mistakes and heartaches.
