Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

13. Sayings of Confucius

It was a chilly night and it began to rain as I left my flat; by the time I got to Earl’s Court Road the streets were shining and vivid with bright reflections. It was a Friday night/Saturday morning and the scene ought to have been a lively one but it wasn’t; everything had a low-spirited look: a few people in twos and threes with long intervals of no people; minimal signs of life at the Star Kebab House and Perry’s Bakery; a man in an apron sweeping out the Global Emporium; the Vegemania dark and silent, sending out waves of no-Serafina; modest traffic at the 24 Hour 7/Eleven; shelves being stacked at Gateway. At the closed tube station a man was leaning against the grille and vomiting. Two men were standing in the middle of the pavement and kissing. I closed my eyes and tried to see the oasis but it was Mr Rinyo-Clacton that I saw instead, his face blotchy and red and his breath bad while the Ravel played itself in my head. Then once more came the rage and the feeling of my hand closing on the heavy desk lamp.

What is the reality of me? I wondered, looking down at the wet pavement and my walking feet. I have moved out of my proper time and space into something else where anything at all can happen. Or maybe I’m not really me; maybe when I sat down in Piccadilly Circus tube station Death crawled up inside me and that’s why it was looking out of my eyeholes in the mirror.

Calm down, I said to myself. This just happens to be a part of reality and a part of you that you haven’t been to before, OK?

As I drew nearer to Katerina’s corner I was full of excitement and anticipation, the way I used to feel when I was going to see Serafina. What’s happening here? I asked myself but got no answer. The Waterstone’s window was devoted to Dr Ernst von Luker and copies of his book on the latest theory of consciousness: Mind — the Gap. Bald, bearded and bespectacled Dr von Luker, staring out of a giant photograph, looked into my poor little mysterious mind and his lips moved. ‘Arsehole,’ he said.

As I went up Katerina’s steps I saw her looking out of the window and she came to the front door to let me in. Her hair was down and she was wearing a blue kimono decorated with little birds on flowering branches. Her scent was light and fresh. Feeling crazed and utterly correct I held out my arms and she came into them and I kissed her. Gone, gone, gone. I closed my eyes and saw a full moon over the sea, white and lonely, felt the pull of the moon that couldn’t be seen this rainy night and the rising and falling of the sea.

‘Plum blossoms,’ she whispered, ‘on a dry tree.’

‘Plum blossoms?’

‘On my kimono. The bird is the uguisu, the Japanese bush-warbler. “Uguisu no, nakuya achimuki, kochira muki”:

An uguisu is singing,

Turning this way,

Turning that way.’

‘You’re not a dry tree,’ I said, ‘you’re some kind of sorceress — the ordinary rules don’t apply to you.’ We were still standing just inside the front door and I was afraid to move, afraid I might disappear at any moment.

She kissed me again and led me into her flat. There was faint music, Ravel of course, the first-time-with-Serafina-trio again. Well, Katerina was a psychic, wasn’t she. I was going to ask her to switch it off when I changed my mind and tried to listen past Mr Rinyo-Clacton for what else was in the music, the voices and the colours of it.

We went through a book-lined hallway into a bedroom full of books. ‘Apart from the front room there’s only this one,’ she said. Other than the shelves, the only pieces of furniture were an old brass bed and a bedside table with an Anglepoise lamp. As well as the books there were several shelves of LPs. The turntable stood on the floor with the amplifier and the speakers. Beyond the circle of lamplight the room was shadowy like the music.

Katerina’s recording was a Deutsche Grammophon LP; the artists weren’t the ones who’d performed on the CD that Mr Rinyo-Clacton and I both owned; this lot had had no part in his synchronised buggery. The strings and the piano seemed to be engaged in a meandering colloquy in which sometimes reason and sometimes emotion prevailed; the mood overall was one of melancholy.

In the second movement, designated Pantoum (I’d looked it up once: it was the name of a kind of Malayan verse quatrain) the musical protagonist seemed to be trying to break free of something. Pantoum, I said to myself, Pantoum, liking the strange sound and the mystery of the word.

Katerina kept her kimono on when she got into bed; her shapely feet looked younger than her years. I undressed, removed the envelope from my leg, slid in beside her, and took her in my arms. A woman of seventy-something, for God’s sake! I thought I’d do no more than hold her but our kissing had moved on to something more serious than before and the music now seemed especially of this strange moment in which the ordinary rules were suspended. I didn’t have a condom.

‘It’s all right without,’ she said softly. ‘I know you’ve been with him again but this is how I want you. I’m not going to catch anything from you.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m psychic, remember?’

‘Strange woman, magic woman.’

‘Remember that when you wake up in the morning and find yourself lying beside a bundle of ancient papyrus.’ She switched off the Angle-poise and there were only the faint light from the hall and the little red beacon of the amplifier and the music.

Afterwards she said, “Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit / Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit” Only fullness leads to clarity / And in the abyss dwells the truth.’

‘Is that Schiller?’

‘Yes, “Sayings of Confucius”.’

‘What makes you quote those lines now?’

‘I don’t know — you mustn’t expect me to be rational all the time. One does something and perhaps has no idea what it was that was done. Then much later there comes suddenly the understanding — Aha! So that’s what it was. This that just happened with us, maybe we think it was only with the two of us here and now but nothing is separate from anything else: not people, not places, not times. The present is the fin you see cutting the water, and under it swims the shark that is the past and the future.’ She gripped my hand. ‘Jonathan, I know that you are in some kind of a life-and-death thing. Will you tell me what it is?’

I told her and the pillow rustled as she shook her head. ‘Mr Rinyo-Clacton was right,’ she said. ‘That was Death looking out of your eyes when he saw you in the tube station. It’s very strong in you now. Don’t you want to live?’

‘Sometimes I think yes and sometimes I think no. Sometimes I feel as if Samarra is everywhere and Death is looking at his watch and waiting for me.’

‘For you Death is a man.’

‘Definitely.’

‘What if you were to tell Mr Rinyo-Clacton you’ve changed your mind and you give back the money?’

‘Surely a modern no-bullshit psychic and clairvoyant can guess the answer to that one, Katerina?’

‘I know — he’s full of death also. You must understand when we talk about this: I can feel some of the big things but I don’t always get details. And even with the big things I’m not always clear; there are often cross-currents and contradictions in what comes to me.’

‘Well, one of the details is that even if I return the money he’s still going to require my death in one year.’

‘Do you think he’ll honour the agreement and give you the full year?’

‘I’m not at all sure he can be trusted.’

‘Oh God, what a thing you have got yourself into, Jonathan.’

‘Maybe in some way I needed to make this happen.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know — I can’t always join up the dots but I feel that if I’d been more of a man, if I’d liked myself better and liked women better, I wouldn’t have needed to get so many of them into bed; I’d have been too full of Serafina and what she was to me and things wouldn’t be as they are now.’

‘You’ve just been unfaithful to her again with this old woman lying next to you.’

‘This is different — she’s left me and she’s probably sleeping with someone else this very moment.’ I said that but I didn’t believe it.

‘Have you got anything he’s touched, this Rinyo-Clacton?’

‘Here I am — I’m something he’s touched.’

‘You’re too full of you; I need something with no output of its own.’

I took the envelope from the bedside table and put the banknotes in her hand. ‘This money,’ I said, ‘although it was sealed in plastic when he touched it.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She held it in both hands, pressed it to her chest, and shut her eyes. Then her face changed — her lips drew back from her teeth in a long shuddering breath; she looked suddenly ancient and sibylline and altogether frightening. For the first time it came to me that I might be involved in something beyond my understanding.

‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s happening?’

Still with her eyes closed, she shook her head and put her finger to her lips for silence. After a time she opened her eyes and said, ‘It’s not good, too many words — the energy of the mind goes like water down the plughole. Some things I see again and again, years apart, and each time it means something else and I must think about it.’ With the index finger and thumb of her left hand she massaged her temples as if she had a headache. I listened to the ticking of her little bedside clock and waited for her to speak. After a few minutes she said, ‘One thing I tell you, though: there’s fear in him.’

‘Fear in him!’

‘Yes, in him.’

‘Fear of what?’

‘I don’t know. Could he be afraid of you?’

‘Of me!’

‘Sometimes you know what someone is to you but you don’t know what you are to them. The fear is definitely there.’

She gave me back the money. ‘Anyhow, he probably doesn’t come after you already tonight so maybe we can get a little sleep.’

‘It just occurred to me — would a photograph of him give you anything?’ As I said that I thought, what, is she your minder now? What a hero.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it only gets in the way. When the time is right, maybe his face comes to me.’

The lovemaking and the talk had drained some of the disquiet out of me; I kissed Katerina and fell asleep and dreamed that I was approaching the oasis with Mr Rinyo-Clacton.

I woke up when I felt Katerina’s absence. Hearing watery noises from the bathroom and expecting a few more minutes alone I found a scrap of paper in my pocket and wrote a note which I slipped under the pillow with fifty fifty-pound notes:

Dear Katerina,

This money is for a digital piano. You can play it late at night with headphones so no one can hear it and they won’t bang on the door. Don’t give me an argument about this.

Love,

Jonathan

When Katerina made her next appearance she still looked troubled. We kissed and hugged and said nothing more than ‘Good morning.’

I smelled bacon and eggs and coffee when I came out of the shower. Grapefruit juice, too, I saw when I went into the kitchen. ‘Do you ordinarily have bacon and eggs for breakfast?’ I said.

‘No, but I’m a no-bullshit modern psychic and clairvoyant, remember? I think this is what you like when you have time for it, yes?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and thought of Serafina.

On the way out I went into the front room for another look at Melencolia. It was really very hard to tell whether she was smiling or scowling. Had some winged male abandoned her and the sulking child and left all his tools behind? Or had she thrown him out?

When I left, Katerina hadn’t yet made the bed so I didn’t think she’d seen the money and the note. I imagined her lifting the pillow and smiled to myself.

The morning was bright and cold. Considering that I had only a year to live I felt pretty lively. Crazy but lively. I noticed that I was singing to myself, to the tune of a Haydn symphony the number of which had slipped my mind:

Nur die FülleführtzurKlarheit,

Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit.

About the money I gave Katerina — to be honest I have to say that it wasn’t only that I wanted her to have a piano; I needed to break the lump of that million pounds to convince myself that there was no turning back. Weird, yes? I’ve already said I was feeling crazy.