toppreviousnextbottom
back to top

<p style="margin-left: 0.5cm"><a href="../index.html"><img src="butterflyopen.gif" border=0><br><img src="samnamesmall.gif" border=0></a></p><p style="margin-left: 0.7cm"><font face="Arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size=2 color="#ff6600"><A HREF="../publications.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Publications</a><br><A HREF="../fictions.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Fictions</A><BR><A HREF="../poetry.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Poetry</A><BR><A HREF="../essays.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Essays</A><BR><A HREF="../calligrammes.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Calligrammes</A><BR><A HREF="../bilingue.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Ecrits bilingues</A><BR><A HREF="../info.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Information</A><BR><A HREF="../notebook.html" class="menu">&nbsp;Notebook</A><BR><A HREF="../links.html" CLASS="menu">&nbsp;Links/contacts</A><BR><font color=white><B>&nbsp;The Quean</B></font><br><br> <img src="coinmid.gif"></font></p>

stanzas diary synopsis and guide

  
only part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently availableonly part 1(a) is currently available

The Trainor Diary: Feb 7 to Feb 12

Saturday, February 7

“Leon couldn’t have been more wrong. She just told Amrit the man was a very close friend of his dad’s from the buses who’d come over during the expulsions. She said the man had lost contact with his family in the move (they had Ugandan citizenship) & had killed himself when they didn’t follow on because he was very unhappy in England without them. During his final depression, she said, Leon had promised to name any children he had after the man’s estranged family. It wasn’t till two years after Sanjit’s death that she met his father. Carla was quite insistent on that point... It was actually the other way round, of course.”

I glanced around for sugar as she spoke. There wasn’t any.

“Eventually, one of Amrit’s aunts told him what had really happened. It was a couple of years after Carla had left Sanjit in Uganda at the height of the civil war that she met Leon. He could never be sure, but Amrit always said he thought his mother & Sanjit had been very much in love & Carla, when she found out she was pregnant, had tried to get them both out of the country at the same time, via the British Embassy. But for some reason they got separated — maybe he had other things to deal with, maybe he really did have another family — whatever the case, she left without him, hoping he would follow on. He never did. After the expulsions, she spent weeks searching vainly for him in the relocation camps.”

“I suppose it goes to show you should always tell your children everything.”

“You obviously don’t have children, Sam. You couldn’t be more wrong. You’ve got to lie to them sometimes; there’s no way of bringing them up otherwise. She probably thought she was doing the right thing. It’s strange: you get into the habit of not quite saying everything you could & then... anyway, the point is that you need to know where to draw the line... when to stop...”

“& she didn’t.”

“Obviously not. It wasn’t until he was a young adult that he started using his given name. The incredible thing was that Carla had never known what Sanjit’s family-name was. It was hardly surprising that she couldn’t find him in 1972. All she knew was... ‘Sanjit Singh’, so that’s all that was entered on the register.”

“It must have been a pretty short affair... if she didn’t know his name.”

“I suppose so, but I bet it was exciting.”

I tried to work out whether this was meant to be flirtatious. Hannah was looking just to the right of me as if I were slightly blocking her view of something she’d misplaced. She seemed more reminiscent than keen, I had to say... unfortunately.

“All that ducking & diving,” I offered, “secret assignations in the middle of a crisis.” Obviously the thought had occurred to me that this was still something of a crisis for Hannah: even this long after Singh had left. In the circumstances I might convince her it could be quite exciting to get up to a bit of ducking & diving of our own.

Sunday, February 8

She ignored me & took a sip of coffee: “By the time he had enough evidence to challenge her with it, Amrit had left home & Carla simply refused point blank even to have the subject broached around her. She would usually say ‘Marty, it took me a long time to get over your father’s death & I don’t want to dredge it all up again now.’ if he attempted to suggest, perhaps, that his real father wasn’t dead, she’d just silently busy herself with something else or walk straight out of the room. He stopped going to see her in the end.”

“I suppose you would.”

Hannah didn’t say anything. I tried the coffee. It tasted just the way it looked: like diluted bitumen. I decided I would have to bring her up to date as soon as possible. We were getting bogged down in the past: “So you think, when he found out he was to be a dad himself, he might have decided to track down his own father maybe, & tell the old man he was to become a grandad? Maybe we should think about Uganda as a place to look.”

I was thinking of that exciting affair against an exotic Ugandan backdrop — something like The English Patient meets Gorillas in the Mist.

Hannah turned her head very slightly from side to side through the vapour rising from her mug: too slow & deliberate to call it ‘shaking’. There was emotion in her expression, but of what sort I couldn’t really tell: “But he didn’t, did he? He stayed & he worked on his PhD. Amrit had long since sunk all his life & thoughts into that thing. If he was looking for his father, it wasn’t the real man, Sanjit Singh, but the idea of a missing fatherhood, a missing history that wandered the streets of the city like the tramps he followed into bushes in parks, up alleys behind the shops, down dank canal tunnels &... I shudder to think where else.”

She actually did shudder. It was very sexy.

“If only he’d just asked me for help, or at least tried to find what he was looking for in the world of flesh & blood instead of chasing it around like a bit of scrap paper blown by the wind through the screwed-up streets of a screwed-up fucking paper city.”

She looked like she might begin to cry, then chuckled at her own spontaneous melodrama.

“So I guess that’s why you need me, doll,” I chimed in, doing an awful Bogart, “if you wanna find a man lost in a screwed-up paper city, you need a screwed-up paper kinda Private Dick who thinks he knows his way around.”

She grinned... rather desperately it has to be admitted. This would have been a good moment for the kid to start blarting. He didn’t, but Hannah did: only one or two tears, & she didn’t cover her face or let it twitch. This was the second time she’d done this to me. Our conversations seemed to be developing a pattern. The cloudy drops clung to her chin as she continued to smile, like rain on an unpainted garden gnome. I couldn’t decide whether this was a good sign or not: her willingness — half willingness at least — to show me her emotions. I tried to touch her fingers. They were laced around the yellow coffee cup. She pulled her hands away slightly, the mug inside them, very subtly, so as not to offend.

Monday, February 9

“Sorry,” she said “bit tired. I’d better go & get him out of there now anyway. If I let him sleep all day he’ll only keep me up again. Then you can get cracking.”

The boy was older than I’d expected. Bigger than a toddler: 2 or 3. Not the kind of child you’d expect to keep his mother up at night much any more. He was slumped forward like an old drunk in his pushchair. Loose brown curls, almost indistinguishable from his mother’s, were stuck to his forehead. His lips glistened luridly. His bare legs were smooth & buttery, the knees beginning to lose that chubby expression of the crawler. He pulled a gargoylish face as his mother began to tickle his nose with her dry lips.

I decided to avoid any awkward introductions & sidled off into the study straight away. Children of that age invariably run screaming when they see me, or else accuse me of being their dada. Besides, I secretly suspected my namesake would be able to see right through me; he would know instinctively that I wanted nothing more than to be able to wake his mommy up tomorrow morning the way she’d just done to him today. Hannah let me go, suspecting something similar. I shut the door behind me.

For the rest of that week, I spent my daylight hours hiding in that little room, going through Amrit’s papers. If I’m honest, it was more as a way of killing time whilst trying to get Hannah on her own than out of any real interest in the work. I soon realised she didn’t need to socialise with me though & only really wanted to talk when I had something to report. So I got on with the work. She offered me lunch that first day, & I declined, wanting to avoid the child. From then on, I would turn up in the morning after breakfast & bring a packed lunch with me, & I’d go home around 5 before they ate their tea. No-one else came round.

The room was unusually bright & cheerful. It was difficult to fathom how anyone could hide in there. It was almost entirely taken up with a large south facing bay window that looked out onto a strip of overrun garden with a laurel bush enveloping the fence at the end. It did, however, have a heavy set of velvet curtains you could close, but which, for some reason, I never dared to touch. There was a slight smell of damp & old books... most of which were arranged in rather useless vertical stacks on either side of the door. Besides that, there was nothing much else except for a swivel chair & an old desk that had been given a few too many coats of beeswax over the years so that any wood still left exposed amongst the valleys of a small mountain range of A4 paper was slightly tacky to the touch.

Notwithstanding the volume of stuff, the task turned out not to be as daunting as it seemed at first. An awful lot of the bulk was provided by multiple printouts of the same files with very minor variations: updates & edits. I spent an hour or so on the first Sunday trying to work out in what order one of the most common files (called ‘Unfencing Theory’) had been produced, but realised this was a futile exercise. I should focus on the content, I decided. I simply collected together the versions of each document that contained the most important information.

Tuesday, February 10

The widest variety was to be found amongst the photocopies: academic articles & extracts from monographs. Obviously he only had one each of those. But they were remarkably diverse — a bit of pretty average history & criticism, a smattering of theory (most of it predictable enough), & quite a lot of stuff in foreign languages (both Modern & Classical) but there was also a good deal of mathematics & biology & some serious linguistics — despite the variety, though, you could still easily have stored it all in one drawer of a standard filing cabinet. As for his own work, there were numerous versions — he had a habit of changing titles of things without altering the content much — but very few genuinely discrete documents: a parody of the Communist Party Manifesto, a few derivative poems, the embryonic first chapter of his thesis ‘Unfencing Theory’, a chapter breakdown of the project in the style of an eighteenth century contents page, a pastiche of Joyce’s Ulysses, a short story called ‘Mustard Oil’, & a number of unfinished essays. Singh’s stock-in-trade appeared to have been a very close form of parody: he made perverted copies of famous (infamous) texts in which he would change only certain key words & phrases. It was a kind of creative criticism. Strictly speaking, he managed to avoid veering into plagiarism by surrounding his texts with large amounts of ingenious annotation that was explicit & thorough in citation & insistent that the minor damage inflicted on source-texts was a useful form of post-deconstructive intervention.

A few things quickly became apparent: firstly, it was about as likely that I would find anything in this (so-called) academic work to help Hannah find her missing boyfriend as it was that Amrit himself would have found anything amongst the tangled mass of ideas to form a proper thesis.

Secondly, Hannah’s idea that the work was all about looking for a missing father-figure, or at least recovering a lost idea of fatherhood in the labyrinths of theory & Birmingham geo-poetics was pretty wide of the mark. Amrit’s approach was based almost entirely on debunking the search for origins. He was a rather typical neo-Marxist, neo-Feminist, neo-poststructuralist theorist influenced by Bakhtin, Adorno, Derrida, Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze & so on. His big idea was dividualism, the opposite of individualism. He saw the ‘zomby’ human being that was the potential product of the patriarchal capitalist society as the victim of a reduction (a near annihilation) of its mind & its identity to a material singular whose very epitome was the idea of the legacy of fatherhood: capital, cultural, genetic. If his upbringing influenced his work at all it was to make him argue that people should be more like him: they should develop multiple identities & break free of the one that society insists is their inheritance. What he had got by accident, he wanted to deliberately pass on to others: multiculturalism, polyvalent imagination, & so on. Fiction he saw as a way of doing it, both for himself & for readers; the dramatic activities of reading & writing were both a way of accessing some higher (musical or contrapuntal) truth & the route eventually to something like a socialist utopia. You could, I supposed, craft the argument that this was evidence of an obsession expressed as a fantasy of its absolute rejection — theoretical Oedipalism. The practical upshot was, however, that I wasn’t going to find Amrit’s dad — or any explicit evidence of a search for him — amongst his academic writings.

Wednesday, February 11

The third & most obvious thing I realised was that Amrit Singh had probably run away because he was weak. He simply wasn’t a man ‘ready for commitment’ as they say. If his work was evidence of anything it was evidence of that. The only thesis he would commit to was that truth was always plural & could only be reduced by an act of cultural violence even to a dialectic thesis. His most obviously heartfelt piece of work was a reversal of the ‘Penelope’ chapter of Ulysses which replaced the repeated yes with a repeated no. Little wonder he couldn’t commit to family life. Toward the end, he was probably suffering in a dutiful attempt to make all these chaotic imaginings come together into something presentable for a degree... in time to become a proper father: one like Leon, who went to work every day & earned just about enough money doing something quietly worthwhile to keep his family in mince & dungarees & caravaning holidays. As the deadline loomed, however, & he knew he was no closer to achieving even this, he probably came to the dull, but still quite dreadful realisation that he simply couldn’t hack it: neither as an academic nor as a dad. It wasn’t rocket science. He didn’t have some romantic nervous breakdown because he’d delved too deep into the human psyche, or capitalist culture, or the nature of the universe. He wasn’t Faust. He wasn’t even Moses Herzog. He probably just legged it the first time he heard the kid screaming or cast a desperate eye over his latest bank statement.

Most importantly, it became rapidly evident that I couldn’t tell Hannah anything: not if I wanted to carry on coming to her house, not (being brutally honest) if I wanted to get her into bed. I couldn’t tell her why I thought he’d run away. I couldn’t tell her how disorganised & flimsy his research had been. I couldn’t tell her there was going to be nothing in it to help her trace him, that her best chance would be to find a diary or a postcard (something unrelated to the work) hidden in a drawer or underneath a pile of photocopies. I couldn’t even explain that her theory about Amrit’s father was probably a red herring. I needed her to think that she’d been right: in part, at least. How else could I convince her it was worthwhile me continuing to look for him?

For five evenings in a row I fended off her enquiries, telling her it was coming together & I’d let her know when I had a clearer picture. Stuff like that. She tried to hide it, but I could see the desire brimming in her as the days went by: a desire for anything, the smallest titbit, some clue about her lover’s inner life. It was that eagerness of hers that made me keep delaying her. I wanted to watch it grow. Every afternoon she would appear even closer to the brink of some magnificent, mind-altering discovery. & I was the key to it. Once her knowledge & my own, newly enriched, were brought together, some kind of critical mass would be reached. There would be bright reaction & the generation of a considerable amount of heat.

Thursday, February 12

I began to convince myself, I suppose, that her desire for Amrit was as good as a desire for me. I would compliment the work as vaguely (but as convincingly) as possible: it was fascinating, bizarre, original, I’d say, I’d never read anything like it. The implication was obvious. I was becoming acquainted with some exquisitely unstable secret that she wanted to know, that she needed to reach out & touch somehow, to bring her life back together, & open her up to the world again. I wasn’t going to disabuse her of a fantasy like that.

I was obviously becoming a replacement for the man. I must have realised, instinctively, it was the only way I’d have a chance of loving her. She began to treat me like him in the subtlest of ways. She would shush the child & make sure he didn’t come into the study, as if to say don’t disturb your father while he’s working. She would stand in the doorway & look at me as I pretended to pore over something new, not saying anything, the way you do only when you know somebody so well you recognise every movement their body makes, better than they might themselves. Despite the pain it probably caused her, I think she secretly enjoyed the whole experience. I would stay in the study all day long & she could pretend that it was Amrit in that little room, refusing to come out, the way he always had when she was pregnant.

By Friday, I’d been through most of the stuff on the desk. I hadn’t actually read most of it but I had made sure I was pretty certain what it was, what kind of thing it said. I realised I’d have to tell her something by the weekend. I was becoming confident enough, however, to think I could spin a tale sufficiently alluring to start the process of shading Hannah’s desire for Amrit into a genuine desire for me. I didn’t care how long this took. I just knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

There was something genuinely troubling me, though. There was no computer in the study, not even any sign of one: no floppy discs, or cables, or CD-ROMs, not even a printer that might have produced all that inkjet paperwork strewn around the place. I didn’t really want to entertain the possibility that there might be a PC somewhere with another morass of Amrit’s research on it, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that Hannah might not take me seriously if I didn’t bring the question up. It might have been a test. I had to ask.

I left on Friday at about 4 or 5ish, as normal, but made arrangements to come back in the evening & tell her what I’d found. I brought a bottle of brandy & a packet of dates. I had to stand outside in the drizzle, tapping the neck of the bottle on the living-room window for a while before she let me in. She was in the back & there was a locked gate on the alley. She didn’t apologise when she finally came. She didn’t need to. She looked stunning.

She swung the door open. An eager breeze from the drive vacillated over which lush curtain of inviting fluidity to riffle first: her long patchwork skirt or the glossy, herb-scented curls, tumbling reluctantly over one of her shoulders, left pink & bare by the material negligence of an army-surplus vest. The heating was obviously back on again then. She grabbed my wrist & tugged me inside, grinning & kicking the door shut as I entered. Her lips were already dark with wine. Everything about her seemed incredibly unfashionable & incredibly beautiful. I thought for a second she might take me straight into the bedroom.



next
top popup home


back to top

© Copyright S.A.M. Trainor 2002-2008