The Trainor Diary: Feb 13 to Feb 16

Instead, she led me the same old way down the long book-lined Victorian hall towards the back of the flat & the kitchen. Sitting at the table as we entered, already pouring a third glass of wine for whoever was about to walk in, there was a very tall black woman with a broad metallic ribbon wrapped around the base of her unkempt afro like an over-risen chocolate cake. A bright red leather biker’s jacket was slung over the shoulders of her chair. She widened her eyes in mock astonishment when she saw me. It struck me that she probably did that whenever she met a person for the first time. It was probably a way of pre-empting the same reaction in her new acquaintance. I was certainly taken aback by her. She was really quite enormous: long-limbed & angular. The fingers on her right hand almost fit completely round the wine bottle. I should have been upset to find someone else in the room — especially when I’d been envisioning candlelight & hushed excitement with Hannah — but the sheer size & colour-definition of this figure against the drab wood-grain of the kitchen units stunned any inward objections I might have had to silence.

”Oh, this is Lynne,” said Hannah, “we used to work together... she just dropped round.” She didn’t tell Lynne my name. It didn’t occur to me that they’d already been discussing me before I came. I just assumed that Lynne didn’t need to know, or (more likely) didn’t need to be told. She slid the wine over to me with the faintest of smiles, saying nothing. Her movements were slow & careful... like a delicately powerful insect under a magnifying glass: one that has evolved specifically to be magnified to such unnervingly beautiful proportions in order to teach human entomologists an intricate lesson in design. She turned back to Hannah, who was asking:
“So it’s a proper tenure-track post & everything?”

“Yeh, the works.”

“& she’s never published a thing? Just goes to show you should use whatever you’ve got.”

“Whether it’s between your ears or between your hips.”

“I reckon they all want to get her into bed just to shut her up. She asks those interminable bloody questions, without even a modicum of relevance, just so as everybody in the room gets to see her lips in action & to hear that charming little accent as she works her tongue around the jargon. If I was a bloke, & I had to choose between listening to her wittering on about stratified methodology or trying to make her grunt like a sunbathing walrus up against a hotel bedboard, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t shag her too. It’s just incredible that afterwards they always want to give her jobs as well.”

“Oh she knows what she’s doing. It’s just like the music business, honey: if you wanna get ahead, you gotta give a little.”

They carried on gossiping about ex-colleagues like this for a good hour before Lynne made her excuses. I attempted to chip in from time to time with observations, but I could tell I would be much better appreciated as an audience than a participant.

My presence actually seemed quite important. They were being pointedly indiscreet & carping about members of their old department, whose surnames I could easily have traced by looking up the staff list on the internet, but rather than pretending I wasn’t there or modifying their references the way you do when talking about hidden Easter Eggs in the presence of a child, they would glance over at me every now & then to see if I was enjoying the performance. I would shake my head in disbelief or laugh & they’d take visible encouragement from my responses. Those looks also made it clear, however, that I was not supposed to use any of the privileged information I was being given. In fact, I was not being given the information at all. The content was not the focus of the exercise. I was supposed to enjoy the fact of the conversation’s intimacy rather than being allowed any lasting access to it. I was supposed to disengage my memory, sit back & enjoy the ride.

The conversation followed a pattern that was becoming familiar to me: Hannah would do most of the talking, with Lynne feeding lines to her — even when it was actually Lynne who was revealing information or telling a story. That was the way Hannah spoke to me as well. Once she’d heard enough of your idea or your anecdote to take up the reins, she would begin to speculate about what you were about to tell her, often extremely accurately, so that any new material you contributed seemed to be a minor ornamentation of a theme she’d already introduced. Perhaps this was one of the reasons I’d been avoiding giving her reports on my discoveries in the study. I couldn’t tell her the truth, but her uncanny ability to pre-empt your words always made me feel rather anxious about spinning her a yarn.

Unlike me, however, Lynne seemed totally at ease with this way of doing things. She would wind Hannah up & then occupy herself with the zen-like performance of some simple task: the rolling of a cigarette, the pouring of wine, the changing of a record. She got out of her chair as Hannah spoke, unrumpling the vertiginous length of her body, & carefully organised her surroundings. She behaved very much as if it were her own house & Hannah an unexpected & slightly over-talkative visitor — she straightened picture frames & wiped down the working surfaces — without ever once appearing fidgety. Perhaps the muscles responsible for animating such an impressive skeleton find it difficult to fidget.

The elaborate performance of these two women had something like the same effect on me. I was engrossed. I quickly lost any sense of nervous apprehension & began to take real pleasure in observing their complex dance. It was almost as if I had stopped existing as anything but an integral function in their show. I had become a voyeur, & nothing else. My body seemed entirely autonomous & self-aware, which made my movements all completely unselfconscious. There was no question of my taking a wilful decision to move an arm or turn my head an inch or two; everything around me, including even the smallest of my own physical motions, was to be experienced rather than controlled.

& yet they were all experienced. It was no more true that I could ignore the tiny physical changes in the shape or state of my body than that I could predict them. Every movement became like the beat of my heart: a precursor to, rather than the subject of, any mental act of will.

I’d experienced something similar, from time to time, when playing musical instruments. If you’re lucky enough, you can reach a stage where it seems that you are no longer playing a piece of music, but that it is playing you. The music exists as a complex organising principle that has come to inhabit your mind through multiple exposure to its organic structures. It brings together items of your imagination & functions of your body that normally remain detached & employs them to bring itself into existence, driving your limbs, your lungs, your mouth, your fingers to reproduce its multiplicitous vibrations by interacting with the objects they can touch or the breath they can control. This is like the music flourishing: attempting to breed by bursting out of the silent compost of the brain in which it has been germinating & mingling with the other, libidinous musics that are troubling the air, reaching out to clash or harmonise with them. When that happens, you graduate from being just a player to being a musician: no longer the reproducer of the music but a member of a special audience whose minds & bodies are co-opted by it to take part in an erotic ritual of contrapuntal sonic interaction.

This was how I felt when Lynne & Hannah spoke. My neck & eye muscles were entirely at the whim of their speech patterns. My gaze wafted back & forth like a blade of kelp in the ebb & flow of a coastal swell. It was not always clear which was which, or indeed if I was really in the room at all. What is certain, is that I’d forgotten about Amrit Singh.

When Lynne suddenly announced she had ‘a dinner date’ (at a quarter past eleven on a Friday night), flipped her heavy jacket off the chair & reached inside it one arm at a time, it came as a real shock: like an unexpected teaspoon full of mustard. She zipped it right up to just beneath her chin then took my hand & shook it extremely gently, but without seeming in the least dismissive or insincere.

“Nice to meet you, Sam... sure we’ll catch up again sometime. Don’t bother getting up Han,” she turned to her friend & bent down to the unlikely depth necessary to kiss her on the top of the head. Whispering assurance that she knew the way out, she allowed her long thumbs to meet across the half-exposed skin of Hannah’s shoulder-blades, the fingers exploring the brinks of her pale arms like the tentacles of an octopus. She straightened up again, but dipped slightly to get her hair under the doorframe as she loped into the hall.

We heard the flat-door close... neither of us said a word... then the front-door of the building. I considered leaning forward & kissing Hannah there & then. There was a click & a hum as the fridge came on.

“So, Sam, what have you come to tell me?” she asked.

I couldn’t remember exactly. I’d been practising on the way here, but now... “Fancy a date?” I said, it was a stupid joke, “they’re the perfect accompaniment to a cognac.” I tried to sound like Noel Coward as I said that last bit but my tongue, tapping about amongst all those enamelled consonants, was less a linguistic Fred Astaire than a demented moth trapped in an upturned tumbler.

She took one anyway, which was a great relief, & accepted the generous glass of brandy I poured out.

“Have you any idea...” she teased the long, woody date-stone around in her mouth as she spoke, “where he might be?”

“Perhaps,” I exaggerated, “but we’ll come to that. First, I should tell you how I’ve managed to arrive at my conclusions.” (& perhaps I could think of something as I did.)

“Amrit’s theories are fascinating. The principal text, I think, is his parody of the Communist Party Manifesto.”

A glimmer of a smile started in the corner of her eyelids. Maybe she was remembering something. She pouted rather than broadening her lips though, & the date-stone half ejected like a bank-card from an ATM. She pulled it out & dropped it next to her glass: “Tinker”, she whispered. She didn’t take another. She was encouragingly tipsy.

I considered commenting on this, but found myself just carrying on.

“It seems a pretty cheap trick at first: he just changes a few words here & there & makes it into a manifesto of the ‘Fiction Party’. But then you realise just how hard it is to keep this effect up & how cunningly he’s done it. It’s not so much a parody as a kind of fruitful mistranslation. It owes a lot to deconstruction, I suppose, but it’s a lot more positive. I mean, it is a deconstruction in the sense that it deliberately mishears the first sentence of the Manifesto: ‘Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa: der Gespenst des Kommunismus’ as ‘Ein Gespinst geht um in Europa...: not ‘A spectre haunts the land of Europe...’ but ‘A yarn (the result of spinning)...’ or ‘A tall tale haunts the land of Europe: the tall tale of Communism’.

“But from there he moves on to imply that not only Communism, but also the manifesto itself, is a self-conscious fiction which is designed to reveal the truth of a Socialist Utopia that haunts the Capitalist present like a ghost of the future: one that can only be brought about by such acts of fiction.”

This was utter crap, but Hannah’s smile was encouraging, &, to be fair, it was precisely Amrit Singh’s kind of utter crap.

“He sees the manifesto, & even Das Kapital, as something like gothic Science Fiction: closer to Frankenstein than any genuine history or economics. That’s why Karl Popper gets it so wrong. In order to tell her story, Mary Shelley needs to invent a world in which the creature’s reanimation is scientifically possible. The same goes for Marxist historicism...