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DREAMING
OF HEDONISM
Which
isn’t to say that my brother didn’t have a
flat. He did. It just wasn’t the one I was
expecting.
What was I expecting? I think I could be
forgiven for my romantic expectations: Brighton
was, after all, a seaside resort. I suppose I
imagined something safe and smelling faintly of
seawater. A flat with a balcony - the useless
kind with rusting curlique railings, designed
for decoration rather than to carry the weight
of a human being. Behind it, an airy
sitting-room with the kind of sofa that
swallowed you whole, and the windows open to
summer. Perhaps a few prints on the wall, fading
to yellow from years of direct sunlight. The
sound of seagulls. A horizon.
It was a vision that had sprung from nowhere;
had no right, in fact, to be there at all.
Perhaps the building does exist, in a different
seaside resort, or a former life, or in
something I’d once dreamed but had never
remembered in the morning. Either way, I
couldn’t have been more wrong.
By the time I’d found the right street, it was
already evident that the flat wasn’t located
on the seafront at all, but rather, beneath
pavement level on a busy main road. It was one
of those tall Victorian buildings, converted
from the pavement upwards into offices, and
below, a thin, giddying stairwell that clanged
noisily with every step, confusing your feet,
tricking your brain into thinking you were going
to fall. The whole street shook with traffic and
building works.
The key was bent at the base, forcing me to
jiggle it back and forth to fit the lock, and
threatening to cut off my weekend away from the
city before it had even started. It was typical
of my brother to have a bent key. It was also
typical of him to have a flat which, rather than
overlooking the seafront, underlooked the
pavement. He’d buried me in the underworld; a
lightless subterranea with the traffic roaring
past overhead and making you feel like something
forgotten.
I shut the door behind me. The traffic noise
dies a little, drowned by the sound of the
hallway. There is no sound as lonely, as
sub-human, as the sound of a hallway. All that
life passing through, never staying long enough
to leave its mark. By the door, thrown in a
haphazard heap on the floor, lies a pile of
unopened mail. Official envelopes, the names of
people I don’t know trapped behind cellophane
windows. The kind of mail no-one wants to open.
From above, the sound of footsteps. Someone in
heels, running for a phone. The phone stops
ringing. A voice, muffled by floorboards and
sounding like the incoherent mumblings of a
radiator.
I’d once had a girlfriend
who would gargle with mouthwash every night.
Lying in bed, I’d hear her from across the
hallway. She sounded like a satellite dish
reverberating. It was times like these when I
wondered if I was ever destined to connect with
the rest of humanity.
Opening the door to my brother’s flat, I
suddenly feel like an intruder. It’s not the
darkness or silence, but the alien scent of
another person’s lifestyle. The ghosts of
cooking smells, and cigarettes.
Damp carpet. I shut the door to the flat, and
turn the light on to find myself standing in a
long, narrow corridor. An underground chamber.
Outside it’s 2pm, but here, in this space,
everything is nocturnal: the walls, glowing a
sickly yellow under the light-bulb, the hum and
bubble of the boiler, the strand of cobweb stuck
to the ceiling and drifting gently to and fro in
a draft I can’t feel. It’s another world
down here. It’s a world that has no season or
body-clock. Standing here, it feels like time is
standing still. It’s depressing. I could stay
in this corridor forever and never grow old.
It suddenly occurs to me that my brother
probably doesn’t even notice the dark down
here. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you live in
the dark, when your life is full of light. Maybe
it is only when your thoughts are dark, when the
future seems nothing but a black yawning chasm
of chance or pre-destined disaster and you have
to turn Ricky Lake up to full volume just to
drown out the doom, that darkness becomes more
than just a lack of light, it becomes a state of
mind.
It was only two years ago, after taking me
fifteen minutes to choose a brand of soup, that
I realised I was suffering from some sort of
existential neurosis. I found myself transfixed
by the nutritional content on the labels of
common grocery items. Take two cans of soup,
compare sodium content, protein, carbohydrate
(of which sugars), fat (of which saturates),
fibre content, artificial stabilisers,
preservatives, etcetera, ad infinitum, without
at least three million neurones spontaneously
combusting or various mind-blowing, doom-laden
theories concerning the DNA structure of a
tomato threatening your entire perspective on
the future of science, and then tell me
there’s nothing to fear from a single can of
Heinz Condensed Makes Double.
I’ve seen how Other People shop. They snatch
and grab without even looking at the price or
the ingredients list, without thought or
philosophy. It’s a kind of retail reflex
action. Hit and run, smash and grab, wash and
go. That’s the way I see my brother shopping.
Violently and without emotion.
And then there was the Internet. Never before
had I had access to so many medical files, so
many terminal illnesses, so many articles about
pesticides, BSE, food intolerance, the relative
threats of terrorism and bowel disorders. Before
I’d bought the computer there had always been
the weekend trips to the library, furnished as
it was with so many Reference Only medical
encyclopaedias. Now I had an entire electronic
universe of illnesses to look up. And of course,
no sooner had I looked them up than I started to
notice The Symptoms. Which of course led to The
Diagnosis. Which fed The Paranoia and The Night
Sweats and made me start thinking about when the
world was going to end and whether or not there
was an afterlife. It was like the old lady who
swallowed the fly, each thought leading to
something slightly bigger, slightly more
catastrophic and harder to digest, and in the
end I’d find myself sweating profusely and
tapping the word ‘Nostradamus’ into the
search engine to compare my own predictions with
the high priest of paranoia.
All this, just from standing in my brother’s
hallway. I take a deep breath and try to focus
on what’s around me. There are three doors.
The middle one is stuck fast with paint. I try
it but it won’t open: it’s stuck like a
gummy eye. Why do people paint over doors?
Deliberately shutting them forever, as if there
were memories inside, or air-borne viruses. I
scramble with the first door, thinking of
claustrophobia, zombies, a thousand Hammer
Horror nightmares of underground tunnels and
trapdoors, and in a burst of sunlight the door
swings open, it’s the Twenty-First Century,
and summer, and I suddenly remember to breathe.
I stand there for a while, listening to the
traffic overhead. Now and then, the shadow of a
passer-by will move across the panes, over the
far wall, and disappear into the shadows behind
the bed. It makes me uneasy, as though there
were people in the room. It feels like an
invasion of privacy, even though I know the
intruders are just an optical illusion. But then
again, aren’t most people?
An unmade bed with the shape of a body still
imprinted on the duvet. The box of a Playstation
game, demoted to a coaster. Disembodied shoes in
disarray. A vacuum. A pair of weights. Apart
from that, nothing. It was the room of someone
who is rarely at home. On the television sits a
token ornament: the Speak, Hear and See No Evil
monkeys, which seems ironic, considering my
brother spoke, heard and saw as much evil as he
possibly could, largely on Channel Four in the
small hours of the night, from what I’d heard.
But then, I didn’t know my brother
particularly well. Sometimes I wondered if he
was just another reverberating satellite dish.
Or maybe he just liked monkeys.
He worked hard, played hard, loved hard and
fast, drove fast and dangerous. He was a
hedonist. It enthralled and disgusted me. I
sometimes (often) wondered what it would be
like, to have all that frantic energy in my
body, rather than my head. I sometimes (often)
wished all the uncontrollable kinetics of
thought, paranoia and imagination would simplify
themselves into basic movement. Basic movement
with basic purpose: rushing to work, grabbing
takeaways, looking for sex, running down stairs.
Rather than arriving at work twenty minutes
early, worrying about the fat content of a
hamburger, or the emotional content of a one
night stand. Worrying about falling down steps.
If my brother’s philosophy towards life was a
throwaway comment like ‘Come on, what are the
chances?’, mine, in contrast, would be a
literal reply; that is to say, an approximate
calculation of the chances, whether expressed as
statistic, percentage, or the non-biodegradable
memory of a ‘Daily Mail’ trivia column. Like
a habitual dieter who knows the calories of all
everyday foods by heart, I knew by heart the
risk statistics of everyday tasks. Fatal
accidents caused by public transport. The
microscopic eco-system of a toilet seat. Did you
know that the fluoride in toothpaste can cause
bone cancer if regularly ingested? That
washing-up liquid, if insufficiently rinsed, is
thought to be carcinogenic? That 6 percent of
all serious household injuries are caused by
merely putting on one’s socks? How? Why? It
didn’t matter. I’d read it three years ago
in the trivia column of ‘The Daily Mail’ and
it had haunted me ever since. It didn’t seem
logical to be afraid of one’s own socks.!
And yet, I’d read it, I’d seen the evidence,
wasn’t that enough?
Perhaps, secretly, I wanted to be a hedonist.
Perhaps I wanted to be a little bit crazy, a
little bit stupid, a thoughtless pleasure seeker
like my brother, but even as I’m thinking this
my legs are moving ahead of my brain and before
even I know what I’m doing I’m racing
through the flat, checking walls and realizing
with horror that there are no fire alarms in the
building, that I could be burned alive in my
sleep, that the landlord had left my fate to
chance, destiny, a blown fuse or a faulty
socket.
In the kitchen, heart banging, leaning for
support on the worktop, there’s a note
scrawled in felt-tip accompanied by a video card
I’ll never use and a hand-drawn map showing
the route to the local Co-op:
HELLO!
WELCOME TO BRIGHTON
HEATING ON 6 TILL 8
USE MY CARD TO GET A VIDEO
ENJOY YOURSELF!
PAUL.
P.S. AND YES, I KNOW THERE’S NO FIRE ALARM.
BUT COME ON, WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?
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