Beautiful World, Where Are You(30)
passing, people were out walking dogs, calling to each other across the street. Simon kissed Eileen’s cheek, and they wished one another goodbye.
12
Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. We can wait, if you like, to ascend to some higher plane of being, at which point we’ll start directing all our mental and material resources toward existential questions and thinking nothing of our own families, friends, lovers, and so on. But we’ll be waiting, in my opinion, a long time, and in fact we’ll die first. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person? So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call ‘breaking up or staying together’ (!), because at the end of our lives, when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about.
Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.
And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead.
Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.
As to this last point, I speak from personal experience. On the way home from a birthday thing last night, I kind of randomly got off the bus at Grove Park and walked
over to Simon’s house. I suppose I was a little bit drunk and feeling bad about myself, and maybe I thought I could rely on him to rub my shoulders and give me compliments.
Or maybe I wanted him not to be there. Or to be there with this girl he’s been seeing, so I could feel even worse about myself. I don’t know. I don’t know what I wanted, or what I thought would happen. Anyway, when I got upstairs it was obvious the buzzer had woken him up, and he’d had to get out of bed to let me in. It wasn’t really late, only around midnight. He was standing in the doorway looking tired and old. I don’t mean that in a bad way. But when I see him usually, I suppose I’m used to seeing the same beautiful blonde teenager I’ve always seen, since I was a little girl. And when he was standing in the doorway last night I realised, he’s not that boy anymore. What do I really know about his life? When I developed my first teenage crush on Simon, I didn’t understand sexual feelings very well, and I came up with the phrase ‘the special touch’
to describe to myself how I felt when he touched me. Which, by the way, he only ever did either by accident or in the most chaste ways imaginable. Isn’t that a really funny phrase, ‘the special touch’? Thinking about it now, it makes me want to laugh. But then last night in bed, he put his arms around me and immediately those words rushed back into my mind, like the last fifteen years were nothing, and the feeling was the same.
We ended up going to Mass together this morning. The church on his street has a very glamorous stone portico at the entrance and the extraordinarily Catholic name ‘Church of Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners’. He didn’t ask me to come with him, by the way, I wanted to go, though I’m not sure now why I wanted to. It’s possible I was getting such a nice feeling from his company that I just didn’t want to be physically parted from him for an hour. But it’s also possible, and I’m not sure how to put this, that I didn’t want him to go without me because I felt jealous. Now that I’ve said it, I don’t
really know what I mean by that. Do I resent him for liking the concept of God better than he likes me? The idea seems plainly absurd. But then what? Having put myself back on intimate terms with Simon, albeit for a brief interlude, was I afraid that he was going to Mass to cleanse himself of me? Or maybe in a way I didn’t really believe he was going to go through with it, and that if I offered to go with him, he would have to come out and admit he had not been totally serious about the religion thing after all. In the end of course we filed into the church together uneventfully. Inside, it was all white and blue, with painted statues, and dark panelled confession boxes with luxurious velvet curtains. Most of the other attendees were little elderly women wearing pastel-coloured jackets. When the service began, Simon didn’t suddenly start acting very intense and spiritual, or crying about the majesty of God the Father or anything like that, he was just his usual self. Mostly he sat there listening and doing nothing. At the beginning, when everyone kept repeating ‘Christ have mercy’ and all of that, I think a part of me wanted him to start laughing and tell me it was all a joke. In a way I felt afraid of the way he was behaving, saying things like ‘I have greatly sinned’ – actually saying such things out loud in his ordinary voice, the same way I might say ‘it’s raining’, if I had a sincere belief that it was raining and nothing about this belief struck me as ridiculous. I looked over at him a lot, feeling I suppose alarmed by his seriousness, and he just glanced back at me in a friendly way, as if to say: Yes, this is Mass, what did you expect? Then there was a reading about a woman pouring oil on the feet of Jesus and, I think, drying his feet with her hair? Unless I misunderstood. Simon sat there listening to this patently bizarre and freakish story and looking, as ever, completely calm and ordinary. I know I keep saying how ordinary he was, but it was precisely the seeming absence of any