The This, page 9
Truth was: it was OK. He’d got used to it long before. If he tried the thought experiment of fitting a new human being into his life, the main sensation he experienced was a remote sort of dread. He’d have to adjust all his routines, to give up all his freedoms! Wasn’t worth the candle. Perhaps things would change in the future – conceivably The One would arrive and sweep him off his feet – but for now he was content to live alone. He’d had relationships before – serious relationships. He knew how inconveniencing they could be.
His phone rang. He answered it without thinking.
‘Hello, Alan. We at The This would like to invite you to try our new deluxe introductory package, currently being rolled out to a select group of VIPs in the London and Greater London area.’
Click. A cold call! How very 1998.
He occupied his life with various things. He had hobbies. He collected banknotes. He read poetry – at university he’d done an English degree, and Coleridge and Keats had been his two favourites, and ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ the tip of the toppermost so far as he was concerned, poetry-wise. He had an 1836 edition of Coleridge’s Sibylline Leaves and various pieces of Keatsiana. He had done English because he had wanted to be a writer, and now here he was: a writer! Of sorts. What else? He liked watching comedy. He collected banknotes. Or did I already mention that? My point is, he fills his days. He’s us, in this respect, he’s you, he’s me. The distinction between work and play has long since been eroded for you and me. We slog onerously through yet another joyless TV box set, or camp out like navvies and twerk ourselves to exhaustion at Glastonbury, or trudge round the shops, or scroll through the endless Tibetan prayer wheel of social media – or, that apotheosis of modern play, we work work work through the latest video game, clocking long hours in front of a flickering screen to move our simulated self slowly and with many setbacks through a virtual landscape fundamentally defined by frustration. What fun we have! Rich was no exception.
But if you had asked him what his main hobby was, he would have replied: banknotes.
It went back a long way with him. Something about the intricacy of the designs on them had captured his imagination when he was a child: back in the days when notes were actually part of the functioning economy and everybody carried them in their wallets and purses. Old-style scrip was his passion (collectors who specialised in polymer notes baffled him) and he had thousands of separate pieces in his collection. Most, it’s true, were low-value items: notes Rich considered pretty, or with intriguing or exotic artwork. The thing is: now that financial transactions are all virtual we forget how many banknotes were printed, once upon a time. Many denominations were so common once that they’re dirt cheap to pick up now. Rich had a complete run of twentieth-century UK shilling and post-decimalisation paper currency, for instance – not all the variant designs, of course, and not counting war credit notes, but at least one example of every denomination – and his was a pretty good global spread, too. He collected without any particular agenda. He knew (online, that is) fellow collectors who were interested in notes with misprints, or unusually high denominations, or notes with unusual serial numbers – a ten-pound note with the serial number AK47 007 had recently sold for more than a thousand euros – or treasury notes, or provincial and Scottish notes, but Rich’s guiding principle was unfettered by these sorts of bugbears. He browsed online and, if the art on a note caught his fancy, and if he could afford it, he bought it.
He had a few examples of leper colony money, some unusual treasury bonds and an A3 sheet of proof fivers from the 1960s. Once, a little whisky-drunk, browsing online at two in the morning, he’d seen a Wisbech & Lincolnshire Bank 1890 £5 note. This bank had been one of the last private institutions in the UK to issue its own banknotes, before being bought up by Barclays at the end of the nineteenth century. When that happened Wisbech & Lincolnshire banknotes were all decommissioned: a triangular wedge was cut through the signature. Unmutilated Wisbech & Lincolnshire notes are very rare, and Rich chanced upon an online auction for one of them. He wasn’t a private bank nut, or particularly interested in provincial notes, but something about this one snagged his eye. The plain white note, with a roughly oval, pink watermark filling its middle like a blush. I PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND THE SUM OF £5. The gorgeous tracery surrounding FIVE POUNDS at the bottom; the flourishes on the letters. Rich logged a bid, and then waited for a higher bid that never came, such that he woke the next morning €475 poorer and £5 richer – he was overdrawn for a fortnight as a result. When the note came through the post, Rich framed it and hung it in his hall, something he did with only his most favoured notes. He almost never had visitors to his flat, so it was only Rich who noticed them. But still: sometimes you had to make an effort.
Sometimes a note would arrive through the post and he’d hold it in his hands and find himself drawn into it, as through a portal. The miniature wonder of it! A 1970s one-pound note, as green as emerald, promising to pay the bearer on demand one pound. What kind of a promise was that? Take it to Threadneedle Street, bang on the door and demand a tiny flake of gold to the value of exactly one pound? Hardly. Britain came off the gold standard in (Rich checked his phone quickly) 1931, so it wasn’t that kind of promise. It was a third party’s promise that facilitated the interaction of two people who had never met before and never would again, without either having any connection whatsoever with the Bank of England. Could you even call that a promise? I promise I won’t let you down is a promise, because it is particular. I promise to love, honour and obey you, I make this promise to this specific and identifiable person, before these specific witnesses. Without specificity, did the word ‘promise’ even have meaning?
The promise meant that the banknote was worth £1. But Rich had just spent £7.95 on it, so that promise hadn’t been kept. Or maybe that was the point. Promises are only truly promises if they can be broken – you would never say ‘Once I’ve thrown myself in the air I promise to fall to the ground.’ Which is to say: you wouldn’t call that a promise, because you had no say in the matter. You fell whether you liked it or not. On the other hand, if someone told you: ‘Watch this – I’m going to jump in the air and then … fly out of the window like a bird. I promise I will!’ then you’d have to accept the word was being used correctly, even though there was no chance of that person keeping their promise. So we could argue that the breaking of promises is the condition of promises. This one-pound note was signed by John Page, and he was the one promising to pay the bearer on demand. His promise was a knowing lie, and everybody concerned in the project knew that it was a lie, and the entire system of notes and coins was predicated upon this lie. The promise was pre-broken before the note even left the printer.
Rich put the note to his nose and sniffed it. It smelt of old paper, old clothes, or not quite of either. It had its own particular smell. John Page was presumably (Rich checked his phone: it was true) dead now. But imagine he was alive. Imagine you knew him, and imagine he borrowed a gold watch from you, promising to return it by a certain date. The date passes, and you challenge him, and he says ‘I know what I promised, but I’m keeping the watch.’ It would reflect badly on him. It would damage his reputation for honesty, it would make you angry that you’d been betrayed. But here Page was, promising something to millions of people that he, and anyone else who thought about it, knew he couldn’t deliver. And nobody cared. You might think that such a promise made to millions and then broken – designed to be broken – was millions of times worse. But apparently what was true for the individual was not true of the collective. But of course you know this. We expect our friends to keep their promises. We don’t expect politicians to keep theirs. An alien looking in from outer space would think that was the wrong way round, and perhaps it is, but there we are.
He put his new note in his collection book, and went online to brag about his purchase to those banknoteheads he followed in various chatspaces and curated Twitter feeds. There was some small likeage, but not from any of the big hitters or influencers. So it goes.
Ding! A delivery. Pizza like a map of the moon in red and yellow. A patchy goatee of cheese strands on Rich’s chin as he scrolled through blogs and websites.
And then The This really began courting him in earnest. They really went for it, as if, after months, they had suddenly woken up to how special he was. Every time he turned on his computer the promoted email in his inbox was always from them – special terms, introductory offer, join today for 45% off! Then it was 75% off. Then it was an offer to join for free. He had, it’s true, toyed with the notion of trying the app, and the pellet in the mouth, but this hard sell put him off. He reset his preferences and put up blocks, but The This ads kept finding their way through. Always the lead ad. Always the pop-up, or the pre-video ad. He got a D-Work gig to interview a structural engineer for Enjzine, but when he arrived it turned out to be a The This employee, there to deliver a personal invitation to try the service ‘absolutely free for six months, and the surgical costs of removing the tech covered by us, if you are not completely happy and would prefer to leave.’ That they had tricked him into this face-to-face irked Rich, but he was more irked by the fact that their ruse left him with no interview to conduct and no pro forma to file. He stomped sulkily out of this meeting and spent an hour trying to contact somebody at D-Work to explain the reason why he was unable to file. The D-Work app didn’t care: it was interested only in its metrics. No pro forma meant no fee and an automatic zero-star rating from D-Work that dragged his average down. The whole silly business left Rich fuming for days.
:3:
In his university days Rich had known a man called Alexander. Not a close friend, an acquaintance, an occasional pub-buddy, someone with whom Rich sometimes hung out. Alexander called himself Xander and was addressed by those who knew him as Xender, Xinder, Xoinder, in mocking tribute to the extreme poshness of his wandering vowels. ‘Xonder of the Wandering Hands’ Caroline called him, and indeed he was over-physical, borderline-harassy where attractive women were concerned, puppy-enthusiastic, and also deeply religious, destined for a career in the Church.
‘I thought Christianity frowned upon sexual urges, Xonder,’ Caroline said, as they were all in the union bar one evening. ‘Shouldn’t you be repressing them, like a good little Puritan?’
‘It is better to marry than to burn,’ Xander replied, raising a finger like he was admonishing her. ‘Burn with lust, that is. God’s all for sex within marriage. The sword of the Lord shall not be sheathed forever.’
Something about Xander’s boundless energy, his ingenuousness, the way he was happy to move without seeming gear-change from gossip and chat to considering the deepest questions of life and death and the nature of the soul, endeared him to Rich. For about three months Xander and Rich spent quite a lot of time together, because they had a mutual friend who was good at the javelin, and they used to travel with him around the country to athletic meets for support, and for pub lunches. Xander drove them in his car because he happened to own a car, having previously had the good judgement to be born to wealthy parents.
‘Life is a fairy tale,’ he told them, one bright June day as they sat in a paved pub garden on the outskirts of Lanborough and drank lager. ‘It’s not a tragedy. There’s a happy ending to look forward to, for all of us. God has written the screenplay of the universe that way.’
‘What about wishes?’ Rich had prompted. ‘If it’s a fairy tale, do I get my three wishes?’
‘You get as many wishes,’ Xander replied, earnestly, ‘as you have faith. That’s the deal. If you have enough faith and wish a whole fucking mountain shifted away, then it’s done – it’s gone – if … you have faith. Jesus is your genie, and he’s not one of those jobsworth genies who says you can’t wish for infinite wishes. You can absolutely wish for infinite wishes, with him.’
Cars rattled and trucks thundered past. Back then, motor vehicles ran on things like petrol and diesel and: good Lord, the noise they made! You wouldn’t believe it. Drowned out conversation, rather.
‘What?’ Rich asked. ‘What?’
A lorry went past like a storm front, and the tourbillons of air stirred up by its passage lifted ash of out the ashtray and swirled it around before settling it down again across the table. The ash was Rich’s. He was, at that time, a smoker.
The air smelt of cut grass and tobacco and diesel and a faint tang of agricultural manure and the sun was bright, and the bubbles of gas rising through the three columns of lager were as round and shiny as pearls.
‘Xanderella,’ said Rich. Then, because the other two were not reacting, he said: ‘Hey, that’s funny!’
Nobody seemed to think it was funny.
‘What’s so cool about all those old fairy tales,’ Xander said, and then said something that was muffled by a passing van, and then he became audible again, ‘… never alone. Hansel and Gretel. Seven dwarfs, not one. The journey from being cast out to belonging. And magic. They are stories that say, there is magic in the world. A deep magic, a strong magic. I believe it!’
After that Rich went through a phase when he saw less of Xander. Mostly this was because Rich started dating Caroline, and she persuaded him to give up smoking, and for most of a year they were a proper couple. And then they broke up and Rich was busy with finals. Very busy – with finals and drinking and masturbating and feeling sorry for himself. After uni he lost touch with various people. Things happened in Rich’s life. They were the sorts of things that happen in lots of people’s lives: bereavement, arranging the legal necessities on his parents’ estate, moving flat, and he got on with them. He inherited a small peck’s-worth of money along with his parents’ flat: not much, but enough to mean he could postpone finding a Proper Job for a while. He settled into a new and solitary rhythm of life.
Then he chanced upon one of Xander’s friends, the javelin guy, called Niko, in a bar. It was late, and Rich was on his way home, and had only gone in to use the toilets, but he’d spotted this guy on his way back out, and sat down with him for a glass of wine. And from the general catch-up chatter he discovered that Xander had taken holy orders in the Anglican Church. His superiors had considered him destined for great things. Assigned a curacy in an inner-city parish where he worked super-hard helping people and spreading the gospel – whatever it is priests do – and then: blam. Gone.
‘Sex scandal,’ said Niko.
‘I see,’ said Rich, in a knowing voice, although in fact he knew nothing about it.
‘Not kids,’ said Niko. ‘Nothing illegal, nothing … you know. Nothing weird. But a couple of impressionable parishioners, nineteen, twenty. It’s not that he’s supposed to be celibate or anything, but he is supposed to marry if he wants all that, and he’s definitely not supposed to fuck his teenage parishioners.’
Rich remembered Xander saying the sword of the Lord shall not be sheathed forever and laughing, and he said, ‘not nice’ and Niko agreed.
‘So did they defrock him?’
Rich had been drinking before he popped into the All Bar One for a slash, and now he was drinking again, so he was drunk enough to be secretly impressed with himself for knowing this technical term. Or, wait, was that just Catholics? He checked his phone.
‘They’ve disciplined him, demoted him, moved him to a parish in Lincolnshire somewhere, I think. Or Norfolk? I’m not sure, except that it’s very remote and very flat. Xander messaged me a few times complaining how oppressive it was, the flatness. The horizontality, was how he put it.’
Good to see you. Good to catch up! Let’s do this again, mate. Yes, let’s! Both knowing they will, in all likelihood, never see either ever again. Night night then! Nigh-nigh.
Good night, laddies. Good night, sweet laddies. Goo nigh. Goo nigh.
And that was the last Rich heard of Xander for many years. Then he chanced upon him online, and had a few conversations with him. He was living in London now, and was no longer a cleric, but he had abated nothing of his enthusiasm for God and religion. Rich even met him for a coffee – he was guilted into it, really, after heavily dropped comments about how isolated Xander felt in the big city, how lonely urban living could be. So they met up in a cavernous Costa in Southwark, near the river, and Xander sat with both his elbows on the table, leaning forward, talking, talking and talking some more. At uni he had possessed a mess of blond hair, like stuffing exploding out of an armchair, but that was all gone now. Now his was a high bald forehead reflecting a blob of brilliance from the ceiling light. His eyes were a thin grey-blue and he blinked too often. He talked and he talked, and little flakes of spittle accumulated in the corners of his red lips.
‘I fell in love with the Church,’ he said. ‘I see now, I can see it now, that we’re supposed to love God, and that the Church is there to help us reach that state, but I got distracted, and fell in love with the people who loved God. You can see that distinction? Of course you can. But if you can see the distinction then you can also see how easy it is to elide the one and the other. It was trouble, Alan. It meant big trouble in little Church-a. Because falling in love with people, of course, it … it … it involves sex, if you fall in love with a woman and marry her and don’t have sex something’s gone wrong somewhere. Sex and love fit so neatly together. I got so caught up in it – libido and agape all muddled in with one another. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last and that’s no excuse at all, but it’s human, it’s all too human, yah? It’s tricky, though, don’t you think, separating out the rush of spiritual joy from the intensity of pleasure when you come? Or not even that, but the anticipation. Loving God is all about the anticipation, because one day we will see Him face to face, but not yet, that not-yetness is everything, it’s the whole of the religious life, the joyful anticipation of that connection. And the build-up to sex is like that, don’t you think? There’s a passage in John 21 where Christ asks Peter if he loves him, and they talk at cross-purposes – Christ uses the word agape, which means spiritual love, but Peter keeps replying yes I love you, but with the word philia, which is like a human love, a person-to-person love. You can’t bracket sex out of that. It’s human, don’t you think?’
