This is the Ritual Read online

  7 A certain lightness of tone, unusual in Turner’s work, can be detected in passages and diary entries written during these months, as if the happiness inspired by his friendship with Mother D could not but seep through into Turner’s authorial voice.

  8 Thomas Duddy, ‘Ecstatic Slaughter: Human Sacrifice in the Work of Georges Bataille and Killian Turner’, Radical Philosophy, Issue 116, Winter 1999.

  Paris Story

  It happens like this. While living in Paris, X writes a novel based on his experiences as an expat. The novel receives interest from several publishers, but none of them is finally willing to take it on. Meanwhile, X’s friend K, who is also living in Paris, completes her first collection of short stories. K is signed up by a literary agent and, within a month, the collection is sold to a major publisher.

  While X has always been encouraging of K’s writing, in private he considers it sentimental storytelling, of no great literary moment. X begins working on another novel, but progress is slow and difficult. Meanwhile, K’s collection is published and is an immediate success. K begins appearing in newspapers and on radio shows. X and K still meet for coffee, or drink in wine bars with their friends, and take walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg. While they walk, K admits to X how pleasant it is to receive the media attention, yet ultimately how silly and inconsequential. Maybe, maybe not, thinks X.

  X plunges on with his new novel. It is set partly during the French-Algerian war (he has stacks of books borrowed from the library), and partly in contemporary Paris, among expat writers like himself and K. In short, it is a more ambitious novel than his first. He soon feels overwhelmed: he has lost the thread; the novel is a chaos of interminable sentences and scenes with no clear connection to one another.

  In an interview with an expat magazine, K mentions X. She refers to him as a ‘writer of real ambition, one to watch out for’. Initially, X is flattered. Soon, however, he feels only anger and disgust. It is clear to him: K now considers X to be beneath her. One evening, after a long walk from the eleventh arrondissement to the rue de l’Odéon and back again, X sits down at his desk and writes about K’s story collection. He pours all the bile and scorn that have been festering inside him on to the page. At first, he is writing the piece only for himself. By the time he has composed the final paragraph, though, he knows he will have it published.

  The review is accepted by a well-known literary website. X publishes it under a pseudonym – J. Curtis. It is K’s first experience of a truly hostile review. She stays at home for two days. At the end of the second day, she calls X and talks quietly about the review for several minutes, then begins to cry. X feels uncomfortable – by now, he regrets publishing the piece and knows that, if K ever finds out who its true author is, their friendship will be over. Please come, K says. X feels he cannot say no.

  On the way to K’s apartment on rue Moret, X buys a bottle of wine. They drink this together, listening to Nina Simone. Though neither of them mentions the review for almost an hour, X can see the effect it has had on K – she looks as if she has the flu. Abruptly, K opens her laptop and reads aloud some of the harshest sentences. X says nothing. Then K shuts the laptop and says, Let’s go out and get drunk. They drink red wine in a bar on the Quai de Jemmapes, by the canal. A band plays jazz. X stares at the double-bass player, a young man with a tormented expression who seems somehow familiar (for years afterwards, X will be haunted by his face). That night, X and K end up in bed together. Though this is not something that either of them has ever particularly longed for, both find it satisfying. In the morning, K stays in bed while X makes coffee, then goes out and buys pastries and croissants from the patisserie on the corner. After breakfast, they make love again. X feels an urge to confess that it was he who wrote the hostile review. He suppresses the urge.

  From that morning on, X and K spend many hours each day in one another’s company. They write together through the afternoons, and see their friends in the evenings. X even begins to find a way back into his novel. In short, they are enjoying an idyll. However, X burns with guilt for the brutal review he published of K’s collection. He no longer even agrees with the arguments he levelled against her, though he knows they were of a sophistry that will have convinced many.

  Years pass. K and X have married and are now living in Dublin. K has written two more story collections and a novel. X’s novel involving the French-Algerian war has also been published. X writes book reviews, and the couple manage to raise their young daughter solely on money earned through literary activity. One September, K leaves Ireland to give a talk at a conference in Munich, before spending three weeks at a writers’ residency near Heidelberg. While she is gone, X receives a phone call. He picks up the receiver and hears nothing. Eventually, X curses the mute caller and hangs up. Later that evening, X receives an email from an unfamiliar address. It says, You are a liar. The email is signed J. Curtis.

  X is badly unnerved: it takes a third of a bottle of whiskey to calm him down. When he finally falls asleep on the couch with the television on, he dreams of the review he wrote years earlier of K’s book. In the dream, naked men sit at their computers, reading the review while masturbating slowly. Later, the website is revealed to be embedded in a cliffside. The name of the website is ‘Melted Face’.

  The next day there is a second email. The message is repeated – You are a liar – and this time there is an address: 38 rue du Borrégo, Appartement 107, Paris. This is intolerable, X thinks. He decides that he must travel to Paris while K is abroad, and confront his accuser at the address indicated.

  X flies out that Monday morning, having left his daughter with her grandparents. He spends the first afternoon wandering the districts where he had spent the happiest years of his vanished youth. After dinner that evening at a bistro near the Sorbonne, X decides to enter a small cinema where a film is about to start. He sits in a middle row, away from the few scattered viewers. In the film, a man in his sixties is living with his cat in an apartment in Brussels, shunning the world. One day, a young woman appears at his door. Various misunderstandings ensue, which result in the older man and the woman driving across Europe in a sports car. (X’s French is rusty and the finer details of the plot escape him, though he believes it involves either an annulled marriage or an attempted kidnapping.) The film ends in Reims, where the woman draws a revolver and shoots a squat, bearded Asian man in a bowler hat, for reasons which remain opaque to X.

  The following morning, X resolves to visit rue du Borrégo. He takes the Métro, and as he holds the overhead hand-rail and watches the Parisians sharing his carriage, he imagines the paths both his and K’s lives would have taken if K had learned, years ago, that he was the author of that cruel review. He disembarks from the Métro at Saint-Fargeau and follows the map on his phone, which takes him off the avenue, down a quiet street with high residential blocks on either side. When X reaches number 38, he presses the bell for apartment 107. There is no answer. An elderly woman exits the building and X lets himself in behind her. He ascends the poorly lit staircase until he reaches the top floor. He knocks on the door of 107. Nobody comes. He presses his ear against it, but can hear no sound from inside. He knocks forcefully, many times. He cries out, I’m here. Open up. Who’s in there? His voice resounds through the stairwell. Then X throws his weight against the door with his shoulder. To his surprise, it opens.

  The apartment is bare and unfurnished. The walls, floor and ceiling are all of grey cement. There are no panes in the windows, and X can see the higher floors of the building across the street. A cold breeze blows through the apartment. X enters each room, but it is all the same. No one has ever lived here, he thinks. Fleetingly, it seems to X that he has been here many times. After standing in the middle of the largest room for a long time, he leaves the apartment.

  That night, X gets extremely drunk in a series of ugly bars around Clichy. When he finally returns to his hotel, he falls into bed without undressing. His sleep is hot and jagged. As dawn filters gre
enly through the curtains, X dreams of K. In the dream, K’s skin is pale and she never meets X’s eyes. He tries to follow her head so he can look at her directly, but it swivels, always out of reach. Finally, her head separates from her body. Then K is gone, and the squat, bearded Asian man appears. He says to X, There is a man who has sucked your wife’s nipples. When? asks X. In August, says the Asian man.

  Outposts

  1

  World Without End

  Afraid of all that lay ahead, she felt closer to him than ever. ‘The time is past when man thought of himself in terms of a dawn.’ They drive along the curving, shadowy streets. The shutters are already closed throughout town. The wind sweeps the church and its surroundings. ‘An ache I soothed with prayers and codeine.’ A car approaches. ‘What if he asks for our names?’ There were tears in her eyes.

  *

  The door opened. A grimy old woman in a headscarf. Everyone moves with deliberation. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he says. ‘Giving up is cowardly. So is carrying on.’

  ‘Silence please.’

  *

  They are in bed, windows open to the morning coolness. Analysis of the passions, a definition of love. Faith, she thinks, is more mechanical than doubt. The wild light in her eyes. Or rather, almost wild.

  ‘Great minds are very near to madness.’

  *

  A photograph on a mantelpiece: his future wife. The light was better then. ‘Nature can hardly be forgiven.’

  Goes over to the table where the American woman is sitting. ‘In Barcelona I turned thirty.’ ‘Yes, I remember perfectly.’ Slowly the light changes. Old surfaces of the town. They walk on to a balcony. ‘It’s hopeless.’ ‘This is what you wanted.’ Season follows season, world without end. ‘We have known each other for ever.’ ‘It isn’t enough.’

  *

  I was alone, as if face to face with a blank rock. Traders and pedlars in the sunshine, the major marketplace. No one stands still under that dome, in dim shadows. ‘If it smells like shit, it probably is.’ I won’t see her again, he thought. Spends her years making propaganda like someone stirring a burnt-out fire. She was more beautiful than –

  In the morning, a little lucidity and few illusions left. Hotel melancholy. Now she goes out to the coast for the summer, in a caravan, where the estuary becomes tidal. A feeling of eternity. Black hair, an open window. It is already afternoon. The Volkhov River.

  *

  Asians wearing European labels. Hotels erected on the shore. A whale’s skeleton at the base of a limestone cliff. The last race, all colour and fire. Instead of dreams, memories. ‘I have returned to Europe and its struggles.’ The Russian ballerinas, they dance very well. Red stone buildings, copper pagodas. The fragility of those shacks. ‘They used to run this place like clockwork, but now . . .’ The church square is rather sad. Love is possible, but unlikely. Young men with fine features and cold, knowing gazes. People who seek to be useful (not us, my love). ‘A book is a postponed suicide,’ mutters the tramp as he slumps in a doorway. Even in a large city, the streets at night are relatively still. How lonely it is to be alive.

  *

  In a Genoa hotel room, hears the ringing of bells resound through quiet streets at dusk. I leave the world as I found it.

  This Is the Ritual

  Face covered against the pollution, she fumbled in her bag for a coin. The entire ritual had been tainted. ‘If I had children, I would strangle them here and now.’

  Under a metallic sky, composing music far away from the war. Valiant but vain attempts to find a common language.

  *

  Sex detached from any genital processes. He goes back to bed and lies down. She is too old for him.

  ‘Kiss me.’

  ‘I never thought my mother would become my mistress.’

  *

  I was watching television on New Year’s Eve. The demons were getting worse. (‘It’s a long trip. We are the only riders.’)

  *

  When she arrived at the Greyhound station she understood that something was different. Sound of gunfire . . . Funeral processions . . . Atrocity footage in black and white . . . ‘This is the ritual.’ She drinks coffee from a Styrofoam cup and looks over the crumpled sheet music, puts it away again.

  *

  Dusk, the lights of windows in high-rise blocks. ‘Take me there.’ A bullet shattered the pane in the lift. For a few days the girl seemed to lose her mind. ‘You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it.’ Suddenly the voice of a human being becomes a towering edifice. ‘I can’t stand it any longer.’ She turned to those who deny all taboos, all shame. ‘Again and again I am engulfed by it.’ She died miserably. Windy city outskirts.

  *

  I was drinking whiskey with two French friends. City outskirts. Smell of used condoms, excrement. Conversation revolved around sick dogs and a viable home. I thought of Claudel. (My erect cock seeking his testicles, his scrotum.) All my previous conditioning disqualifies me from what we face now. The city is a cemetery, the tramp used to say. Graffiti I saw in a Métro station: I am come to destroy the works of women. Realising then that her fears were real.

  I endure myself.

  *

  Nothing in his face reveals suicidal tendencies, she thinks. An advertisement for whiskey. The four provinces of Ireland. Flecks of snow in the sea air. They rarely speak. She has always associated sex with the sea. Our Lady of the Dark Interstellar Spaces.

  Onward. Landscapes seen through train windows. No one is expecting to be thanked. ‘I love your ferocity,’ she says. Snow in the sea air. Windy city outskirts. ‘Swear I will also be your victim.’ Smell of condoms, excrement. They travel widely. A young male lover, known to pick pockets and carry a knife. Lost a fortune. As if from a distance, sadly but gently: ‘The triumph of death and pain.’

  *

  The canteen was all but deserted. An elderly woman scribbling a mathematical equation. ‘We live in a climate of exhaustion.’ Outside the window the sky is darkening. Night after night I had passed these houses. ‘There are bodies by the pool.’ ‘Non.’

  My salary ran out in Paris. ‘I’m no longer capable of rage.’ ‘I’m still young, I need sex. It’s normal.’

  Late at night there would be older people at the tables, sometimes couples. Habit dulls intensity and marriage implies habit. ‘That was just poetry.’ Buses that don’t arrive. A café that is closed for the summer.

  ‘Needed you, Claudel.’

  *

  She fantasised about picking up a hitch-hiker. A couple of strangers, their faces seemed familiar. Windy city outskirts. Psychopaths preserved in a nature reserve. Unmade beds that smell of excrement. ‘All the same she was a good-looking woman, in a common, feral way.’

  *

  She watched him with a faint, sceptical smile. He was sitting on the bed, drinking a beer. There subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can only be partially reduced to order. He lay down. She shook her head, a faraway gaze. The transgressive side of marriage often escapes notice.

  ‘I never thought my mistress would become my mother.’

  *

  Long shadow of the corporation. In a late-night shop she buys a bottle of gin . . . Scattered factions near the border . . . That bar, always full of smoke and drunks . . . Late-evening sun . . . The estates . . . ‘We must have a formula, if only to give a façade to the void.’

  I leave the world as I found it.

  2

  The Outer Sites

  We drive in silence. Fox eyes flash in the headlights and she curses under her breath. Corroded, like everything in our marriage. ‘Answer me, you fucking bitch.’ ‘If you’re going to do it, just fucking do it.’ Moment of weakness, like many before. Both of us fantasise, both of us are tired. These streets are decomposing, he thinks drowsily. Cocktails at the weekend with the Herriots.

  *

  The orgasm came quickly, powerfully. A chubby boy in an anonymous hotel. Desert highway,
far from any need for conversation. Not creating a life, not changing for anyone. I never said I was lost. Later, the boy stands in the moonlight like a god or a phantom. ‘But you disappeared years ago!’ Wind across the plains. In the distance a coyote whines. A man devoid of hope, with no investment in the future. ‘No one lives for ever, therefore no one is alive.’ ‘A banal assertion.’ Fires burn along the mountain.

  *

  They were watching him from across the table. Hard, ugly faces, missing teeth, utter lack of warmth or sympathy – no better than cannibals. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Gone.’ His teeth on edge like acrobats. Muttered curses, glances passed among them. They get up and leave the canteen. Time of our dire need. They found the old lady by an open window that night, broken in various ways. Consign them all to the pits of hell.

  Aren’t you dead, like us? ‘Only on the inside.’