Ware The Peckham Experiment

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-78463-264-9
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Guy Ware's new novel charts a course from the 1930s onwards through the fragmentary memories of the 85 year-old Charlie, whose identical twin brother JJ has recently died. Sons of a working-class Communist family, growing up in the radical Peckham Experiment and orphaned by the Blitz, the twins emerge from the war keen to build the New Jerusalem. In 1968, JJ's ideals are rocked by the fatal collapse of a tower block his council and Charlie's development company have built. When the entire estate is demolished in 1986 JJ retires, apparently defeated. Now he is dead and Charlie, preparing for the funeral, relives their history, their family and their politics. It's a story of how we got to where we are today told in a voice - opinionated, witty, garrulous, indignant, guilty, deluded and, as the night wears on, increasingly drunken - that sucks us in to both the idealism and the corruption it depicts, leaving us wondering just where we stand.

Guy Ware is a critically-acclaimed novelist and short story writer. His work has been listed for many awards, including the Frank O'Connor International, Edge Hill and London Short Story Prize, which he won in 2018. Our Island Story is his fifth novel. Guy was born in Northampton, grew up in the Fens and lives in southeast London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ware, Guy

Leseproben

7th–8th of June, 2017

Diana fusses around behind me, plumping cushions on the sofa for no good reason, because these days I don’t make too much of a dent. She’s come to talk me out of it, I know she has, but I’m playing dumb. I don’t want her thinking I’ve any fewer marbles than I have, so I said earlier, when she arrived, Diana, darling, I said, when she let herself into the flat with the key she’s insisted I give her, just in case – she doesn’t say in case of what, but we both know – It’s always a pleasure, I said – lied – and she said: For me, too, Uncle Charlie, look, I’ve brought you some kitchen roll, and I thought: kitchen roll? What was the woman up to? But: Truly, I said, perhaps a little too quietly for her to hear, the wonders of the Orient, I said. Which was from a nativity we did here, at the Pioneer Centre, the old Peckham Experiment, when we were kids and you were Joseph – Joseph, for Christ’s sake – and it stuck in the family, the way things do, and

~KIT - CHEN - ROLL!

Diana shouts because she likes to pretend I’m deaf, or hard of hearing, she says. But: I’m not deaf, I say, just a little … overwhelmed, by your generosity. She says: You didn’t have any last time, remember? When you spilled your tea? We both know it was gin, not tea: can she not bring herself to say the word? – Unless it was brandy? Not gin? – It was not tea, anyway, although it was possible I had it in a teacup, I do that sometimes, so as not to offend her sensibilities. I say: Do you know what projection means? And she says, Speaking clearly? EEE-NUN-SEE-A-SHUN? Like the actors do? ~Very funny, I say. It means seeing your own subconscious fears and failings in another person, specifically, your analyst. And she says: Well, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? And really, what is she? Eight? – don’t say really – she doesn’t mean it, she knows I’ve never been in analysis, it’s not something the working classes do, or wasn’t, anyway, so what she means is: I’ve read books, I know big words. She means I always was a bit above myself, which can’t be a good thing, can it? So I say, You brought me kitchen roll, in case I spill my gin again and haven’t been shopping? What she’s trying to forget is that I’ve got my own slippers, my own teeth and – best of all – my own front door, even if she has a key as well, and okay, I have my own mobility scooter, too, but you can’t have everything, and I get around –

you do

– I do, which is the Beach Boys, like you didn’t know, 1964, all summer long, and so what if you were already too old for pop? Or what we called old, then, what we called pop, then, when we had no idea. So what if you were in your 30s? Because I was, too remember? ‘I Get Around’?

you always did

that’s right, I always did

All Summer Long was the LP

like you didn’t know.

I turn away from the table I use as a desk and wave the page at Diana. It’s all I’ve written up so far. She asks me what it is and I say: My script. For tomorrow. She says, It’s not a play. I say: Would you rather I … what’s the word? And anyway it is a play: I’m acting, I know exactly what the word is. I’m old, not gaga. ~What word, Uncle Charlie? ~The word I want. Would you rather I … ~Prayed? ~Good God, no. Don’t be stupid. Would you rather I … extemporized? Her face is pleasingly blank, and I’m pretty sure it’s horror, not incomprehension, which is what I’m after. She is picturing it. The risk. Given the choice, she’d rather I said nothing at all. She’s made that clear, but that’s not a choice she’s getting. I am his brother, as well as her uncle, and in this, I outrank her. If her mother – our sister, JJ’s and mine, our big sister: Angela, for fuck’s sake – if Angela were still alive, she’d outrank us all, and the entire funeral would be in her hands, which is a prospect I don’t imagine Diana would find any more comforting. If Angela were alive, she’d be, she’d be ninety-six, but more to the point, if Angela were alive the chances of her being sober would be slimmer than a flamingo’s shin. Which I suppose is why she’s not alive in any case.

Diana snatches the paper from my hand, scans it quickly and hands it back. I can’t read that, she says. There’s nothing wrong with my handwriting, not now. It didn’t help that you stole my pen, though, did it, JJ? Still, that Welsh night school bastard tortured it out of me. You might have A-levels, Charlie Jellicoe, though God knows how, maybe you bribed the examiners? No? You wouldn’t have had the money, would you? You may have A-levels, but you can’t be a QS if no one can read your numbers, now can you, Charlie Jellicoe? So my numbers are perfect, and the letters, the words, got dragged along behind, and still Diana says she can’t read what I have written – so I read it myself, aloud, editing as I go: The day my brother retired he killed a woman, not for the first time, I don’t mean a woman – well, okay, yes: a woman

she was a woman

And Diana says: You can’t say that. ~I know, I say, these days, it creates a certain … what’s the word? … a certain frisson. She’s looking blank. Come on, it’s not that hard. ~Not frisson, I say, expectation, prejudice. It makes him sound like a monster. Diana slaps at the sheet of paper in my hand and the sound is surprisingly loud. ~It’s a funeral, she says. You can’t say he killed anyone.

He did, though. And – to be honest – it wasn’t just a woman, was it? Not just any woman. Even if that really wasn’t the point. Not the second time, anyway. That’s what I was trying to get at – it’s that he never did anything else. Which isn’t right, either. I don’t mean he only ever killed people. That would be stupid, nobody ever only kills people, do they, however bad or mad they are? We all have a hinterland. Even Hitler liked to paint, Uncle Joe wrote poetry and loved his mother. Truly. Pol Pot? I don’t know. I can’t be expected to keep tabs on every homicidal dictator, now can I? Not these days – 100 minus seven equals 93, minus seven equals 86 – no, what I mean is that, afterwards, after the second time, he never did anything again, and yes, I know, he did some things, he ate and slept and no doubt wiped his arse, or had it wiped for him, towards the end. He’d meet me sometimes, for a drink: not here, in town – when he could fit it in between that charity stuff he did, towards the end, the food banks, and the woman he met there – when we both still went up to town to drink instead of doing it all at home, in bed, from teacups. But that’s not anything, really, is it? In thirty years? That’s not a life.

If the first time was tragedy, the second was surely farce? And after that, after ’86, he withdrew. For decades. W hat’s charity, after all? The last refuge of the scoundrel. Ask Profumo.

So what am I supposed to say? Tomorrow. What am I supposed to say tomorrow? At Honor Oak crematorium. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? The fire. I don’t get it myself. Maybe because there’ll be enough of that where I’m heading, if you believe. I don’t believe, of course I don’t believe. What do you take me for, Diana? All the same. What I want, when it’s my time – it is my time – I want a modest headstone – no, bugger that, an immodest headstone – in the corner of some ancient graveyard that Diana and the rest of them can feel guilty about neglecting for a year or two. Where little Dougie – Frances’ Douglas, that is, a boy after my own heart – can take his own sprogs and say: that’s your great uncle there – great-great uncle? – next to the grave of William Blake, or some such éminence grise. One of the more prominent Jellicoes, perhaps. A descendant of the first Earl Jellicoe himself. There’s enough of the buggers around, and not one of them related to us, as far as we can tell. And little Dougie’s offspring can look up at their father, tears in the corners of their bright blue eyes – eyes framed by perfect blond ringlets, I dare say – and lisp: What was great about him, Daddy? – It’s a great life if you don’t weaken – Does Dougie have children already? Does he? I think he might. I say already. He must be – what? – forty by now? Forty. Where are we? 2017 – so forty would make it 1977. That’s about right. Sunny Jim Callaghan, Provo bombs in West End pubs; battering the NF in Lewisham and Brick Lane. See? There’s nothing wrong with my memory, whatever the doctors think. Nothing. Even so. Even if I were to die tomorrow – which I won’t, but even if I did – Dougie’s nippers might be...