Try telling me that. It was curious. All Saturday I had been strung up about Rachel: would she stand me up ? what would I do when she cooled me? All Sunday – too busy being with Rachel to worry much in a general way -1 had been strung up about my spot: would it turn cancerous ? would it permanently alter the shape of my face? would it erupt over Rachel’s white shirt? All Monday, yesterday, after a bad night and, this morning, an unusually productive bronchorrhoea session, I had spent the day with the growing conviction that my lungs were on the way out, that soon I would be coughing up not just gilbert but stomach-lining, key sections of my vitals, that surely I could not live beyond a Keatsian twenty-six.
Now all these problems seemed laughable. I couldn’t imagine why I had given them even a passing thought.
And there was something that frightened me much more. If I went to the doctor’s tomorrow, and was cured by, say, the weekend, there’d be no relief from anxiety, just different anxiety. Even as the antibiotics hosed down my genitals, the mind’s bacteria would be forming new armies. I’d come up with something to get me down.
I went over to my desk, put on the lamp, and got out the note-pad entitled Certainties and Absurdities. I wrote :
ANXIETY TOP TEN.
Week ending September 26th (Last week’s positions in brackets)
(-) 1 Clap
(1) 2 Rachel
(2) 3 Big Boy
(7) 4 Loose Molar
(10) 5 Owing Norm Money
(3) 6 Bronco
(6) 7 Being Friendless
(9) 8 Insanity
(-) 9 Rotting Feet
(4) 10 Pimple in Left Nostril
Ones to watch: Having a smaller cock than DeForest; incipient boil on shoulder-blade.
Clap has taken the charts by storm, ousting Rachel after her confident two-week run. Spot in Nose is definitely following Disintegrating Toenails on its way out of the Ten – but watch out for Boil on Back!
So see you next week. Right ? Right! Goodnight.
Was this the case with everyone – everyone, that is, who wasn’t already a thalidomide baked-bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably ugly, and would therefore have pretty obvious targets for their worries ? If so, the notion of ‘having problems’ – or ‘having a harder life than most people’, or ‘having a harder life than you usually had’ -was spurious. You don’t have problems, only a capacity for feeling anxious about them, which shifts and jostles but doesn’t change.
It struck me, not for the first time, that I owed it to the world to write some kind of dissertation before my untimely death. The trouble was that I never got further than the title and dedication before I started thinking how it would be received, its reviews and my trenchant answers to them. The long-awaited open letter to The Times:
From Professor Sir Charles Highway
Sir, I should like to point out, for the last time, to Messrs Waugh, Connolly, Steiner, Leavis, Empson, Trilling, et al, that the argument of my The Meaning of Life was intended to be anti-comic in shape. The recent television publicity has done a good deal to becloud the issue…
And so on.
Beneath my bed was an unopened quarter of whisky, my liquid sleeping-pill. Were you allowed to booze before you started on the antibiotics? I wondered, as I drank it all anyway.
When drunkenness arrived I made for the bathroom. I spent a lot of time, especially at night, moving from bedroom to bathroom, from underground bathroom to underground bedroom, the hidden worlds of sleep, dreams, weariness, shame. Now where had I got all that from? Ah yes, I remembered some essay which claimed that the bedroom and the bathroom, the secret, private area of human life, was the world of ‘death … from which all human imagination comes’. (Geoffrey, by the way, didn’t have one. He said he had once crapped while a girl of his had a wash. There you go.)
I ran a bath and stripped. Lowering my jockey-pants, a razor-blade on the basin shelf caught my eye. I looked down and looked up again. There was my rig and there was the razor-blade. ‘Come on, don’t be wet, have it off,’ my mind coaxed. ‘Just lop it off, lop the bugger off. Go on. Go aarn.’