Stansted (fiction) — Philip Traylen

Of course there were brief moments of reprieve, I remember our holiday to Saint-Gilles for example, staying in a nice cottage, I remember in particular the wooden furnishings, of the wooden furnishings I remember in particular the staircase, of the elements of the staircase I remember in particular the banister, I simply hadn't thought the word banister for years, and then I remembered it, the word banister, what a stupid word, I thought, a banister, a thing you helplessly run your finger along with a sense of vague satisfaction, if not inner completion, because if you own a banister you perhaps also own about £500,000 of property, in London if you own a banister you surely own at least £1,000,000 of property, and if you feel someone else's banister it is somehow easy to start thinking it’s your banister, there’s something communal in it, the banister supports you, you lean on the banister and for a moment believe yourself to own £1,000,000 of property, at least that’s what happened to me when we arrived in Saint-Gilles, you saw me doing it of course, you saw the light playing across my face, saw a kind of liminal joy hanging around in one of my eyes the moment my hand reached out towards the banister, I wasn't even climbing the stairs, I was still firmly on the ground, and what I remember is that you didn't say something, it was the only time in the course of our four year relationship that you didn't say something, something about the banister held your tongue, the sight of me reaching out for it, the form of the banister, its magical coupling of humble polished wood with brazen financial potential, a Londoner too, it’s no surprise that you were affected by the banister in exactly the same way I was affected by the banister, I reached out for it first, just as I had entered the house first, but rather than rush towards me and try to lay claim to the experience, something about the banister imbued you, just as it imbued me, with a sense of charity, of generosity, we were both of us pacified, for a moment, by that banister, I looked at you and there was no hate to be found, just the realisation that some people have banisters and other people don’t, but without anger, and on this eerily solid foundation we passed several pleasant days, looking at the flamingos in the water, walking past the wine shops and smelling the wine, exchanging glances with the aproned proprietors, walking up and down the staircase, passing each other on the stairs, and taking turns to make eggs benedict, and then omelettes for lunch, and some other kind of luxurious egg based concept dish in the evenings, before slipping into a mutual sleep, it seemed like it was one sleep we were sleeping, me at one end and you at the other, like carrying a bookshelf, we’d finally found something we could genuinely collaborate on, namely falling asleep, something about the banister had welded us together, for three or perhaps four very pleasant days, looking up at the pinkish skies, looking out across the pinkish waters, until the moment we returned, and of course it might as well have never happened, once we got to Stansted airport, there isn’t a worse place on earth, not that it matters, than Stansted airport, everything about Stansted airport has been carefully designed to cause me pain, and to cause you pain, but in such a way, in such a ratio, as to prevent us from empathising with each other’s pain, when I look at you at Stansted airport and see you suffering I am irritated, I think you’re weak, that you have allowed Stansted airport to get to you despite the two hour flight, during which you could have been preparing yourself, raising at least a minimal internal defence against the imminent Stansted airport pain, instead it has sliced right through you, the fact I made no attempt to prepare myself doesn’t help, in fact it only adds to my bitterness, or to your bitterness, it’s hard to tell, the bitterness could be seen, from a certain perspective, to have been shared between us in approximately equal doses, but it doesn’t feel like this at the time, my bitterness is absolutely rock solid but this doesn’t prevent me from feeling suddenly – bitterly – protective over my bitterness when I look over at you, in that terribly cute brown hoodie from earlier, that you love to tie up the strings of, it’s a good look, the monastic implication certainly does you no harm, but when I see how bitter you are I feel affronted, I feel that my bitterness is at risk of being subsumed in your, more enormous, bitterness, that you bear with such scandalous equanimity, the same equanimity with which you wear your monkish hoodie, which previously I felt such an overwhelming affection for, I’d have been happy if it was the only item of clothing on earth, I’d have been happy if you wore it permanently, if you never took it off, never showered, I’d even have been happy, I think, if you had disappeared into it, I can’t say for certain that I would have intervened if it had started to consume you, to eat you up, your brown Uniqlo hoodie, but that doesn’t matter anymore, eight hours earlier you were looking, I was looking, at a literal flamingo, how the mighty have fallen, as they always will, it’s written in about half of all books, that when you feel good, it doesn’t matter, because soon you’ll feel bad, soon you’ll be in Stansted airport, or some historical precursor or otherwise analogous space, the fact is that wherever you go sooner or later you’re going to be back in Stansted airport, which like a multi-stage military disinfection process strips you of anything good, as soon as we arrive in Stansted airport we’re both struck down by the same vision, of six months of bodily and mental pain, pain as mental as it was physical, as physical as it was mental, as mine as it was yours, as yours as it was mine, belonging completely to me, according to me, belonging completely to you, according to you, while you, according to you, were absorbing, internalising, dealing with, the actual pain, I was basking in a fake pain, a commercialised pain, a piña colada pain, you said, that could only exist because the real pain had already been absorbed into you, and although I was prepared to acknowledge that now and then certain mental and physical pains were, in some quantity, suffered by you, I was always convinced that the meaning of the pain belonged to me, no doubt you were aware that I thought this, because I kept repeating it, I couldn’t help myself, whispering to myself, the pain is mine, and you had to deal with this, but naturally you couldn’t deal with this, looking back on the four years we spent shuttling from one country to another, or spending six months in a room, earning money incredibly slowly, then spending it incredibly quickly, almost instantly, all the while neither one of us ever dealt with the smallest thing, the verb to deal with is really one of the most outrageous affronts of the English language, a language generally very apt to misdescribe things, a language designed to confuse and disorient anyone who tries to use it, but all the same what certainly doesn’t help is trying to learn another language, you had been trying, or perhaps I should say, she had being trying, seemingly very hard, I’ve no idea how hard she was actually trying but it certainly seemed to me at the time that she was trying very hard, perhaps as hard as she could, under the circumstances, to learn Norwegian, believing that however bad it was, however inaccurately and inopportunely the Norwegian language described even the most simple thing, it couldn’t approximate to the descriptive inaptitude of English, but what she discovered after a year or two of intensive study was that, in the end, the Norwegian language was very similar to the English language, while the English language might, all things considered, be very slightly worse than the Norwegian language, less descriptively apt in the majority of contexts, in the grand scheme of things they were equally useless, and moreover when she spoke the Norwegian language, however well she spoke it, as several Norwegians informed her, it sounded just like someone speaking the English language, albeit in Norwegian, and anyway she could never escape from her face, or her body, or her clothing, or her mannerisms, or her ideas, or her decisions, or anything actually, it was all English, as a whole series of Norwegian men carefully informed her , in their typically direct and soft spoken way, the only way to become more English, they intimated to her, all speaking in a dispiritingly Knausgaardian way, the quotient of directness and soft-spokenness barely varying between them, is by trying to become less English, and my situation was similar enough, the only difference being that my efforts had been directed towards the Bulgarian language, in fact we had been studying together, I had my corner of the room, laid out as I liked it, packed to the rafters with glass bottles from Ikea, all full of water, because I’d read that if you want to study a language, what you need to have first and foremost is a lot of drinking water, high quality drinking water if possible, you need to have such bottles at the very least just lying around, if not actually being drunk, and anyway it was the only way I could afford to furnish a room in London, other than by simply stealing things, but the truth is that good, hard-wearing furniture is difficult to steal, of course bad furniture, especially in London, is freely available everywhere, London is a city basically drenched in bad furniture, some mornings it seems the city has undergone a long hard rain of bad furniture, people with even the slightest disposable income, just a couple of hundred pounds a month surplus to requirements, feel compelled to buy bad furniture as soon as possible, perhaps under the illusion that it might by some freak occurrence turn out be good furniture, but it never does, and they leave it outside their houses, or rather outside their parts of their houses, they’re only able to rent a tiny part of a house and in their despair at this interminable situation they spend any savings they manage to accumulate on bad furniture, which within thirty days they’ve put out on the street, all it does is fill up space, they have so little space that it could only make sense to fill it with good furniture, which they can neither afford, nor, as I have mentioned, reliably steal, my solution to this problem was to fill my part of the room with bottles of luxury water, there I was, sitting among them, studying a certain aspect of the Bulgarian language, with a certain amount of enthusiasm, and she adjacent, studying an aspect of the Norwegian language, so things went for a year or two, in retrospect there was something pleasantly subdued about those years of intense and fruitless study, since after all the Bulgarian language and Norwegian language are quite different, mutually unintelligible at least, and immersed in the peculiarities of each we found it easier than otherwise to, at least at times, leave each other alone, it could almost be said that we respected each other during those years, perhaps we were just respecting ourselves, but with the net result that we developed an implicit respect of each other’s mental rhythms, I’d know that she’d be very focused from three to six in the afternoon and try to comport myself accordingly, I wouldn’t shout anything or bang or snap anything, or otherwise make a nuisance of myself, as I normally would have during those afternoon hours, since if I did she would surely be snapping twigs in my face from six through to nine, but it wasn’t a long term solution, as I’ve said a host of Norwegian men had already made this clear, no one, in my experience, speaks with more clarity than a Norwegian man, I suppose it’s because their country is so long, there’s no point beating around the bush in a long country like Norway, whereas the opposite holds true in a round country, like Ireland, say, or more to the point, Bulgaria, but in the end all languages have the same function, communication, or the total failure of communication, depending on what you’re using them for, and it was becoming increasingly plain that what we really needed was just to become someone else, to both become, at the same time, but in completely different directions, someone else, previous generations have successfully relied on the old methods of betrayal, like messing around with a friend, but for our generation that isn’t enough, you have to become someone else, become unrecognisably different, become an animal, only by full on metempsychosis of the soul is it possible, these days, to move on from a relationship, the truth is every word I learned in Bulgarian reminded me more of her, and of her studies of Norwegian, it didn’t help that she was always only about two metres away from me, in the ‘Norwegian quarter’ of our room, the fact I didn’t know a word of Norwegian didn’t help me either, it makes no difference whether you understand what someone is saying, you communicate by your head, by your face, by your head being on your body, and your face being on your head, and with the whole assemblage being in the room together, or not, you are either in a room with someone or you’re not, and that’s all communication amounts to, in short it was absolutely clear that no one was going to move on from our relationship, we were trapped in the foregone conclusion of each other’s bodies, the only thing for it was to somehow insert my soul, the reflective part of me, into an animal, and then just stay there, not a passing animal, but an animal several oceans away from her, with that distance in place surely things would start to feel different, the memory of our sexual congress wouldn’t be appropriate inside the soul of a duck or a sparrow, see that’s how capitalism works, whatever solution is least possible, that’s the one you start to think about, the less possible it is, the more you think about it, you’re forced into a lifelong preoccupation with the impossible as bit by bit the possible is slowly removed, slips out of your grasp, these days you can’t even leave a room any more, not properly, because the outside just feels like another room, there’s nowhere you can go and sit and moan, you can’t engage in a formal act of moaning any more, you have to stay in whatever relationship you’re already in, there being no moaning rooms, no moaning places, available, the only place where I could feasibly moan, I felt, was a room I had once seen on booking.com, off the coast of Iceland, costing about £300/night, where you could look out at the melting glacial landscape, feel your contribution in your very bones, yes, that’s what I remember reading in the reviews, I’d never known my grief, someone said, until I came here, my grief has always been a stranger to me but it was waiting for me right here, finally some space opened up, that’s what they said on the booking.com reviews, but it needed to be booked months in advance, there’s no chance I’d have the presence of mind to arrange it, or the money to pay for it, and moreover I didn’t really want to, what I wanted was to look at the image of the glacier on booking.com, looking at it gave me a futural insight into my grief, I knew what it would be like to leave her behind when I looked at the million pound Icelandic glacier, when your hand is on the door handle, and you’re about to finally go somewhere, that’s what my eyes felt like on the booking.com page for the glacier hotel, eventually I started having more practical thoughts, I burned off my hunger for the unlikely by staring long and hard at the booking.com image, by constantly checking it, by studying the updated images, showing progress of melt, etc., they were adding increasingly scientific diagrams to their booking.com images, alongside updated images of their guests, who all seemed somehow eaten away, there was something decidedly gothic about the guests at the glacier hotel, despite their colourful windcheaters they all looked like they had come here for some terrible reason, but the truth is that you can’t solve things by looking at them, all looking does is deepen your existing feeling, grief or love, whatever it is, looking only deepens and widens it, but a point of crisis had been reached, what had we been doing, for the past two or three years, except slowly becoming furniture, furniture sometimes lit up by fleeting erotic sentiment, that we then pretended to quench, we enjoyed showing off our fake desire quenching skills, which were quite in keeping, I should say, with the mood of the time, there can’t have been a time in history when more people were trying to quench their desires, or advising others to do so, it was considered the only way to achieve lasting peace, I remember these words being thrown around in every imaginable context, not only at yoga but on Radio 4, at the canteen, at the bus stop, everyone wanted to know how far you had come in your journey, first stop, quenching desires, last stop, lasting peace, and we’d willingly enough joined in, until we discovered that the only thing worse than having desires is having no desires.

Of course there’s always literature, one thing you’re sure to get in any somewhat functional capitalist state is a ready supply of classic literature, in new and snazzy editions, for about the price of going for a walk, and it occurred to me that perhaps we could read some books, it took me a while to get her attention but eventually I did, I’ve no doubt she was going through a similar enough thought cycle, was similarly infatuated with impossible solutions, we both, it seemed, had dedicated large parts of our brains to the impossible, and it was only very occasionally, like a lunar eclipse, that we’d be able to talk about anything that might actually happen, occasionally one of us would pass through a brief pragmatic phase but almost always it would be cancelled by the other, who would ‘coincidentally’ have an ongoing obsession with something completely impossible, at any given time at least one of us would have an ongoing preoccupation with hardcore predictive astrology, even though it had nothing to say about relationships “after the fact”, astrology only works in the early stages of a relationship, when it has no reality to compete with, but we had an excess of reality, which we’d been slowly building up over the years, and which despite our efforts only expanded in scale and scope, but eventually, with the planets sufficiently aligned, we managed to have a discussion regarding what book we should buy, it was a typically ridiculous December evening, the wind swashing around in the street like it had lost its only child, I put my book down first, on a wooden stool, in a gesture of goodwill, and a little later her book fell to the ground, she let it slip, perhaps a little dramatically, out of her hand, of course I couldn’t help staring at its upended form, but I was in no mood to judge, at that point I’d even stopped judging myself, which after all is the training ground for all external judgements, I was either going to fall asleep for a year or read a book, I thought, and how could I fall asleep for a year except by dying, luckily she had started speaking, it was always an event when she opened her mouth, the light in the room seemed different, not brighter or darker but carrying a different meaning, clearer but stranger, perhaps a little heavier, I don’t know, perhaps because I didn’t care, but she started talking about prison literature, in all the time we’d been together she had not once mentioned prison or literature and now she was talking, ceaselessly, about prison literature, she explained that all true writing necessarily takes place in prison, only in the pressure cooker of four stone walls, she said, does any true writing happen, if only all the so-called writers of our time were put in prison, she said, in different prisons, because the more writers talk to each other the less truthful they become, if the government would only design several tiny prisons, and move the writers into them, very suddenly, with no warning, and then leave them there, only a year or two would do it, and if they would then send me the results, in a sealed envelope, but thankfully there’s no need, she said, smiling, because it all already exists, it’s all been done, she said, and she began to list of examples of classic prison literature, she started teaching me, ad-lib, a remarkable lesson on the development of prison literature, eventually we ordered two copies of Memoirs of the House of the Dead by F. Dostoevsky, via Amazon Prime, in latest Penguin Classics edition, new and untouched, £16 with free next day delivery, as it happened ordering that book was the only good decision we’ve ever made, above all because Dostoevsky had no interest in quenching anything, instead he was busy tracing his desires outwards, following them to infinity, from the first page on he was searching for an exit, not from prison but from himself, an exit named love, once you’ve been forced into the closest imaginable proximity with your fellow humans, and if you’re Dostoevsky, you never turn back, you make the limit the norm and thereby survive it, I could feel him trying to crawl out of himself in every sentence, and again in the next sentence, to see how far he could go, he was trying to squeeze his soul out of his body by turning up the pressure therein to cosmic levels, the only way to protect yourself from what you love is by wanting more of it, instead of quenching your desires, he seemed to be saying, you need to squeeze them as hard as possible, and see what comes out, and it seemed so incredibly sensible, after all every time I looked over at you, sitting cross-legged in the Norwegian quarter of our room, any desire that I’d successfully quenched in the previous few minutes was immediately unquenched, in the light of your eyes, in your mouth, in your nose, it made no difference where I looked, each part of you implied every other, only when you live with someone do you confront their biological cohesion, the fact they have arms, legs, a mouth, a stomach, all interconnected into an overwhelming oneness that you can do nothing about, once you’ve seen the whole of a person you can’t ever forget and you can’t go outside either, the door feels locked, even if you somehow pass through it makes no difference, someone once said that the human body is a picture of the human soul, and they weren’t lying, but they didn’t say what to do about it, it’s always that way with Germans, they know what the problem is but they refuse to solve it, but Dostoevsky didn’t care what the problem was, or the solution, at least not in that particular work, you’re responsible for everything that happens, and everything that doesn’t happen, that’s what he seemed to be saying, don’t quench, squeeze, I thought, again, as I turned the final page and looked over to you, to see how you were handling it, you gave nothing away, simply sat stoically with your cup of tea, filled and re-filled, re-filled and filled, often with the same bag in, until it was simply a cup of hot water, nothing more, I suppose that’s how you liked it but I’ve no idea, perhaps you had simply left your head at that point, or perhaps it was the only thing keeping you in there, the searing heat of just boiled water, my God, I thought, as I looked at him, there on the cover, with that teary, psychological look in his eyes, if there was ever a man who understood what really goes on at Stansted airport, here he lies.

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Philip Traylen is a British writer. He writes regularly at https://oldoldoldoldnew.substack.com. Poetry/fiction in Soft Union, Hobart, Expat Press, Spectra.