Another Cheek

"He seldom spoke."

A Most Peculiar Man, Simon and Garfunkel








Music:

Scriabin: Sonata No. 3, Mv. III
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Major, Mv. II

Transcript

Another Cheek

Roger is a creature of habit and doesn’t like to talk. He is a man with a weathered, introverted, over-serious face which appears much older than his early middle age. He shuffles along the street and then turns into a pebbly lane. The expressionless face is half-deliberate, an attempt to conceal what he is, what he is thinking, what he is feeling. But every detail of him tells, divulges what he is to the world, to those who pass him. He mutters softly to himself as he walks in the direction of Poppyseed. His gait is not fluid, adaptable; he walks with a withheld uniformity. His arms don’t swing, his steps are quite slight. He likes his body to be as symmetrical as possible at all times, he likes equidistance between his torso and his limbs, the main body of the machine and the out-flung extremities, breakable he thinks, he feels as though they will drift off and become entangled with the world if he doesn’t keep them close, he fears he will lose purchase on them if he does not attend closely and manage their pattern, keep their swing and sally from getting too wild. He has a lot to communicate but the only auditor he trusts is himself; that is why he talks to himself, voicing the babbling brook of his thoughts. 

There are nice houses along this lane, attractive fences, flowers, trees, polished cars in the drives. Roger opens the kissing gate and passes through the squeeze with a little bit of difficulty. He is gaining weight. The kissing gate closes behind him with a creak. He approaches the train-crossing with an air of something like liturgy. There is something sacred in this gentle gradient, leading down to that vehicular brink, red with visual warnings, bold-black with worded warnings. Roger says them to himself as soon as they are in view. He traces the lettered squiggles of the words in the air, and even the stacked concentricity of the three lights, with his fingers.       

He grows a little wide-eyed as his eyes fix upon the tracks. He loves the extent, the width; not the sleeper-width, but the long breadth, the geometric rush into the distance either way, into near infinity, of the tracks. He stands on this brink, listening to the tense quiet. Electricity fizzes softly. He feels wonder, awe at the symmetrical span of these two vast arms. The steel squeals with light-pricks, and glimmers, even on overcast days like these. On hot days, the polished finish of the tracks, so well-trod with wheels, forms a kind of mirage in the distance and quivers. Then, there begins to gather in the ground beneath him a feeling of great force, a mounting tremor of potentiality. Something is about to happen: something is happening. A pupil is dilating on the horizon. The train is coming. The crescendo of that great, hellish screech follows promptly. It’s an indescribable wail, a choric, weighted, metal cacophony. With the physics of the wind and track beneath, the sound alters. Peripheral, waiting, watching, Roger bares his cheek: he knows from experience, from his religious love of trains, that the heavy hurry, the fast proximate rush, will dance airily upon his cheek. It is his reason for shaving, though he hates shaving. Beards mask, in his mind, they pad the cheek against sensation, against sympathetic touch. The train glides grounded-ly in.      

The train hurries off into the distance, sweeping across the crossing with tremendous arrogance. Everything has occurred, Roger thinks, precisely according to his mental mapping of it, his systematic accounting of it. Everything has occurred correctly; the train has been co-operative, a dream collaborator in ritual. But no-one knows this, no-one knows that Roger thinks like this. He doesn’t have the desire for anyone to find out these things about him. He doesn’t like to talk, but he likes to think. He will go to considerable lengths to avoid talking, to anyone but himself that is. His mornings in the café, his evenings in the pub, are all wordless. People look at him and think him glum, morose. But he isn’t those things, glum, morose. In fact, he’s quite content. He isn’t a map, he can’t be navigated like other people. He’s an enigma, a cache sheltering many more secrets, more complex secrets, than most people realise. 

Leaving behind the initial scenes, he ventures on to new ones, suddenly finding himself a part of them, large, awkward, alien, benign. He patiently investigates the world for a way of belonging to it. He turns left, crests the usual rise. Ascending, he smells the rosemary and willow herb (the buddleia in the summer months) sooner than most are able. He turns another corner and descends towards town. The path is bordered in yew. 

There is a tree the council are required to cut down for reasons of irrigational safety. With their long, crooked knuckles, their invasive stab upwards in earth, the roots are disrupting the plumbing of the nearby houses. Certain people in the village have mounted a protest: STOP THE CHOP. The bannered emblem of their minute movement is a stout, profiled tree stump in silhouette; big inky tear drops fall in a rain from the sky; and the depicted scene is framed within and foregrounded by an enormous red X, like a weird fence. Printed beneath, all capitals: STOP. THE. CHOP. 

The actual tree itself is hung with silken streamers of pea green. Some people have offered flowers, votive candles and votive cards. A visitor to the town recently passed by the busily accoutred tree and assumed it was a memorial for a dead child, an accident spot. Stupid place to get hit by a car, the visitor thought. At night, a little battery-powered projector with a variety of light/colour filters projects various stained-glass luminosities onto the trunk. Children have been forced to draw pictures of they and their families standing with little candour under the shelter of the tree, smiling. In some of these drawings, even the tree itself has sprouted human features and, like the rictus stick family, is smiling, with them. The drawings have been sellotaped, in landscape, to the tree. They are creepy. When it rains, the colours will cry.    

            Today, a chain of protestors in broccoli-toned onesies imprison the broad, bark-black trunk of the not-yet-felled tree. A woman in a high-visibility jacket and a hard-hat of ecological green lurches forth with a clipboard each time somebody passes. She fills the air with the general babble of her cause. Some stop, enquire. Most wave her away wearily. Roger is coming around the bend. He finds himself half-way up the long, gradual slope of the street. He is suddenly terrified of the stretch of street lower down on which she stands, barking and railing, just a few feet in front of the heavily adorned tree. He knows that she will advance when he passes, she will want to speak to him, the clipboard is already primed, hungry for signatures, cocked like an assault weapon. He tries to plot a way to Poppyseed, his usual café, that will enable him to evade her solicitation. But he can’t think of one. So, he runs, half-runs. He sets off at a slow, bothered, moderate running pace, and runs past her. The woman with the clipboard is confused at first. Then her face melts with pity, and her petition is gone, briefly, from her mind. Approaching the pretty façade, with the awnings, Roger utters his one brief giggle of the day. Pop-pop-PoppeeeeSeeeeeed. He likes the word Poppyseed. 

In the café, there’s a queue and this causes Roger anxiety. It’s not the standing in the queue he minds, it’s the wait. He wants to get it all over with but he’s forced to stand in a state of apprehension, part of that slow approach to the counter. Person by person, body by body he edges closer towards the woman on the till, behind the counter, the owner, a nice lady. She works with dextrous speed. In an ideal world she’d have an assistant but this is no such world. (Her daughter helps out when she can but the time between these occasions is growing longer and longer). 

She deals with her customers briskly, in curt, fast, fluent exchanges. It’s a polished, courteous hurry which Roger finds comforting, though he isn’t able to articulate this. In his dealings with her, which are regular, he has hardly to say anything. In the transaction, there isn’t the time for one of those usual, dreaded gaps to open. In normal, more casual conversation, a sort of space inevitably dilates, within which Roger becomes acutely aware of his own silence, his own impotence, and feels mortified. Sometimes people trap him: they just don’t allow him to walk away. 

In this case, in Poppyseed, the man behind Roger is impatient. He doesn’t need to say anything to make this known, it is plain in his manner, and in his face. The woman currently being served notices that there’s a miniscule speck of something on the crockery. She asks the owner behind the counter to remake the order. The owner calmly acquiesces. She has been doing this for a long time. Once she might have reacted defensively. Now there’s a coolness to her efficiency, she is unimpulsive, every action is considered, she plots her moves like a skilled chess-player. The tea is remade but in her haste, the owner has nicked the bag and the crushed tea-leaves are seeping into the tea. There’s something about the woman’s confidence, her easiness with her own demands which grates. She isn’t an entitled person but she exudes, on this occasion, such an air, because the truth is that she is entitled to a third tea. But just a hint of embarrassment, a hint of self-effacement, the tiniest offering of humour, or the slightest subtraction from her own status would go a long way. Naturally, the man behind Roger is getting angry. He looks around for someone to share an eyeroll with. Roger fixes his gaze in front of him as the woman behind the counter makes tea a third time and at last the queue shifts on and the next customer’s order is taken. 

Finally, Roger is at the front. The woman recognises him and is very polite, though she is a little weary, a little flustered by the two tiny slip-ups that came before. This bit of the day is probably the most challenging for Roger. He has to think quite carefully about what he’s going to do before he does it. He has to prepare his fingers. The woman has too many customers to remember Roger’s usual order, neural pathways don’t form in her mind between faces and habitual orders with the same ease they used. Roger can feel the tension in the room, the greenhouse humidity and heat produced by its flustered parties. Somehow the silent ire in the man behind Roger heavies him. Roger feels this heaviness behind him, as he begins to stammer out his order. He even enjoys the precision required. Drink, blend, size, have-in or takeaway. He says it aloud but almost completely unintelligibly. He doesn’t say Please and Thank you but he is not reproached for this. He communicates everything successfully by pointing to it on the laminated menu, flat on the counter. 

The order is received. Roger may not possess emotional insight, but the physiology of faces is startlingly and ever apparent to him. Faces look creased to him, boldly veined with their worry or sadness or anger. They bear their flower-centres at him, tallow, and loud like the powdery space of earth in which the Stop-The-Chop tree stands, rough with visible tree-roots. He treats human faces, their miscellany and many, with a fox-like wariness. He knows that they aren’t dangerous, that they mean him no harm, but they still appear frightening nonetheless, and seem to belong to another species whose ways he has not yet troubleshooted, sussed. 

He knows how to count money but doesn’t feel able to let go of it without a ritual overcarefulness. He has to count it three times before he is satisfied that the money is ready to make the journey from the countertop to the till, from the hard surface where the coins incur their metallic splash into tangibility, to the slots where they are safely stowed. The vari-sectioned tray jumps suddenly out from the cash-register. 

Finally, it is too much. Just as Roger begins slowly counting the cost of his regular mocha-latte (£3.35) for a second time, the man behind him snaps. Roger knows that £3.35 (and a little bit more) is there on the counter before him, division clearly made between this amount and the ninety pence excess that came out of his pocket. To satisfy himself that they are all veritably there, his fingers have to press very hard into each coin as he counts it. If he does not do this the coins are liable to get up and walk away, to scuttle off like little disc-bodied spiders. That or there takes place an odd erasure in Roger’s mind: coins he knows he’s counted have simply never been counted. The monarch’s engraved head imprints into the ball of his right-hand index finger, in a little shape like a small island on a map. He is nearly satisfied. He has made sure that three whole pounds, the two pound coins, and the fifty, and the twenty, and the second twenty, and the ten pence piece that make them up are all permanent, intransient, of substance not hallucination. His slowness isn’t to allow himself the time to do the requisite mental arithmetic, it’s a space in which he’s probing not thinking, verifying the evidence, its palpability. It’s as Roger turns his attention to the 35p (he wants to make it up out of what he has- he hates to give anything more than the correct amount, receive change)- that the man says:

“You can talk, you know?”

This cocks the owner’s head as she makes the coffee. Roger is silent, hoping the man will back off. Of course, his silence only provokes the man. It’s a further dose of the thing the man dislikes.

“Hello…? You can talk, you know? Please, thank you, remember them…?” he says again.

No response. The man shakes his head and sighs, this all entangled with a withering mutter of “Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I don’t know…”

The owner steps tactfully in, the coffee made.

“With you in just a moment, sir., I’m sorry about the wait.”

“Where’s your assistant?” he says, a little shortly. The woman doesn’t recognise the man but she infers from this that he’s been into Poppyseed before, that he’s come in on one or two occasions when she’s been partnered by her daughter. She makes a mental note to ring or text her daughter, to try and get in touch for a second time this week. Where is she, indeed, the owner wonders with the man.

“Too much homework,” she invents.

The man tuts, seeming a little placated. Roger, too, is pacified by this redirection of the man’s attention from him to the owner. In Roger’s head, she is “the lady”. He likes the daises on her apron, he likes the way her breasts show in her apron. 

The ribbon of the voice in the air is so tangible to Roger that he can look down and follow it. For these last moments, the man’s voice, like a laser, like a horizontal stalagmite of molten heat, has been curving safely around Roger. But the man suddenly refocuses on Roger’s activities, just as Roger is finger-trotting across the last of the money he owes. In his head, the man thinks of Roger as “the retard”. The lady is very patient, lets Roger do what he needs to do. She permits the ritual, believing that Roger’s right to enact it is greater than her right to abort it. She doesn’t hurry him, or tell him what to do (just give us that pound there, love, and I’ll give you change for it) like she did the first time. She was somehow able to understand the blank, anxious stare that he gave her, the eerie look of contempt. She learned from it. She is aware of the inconvenience of the ritual and sits inside it, planting herself firmly within it, loyal to it, counting on the understanding and patience of the other people in the queue. The bell: someone enters the shop, joins the queue. The man behind Roger fixes his eyes upon the counter in disbelief, he looks up at the owner with a pallor equally incredulous, and finally, in frustration, he barks, sharply:

“For Chrissake, just give her that 50p there. We’ve been made to wait long enough already!”

“Leave him alone,” the owner snaps. 

“I’ve been standing here for nearly ten minutes,” he says. No-one around him is in possession of the relevant facts so they take his word for it. An old man looks up from his newspaper, squints.

“Pipe down and be patient or you can get out,” the owner says.

“Unbelievable,” the man utters, shaking his head. 

In all of this, Roger is unnervingly absent. His face hovers in the air as if disembodied.

The man manages to remain calm. The anger in men with anger issues is fed by outbursts, it grows greedy for more and greater, grander. In the instance of this man, the pressure is released by his little outburst and he is able to remain silent until its his turn. He apologises to the owner behind the counter. It doesn’t occur to him to apologise to Roger. But it doesn’t matter. In any case, Roger wouldn’t have heard the apology, he wouldn’t have stayed to hear it; if, by some miracle he had, he wouldn’t have known what to do with it, how to answer it, how to feel consoled by it. He has already fled the building with his coffee, marching away with a faint feeling of victory in his body, the feeling of something accomplished. 

He doesn’t like to drink-in. The walls are deceptive in that building, in most buildings that are not his house. They inch forward, when he’s not looking, they close in. He is going to take his mocha-latte back to his house and sit in his favourite spot in his favourite room and drink it, very very slowly. He resumes walking, beginning on the way by which he came. Even though he’d prefer to avoid the Stop-The-Chop people, of whom there are even more now, it is paramount to him that he keep his journey symmetrical. Nothing can disrupt his sturdiness in this, his intention to remain faithful to the palindrome he purposed to weave early that morning the very instant that he stepped out into the world and shut the front-door behind him.

At night, Roger has a very strange dream. The dream stirs in its hole, like a creature in darkness. It creeps from its warren, steals over him. He lies horizontal. The first perfume, the first notes of aura come upon him as soon as he shuts his eyes, as soon as they fall shut, by about one PM. The dream has a voice which wants to be heard. It is an eager dream and tells its story economically. Roger recognises where he is in the dream. He is approaching the train-crossing. There is nothing disquieting in this. It makes perfect sense to him to dream about trains. What he finds unnerving is the way he feels: he feels like somebody else. He is unable to attribute the concept of himself, of “me”, to the point of view, whoever it is, seeing unseen, seeing from behind the mask, who walks and breathes behind the gaze, the one to whom the gaze belongs. He approaches the train-crossing and he knows, whoever he is in the dream, walking, that he possesses the expertise or the past experience or the instinctual understanding to know that a train is coming. He doesn’t know how he knows but he knows that he knows: a train is coming. Then he hears what he thinks is laughter. It’s not laughter. He moves forward, the bramble bushes obscure what’s there. He moves forward. He sees what’s there. There’s a woman on the tracks. She’s lying down. She’s not laughing. She’s chained, bound, tied, manacled somehow to the track. There’s an eerie calm. Jackdaws flap away, perfectly black against the clouded sky. Other birds, chaffinches, sparrows, titter nervously and swiftly scatter. The horn wails. It ceases about a second prematurely. The dream train-horn is a shorter sound than the one in real life, amazing how much less musical it is, abruptly curtailed like that. Roger sees the woman and he hears the horn and he knows the train is coming and he knows that he is there and knows where he is standing. He finds himself walking forward. He would normally wait, stand, stand back, admire the clunking freight, the rush, coach after coach, of the train. He can’t read the woman’s face. She has ginger hair, strawberry blonde. It is creased with alarming laughter, it is so bright with emotion that it hurts to look at. With his approach, his shadow falls across her. He bends down beside her. He investigates the binding, whatever chain or cuff or fetter or cord connects this woman to the tracks. But he can’t make any sense of it. This bothers him more than the fact that he can’t make any sense of why she’s there. He begins to moan low, long, animal moans of panic, of frustration. He rocks back and forth. She isn’t afraid of him. Still on the tracks, he knows the train is coming but he feels exquisitely empty of fear. In a remarkable, all enveloping, quick, black movement, he takes the woman’s shoulders in his arms. Then, his great, desperate hug becomes a clasp. He is clasping her two cheeks in his two hands. He takes hold of the back of her head, the long, ruddy hair streaming behind over his hand. He turns her head, turning her left cheek towards him so she’s profiled and he’s facing her profile head-on. He presses the left of her two bright, pale cheeks against his right cheek. He holds her cheek against his own. She is cold. The train arrives, or begins to arrive, the horn screams the scream of the driver in the driver’s seat as he recognises what’s ahead of him. The last thing Roger sees is the flat, wasp-like face of the train, and in one of the eye-like windows the eyes in the driver’s face like moons, his entire face wide in anguish and fright.

Roger wakes up. Sitting up in bed, he listens, hard. He tries to listen in closer, deeper, tries to become an enormous ear, quite still, feigning sleep in the earth but listening, hearing, receiving everything. He’d like to hear a train. When the train crosses the crossing having blown its horn just before, there is nowhere in the village that it can’t be heard. But, of course, it’s deep into the night, and the last train passed through hours ago. There’s breeze. The trees and bushes break the wind into voice by being there when it blows. They fill its endless vowel with consonants. For some reason, Roger thinks of STOP THE CHOP, the tree hung with silk, the woman with the clipboard. The children’s drawings. And then he thinks of the nasty man in Poppyseed, and how much he likes saying the word Poppyseed, and the nice lady behind the counter.