An Old Man

"Hope there's someone to take care of me when I die"

Anthony and the Johnsons

Transcript

An Old Man

Clarence Key was an old man. He was a very old man. His eighty-seventh birthday was rapidly approaching. His wife, Leanne, had been dead for nine years. So, he lived alone. Sometimes, it seemed that Clarence was a sad old man; others, he seemed an unusually happy old man. On occasion, he even experienced joy, jubilance. He had expected his wife to outlive him. Of the two of them, he had done most of the smoking, and drinking, and meat-eating, and aging. So, he had naturally assumed that he would be the one to do most of the dying, the first to do the dying at any rate. This notion had never bothered him, that his spouse would survive him. It had been his wish to go first; he had never been able to make sense of a life without his wife. But, as things turned out, Leanne had been the first to die. Sometimes, before Clarence woke up, in the bed where he was the only sleeper, he would have this very palpable sense that there was someone with him, someone beside him in the bed. And he wouldn’t know who it was at first. The face was turned away from him and he believed the figure was a stranger. Morning would break, and Clarence would begin to recognise the figure beside him, this mound of back and hair. He would recognise the scent as Leanne’s, and he would find himself inching towards her, full of a desire to turn her over and see her face, desperate to view and kiss the sweet, confirming, sleeping features. But he would always wake up before he reached her, and he would come to a dazed, imperfect consciousness, finding himself alone, in the bed where he used to sleep partnered by his wife, a solitary survivor. 

            A week before his eighty-seventh birthday, something very odd happened, something that was impossible to explain rationally. It was difficult for Clarence to determine what was happening, though he knew something was happening, or had happened; others, those outside him, saw evidence of no untoward occurrence at all. But the fact was that that the world started to see Clarence differently to how it had before. People no longer saw an old man, a male human being in the last years of his life, slowly bowing out of existence. Apparently, they saw something else. As he quickly found out, different sorts of people reacted differently to what they saw.  

Now, when Clarence sat on a park bench, children did not see an old man sitting on that bench. But they treated him with the same quality of indifference. From most women, he elicited the same quality of polite tolerance. Occasionally, a young woman would linger by him, by his usual spot on the usual bench in the park, or if they passed him in the street- and they might compliment his hair, or his top. He infrequently received remarks and enquiries of this sort in the usual hospitality establishments he visited, at the counter for example, if it was a young female barista or cashier serving him. Where did you get that blouse? And Clarence would look back blankly at the grin and the big, uncluttered eyes, and croak in his old man’s voice: I don’t know. What blouse? He wasn’t wearing a blouse. He saw only chequered shirts, pullover, braced trousers. To glowing praise about his hair, questions about shampoo and conditioner he was exceptionally clueless. For about twenty years he hadn’t had any hair. All he had, pushing eighty-seven, were a few white wisps at the back. That’s what he thought anyway. 

            These encounters were extremely baffling at first. He wondered if he was losing his sanity and decided to seek the advice of his doctor. He was taking a variety of medications, including Beta Blockers and Omeprazole for gastrointestinal reflux, and so was worried that he might be experiencing psychotic side effects. The surgery reception didn’t believe it was him on the phone when he called, and when he got there in person and presented himself, calling himself Clarence Key, they were angry and had had him ejected from the building. He could recall, in the waiting room, how a young man, little more than a boy, lifted his gaze from the magazine he’d been reading and looked at Clarence with the strangest expression on his face.

            He began to notice more and more the unusual looks men gave him in the street, in shops, on buses, in queues of any kind. He received looks from men he had never received before. Teenage boys in tracksuits, young men with piercings and tattoos, men pushing forty- some with wives even, men in late middle age with receded hair and newly wrinkled skins, even old men in pork pie hats clutching canes. They would notice him, they would acknowledge him, their eyes would light up with a spark of fresh, sudden attentiveness. Sometimes, if they were walking in opposite directions, they would even look over their shoulders after they’d passed him, and follow him with their eyes until they couldn’t see him anymore.

            One evening, the sky pink and melancholy with the sun’s demise, Clarence went to the Duke of York for a pint. It was a regular haunt of his. He had become more seldom in his patronage in recent months. He had certainly not been since the strange incidents had started occurring. The latest pints he had imbibed had not been pleasant for him. As the pints descended, he had felt the age in his octogenarian bowels, and the general complaining strain with which his body continued to live, further taxed by alcohol. Tacitly, he sensed and told himself that perhaps he had reached the point in his dotage beyond which alcohol might have to be forgone. But he wanted to be sure about this, surer.   

“My usual, please, Arthur,” he said, facing the familiar landlord who looked back at him with an expression of bemused wonder. 

“I don’t know what that is, love,” he answered. 

Clarence was puzzled by the “love”. He took it as an eccentric term of endearment. If he was honest, he didn’t much care what names anyone called him anymore. On both sides of Clarence, a murmur of covert excitement went around the drinkers sitting at the bar on barstools. Soft sniggers followed.   

“You mean you don’t remember?” Clarence said.

“No, love, I don’t know. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“You don’t remember me?” Clarence felt this conversation being listened to by those in his immediate environment. A note of desperation crept into his voice.

Arthur, the landlord, answered:

“Love, if we’d met, I’d remember.”   

Clarence was impatient for a drink. He wanted to soothe the panic he felt. He didn’t much care how the drink came to be obtained.

“Pint of Red Badger, please.”

The landlord didn’t acquiesce. 

“Any ID, love?”

“ID?”

“Proof of age.”   

“Oh…erm…”

Clarence had never been asked for proof of age in his life. He’d been drinking beer and gin in pubs since he was thirteen, and purchasing cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco since the age of twelve. (The tobacco he’d given up in his fifties). Not understanding what was happening, he reached into his coat’s breast pocket and withdrew from it a senior citizen’s bus pass. It had a picture of Clarence on the front, unsmiling against a blank background, and a rather overwhelmed expression on his face. It also indicated his date of birth. 31st, May, 1938. He handed it to the landlord. 

“Very funny,” the landlord said, handing it back.

            “What is it you want from me?” Clarence protested. There was a titter of laughter at this.

            “That…is not you,” the landlord said, quite slowly. “That’s Clarence’s bus pass. I know him. I know that isn’t you. What are you doing with Clarence Key’s bus pass?”

            “Arthur…it’s me. Clarence,” Clarence petitioned, holding up the bus pass beside his face. “That’s me. This is me. Here. I’m an old man.”

            The mood changed. The sniggers quietened. Arthur looked at Clarence with hooded eyes, knitted brows, with the squint of a man confronting the very peculiar. This situation was peculiar, very peculiar indeed. But there was something about it that wasn’t readily dismissible. There was something serious going on, something the landlord couldn’t quite figure out. He searched, he dug with his misted eyes, with his sidelong expression.

            “Sorry, love,” Arthur said finally. “I can’t serve you without ID.” There were a few mutters of protest from the drinkers on the barstools. Go on, pour her a drink…etc…and words to that effect. But Arthur just directed a stern, unappeasable glare at the men who had spoken, and their comments quickly subsided.

            “Erm…” Clarence looked about helplessly. He felt exhausted. He coughed a few times. 

            “How about a soft drink? J20?” 

“Just give me a…a lemonade,” Clarence replied.        

“Lemonade. Absolutely.” 

The landlord produced it, and Clarence paid for it in coins.  

He took his glass of lemonade, and the bottle with half of its contents still remaining, to his usual seat in the smallest of the pub’s three snugs. He wasn’t gratified to find three people there already, two men and one woman. The woman was in the middle, the men either side. They were talking together quite jauntily. The men would listen to the woman, who emphasised her speech with violent hand gestures, and then they would energetically concur with what she had been saying. As soon as Clarence appeared at the mouth of the snug, hovering unsteadily on his shuffling feet, they all ceased and looked at him with a fixed, silent awe. The look of surprise on the woman’s face quickly became a look of suspicion, but the men’s faces remained bright with sexual enthusiasm. What they saw, all three of them, was a beautiful youthful woman.

“Hello,” Clarence, appearing as this woman, said.

“Hello,” they all answered. 

“You want to join us?” said the man on the woman’s left. 

“Erm…no thank you.” Clarence said. He’d already turned and begun trudging off before he finished speaking. The men’s eyes remained fixed upon him. Clarence didn’t notice. No matter how he appeared to the world, he was the same old man, and within his body he still felt the same aches and gripes. He was too old to turn his neck. He didn’t see the eyes that followed his old man’s arse, the lips that were licked and made wet with appetite.

Clarence found an unoccupied table and sat there with his glass of lemonade, the bottle beside. He felt an unbearable sadness. He looked down at his body, in its old man’s clothes. Beneath its garments, it was complaining. He felt spanned, from crusty top to dead-skinned toe, by this churn of irritation. Sometimes, in the bathroom mirror just before or after showering, he would see his body, naked. He would regard it as a stranger’s body. Androgenous, pale, marked all over by blemishes and imperfections. He saw it as a site of suffering, a thing of great fragility which had been entrusted to him. Like a woman’s body, like his wife’s body, like a baby’s body. He sat there, in the pub, surrounded on all sides by life and warmth and noise, and thought about Leanne. He longed for the way she used to see him, the way he felt whenever she looked at him. It was a regard he understood, a quality of gaze he had searched for his whole life, and found, and lost.    

            All evening, he received the looks. Men would sit and stare at him. And when he looked back at them, when he tried to acknowledge the gaze within which they held him, they would turn away and act as if they hadn’t even noticed him. 

He drank very slowly. As the evening drew on, and night took prescience, the men began to take his reply as encouragement. The man and Clarence would look at each other, they would keep their eyes upon one another. Then, the man might come closer. He’d tentatively investigate the response Clarence offered to these overtures. Closer. One, a big, dark, muscular man with enormous arms, came very close indeed. Approaching the table, he looked at Clarence with that unmistakable twinkle of attraction glittering in his big, brown eyes. This being, on whom he had only just laid eyes, filled his mind, was dominant there, and mattered more than anything for a while. The man felt unignorably, incontrovertibly impelled towards the young, beautiful, pale-skinned woman he saw sitting alone at her table, with an empty bottle of lemonade. He was nervous that she’d reject his first advance, but confident in his own sexual appeal. 

Clarence felt no threat, only safety, as this muscular, dark-skinned man reached his table, and stood before him. He towered over him, sane and massive. Old men and young women are both small; Clarence shared a slightness of stature with the figure he outwardly showed. Leaning against the table, clutching a straight glass of tonic water and gin, tiny in his huge hands, the look in the man’s eyes was so tender and beautiful that Clarence could not help but stare back at it in a dreamy and acknowledging stupor. No-one had ever looked at him that way. None of the new and recent looks he’d received had possessed this heightened quality. And in his life before, no-one, not a soul, when he was a young man, when he was a child (so far as he could remember), had ever looked at him this way. 

“Hey,” the man said. He declared his sexual interest so confidently, so assertively that it hardly allowed any space for awkwardness. To the object of his attraction, he gave his interest generously, directly, as a gift and positive energy. He made simple the much-agonized-over, and often complicated, encounter of man and woman. “You alone?”

It was quite loud in the pub and Clarence didn’t hear.

“Pardon me, lad?”

“Are you alone?” the man repeated.

“Yes,” Clarence answered.

“Mind if I join you? Do you want a drink? I see you’ve finished your lemonade. How about something stronger?” 

            “Bitter.”

            He found Clarence’s directness sexy, his lack of please and thank you an intriguing, titillating impoliteness.

            “No worries. You’re not going to ditch me now, are you?”

            “What?”

            “You’ll be here when I get back?”

            Why wouldn’t I, Clarence thought to himself, now that there was a promise of ale in it.

            “Yes,” he said. 

            “Smashing. Back in a minute.” 

            The man went off, taking away with him, into the swirl of the crowd, a whole soft season. Clarence couldn’t wait for the man to come back. Not because he would be bringing drink but because he felt warm and loved and safe and attended to by this man.

            He came back with the pint and another gin.

            “I’m an old man.” Clarence said. “My name is Clarence.”

            “Tom,” the black man said. Then he was silent for a moment. “Did you say that you’re an old man?”

            “Yes, I’m an old man. My name is Clarence.” Clarence took a deep drink of his pint.

            Tom didn’t react. Then, no longer deadpan, he laughed. The laugh flashed from his dark face like a brilliant light.

“You’ve got a…a…strange sense of humour. Seriously though What’s your name?”

Clarence didn’t want Tom to leave. It was abundantly clear to him now that his name was not accepted any longer: his name was no good. He further intuited that people now saw him not as an old man but as a young woman, and so he gave himself the first female name which came to him.

“Leanne,” Clarence answered. “My name’s Leanne.”

“Leanne. I like that,” Tom replied. “Why did you say your name was Clarence?”

“I used to be an old man, an old man called Clarence. But now…I’m something else. I’m something else.”

“I swear you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life.”

They spent most of their time in silence. The world around them was very noisy. But they were silent, in a quietness that was love. Indeed, it reminded Clarence of the quietness at the end of Leanne’s life, the quietness that had filled their final days together, and which had somehow been able to bathe them, cleansingly. 

Clarence, a withered old man who had just started calling himself Leanne and whom the world seemed now to see not as the undesirable thing Clarence thought himself to be but as the furthest thing from it, sat, in that pub, hardly saying anything, adored by this beautiful, taciturn, muscular man, with the darkest, most perfect skin Clarence had ever seen. He never flinched. He was ease itself, he felt no discomfort or awkwardness, no need to dispel the silence between them, that descended, heavy and swift, as soon as the pleasantries were dispensed with. 

Tom was his name. Tom. Clarence had to work hard to remember it. Tom was very polite and probably wouldn’t have minded: but Clarence didn’t want to offend him by forgetting it, all the same. Throughout the evening, Clarence sometimes mouthed it to himself, allowed the T to trip off his tongue and the vowel to open wide its purse of wealth, and the M to close it again. He was in love. Though Tom didn’t see Clarence as an old man, he treated Clarence a little like an old man. The difference: it was love, and not a kind of everyday hatred, than ran beneath his way of treating him.   

When the end of the evening arrived and it was time to go, neither tried to go home with the other. Tom simply asked Clarence if he would give him his phone-number. Clarence searched in his pockets for a pen but couldn’t find one. Tom went to the bar and the barman gave him a pencil, from the office behind the bar. Tom came back with it, just as he had with the pint, and he handed it to Clarence, along with a sheet of lined paper. 

Though Tom saw this new thing he had become, Clarence remained an old man and his joints were stiff, his digits undexterous. He struggled to write fluently. It was an even greater struggle than usual to hold the pencil and write with it. Like a child, with the pencil clumsily lodged in his uncertain grip, he formed the messy loops and lines of his landline number. He was amazed that he could remember it. But he could. Tom saw how much effort it took Clarence to write it, though he couldn’t explain why it took him so much effort. He just felt grateful.    

“Thank you,” he said, receiving the sheet of paper with the number on it.

He looked at it, sceptically, not pocketing it. 

“Landline?” Tom said, seeing it wasn’t a mobile number.

“I don’t have a mobile telephone” Clarence said. “Don’t worry. I always answer when I’m home. Leave a message if I’m not. I’ll respond to it within twenty-four hours.”

“Okay. You promise I can see you again?”

Clarence said Yes, immediately, and thought he meant it.

“Okay,” Tom said. “I’m going to go now.” And he got up to do so.

“Wait…” Clarence cried, uncertainly. 

“What is it?” Tom answered, laying the sheet upon the table.

“Erm…” Clarence searched. He searched his old man’s soul and his old man’s heart. He felt old. Old and unwell. Words came, gradually: “I’m not…I don’t know what people see when they look at me. What I’m doing is…research…I’m finding out things. I’m learning how people treat me, how they seem to find me. And…how people respond to me helps me to understand what sort a person I am. I’m trying to understand who I am by how others treat me. Does that make sense to you?”

Tom studied Clarence’s face, the exquisite face of what he took to be a beautiful woman who called herself Leanne.

“No,” he answered finally.

“You’ve been so…friendly. So tender. I’ve never felt this way with a coloured man.”

Tom heard the phrase formed by those final two words. His reaction was only slight, almost nothing. Then, he smiled serenely, said goodnight, and went. He left the sheet of lined paper upon the table. 

The landline number stared up at Clarence: he knew it was his, that he had written it. But somehow, paradoxically, he didn’t recognise it as belonging to him. 

Clarence died that night. The last words he heard spoken to him were:

            “You looking dangerous, baby. You looking dangerous.” The figure passed him. Having loomed into existence out of the night, he then seemed to merge with the wall they were both passing at the time, and disappear.

            At last, Clarence was an old man. He was an old man again, lying on a street corner, curled up, on his side, in the place where he collapsed. In death, he attained an outward state which didn’t lie.