EPISODE 84: NOT WITH A BANG

Welcome to my blog which is aware that the end of the project and the year are approaching and really it is very much a damp unfiring squib of an ending, marked by desultory action, large amounts of wasted time and the emerging of thoughts which are either extremely honest or merely self-deluding. Nothing at all seems to have been accomplished; nothing; not only this year, this all-important last opportunity water-dragon inspired year, but in every year before.

Of course, in itself it doesn’t matter whether anything is achieved but why the effort, the bother, the sowing of dissatisfaction. Why does nothing actually work? Is it the tools or the user of the tools? And what really has he been trying to accomplish?

When I look back over the past god knows how many years, I’m a bit surprised how many efforts I’ve made, how many stories and books I’ve completed, each with a hope of success, how many courses and degrees I’ve done, all without establishing a paid career, how many times I’ve picked myself up and had another go and how many times I’ve reached to the world to make an impact and made none.

So it goes.

Sad Sam is a case in point. I wrote in an enthusiastic rush eighteen months ago. You may recall I had an instant hit with a prospective ebook maker. He promised to publish me and made a deal. A few months later, he renewed his pledge. Never heard from him again. And since then I’ve made other efforts to get the book published but just can’t get it done.

The Dead Day was another endeavour that couldn’t quite make the break and that’s the theme, I suppose, my asking for a response from the world and never quite getting it. An almost man. Not something to be.

….

So, rather than continue with the post-mortem which can only conclude that I just wanted talented enough to make it in my chosen fields, here’s the beginning of a story that doesn’t yet know where it is going and at the moment feels a little dry and ugly. It is called, for now, Precious.

PRECIOUS

I bought her on the internet. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do; so simple and so swiftly accomplished, I could almost claim I hadn’t had time to think about it.

I was bored when it all began, as I often am between books. This interregnum phase agitates me and my mind fidgets at the computer, neither doing one thing nor another on my behalf before gadflying off on a google quest of its own.

So this was how I came across an International Pen-friends site. I haven’t had a penfriend since I was 14 when I had had an increasingly filthy correspondence with a number of imaginative Finnish teenagers. Fifty years on there is no need for the snail mail patience of old and within hours I was swopping humanitarian pleasantries with an Ugandan peasant, an Iranian doctor, a Syrian teenager, a pro-Gaddafi Libyan widow in hiding, an Indian holy man and a ladyboy in Thailand. By the first evening, I was exhausted, my emails were getting shorter and terser and my interest in the global community diminished.

The next morning I discovered a new world of possibility. In my inbox were three emails from women in Ghana, each telling me how she had read my profile and believed I may be the man she has been seeking all her life and each accompanied by a  head-shot of an  extremely pretty woman aged between 19 and 25. Prompted by a mixture of natural lust and intellectual ennui, I replied to each woman, explaining that I was twice her age and suggesting that she would be better off patiently meeting someone in the normal way. The responses to this were immediate and outraged. ‘How could I be so superficial as to worry about age? Love and fidelity are all that matters. Didn’t I love them after all? When could we meet? Oh, by the way, here are some more photos.’

I then pretended to be seriously engaged with my correspondents. As the women were a) an orphan living with a cruel aunt; b) an unemployed dressmaker; and c) a part-time worker in a café, it was obvious that any meeting would involve considerable expense on my part. What would happen, I asked, if I went to Ghana or they came to England only to discover that we weren’t mutually attractive?

Oh no, came the replies, this won’t happen. They’ve seen my picture, they’ve emailed me twice, they know nothing could go wrong. In fact, they have already been to the travel agents and they can get a visa and ticket for just a thousand US Dollars.

That’s all very well and very exciting, I wrote, but if I’m to spend all that money, I really want to know what I’m getting. Please send me some nude photos so I can guarantee that I won’t be disappointed when we meet.

Sure enough, not twenty minutes later came the pictures I had requested, alongside further declarations of eternal love, promises of sexual satisfaction beyond my wildest dreams and suggestions that I could put the money for the visa in to a Western Union account.

My assumption, at this point, was that the whole thing was a scam and that the single aim was to have money put in those accounts.  To test this, I said that I had my own contacts in the travel business and that I would organize for them to come to London myself. Would that be agreeable to them? As one, they assented. This puzzled me and I began to wonder if perhaps they were genuinely as desperate and naïve as they sounded. In a mood of contrition and decency, I then changed my tack entirely and beseeched them to take care and not for a moment believe what anyone told them on the net. You could end up in prostitution and sex slavery, I warned. If a man sends his picture, make sure his family are in it, get his home address, check the bastard out.

So you don’t love me, they said.

I do love you. That’s why I am telling you this.

On every subsequent day my inbox delivered invitations from Ghana but none further arrived from my three original prospective life partners.  For a month I ignored the accumulation until another bout of boredom found me opening the emails one by one and relying to them with the same compassionate advice that had disenchanted my harem.

Only one replied. Her name was Precious.

Dear Man,

My dear, thank you for your warning. You must be very kind to worry about women in Ghana but not to worry for god is with us.  All other men ask for naked pictures so here are yours as a gift that you don’t have to ask for because you are gentle man with love.  In your picture I see the eyes which show the soul. I am loving girl looking for my one true man who will love me forever and I will give him everything back with my heart, my spirit and my body which will do much sex for right man. Please I think you are this man. You must write me.

Your loving, Precious

There were four pictures altogether. The first was a face shot. The girl was beautiful. I use the word ‘girl’ deliberately for although Precious was 22, and looked it, the face that smiled at me was virgin, untouched, as it seemed to be, by life.

The second picture showed Precious in what I took to be her Sunday best, a smart short-skirted suit and matching hat. I was later to discover that she was a regular churchgoer with an indefatigable belief in the ‘Lord Jesus Christ’ as her personal saviour. Again her image transmitted an innocence that even I, as cynical a fifty year old as ever there was, was tempted to believe in.

 The two nude photos just added to this illusion. Taken in a studio that I recognized from other pictures I had been sent, and coarsely posed to display the perfect breasts and bald vagina, they became transfigured by the sanctifying quality of Precious’s beauty which swept over me like a cleansing lotion that removed the mote of lust from my eye.  Or so I told myself.

Dear Precious,

Thank you for your email and the photos. You are beautiful and I hope you find the man you desire.  I am much too old for you. The internet is a dangerous place to find a man. Why don’t you wait to meet someone in Ghana? Take care.

John

Dear John,

Age is nothing where this is love. I am love. I will love you good. Try me and see. If not I have to look for another man who will care for me and promise me his life. I have visa, all I need is a ticket and love will be ours. God will protect me from harm.

Your Loving Precious.

Dear Precious,

Again, thank you for wanting to be with me. It is difficult for me to believe that a beautiful girl like you can really want to be with an older man like me. Have you really thought about this? Imagine coming here and having to give yourself to a stranger in a different culture. How will this make you happy? Your circumstances must be very bad that you would take such a risk and make such a choice. What happens if you get here and find you cannot love me. What would you do then?

John

Dear John,

Do you not trust in the power of love? Without trust we have nothing. I trust us, why don’t you?

Your ever loving Precious.

2.

I’m not a man with morals. In any given situation, I may feel there is a right and wrong bit I’m not swayed by this. Thinking that something is wrong doesn’t stop my doing it, whereas fear of the consequences might. My writing life has given me both financial independence and leeway to be capricious in my personal life. I am used to doing what I want when I want without ties to anyone. Even when I was married and was a parent,  it was understood that my selfishness was part of my art and that I was for taking or leaving but for not for changing or confining. So it was, therefore, that I could find myself at Heathrow Airport waiting for Precious to arrive with the knowledge that it was unnecessary to explain myself to anyone and that I could meet Precious, take her to my house and do what I liked without having to defend my actions to anyone but her and me.

Was I going to have sex with her? I didn’t know. Was I going to be her abuser or her saviour? I didn’t know.

(To be continued, perhaps)