12: KEVIN CAMUS

  "There's nothing here."
   "Of course there's nothing here. That's rather the whole fucking point."
  Here was the shoreline of a small island about ten miles north of Amsterdam.
  "I don't even think this is the right place," said Kevin. "It says in the book they go on a boat."
  "Well the fucking causeway was built afterwards, wasn't it?" said Forbes irritably. "Of course it's the right place, the island of Marken. The village was like he described it in the book."
  "I mean it didn't say anything about it in the guide book."
  "Well it's hardly the sort of thing you put in a guide book, is it? 'Renowned for its existential bleakness.' That'd really have the tourists flocking, wouldn't it?"
  "It's not even particularly bleak. I can show you far bleaker stretches of the Leeds-Liverpool canal. I mean on an overcast day it might be a bit grim but on a sunny day like today it's really not too shabby. It wouldn't be a bad spot for a picnic."
  "The point is it's fucking empty. The point is Camus himself must have sat here once, perhaps right where we're sitting now."
  "But it's probably all changed. The whole coastline's probably changed. They've had at least two big floods since and they built that fucking great dam across the top of the Zuyder Zee."
  "You're determined to spoil this for me, aren't you? Look at it, it's exactly like he describes it. Listen." Forbes opened his copy of the Albert Camus novel The Fall and, gesturing theatrically about them, started to declaim: "'Well, what do you think of it? Isn't it the most beautiful negative landscape? Just see on the left that pile of ashes they call a dune here, the grey dykes on the left, the livid beach at our feet and, in front of us, the sea looking like a weak lye-solution with the vast sky reflecting the colourless waters.' Admittedly that part would work better if it was a bit less sunny today but you can use your imagination. 'A flabby hell, indeed! Everything horizontal, no relief; space is colourless and life dead. Is it not universal obliteration, everlasting nothingness made visible? No human beings, above all, no human beings! You and I alone facing the planet at last deserted!'"
  "Alone at last, eh? Well we can make out if you want but don't blame me if you get shingle up your arse."
  "Oh, you pygmy," said Forbes.
  It was their fifth day in Holland. The previous three had passed in a haze of cannabis smoke. They had scarcely ventured out of the attic room except to get food, weed, and alcohol. This was a pattern dictated by the will-sapping effects of the first skunky spliff of the morning (or, to be accurate, the early hours of afternoon that they referred to as morning) which was itself made necessary by the effects of the spliffs they'd had the night before. Well, thought Kevin, it might not have been strictly necessary, but it was certainly a fine way to start the day. Late at night fantastic plans would excitedly be made for excursions and other energetic courses of action the next day, but somehow in the morning they never seemed to exert quite such an appeal as did the Rizlas and the bud bag.
  Darren had been their constant companion in this debauchery. He had come up with a number of ingenious ways of keeping Call-me-Keith out of his hair. He had, for example, taken to spiking Call-me-Keith's coffee with laxatives, so that Call-me-Keith would spend the greater part of each day locked in Betsy's squalid toilet. Secondly, he would send a succession of skanky prostitutes to Call-me-Keith's room each night. Call-me-Keith never seemed to fuck any of them but the mere act of getting them out of his room was always a traumatic and strenuous business and invariably ended in Call-me-Keith being threatened, lightly duffed-up and having money taken off him by a pimp. The net effect was that Call-me-Keith was constantly shagged-out and short on sleep, a haggard and harrowed shadow of a man with neither the energy nor the inclination to attempt to control his wayward ward.
  Late on on their second night there Darren had suddenly paused in mid-skin-up, clicked his fingers and smacked his head. "Fuck," he tutted. "I forgot to cash the German's travellers cheques. I bet Betsy still hasn't got a locksmith for the poor bastard." Sure enough, investigation had revealed that the German was still firmly moored to the bed.
  "Is okay," said Betsy when they saw her/him/it (Betsy was a born hermaphrodite rather than in a state of transition). "Is no hurry. German is big tourist attraction. People pay to come and laugh at him. I charge admission. You no worry, I feed him. My favourite guest, nice quiet gentleman, make no trouble." The German had finally been given his freedom the day after.
  Today Call-me-Keith had asserted himself for once, barging into their room horrendously early in the real morning to get Darren (Darren had taken to sleeping on their floor, largely because he was slightly chary of the possibility of Call-me-Keith fondling him while he was asleep) to take him to the Rijksmuseum. The break in the pattern had had a galvanizing effect on Forbes. They too, he had declared, must have a day of culture. Kevin suspected that this was less because Forbes was genuinely craving to absorb some culture than an example of Forbes' law of eternal opposition, the same impulse that drove him to wear tweed at the holiday camp (and again here) and punk gear at home. If every other English boy visiting Amsterdam spent their days in debauchery and herbal abuse, then Forbes' ego demanded that he do something different. Kevin was strengthened in this belief by the fact that Forbes had announced his decision while the two of them were sitting in the first hash bar they had visited the first day, after Forbes had spent some minutes watching a group of obviously newly-arrived English boys frantically smoking themselves sick exactly as they had done, and finally muttered, "Look at those oafs."
  Eschewing anything so obvious as a visit to the Rijksmuseum or the Van Gogh museum or Rembrandt's house, Forbes had come up with the idea of going on a pilgrimage to Camus's novel The Fall, following in the footsteps of Jean-Baptiste Clamence and his companion and visiting all the Amsterdam locations mentioned in the book. It had turned out that the one concrete location they had been able to pinpoint from the text had been the negative landscape of the island coastline where they now were.
  The two of them sat now staring silently out at the Zuyder Zee, or what The Fall called the Zuyder Zee and the guide book said was now the IJsselmeer. After several minutes of this Kevin took the book off Forbes. He laid it flat on his lap and started to stick Rizlas together on top of it.
  "You're not getting much out of this, are you?" said Forbes.
  "Put it this way, I've already got everything out of it that I'm going to get out of it."
  "I thought you were a fan of Camus?"
  "I'm a huge fan of Camus, he was one of the coolest people who ever lived. I'm just facing the fact that this pilgrimage was a very crap idea."
  "You were on for it this morning."
  "I was stoned this morning. Maybe if I get stoned again I can become more attuned to the negative landscape."
  Forbes rose. "I'm going off to be alone."
  "What?"
  "I'm going to walk on down the shore. You stay here. I've decided it's impossible to contemplate existential bleakness in the company of another, especially you with your bovine northern stolidity." He started to trudge off down the beach.
  "Well I'm going back to town then," called Kevin.
  "Well fuck off then," replied Forbes.
  Charming.
  Kevin looked at the view for a while and tried to get something more out of it and failed. Just as he was about to resume work on his joint he heard someone approaching from behind him and to the side, from the direction he and Forbes had come. He put his skins and weed away. It would be offensive to skin up in front of one of the nice people from the heartbreakingly cute village they had passed through. The guide book said they were all strict Calvinists who lived almost exactly as they had done in the 17th Century and this might extend to burning witches and dope fiends.
  Kevin looked round in the direction of the footsteps and experienced some sort of epiphany. Walking towards him was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.
  She had golden blonde hair gathered up at the back but falling loose at the front to hang down in long strands around her eyes and cheekbones, and curling round her ears at the sides and onto her neck, framing a face of ethereal beauty. Kevin was usually a brunette man but decided he would overlook it in her case. She had large but perfectly formed breasts, jutting proudly and without visible means of support within a white blouse that was knotted above her midriff and unbuttoned enough to reveal a great deal of cleavage. She wore very short cut-off jeans shorts, and her legs were the reason why shorts had been invented in the first place; whoever had invented them had had a vision that her legs would one day come into the world.
  She looked at Kevin with a mixture of surprise and curiosity and came right over to him.
  "Hello," she said.
  "Hello," said Kevin, wondering when his heart would start again.
  "Please may I ask what that book is?" She spoke impeccable English with very little trace of a Dutch accent or even rhythm. Kevin mutely held up the book and she knelt down next to him to see, brushing a strand of hair away from her eyes.
  "The Fall!" she cried in delight. "But this is wonderful!" She looked at Kevin with a smile that was like the first sunrise on the first day of the earth. "You came here because of Camus, yes?"
  "Yes."
  "This is wonderful! I, too, came here the first time because of The Fall. I also sat here with the book just as you are doing."
  "You're kidding."
  "It's true! Now I come here often to think. It is wonderfully empty, yes?"
  "Yes, er, it's a beautiful negative landscape, as he says, 'everlasting nothingness made real', er, alone facing the deserted planet at last, and that."
  She nodded eagerly. "Yes! Yes! That is exactly it." She sat back and looked around at the horizontal landscape. "Yes, a beautiful negative landscape. It is wonderful, yes? Calming and humbling, almost terrifying and yet uplifting. Yes?"
  "Yes," said Kevin eagerly. "That's exactly how it makes me feel."
  She turned and smiled at him again. "Really?"
  "Yes. It sort of makes me feel, er, how can I put it into words, like my ego is crushed by the glimpse of the ultimate nothingness, and yet I'm exalted by a feeling of being at one with the totality of the, er-"
  She nodded enthusiastically. "Yes! Yes! Yes! I know. That is how I feel."
  "Yeah, I was just thinking, I could just sit here for hours." Kevin glanced around nervously but Forbes had disappeared around the headland.
  "I often sit here for hours. It is inspiring also to think that Camus himself must have come here once."
  "Yes, it's thrilling to think of, isn't it? I mean, just imagine, he might have sat right where we're sitting now." Kevin wondered if Camus, babe-hound that he was, had ever come here with a chick, and how he would have proceeded with this amazing creature sitting next to him. Kevin thought his best course of action was, firstly, to identify himself with Camus as much as possible, secondly, to talk a lot about ultimate nothingness and annihilation and obliteration, say, in effect, 'Ee, you're a long time dead' and then attempt to put his head between her breasts. This could be the day when years of dressing in French intellectual black finally paid off. He wished he had some Gitanes to smoke. Maybe he should offer her a spliff. Maybe he should offer her his life.
  "Yes, Camus inspires me," said the girl. "He is my favourite writer and philosopher."
  "Mine too."
  "Really? Your very favourite? This is wonderful! My name is Ingrid."
  "Mine too. I mean, my name's Kevin."
  "You are English, yes?"
  "Yes."
  "Most English boys come to Amsterdam only for the cannabis. They are very shallow. I do not say all English people are shallow but I do not like those who come for the cannabis. I do not approve of cannabis or any drugs. You do not approve of drugs?" she asked, looking at him earnestly.
  "No, no, I hate them," said Kevin.
  "Good. The hash bars and the red light district make me ashamed of Amsterdam. They are degrading to humanity. They should be stopped, yes?"
  "Oh, yes, definitely," said Kevin fervently. He would have agreed with her if she had said that the Pope raped Protestant virgins or Belgians smelled like Tuesdays or that warthogs were the natural destined rulers of the earth.
  "Why have you come to Amsterdam then?"
  Kevin gestured about them.
  "Well, I came to see this."
  "Really? But this is fantastic!"
  Kevin supposed it was a bit fantastic. "Well, this and the Van Gogh museum and Rembrandt's house and that. It's the Venice of the North, isn't it?"
  "Ah! How did you like the Van Gogh museum?"
  "Er, I haven't actually seen it yet. I've only just got here."
  Ingrid slapped her bare thighs and stood up. "Then you will come and see it with me now."
  "Really?"
  "Yes. I have nothing to do and I would like to see it with you. There is much food for thought there. You would like to, yes?"
  "Oh, yes." He looked in the direction Forbes had disappeared in. There was, thankfully, still no sign of him. "Let's go."
  He stood up and they had a final look around them.
  "Yes, this is a wonderful place," said Ingrid. "You are glad you came here?"
  "I certainly am," said Kevin with feeling.
  "You have read all of Camus's work, yes? We shall discuss Camus as we walk."
  They discussed Camus all the way back through the village and along the causeway and on the bus into Amsterdam. Camus was indeed one of Kevin's favourite dead people and he knew enough about him to be able to hold his own in the conversation but from the depth and width and animation of Ingrid's talk he began to suspect she had posters of him on her bedroom wall. He was glad Forbes had corrected his pronunciation this morning: it was Alberr Camoo, it turned out, rather than Albert Cammuss.
  Once on the bus when Ingrid was in the middle of a lengthy analysis of The Outsider Kevin said chirpily:
  "Did you know the Cure song 'Killing an Arab' was based on that book?"
  She frowned in slight annoyance. "That is not relevant," she said.
  At another point she said: "I would like to know what Camus did in the resistance. There is a gap of some time where no-one is sure exactly what he did. I would like to know if he was forced to kill. He did not write of it and I do not believe he would have. Of course a lot of his time in the resistance was spent as editor of the underground newspaper Combat. I would like to read his editorials."
  "I believe he had a lot of headaches in that job," said Kevin. "He couldn't sell any advertising space, and his restaurant critics kept getting shot, and Sartre was always missing deadlines."
  She raised her eyebrows. "Really? I did not know this. I do not like Sartre so much as Camus. I do not like Sartre much at all."
  "Me neither."
  "Really? But this is wonderful!" Kevin reflected that the last time he had been so much on the same wavelength as a girl was when he and she had listed their favourite three characters in Heartbreak High in the same order. They turned to discussing why Sartre was not as good as Camus. Ingrid's reasons went somewhat deeper than Kevin's, which were that Sartre was into terrorists and looked creepy.
  On their way to the Van Gogh museum they passed the Rijksmuseum.
  "One day I will show you the Rijksmuseum," said Ingrid.
  "Not today," said Kevin hastily, thinking of Darren and Call-me-Keith. He was startled by the 'one day' bit and decided he liked it very much.
  "No, there is not time today. We will spend all of one day there or perhaps two. You will like that?"
  "Yes," said Kevin, who had long since decided he would like to spend the rest of his life with her.
  They went round the Van Gogh museum. Kevin stared at the paintings with the same studied concentration with which he'd stared at the Zuyder Zee after her arrival. He had never got a lot out of visual art and usually considered himself to be doing well if he recognized what a picture was of. Ingrid commented extensively and incisively on every picture. Kevin limited his initial comments to 'Wow' or 'Gosh' and then listened to what she said and agreed with it and intelligently paraphrased it and threw in a couple of likely-sounding phrases such as 'interesting dichotomy' or 'unusual kinetic quality' or 'the chairness of the chair' or 'You can almost smell the angst.'
  As well as Van Gogh's paintings there was also an extensive collection of his letters and other effects.
  "His ear isn't here, is it?" said Kevin.
  "No, his ear is not here."
  "The Japanese probably have it. Quite a dramatic gesture, to cut off your ear for a woman. I mean, I once trimmed my toenails for a woman, but..."
  "He did not cut off his ear for a woman."
  "I thought he gave it to a prostitute as a present?"
  "Yes, but it is most likely that the reason he cut his ear was because he had quarrelled with Gauguin. Actually, it is now thought that the reason may have been that he had a disease which makes a constant ringing in the ear."
  "Really? I prefer not to believe that. Less romantic that way."
  "Romantic? That is a word which means 'stupid' however you apply it. If you say that an artist lived the life of a romantic it means that he was narcissistic and selfish. It means that he indulged in acts of animal sensuality and self-destruction and egotistical self-pity instead of striving to improve the lot of humanity or simply working at his art. If you mean romantic in the sense of conceiving an adolescent sexual fixation on someone, resorting to idiotic gestures to try to bend them to your will, and behaving as if in physical pain when they will not do so, then that is even more foolish and not to be admired. You must agree."
  "Yes, I suppose so."
  "Definitely so."
  "All right. It would be less stupid if he'd cut his ear off because of tinnitus. You're right, it does make more sense your way."
  "It is interesting that you thought he mutilated himself because of a woman. A woman is always blamed when a man behaves irrationally. Particularly when he cannot control an atavistic sexual passion. From early European mythology through to Hollywood film noir there appears the recurring figure of the bewitching woman who enslaves and destroys men. The truth is that this is a displacement by men of the guilt for their own enslavement to their own primitive animal instincts. You agree?"
  It was difficult to frame an intelligent response to this when he had a definite half-erection merely from proximity to her.
  "Oh, absolutely. I agree."
  "Good. You would like to come to my flat?"
  "God yes. I mean, yes."
  "Good. We will talk some more."
  They left the gallery and got on a tram. Kevin asked her what she did. She said she was studying politics and philosophy at the university. She had been disappointed, she said, by the intellectual limitations of most of the people there, including the lecturers.
  "I thought there would be many people there with whom I would enjoy talking. But most are shallow and poorly educated and do not think a lot. Most of the people there seem only to be interested in relating to me sexually. This includes the lecturers. Do you not think that is degrading?"
  "Terrible."
  She asked him what he did and he said he thought a lot.
  They got off in a nice street not too far away.
  "This area is too bourgeouis, I think," she said as she inserted a key in the door of an apartment house. "I would prefer a flat in the workers' part of town. But my parents are paying and they insisted. I think the intellectuals have a duty to help the workers. You agree?"
  "Oh yes," said Kevin automatically, his attention on the undulations of her denim-clad derriere as she walked up the stairs ahead of him.
  "I do not say we should lead them necessarily. Often the intellectuals have encouraged the workers to civil disobedience when the time was not right. In Berlin in 1919 I think and perhaps Paris in 1968. The workers have their own wisdom when they are not led astray. I think of your George Orwell's poem to the proletarian boy he met in Spain. 'He was born knowing what I had learned out of books and slowly.' You like George Orwell?"
  "He's my favourite English writer." He really should close his mouth in case she looked round.
  "But this is wonderful! He is my favourite English writer too. Sometimes I think it would have been wonderful to fight in the Spanish Civil War."
  "Me too," said Kevin, deciding that if he could set the movements of her haunches to music he would have the world's greatest symphony. "But isn't that a bit romantic?"
  "Yes perhaps. But not such a stupid romantic. Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London are also inspirational. One day I would like to do manual work to see what conditions are like."
  "Actually," said Kevin, "I've just spent two months working in a holiday camp in order to investigate conditions there."
  "You did?" She turned and did the solar smile again. "But this is wonderful! You will tell me all about it."
  By this time they had reached the top floor and Ingrid was inserting another key in another door.
  To his dismay Kevin found when they went in that the flat already contained at least a dozen people, two of whom, he quickly gathered, lived there. Most of them were sitting around on beanbags or cross-legged on the floor talking animatedly or arguing in groups of two or three with not a joint or a drop of alcohol in sight.
  "This is Kevin from England," said Ingrid. "I met him at Marken. He is an admirer of Camus. He also likes Orwell and has just been working at a holiday camp to study conditions. He has come here for the paintings."
  There were several distracted smiles of greeting from the people who were listening rather than talking at the moment; the talkers mostly just glanced at him without a break in their speech.
  "Ingrid!" cried a blond spectacled boy on the other side of the room. "Come and settle an argument." And with that Ingrid was whisked away from Kevin, going over to sit next to the blond boy. While Kevin was debating whether to follow - there didn't seem to be any more room over there - a boy sitting near his feet looked up and said, "You have been working at a holiday camp? That is very interesting. How were conditions?" and Kevin found himself sitting down and telling him.
  Then someone else wanted to discuss Camus, then someone else wanted to talk about Orwell, then someone else wanted to talk about painters. Then someone asked him why there was no longer a socialist movement in England. Then someone asked him why there was no longer any intellectual thought in England. "Whatever happened to people like Hume and Locke?" Kevin replied that he thought Hume was dead or being very quiet at least and that Locke had retired to run a chicken farm but still popped up on chat shows from time to time. Then he was drawn into an argument about whether the Western nations should attempt to impose democracy and women's rights and civilized humanist values on certain Islamic nations by economic sanctions or whether this would be cultural imperialism. Then he was asked whether he thought someone left alone since birth on an island untouched by civilization would come to realize the inevitability of death and whether they would posit the existence of a God or an afterlife. He replied yes, perhaps, and probably not, and in return posed what he considered the far more important question of whether such a person would know how to masturbate and if so what they would think about while they were doing it.
  And so it went for the rest of the night. Everywhere Kevin turned there was someone desperate to discuss something or other with him; fortunately they were a polyglot lot and English was the lingua franca. Many of them were of a heavily philosophical bent, most were ardently artistic and literary, and all were deeply political and passionately committed to a variety of causes. Positions ranged from liberal to semi-revolutionary left but they all shared a common goal of a radical reworking of Western society to be achieved by next week at the latest. They all turned out to be militantly anti-drugs, dispelling Kevin's early notion that they were all speeding their tits off and that he might have been able to score some when Ingrid wasn't looking; after the first couple of hours of unremittingly heavy and deep and earnest talk he had come to feel that he could definitely use a little something. Kevin's sole light relief from the constant barrage of social concern and artiness and abstract speculation came from a grinning, happy little shit of a fat boy named Rollo, who talked about popular music with the same degree of enthusiasm with which the rest of them talked of Kant and Kierkegaard. His tastes in music were catholic and refreshingly undiscriminating to say the least.
  "Take That is better than East 17, yes? Bon Jovi is not so good as Rolling Stones I am thinking. In England you get your heads behind 2 Unlimited? When I am in Paris I go to grave of Lizard King Jim Morrison. Is very intense, you bet. You know Scorpions song Wind of Change? Is anthem for new Europe I am thinking. When is expected new Mike and Mechanics record, please?"
  Rollo didn't seem to be on quite the same rarefied intellectual level as the rest of them; they seemed to keep him around mainly to make coffee for everyone and run down to the pizza shop for them. The sole contribution Kevin had heard him make to any of the raging debates had been, during the cultural imperialism / tell the Arabs to fucking shape up controversy, to say, nodding solemnly to himself, "Star Trek, Prime Directive: do not interfere with alien cultures." Kevin wondered whether this might not have been an attempt to deflate some of the hot air that was building up and parody the quotes from various sage authorities that were being bandied about and whether there might be a brain ticking over in there after all, but after a glance at Rollo's bland vacuous face he rather thought not. He was either a master of deadpan or a happy idiot. Kevin's own attempts to lighten up the proceedings all failed miserably. His merry quips were not understood or simply ignored. Statements intended ironically were taken at face value. Deliberate obtuseness such as saying, "Nietzsche thought he was Superman, didn't he? Did he wear the tights and the cape and everything?" produced patient and earnest explanations.
  Giving his report on conditions at the camp for the third time - to a girl of the Earth Mother type named Eve, who was one of the people who lived there (the third member of the menage, he had discovered, was a lad who, happily, was gay) - Kevin found himself describing how waiters who failed to smile at customers were not fed that night. She seemed to accept this without question or surprise.
  "Yes, of all occupations I think the service industries are the most demeaning to human dignity. I have a friend who worked at Eurodisney in France and the Mickey Mouses in particular were treated very badly."
  "I was Garfield," said Kevin. "Sucked."
  "Yes, one day soon we shall all be dressed as American cartoon characters or selling American hamburgers to one another."
  At this Rollo, who had been lolling nearby yawning and looking bored, perked up.
  "My piece of news!" he cried beaming happily. "I had forgotten my piece of news! Listen, everyone, to my piece of news! I have got a job at McDonald's!"
  A total silence fell on the room. It was rather as if during a get-together at Mary Whitehouse's place someone had announced they had had a lovely wank watching Baywatch last night.
  "You must not work at McDonald's," said Ingrid. "They are cultural imperialists who harm the rainforests."
  "But is nice uniform," said Rollo crestfallen.
  "You will not work at McDonald's," said Ingrid firmly.
  "Okey-doke," said Rollo sadly, looking as though he was about to burst into tears. "I will not work at McDonald's."
  Talk slowly resumed.
  As the evening wore on Kevin found himself increasingly in opposition to the people he talked to and becoming more and more wound up by some of the things they were saying. He found himself saying "Bollocks" a lot and "Don't talk wet."
  There was a wanker who wanted to get into a 'How can we prove anything exists?' conversation. Kevin told him to fuck off. There was someone who apparently studied semantics who said that language was the root of all evil and that the only function of words was to obfuscate meaning. "Where there is a word, there is a distortion of truth." When Kevin said "Bollocks" to that he replied that Kevin had only said that because he had failed to understand him due to the inadequacy of words and if he understood what he meant he would agree. When Kevin said "Bollocks" to that he said that here again was a perfect example of the impossibility of comprehending another through language. He kept on saying things like that in reply to Kevin's every objection until Kevin threatened to hit him.
  There was someone whose name sounded like but could not have been Arse who said:
  "Nietzsche said you only have one life so it might as well be great. I wish everyone would take this to heart. So many people are willing to settle for ordinary lives."
  "Bollocks," said Kevin. "What your life is is settled by force of circumstances and genetic destiny. Anyway, there's a lot to be said for what Tennessee Williams said: 'I want a quiet life with epic fornications.'"
  "Such a life would be unbearable for a man of sensibility."
  There was someone who tried to tell him that behind the surface randomness of life there was a predestined pattern to everything.
  "Look," said Kevin, "if you went to a train station and got on the first train you saw at random and then got off at the first city you came to, chances are you'd make friends there and get a job there and your life would organize itself into a routine and things would occur which would become part of who you are, and after a while you'd start to think it was all meant to happen."
  "Yes, and maybe it was, maybe some guiding hand arranged your destination. Everything happens for a reason."
  "Bollocks."
  Then there was a horrible little French pseud named Leon who was supposed to be a talented artist, who turned up halfway through the evening and spent all his time leering over at Ingrid even when he was talking to someone else and attempting to work his way around the circle towards her. He said:
  "Before Picasso there was nothing. Picasso invented himself and so invented all true art."
  "Bollocks," said Kevin. "Picasso was full of shit and everything went shit after him. He couldn't draw to save his life. A spastic child of three could draw better. If someone draws a picture of a horse, right, I want it to look like a fucking horse. Like a proper fucking Stubbs, right? That to me is a fucking artist. And if someone draws a picture of a woman, I don't want both her eyes on one side of her gob unless she's got both her eyes on one side of her gob."
  "Ah, you are English, I see," said Leon coldly. "The English as a whole are not renowned for sensitivity to art. Music hall comedians and football hooliganism are your principal art forms."
  "And pop music," said Rollo stoutly. "France has many painters but only Johnny Halliday, he is no fucking good, you know."
  Then Kevin got into a very heated debate with Jan, the blond spectacled boy who had not moved from Ingrid's side all night, about the relative merits and contributions to Western thought of Camus and Sartre. Jan gesticulated a lot when he talked and got even more worked up than Kevin, spittle flecking his lips and eyes blazing with fury when he was opposed. Kevin found himself saying loudly: "Sartre was a wanker. Sartre was a wanker. Sartre was an ugly little bog-eyed wanker. Camus was better looking, a nicer person, had more birds and smoked more cigs." It was generally felt, even by Ingrid, that this did not quite come up to the required level of reasoned debate.
  By and large Kevin was stimulated, even by the more ridiculous and pointless debates. He found himself thinking about things he had never thought about and questioning long-held beliefs. He had, for example, found himself in effect arguing against his conveyor belt theory of life on at least two occasions, although at several other points he had been arguing equally vociferously in favour of it. Except when Ingrid was listening he tended to pursue a course of not very Socratically ripping the shit out of whatever anyone else said, especially the males, almost all of whom were obviously letching after Ingrid. Railing against the various kinds of shite they were talking often forced him to recognize that he had once vaguely thought he believed similar shite himself and to ask himself what if anything he did in fact believe.
  But eventually the passion he was expending on pointless matters came to seem absurd, and the leaden earnestness of the talk and the dogmatic zealousness with which Ingrid's friends expounded their beliefs came to weigh heavily upon him. Some time around ten o'clock while he was being lectured by someone on why Arthur Miller was a better playwright than Tennessee Williams on grounds of greater social usefulness a vast ennui and an overwhelming desire for a joint settled over him. He had barely spoken to Ingrid since their arrival except when the conversation became general and his early hope that she would get off with him because of their shared interest in Camus had evaporated. He began to think about taking his leave.
  Just then Ingrid came over, took him by the hand, and pulled him towards a door.
  "You will come into my bedroom," she said.
  There were no posters of Camus in Ingrid's bedroom but there was a portrait of a woman Kevin was fairly sure was Rosa Luxemburg. There were also more books than he'd seen in a room of comparable size in his life.
  Ingrid locked the door behind them and went around the room lighting joss-sticks. Then she sat on the bed with her legs doubled under her and apart so that he could see her inner thighs all the way up to their denimed apex, and patted the duvet for him to come and sit in front of her.
  "Now we will talk," she said.
  And did they talk. They talked about art and literature and politics and philosophy and the history of mankind and the future of mankind and the responsibilities of man to man and the difference between rebellion and resentment and how to build a better world. They talked of anarchism and Brecht and Camus and social Darwinism and existentialism and a federal Europe and German unification and Hegel and cultural and economic imperialism and the rise of Japan and Keynes and laissez-faire and monetarism and nihilism and Orwell and the essential politeness of political correctness and quietism and Rembrandt and Spinoza and Trade Unions and Vermeer and War and Peace and war and peace and exceptions to the rule of law and why people were not naturally selfish and 'how can you visit the zoo and the opera on the same night?', a description of Henry Miller's of the German national character which Kevin dredged up and which amused Ingrid even though she didn't quite approve of the implied ethnic stereotyping. They talked of a hundred other things. They talked on and on through the night. The other people in the flat wound down and went home or to their rooms, the house fell quiet and the street outside was silent, but alone on the island of her bed they talked on. Most of the time Kevin had an erection.
  Kevin was forced to blag his way a lot of the time, feigning knowledge of or interest in or passionate commitment to things he had barely heard of or never thought about before. Fortunately he was adept at faking knowledge of subjects with which he only had a rudimentary or second hand acquaintance, and having spent a good part of the last four years at least lying on his arse reading he had at least heard in passing of most of the things she talked about. Occasionally he was able to take issue with her on some point (always being careful to explain he was merely playing devil's advocate if he sensed it was something she felt deeply about) and sometimes even tell her things she hadn't known about one of her pet topics. When he was truly floundering he was usually able to intelligently compare whatever they were talking about to something else and thus steer the conversation into an area in which he was on surer ground. Ingrid had a political stance or a firm opinion on everything and he fell in with her view every time. At one point he found himself agreeing with the statement that cannabis and other drugs were disseminated by the establishment to keep the proletariat down.
  When Kevin advanced opinions and ideas of his own, some of it was stuff he believed and some of it was stuff he was only thinking about for the first time now, and some of it was stuff he didn't really believe or wasn't sure he believed or was sure he didn't care about, but all of it was stuff he was sure Ingrid would want to hear. She would usually start to smile and nod eagerly almost as soon as he opened his mouth, and often before he could grope his way cautiously to a conclusion would be enthusiastically voicing her agreement. This would sometimes save him the bother of having to finish his sentence, a good thing on those occasions when he found he wasn't quite sure exactly what the fuck it was he was trying to say.
  "Yes! Yes! Yes!" she would cry, sometimes so loudly and with such passion that, in the earlier stages of the night before everyone else had obviously gone home, Kevin would find himself speculating happily on the construction the pseuds in the next room would put on the noise. "I agree! I know."
  At only one point were they not in complete accordance. This was when Kevin had repeated something Forbes had said on the boat coming over which had sounded quite impressive to him: "There are no truly European people any more, only watered-down Americans."
  For the first time Ingrid didn't know. She had frowned and shook her head and come out with an even more impressive statement: "There are no people any more."
  "Oh, I know," said Kevin after a while.
  And so they talked, and talked, and talked, until the joss-sticks burned down to fragrant stubs and the sky started to lighten outside. At last Ingrid looked at an alarm clock. It was five in the morning.
  "May I have a cigarette?" she asked.
  He had not thought she smoked. He gave her one and lit it for her. She took a big drag and exhaled slowly and deeply.
  "Now we must go to bed," she said. "You must go now. You will come back tomorrow? I like talking to you."
  As he walked back to Betsy's across the canal bridges the dawn was breaking and birds were singing. He had rarely been so happy.
  As he crept across the darkened attic room Forbes sat up in bed.
  "Where the fuck have you been?" he asked sleepily.
  "Shortly after you left me I was picked up by a gorgeous intellectual chick who was also a fan of Camus. She took me back to her flat and locked me in her bedroom and we've been talking and looking into each other's eyes until now."
  "I thought that must be it," said Forbes, rolling over and going back to sleep.



Chapter 13
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