Cal

Cal is here again. He’s returned from Australia with a bandana and a faux-antipodean accent. “Ye-ah” he keeps saying for no good reason. He’d taken a sabbatical from his consultancy job to go travelling. His high paid consultancy job with which he’d bought his flat in Clapham years ago. He’d rented it out at some exorbitant rate to help fund his travels. The smell of cigarette smoke rises through the floorboards. So does his voice.The floorboards are bare after the carpet was eaten by moths, but that’s another story. It means that the odours, meandering conversations and even tiny blades of light from the kitchen enter my room, which is intolerable. Cal’s got lots to say about the aborigines and various historical injustices. He’s been humbled by speaking to them. Their resilience and approach to life is amazing. Their wisdom, their sense of time. It’s elevated him but also deepened him. He’s talking about Western this and Western that. Western conceptions of past and future and so forth. Suddenly he’s outside the West seeing things from the point of view of the aborigines. Even though he lives in Clapham. He is perpetually “cheering himself up”, a manic form of self-persuasion in which everyone around him is willy-nilly enlisted. This manic behaviour is fuelled in part by a continuous chain of “rollies”, with which everyone is fumigated, a spontaneous metaphor also for the noxious “happiness” he spreads around, which is not in fact actual happiness but a concatenation of gestures and attitudes from which happiness is supposed to follow, just as Pascal held that faith would follow in the footsteps of prayer rather than the other way around. He – Cal that is, not Pascal obviously - has a fish’s head with oily smoked skin. I find it repulsive, even as I am aware that my dislike of Cal is disproportionate and doubtless symbolic, which is to say he represents something I find abhorrent. A certain middle-class.. actually, no, I can’t be bothered to even conceptualise it. But then, listening through the floorboards, my ear pressed to the floorboards, in my room directly above the kitchen, I learn that he was a consultant for the US government in Nicaragua at the time of the passage from the Sandinistas to the US backed regime, that is to say he was instrumental in assisting in some of the privatisation programmes. All of those programs presupposed the savagery of the US funded Contras, who picked up babies by the legs and cracked their heads against trees. All of this to terrorise the population so that Cal and his fuckwits could come in and prepare the transition to private industry and so forth. So there is it: Cal, for all his mind-wank about the aborigines, was in fact the unwitting – and therefore more repugnant – lacky of state sponsored terrorism, and instrumental in one of the great political tragedies of the last century. Imagine such a man sat underneath me, talking and smoking. Practically a monster. All this over the course of half an hour, with my ear pressed to the floor, perfectly still, listening, when I should be preparing my lesson for tomorrow