Ubu

I called him Ubu, and for no good reason. Perhaps I wished simply to negate his actual name, which was Adam, and maintain distance from him by insisting on my own nomenclature, and also by using a nonsense name, like a child’s scribble over his actual name. He first spoke to me after a poetry class in Covent Garden. I had read my Kafka poem. I was the only woman in the class.  “He came to Prague in a fragile boat, his hair was beetle black,” and so on. He loved the poem he said and suggested we go for a coffee. We talked about my poem. Kafka and his relationship with Felice Bauer. The breaking off of the engagement. The brutal honesty. But not long after that he began talking about his father who was dying of cancer. Thus was I immediately forced into a corner, ethically. It is not inaccurate to say that he weaponised his dying father in order to pre-emptively secure my companionship. As a short cut to friendship. For it’s true that from that point on it was difficult for me to refuse or refuse for very long the offer to go for coffee or even for a drink, as for example at that Egyptian place in Stockwell with its admittedly superlative falafel. All these meetings were in fact dominated by the figure of the father, hospitalised and dying. He was the subject but also, it seemed, the choreographer of our conversations. The father had a house on the coast near Bournemouth. Would I drive down with him to sort through his things in preparation for the inevitable? I could sleep in the spare room. On the day of the drive he turned up late. He’d walked into a lamppost and had a lump on his head. “Are you sure you’re ok to drive,” I’d asked. He insisted she was. Half way there he declared he needed some protein. “put your hand under the seat,” he asked. I found a piece of chicken wrapped in tin foil which I then passed to him. I said that this attitude to food – bypassing its flavours and textures and breaking it down into non-sensible scientific units such as Carbs, Protein, Fat. – was anathema to me. This way of relating to the world, in fact, was anathema to me, I added.

The traffic was so bad that it was nearly nightfall when we got to the house. He began to lay out photographs on the floor, each one accompanied by an almost inaudible commentary, as if each photograph was in fact a magical object drawing forth words from some previously impossible recess of his mind. His eyes were blue and full of grief. Nonetheless, I became more and more taciturn, more remote. I did not want to enter with him into this whirlpool. I was there on the bank, watching and wanting to be elsewhere. He found a bottle of wine in a cupboard. “We should have a poetry reading night”, he suggested, “to summon or placate the spirits, I’m not sure which”. He started reciting Dylan Thomas which he knew by heart. “when their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone.” I’m sorry, I said, I need to sleep. I took myself off to bed. Early next morning he was up making breakfast. I apologised and said that I had to return to London. I took a taxi to Bournemouth station. I reached London in time to get the tube down to Clapham and have morning coffee at Gastros. I entered the café like a boat coming into harbour. I was aware of my callousness but also relieved. Over the coming weeks, I refused all calls from Ubu until they stopped. It was the cruellest thing I have done. Until I saw him in a bookshop. Waterstones in Piccadilly, just after its grand opening. I saw him looking at me and I looked back as at a stranger, coldly, and turned away. I sensed his eyes trailing after me. It was a moment of brutality, sadism even, for I took a certain pleasure in it. Such a small pleasure, if indulged, or expanded and incorporated into politics, I thought, opens the door to monsters. In my relations with others I have tried to keep that door closed. But I never spoke to Ubu again.