Zone of the Interior by Clancy Sigal

Zone of the Interior by Clancy Sigal

Author:Clancy Sigal [Sigal, Clancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3707-4
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-10T16:04:00+00:00


] three [

SPRING ALSO CREPT INTO Clare Community Council. By Easter Bank Holiday (I missed another Aldermaston march) we had shaken down to “our fightin’ weight,” as Dr. Last put it. The dross—Clive Flynn and his ilk—we’d got rid of simply by letting them come to meetings. No stranger ever survived a Lastian interrogation. “Wha’s th’ point in suckin’ up to outsiders,” he declared. “Sooner or later they’ll only find out th’truth about us.” And he’d giggle unhappily.

I thought that this blackballing of outlanders contradicted Last’s stated policy of courting all possible allies, and said so. (After all, it had provoked my first quarrel with the group.) He looked right through me as if I wasn’t there. Though I’d been elected chairman—admittedly, to keep me quiet—Last still ran Clare meetings in his own way. Head in hands, he punctuated the agenda with doleful comments on our shortcomings. “Davina, stop mumblin’. If ye’ve nuthin’ to say, shut up.” “Git to th’ point, Boris. Yir Stalinist prattlin’s drivin’ me up th’ wall.” “Sid, I swear if ye was a mite more withdrawn ye’d disappear up yir own arsehole.”

We accepted his judgments docilely. Davina said, “Willie gives one such a feeling of being nobody and of not even existing. That’s the first step to Enlightenment, isn’t it?”

The plain truth is, we jumped whenever Last cracked the whip. His decisions, usually handed down in the form of soft-spoken suggestions or off-the-cuff guesswork, had the force of Law. A strange collective chemistry transformed even his slips of the tongue into group canon. Will-lessness emanated from us like plants stretching out to their light source, Willie Last.

Hell, I’d been through all this charismatic b.s. before, in American politics. And the other Clare members had been around, too. Why did we stick it?

If Last had been nothing but what he seemed—a vain, truculent stage Scotsman with a talent for “puttin’ th’ boot in” to our emotional soft spots—we would never have followed (and loved) him so. He could also be sweet, tender and caring, fatherly, without side or swank, retaining—even in fits of arrogant temper—that sly, warming grin, which seemed to say: “Och mon, what’re we takin’ ourselves so seriously fer?” He had a trick of enticing you into dark, twisting mental labyrinths and then suddenly abandoning you to find your own way out, which we proudly thought of as his liberating us from “th’ chains o’ love.” Though he made much of his dislike of the role of Master, which he claimed we foisted on him, he seemed to accept such eminence with a humility that was indistinguishable from arrogance. At the same time as he poked fun at my habit of always calling him “Doctor Last,” a respectful hangover from our previous analytical relationship, he made it equally clear that in practice Clare’s democracy of souls meant he had every right to lash us for (among other things) our dependence on him.

At bottom, of course, couch power dictated Clare relationships. Part of Last’s abnormal authority



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