Self & I by Matthew De Abaitua

Author:Matthew De Abaitua
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2018-01-23T11:08:48+00:00

Good

We drive to London in the Citroën. Somewhere on the A12, the exhaust rattles out of its bracket and drags along the road. Will pulls over onto the hard shoulder and we get out to inspect the damage, crouching to look at the underside of the car like we are experts. Will has an idea. He strides into the thicket and returns holding a tree branch. Then, in one swift movement, he whips off the belt of his trousers. He ties one end of the belt around the branch, and the other end around the exhaust; then to achieve the required tension, he wedges the branch into the boot of the car, and shuts the lid across the belt.

‘Fixed,’ he says.

The car stays fixed all the way into central London. It’s a piece of good luck, the wind is at our backs. He drops me beside the A40, where the houses have been cleared in anticipation of an expansion of the road. I walk to El’s house to pick her up for a night out.

El and I go to the French House in Soho for dinner with Will and Victoria. The upstairs dining room overlooks a neon-lit pornography store, where sad men come and go, servicing a peccadillo.

El is wearing a green shirt and black leggings. I am wearing one of Will’s old blue suits, a hard-wearing tweed that has seen gutter action. It is ‘virtually bullet-proof’, he assures me, the gentleman’s Kevlar.

The menu at the French House was typed up that morning and offers various neglected cuts of meat and offal, an emerging trend pioneered by the Hendersons running the kitchen. On the table, the tiny saucers of sea salt and ground black pepper are another new thing, signifiers of a change in taste. El and I joke about them but we share a quiet excitement for these tiny saucers: food and books are two ways in which we can get on in the world, accumulate cultural capital in lieu of financial capital; perhaps we will cook and write our way into a better life.

The table talk is of morality. From where do you derive your ideas of good or evil if you are not religious? The conversation arises from Will’s projected novel ‘Good’; goodness is what is on his mind, and therefore, what is on our mind too. Goodness is a subject for which El has more conviction than I can muster: a moral inclination only becomes a principle when you sacrifice something for it, and I have not made any sacrifices that I am aware of. I am not sure I have anything to sacrifice. Would my stereo count?

Will makes Soho happen for us. It is a burden of expectation for him, one that he throws off then takes up again in a way that is hard to anticipate. In Soho, it is difficult to tell self-destruction and self-advancement apart, sliding sideways along the bar rail, measuring out progress in cigarettes and sea breeze cocktails.

Masked ambition is the feeling I most associate with these evenings, moving from place to place in an entourage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.