Читать книгу A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 10

I had a dream, of beating Peter up.

Aged fifty-four

The freshest diaries contain the oldest handwriting.

These are in the second box – the one the size of a thigh – and are as out of place beside the 1960s diaries I found in the Ribena crate as bubblegum squashed on an Etruscan pot: one is indignant green, similar to fish-and-chip-shop mushy peas; another is milky parma violet; a tangerine version looks as oily and dimpled as the fruit. The diaries in the Ribena box suggest Britain after the war. By contrast, these books in the thigh box couldn’t have existed before the 1990s. They’ve been produced using computer-aided chemical processes. They’ve made long container journeys from South-East Asia by sea, and they have a texture similar to thin, soft rubber; it’s disgusting, like a sheath.

The endpapers cracked when I eased them open.

The writing in the thigh box is also different to that in the earlier books. It’s done in blue-black ink with a medium nib, never biro, and makes me think of escaping maggots. The early diaries from the 1960s are written in ebullient letters. Four words are sometimes all it takes to fill the width of a page. In these modern books ‘I’ crams fourteen words to a line. The height of the letters is the same as the thickness of the pen nib. The shapes of the letters have changed too: ‘h’s are often written with just a vertical line, or (in small, quick words such as ‘that’ and ‘the’) ignored entirely; ‘u’s and the round bit of ‘d’s are as flat as pennies. Everything is wriggly or sat on. But after the initial shock this hand is not too difficult to read.

If I was “God”, I would

strike the people all dead.

Two lines of text can easily be slid into each gap between the printed rulings:

Peter still risks having a knife stuck right through him;

and the police coming up here and all that,

just like with the widow lady.

And, whereas in the early books the diarist wrote always on or parallel to the line, here he runs at precisely two degrees to the horizontal, suggesting that his arm is constrained, as if by a piece of rope:

It was in the news that a man has been let out of prison –

was wrongfully imprisoned since 1975, twenty three years;

myself been shut up at Peter’s for one year more.

Yet these diaries are unquestionably by the same person as the ones in the Ribena box. It’s not the handwriting that gives the author away, it’s the sense of urgency. In both cases, the text charges in from a previous book in the top-left-hand corner of the first possible page and, two hundred sheets later, in the last millimetres of the closing blank side, explodes off towards tomorrow. Removal men couldn’t squeeze in more. The luridcoloured modern volumes each contain 150,000 words and cover roughly two months of entries, or 2,500 words a day. The typical English human can write thirty words per minute. Assuming no pauses for thought or to relax hand muscles, this man is therefore spending an average of an hour and twenty-three minutes each day offloading his thoughts onto paper. It is never less than forty minutes. On rare occasions it is as much as three hours.

There are no crossings-out or hesitations. Once or twice the ink fades abruptly in the middle of a word, in the space of a few letters. But the writer must have spare cartridges close by, because instantly it spurts away again, hauling the day on.

Life is an emptiness in these late books. All talk about the Great Project is gone. There is no mention of ‘it’. He sees nobody and goes nowhere. ‘I’ describes himself as ‘ruined’, lost’, ‘sacrificed’. There has been a smash of all his hopes. It is not only the man called Peter who is responsible for this catastrophe; ‘I’ several times accuses ‘those who are stuffed with sleep’.

The writer refers to this man called Peter as his ‘gaoler’ – a ‘cruel’ person.

I just wish I could put my hands round his throat

and strangle him – throttle him to death.

We never see Peter. The writer never describes him physically. We smell him. ‘Pongy Peter’, ‘I’ labels him; ‘Stinky Peter’. Occasionally, particularly at night, we hear him. His footsteps creak along the corridor below; there is a rattle at the rear of the house and a rush of water: he has gone to the toilet.

It is still a riddle to me, how all the stink of his wicklery [going to the toilet] comes up to the back landing when he has a crap – if it comes up through the drainpipes or the ventilators or what. Or if the smell seeps out of his bedroom from the pipe to his washbasin.

Occasionally, Peter creeps into ‘I’s room. What happens next is hardly believable. He steals ‘I’s belongings! Books, valuable letters, volumes of the diaries themselves. He sets light to his haul in the garden.

I think Peter must have burnt all E’s photos, and a lot of the music – took advantage when I was in hospital.

What is going on? Why doesn’t the diarist stop this hateful behaviour?

Peter is a detestable man.

He seems indestructible, like Nelson Mandela.