Free A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

. You see, Kenny, there are some things you don’t even know you know, until you’re asked.’
    They have reached the tennis courts. The courts are all in use, now; dotted with moving figures. But George, with the lizard-quick glance of a veteran addict, has already noted that the morning’s pair has left, and that none of these players are physically attractive. On the nearest court, a fat middle-aged faculty member is playing to work up a sweat, against a girl with hair on her legs.
    ‘Someone has to ask you a question,’ George continues, meaningly, ‘before you can answer it. But it’s so seldom you find anyone who’ll ask the right questions. Most people aren’t that much interested —’
    Kenny is silent. Is he thinking this over? Is he going to ask George something right now? George’s pulse quickens with anticipation.
    ‘It’s not that I want to be cagey,’ he says, keeping his eyes on the ground and making this as impersonal as he can. ‘You know, Kenny, so often I feel I want to tell things, discuss things, absolutely frankly. I don’t mean in class, of course – that wouldn’t work. Someone would be sure to misunderstand —’
    Silence. George glances quickly up at Kenny and sees that he’s looking, though without any apparent interest, at the hirsute girl. Perhaps he hasn’t even been listening. It’s impossible to tell.
    ‘Maybe this friend of Lois’s didn’t see God, after all,’ says Kenny abruptly. ‘I mean, he might have been kidding himself. I mean, not too long after he took the stuff, he had a breakdown. He was locked up for three months in an institution. He told Lois that while he was having this breakdown he turned into a devil, and he could put out stars. I’m not kidding! He said he could put out seven of them at a time. He was scared of the police,though. He said the police had a machine for catching devils and liquidating them. It was called a MO-machine – MO, that’s OM – you know, Sir, that Indian word for God – spelled backwards.’
    ‘If the police liquidated devils, that would mean they were angels, wouldn’t it? Well, that certainly makes sense. A place where the police are angels has to be an insane asylum.’
    Kenny is still laughing loudly at this when they reach the bookshop. He wants to buy a pencil sharpener. They have them in plastic covers; red or green or blue or yellow. Kenny takes a red one.
    ‘What was it you wanted to get, Sir?’
    ‘Well, nothing, actually.’
    ‘You mean, you walked all the way down here just to keep me company?’
    ‘Sure. Why not?’
    Kenny seems sincerely surprised and pleased. ‘Well, I think you deserve something for that! Here, Sir, take one of these. It’s on me.’
    ‘Oh, but – well, thank you!’ George is actually blushing a little. It’s as if he has been offered a rose. He chooses a yellow sharpener.
    Kenny grins: ‘I kind of expected you’d pick blue.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Isn’t blue supposed to be spiritual?’
    ‘What makes you think I want to be spiritual? And how come you picked red?’
    ‘What’s red stand for?’
    ‘Rage and lust.’
    ‘No kidding?’
    They remain silent, grinning almost intimately.George feels that, even if all this double talk hasn’t brought them any closer to understanding each other, the not-understanding, the readiness to remain at cross-purposes, is in itself a kind of intimacy. Then Kenny pays for the pencil sharpeners, and waves his hand with a gesture which implies casual undeferential dismissal, ‘I’ll see you around.’
    He strolls away. George lingers on in the bookshop for a few minutes, lest he should seem to be following him.
    If eating is regarded as a sacrament, then the faculty dining-room must be compared to the bleakest and barest of Quaker meeting-houses. No concession, here, to the ritualism of food served snugly and appetisingly in togetherness. This room is an anti-restaurant. It is much too clean, with its chromium and plastic tables; much too