Free Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson

would fill in the details … the friend we had in common, the event, the circumstances of his being here.
    ‘Tom Lynch,’ I smiled, ‘from Michigan’ and then, in case our connection was professional, ‘from Lynch & Sons, in Milford.’
    ‘How nice to meet you Mr Lynch. Fines … Ray Fines…’ His voice was hesitant, velvety, trained; a clergyman I thought. They were always doing these ‘exchanges’ whereby one rector traded duties and homes for a season with another, the better to see the world on a cleric’s stipend. Or a TV reporter, the UK correspondent for CNN perhaps, maybe wanting an interview with the visiting American poet?
    ‘Are you here on holidays?’ I asked him.
    ‘No, no, just visiting friends.’ He kept looking around the room as if I wasn’t the reason for his being here.
    ‘And where did we first meet? I just can’t place it,’ I said.
    ‘I am certain I don’t know,’ he said, and then almost shyly, ‘perhaps you have seen me in a movie.’
    ‘Movie?’
    ‘Yes, well, maybe,’ he said. ‘I act.’
    It was one of those moments when we see the light or debouch from the fog into the focused fact of the matter. I had, of course, first seen him in America, in Michigan, in the Milford Cinema, where he’d been the brutal Nazi, Amon Goeth, who shoots Jews for sport in
Schindler’s List
and more recently in
Quiz Show
where he’d played the brainy if misguided golden boy of the American poet, Mark Van Doren. He was not Ray Fines at all. He was
Ralph Fiennes
. His face was everywhere – the globalized image of mannish beauty in its prime, and dark thespian sensibility, privately desired by women on several continents and in many languages whilst here I was, slam-dunked in the hoop-game of celebrity before I’d even had a chance to shine. Across the room I could see the rector’s wife, watching my encounter with the heartthrob. She was wide-eyed and blushing and expecting, I supposed, an introduction.
    A contortionist of my acquaintance, whose name would not be recognized were I to use it, though he has accumulated some regional fame for something he does with thumbs, once theorized that if the lower lip could be stretched over one’s head, and one could quickly swallow, one could disappear. Never had I a greater urge to test the theory than that moment in Aldeburgh.

‘There are more ways of killing a dog than choking it with butter.’ Proverb
D.B.C. Pierre
    The Art Beast spoke to me on the road to becoming a writer. It urged me to explore every opportunity for life experience, because as an artist it would be my job to probe the edges where others mightn’t go. The taste of these edges must one day fly off a written page, said the Beast.
    This was a bloody stupid thing to say to me.
    I sometimes visited Australia in spring or autumn. This is when flies in the outback swarm fewer than eight deep to your nostrils, eyes, and mouth; an opportunity certain mates and I took as a mandate to pack a car with baked beans, port, and rifles, and drive across nowhere looking for animals to shoot. Hunting, we called it. Wild goat by day, fox by night, for these were introduced pests, doing violence to the balance of nature.
    We never once suspected our testicles of contriving this excuse.
    Conditions on these trips were traditionally cold and prickly. Then one day a mate secured a cautious invitation to use a distant relative’s homestead as a base. The offer came after much lobbying of the mate’s elders, the kind that don’t answer when you ask them favours, that just sort of creak, or suddenly sneeze and have a stroke.
    We leapt at the invitation, though it was made clear our host’s property was a working farm; we would camp in the shearing shed, and our behaviour should be beyond reproach.
    And so, while three city boys debated whether an ice-cream machine or a taco dinner kit would make a better gift for the host, our mate with the country connection quietly slung a sack of oranges into