Free As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman

hulks of buildings, at the oil-dark canal. ‘Do you know what that was?’
    Ignoring Rea’s smart disparagement I finished the article, and then, while considering it, in order to justify a continuing disinclination to converse, allowed my eyes to slide idly down adjacent columns of print. Mike Rea lounged at the window frame, making clicking sounds with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, affecting amused patience and I, trapped as inevitably happens, by messages of whatever kind, windows, footholds on the wild ranges of all experience, drove, or felt receding, the crucial fact of the writer’s death back into coronary realms of consciousness, while my mind surrendered to the text actually entering it: undesired, unemployable data on the market prices of aluminium domestic products.
    Light.
    Light and fatigue. And brutality. And death. Light and the horror of detail, of the ‘all-revealed’, each apple on the barrow from the window of Mike Rea’s smelly room, the probably excremental stains on the vest-end escaped from the drooping pants of the small boy clinging to the pitching back of his hardly-larger, equally-grubby sister humping him down the milling street between the barrows. Obliterating light of today in which all yesterdays are dissolved. Where in the flood of summer light does the conscious past survive? Light is mere achievement while the dark is potential.
    In retrospect, this scene of light becomes assimilated to other lightscapes, all of them manifesting the same primary aspect of rigidity, of finality, of holding their human components in a highly-articulated but unevolving framework in which, forever, the strewn sun-bathers on the beach, the promenaders on the front and the decrepit valetudinarians on the porches and terraces of the hotels would exist in contempt of history and cosmic dynamics, in which, beyond the shadowy cubicle in which the two introspective astronomers (Rea and I) brooded, the teeming street-market would timelessly hawk fruit and shoes and the detritus of industry, in which the cornfields and the copse and the arrowing birds above the brook could permanently ignore geological erosion and human intrusion and carry a pastoral image unscathed through all escapades of energy, in which—but no, not the sea, where there is always secret darkness, soft organisms fleeing the light, a sealed mystery and the supple, mammalian rovers congealed from the contra- sliding waves.
    ‘I could use that van,’ remarked Rea. ‘Well?’
    The round, brown eyes in the faun-like face dilated as they swung mischievously round to accost me.
    ‘Toiling brother, exploited brother, tell me something. Tell me something, friend worker. Tell me something true, you bastard!’
    Rocked back and forth in Rea’s gipsy grasp, delicategastric equilibrium tilted by his foul breath and sight offended by his swarthy, leering countenance, I protested.
    ‘No. Stop—hey——’
    ‘Well then? Stop me. Defend yourself. Arr——’
    Rea hurled me back on the bed and then, humiliated by my refusal to romp with him, paused.
    ‘Me? I’m only a poor, crooked dealer. You read books. Here, how about paying your rent?’
    He eyed me cautiously for a moment or two longer.
    ‘You going to be sick?’
    Normally my stomach was fairly strong but sometimes, after much drinking and irregular eating, it protested in bouts of violent vomiting. That summer I had been drinking a good deal, in pubs and at parties. Earlier in the summer I had met Vanessa Coutts, a pretty American girl with a rather fetching (if, as it ultimately appeared, deceptive) air of candour and an open mind. That had happened, inevitably, in a pub.
    The pub doors had been open onto the soft summer evening. The crowd in the popular, ‘bourgeois-bohemian’ establishment, both expelled by internal pressure and seduced by the mild dusk and soothing, if exhaust-impregnated, although the subtle excitement of vegetable reflorescence also flavoured the Chelsea