Love in a Blue Time Read Online Free Page B

satisfaction he considered to be unjustly unappreciated now he had time to think about it. In the republic of accumulation and accountancy there was no doubt Jimmy was a failure artist of ability. To enlarge a talent to disappoint, it was no good creeping into a corner and dying dismally. It was essential to raise, repeatedly, hope and expectation in both the gullible and the knowing, and then to shatter them. Jimmy was intelligent, alertly bright-eyed, convincing. With him there was always the possibility of things working out. It was an achievement, therefore, after a calculated build-up, to bring off a resounding fuck-up. Fortunately Jimmy would always, on the big occasion, let you down: hopelessness, impotence, disaster, all manner of wretchedness – he could bring them on like a regular nightmare.
    Not that it hadn’t cost him. It took resolution, organisation,and a measure of creativity to drink hard day and night; to insult friends and strangers; to go to parties uninvited and attempt to have sex with teenage girls; to borrow money and never pay it back; to lie, make feeble excuses, be evasive, shifty and selfish. He had had many advantages to overcome. But finally, after years of application, he had made a success, indeed a triumph, of failure.
    Jimmy said, ‘The rich love the poor to work, and the harder the better. It keeps them out of trouble while they’re ripped off. Everyone knows that.’ He picked up a porn magazine, Peaches, and flipped through the pages. ‘You don’t think I’m going to fall for that shit, do you?’
    Roy’s eyes felt heavy. He was falling asleep in the morning! To wake himself up he paced the carpet and strained to recall the virtues of employment.
    ‘Jimmy, there’s something I don’t understand about this.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Don’t you ever wake up possessed by a feeling of things not done? Of time and possibility lost, wasted? And failure … failure in most things – that could be overcome. Don’t you?’
    Jimmy said, ‘That’s different. Of mundane work you know nothing. The worst jobs are impossible to get. You’ve lived for years in the enclosed world of the privileged with no idea what it’s like outside. But the real work you mention, I tell you, every damn morning I wake up and feel time rushing past me. And it’s not even light. Loneliness … fear. My heart vibrates.’
    ‘Yes! and don’t you think, this is a new morning, maybe this day I can redeem the past? Today something real might be done?’
    ‘Sometimes I do think that,’ Jimmy said. ‘But most of the time … to tell you the truth, Roy, I know nothing will get done. Nothing, because that time is past.’
    When the beer was gone they went out, putting their arms around one another. On the corner of Roy’s street was a roughpub with benches outside, where many local men gathered between March and September, usually wearing just shorts. They’d clamber from their basements at half past ten and by eleven they’d be in place, chewing a piece of bread with their beer, smoking dope and shouting above the traffic. Their women, who passed by in groups, pushing prams laden with shopping, were both angrier and more vital.
    One time Roy walked past and heard Springsteen’s hypodermic cry ‘Hungry Heart’ blaring from inside. He’d lingered apprehensively: surely the song would rouse the men to some sudden recklessness, the desire to move or hunt down experience? But they merely mouthed the words.
    He thought of the books which had spoken to him as a teenager and how concerned they were with young men fleeing home and domesticity, to hurl themselves at different boundaries. But where had it led except to self-destruction and madness? And how could you do that kind of thing now? Where could you run?
    Roy’s preferred local was a low-ceilinged place with a semicircular oak bar. Beyond, it was long and deep, broken up by booths, comers and turns. Men sat alone, reading, staring, talking to themselves, as