Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN Tun other morning — I knew, even at the very bot- tom of the well of oblivion, that it must be around 2.30 a.m.—I felt some gigantic, superhuman, monstrous force shaking me awake. My spirit rose slowly to- wards the light like- some • ancient bubble of marsh gas pushing through a thousand woollen cobwebs. As it burst wetly into consciousness, I realised (the way people do in thrillers) that the nightmare was in front of me not behind. But it was much worse than that 'sixth sense that there was some- one in the room.' I have been a married man for so long that it always unnerves me to wake up and find there isn't someone in the room. This time, a perfectly normal sense, that of hearing, told me without possibility of mistake that at least fifty people were in the next room and what's more they were howling out The Song of the Volga Boatmen' at such a pitch that the whole bedroom vibrated and resounded like a hi-fi loudspeaker.
Had some hooligan gang seized the house as their headquarters and now would force me to dance the gopak on my own refectory table—a mob of youthful Stalins humiliating this ageing Khrushchev? The fact that they obviously did not give a damn about rousing the entire neigh- bourhood made their apparent self-confidence particularly sinister. There was no possible weapon in sight, so I was obliged to put all my trust into my sleep-bloated Gorgon face. All the lights were blazing on in the dining-room but there was only one person there. My two-and-a- half-year-old son was sitting on the table, legs swinging, chin in hand, elbow on knee, listening to a record of the Red Army Choir full-volume on his portable transistor gramophone. 'I playing my songs,' he announced. 'Now hear "Help".' And he started to slide the latest Beatle album out of its sleeve.
'No, Adam, please, no, not that.' I grovelled because I could hardly stand up and the Red Army noise still filled the room like flood water.
I could just about keep my face above its boiling, foaming surface. 'Everybody is asleep. Every- -
thing is asleep. The sun has gone to bed. There's only you and me and the Red Army making the night hideous. Even the songs want to sleep.' Be- ing an obliging lad, and possibly slightly embar- rassed by seeing his father reduced to such snivelling jelly, he clicked off the gramophone, put the top carefully on, and stored away his `songs.' He extracted an unscheduled, and totally illegal, instalment of Danegeld in the form of a glass of passion fruit juice and two squashed-fly biscuits then climbed briskly upstairs to his room. I weaved back to my bed feeling as if I had just been keelhauled by Captain Bligh. I awoke again at 6.30 a.m. to the slightly muted strains of Tom Jones singing 'It's not unusual.' The day was beginning again in the house dominated by the musical monster.
One of the few things Adam has been told he must not say, to anybody, for any reason, is 'Shut Up!' A self-denying ordinance bans it from our conversation too. The only time it is ever heard is when Adam is furious that I am about to inter- rupt him and he gets in first by shouting 'Mustn't say "Shut Upl" Mustn't say . . . "Shut Up!" Never say ... "Shut Up!" ' The pauses get longer so that it would be a philosophical problem to occupy a school of Greek Sophists through a long Alexandrian night to decide whether saying 'Shut Up!' a minute after saying 'Mustn't say' counts as saying 'Shut Up!' or not. It certainly has the effect of saying 'Shut Up!' Being so fixed on his gramophone, he has imported certain of the instrument's technical terms into his normal conversation. For example, a permitted variant of the banned 'Shut Up I' has become 'Click Off!' When he sees me opening my mouth to deliver a lecture I have delivered many times before, he rushes away, tossing back over his shoulder: `Click off! Buzz up! Mustn't say . . . Sl-WT UP!' He is in the process of making a collection of such silencers and I keep on realising that there must be an antique underlayer of dead slang beneath my usual hipster vocabulary when I am suddenly told 'Get lost! Vamoose! Scrambo Get knotted!' by a polite childish treble. (By the way, one of my really hippy friends tells me that 'Naked Lunch' is now rather dated American shorthand for a pair of bare breasts. It makes sense as a title for Burroughs, but it makes non- sense of some of the elaborate philosophical glosses given by the book's learnedly naïve admirers.)
This devotion to pop diskery seems not so un- common as I feared among Adam's contem- poraries. But he does seem to have been in- oculated with the needle a little earlier than most, which is perhaps why he goes around lying about his age—`Adam Peter Brien, sixa half yearsa age twoa half stone.' Perhaps other parents are not so idiotically indulgent to these dwarfish whims of their offspring. I cannot help remembering what a superior glow of proleterian asceticism swept through me years ago when I read that some rich cow had given her six-year- old son an electric typewriter (or was it only gold- plated?). Why should he have such elaborate toys when the children of the poor were often without a fountain pen to their breast pockets? Perhaps the constant flow of soupy tunes and soapy lyrics which pursue me around our small cottage at the weekends is gradually turning my brain into a kind of lumpy porridge. I may be giving him a transistor TV set for his third birth- day, a miniature E2 Jag for starting school, prob- ably a yacht to celebrate puberty and to provide him with somewhere to hide his girl friends away from his drooling old man. Heaven knows what I will wake up to find going on next door then.
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