Internal peace
Jeremy Clarke
On Election Night I went to the pub, then on to two parties and finally ended up round at Trev’s playing Round the Clock darts on amphetamines with a part-time drug dealer and an 18-year-old girl who sells double glazing door-to-door. Playing Round the Clock darts on amphetamines at five o’clock in the morning with these two has become a bit of a habit. The girl — I’ll call her Polly lodges at Trev’s. The pot and speed salesman, George, is a permanent fixture but doesn’t actually live there. That’s the beauty of Trev’s place. You can go round there at five, six o’clock in the morning, bowl in without knocking, and there’ll always be a few self-confessed losers sitting around, and they’re always glad to see a fresh face.
The dartboard hangs on Trev’s lounge door. In the past, I’ve consistently missed the door with three darts, let alone the board. On Election Night, though, I was Dead-Eyed Dick. It’s like that sometimes. I can go out and cane it because we’re all going to die, and instead of feeling drunk or drugged up at the end of the night I feel absolutely normal and perfectly at home within myself. I was so completely at home on Election Night I had a revelation. I realised that what I’d assumed to be my normal self wasn’t the real me at all. It was just a rather anxious persona, a sort of political party with a small majority, if you like, overseeing a holding action between the various competing factions of my mind. This real me was more relaxed. There was no mental hubbub. For the first time since the last time I’d felt like this, there was that spaciousness to my thoughts that good prose has, and I wasn’t afraid of the truth. And, more importantly, I could throw a mean arrow.
Normally, I’m hopeless at darts. I’ve not got either the requisite eye–arm co-ordination or sufficient powers of concentration. Put me up against a man with his trousers on fire and he’d probably beat me. But at five o’clock in the morning on Election Night with a quietened, clear mind, and no fear of the truth, I could have castrated a passing bluebottle. I was round the clock and into the bull while the other two were still on single figures.
After that we turned on the television. Quite forgetting that, politically, it was a crucial night in the history of our country, we watched, without comment, an American programme in which, oddly enough, people were playing a game of darts on a man’s bare backside. It was gruesome. Then George initiated the usual five o’clock in the morning conversation about bashing people up for money. He used to do it, he says, a long time ago, and now he’s thinking of coming out of retirement. What did we think?
Every time I go round there, just as daylight is edging the curtains, we always get on to the subject of how hard he is. You can almost set your watch by it. I can never tell, though, whether it’s just some weird fantasy of his. But nor do I care. I give him the benefit of the doubt, and I nod and shake my head and occasionally offer modest advice as if it’s all true. But why, if he really is such a violent man, does he advertise it?
I’ve been rereading recently a marvellous translation of Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. Musashi was Japan’s greatest ever swordsman: he killed over 60 men in fights and duels. His celebrated little book is a treatise on how to cultivate a martial spirit. He must have been a ferocious opponent; it wouldn’t be unreasonable to condense the entire contents of the book into just three words: Attack! Attack! Attack! Preceding a chapter entitled ‘The Stupidity of Fancy Footwork’ is one called ‘Incorrect Carriage and Warrior Attitudes’. In it, Musashi says:
The true warrior does not go around telling everyone he is a great warrior. He permits his actions to govern others’ responses ... You must understand this basic lesson.
I put this to George. George, I said, those that talk about it just ain’t doing it. But he didn’t talk about it to everyone, George said. Only to me. Well, why me? I said. And he said it was because he thought I was mad and sort of didn’t count.
By this time the speed’s wearing off a bit, so I had another tenner’s worth off him and we all had another game of Round the Clock. And it was only by accident, really, flicking through the TV channels later on, that we learned that Tone had got in again.
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