INAPPROPRIATE TEACHING METHODS
by Mark Gullick
An first-chapter excerpt from Mark Gullick's novel, Vanikin in the Underworld, the story of the furthest down and possible redemption of an educator who can’t escape education
I dreamed last night I was being measured up for my burial suit. The odd thing was that I was still alive. That’s right. Some mincing little chaffinch with a tape-measure round his neck was feeling me up, chalking outlines on butcher paper, cocking his birdy head to one side while he looked at my scrawny seventy-year-old frame, and all to the end of making a suit to grace Harry Vanikin’s coffin, his lying in state. He didn’t say anything, but I knew. That’s one of the things about dreams that sets them apart from waking life: However strange or other they might be, you always know what’s going on.
I say I had the dream last night, but I meant when I was last asleep. The windows here are blacked out by big theatre curtains. It could be day or night. There used to be tiny, ragged holes in the fabric — wounds from a moth invasion — and the daylight would announce itself through these tiny spaces, making it look like a knackered old planetarium. That’s what the ancient astronomers thought stars were, light getting in through a bloody great dome a few hundred miles above the earth. How do we know they were wrong? Everything else in the modern world is built on lies, why not the stars, too? Make it all up, fabricate, weave, and spin. I stuck black gaffer tape on the holes, and now, it’s as black in here as a crow’s heart.
I used to burn candles, but I set fire to one of the walls, and the boy now refuses to buy me any more. So, I switch on the electric light, the 40-watt bulb suddenly spewing out its pale-yellow effusion. Not pale enough for Vanikin. I asked the boy if the shop did 20-watt bulbs, 10. Can you get a 1-watt bulb? Could you see by its light? Perhaps I should learn to feel my way around this haunted palace, like a blind man. Once, when the boy was sick, Estrella did my shopping and brought me back a light bulb that looked like it had been a prop in a Russian science fiction movie of the 1960s. Estrella, tall and gangling, with an anachronistic flapper’s face tending to the lengthy. The bulb was sculpted glass tubing, and Estrella said it was energy efficient. Like all young people now, she is the conscience for an entire planet. When she had gone, I broke the monstrosity with a ball-peen hammer to see what was inside and waited for the boy to get well and buy me a proper bulb.
At the moment, the boy is well. He rarely gets ill, but he is on the right side of puberty, untroubled by the itches and drives that arrive when poisonous hormones leak into the childish glands. He is, however, prey to the natural maladies of the young. I don’t know what time it is; watches and clocks simply sneer at you concerning your own mortality. When the boy comes, I know it is morning. He is a part of the overworld, and he has a mother to keep him on the temporal straight and narrow. His mother is called Manda. Not Amanda. Just Manda. I saw her once, peering in at my humble dwelling like a medieval courtesan gazing in wonder into a turf-cutter’s hovel. She lives with the boy in one of the other rooms. The boy has a similarly mutated modern name, but to me, he is just the boy, a beacon of innocence in a world as rank as month-old cheese in a long-broken refrigerator.
The house has yet to come to life, so it must be early in the morning. The boy used to chatter away of his adventures in the overworld, giving away clues as to the season. I forbade him ever to speak of it again. I carry enough of the infection from outside, and I am here for the cure, to take the waters. Winter or summer, equinox or solstice; these climatic mood swings no longer concern me.
No. That’s a lie too far. You will become used to my lies, my swingeing embellishments and outright deceptions, but let’s not run before we can walk, or walk before we can crawl, or crawl before we have oozed from our mother’s great tented bellies. Of course, I know the seasons even here, down here in the underworld. It is summer now. There is no need for the convection heater, and the caretaker of the building in which I live has turned off the central heating. The caretaker is a man called Craig McCerrow, and he is one of the most frightening of God’s creations. God, or whoever runs this spiteful orb. But it is summer now.
Summer, too, when I first descended from the glare, down into the bowels, searching for no Eurydice but the truth, or at least a truth. ‘Supposing truth to be a woman,’ wrote Nietzsche, who slept with one woman in his life, who gave him syphilis, which drove him mad and left him in the Jena asylum for eleven years. Beware truth. Summer when I came here, seven summers ago, and in those seven years, I have left this room for a period in excess of twenty-four hours once and once only. Of which, more later.
Inappropriate teaching methods drove me here — or, led me here, the distinction being a part of the purpose of my visit — and I have to say that is pretty rich coming from the gauleiters of the overworld. I taught inappropriately? In a world where pinheaded advertising executives spend Third-World-economy-sized amounts selling children plastic and rubber shoes endorsed by multi-millionaire hoodlums who made their own fortunes braying about violent sex acts and ballistic weapons, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which banks deemed too big to fail are paid to survive by money taken from the pockets of toilet cleaners and nurses before awarding their incompetent executives yearly bonuses outstripping the amount those same cleaners and nurses would need to live for as long as a dozen Roman empires to earn, my teaching methods were inappropriate? In a world in which women can become men and men women on the state’s ticket, children can view buggery at any hour of the day or night, screaming dervishes knife octogenarians as they queue for the bus, actors are asked about the world economy, simpering and large-breasted women lie about the weather to make themselves a fortune, shallow graves dot woodlands when men are done with their entertainments, and no one is allowed to use the word ‘spastic’ even though it comes from the ancient Greek ‘spasmos,’ which, meaning as it does ‘to tremble violently’, adequately describes the condition it used to stand for, and my teaching methods were inappropriate?
‘Mr. Vanikin?’
Outside the door, the boy is here. I shuffle to the door and release the latch, tacky with age, and open the door an eye’s width, checking that this is not that dreadful sprite Adam, with his abilities, his mimicry, and othernesses. It is not. It is the boy. I retreat back to the safety of my geriatric sofa, my large bald flannel dressing-gown’s train following like a sick dog.
The boy is about twelve but already tall. Christ knows what there is in food nowadays, but it’s not just the post-war boons I remember, iron and calcium and phosphates. Nowadays, the junk they shovel down must be crammed with alchemised plant food, kerosene, plutonium. The boy is tall but not independent of limb like Estrella. He already has co-ordination and grace, a larval godling. His mop of curly hair falls over one hazel eye. He would have gone down handsomely in the Athenian square, fawned over by a gaggle of Socrates’ loquacious bum-chums.
Don’t worry, little boys are not what the young people call ‘my thing.’ Christ alive, what do you do if you find out it is your thing? Lars, the middle-aged Danish laboratory worker who sometimes sits with me and brings me newspaper snippets from the world of men, like a paunchy Scandinavian Mercury, tells me there has been a spate of arrests of ‘celebrities’ over child abuse back in the days when men were all wearing Neanderthal sideburns and velvet jackets with landing-strip lapels. What actually happens on the day you discover that little girls — or little boys — are your thing? You are sitting on the tube train opposite a cherub. The swinging legs, the flash of tiny knicker cloth, the empathic pull in the sinews of the unruly member… Jesus, do you make straight for the nearest hospital, the nearest cop shop, or do you embrace your new vocation and head for darker infernal regions? Or are we, to use another phrase beloved of today’s academic grubs and pupae, just ‘ethnocentric’ about all this? African tribes and their child brides. Nine-year-old Aisha shepherded into a tent to meet the patiently waiting Mohammed.
The boy has come into the room and is standing tapping at his ever-present mobile telephone, the portal to elsewhere beloved of all modern youth.
‘What do you need today, Mr. Vanikin?’
‘Um, the usual, really.’
I hand him my list, a pathetic inventory in a crabbed hand. Harry Vanikin’s needs, strip-lit libations. The boy looks down at the meagre collection of items and pries loose the twenty-pound note carefully stapled to the torn strip of copier paper. He says,
‘Craig says the water’s got to go off today for two hours. Shall I fill the kettle right up?’
He’s a good boy. If the child is father to the man then the world has a treat coming its undeserving way. The boy will not grow up to be Craig, crackling with malice, finding his way into a job with people, I’m certain, because people are his sport. The water is always having to go off, the lights go out, the heating fade to tepid, so that gangs of mythical ‘workmen’ can tinker and prise. The block is like some great sick mastodon tended by pygmy veterinarians.
The boy has gone, striding down to Ahmed’s shop, and I am alone, or as alone as I can be. Vanikin in the underworld. Where were we? Ah, yes. Inappropriate teaching methods. I suppose it could have been worse. Socrates got the hemlock, Bruno, Wycliff, and Savonarola the stake and the fire, looking down and hoping the breeze was ministering to the flames. The university simply made no fuss and paid me my pension before laying me off. Estrella tells me my book is no longer to be found in the library reference system. My book. So much to tell.
Another day in my circle. I rip off a puckered square of kitchen roll and evacuate my nose into it before looking down to view the outcome, a Kandinsky miniature in grey, green, and red. My stomach, that aged coil of plumbing, is making small spiral noises, like tiny springs emerging from a captor mattress, and I must prepare porridge.
In the ‘kitchen’ — the square boarded off by prefabricated and hastily painted and wonky boards — I line up oats, salt, milk, a cup of water, and sugar on the ugly Formica surface. I turn the hob to three — hob, Anglo-Saxon word for the devil. Now, a circle of fire. Everything is present everywhere else; the human task is to sort it into piles that make sense.
I make porridge exactly the same way my father did, the big, bearded man who was as good to me as he knew how to be. Porridge must not be a swimming gruel, but neither must it be industrial adhesive. It should exist betwixt and between the two extremes, like we poor ape-angels.
As I carry the bowl back into the central space and the retired sofa, I realise I must not have slept at all well.
Mr. Gullick is a philosopher (Ph.D. University of Sussex) who writes on English politics and culture for American magazines. He was born in London in the early 1960s, and he currently resides in Central America.