Quality Retention

In those early visits to Forgall Terrace, I did not meet Phyllis Berrills.  But she was there alright.  First day I could hear the clack-clack of an old typewriter going upstairs.  Or might it have been the keyboard of a monstrously ancient PC?  I couldn’t say.  She’d been working on her play for years and, as I was to discover, was still at it, with fluctuating diligence.  I learned after meeting her it was Phyllis who in no small part was responsible for the abundance of stuff they had in the house, the DVDs, books, paintings, whatnot.  At first I thought it had to be all Oran’s doing.  For if anything was a man’s hobby it was the accumulation of kipple.  And yes he did contribute.  The books primarily, that is.  But to my rather ashamedly sexist surprise I discovered that most of the other stacks, the discs and tapes and LPs, had been amassed by Phyllis.  And she made no bones about it. 

I’m distrustful of anyone who doesn’t own a collection of something or other, she told me when I enquired about their hoarding.  Even those incapable of appreciating a good archive.  That’s what we’re looking at now.  Out there.  A people made miserable by their own momentum.  They’ve got an all-out assault on human memory going.  We’ve lost the knack for quality retention.

I agreed.  Because I too felt great unease when I saw the extent of their accrual.  It was a great weight upon me and I thought I might have to sit down and have something to settle my stomach.  I did not see among their stuff a treasured memory, nor even a work of art to be held in high regard.  I saw only plastic.  Some of it stained.  By wine, or a bit of hardened digestive biscuit. 

I suppose most people these days would look at all of this and worry that they may never find the time, I said to her, sympathetically. 

Ah, who has the time for anything? she said.  If libraries could talk, for your notion you’d get the stinkeye. 

Over time I would find out more about the frequently strange and sometimes familiar names on their media objects and would get to know and even come to admire some of them myself: Montague.  Jodorowsky.  Brophy.  Nabokov.  Linda Perhacs.  Kieslowski and Lispector and Northcote.  Phil Collins and the Nine Inch Nails.  Casares, Rorty.  Rollerskate Skinny.  Yuzna.  Frayling.  Hamsun.  Heppenstall.  Frankenheimer, Bartok and Minnelli, and Tanizaki, Tarkovsky and Peake.  Janet Frame, Soundgarden, and Space 1999. 

Phyllis’s favourites were Elton John, Oliver Reed, and Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. 

After meeting her. I realised I had spotted Phyllis once before out in the world.  Her stature was unforgettable.  It was near the Martlet offices, outside the newsagents, about a year ago, and what I saw was her berating a rather ugly teenage couple.  I was punched with glee as I witnessed myself on the regular these particular ugly teens with their hands all over each other in public and they were quite a revolting sight in all truth.  Phyllis had become embroiled in some sort of dispute with them.  I didn’t make a word from it, just saw and heard the fracas.  The young girl was screaming up in her face, while the young fella holding his lover’s purse stood back in fear.  But Phyllis was so imposing that the young girl had to shrink away eventually.  When I asked her about the teenage couple she said that she couldn’t remember the situation in question; she became quarrelsome with someone on just about every tour into town and almost always forgot the triggering incident though she maintained that on every occasion it was the other side’s fault.  Her scrape with Lavery on the schoolbus she was also unable to recall but she did share with me romantic advances he had made toward her in times gone by which she had rejected and which were suddenly another possible reason why my much-disliked employer held a grudge against Oran.

For me it was a revelation to witness Phyllis dressing down those teenagers and so I had great respect for the woman before I even knew her.  Long had I loathed the mucky youngsters of town, who represented the promise of everything I’d wanted for myself in life, and regretted not getting, that total abandon and obnoxious zest plus the potential to get the hell away at any moment.  For this reason I withheld a private joy in the aftermath of Ernest Gilgan’s accident.  Although I might have enjoyed some credit and satisfaction in being part of the team that helped kill a favourite son of the town, it wouldn’t have served me well to allow such egregious ill-will towards the youth to be divulged.  And I didn’t feel especially proud of myself for taking even the tiniest pleasure from one of their ilk passing.  I mean, no death is any good, after all.  I don’t believe Oran or Phyllis were sensitive to these same levels of guilt about the situation but then again they being shut-ins of notoriety did not have to stand face to face with Mr and Mrs Gilgan in the Martlet’s office and look straight into their aggrieved and vengeful eyes, as was my own personal destiny.