The lake is still frozen, but not enough to trust. Hyde Park this time, though one lake can seem very much like any other.
Our quartet circle it, as they do.
Somewhere on the lake, a yacht is being launched and on it a party. Champagne flows.
M is there. Or could be. Someone like her anyway. Le’s call her something else, the Man suggests.
“No, she exists perfectly well as a function at this stage,” says Lacan. The Editor agrees. M stays.
And then the envy starts to build. As it must at this stage.
Her grass will always be greener, even if it’s burnt to a cinder, the Man thinks.
It’s not grass on which to play football, according to the Boy. He notices the bodies – intact, sealed, positioned. No gaps visible. No lack on display. A low block, deep press. A double pivot perhaps? They look like people who have arrived, though they are still on the moored yacht.
The Man feels the familiar tightening: chest, jaw, the low electrical hum of comparison. The loop is warming to its task.
They walk on. Through London rain this time.
Lacan clears his throat.
“Resentment,” he says, “is not anger. Anger moves outward. Resentment circles.”
They circle the lake again.
The Man knows the route. He has walked it before – in memory, in fantasy, in recrimination. London as withheld inheritance, occupied by people on yachts.
“If I were there,” the Boy says, nodding toward the champagne cluster, “I’d be whole.”
The Man flinches. “You’d be pissed and dancing on the tables by now,” he says.
The Editor sighs. “Classic error. Wholeness is the product being sold, not the condition being enjoyed.”
Lacan turns to the Editor and for the first time a look of admiration crosses his face. Perhaps he’s not such an English buffoon, after all, he thinks.
The Editor had Googled ‘Lacan’ the night before and to his surprise quite enjoyed what he found. He doesn’t let on. There will be no Entente Cordiale in this tale, he vows silently.
They stop. The ice creaks – not loudly, just enough to remind them that surfaces sometimes lie.
A newspaper appears in the Editor’s hands. He doesn’t remember picking it up. An interview. The Financial Times – grave, benevolent, imperial. Sikorski is speaking, again. Explaining Poland. Offering reassurance. Wanting to be taken Seriously.
The Boy leans in. “He sounds English,” the Boy says.
“No,” the Editor replies. “He sounds like he knows how England wants to see itself.”
The Man smiles. An angry smile. The ritual humiliations. The private codes. The cruelty.
“This is the mistake,” the Editor says. “They copied the style and missed the struggle.”
“Or maybe they didn’t, but just didn’t care,” Lacan butts in.
M is there suddenly, as if wafted from the yacht just to be in the chat, in the loop.
“We had class struggle for a while in Poland and don’t care much for it,” she says, champagne glass still in hand. Mario, or Werner, or Diego back on the yacht are now in search of their Polish princess. Back she trots. Tomorrow for her sins she will visit half the churches in London, looking for something the Man can never seem to put his finger on.
“It’s forgiveness, or love,” I guess, he says, weakly.
“It’s protection, insulation and community,” Lacan corrects him. “Another loop – sin, repent, sin again. The City loves it, and it means top quality snuff for the Polish girls.” Win-win.
They walk on.
Lacan, hands behind his back, mildly bored, speaks again. “Desire,” he says, “is not the desire for an object. It is the desire for desire itself.”
The Man nods, but thinks of M. He doesn’t really get the metaphysical, although he likes to think he does. It doesn’t stop the ache.
“What capitalism does,” Lacan continues, “is stop pretending that fulfilment is deferred. It promises it now. Perfect bodies. Perfect souls. Perfect alignment.”
“And surplus value,” he adds, “is simply when some people monetise the gap between that promise and its impossibility. The rest of us work to make their dreams come true.”
The Boy, a socialist in all but name, loves the words, but doesn’t quite agree. “I want it now too,” he says.
They resume walking.
The Man thinks of journalists who got it wrong, not because they were stupid (though many were), but because they believed too sincerely. They thought proximity was participation. They thought speaking meant being heard.
Rudy Mindbender, king beaver, appears at the lake edge where a brook slips away into an unseen sewage system. He has reports from inside the water that the lake is not actually a lake, but an aquatic interlude between pieces of earth. Squirrels in London offices hold front pages.
“They wanted the gaze,” the Man says.
“And mistook it for recognition,” the Editor chimes in, as if he and Lacan were in fact the same person.
“The cost is paid elsewhere. In Bolton, or in Warsaw. In provincial parochialisms. In resentments sanctified by piety,” Lacan says. He must always have the final word, even when it isn’t. Union rules, brother.
M pops up again, as if by magic, as if she had always been in the scene. “Mr Lancan,” she starts, her mispronunciation of his name not a deliberate snub, but almost as if she hadn’t actually read any of his famous works. “You are an empty man, no soul, no belief. A Godless man.”
Lacan corrects her as best he can. “I am empty, but I am whole,” he says. “You, on the other hand, perform having what cannot be had. And in the morning, Madame, I shall be sober, and you will still be ugly.”
The Man notices a touch of latent Winston Syndrome in the Great Lacan.
M leaves in a huff. Lancan can go fuck himself. “And he’s not even fuckable,” she sniffs. There are more backsides to be nosed across the lake, where the mud is a little browner.
The Man remembers something. “London used to promise an outside. Not just submission. You could be marginal and still necessary for the city the bankers have now occupied and suffocated. That is gone,” he says to no one in particular. Joe Strummer strums in Hammersmith Palais, just down the Holland Park Road.
Or perhaps the old town still offers belonging, just not to him. “It prefers companies that make machines designed to kill other people,” Lacan says. “War economies only work if there are wars. And wars need enemies.”
Violins appear at the water’s edge. A trader, from Gdynia, has sent them over as a joke. It is actually quite funny. Gypsy music and plucked heart strings. The banker takes out another $100 bill, rolls it and snorts white powder up his nose.
“What hurts,” the Man says finally, “is not exclusion. It’s redundancy.”
The Editor nods. “Capitalism doesn’t hate you. It just no longer needs you.”
The Boy looks down at the ice. For a moment, he imagines stepping onto it. Falling through. As a test.
The Man puts a hand on his shoulder to stop him, as if he and the Boy were in fact the same person.
The champagne group is breaking up now. The vomit on the yacht’s deck will be cleared up by others less fortunate. Probably also from Gdynia.
M glances across the lake – or doesn’t. It no longer matters. The fantasy doesn’t require eye contact to function.
The Editor closes his notebook.
The Boy exhales.
Behind them, London continues – efficient, beautiful, ugly, full of bankers, radiant with promises it cannot keep.
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