Waiting for God? Oh…
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“He said he would come.”
“But do you think he will?”
“Maybe... He said he would.”
“It’s getting late.”
“Yes.”
“When did he say… When did he say he’d…
come?”
“He said today.”
“Today… when did he say… today?”
“Yesterday.”
“That he would come today, yesterday… or yesterday he’d come
today?”
“Yesterday he said today.”
“Do you think he’ll come?”
“He said he would.”
What, you’re asking yourselves, is all
that about. What illicit substances has he been ingesting to have brought this
on. Nothing so exotic I’m afraid. Permit me to explain.
I’m sat on the veranda of our Turkish apartment
awaiting the belated arrival of the plumber. To the best of my recollection he
promised, or at least I think he promised, coming out ‘tomorrow’ to replace our
conked out solar panelled hot water system. He had come out yesterday in an
attempt to resuscitate it, but ended up, despite his best endeavours with spanner
and screw driver, giving it the last rites and pronouncing it ‘mort’.
So, I am sitting here, sans plumber,
and my memory is beginning to play games with the evasive recollections of what
was actually said, when, by whom and to whom. Hence the absurdist conversation,
held with myself, to wit, the opening lines above. Though, on reflection, I’m thinking
all this is going to sound not so much like ‘Waiting for Godot’ as Flanders and Swan’s ‘Twas on a Monday morning…’
Since arriving out here a week or two
ago all I have been able to shower in is cold water, which I have to say, given
the ambient temperature is not as unpleasant as it might at first sound.
However, with either the impending rental or, more hopefully, immanent sale of
the property, I have been forced to address the need for hot water.
Cleanliness, it is said, is next to
Godliness. Of course in saying this they omit to mention whether this ‘next to’
means beside, beneath or even above. For is it not on such philosophical details
that understandings and concepts are based, and cases made.
I am absorbed by this. Should one of
these positions happen to subordinate the other, ie. being above GOD, as
opposed to sitting harmoniously along side, does it bring into question the
supremacy of God?
I muse… so where in all this do ‘Them
what supplies the water for this cleansing process’ stand in this equation? Are
they simply there at the behest of GOD, thus requiring HIS, or as many would now,
in modern PC parlance suggest, HER approval, but still requiring the
appropriate completed paperwork, signed and in triplicate, and hence the
accompanying delays? Or, might they, if above God, be akin to a GOD; autonomous in their powers to cleanse all who so desire,
provided that all who so desire are sufficiently funded and, prepared to cough
up the requisite folding.
Certainly a sharp intake of breath and
accompanying reply of ‘Them what supplies’ allied with an “Ooooh, hot water
squire… Can’t do nothin’ before Tuesday week earliest” smacks strongly of the omnipotence
of a GOD; six days toil followed by the seventh, of rest… plus, these days of
course, the obligatory seventeen and a half percent VAT. Of course should you
wish to be anointed immediately, that’ll be plus the requisite diocesan emergency
call-out fee. But I digress.
However at this point a further thought
occurs to me. For all I know it may have been thus for a certain Mr S.
Beckett esq. of Ireland, England and France,
and accidentally been the fount of his tortuously incomprehensible absurdist opus,
‘Waiting for Godot’. Might it have been the case that, in those hours, who
knows maybe days, weeks, months even, of awaiting the arrival of the plumber,
who had promised to sort out the replacement high pressure cut off valve for
his Thermacoke 1100 central heating boiler that had gone on the blink two weeks
previous on account of that unexpected cold snap of 1947, and was now being informed
by young Reg up Customer Services where, “due to them down the depot puttin’ in
a requisition for an SPV/14B when they should have done a HPV/15A, due to
Doreen in the office, bein’ off sick wiv her Cyril’s appendectomy and the new
temp not knowing her ball cock from ‘er stop cock, it had meant that by the
time they got the wossname, the SPV/14B sent back up the warehouse and the
HPV/15A re-ordered, they wos outta stock wiv ‘em. An’ they wasn’t expecting no
more in at present, bein’ as how they wos currently on hold due ‘em havin’ a
load o’ trouble wiv the thermostatic couplin’s and they wos prob’ly goin’ to be
a discontinued line”.
Would then Mr Beckett
esq., like me, have found the whole ‘sans plumber’ experience thoroughly
vexatious, and with his intellectual train of thought being on higher things, it
became most detrimental to his knocking out another erudite poem or similar? Being
of an artistic bent, not to mention an irascible and bloody minded temperament,
he would, no doubt have jotted notes on the matter, with regard to forwarding a
pithy and pertinent reprimand to Thermacoke inc. pointing out their shortcomings,
come a sudden cold snap and the availability, or more precisely the
unavailability, of their HPV/15A and the knock on effect of its possible
discontinuation.
Who knows how, on a twist and whim of
fate, these things might turn. Might those jottings, not perhaps, have just got
mixed up with other of Beckett S’s jottings and, by shear chance arrived, in their
strangely cryptic form, upon the desk of some great literary agency such as say
Cohen, Goldblum and Rappaport mayhap? And, as a
result of fate’s capricious whim, before you could say Jack Robinson, cause
sleeves to be rolled, cigars to be lit, phones to become luminescent from their
excited use; posters to be printed, tickets issued, theatres booked and
royalties… royalties flooding in. Would an agency as savvy and with chubby digits
on the pulse of modern theatre as Cohen, Goldblum
and Rappaport, not immediately see the potential in such a work, grasp the implications
of such modern intellect, its financial potential and… capitalise on an
opportunity gifted from such an eminent dramatist?
In the tiny cluttered office of Cohen, Goldblum and Rappaport, ‘Literary and Theatrical
agents of some thirty years standing’, Samuel Cohen
was pacing back and forth. Arms outstretched in appeal, he addressed the
scepticism of his colleagues.
“Boys believe me, Wesker, Osbourne, Rattigan, Pinter, dey should be
writing such pithy dialogue as dis.”
Nathaniel Goldblum and Wendell
Rappaport were still not
enthusiastic. Nat Goldblum
shook his balding pate and looked across for a supportive reaction from Wendell Rappaport.
“Sam,
it’s unintelligible. Forget it already.”
Wendell Rappaport too was unconvinced.
“At today’s prices, paper he wastes. You read it Sam?”
“Sure I’ve read it.” Replied Sam.
“All the way through you’ve read it?” Queried
Wendell,
incredulous.
“Didn’t I say.”
“Sam,
you drunk, on drugs maybe? I’ve seen laundry lists more entertaining dan dis. You
seriously thinkin’ peoples is goin’ to sit dere for an hour, an hour an a half maybe,
listenin’ to this? Yi, yi, yi.”
In frustration at this rebuke Sam Cohen
smacked his brow with the palm of his hand; cigar ash showered from the
smouldering Havana
wedged between his stubby fingers and cascaded down his shirt front.
“O’ course I’m not drunk, an’, I’m tellin’
you, foresight is what I got here. Certainly peoples is goin’ to sit an’ watch
dis, dey is goin’ to lap it up; would I lie to you?”
Wendell Rappaport stared at him distractedly, watching tiny
red specs of ash glow across his colleague’s shirtfront leaving equally tiny
brown ones marking their passage.
“Well,” said Wendell
at last, dragging his concentration back from the singeing shirt. “I gotta agree
with Nat. Twice last night I tried to read dis stuff, twice I gave up, past
page one I couldn’t get. By page two I’d lost the will to live.
Sam, ‘Gone
with de Wind’ it’s not, Noel Coward he’s not goin’
to be loosin’ any sleep. Agatha
Christie is what we is needin’
here, something peoples can get their teeth into. Mystery, suspense. A song’s
not out o’ the question. Somethin’ for the whole family. Somethin’ dat night
after night vill fill a theatre. Another ‘Mouse Trap’ I’m thinkin’.”
“Mouse Trap Schmouse Trap!” Sam Cohen,
his face getting redder, struggled for words. Once again he tried to engage his
partners’ interest. “Boys,” he pleaded “do me a favour, I’m tellin’ you, dis is
new, dis is big, dis is de future, believe me; Harold Hobson I spoke to, Kenny
Tynan, dey love it. It’s modern, postmodern yet. You want mystery, you want suspense?
Mystery and suspense is what we got here. Who dey waitin’ fo’? Will he come?
Thinking is what it’s goin’ to get peoples doin’. Songs? You want songs? Go
watch Doris Day.”
“Thinking!” Cut in Nat Goldblum
bitterly. “The only thinkin’ peoples is goin’ to be doin here is where we are
such schmucks to be puttin’ dis on. Dat’s what peoples is goin’ to be thinkin’.”
Again Sam
Cohen drew up his hand to smack his forehead, but
this time, remembering the ash storm on his new Charles Tyrwhitt
shirt his wife had given him only that morning, he refrained. “Oiy vey, what is
it wid you two today? Modern times is what we is livin’ in here; somethin’ new audiences
is wantin’, zeitgeist yet, an’ dat, here we got, we got in spades, definitely.”
“Modern Times… nice film” mused Nat,
nodding abstractedly. “Chaplin, now there’s an
actor; might be he could do somthin’ wid dis.”
Wendell Rappaport bit on an already gnawed fingernail
thoughtfully.
“I don’t know Sam,
what we getting’ ourselves into here. Angry young men plays I get, angry I can
live with, angry everybody gets, but dis, it makes no ‘sense’. No story, no
plot, jus’ two menches debatin’ as to whether dey thinkin’ de plumber’s goin’
to arrive?”
Samuel Cohen looked at him in dismay. “You been in
dis business how long now Wendell, eh?
Since when did theatre have to make ‘sense’, you tellin’ me you never been to a
pantomime, a farce, eh? At these there are empty seats?”
My reverie is broken as across the
street a neighbour passes and shouts over to me “What you up to then, you’ve
been sat there all mornin’?” “Plumber,” I call back “promised to renew my hot
water system today.” He nods in sympathetic understanding “Waitin’ for God…
Oh.”
At this point I am encouraged by the
arrival of a truck complete with solar panels, water tanks, piping, new framework,
and an unholy trinity of sullen looking plumbers. But, to my amazement, no
sharp intake of breath fellows these. No pointing towards the roof with a
“What, up there squire, you havin’ a chuckle? How we s’posed to get this lot up
four storeys an’ no lift then?”
No, none of that. Heights are scaled. Ropes
lowered, items attached and hefted roofward; ropes again are lowered, this time
suspending a variety of elderly and rusting scrap metal. In less than two hours,
we once again have hot water. I shower. Once again cleanliness and Godliness
are adjacent.
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