He put on the yellow marigolds with some difficulty, while at the same time remembering something a wise Roman stoic had once written that went ‘dig inside yourself. Inside there is a well of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging,’ and wondered if he had learned the line while studying for his PHD. Perhaps it was earlier when he sat long evenings in the library at Senate House attempting to become a master of arts. He couldn’t quite remember. His past was becoming a single entity, where once it had been fractured. He had woken up early that extremely cold winter morning to become a dish washer, or kitchen porter as it was advertised, and he wondered as he battled through the arctic weather, what had become of his long and arduous education. All those hours worrying about exams, all those times revising, researching, reading and editing and now at the age of forty-three he had seventy-three pounds to his name. He poured the washing up liquid into the large metallic sink under the instruction of the young Romanian woman and turned on the hot tap. “The water must be hot” she informed him. He looked into the mountainous bubbles as they slowly rose in the basin and in them, saw a galaxy emerge. Bliss came over him when he thought he could kill boredom with his imagination alone, and the silence of the universe out-manoeuvred by a simple playfulness of mind.
As he began to scrub the dirty dishes, he wondered what his thirty years of education had all been for. It couldn’t have been for the money. Like the pieces of paper tucked away in a draw in the old homestead, his past successes were quietly hidden now, to mention them a suggestion of either boastfulness or failure. The first pan he washed had burnt black crusts of pastry stuck along the sides and he began to scrub it with a wire brush. It was stubborn and he applied more washing up liquid, and gave some extra elbow grease to remove it, but the dark stain wouldn’t budge. Minutes rolled by to the sound of scrubbing. The steam from the hot water was like sweat on his face. The harder he worked the more intense his feelings of failure became. The failure of his life’s work up until that moment. Was he ‘better’ than this? Was he better than washing dishes for a living? Scrubbing dishes to make ends meet. He must be ‘better’ than this he thought, as he finally removed the last piece of caked in pastry, but he couldn’t exactly work out why.
Minh, the old Vietnamese lady that had worked in the kitchen for many years, smiled at him as she passed to go about the morning chore of cutting the bread for that afternoon’s school lunch. Her smile brightened his spirits. Three more dirty trays arrived and he submerged them in the suds. As if stuck on a treadmill like a hamster in a wheel his thoughts returned to his predicament. Only a job and a place, that would certainly change in time, as all the times and places of his life had changed up until then. He remembered another thing the Roman stoic had said, about change being a constant of all life, and was contented.
Maybe now, at his age, he should be making more money than he was. He never really cared about money if the truth be known. If he had enough, he had enough, and enough was enough. It was one of the reasonings in his life to which he stayed true. The main thing that he got out of his philosophical studies was the idea of becoming good. Then, being good, was the natural state. We shouldn’t be kind to others for our own sake but rather because being kind brings the universe, the whole, into alignment. He looked around at the clock on the wall and it was exactly noon. Then he did an hour’s worth of thinking and when he looked back up, it said four minutes past. ‘Most work is trading your life, or time, for money. Maybe the whole of nature is just hope, manifest’ he thought as he gazed down at the collapsing suds. His imagination had awakened in the uneventfulness of the morning. He felt the warlike silence.
He emptied the sink and then spent a while picking the soggy pasta and vegetables from the plug hole and decanted them into a bin bag. Then back to the sink to refill it with soapy hot water. He looked up and out of the window, and saw a crisp blue winter sky. On the thin branches of a leafless tree, glistening crystal droplets of rain shone below the grey sky of the recent Atlantic storm and his work came to a discreet standstill. Two robin red breasts danced on a twig. Behind the January tree was a road and a queue of people, some with umbrella’s waiting in the flour mist, waiting for the bus that would take them away from this same old place. None of them had noticed the rain-dropped leaves in the downpour, each one a kind of planet, a world within worlds, making up the whole.
There was an old cockney woman that worked in the kitchen that liked nothing more than power, driven on every morning, through every day, by the smallness of her sad world, butchering the language with her soulless rants and dull observations. She walked into the kitchen and ruined the moment for him by talking for twenty-two seconds about the steam that was coming from the oven. The words that came from her mouth had no value or interest to the dishwasher but it was important for her to hear her own voice to remind others that she was in charge. In charge of this small kitchen, and in charge of her small world. He didn’t attempt to say anything to her, but he thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was kinder. More dirty plates were dropped with a clang into the soapy water which meant more work, which meant more money for him, even though he was being paid minimum wage, his presence alone was earning. ‘This is the way society says self-worth is achieved of course. That in some way or other life must me earned, it’s not good enough just being born. Born poor I mean.’ He thought.
Then he thought back on his education and experienced a sublime uplift when he reasoned that learning in and of itself can never be a waste of time, but then his gladness abated as he considered the other side of the coin. What if, like those that had been brought up in religious cults, an entire life of thoughts could be wasted. If the truth lay south and you walked north for 84 years where would that leave you on your death bed? Lost, presumably, but perhaps happy and content. Perhaps not. He considered different belief systems in the world. The only wisdom he could glean was to avoid dogmatism at all costs, and to cast doubt on certainty. And then he thought that must be easier said than done when he thought about the importance of conviction, and the humiliations it is heir to. To work, to seek meaning for a lifetime, in a lifetime, and then have it robbed at the finish line may be too much to bear. Maybe Epicurus was right, in the end. Also, maybe hedonism has a value. To dance, to sing and play was good, and better than the opposite. He saw a side-burned face in the suds, ‘lose your sense of humour and you’re fucked’ came the Burslem voice from the sink water. His memory played games again. And then from nowhere the voice of Jeffrey Bernard on Desert Island Discs. Dying, and with the cigarette smoke almost travelling with the radio waves saying to the interviewer ‘to me Mozart is divinity’ and then pressed by her on the regrets he had now he faced death he replied matter-of-factly ‘I wish I had been a better person. It’s as simple as that.’ The dishwasher thought there was a beauty in this acknowledgment, in the recognition of the fact.
The dishwasher began to dream of the mountains of Scotland where he had once lived, and where he had felt, once upon a time, a thousand years pass in the afternoon rays. Memory, and dreams of a future past, vied together as if they were one entity. Why do we have to earn what we never chose? Born and demanded to work. He thought. It was a melancholy meditation. He thought ‘If life is a competition, then maybe we are just cunts, to use the proper Saxon vernacular’. For the rich to stay rich the poor must be poor, this was the application of pure logic to him, a revelation in its simplicity. It’s matter-of-factness. What if everybody was rich? What if there was no-one to wash the dishes? What then? The old cockney lady continued talking because it was something to do, but at the end of her soul destroying jabbering’s she said something that interested him very much, when she described how when she was growing up in the east end of London it was ordained in her community not to get above yourself and say or act as though you are better than anyone else, ‘because you are not.’ He witnessed a different, more humane side to her. He mulled over her wisdom, intrigued by her comment, until only a few minutes later when she described her joy as she waved her flag on the Mall up at the balcony where Prince Andrew and ‘their highnesses’ stood and waved back. His democratic socialism and her monarchism were spiritually incompatible. He began to load up the plastic tray with cups and turned on the machine once more. To the dishwasher, her way of thinking was more toilsome even than the constant repetition of washing dishes. As the machine came on, the noise allowed him to think for a moment. It didn’t matter how many material things he had. How much money. What mattered was what was felt, what was thought, what could be imagined, what could be created, out of thin air. He looked up and saw that Minh was smiling to herself as she thought a happy thought, not knowing anybody was watching.
The following morning, he arrived to work early and felt content working for a while alone, preparing for the day. That was a good time of the morning, full of potential. The dishwasher tingled with dreaming. Or was he a philosopher? With his mind and hands at work simultaneously he could be both. The plump old Cockney woman barged into the kitchen fifteen minutes late for work just as he was thinking about definitions of love, and to placate her anger at being late, began to talk at him in a loud condescending voice about the floor not being mopped. He said he would do it calmly with his body language saying ‘if you would politely leave me be.’ He remembered the word ‘Ataraxia’ which can mean ‘freedom from disturbance’. She continued talking loudly and when she said ‘we was’ for the third time he drifted off into an internal debate and wondered how many people in England who disliked foreigners and foreign languages as she did, and said so, understood that their handle on the English language was ungood. He felt certain if he brought the subject to light he would be hated for it. He would be damned as a language snob or worse, a snob. He said nothing. He thought the language of accents reflect souls in their own ways. The accent reflects belonging. ‘People who change their accents no longer wish to belong. The new tribe outweighs the old.’ He thought. He wondered about the imagination and whether it is built from the world we see, the world we experience, or is it born from something separate, like the unconscious mind being born from ancestral dreams. He had looked into Buddhism and concluded he didn’t want to free his mind of thought. Also, he didn’t want to reach Nirvana because he felt from there, there was nowhere else to go. The trick of life was to keep on learning, imagining, until all faculties are lost. A huge pile of plates came in after lunchtime and this was the signal to keep his head down working, until he clocked off at 4.30pm. He had a take away that night as he had become sick of the sight of unclean plates, and the endless necessity of washing them.
He went home to his bedsit with his fish and chips in a bag and sat down in front of the TV with a six pack of beers and a packet of cigarettes. ‘No point working if you can’t enjoy it’ was the persistent thought he had on leaving his places of work. For relaxation he played computer scrabble as a form of meditation but he found writing, the thing he dreamed of doing, difficult, and rewarding only very occasionally. He would sometimes strum away at the acoustic guitar in the corner of the room which he had had since university. It brought back good memories, just being there. All the dreams he had when he was a young man were now living memory, the whistle blown on stardom, but then he concluded his youth was hard enough without the added complication of fame. He had been friends with a man at university that had been desperate for musical stardom, and years later he had heard through the grapevine that the man had taken his own life by throwing himself into the Thames. He wondered whether the suicide and the reality of unfilled dreams were interconnected and concluded that they probably were. The sad thought was silenced by the cracking open of a can of cold lager. Television, which was once the drug of the nation, had been replaced by the internet, almost overnight, or at least while no-one was looking, but he was hanging on by his remote. He went to bed half tipsy, taking care what he wished for.
Early the next morning he was on his way to work when he saw the crowd at the bus stop gathering around someone on the floor, there was an obvious commotion. He went over to see if he could be of any help and when he leaned over the shoulders to see what was going on he saw Minh, the old Vietnamese lady he worked with, lying on the floor clutching her heart. The sight of her suffering made him panic and worry deeply. He told everyone he was her colleague and then asked if someone had called an ambulance to which they replied they had and it would be there any minute now. He leant down as she opened her eyes and she registered his presence with a smile. He smiled back. Then she closed her eyes and the hand on her heart relaxed as if she was falling asleep. He called out to her but she made no reply. In this moment the paramedics arrived with the whirring of sirens and took over. Very shortly afterwards she was on a stretcher being carried into the ambulance. He explained he was her colleague and asked if he could accompany them to hospital. They said yes. As they left, he turned around and the assembled crowd reminded him of a herd of wildebeest that look on as one of their own is devoured by a lion. He wondered what the Roman stoic would have thought and concluded it would probably be, ‘this is the way of thing’s’ or words to that effect.
At the hospital he was told the sad news that Minh, the kind Vietnamese lady that he worked with had died. He travelled back to the school kitchen where they worked by foot. Everything on the walk took on a new state of life. The glittering frost now had the soul of symphonies, the barren trees proof of nature’s fight, the foggy veil of the sun emanating a magical winter light away above the horizon. He walked through the kitchen door with the sorrow in his face reflecting the sad news he had to tell and was greeted by the plump old cockney lady who in a loud voice said to him before he had a chance to speak ‘what time do you call this you caaant!’ He looked her in the eye. ‘Minh is dead, and so are you, to me.’ He tossed his apron back on the pile. She looked shocked but instantly refused to apologise. The dishwasher looked at her and said ‘I was wondering if I was better than this job. No, I don’t think so. But I am better than being bullied by you. Dig?”
“Go on then. Do one, get aaaat!” She said loudly and waved him towards the door. He turned to leave and saw the large pile of washing she would have to do if the agency didn’t have anyone. They probably did though. There are always people who have to work for poor wages. That provides the surplus, but I suppose that’s a story for another time. He hadn’t lasted long in the job as dishwasher. ‘I can’t be having that’, he thought as he closed the door behind him and walked out into the freezing day. He carried on down the icy sludge path to freedom and recalled the Roman stoic, ‘Pain is neither unendurable or unending, as long as you remember its limits and do not exaggerate it in your imagination’. Jobless for the foreseeable, again, he was hit by the thought that his life could be ten or a hundred times more fulfilled, joyful and meaningful as someone who earned ten or a hundred, or a million times more than himself, if he had the right frame of mind. It was the destiny of the dishwasher to live in his imagination, and his imagination didn’t pay by the hour.