Life. Getting Away With It.

By Merlin Cullinan

Whether you are getting on with life, or getting away with life, you know where you are.

Or do you?

Here’s a look at the way it is, was, or possibly could be.

From the biggest to the smallest, the dumbest to the smartest,

The most selfish to the most selfless,

You are in here, because you are one of us.Just remember

Life will get you in the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Dec 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789559262

Book preview

38.

1.

The view from the lighthouse this morning was blue. A whole range of blues and just some flecks of white on waves and as wispy clouds, a wet canvas. Spring was merging into summer. The sky-scraping tower’s stonework was warmer and the salt less sticky. The keeper’s cottage was feeling the climbing sun on its roof, stretching. I opened a window and air crept in to clean the room, nosily fresh. It was a setting today that photographers enjoyed, a picture for their glossy coffee-table books, a contrast with the others they captured in winter storms or on starlit nights, all careful compositions and filters, long lenses, tripods and careful patient hands. There were no visitors due for a while, and there had been none for a while longer. This was a space to mix with nature and few illusions, few distractions from exposure. It was also a space to ponder life in other places, cities where stars were hidden by light pollution or industrial smog, places where people rarely looked up unless they were caught in the glow of advertising billboards. I was taking time to get away from those places and their activities, to see things from a different perspective, to record some thoughts about what people were up to on their pathways from childhood to senescence. A review that included me. But I had been doing this for who knows how long, it seemed, and I now found it hard to measure precisely how the time had gone by. Yes, I could create a base from guessing about the passing of the days outside, the cycles of sun and moon, the light arrows of shooting stars and the turning of the skies, but measuring time passing accurately in my mind and its memories was a different thing, time-bound and timeless together.

There was no-one to talk to here, by choice, right now, so most of my dialogue was internal, unless I did something, you know, hit my fingers with a hammer while fiddling around trying to do a repair outside, a fix, to a rusting hinge or trolley wheel, and then I would shout at the walls for a bit and they heard words they had heard before, a long time ago, from keepers charged with keeping the flames alight and trying to prevent perils on the sea. Maybe different words in different accents and languages but with identical sentiments. Living alone in these places for any length of time didn’t suit everyone, but for those it did, there was little else that offered as much. This was a world apart but one that presented a natural reality. Maybe it was just a way to fool yourself. But at least you weren’t being fooled by others. So, occasionally, you might follow the evening path of the still-working light, automatic now, but in general here I was searching for a different variation of light, for insights into what makes others tick. I was after understanding more about the mechanics of the minds of all those out there who live off the sometime nourishment of deception, of others and of the self. Quite a start to the daily round of reflection and short spells of what some might loosely call a form of meditation. Light and darkness, focused.

The trouble with us is that total agreement is a chimera. For every statement and belief and declaration, and sometimes before they have reached a full stop, you will hear the absolute opposites and variations of the contrary from others. Does it matter, really? Is this the way we have to go to move forward, to improve? It’s at this frequent point where I scribble things down. That’s a simile these days, because scribbling can now be a digital imprint or a voice-captured note, as well as a hurried hand-written note on a piece of paper, if there’s any left and it isn’t too damp to do anything but tear or refuse the ink when you try to write on it. This is what we have. They say that as we get older, all we increasingly own are memories, except when we don’t, because they are no longer reliably accessible to us, or they turn into confabulations. There are key notes that come at different times.

The day uses up its pass and begins to hand over to the night. At what the clock captures as eight in the evening of this 24-hour period, I note a niggling question: do sheep seek leaders? And then, waking up the following morning, I wonder if there is a problem with the fact that if people are happy, having been duped, does the fact of the deception matter? Or, at noon, do you really seek the permission or the action of an external god in that moment when you realise you truly fancy someone, a state that might translate into what many call love? My mind is that way inclined, it seems.

Who can we turn to? Who do we turn to? Some of my thoughts are dumbly aimed at helping people to sidestep puddles I have stepped into in parts of those places they call life. Some are simply observations noted about things that many have also already witnessed or experienced and that we would like to pass on to yet others as advice or anecdotes, leaving them to believe or disbelieve, to take on board facts, events that have happened, or ignore them, and just let outcomes define their and our existence. This is one of those things that you have time to play with when you have few other distractions and commitments and you spend a lot of time in lighthouses. And so, the trip, the journey, begins. Let’s start with desire and rewards.

Compared with our animal ancestors, and it’s still a big leap for a lot of folks to think we are anything but perfect and on a higher plane, more special, than they were, we have more commonalities than you’d like to agree on. One of those is the extent to which we are, in our groups, conformists. We seek consensuality about a few things or part of a few things, but as part of that process in turn we also use condemnation to reach it. We apply the same approach when we shift our views about what is acceptable conformity today, in the present, now. Conformity is not an absolute, it is a variable. Maybe a few more need to practice acts that come under the descriptor – pro-social. Am I going too fast, too far, too soon? Let’s see. Let’s slow things down. Let’s rewind the mind for a while and press ‘Start’ again.

The following morning. Today begins – Blueday again. The blue t-shirts and blue jeans are already out there blowing in the blueness on their pegged lines, horizontal staves with breeze-shaped notes in short sleeves and still damp hems. Time passes and a thought drifts in. Behind it, out through the window, a yacht sails by in the distance, sails revealing an ideal windspeed for their shape and size and settings, a steady day today for a journey to wherever, or wherever and back.

The desire to get a big return on a relatively small outlay seems to be hard-wired into people. Some call this greed, one of the major seven deadly sins. Others call it optimism, wishful thinking, foolhardiness, or innocence. Depends a lot on whether you are doing the selling or the buying. What we can say with certainty is that there will always be victims. There is no such thing as everybody benefitting, and the winner, until becoming a loser, or caught out, often takes it all, or most of it. That was an early lesson I learned. Others had different reactions, different outcomes. Take a look.

At that stage, as my mind circled on a particular memory prey and I zoomed down onto it, I was interested in contemporary art and had a few pieces I had bought because I liked them, as opposed to treating them only like assets I would move on after they had excelled in raising their value. But then I came across an offer that seemed appealing in a new way, the way of the second part of that last sentence, and I can’t even remember exactly how it appeared in front of me at the time. It looked like an elegant and innovative way to combine two different sets of people, and two mind-sets, with maybe complementary needs. Here’s how it went. I decide on the back of the tempting way of considering the new proposition that I want to buy contemporary art now that really will deliver a return on the investment as well as the reward of the pleasure of looking at it, although at this stage that wouldn’t be every day. But I needed something back in the short term, one to appease the absence of the fix, the buzz of ownership, and secondly to ease the level of input needed to benefit from the deal – so I was effectively punter ‘A’ if I went ahead. The artworks were attractive, the credentials of the creators pretty good. On the other side, it was a time in the city I was living in when the construction industry was booming, especially in commercial property, and large new offices were being created at a rapid pace, all to accommodate the businesses that were going to capitalise on the emerging future of technologies. Interior designers were scouting for pieces that would complement architects’ ideas about modern working spaces, and what better than artworks that would grace board rooms and reception spaces, large atriums and statements about the size of receptions, all marble and glass, suggesting the owners or renters were already significantly successful enterprises surfing on the latest waves of investment oxygen and readying themselves to become firm and long-lasting players in business. So, here’s the deal.

I buy one or more pieces of art with virtually guaranteed future rising values. I could have them now in my personal possession and domain, or I could benefit from something else. The company with its sophisticated and provenance-proofed background would take care of my artworks, but place them in safe and modern offices, where eager dwellers were keen to create positive atmospheres and reassurances to customers about their own validity and taste. In return for this gifting of the management of my newly acquired pieces, I would receive a quarterly sum of money from the rental fees charged to the corporate displayers who weren’t interested in buying pictures themselves, minus a small handling fee from the management company. The return levels seemed generous. To make it even more palatable, you could opt out of the programme with very short notice and retrieve your own artwork, only sacrificing the quarterly and steadily rising income returns. On this basis I bought six contemporary limited-edition Japanese prints, quite large, that would shortly be gracing board rooms or reception areas, and of course I could, with a little notice, visit any of them to see what they looked like in situ and reality. Happy. After six months I had received two payments on the dot, the second one slightly higher than the first. I carried on with my busy life, relatively smug in the thoughts of what my investment was doing for me while I was busy doing other things, and hoping that viewers were enjoying the artworks and that the notion of good taste was being conferred on the corporate hosts of the day. A third payment came through, so far so good. And then the fourth payment didn’t materialise. I looked at my portfolio and wondered whether it might now be time to bring them in from the commercial ‘cold’ and rehouse them, tight though that might be, in my present home. Work distractions meant that more time passed. A further payment also failed to materialise, and then I decided I really would call in my pieces. Contacting the company left me transferred to another enterprise and greeted with the information that it had gone into receivership. There were a couple of large players in the game, and the receivers advised that the list of creditors was long, so that relatively small investors like myself were not only unlikely ever to see the artworks we had ostensibly bought, but that there was also virtually no chance that we would see any of our initial capital again. I drowned the awareness of my misfortune with some decent wine and a couple of friends I could share the news with, and I put the loss down to experience. Won’t get fooled again.

I was, if you like, lucky. Some people had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in the scheme, others almost their entire life savings. All gone. I might have been the owner of six fine works, which really did exist even though I never saw them in reality, but what I and many others didn’t know was that we all owned them. The first return payments came from the accumulation of investor money from people who thought they were now on the express train of making money from contemporary art, managed by a respectable enterprise, giving them the pleasure of ownership and the cachet of being players in the game. The only problem was that this was exactly what it was – a game. It was a Ponzi scheme with an artistic twist. The artworks were original, the quality clear, unlike the credentials of the company perpetrators. They had got their forecasting wrong, but you could argue that they got away with a lot in a short time, for not a lot of effort. It actually didn’t take very long for the new signups to begin to peak and then flatten, exactly when it began to be difficult, and then impossible, to pay income to the early investors. No doubt we will see this scheme resurface somewhere else with predictable results. Given the very nature of the contemporary art market, there will be plenty of other opportunities for the smaller sharks to find fresh prey. But do these experiences really sharpen you up for different scams – maybe a little? If it looks too good to be true, the old saying would tend to confirm the wisdom of the observation. There’s little to suggest that Ponzi-type schemes are going to be extinct any time soon. What you see isn’t always what you get.

I passed the rest of that day in the company of a couple of books about the ways that philosophies take different forms and shapes around the world, and how global wealth and trade patterns are shifting like forecasts on weather channels. How the West is being Won. The seeking of the way and the seeking of the truth. The lighthouse is a machine to think in.

I stopped for a glass of wine now, back in the present. It kept well in the stone foundations of the cottage. I watched the sun perform its evening dance with the sky and slip off the stage. I selected a movie from the digital archive and watched it through, the appropriately styled The Talented Mr Ripley, and had a relatively early night. I would revisit the theme of temptation and deception again tomorrow.

2.

The morning stimulated another memory, so I was still alive and kicking and I played it back in my mind. It was set in another country, another time that felt further ago than it should have. Set the scene.

The phone rang. It was my mother.

I’ve got some news, darling, but I’m very nervous.

This opening at this stage of her life usually prefaced word that someone I had vaguely known or met from my mother’s past had just died, but this time it was a different tale to tell.

We got a letter. It’s very exciting, but it’s such a responsibility. We aren’t sure what to do.

OK. So, what is it?

We’ve won a villa in Spain.

Wow. How did that happen?

We got a letter saying that we had been specially selected and had won a prize. All we have to do is go to a meeting in a hotel near here and it will all be taken care of. I’ve never had something like this before, it’s unbelievable.

When is this meeting?

The week after next.

I’d say congratulations, but just before I open the champagne, can you send me a copy of the letter?

Of course, we’d like some advice about what we should do. I’m all on tenterhooks.

We moved on for a little round robin about friends and relatives, work and health, and I finished by saying I would get back to them as soon as the letter arrived, and before the scheduled prize-giving. We closed the call and I immediately felt the curiosity button being pressed. My parents had been around for a long time, but they led relatively simple lives these days, and events like this were extremely out-of-the-ordinary. I could sense the conflicting emotions of child-like Christmas Day excitement, and fear of the unknown, a major responsibility worth a lot of money, and just what should be done?

The letter arrived. It confirmed my suspicions from the opening layout and presentation style. What they had ‘won’ was the opportunity, as the writers put it, to attend a ninety-minute presentation at a relatively swanky hotel, probably with about fifty others. The presentation would be a propaganda exercise, a conditioning programme, a soft clubbing with enticing words and phrases. The alleged prize was indeed a villa. There were plenty of them. The only catch was that after ninety minutes you were supposed to sign up to a deal that spelled out that indeed you had ‘won’ most of the grandiose villa worth some hundreds of thousands of some currency or other and that it could all be yours for a significantly low outlay over a significant period of time. Like many such ‘contracts’, there were pages and pages of caveats and clauses and 4-point typed sentences covering a host of penalties for any range of actions or requests that many a saint would fail to fulfil. In short, it was a time-share.

In essence, the offer could be summarised as this. My parents were being lured into buying two weeks a year over twenty years in a yet to be built house, but whether they would fully grasp that was unclear at the moment. The brochure pictures were good quality and like many artists’ projections were idealised. They were supplemented with maps indicating a location and accompanied by photographs of views and vistas, expansive horizons and lush landscapes. My parents were blinded by the excitement of being told that they had won a villa that was twice the size of their married home of thirty years. There was nothing, of course, no reference to the parlous state of the property and building construction market in that country at the time. There was nothing about land rights and water rights and building permissions and quality of construction guarantees. It was typical of an emerging pattern of the times, where young hustlers were trying to bludgeon the wishful and the unwary into shoddy but glossed-up schemes to extract money from them, and which they would rabidly fight over to secure volume-based commissions, and, after a couple of years, disappear with no come-backs. There were some sound players out there in this market, but this wasn’t one of them.

I loathed these people and their predatory approach to relatively innocent or ignorant people. They didn’t care what range of emotions their ‘candidates,’ their ‘prize-winners’ were going through when first confronted with the myth that they had won a prize that looked initially like it was free and gratis and for nada. They didn’t care about the disappointment, the let-downs, the wondering if their victims might after all have felt they had done something wrong first to have the thing dangled in front of them, and then either to sign up to something they didn’t understand the fullness of, or to leave it with only the pangs of losing to take home with them. Some marriages were put through tough periods, where blame crept in to replace disappointment, episodes that maybe hadn’t occurred in a long time. The challenge for me was to let the old folks down gently, and to explain that what they had won wasn’t quite what they had perceived, and how there were still people out in the wide world who were in the business of dressing up schemes for their own rapid enrichment and subsequent disappearance, and that they would do better not to have anything more to do with them, and let it go over several cups of tea in the place they really could call their safe home. I’m not sure they entirely thanked me for the scenario I presented to them, or deeply understood what the prize offer was not – shoot the messenger and all that.

It was the beginning of a whole swathe of free-gift ‘opportunities’ that emerged over the coming years, from Nigerian 401 scams about wealthy tribal leaders requiring help to distribute their accumulated wealth to various parties as a sign of their philanthropy, through to letters explaining how the recipient had just won a major slice of another country’s lottery, all for the simple act of providing the sender with your bank account details so the transfer and deposit of funds (yours not theirs) could be expedited quickly and smoothly and then Byee. Few seemed to wonder how they had won something when they hadn’t even bought a ticket, but the dazzle of money blinds many whose lives could be transposed by these mountains of cash. Even with the real thing, even fewer either calculated or understood the cosmic levels of the odds stacked against them winning anything.

I spoke to my mother again. Without patronising her I told her she was like someone who encountered the ill-intentioned people in fairy-tales, but at least she was safe now, if only down to one home. I knew that a part of her was relieved, because she was always scared of major incursions and responsibilities outside the normal things that filled her days. I also knew the Old Man would secretly have been pleased, because as he got older the last thing he wanted to do was travel to another country, preferring the solace of test cricket and whisky in his small private domain. But I also felt her tears and pain. After all, this was one of the most truly exciting things that had entered her life in a long time and might have made it charmingly different in her later years, especially when the Great Dictator, her husband, and reluctantly acknowledged legally as my father, passed on.

She had loved her four days in Madrid, visiting me when I was working there, only to have it crushingly and cruelly spoiled by the stay-at-home who gave her grief at every turn, about being abandoned and left alone while she was indulging herself in paella and Tempranillo wines, neither of which he would let pass his lips. He was a curmudgeon, or something like that beginning with ‘c’, only much shorter.

This had got to them late in life. They had not been exposed to these fresh kinds of ways of separating you from your money before. I don’t know if I was blessed, because naivete and need drove me into situations where I was a sucker for thinking I was about to secure a major bargain or deal, but they happened when I was still young and the sums of money lost weren’t really going to have terminal consequences. I played out another scenario.

I thought it might be practical, maybe even smart. My girlfriend then was still at university, in her third year, while I was in the sold-out world of work in London. We tried to alternate weekends together between my small shared Dulwich apartment and her even smaller (and against the rules) room in college in one of the town-and-gown cities. The plan was to acquire some things that should have conveyed the impression of a not too forward way of suggesting a bit of future home making, of togetherness and comfort without confronting the really big questions about public commitments (my problem). I had seen the ads in the paper. There was going to be an auction, a series of them over three days, quite local, where an amazing array of quality goods at even more amazing prices was going to be made available to a discerning public for the FREE price of turning up at the venue, a small warehouse. I suppose I should already have been aware of what might be coming down from the nature of the prose in the invitation, something that wouldn’t have felt out of place in late nineteenth or early twentieth century beckonings to bargain ways to find solutions to all sorts of problems from stiff backs to cleanliness, good health, posture and all-round well-being, mentally and physically, all for next to nothing.

I turned up, stayed near the back of the small venue, and watched the barker proceed with his banter, banging his gavel, sounding like some record about an auctioneer I used to hear on the radio. His eyes would scan the audience, looking for victims and suspects. Some of the attendees looked wised-up, others looked nervous, shy or waiting for some collective signal to get started on the tide of accumulation. The set-up comprised a pair of young men who paraded lots across a small platform as the presenter introduced the next stellar item for sale. There would be signals and gestures to accompany the Music Hall style of alliterative adjectives that adorned the wrapped-up goods with the values of scarcity, quality, and the truly unbelievable countdowns of No, not thirty pounds, my friends, not twenty-five. Not even twenty pounds today - you lucky people. But for you only, for you, gracious enough to turn up today, I offer you, I present to you, this (whatever) at the final and never-to-be-repeated price of 9.99. Fair and final offer. Only two dozen left. What do I hear for this on the count of three – on the count of two – that’s over there on the right-hand side and here in the front row? And on my final count, and for the luckiest few who put their hands up now, two for the price of one – yes, my lords, ladies and gentlemen. Two for the price of one, 9.99 once, 9.99 twice – (pause), and 9.99 thrice – Bang. Sold to the couple in the corner, and what a deal they have today, folks. Right, lot 27, I present to you this beautiful…

And so, it went on. Other working blokes on the floor scampered up to those who had put up their hands. Money crossed palms, cash only, and yet others disappeared and returned with said goods, passing them into the arms of the gratefully received. The show went on for about ninety minutes. I thought it was amazing. I spent more than I thought I would. But what a treasure trove of useful goods I had acquired, with perhaps only one small personal indulgence. I had bid for, and received, bedsheets, crockery, towels, cutlery, lamps, and a then trendy LED wristwatch. Laden with goods, I took a taxi back home, pleased as punch, the fare a tiny indulgence compared to the savings I had achieved that day. It was a first, an auction, and I had won out. I thought.

In the silence and fading light of the apartment, I examined my new material bargains. Wrapping unveiled, like the fineries that might have covered the real and tempting flesh beneath, I discovered a conveyor belt of tat. Dogs that preferred packaging to contents would have rolled around with toothy winning grins. The china tea-set was paper-thin and looked like it might just make it as a one-time picnic set before being disposed of. The sheets were thin nylon of the scratchiest, hair-standing on end static-inducing variety. The cutlery would have bent if a spoon had a cube of sugar balanced on it. The LED watch flickered its red digital display for a day and then faded as rapidly as its ‘gold-plated’ covering. I realised I had been duped, blinded by my desire and belief that I was out in the big world acquiring family heirlooms for a romantic dynasty; that I had the skills to negotiate amazing deals from unaware auctioneers at once-in-a lifetime prices for our first steps in nest-building. I reckoned even the initial hands up holders were plants. I would have been a natural for a minor character victim role in a Dickens’