THE GUTMAN CHRONICLES - 1 MORBIDITY

I wish my good friend Gutman had said to that fat swizzler McLaughlin: “You get out of my life, you revolting parasite, and take your monkey friend Tomkins with you”. He didn’t, so he had to suffer the ignominy of being undermined by that fraudulent pair, to the extent that he lost what he had left of his ragged and bleeding self-esteem. The fact that he was eventually proven right about their lies and false pretences gave him no satisfaction whatever. The truth is, he’s a lost soul, a man desperately scrabbling round for some sense of order in a chaotic world. As he advances further into middle-age, he sees the glass becoming emptier and emptier. He envies those who shimmy through life with barely a forward pass, and, when asked about their greatest contribution say: “Nothing of the slightest importance.” To Gutman, everything is of the utmost importance. On one occasion, he told me he needed proof as to the existence of God. He needed what he called ‘proof of faith.’ He needed to know that the world was not a singularity that exploded into being all those years ago, but was the work of a venerable white-haired gentleman with a beard, who managed it in seven days, give or take. He needed proof that the universe is set to keep on expanding and how people know that it is so many billion light years, side to side. He needs to know what lies beyond infinity. I saw him today. He told me he saw a dull day, cold, unforgiving. He saw bare patches on his lawn. He saw huge oak trees, daunting, unforgiving, demanding. He saw leaves falling with the onset of autumn. He said they all needed sweeping, one by one. He saw a blanket of cloud stretching to the horizon, which matched precisely his downbeat mood. He saw advancing age, colic, deafness, nose-hair and skin you could peel off. “Hallelulah”, he said. Later, he told me, with some asperity: “Look at me – I have this intellect, capable of building mental bullet-trains, reduced to assembling firebox stays for a 19th century branch-line tank engine. I need challenges, I need to create, to surprise myself at the magnitude of my achievements, not bumble along like a parks attendant scraping up leaves with a lawn rake and repetitively depositing them in a bin marked “failed ideas.”’ Poor Gutman, a man who will never be satisfied.