I asked the coach driver what was wrong. Her husband had been called Thomas, he told me. He’d been run over a few years ago, and Clarise had never really recovered. We stood about on the pavement, the four of us, uncertain what to do. At the end of the street, beyond a row of black railings, I could see a park. Birds were beginning to fidget in the trees. Dawn could not be far away.
Clapping his hands and then rubbing them together, the driver said he should be going. He was behind schedule, he said. He wasn’t addressing anyone in particular, and nobody responded. I watched the door slot hydraulically back into position as he settled himself behind the steering-wheel. The coach reversed into a nearby side-street and then pulled away, Iris Gilmour’s face floating in the dark window like a moon trapped in a jar. When she gave me her name, there had been such intensity in her, such earnestness, as though she feared that I might be the last person ever to hear of her, and that if I didn’t remember her no one would. The coach reached the corner, tail-lights blushing briefly, then it was gone.
‘Not right,’ I heard the woman murmur.
I glanced at Friedriksson, but he just shrugged and looked off towards the park, as if he was expecting someone to come for him. The other man had his back to me. He must have been feeling the cold because he was hugging himself. I could see the tips of his fingers on either side of his rib-cage.
In the distance a cock crowed, raucous and yet forlorn.
At last the woman blew her nose, then she looked at us over her shoulder, her face puffy and tragic. We followed her indoors. I waited in the hallway while she took the others down to the basement. The house smelled like a cheap hotel. Armpits, cigarettes and gravy. The stair-carpet had turned pale down the middle, its pile almost worn away, and the paint had chipped off the banisters, revealing the wood beneath. When the woman returned, she locked the front door, then led me up the stairs, letting out a faint but urgent grunt with every step.
Once she had showed me to my room, which was on the first floor at the side of the house, she went downstairs again, muttering something about the television. I said goodnight and closed my door. The room was small and square, almost exactly the same dimensions, curiously, as my room in the house on Hope Street. A single bed had been pushed up against the left-hand wall, and an armchair was wedged into the gap behind the door. A chest of drawers doubled as a bedside table. On the wall above the bed was a painting of a clown with a fistful of wilting marigolds. Putting my bag down, I went to the window and looked out. A yard, a wooden fence. A mangle. The sky was a grey lid on the new drab world to which I had been delivered. Once, as I stood there, a light came on in the bathroom of the house next door, a burst of yellow behind a pane of blurry scalloped glass, and then, perhaps a minute later, it went out again, and everything was the same as before. Lowering myself on to the edge of the bed, a great burden of familiarity settled over me, as though I had already spent long years in the room. I seemed to be looking back on something that hadn’t happened yet — my own existence, endless and unvarying. Was the Cliff, with its ominously precipitous name, the place where it would all, finally, come to an end?
Five men were already installed in the house when I arrived. The room below mine was occupied by a man with an unlined, almost childish face whom everyone referred to, mysteriously, as Marge. A sour-looking ex-town-planner called Martin Horowicz lived across the landing from me. His room looked out over the street. He appeared to have a fixation on Clarise Tucker, the landlady, but she was at least twice his size and had no trouble fending him off. She kept two rooms at the back of the house, both of which were painted pastel colours and filled with soft toys. Sandwiched between my room and that of the town-planner was a young man by the name of Aaron Moghadassi. I rarely heard him speak. Every now and then, while sitting at the kitchen table or in the lounge, he would bring his right hand slowly up out of his lap. He would examine the palm, then the back of the hand, then the palm again, and he would frown, seemingly baffled by the fact that they looked different. An old pot-smoking carpenter by the name of Urban Smith had made his home in the attic. The fifth man, Jack Starling, had moved into the converted outhouse. With the three new arrivals — myself, Lars Friedriksson and Bill Snape — the house was full.
To begin with, I kept to myself, never leaving my room except at mealtimes, or when there were chores to be done, but gradually I ventured out into the common parts of the house. I encountered despondency and gloom, which was only to be expected, but I also encountered merriment, and some, like Clarise, veered wildly between the two. I had thought, on first meeting her, that she was large, but she was actually a woman of such vast proportions that she was as wide when viewed sideways-on as she was from the front or back. She tended to raise the subject herself, and usually with hilarious results. ‘Why, I’m practically square!’ she shrieked on one of the first evenings I spent downstairs. ‘Yes, you are square,’ Jack Starling agreed. ‘Like a plinth.’ He grasped his chin between finger and thumb in a parody of thoughtfulness, and then added, with a sly glance in Horowicz’s direction, ‘Now what are we going to put on top of you?’ They had all howled with laughter, Clarise included.
Most nights, after supper, she would switch on the imitation coal fire in the front room, draw the brown velour curtains and gather us around her — ‘my boys’, as she called us. We would fog the air with cigarette smoke and down Jack Starling’s lethal home-made beer, and Urban Smith, who had a fine baritone voice, would entertain us with his extensive repertoire of morbid songs, or Lars Friedriksson would read excerpts from the autobiography he was writing, a work that wasn’t remotely amusing in itself but was rendered so by his unbelievably earnest and lugubrious delivery. Later, one of the men would start complaining with great relish about something or other — we all enjoyed a good moan — or else somebody would embark on an anecdote, and what anecdotes they were, riddled with mythomania and self-delusion. Since we were living in the Green Quarter now, these stories often hinged on some misfortune or disaster, and long before she retired to bed, Clarise would have tears in her eyes. She would not be the only one. The combination of her infectious sentimentality and the potent home brew was enough to bring anyone’s emotions to the surface. I didn’t take up smoking, but I drank and wept with the rest of them, and I laughed the peculiar, giddy, almost hysterical laughter of the melancholic.
Of all the tales that were told, none was stranger than Marge’s, and I heard it not in the front room but privately, during a walk through the neighbourhood. One afternoon in the middle of December I was returning from the town centre, where I had just collected my weekly allowance, when I spotted him on the road ahead of me. Drawing closer, I saw that he was clutching at a tree-trunk with both hands and squinting upwards through the branches. He seemed apprehensive, if not actually frightened. I stopped a few feet away and asked if I could help.
‘Help?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’ His eyes wobbled a little as he brought them down from the sky. ‘What’s that sun feel like?’
‘It feels good.’
‘Is it warm?’
‘No, not very.’
‘Oh.’ If his face looked unnaturally youthful, his voice sounded like that of a much older man, the tone uncertain, tremulous.
I asked him whether he was going back to the house.
‘I’d like to, yes,’ he answered mysteriously. As he spoke, the sun slipped behind a cloud. The day darkened. ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘No time to lose.’ He started up the road, bending forwards from the waist, his badly darned elbows jabbing at the air.