Lunch at Leon’s was the high point of my day. I always looked forward to my steak and onions, the bustle and clatter of the kitchen, the conversations I could listen to. I liked the plastic hoop ear-rings the cashier wore; I liked the way the cook’s face hung in the steam above some boiling pot or pan. And it was Leon’s that had provided me with my first real acquaintance. Gregory worked nights as a security guard at a bank, and he often dropped in halfway through his shift for a cup of coffee and a pastry. During my second week in the city, I ran into him again.
‘I thought I’d find you here.’ Gregory sat down at my table, without asking this time, and slumped over the Formica.
I could see that, before too long, I’d have to find somewhere else to eat. We were both lonely men, Gregory and I; the difference was, he hadn’t chosen it. Still, by hearing me out the other night, he’d done me a favour (even if he wasn’t aware of it), and that made me generous.
‘Smoke,’ I said, ‘how’s things?’
A grin split his face wide open. All you had to do was use his stupid name and he’d be happy.
For a while we talked generally, about the present — his job, his daughter’s wedding, sport — then he narrowed it down, went back in time. He began to tell me about the factory he worked in for twenty years. He used to pack fish. This didn’t surprise me. The first time I met him I thought I could smell fish, and now I realised that I hadn’t been mistaken. It was as if the smell of cod had been preserved at some deep level of his skin, layers down, the way a tree’s rings can record a bolt of lightning or a flood.
‘Feel this,’ Gregory said. ‘Feel my hand.’
I reached out and felt it. I remembered it from the week before. It was smooth and shiny, like touching fibre glass. I told him so.
‘That’s twenty years of packing fish, that is.’
His hands were ruined. Where I had lines, he had cracks. And the cracks, he told me, often opened up and bled. There was nothing he could do about it. It was the price you paid, working in those factories. Before that, he’d sailed on trawlers, up into Arctic waters. ‘But I already told you that …’
I nodded patiently. I was thinking about getting away, back to my room. I was thinking about turning on the TV. Maybe I’d drink a schnapps or two. Then, later, a walk through the red-light streets, peep-show neon silvering the puddles …
‘You’re a good fellow, Blom,’ he said, and he stared at me, all watery-eyed and serious.
At first I wasn’t sure why he had that look on his face. Then I realised what it was, and almost choked on my steak. The poor fool felt sorry for me!
‘You’re new to the city,’ he said, ‘aren’t you.’
‘I got here about a week ago.’
‘You know anyone?’
‘Only you.’ I grinned. ‘Sounds like a song, doesn’t it.’
‘You know, you should get out,’ he said, ‘meet some people.’ His voice brightened suddenly. His daughter’s wedding, he’d mentioned it already, it was in a few days’ time. Maybe I should come along.
‘That’s very kind of you, Gregory, but —’
‘Loots is coming.’
‘Who?’
‘Albert Loots. He’s a friend of mine.’ Gregory leaned forwards. ‘He used to work in a circus. Works in a factory now. Cakes and biscuits.’ Gregory sighed, but it was a sigh of deep satisfaction. He liked it when lives described a curve, as both ours did. He liked to have some kind of proof that fortune’s wheel had turned. ‘I see him on his bicycle sometimes. Usually it’s when I’m going home, six or seven in the morning —’ Gregory yawned. ‘Wish I could hit the hay. Ah well, no rest for the wicked.’ He heaved himself to his feet, looked down at me. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you think you’ll come?’
‘I’ll try.’
I watched him leave with dread rising in me like a river whose history it is to burst its banks. Gregory’s daughter’s wedding. It was bound to be one of those interminable suburban functions. There’d be a band — some bunch of tone-deaf alcoholics playing folk tunes. There’d be dancing, which I’d always thought of as a kind of illness, like Parkinson’s disease, or epilepsy (someone call an ambulance, for Christ’s sake). There’d be displays of sentiment and bonhomie on every side. I was going to have to get out of it — but how? I walked through the 14th district for most of that night, trying to think up excuses.
Towards dawn I was on my way back to the Kosminsky when I saw a man riding a bicycle down the middle of a wide, deserted street. It was still very early, the trees loud with birds, light slowly beginning to ease into the sky. Because he was just about the only thing moving, I kept my eyes on him. He was some distance away, though; I couldn’t see his face.
As I watched, the man swung himself up into the air. Suddenly he was upside-down, one hand on the handlebars, the other on the saddle. It was so deft, so effortless, that he appeared weightless, immune to the laws of gravity. And the bicycle was still travelling down the middle of the street; if you’d traced its progress with a piece of chalk, if you’d drawn a line on the tarmac, I doubt there would have been even a kink in it. The man wore tight-fitting, pale-yellow trousers and a glittering blue jersey with stars on it. It seemed to me that he was juggling what looked like oranges with his feet. Then, just before he disappeared from view, he dropped back down into the saddle, his feet synchronising with the pedals, the oranges vanishing, one by one, into his pockets. I found myself applauding.
‘What happened?’ asked a passer-by.
‘It’s over now,’ I said. ‘You missed it.’
As I prepared for bed I remembered something Gregory had told me. Used to be in a circus. Sometimes I see him on his bicycle. Surely it had to be the same man. That friend of his, the one he’d invited to his daughter’s wedding. What was his name? Teats? Groot? Something like that. I felt my anxieties lift, my excuses fall away. I’d spent half the night in torment — and now? I realised I was actually looking forward to the event. All it had taken was a man on a bicycle and half a dozen oranges. I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. I watched my mouth open wide, I saw my teeth. I was laughing.
That same week I noticed a disturbing phenomenon. It was after returning from Leon’s one night. I pressed the call button outside the lift. Nothing happened. I must have waited five or ten minutes, first pressing the button, then leaning on it, but the lift never came. In the end I took the stairs.
I’d just reached the second floor when I saw something that brought me to a sudden standstill. Two people, having sex. They were lying on the carpet, half in and half out of the lift. One of the woman’s arms trailed across the corridor, as if she was practising her backstroke, as if the whole thing was taking place in water and she was trying to swim away from it. Every now and then, the lift doors closed on her — then opened again. There were red marks where the stainless steel had bitten into her hips. It was like seeing one form of life caught in the jaws of another. This didn’t seem to detract from her pleasure, though; in fact, it could well have been contributing. I smiled, murmured an apology and, stepping carefully over her outstretched arm, continued up the next flight of stairs. They didn’t seem to notice me at all.