With the unhurried ease of labourers everywhere, who seek, on a daily basis, to escape the winding down of their own bodies’ strength, they brought the children in from the truck and stacked them all over the house. Box after box, one hundred gross in all, laid out in all the rooms. After they had gone I amused myself for a while by taking them out and playing with them, forming patterns, marching them up and down, and when that palled I lined them up in ranks. Especially next door in the dining-room where, at this moment, four companies are drawn up in tight formation under the table.
When they’d all been unloaded and the various invoices signed I wanted to stop the three men as they moved off to their orange truck. I felt a terrible sense of abandonment and strangeness. The whole grey afternoon possessed an awful thin reality that might slice into me. I wanted to call them back, but could think of no pretext. The air brakes hissed and they roared up through the gears and away towards the North Circular.
You see, I’m not convinced any more by Gavin. That’s the root of it. I’m suspicious. When we met David Hangleton two weeks ago for a ‘little Italian dinner’ in Hampstead, he was so much more convincing. I’ve never pretended to know anything about this. It was never my job to supply front or charisma for Ocean Ltd. I was the back-room boy who would square things away and make them look right on paper. But next to Hangleton, Gavin seemed insubstantial. It was as if, with Gavin, I had witnessed a clever pastiche of the real thing. Everything Gavin did, the gestures he made, the things he said, the suits he wore, was forced, it was a performance. Hangleton on the other hand was clearly a real entrepreneur, he meant it all. He was natural and unforced and his bragging related to funds that were, if not entirely his own, at least not subject to punitive rates of interest.
‘Buy something very cheap, with someone else’s money and then sell it, quickly, not so cheap.’ That was Gavin’s maxim and the motto of Ocean Ltd. He even made me get a little sign made up with this written on it and hung it over the computer.
‘Then we can pay off the loans.’
‘Then we can pay off the loans.’
‘And the credit cards.’
‘And the credit cards.’
‘And the current accounts.’
‘And the current accounts.’
‘And the charge cards.’
‘Yeah, and the frigging charge cards.’
‘And pile the capital back into a real enterprise.’
‘Of course, this isn’t simply a stupid sting, is it. We’re businessmen, entrepreneurs.’
Businessmen, entrepreneurs. Gavin had certainly looked and acted the part. At least I had thought so to begin with. He was so good-looking for a start, with his neat sandy hair, his regular, even features. He had a nose that had such a tight little bridge, not like my flat lump of clay; and a flawless complexion, so flawless that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a seam running down the back of his neck.
When Gavin and I first became colleagues he took me out with him to meet his friends. They all had the same kind of manner as him, a sort of unforced and facetious ease. It was the kind of charm that I’ve always found myself a victim of. Gavin and his friends, with their minor public school slang, their games of backgammon and their saloon-car races round London’s arterial roads, reminded me of the nouveau riche kids I went to school with. They had the same consumer’s attitude to the business of living. Like Gavin they went straight to the bottom line without troubling to check the balances. I suppose the difference was that Gavin brought to the whole thing the strong implication of ultimate solidity, a four-square Virginia Water kind of security. Redolent of retrievers and women with seriously quilted clothing. He also had the knack of elevating you, making you feel speciaclass="underline" ‘I’m telling you this because I know you can keep a secret and …’ Lengthy pause, ‘well, because I suppose I regard you as one of my closest friends.’ Eyes downcast to denote embarrassment and then briefly flicked upwards into your own to indicate complete faith.
Actually, you know, I’m wrong to rubbish Gavin like this. I’m wrong and I’m stupid. Very stupid. He’s out there alone in a hotel room, he’s staked everything he has on Ocean Ltd. I never had anything to stake to begin with. He’s been a friend to me — if a little capricious. But maybe that’s what friendship is, a slap and then a tickle. I suppose I’m nervous because I’m expecting the call and because the last thing I read in How To Form a Company was ‘Business partnerships can be very thorny indeed, even close friends should ensure that partnership agreements are vetted by an experienced solicitor.’ But of course we don’t have a partnership, we have a limited company, with directors. Mr Rabindarath and, of course, Sandy — although his identity could be said to be problematic.
I can see the corner of the garden out of the corner of my eye. Dawn must be coming. Gavin should call. It’s damp out there, a little wetness glistens in the orange light, on the privet and the flattened grass. In here it’s the same. My chair. The sofa. The wall unit, the triangular area between the side of my chair and the wall, full of loosely piled newspapers. The miniature landscape of the newspaper, up column and down advertisement. Who is to say that it’s really smaller than the room, the garden, or the world? If I rub my hand up and down the arm of the chair the pile on the cover moves from flat to prickily upright, to flat again. Co-ordination is the key here, foolish to look for wisdom in books, because they have nothing new to say. They contain everything in their one long sentence. Everything and nothing. Whereas in this simple ritual — rotating the chair-cover pile with the flat of my hand, whilst rhythmically breathing and, at the same time, running my eye carefully over the newspaper hillocks — I achieve control. I create a tiny ordered universe, which means that Gavin will call. He must call because the universe is ordered. The solid beams can be made to expand and contract in tight ranks. The children have all gone to bed quietly. The mushrooms lie swaddled in batter, the chicken wings subside into the polystyrene mattress. And the wart starts up as a dot, that flares into a portal. A ghastly door. Its subcutaneousness. Urghh … its layeredness. I hate the layers of my skin, because they’re all over and beneath them are layers of viscera. Someone has sprinkled sand between the layers of my viscera. And the beer is flat again. And I have heard this song a thousand times. Where is my control …
Actually, there’s nothing particularly awful about this song. It has a kind of folksy innocence, a wistfulness that rather suits my current mood. It could be ironic — but maybe not. I sit here, looking, I think, rather dapper for someone who’s been up the whole night. My clothes have a rather billowy aspect to them, perhaps it’s the light quality. I sit in the pool thrown down by the standard lamp, washed by the orange from the street lamp and tinged with the palest of grey flushes from the coming dawn. And the beams, those solid beams, which elsewhere in the living-room are orderly and controlled, dance and hum around me, weaving in and out of one another; I am their focus.
I am like some small, brightly coloured fleck of life, caught under a microscope. Beautiful, weightless, shrunk beyond the force of gravity or the effect of the sun, I swim in the amniotic air of the living-room. The wallpaper gently susurrates. And then, without warning, a hostile beam enters the room, plunges through the cornice, a beam unlike the others, not subject to my optical controclass="underline" a beam of pure anxiety. Which probes me with its needle tip, touches me just once. Pokes a single time, into my soft midriff, the heliotrope heart of my pathetically simple organism. And I contract. I seize up. I clench and ball into a little jelly fist. Slowly, slowly I relax again, blob out, float in the limpid fluid that magnifies my transparent body. It happens again and again. I am but a single-celled creature capable of one, giant, knee-jerk reflex. This is a bit of a digression from my main area of concern, or at any rate the area of discussion, founded, as it were, on words like ‘pallet’ and expressions such as ‘bill of lading’ and ‘pro-forma invoice’. This area is coextensive with tarmac aprons bordered by chain-link fences. The world which Ocean Ltd inhabits is an active world of quantifiable phenomena, not some amoebic fantasy concocted in a suburban living-room at … getting on for 6.30 a.m.