Mr Rabindarath came footing round the bend in the stairs. Sandy, aka ‘Mr Eccles’, padding by his side. Mr Rabindarath wore a very long gaberdine mac that covered him to his feet. He headed on down and passed us, blank eyes recessed into his grey, eroded face. His prescription was clutched in one hand and in the other he held a child’s blue plastic spade which bore Mr Eccles’ toothmarks.
‘Not so good I’m afraid,’ Gavin was reading a letter addressed to Sandy in his capacity as marketing manager of Ocean Ltd, ‘they seem to be getting rather cold feet in Hamburg, I’ll have to go over. I’m sure they’ll be no trouble once I get there, Horst just needs a little babying. You stay here, transship the goods. No sense in warehousing them, it’ll simply eat into our profits. Keep them at your place. It’ll only be for a night …’
We left the house and walked down the North End Road. Gavin seemed not to notice the oppressively low sky, or the sad juxtaposition of tatty mullioned windows with dirty sheet glass. He was erect and going somewhere. But the city held me to it, like some dried and crusty discharge mirroring the Artexed wall, above the meter, where Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post had lain.
* * *
Gavin took me to the Savoy for a farewell tea and we ate crumpets and drank Earl Grey at the bottom of that great sunken swirl of carpeting. Waiters came and went with the softest of footfalls, bringing and taking thick crockery and heavy, stainless steel vessels. The crisp, white linen of the tablecloth and the crisp, white linen of my napkin, folded into each other on my lap. Gavin talked about Ocean Ltd and his sex life as if they were one and the same and chopped the air vigorously with his hands. Stubby hands with spatulate fingers and recessed nails, Gavin’s hands were like someone else’s shoulders.
I couldn’t concentrate. I became fixated by the details: the underside of a leaf on a rubber plant, the ridged rubber rim of a waiter’s shoe, the precise three-button belly bulge of a fat man at an adjacent table, and eventually by the green-gold pelmets capping the great swathes of drapery at the end of the room. A pelmet isn’t a piece of furniture, but nor, on the other hand, is it merely decorative. These pelmets were vast, adult versions of my little purple pelmets at home. The curtains cascaded down from them to the floor. They were fringed with hooks of gold thread. Gavin waved buttered toast about and I couldn’t wait to get home, to my chair and my bubble and the quiet part of the night.
That was thirty-six hours ago. For thirty-two of them, or thereabouts, I have sat here. Excursions to the toilet, the fridge, to supervise the unloading of the children. There has been one phone call from Gavin: everything is going well. I’m just to sit tight and wait for his call and then fill out the pro-forma invoice which coils out of the old Unwin on the dining-room table. An undemanding way to make a living, or so I think. I’m privileged in my house, which is only superficially attached to the other houses strung out alongside an isolated rectangle of green in the midst of the suburbs. My truncated garden is backed up by another, the same and the same to east and west. My house is built into the next one, but only brick deep. Inside it is a tardis, far larger than anyone can imagine. It is an island, separated from the rest of Brent, floating in a viscous bath of salty, crusted fluid.
Damn it all, I should make an EEC declaration when I transfer objects from one room of this house to the next, or even mental objects within my own head. Yes, that’s it. Declarations of intent: stating the purpose of the thought, its resale value and so on. The problem is not to attach such a declaration (in triplicate) to each thought. It is simply that there is no one there to check it, no customs men. Nothing new, except mile upon mile of dun-coloured tundra, unrolling under a sky that matches it, for flatness, for billowing featurelessness, excepting for here, and there, the brackish open sore of a peaty pool, fringed with sedge.
Breakfast television starts in half an hour. I’ve just checked my watch. There’s two certainties. Two pieces of evidence … that add up to … my controclass="underline" real evidence of my control over my environment. There’s a certain homeliness about a cardigan … at 6.30 in the morning, worn by an avuncular man … on a screen. It’s the kind of assurance that I need. I must find that bastard child the remote controller … a complete misnomer. There’s nothing remote about the control I exercise with it, one push of the soft stud and the television will spring into life … I can check out the test card and the occasional notices they issue at this hour of forthcoming programmes.
Where is the bastard child? My fingers skate nervelessly over the carpet, sketching out the faint raggedy afterimage of those once firm and solid purple bars. Gone … gone … gonnie! Nothing now but the grey wash of near dawn and the fading yellow pool around my chair, marking the limit of my bubble. The pictures on the opposite wall, which through the long night appeared thoroughly appropriate … full of meaning … in good taste, are now old postage stamps and curling posters on an adolescent’s bedroom walclass="underline" Snoopy, woman in tennis dress scratching her naked buttock and worse. The colour scheme in here is as anonymous and inhospitable as a supermarket aisle, or the neglected lobby of a large corporation.
My hand is heavy with blood. I long to clutch its slim, cool blackness and feel the play of soft studs … so unlike … the wart! Which throbs in my inner elbow, a hard stud that promises nothing but pain. Imagine pressing it … eugh! Jesus Christ! Jee-suss Kerist! Hard, but squishy … and if I pressed it … what then … not control … but less control. Less control …
Well, bastard child. So here you are, snug in my hand, as if you’d never left, and the preview screen undulates gently across the room. 6.45 a.m., Good Morning Britain. And good morning to you … I say. A simple salutation. To breathe freely I have opened the window and a fresh draught of privety air is wafting in from the front garden. In the distance I can hear the swish and roar of artics as they make up for lost time along the North Circular.
It is dawn … If I stretch out from my chair the bubble that encloses me comes too. Stretching stickily around my hand. Cling-film adhesion that turns me into a Cyberman. Time to stand up again, free my clothes where they’ve melded to my body, move around the room a little, gently shaking my limbs. Another night… another dollar. What a doddle. Huh! Futile really to read so many books on self-improvement … Here … I’ll gather them up now and put them away on the shelf. What we need in here is a certain orderliness with which to face the morning. Ch-onk. They fall on to the shelves … and I’ll gather up these album covers that are fanned out over the floor … and stack them here … and now the free newspapers that silt up the wedge between my chair and the wall… voila. Now all I can see is a conventional room in a conventional house, with breakfast television about to be watched, by me: Company Director.
We went out on the town. That is, those directors of Ocean Ltd who weren’t rocking spasmodically in their rooms, or slavering over blue plastic spades. We had just finished opening the last line of credit we required in order to make the big purchase, and Gavin and I were in high spirits. We were just two more young men out on the town. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That feeling that you’re somehow connected, at the centre of things. You’re walking down Old Compton Street and this is your burgh, your village.
We fell in with some girls at a pub on Cambridge Circus, the way that sailors on leave do in Hollywood films. It had never happened to me before … I put it down to Gavin. They were red and brown in tailored suits and didn’t make a habit of this kind of thing and laughed a lot and had conspiratorial nods and catchwords which passed between them. And Gavin and I were interested in them and talked to them about their jobs and their flats and got to know them, because this was our night already and we were young bucks, as it were, loose on the town.