And I remember going on from the pub. This less concretely than before, everything still funny, but with an edge. One of the girls said, ‘What do you do then?’ And I said that we had this company, Ocean Ltd, and gave her my card — stupid really — because she wasn’t in business. Sitting in La Capresa scrunching on breadsticks and drinking red wine that grabbed at my throat. When they went off to the toilet — and God knows why I remember this because it really isn’t important — Gavin asked me to sign a guarantor release on the Ocean Ltd fund account. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. At the time I just signed it. He was always giving me things to sign in my directorial capacity, and on this occasion, being a young Turk, it seemed the right thing to be doing in La Capresa, taking out my thick fountain pen and snaking my bloody signature across the hairlined box … and then … that’s it. The rest of the evening was the rest of the evening. And I know I didn’t go home with one of those girls, because I never do … and I know that Gavin probably did, because he always does. And I don’t know why this business of signing the form is swimming at me now out of my memory, because it really isn’t important at all, is it?
Standing now on the oblong of stairway that is the half-landing. Appalled by the little banks of fluff that have accreted in the gap between the nap of the carpet and the corrugation of underlay. Appalled also by the thin dustfall on my children that dulls them. I’m a pale face at a window on a half-landing … I’m a half-remembered surreal poem, learnt by rote in school, years ago. I’m on my way upstairs to make a tour of inspection, but I can’t get further than this. Transfixed again by a miniature world, where the brass rods that hold tight the tread are Nazca lines on the floor of some delusory desert. Because everything, as it were, contains everything. And this half-landing has as much right to be considered the world as any other, wouldn’t you agree? That’s a rhetorical, rhetorical question, maybe the first of its kind, tee-hee! As long as you can be miserable in good surroundings.
Hoo … It might be a mistake to go upstairs, there’s something a little strange about the giant tortoise that my bed has become, stacked as it is with the fruit of Ocean Ltd’s labours. And I don’t think that I’ll be able to repeat my book-tidying act. I don’t want to be upstairs when Gavin rings, because I hate having to run to answer the phone. As it is I can float downstairs. I feel sustained by lines of credit, that flow like the purple bars, like the bright bars of my childhood, but lighter, filmier, wavier. I float downstairs at the centre of a net of lines of credit, they undulate slackly around me and then gather me together and whisk me back into the living-room. Breakfast television is on the cards and Gavin may phone at any moment. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s wearing lederhosen and standing in an international phone booth that looks like a giant, porcelain-sided stove. We’re in split screen: me in my chair, he in his stove; and he pushes his phone card — emblazoned with a double-headed eagle — into the cast-iron fissure … Clinks and kercherunks and whirrs as the line springs into action triggering circuitry across and over the continent… but no … no ring here. Perhaps he’ll ring in a little while.
Here’s the studio swimming into view. And it makes me feel nauseous. The unreal quality of that manufactured space, intended only to contain posturing presenters. Chipboard pouffes encased in oatmeal twistpile, turquoise striped banquettes … It is a slab for displaying human fish … I can’t bear to watch them swim into view and ‘O’ at me fatuously … I’ve more pressing problems, like flatness of taste … and the malignant wart … Have you met one another? I say here — and mark this — that this wart is cancerous. It represents a new and virulent form of cancer that is peculiar to me. This is an implosive cancer, other cancers infect cell after cell in a chain reaction, but this cancer works in on itself, nullifying cells which turn into heavier and heavier dead matter, glutinous matter, nailed into the pit of my elbow. The symptoms? Well, flatness of taste for one, flatness of mouth taste, eye taste, ear taste. Smell? Ferrr-geddit. The only palliative is chemotherapy … and the side-effects can be disturbing …
What I need to consider, as the television wetly observes me, is some kind of strategy that will make Gavin phone me, now. I’m sick of waiting. I’m aware that there are certain rituals that I can perform which will make him phone me. Never underestimate the power of magic. We may think that cause and effect are billiard balls that strike one another, but we know that we can tip the table. And that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to tip the table.
What is it that keeps me here, sitting, stiffening, in a repro Queen Anne chair, bought from a mail-order catalogue, when I could be asleep? I could be lying in between warm, brushed cotton sheets, enjoying that special, infinitely sweet, morning sleep, that turns one’s aching body inside out like a sock. Instead, I’m rigid, upright, staring, waiting. I’m going to compile a list of the things that stop me sleeping and act upon them forthwith:
1. The wart
2. Lack of appetite
3. Waiting for Gavin to ring
Appetite and the wart and Gavin are all intimately linked. I realise this now although it’s been staring me in the face all night. If I can do something about the former, the latter will fall into place. (I’m just kidding about all of this — really, believe me — just to keep me occupied. I don’t really think I can influence Gavin by acts of magic, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?) I see the wart as a hungry thing … actually as a hungry entity. You notice that I can speak quite openly and casually about the wart at this stage? That’s because the wart isn’t hungry at the moment. The wart is the bivalve that determines my cycle, my expansion and contraction. What I need to do is give it some real nourishment, something that will completely assuage it. Since the wart owes its very existence to the founding of Ocean Ltd, the act of sating its relentless hunger will necessarily bring about the completion of Ocean Ltd’s business. You have followed me so far I hope?
The wart takes in matter and massively condenses it. If you like, it is the biological equivalent of a black hole, infinitely heavy. And what about the meal it requires? Well, this must be a combination of real food: spicy mushrooms, tandoori chicken wings, stale bagels, morello cherry conserve, squares of processed cheese — and material relating to Ocean Ltd. To whit: invoices, bills of lading, delivery notes, customs declarations, spreadsheet analyses and a couple of brochures, one for the product — the children’s scrapbook — and one for Ocean Ltd itself.
I will have to travel to assemble the ingredients of my spell. Into the dining-room to fetch the Ocean Ltd material and then to the kitchen to get the food. Before I go, let me take stock. Is this the only course of action left open to me? Or can I get by with a plainer, more matter-of-fact view of my world? I say ‘my world’ advisedly, the truth of the matter is, can I make my world elide gracefully into being ‘the world’ again? A world of housecoats, washing-up brushes, bilateral agreements, tax returns, sexual encounters and stand-up comedians. Can I?
No. Emphatically not. Things have gone too far. I never should have started that nonsense with the solid tubes of brightness. I’ve made my epiphenomenal bed, now I’ll have to stand in it. Up. And to the dining-room. Gather the necessary papers and continue walking with an easy and unhurried, a supremely natural gait, into the hall. ‘Good morning, watercolour.’ ‘Good morning, table.’ The kitchen is quite light now but I have to see what I’m doing so I’d better put on the strip light. Aha! The mushrooms warble a greeting, the chicken wings hunch on the draining board. Off with their packaging!