I found Jim at his desk, he was taking copy over the phone. The receiver was wedged between his shoulder and his ear, leaving both hands free to type. His fingers riffled over the keyboard at tremendous speed. He grunted into the mouthpiece and occasionally read back a line to check it. When he had finished and hung up he swivelled round to face me and held up his hand.
‘Stop. Don’t say it. Because I know, and I can tell you in advance that I’m ashamed and I’m sorry. I’ve been behaving like a self-centred egotist. I’ve become obsessive and my critique of The Way In Which We Live is nothing but the cynical, sour grapes of an emotional child.’
‘Has Carol been at you already?’
‘Yeah, man. She’s not a happy woman, but she accepts the truth of what I have to say.’
‘Oh, she does, does she. Well I for one don’t want to lose a friend in order to become an audience.’
‘Stop being such a sententious tosser. Come on, I’ll buy you some lunch.’
But I had to wait another ten minutes for lunch. The features editor of Jim’s rag appeared with an obese piece of copy that needed a crash diet. Jim obliged. He was the fastest sub I’ve ever seen at work. It was almost as if he could photograph a whole sheet of text mentally and then work on all the separate parts of it simultaneously. His knowledge of the twisted rules of English usage was also superb; he knew when to judiciously skate away from the received in order to achieve clarity, and how to make sure that every clause was just so.
Wherever Jim worked he soon became an invaluable practical asset, but unfortunately at the same time a devastating emotional liability. He could never hold a job down for long and now he’d managed to outstay his welcome with most of the nationals and was on to magazines.
‘To tell you the truth, I prefer working for Bicycling,’ Jim said as we clattered down the stairs to the street. He paused a few steps below me and struck an attitude. ‘Do you want to know why?’
‘All right, Jim. Why?’
‘Because I don’t have to wait, silly. All the way up to press day I’m keying copy into that little terminal there and I only have to walk around the corner to see it all nicely laid out on another screen. Even at Wapping I had to wait hours to see a completed page. But here it’s all format work. The hacks write absolutely to fit and I know what a page is going to look like even before I’ve started working on it.’
‘But Jim, that’s no fun at all, you might as well be subbing catalogues.’
‘Catalogues, mmm … you might have a point there. I’ve never thought of catalogues before, there’s a certain purity in them.’
I pushed the bar of the fire door and we fell into the street. High Holborn was pulsing and groaning with lunch-time traffic, wheeled and legged. The air was blue with exhaust fumes. People shouldered their way along the pavement and in and out of the cars as they inched towards New Oxford Street. Clerks and secretaries formed straggling knots of protein lacing the arterial strip, constantly harried by cruising antibody-streams of data-processing managers, bank tellers and shop assistants. Looking first up and then down the crowded thoroughfare, I had the same impression that I had had the night before on the M25. It was as if the whole scene were two-dimensional. I existed at a point that had no extension. Either side of me were flat slabs of pulsing colour.
Jim was in his element. He did a little pirouette on the kerb.
‘Look at this. Do you know what these people are doing?’
‘They’re having their lunch hour.’
‘Yes, yes. Of course they are in a manner of speaking. But what are they really doing? Look.’ He held up his hands to conduct an imaginary orchestra. His fingers extended to catch the most delicate modulations of the crowd. He held them there for a beat and a half and then brought them straight down. A forelock of brown hair flipped over his forehead and pointed down directly at the pavement. The passersby paid not the slightest attention.
‘There you have it.’ Jim was triumphant. ‘For that beat and a half I held them, I gauged them. The whole lot of them. I interrupted the cadence of the crowd; they were waiting.’
‘Waiting!’ I snorted. ‘Waiting for what?’
‘For the end of the lunch break, for a nuclear war, for the poisoning of the earth, for old age, for the millennium, for the last judgement, for their hair to turn grey, for retirement, for a big gambling win, for a strange sexual experience, for the hand of God to touch them, for their children to support them, for the right person, for a new car, for the interest rate to fall, for the next election, for their bowels to get back to normal. What does it matter? I’ve said it once, I don’t care if I say it a thousand times — everyone is waiting.
‘There are only two great feelings left in the late twentieth century. Two great feelings that have eaten up all the other, little feelings like love, loyalty, exaltation, anger and alienation; as surely as if they were krill being sucked into the maw of a whale. Immanence and imminence, immanence and imminence. Everyone is convinced that something is going to happen, but they don’t know what it is. Some people suspect that whatever it is will be some implosion of the numen, some great exposure of the transcendent. The rest don’t know … yet. But they will, they will.’
‘Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you promised to cut down on the ranting.’
He recovered himself and we went to get a drink and a sandwich at the Mitre. Jim was quite reasonable throughout lunch and I was almost prepared to forgive him his outburst in the street. There was no talk of waiting at all, even though the bar service was pretty appalling and there was a five-deep press of double-breasteds around the bar. On the way back over the viaduct I said to Jim that I’d see him around.
‘Yeah, you’ll see me around. Around 6.00 at Houghton Street; we’re going to a lecture.’
‘A lecture? What lecture?’ He shoved a crumpled A5 flyer into my hand. It was blue-bordered and had the University of London shield at the top. It read as follows:
Meaning and Millenarianism
Transition to Another Era
An open lecture by Richard Stein, Emeritus Professor of
the History of Ideas at the LSE.
6.00 p.m. The Old Lecture Theatre
&c.
‘All right, I’ll come.’ Jim looked shocked. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to hear someone else give a lecture besides you.’
I left Jim outside the doors to his office and walked on up towards the Central School on Southampton Row. I turned back at the corner to wave goodbye, but Jim didn’t notice. He was deep in conversation with two despatch riders whose bikes were pulled up to the kerb. One of them was short and ginger-haired with a slack, gap-toothed mouth. The other was black and angular, with his hair shaved into a tight triangular wedge on top of his head. Both of them were dressed in the couriers’ uniform: ribbed leather jackets, leather trousers and high rubberised boots, complete with ridges and crenellations. I studied them for a while. It was clear that Jim knew them well. The way the three of them stood, gestured and smiled indicated friendship; and yet I knew Jim well, I was a close friend, but he had never mentioned his despatch rider friends. I turned and walked back to my office.
Both phone calls and Post-it notes have a life cycle of their own. They are not mere servants of man, but clever parasites that use human industry to further their own growth as a species. That at any rate is the way I felt by the time I reached Houghton Street to meet Jim after work. I found him standing outside the Australian High Commission. He was standing at the tall, plate-glass window, staring into an aquarium of humans, as they snaked slowly towards the visa application counters.