Enslaved characters from children’s classic literature shared Room 2229 with me — Stuart Little paddled up and down the bath in a birch-bark canoe, Moomintrolls trampolined on the pillows, the aforementioned Borrowers strung together climbing ropes out of my dental floss, then expertly tackled the four pitches necessary to ascend to the top of the armoire. Then they triumphantly rappelled back down with an individual UHT milk carton that they winched up to where I lay, pinioned by the invisible — yet unbreakable — hawsers of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As they dribbled the last homogenized drops between my cracked lips, I croaked my thanks, then manumitted them.
Eventually I forced myself from Room 2229 and abseiled down the lift shaft into the subway. At the Royal Ontario Museum I became transfixed by the bags visiting high school students had left trustingly strewn across the lobby: how could anyone be allowed to receive an education who insisted on dragging about that much stuff? And transfixed again in a subterranean gallery by the pensées of the former premiere Pierre Trudeau: ‘To remove all the useless baggage from a man’s heritage is to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.’
If it had worked for him, what was he doing here — or at least a photograph of his younger self, in white T-shirt and belted jeans? More to the point, what was the very canoe that he had been paddling when he had this epiphany doing here? Looking round I realized that this wasn’t so much an exhibition as a lumber room, with items from the museum’s permanent collections cast about willy-nilly: a Mercedes saloon got up with wood, a shamanic grizzly bear cast in bronze, and behind this shape-shifter Bacon’s Study for Portrait No.1, the reflex-dilation of Pope Innocent’s anus-dentata as shockingly disregarded as it must once have been when it leant against the wall in the artist’s South Kensington studio.
‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s no photography allowed.’
‘But I’m not photographing anything.’
‘Sir, no photography.’
‘I’m not taking pictures, I’m looking at them.’
The vertically aligned cooker knobs and key-in-lock coition from an ocean away had undone me: I desperately needed reassurance that things had been turned off and closed up, because in my mind’s eye my house was a burning oil well, shedding hairy-black smoke all over the neighbourhood.
Using Canadian magic, the guard pushed me with disapproval alone towards the stairs… and stumping along behind him, swinging one abbreviated leg in front of the other, came another who had more reason to. But no! This was ridiculous, if I carried on like this I’d soon be kitting Sherman out in a hooded shiny-red raincoat and putting a dagger in his hand.
I managed to thrust Sherman away but he rejoined me at the Eaton Center, where I was scanning the directory for a heel bar. He stood sizing up the atrium, and comparing it unfavourably — in loud un-Canadian tones — to the Galleria Umberto 1: ‘Yeah, these fat Canucks could do with a little risanamento, d’jewknowhatImean? Look at that muffin stand — oops! Sorry, it isn’t a muffin stand, it’s some people queuing for a muffin stand.’
He snatched at the air, as if given sufficient reach he might tear down the flock of model birds suspended from the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and hymned the absurd complaisance of the city government: ‘The base of the figure’ll be down there by the fountains on the lower level — but this one won’t stand upright, instead one arm’ll extend along the second level, and one leg will sorta kick through the atrium, while the other arm and shoulder brace against the roof. It’s the biggest yet, mate — a logistical nightmare, of course…’
Novelty Shoe Rebuilders offered a ‘waiting service’, so I waited in socked feet while a cobbler replaced the eyelet of my boot with practised economy. ‘Will that be all?’ he asked. I forbore from mentioning the aglet.
‘There were no egos up there.’ His name was Dan, and he wore a CND badge, the roundel formed by gaping red lips. He also had grey hair in a ponytail and a grey beard. No egos? No fucking egos! I wanted to scream at him: I’m all ego, my friend, I’m a Babushka doll of egos — ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego. Hell, if you unscrewed the fifth ego you’d probably find another one in there ready to shout you down as well.
But I didn’t say anything of the kind, because this was Toronto and we were buried somewhere deep inside the Harbourfront’s concretized bollix, and Dan had just been chairing the ‘event’ I’d come all this way to participate in — an event that had involved me sitting onstage with the actor David Thewlis. In truth, Thewlis didn’t seem at all egocentric — more to the point, he was actual size, which was something of a shock because one’s so used to actors being either much smaller than their image on a movie screen, or much larger than the one on the TV.
Thewlis, who had written an amiable comic novel, had a slightly prominent top lip, a wispy moustache and lean, expressive good looks. If there were to be a biopic of my life I’d want to be played by him. I tried to ingratiate myself with him while we waited backstage by mentioning mutual acquaintances, and he chatted away amiably enough. Onstage he was still more comically self-deprecating. He wore an expensive and globular watch that he brought up to his face from time to time, so that his finger and thumb could twist the end of his moustache. I found this tremendously amiable — and not comical at all.
Afterwards, when the books had been signed, I was on the point of suggesting we go get something to eat, when Thewlis was whisked away by his entourage, leaving me with Dan. It was a shame, because I’d wanted to ask him about his role in Mike Leigh’s Naked. It was the first time I’d noticed Thewlis and I thought his performance mesmeric and bruising — like being beaten up by a hypnotist. It was widely known that Leigh worked largely by improvisation, encouraging his actors to bring their own characters to the set, then spurring them on to create dialogue and action spontaneously. In the opening scene of the film Thewlis’s alter ego, Johnny, was having vigorous congress with a woman in an alley. But was it rape? Some might say that consent is a very little thing — but is it? I wanted an answer to this, a question that had haunted endless late-night conversations in the mid-1990s — after all, Thewlis should know.
Much later that night I lay in Room 2229 unable to sleep and regretting having freed my mini-slaves. I rose, dressed and laced my boots — appreciating the neat job that had been done on the eyelet. Then I went for a walk around the cavernous hotel counting my charged paces in tens, then hundreds; counting the emergency stairs in tens, then hundreds; stopping beside service carts and riffling the shampoo miniatures — then moving on.
In the morning the driver who drove me to the airport was tight-lipped. I could understand why — the highway was wide and terrifyingly nondescript, the buildings resisted the anthropomorphism of scale, the sky over Lake Ontario was bigger than a nebula. I scanned the verges of the freeway; even though it was midweek I hoped against hope that Reichman had got the walking bug, and I would see him pulling his own suitcase back to Pearson.