by Sam Taylor
A bit melodramatic perhaps; and the truth is that my fall was more complicated, more drawn-out, less absolute than I have described it. But stories must obey certain rhythms, or they would drag on interminably and end bathetically, like life. So let’s just say I was in the vortex; my life was spinning out of control, and I was ready to surrender myself to the inevitable. Perhaps I even welcomed it - the thought of oblivion, the obliteration of all hope. Perhaps it would have come as a relief after so much stress and unhappiness? I will never know, because just at the moment when I was preparing to let go of the ledge to which I clung (if I may be permitted to change metaphors for a moment), I was rescued.
One morning in October 1996 - two years after he first altered the direction of my life - Sam Caine, my former arts editor, rang unexpectedly. He had been offered a job as editor of an upmarket listings magazine, he told me, and he was looking for a young, intelligent journalist who could be trained as a sub-editor. He knew I had no experience of subbing, but he had noticed that my copy was always ‘clean’ - no misspelt words, no grammatical errors - and he wanted to give me a chance. The hours were not too long, and the pay was good. It would give you a dependable income, he said, and leave you with enough time to write your novel. I had completely forgotten about the novel by then, and had no desire to even think about it, but financially I was desperate and so of course I accepted the offer. Caine did not mention my recent troubles, though he must surely have heard about them. In retrospect it seems obvious that he took pity on me - that the job offer was an act of mercy - but I don’t remember seeing it that way at the time.
For eighteen months, my life settled down. I moved out of the expensive flat in Liverpool Street, and found a cheaper, roomier, more pleasant place in Bow, round the corner from the tube station. The job was repetitive, undemanding and anonymous, and for those very reasons it was perfect. Each weekday I took the tube to the office - an uneventful, half-hour journey - and began work at 10 a.m. The office was colourless and, but for the hum of the computers, eerily silent: people communicated with each other by email, even when they were sitting side by side. In my lunch hour I went swimming, then ate a sandwich at my desk. I finished work at 6 p.m. and took the tube back home.
As for what I did in the office . . . well, a sub-editor is essentiallya kind of filter; it was my job to simplify and clarify other people’s writing. I removed unnecessary sentences, corrected mistakes, reworked jumbled paragraphs. Where there was messiness, I brought order; where there was prolixity, brevity; where there was ambiguity, certainty. I was a policeman of words. I made each article fit neatly in its assigned box and sometimes gave it a headline too.
The headlines were the sole source of amusement in the job: whereas in all my other tasks, I was expected to be sober, straightforward, machinelike, with the headlines I was free to have some fun. Mostly this consisted of subtle plays on words, sly references to famous films or books or popular expressions. I don’t remember now any of those headlines, but I remember the modest pleasure they gave me. The strongest memory I have of that time is of taking the tube home and sitting on a rhythmically shaking seat, arms folded, eyes closed, thinking of a witty pun I had just invented, and smiling. That was the high point of my working day.
Slowly but surely I repaid my debts. Virtuousness became my only vice; I was celibate, sober and thrifty. I was utterly alone. In the evenings I went to the cinema or cooked myself a simple, balanced meal which I ate in front of the television. (I remember passing pubs and fast-food restaurants during this period and thinking almost gleefully about the clogged-up arteries and dying brain cells of all those other people; how much longer I would live than them; how much cleaner and healthier my insides were than theirs.) In the mornings I read the newspaper. At weekends I slept late and went running in Victoria Park. On Saturday evenings I did yoga, and on Sunday evenings I went to a Spanish class. It was a tranquil, rather dull existence. I might even have felt happy had it not been for what happened to me nearly every night.
‘I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ That line from Hamlet sums up my whole life during this time. In the day everything seemed containable, explicable, under control: the trees I saw through my sitting-room window, the swarm of expressionless faces on the tube, the striplights and recycled air in the office, the rows of letters and dots and spaces on the computer screen . . . none of these realities threatened me in any way; they did not change form or lurch suddenly from the background in which they belonged. They were fine. I was fine. All was normal. But when I closed my eyes and fell asleep I entered a universe in which these reassuring surface details were stripped away to reveal the noisy, brutal chaos underneath. The past. Other people. Hell.
I did my best to forget these dreams, to blink them away every morning, to tell myself they were only a kind of flickering debris: the unwanted parts of memory and imagination being jettisoned by my brain. But if that was so, how come they never ended? What was the point of my mind producing this limitless supply of horror? And why should such a quiet, blameless life breed such nightmares in the first place?
I don’t remember those dreams now. I’m not sure I even remembered them at the time, at least not in terms of images or storylines. But I remembered how they made me feel: the sweats, the nausea, the vertigo, the guilt, the fear.
I suppose things must have begun to change in early 1998. I had paid off my debts by then - my goal had been achieved - but I felt no sense of satisfaction at the thought. Rather, what I felt was an absence. What was the purpose of this pleasure-denying life, now that I was in the black? I began to toy with the idea of quitting my job and writing a novel, or travelling the world. I began drinking again. I used a call girl for the first and only time in my life. My dreams began to seep into the fabric of daily life. I can see now that this was the beginning of another slippery slope. The slope did not have time to steepen because circumstances intervened, but I feel compelled to mention it all the same. Of course I cannot know for certain, but my guess is that, had what happened not happened, I would soon have sought self-destruction in any case. Out of boredom; out of perversity; out of self-loathing; for no good reason at all.
Anyway, this is what happened. On 25 May 1998, the company that owned the magazine announced a wave of redundancies. It was Sam Caine who gave me the news. I had been chosen by management as one of the ‘necessary sacrifices’. It was no reflection on my work, Caine said, which was excellent; it was simply an unavoidable response to a serious advertising downturn across the whole group. How did I feel when he told me that? Embarrassed, mostly. Embarrassed for him that he had to use such dessicated, meaningless words; embarrassed for myself that I was now an object of pity.
I don’t remember the details of that evening, but I know that I went to a bar in Soho on my own and got drunk. Oddly, what I do remember, quite vividly, is a phrase from The Communist Manifesto (read nine years earlier, lying on my bed, with the breathless excitement usually accorded a thriller) repeating in my mind as I sat there and drank. It is the most famous and poetic of all political slogans and, from the perspective of this new century, the most prophetic: ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ That phrase echoed sadly through the night air around me as I walked back to the office after closing time, my body swaying but my mind suddenly sober and clear, and told the man on the lobby desk that I had to pick up some belongings I’d forgotten. He looked at me suspiciously and told me to wait a minute, but just then the lift door opened. I heard him shout as I entered and pressed the button for the top floor. After that, the memories grow vague and broken: I see desks falling over, a chair flying through a window . . . the light-sequinned void of London, its streets swimming invitingly six floors below . . . I hear frightened or angry voices, feel iron hands pulling me backwards . . . I see a neon striplight buzzing on the office ceiling. And then, mercifully, unconsciousness.
The next couple of months wer
e spent at my parents’ house. I really was an invalid now. I have only the vaguest memory of this, but apparently my allergy flared up and I went to see various doctors, one of whom gave me a new batch of pills: the round, sky-blue capsules that I still take now, occasionally. I spent my days in bed, reading, or on the sofa, watching television, or in a deckchair in the garden, sunbathing. Most of the time it was an easy, pleasant existence, but it did get rather boring. And so, in the absence of anything else to occupy my mind, I became quietly obsessed with football.
I had liked football since I was a child, but never fanatically. Now, however, the prospect of that summer’s World Cup loomed as a major event in my life. I spent countless hours ‘working’ on various different line-ups of the England team, experimenting with formations, searching for the perfect balance. I collected fixture wallcharts from the newspapers and predicted the scores of all the group matches, even guessing the identities of the scorers and the minutes in which I thought they would score. I spent so long fantasising about all of this in advance that now, when I try to remember the games from that World Cup, often what comes to mind is not what actually happened, but what I had imagined was going to happen.
Perhaps inevitably, the tournament itself was a letdown. All the same, when England beat Colombia 2-0 to qualify for the second round, I became desperately excited about the possibility of ‘us’ winning the World Cup. I find it hard to explain the intensity of my feelings in this regard. The general obsession with football is easily comprehensible, I think, but the fervour of my desire for an England victory, though shared by hundreds of thousands of other people, strikes me now as bizarre. I am anything but patriotic. I do not think of myself as, in any meaningful way, English. Any pride I might feel in sharing a birthplace with Shakespeare, Blake and The Beatles, of living on the same island as Stonehenge, the Lakes and Cornwall, is naturally offset by a vague shame and repulsion regarding most other aspects of the country’s history and present reality. Yet I suppose my life was so empty then that any chance of glory, however vicarious and momentary, seemed to offer redemption. If only ‘we’ could beat Argentina in the next round, then love might conquer death, and hope win out over fear.
The Argentina match took place on the evening of Tuesday 30 June. I watched it not at my parents’ house, but at a pub in S., a small holiday town on the south coast of England. My parents had rented a chalet for the week, and had invited me along. For the first two days of the holiday I thought about nothing but the coming match. It turned out to be an enthralling game, but England finally lost on penalties and, while other people raged at Beckham and the referee, I exited the pub in a daze. Outside, the air was humid and blue. I felt drunk and depressed and ashamed of my now useless patriotism. I was like a child holding the string of a burst balloon. For a while I wandered aimlessly along the beachfront, then I spotted the lights of a funfair in the distance so I headed towards that.
I found myself in a place that I recognised: a children’s adventure land called The Dream Park. I had been there once or twice as a young child, and as I walked around I felt increasingly nostalgic and melancholy. I began to think about my life, and what had happened to me. I was bothered by the suspicion that I must, somewhere along the way, have taken a wrong turn; that I was not the person I ought to be.
I don’t remember much about that night, but I remember seeing a red-and-white striped tent with a sign saying Madame Something, Psychic and Fortune-Teller, and hesitating outside the entrance. I did not believe in fortune-telling, of course, but I was drunk and desperate. I needed some reassurance, some guidance about the years to come, which to me at that moment had a dark, cold and arid look, like a desert at night.
The first thing the fortune-teller told me was that I had never found true love. I kept a poker-face. But you will, she said, and soon. You will fall in love with a foreign girl. I might have raised my eyebrows at that. She said some other things, which I soon forgot, but the last thing she said, after peering deep into her crystal ball, was this: ‘On or near your thirtieth birthday, something will happen that will change your life forever.’
Outside the tent I laughed, a little self-consciously, then began the long walk back to my parents’ chalet. There was rain in the air, and a cold wind was whipping over the sea. I was wearing only a T-SHIRT and jeans, and I remember shivering as I walked. It was the preciseness of her words that struck me; usually, mystics were so vague. Still, thirty seemed a long way off, and I was fairly sure it was all nonsense. I didn’t give the prediction much thought after that - until, three months later, I met Ingrid. And fell in love.
So now I sit at the desk in this anonymous room and wonder if any of this means anything. What is the point of mentioning the fortune-teller’s prophecy? Am I seriously suggesting it is more than mere coincidence? I don’t know if I am or not. ‘Rationally’, I want to begin, and then I hear the astrologers’ mocking laughter. Perhaps all prophecies are self-fulfilling? But then, can we even say that the fortune-teller was right? I am thirty years old, but has my life really changed forever? Has it changed at all?
It is late and I am trying to escape the terrible suspicion that I have simply come full circle. I have been through so many doors since I left the room in which I began this chapter, and yet, here I am still: stuck in the same loop, with the same nagging emptiness inside me. Older, but no wiser. Closer to death but as far away as ever from the truth.
Is this really my life? Are these words really me? I hardly recognise myself at all. The single-minded workaholic; the self-destructive party animal; the boring, self-righteous sub-editor; the depressed England supporter . . . I don’t even like the people in this chapter. I feel no sympathy for them at all. It is easy and comforting to think of these characters not as me, but as masks I have worn and discarded. And yet they were more than that. I remember thinking those thoughts; I remember feeling those emotions.
The sub-editor in me wants to eliminate these ghosts, to erase them and construct a simpler, clearer storyline, with a single character in whom the reader can believe; with whom the reader can identify. But that sub-editor is wrong. I cannot erase these ghosts, because I am the sum of their parts. I must not simplify and clarify, because I am trying to discover the truth. And this parade of masks - this trail of ex-me’s - these are the only clues I have to follow. Besides, what if I were to rip off those masks and throw them away, only to discover that behind them lay . . . nothing at all?
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the person who began this chapter was an impostor in the first place; that ‘I’ am not to be found here anywhere, but in the foggy void that lies behind . . . in the unwritten pages of Chapter 3.
Midnight, and I stare through the window. But outside is dark and all I can see is the bright-lit outline of my head: the face a blank, the edges blurred. One question reflects back at me in the glare of the desk lamp. One mystery, still unsolved.
Who am I?
As he opened the curtains, James felt like he had reached the end. Outside the sky was low and dark. Today was the last day of the rental period on the room in Newland Road. Tomorrow, James would be expected to move out. He could, of course, go back to the student accommodation office and try to find another room, but he had no money to spare, and besides . . . a whole month had passed. He had heard nothing from Harrison Lettings. He had discovered no new clues. He had not seen the man in the dark coat since that day at the library. All he had done was remember part of his past, and not, he thought, the part that mattered. His secret, it seemed, was doomed to remain a secret; it was hidden behind a locked door, and James had no idea where the key could be.
He sat up in bed and began to consider his options. There were not many. He could stay here, continue to scrape a living, and hope that something happened. He could travel south to other, more prosperous parts of England. He could go to a new country, like Greece or Chile. Or he could catch the ferry, and drive to Waterland, and ask Ingrid to take him back.
Ja
mes did think about this. He told himself he would have a good job, a nice house, a pretty girlfriend, but it would, he sensed, be a defeat. From that moment on his life would be marked out for him. Some inner light would be extinguished. No matter what he did afterwards, he would always be a disappointment; not to his parents or to Ingrid or to his future children, perhaps, but to someone more important than all of them.
After several hours of thought, James decided to give himself one last day. If nothing turned up, he would pack his bags tomorrow and drive to London. He would sleep on a friend’s floor, find some building work, save money, sell the van, and take a one-way flight to somewhere hot and crowdless. He had a vision of himself living in a beach hut, catching fish from the sea . . .
In such circumstances, he imagined, his lost years would cease to matter. Here, in the rain, in this land of money and things, their emptiness weighed down on him; but there, in the sun, he had the feeling that they would simply evaporate, that without the tug of them he would become another person. Perhaps he would even burn his diaries, jettison all that he had, all that he had been. As he thought this, James had a vision of himself as a child, at a village fair on a sunny day, holding a helium balloon by a string; he saw himself let go of the string and watch, his young eyes filled with awe and sadness and exhilaration, as the balloon floated up, up, up, into the blue, and finally disappeared, to who knew where.
As soon as this decision was made, James felt relieved. He had breakfast in a café and, with nothing to lose now, walked through the park to Lough Street. At number 21, he opened the gate, crossed the short driveway, climbed the three concrete steps, and knocked, hard and impatiently, on the door.
There was no answer, of course. Just to make sure, James rang the bell - one, two, three times, leaning on it the last time for perhaps half a minute. Deep inside the house, he could hear the muffled buzz. He imagined the neighbours must be staring by now, but he no longer cared. He would be gone from this city soon anyway; what difference did it make? He knelt down on the doorstep and shouted mockingly through the letterbox: ‘Hello! Anybody home?’