The Captains were easily persuaded, and the school split in two. Using brute force, they pushed one boy to either end of a swaying power line at the edge of the field (in those days, in that district, few cables were laid underground). ‘Climb, Freaks!’ they began to chant.
The poles were as dry and rough as an old man’s heels. Climbing was far from easy, but the alternative was falling back into the rabble: lips parted avidly, pointed teeth shining in the sun. Splinters of wood drove under fingernails and into the inside of thighs. But this hurt less than falling fifteen feet onto baked ground.
Seen from the far end of the swooping line, Luke appeared a long way away, intent on labouring up his pole. Every now and then he grabbed the branches of a nearby tree for support. A shower of dirt rained from his pockets onto the eager faces that were —
That gap you see on the page? It represents silence. Gibby has stopped speaking, and Lace can hear the buzz of the TV in its almost-silent state. ‘Gibby?’ She leans forward, peering through the grey-white flicker. Breath is whistling quietly from his mouth and nose. He has now been up for twenty hours.
Very quietly, Lace sits back. Tears pour down her cheeks and into the collar of her shirt. She already knows the end to this story, for Gibby has told it before, in different forms. She both needs and dreads to hear it, but even the most indefatigable storyteller is entitled to rest.
She stares at the time on the DVD player: digital, implacable, untrickable. 3.30 a.m. In a couple of hours Chummie will arrive home, kicking off his white clogs, reaching for crisps, talking with his mouth full. What a busy night, and Guess which famous dude died on my shift, and How about the orderly caught sniffing amyl nitrate in the lift! After this, another hour or two will pass, during which the sky will creak open, allowing light back into the world, and another grey day will crank up like clockwork: trams, kiosks, vending machines, car engines, car washes. And Gibby will wake from where he is dozing on the sofa to see Lace, her eyes open, her face stretched with tiredness, exhausted from the effort of being:
an orphan
an object of desire
an obviously promising person
and, most of all, with the immense effort of being her out-of-the-ordinary self.
HEARING THE HOLES IN THE SURFACE OF THE WORLD
IT’S TIME TO LET you in on a secret. Gibby is destined to become famous: very famous indeed. Although he works at a newspaper, this is not his main job. Gibby is an inventor. The veins beneath his buttermilk skin are surging with inventive blood.
It was Gibby’s second-cousin-once-removed who invented the bagless vacuum cleaner. And some time before this a distant Lux relation living in Sweden had come up with the ingenious Tetra Pak, that carton now used to hold every kind of liquid. Every time Gibby opens a pack of juice, he thinks (with envy and respect) of that rich and ruddy-cheeked relative, now buried in the frozen North. Even Gibby’s father, before he’d become prudent and affirmed the necessity of a regular income — well, even he had tinkered away in a lean-to at the side of the house for a few years, sketching diagrams that looked as if they might turn into indispensable somethings.
‘What was it that you recently sold, Gibby?’ This is Lace, attempting to showcase her friend’s hidden talent in front of colleagues from the Ha-Ha Club. Five other comedians are here, all male, all drinking competitive beer, pulling it deep, swishing it round, brains working fast on joke possibilities.
An inventor! For most of the night they’ve focused on Lace: the perfect flush on her cheekbones, the slight sweat on her collarbones, the arch of her eyebrows through her soft blonde fringe. But an inventor! There might be potential in this. Recently Johnny has been suggesting that, unless they raise their game, they’ll find themselves in unemployment queues or working as clowns at children’s birthday parties. Enough of the Irish jokes, the Jews and the WASPS; enough of Arabs, Israelis and terrorists, funerals, baptisms and weddings; no more mother-in-laws, stiffs-in-suits, hard-ons, soft-dicks, sex-with-donkeys. ‘So what the hell have you left us with?’ complained Comedian Number 6, who was subsequently called into the office and never seen at the Ha-Ha Club again.
Now five avid pairs of eyes are trained on Gibby, who’s sitting almost invisibly in a corner with a Diet Coke instead of beer. ‘What have you invented?’ barks the short impatient comedian, Number 3, reaching for a pen. ‘Spill!’
But Gibby doesn’t like to talk about his successes. Lace is the only person he ever really discusses them with. ‘I work at a newspaper,’ he says, tipping his almost empty can over his face so that sticky brown drops fall on his nose.
Lace, who always wants her friends to shine, looks disappointed. Her pale pink lips part and her outrageous dress — short and made mostly of transparent bubbles, lent to her by a struggling young designer hoping for publicity — rustles in a polythene sigh. ‘By the time he was fifteen he’d invented something that almost everyone needs,’ she says, which raises a flurry of jokes about toilet paper. ‘Shut up! Gibby is going to be very famous,’ she adds reprovingly (and, as you now know, prophetically).
This is sufficient to set them off, cutting across each other’s sentences like racehorses at corners, refusing to lose. Gibby watches from his corner, thinking of the invention Lace has mentioned that’s now used in commuter trains, bus stations and airports all over the world. It’s a part of his unpaid past, from the times when his father was gullible and his mother unreachable, and Gibby was too inexperienced to know about patents. Now he has two agents (New York and Tokyo) negotiating fiercely on his behalf. There are two articles covering his inventions in international magazines, and two requests for sketches from a curator of technological art in Paris. Projects in the pipeline include:
1) an ecologically sound device to revolutionise home heating, without the need for wind or sun
2) a method of preserving food that will beat tins and vacuum packs hands-down
3) an umbrella that never blows inside out and folds to the size of a teaspoon.
But meanwhile, in the here and now, wisecracks are flying and Lace’s eyes are misting over on his behalf. ‘I don’t mind,’ he reassures her softly. ‘I’m used to being the butt of jokes.’
Lace squeezes his hand. ‘They’re nothing but laugh-counting idiots.’ Her fingers feel skeletal, her grip rasps like sand. Is she losing weight? But as soon as she wipes her eyes, they burn dark and fierce in their sockets. She enters the fray and out-jokes the best of them. Soon the whole bar is captivated by the corner table: the thin golden-haired girl dressed in bubbles and the five good-looking funny-talking men, firing off a barrage of witticisms. Few people notice the soft pale mushroom person on the girl’s left, who clutches an empty drink can and occasionally raises his eyebrows so high that they disappear into his tufty hair.
The rest of the evening is a hunt: the comedians are the hounds, Lace the beautiful fox who will never be caught. Why isn’t Gibby laughing, even at the funniest jokes? Because he’s anxious about Lace. There’s a waxy sheen to her face, and even in the dim light he notices a twitch in her neck. After watching a little longer he is able to see through the thin skin all the way to her lungs, which are clutching for air. How long will they allow Lace to go on breathing?
When he and Lace leave the bar, closing the door on five baying red-blooded males, they step into a windy night. ‘Walk me halfway home?’ Lace’s hair blows back like a cloak.
‘Your crying the other night,’ begins Gibby awkwardly. ‘What was that all about?’
Lace’s feet falter but she covers up by talking. ‘Weird, wasn’t it? Chummie suggested it might be hormonal. A very uncle-ish explanation, don’t you think? Then he thought it might be an allergy to the new floor polish the cleaner used in the hallway. Green apple, safe for toddlers, but smells noxious.’
The high-rises loom like the tallest trees, and the wind, trapped in the alleyways, starts to wail. By the time they reach their usual halfway point — the insurance building with its Greek column
s and golden-owl logo — the whole city is crying, as if bats are rising from unseen ledges and shrieking in circles overhead.
‘What?’ Gibby stares at Lace, trying to lip-read in the murky light. The city is pushing its pain into him, stuffing it down his throat. He has to make an effort not to choke or cover his ears.
Lace does put her hand up to her ear — but only because she often mimes what she’s saying. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ she promises, cupping her hand like a phone, saying goodbye into her palm.
Gibby reels rather than steps behind a fake marble column and watches her walk away: a thin but indomitable figure in a dark coat leaving a trail of tiny transparent bubbles that blow away like sand. As she becomes more distant, so — strangely — does the noise. Now Gibby can hear his own ragged breathing. At first this is a relief, but then, as Lace disappears around the corner, he realises what it means. He’s been hearing her state of mind.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he says into the sudden silence.
He sinks down on the stained doorstep. Imagine living in the middle of that chaos twenty-four hours a day! He wonders how Lace can even get dressed in the morning. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he mutters worriedly, although the words mean nothing to him. He’d welcome some help in saving Lace but he’d have to be mad to rely on a bearded legend who couldn’t even save himself.
LACE DOESN’T CALL. Not the next day, nor the day after that. The hours knot up in a hard mass in Gibby’s stomach, pulling at his guts until he has to walk bending forward.
‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’ It’s Jason, who sometimes works a night shift after a full day because he’s saving for a house somewhere better than the heroin-district where he’s currently living. ‘You’re walking like you’re constipated. Like an ape.’
In fact, it’s Jason who resembles an ape. Beady eyes sunk in large cheeks, a jaw so large it casts a shadow on his shirt. Gibby feels a terrible urge to swing his fist, smash teeth into chin, see blood dribble onto Jason’s fluorescent vinyl trainers. ‘Got a stomach ache. Must’ve eaten a bad curry last night.’
‘Vindaloo?’ Jason nods; his neighbourhood is notorious not only for its white-hot heroin but also its red-hot curries. ‘Got a few bad hours ahead of you, sonny.’ He always calls Gibby ‘sonny’, though they’re about the same age. But Jason has lived away from home for seven years, whereas Gibby has never moved out of the bedroom where he slept as a baby. The difference seems to count for something on the seniority ladder.
Gibby manages to load papers into his cart with one hand while clutching his phone in the other. He’s been holding it for the past five hours, and now it feels like battery acid burning onto his palm. The display ticks away every electric blue minute, a merciless reminder of time passing and the increasing danger of — what?
‘What’s up with the phone fixation, mate? Got a hot chick that’s gone cold on you?’ Jason cackles, a thin chicken laugh that sounds strange coming from a muscle-bound man.
Gibby ignores this. ‘Hey, Jase,’ he says neutrally. ‘Any chance of swapping delivery districts tonight?’
Instantly Jason looks suspicious. His already narrow eyes become slits in his fleshy face. ‘Now, why would I want to do that?’
They both know it’s a good deal. Gibby’s allotted area is closer and better lit, it has fewer alleyways and no door codes to memorise. But he needs to make the offer irresistible. ‘You might want to do it,’ he says, glancing over his shoulder into the loading bay, ‘because you want to get out of your shit living conditions asap?’
If anyone overheard him bribing his way into a non-scheduled run, he’d be fired. But the lorries are roaring, the fluorescent lights of the warehouse are humming, and Jason is already thinking out loud about the needle he found on his landing that morning. ‘Could’ve fucking stepped on it. Imagine if I had kids!’ He sounds as outraged as only a reformed junkie can. ‘All right, hand it over.’
Gibby slips him a folded banknote. ‘Here. Put it towards your Golden Fleece.’ He turns his back on Jason’s incomprehension and releases the lock on his trolley. Free to go. Out of the bright noise, into the cool indifferent mouth of the city. As he takes off running, arrow-straight down the empty street, he makes rapid, accurate calculations.
Number of papers to deliver
+ number of blocks to Lace’s building
÷ speed to destination
= number of minutes he’ll have up his sleeve to deal with — what?
Again, his mind baulks. He may be an inventor but he doesn’t know enough, that’s the problem. He’s already inventing ways of keeping people warm, dry and efficiently transported. But he doesn’t know how to keep them safe.
He shoves his trolley hard and lets it fly in front of him. He wipes his forehead. Running sweat, running steadily. She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Pounding feet, pounding heart. His cart is veering off course, towards a parked Mercedes. He sprints to catch up with it. God knows why he’s not as thin as a rake; he could run a marathon, and more.
Watch him from above, making his way fast and steadily across the city, turning left and right and left again. He weaves through the maze without error, his path glowing like a red line on a dark map. His route is as direct as possible. (Somewhere, several miles away, Jason is blundering. Papers are falling off his overloaded trolley. He’s ended up in the same cul-de-sac twice.)
Gibby stops abruptly at an intersection. Cars leap forward like pumas. How easy it would be, at any given time, to close your eyes and step out. Only red lights and habit stopping you — and a job to finish, and a friend to check on, and parents who sometimes look at each other bewilderedly, as if to say Who did we used to be?, before glancing to their son for reassurance.
The hairs on the back of his neck stand up, like those of a bristling dog before thunder. (In a distant neighbourhood, Jason has dropped the delivery plan down a storm-water drain and is loudly cursing the scapegoat, Gibby Lux.) The pedestrian light turns green, Gibby heaves his barrow into action. A minute and a half wasted.
THE BUILDING IS DARK. Everyone here except for Lace and Chummie has a job with regular hours, and a clockwork life. Gibby runs his half-empty barrow into the playground across the road, parks it in the sandpit. He climbs to the top of the miniature slide and, standing on flimsy blue plastic, cranes his head to look for a light in Lace’s window. Nothing. No television flicker, no glow from the fringed lampshade. Nothing at all.
He leaps from the slide, lands crookedly on grass. ‘Shit. Ow. Shit.’ He limps as fast as he can across the road and jams his finger on the bell. ‘Lace!’ he bellows into the intercom, although no one has answered yet. ‘Are you all right?’
If this were a film, a useful neighbour would appear at a window and buzz him in. But this is Gibby’s life, in which nothing has ever been optimal. He hobbles around to the side of the house, where the fire escape zigzags up the wall, all the way to the roof.
The moon has slunk away behind clouds, it’s almost pitch dark, his hands are sweaty and his feet slip on the echoing metal. ‘Goddam it, Lace.’ He pauses out of fright, won’t look down out of fear. ‘You’d better be in trouble.’ He doesn’t mean this. More than anything he wants to reach the corner window and see her lying on the sofa with the Thunderbirds propped against a cushion, pretending to read, waiting not very hopefully for sleep.
But his gut instinct is never wrong — which, of course, is part of the problem, the unbearable pressure of it all. Since the long-ago day of his accident he’s been a human barometer, a walking pack of Tarot cards, carrying the weight of the soothsayer on his rounded shoulders. At last he’s standing on the small iron grid outside her living-room window. ‘Lace?’ He peers through the glass.
There she is, on the far side of the room, sitting on an upright chair. Thank god! Gibby’s lips move but make no sound: alive, at least. But the picture he sees is dim, lit by a strange smoky glow coming from the metal bin positioned in front of Lace. She sits with her head tilted back, as if she’s
about to be electrocuted. One hand holds a cigarette lighter, the other an open book. Stiff-necked, moving only her eyes, she intently scans the page in front of her until, suddenly, she rips it out and sets it alight.
Gibby is frozen. He stands in the high darkness and watches Lace, ripping and lighting, letting each burning page fall into the bin. Ash swirls around her legs. Her face, clearly visible only during each short flare, is expressionless. Finally, as she lights the back cover of the book, she raises her eyes and stares straight at Gibby. Her shoulders rise and fall in what could be a shrug; then she bows her head. Her hair has been hacked off at the nape of her neck.
STATE OF LACE
THERE HAS BEEN ONE earlier instance of Lace cutting off all her hair in a bout of despair or determination, call it what you will. But that’s an altogether more positive story — at least for onlookers and bystanders — and this is how it goes.
She’s ten years old, and rather busy. It’s the first day of a new year, so she has every excuse for idling like the majority of the population: playing with Christmas presents, watching TV, eating leftovers, sleeping.
Lace doesn’t talk much at the best of times, but today she hasn’t talked at all. The first breakfast of the year was a largely silent affair. Uncle Bill and Aunt Jean were both pale, drinking vast amounts of tomato juice and eating nothing but dry toast. Chummie (who at this point still wears short trousers and is only one class higher than Lace at school) has his head in an illustrated dictionary and only speaks when he wants someone to pass the jam.
‘Got plans for the day, kids?’ asks Uncle Bill. Behind his glasses, his eyelids are collapsing.
Suicide Club, The Page 8