No one would be able to say after his sojourn that the King did not know his people or that he had been cut off from reality by court etiquette. But such knowledge was nevertheless painful and unpleasant to acquire. No one in his right mind would wish to stay here a moment longer than necessary.
The nurses spoke to His Majesty with a combination of amusement and pity. Having revealed who he thought he was, he did not think it worthwhile again to try to conceal it from the nurses. Some of them, in their more jocular moments, referred to him as ‘His Majesty,’ which never failed to produce a giggle among them.
After a few days, some of the most unpleasant that he had ever spent, the King decided to play their game, if that was what they wanted. He would pretend not to be King and instead to be Reginald Smith: he guessed that he would be released from captivity quicker if he did. He would also take their silly tablets by which they seemed to set such store. They said that they would inject him if he didn’t.
The nurses told the Usurper’s pawn that he was a model patient. It was not, unfortunately, that the pills had no effect upon him: whereas his mind had been crystal clear, never clearer in fact, it began to grow clouded and sluggish, as if a fog had entered his skull. He experienced a strange combination of lethargy and agitation, the former interior and the latter exterior to his mind; and although he was still King, it seemed not to matter as much as it had. Now, whenever he was asked who he was, he replied, like a soldier being asked his number, ‘Reginald Smith.’
After two weeks, a nurse in woollen leggings and a long dress too tight for her that revealed the contours of her obesity informed him that he was now better and would be fit to return home, where he would receive regular visits from the ‘team.’ But, she added sternly, he would have to continue to take his pills if he did not want to return to hospital.
His Majesty returned to 23, Magnolia Drive. There was a letter awaiting him from the Director of Human Resources of the county’s Department of Leisure, Culture, Sport and Diversity:
Dear Mr Smith,
Following the closure of Forehampton Branch Library, an exciting new opportunity has arisen at Minchampton Library and Resource Centre for part time work, four mornings a week from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm.
Your role would be as a Reading Facilitator. I enclose an application form if you are interested. Applications must be received by 15th May.
The county is an equal opportunity employer and all posts are subject to medical examination.
Yours sincerely,
May 15th was long past. Minchampton was more than an hour away by bus or car. His Majesty ignored the letter as being beneath his notice. He resolved to write to Mrs Elizabeth Windsor instead – after he had had a rest.
9 - Facing the Music
John Ruskin House, a concrete block of twenty-four floors, had a hundred and twenty-four flats, so it was only to be expected that a wide variety of people lived in it. There was, for example, Flying Pete, who had a flat on the seventeenth floor and who had installed a special window from which he abseiled his way down the facade of the building, not trusting to the lifts (he said). And there was Fireman Charlie, who started rather than extinguished fires. When he ran out of money in the winter because of his drug bills, and his electricity was cut off for non-payment, he would warm himself around the fire he made from his furniture, which was soon replaced by the Social. There was no point in evicting him because he would only have to have been housed somewhere else; and the fires were never very serious. The fire brigade extinguished them in minutes.
Fred Roberts was an unusual, almost eccentric, tenant of John Ruskin House: he gave no trouble and paid his rent. This was despite being only a postman, poorly paid and with little money to spare for his amusements. He was a very quiet, solitary man, shy to the point of timidity, aged about forty. He kept himself to himself, blushed if a woman spoke to him, and his pleasure was birdwatching. Needless to say, the vicinity of John Ruskin House was not a haunt of birds, bar the odd sparrow and an occasional crow feeding on the carcass of a cat squashed in the road by a young driver in a stolen car careering away from a drug deal. So Fred would take himself off at weekends by cycle to a semi-rural area over ten miles away where he would watch a greater variety of birds, keeping a meticulous record of those that he saw.
Fred had to leave early for work, usually about five in the morning. It was only about that time that John Ruskin House fell silent: until then it was a hive of activity of various kinds. The walls between the flats were scarcely more than partitions, and the tenants, mostly, were not averse to noise, rather the reverse: it was silence that made them uncomfortable. Everything could be heard through the walls, or partitions: from the sounds of eating to lovemaking and arguments, from the flats one or two doors away and from the floors above and below. Parties sometimes shook the whole building, as in an earth tremor; it was difficult to distinguish between the sound of people enjoying themselves and of someone being murdered. The one, indeed, had sometimes followed the other; most of the violence was the result of the imbibition of drugs or over the possession of a girlfriend.
But it was music that disturbed Fred the most. It throbbed though John Ruskin House like a disordered heartbeat, or disordered heartbeats, several strains at a time, usually with lyrics proclaiming a hatred of women and the world. Fred disliked it, and one could not even say that he was used to it. Rather he was like a man born in a very hot climate who made what arrangements he could to avoid the worst of the heat. He had experimented with various kinds of earplugs and found the most efficient, or least deficient, of them; he had suspended rugs on his walls to absorb some of the sound, but in summer they lent an unpleasant dusty stuffiness to his low-ceilinged flat. Being on the fifteenth floor, it was only natural that his windows, as a precaution, should open only half an inch and hardly let any air in or out.
A new tenant moved in below, when the old was sentenced to life imprisonment for a gang kidnap and murder in another part of the city. The flat had lain empty for eleven months despite the housing crisis; then Ezekiel, known as Zek, moved in.
Zek, who was probably about forty, had the longest dreadlocks anyone had ever seen. One’s first thought on seeing them was like that of many people on seeing the rooms in Versailles: how were they kept clean? Perhaps they weren’t. Zek’s eyes were always red-rimmed from smoking ganja, which he regarded, or said he regarded, as a religious duty; he was tall and gangling and loose-limbed. If asked about his work, he said that he was a DJ, though really he was, if not a man about town exactly, at least a man about slum. Like many of the residents of John Ruskin House, he lived between the economic cracks. His proudest boast was that he had fathered seventeen children, though no one, perhaps not even he, knew whether this was true.
One thing was certain: he so loved his music – reggae and rap – that he considered that everyone else should hear, if not listen to, it. Unfortunately, he was more or less nocturnal, becoming active at seven or eight in the evening. He went to bed at eight or nine in the morning, unless he had a tryst somewhere else in the city.
He spent several nights a week at home, however, and on those nights he played his music as if he were trying to fill a large vessel with it. The sound went through the walls and ceilings like radiation. It was proof against ear-plugs, which it made tingle in the ears, and it throbbed on for hours, like a migraine headache. It made all the previous noise in Johns Ruskin House seem like silence.
The first time it started, it had an effect on Fred like an electric shock: it gave him a jerk. He thought at first it could not last, not at that volume, that no one could possibly tolerate, let alone want, music at such a volume for long, for more than a few minutes. But on the contrary, it went on and on. In fact, it lasted the whole night.
Well, Fred told himself, it was his neighbour’s first night in his new flat: perhaps it was really something to celebrate in his life. Maybe he had been homeless before and finally finding a roof over his head was a great relief to
him. You had to make allowances.
The following morning, Fred, who loved his work and prided himself on doing it well, was exhausted. He had no more than dozed during the night, waking at short and regular intervals, woken by an exceptionally loud bass thump, or an enraged line angrily intoned rather than sung:
‘I got a case of spittin’ in a motherfucker’s face…’
At least not having slept the previous night would mean that Fred would sleep well the following night.
But it was not to be. At eight o’clock the following evening, the bass began to thump again and Fred’s flat to vibrate to it. The angry lyrics filled the air once more: they came through both foam and wax ear-plugs. But Zek’s exuberance would surely die down sooner rather than later; besides, you didn’t go to your neighbour to complain only two days after he had moved in, because he might be your neighbour for years. In a place like John Ruskin House you had to get on, even with those whose habits you did not like.
Two nights without proper sleep, though, gave Fred a leaden feeling in his skull and limbs. It was not a headache that he had exactly, but a sensation of not quite being in the world, as if the world were merely projected on a screen around him, of everything passing him by while he struggled to keep his eyes open. His eyelids felt like heavy metal shutters.
The third night was similar and the following day he was aware that he was making mistakes in his delivery round. The fourth night he decided to say something to Zek.
He went down the fire-escape-cum-stairwell to the floor below, to Zek’s flat. Where there had once been an electric bell on the door jamb, there was now only a hole with a wire coming out, like a worm emerging from its tunnel. The flap of the aluminium letter-box was too thin and flimsy to make much of a sound, certainly none that could be heard over the music. There was nothing for it but to knock on the door itself, hard enough to be heard but not so hard as to destroy the thin plywood panel (front doors in John Ruskin House were either of plywood or reinforced steel installed at the tenant’s expense). Fred made a fist and banged on the door like a hammer delicately employed.
There was no reply. Occasionally the sound of raucous female laugher made itself heard above the music. Fred tried again, with the same result. He gave up and returned to his own flat.
The music continued almost every night. Fred decided that he would have to tackle Zek during the day, when he was sleeping rather than playing his music. He could have no excuse then for not answering the door. One afternoon, Fred went to Zek’s door and knocked.
At first there was no reply. Fred knocked again and then a third time. He heard the sound of padding feet slowly approaching the door, which then opened tentatively to reveal a bleary Zek in some kind of draped garment of many colours of vaguely African inspiration (though made in China). Zek was half-asleep, half-intoxicated.
‘What you want, man?’ he asked.
‘I want to ask you to turn your music down,’ said Fred. ‘It’s stopping me from sleeping.’
‘I’m not playing no music,’ said Zek.
‘Not now,’ said Fred. ‘At night. It keeps me awake and I have to go to work in the morning.’
Zek was silent for a moment, as if he had to resolve unfamiliar concepts in his mind.
‘I gotta right to play my music.’
‘Couldn’t you play it less loud?’ asked Fred. ‘It comes through the floor and makes everything shake.’
Zek looked at Fred. He was dealing with a madman, someone of no sense.
‘It’s only music, man. Everyone likes music.’
‘But…’
Fred had no more time to explain or discuss. Zek closed the door, muttering something about not being left in peace to sleep.
Fred’s only recourse now was to appeal to the authorities. Appealing to the authorities was not popular with the residents of John Ruskin House, who thought of them as the enemy; appealing to them about other residents was just one step below informing to the police. To be a snitch or a grass was fraught with the danger of retaliation. But by now Fred was so deprived of sleep that he could hardly hold himself upright without swaying. All his thoughts, all his desires, were about sleep. Sleep for him was now the highest imaginable good.
On one of his days off, he went to the council’s Housing Office. He took a ticket from the dispenser which informed him that he was sixty-seventh in line. There were only three staff answering enquiries (separated from the enquirers by thick shatter-proof glass that necessitated speaking through a microphone that the staff could turn off at will), but Fred decided to wait however long it took. Finally, his turn was called.
He explained why he had come to a fat lady behind the glass who seemed to overflow her seat. Before he had finished, she told him that he had come to the wrong place: he needed the E.P.U., the Environmental Protection Unit, which was on the other side of the city.
Again, there was nothing for it but to go: but now it was too late in the day, he would have to wait for another of his days off.
He was unlucky in the day he chose: the Environmental Protection Unit was away at a team-building meeting at the Hampton Health Spa and Conference Hotel, where they were devising a mission statement (they decided on ‘Building a Greener City’). The Unit would re-open as usual on the following Monday, but Fred didn’t have a day off until a week after that.
The woman to whom Fred spoke at the E.P.U. was an African whose accent Fred, no cosmopolitan despite living in John Ruskin House, found difficulty in understanding. However, he gathered that she would ask the N.N.T. (the Noise Nuisance Team) to investigate his complaint, with the proviso that being very busy, it might not make it to John Ruskin House for several weeks. It would record the noise levels in his flat over a period of twenty-four hours.
Luckily Fred was in when the N.N.T. arrived in the form of a man in blue overalls and a tin box of instruments. Unluckily, however, Zek was away when he arrived. His brother had been shot dead in Jamaica, and Zek had decided to combine the funeral with a holiday.
‘It’s no use doing it now,’ said Fred, as the man searched suitable places to install his monitors. ‘My neighbour who makes the noise is away.’
‘Look, mate,’ said the man in overalls, ‘it’s no use telling me. I’m only the technician. I don’t give the orders, I do what them up there tell me to do.’
He came again at about the same time the following day and removed the monitors. Fred had been sleeping better than he had since Zec first took the tenancy. Two weeks later – Zek was back now and a full night’s sleep was again impossible – Fred received a letter.
Dear Mr Roberts [it said],
Our investigations are now complete and have established that the noise levels in your flat in John Ruskin House are well within the limits laid down by Health and Safety Regulations.
Yours sincerely.
Noise Nuisance Team
Working for a Greener City
‘You should’ve been here last night!’ shouted Fred in his empty flat when he had read the letter. Not normally a violent man, he crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it across the room, which he regretted at once having done.
What to do now? He would have to return to the Environment Protection Unit to explain that their decision was erroneous and based on a false assessment, without knowledge of the real situation. He would ask them to repeat their tests. He fetched the letter from where it had landed and straightened it out. He might need to show it at the Unit.
The African lady was not there when he returned: instead an Albanian, or something like that. Fred explained to her why he had come.
‘This letter says there was no heavy noise,’ she said, looking over the letter that Fred had proffered.
‘Yes, but my neighbour wasn’t there when they measured it.’
She looked bored by what he said.
‘What you want we should do about it?’ she asked.
‘Well, Zek’s back, so you could measure it again.’
‘Who�
�s Zek?’
‘My neighbour. He’s there now. He makes all the noise. If you measured it tonight, you’d realise.’
‘You want we measure it second time?’
‘Yes.’
She looked shocked, almost disgusted.
‘Not possible,’ she said. ‘Unit’s very busy. Every day new complaints. We can’t manage all. Waiting list of more than three months. We can’t go back to same place twice. This would be unfair.’
‘But Zek wasn’t there the first time.’
‘Rules mean one time only measurement. Policy because fair. We can’t be favourite of some people because they say they want second, third, fourth measurement, otherwise waiting list two years. You are no special.’
‘But it’ll be terrible tonight.’
‘You think you special, exceptional?’ she asked. ‘Look.’ She held up a document that as several pages long. ‘List of people waiting. Not possible to do two times, only one time. The rules are rules.’ So saying, she put down the document as if slamming a door.
Fred realised he could get no further and there was no point in staying. But he really couldn’t see that he was being unreasonable: Zek’s music was abominably loud.
He had to think of something else. He decided that he would bang on Zek’s door every afternoon after he had played his music the night before: a faint taste of his own medicine.
The Proper Procedure and Other Stories Page 15