The Domino Men v-2

by Jonathan Barnes

  I grabbed my lunch and cycling helmet and exited the flat, careful to double-lock the front door on my way out. It was a cold, clear morning in December and my breath steamed in the air like smoke. It had rained hard in the night and the world had a smeary, dripping quality to it like I was looking at life through a pane of glass damp with condensation. I stooped to unlock the dilapidated bike which I habitually kept chained to a lamppost despite the fact that it had failed to attract so much as a single, half-hearted robbery attempt and that even dogs declined to relive themselves against its rusty wheels and flaking frame.

  Clambering on, I set off, wobbly at first, then gaining in confidence. Down the street, past the corner shop, the video rental store, the King’s Arms and the halal pizza parlor, before, sailing by the tube station, I got giddy, felt a head-rush of excitement, swerved into the torrent of traffic and sprinted out onto the main road. From there, it took me somewhere in the region of three quarters of an hour to get to work, pedaling through Clapham, Brixton, Stockwell and Lambeth, the smoke and grit and filth of London billowing in my face the whole way. Even as I cycled, I became aware that I was part of something bigger than myself, a constituent of the great charge into work, the mindless drone-stream to the center of the city. Underground and overground, in trains, by car, on foot, everybody was elbowing their way in, their eyes on the prize, sparing not a glance for anyone who shared the same quest as them, all of us hurtling forward in the merciless stampede of the morning commute.

  It was perilously close to nine o’clock when I finally squealed to a halt outside 125 Fitzgibbon Street — a squat gray building just down from Waterloo station and a few minutes’ walk from the tourist traps on the south bank of the river Thames. The building did nothing to draw attention to itself, although a grimy plastic sign drilled into the wall gave further details for the curious.

  CIVIL SERVICE ARCHIVE UNIT

  STORAGE AND RECORD RETRIEVAL

  Time was when this stretch of the city would have been thriving with rude life but now it seemed either neutered into the sterility of officialdom or else stuffed and mounted for the edification and amusement of visitors like some dead thing in a museum. Wheezy and panting for breath, I shackled my bike in the parking lot beside a bottle bank and a bin for recycling newspapers. In the distance, still garlanded by morning mist, I could make out the turrets of Westminster, the decorous spike of Big Ben, the shining spokes of the London Eye, but I turned my back on the sights of the city and trudged into the building. I waved my pass at Derek in reception, stepped into the lift, took a deep breath and emerged soon after at the sixth floor.

  Here was all the comfortable monotony of a day at the office. Gray floors, gray walls, gray desks, gray life. The room was large and open plan and seemed crowded with the usual sounds — the fain hum of the computers, the chuntering whine of the photocopier, the persistent insectoid buzz of ringing phones. I walked to my desk, piled high with stacks of dun-colored folders, nodding at a few of my colleagues as I went, exchanging the usual good mornings and all rights and how was your weekends.

  There was a strange girl sitting in my chair.

  “You’re sitting in my chair,” I said, feeling like one of the three bears.

  “Hi.” She sounded friendly enough. “Are you Henry Lamb?”

  I nodded.

  “Hi,” she said again. “I’m Barbara.”

  She was in her late twenties, plump, bespectacled and dumpy. She gave me a gauche smile and fumbled nervously with the frames of her glasses.

  I still had no idea what she was doing in my chair.

  “I’m from the agency,” she prompted.

  Then I remembered. “You’ve come to help with the filing.”

  “I think so.”

  “Well then. I’ll show you the ropes.”

  Barbara nodded politely as I pointed out the lavatories, the water cooler, the notice board, the fire escapes and the coffee machine. I introduced her to a few colleagues, all of whom looked faintly irritated at the interruption, before, finally, I knocked on the door of my manager. A voice from within: “Come!”

  Peter Hickey-Brown slouched at his desk, arms folded behind his head in a clumsy attempt at nonchalance. He had a shock of gray hair which he had grown out too long. He didn’t wear a tie. His shirt was sufficiently unbuttoned to reveal tufts of salt-and-pepper chest hair and, more ill-advisedly still, the glint of cheap jewelry. Poor Peter. He’d worn an earring to work for a week last year until senior management had been forced to have a quiet but firm word.

  “Peter? This is Barbara. She’s come to help us with the filing.”

  “Barbara! Hi! Welcome aboard.”

  They shook hands.

  “So you’re working under Henry?” he asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  Peter winked. “Better watch this one. He knows where all our bodies are buried.”

  The three of us managed some feeble laughter.

  “So what do you prefer? Barbara? Barb?” He broke off, as though struck by a brilliant idea. “How do you like Babs?” He sounded hopeful. “Less of a mouthful.”

  The girl had a trapped look. “Well, some people call me Babs.”

  This I doubted. She didn’t look like a Babs to me.

  Peter strutted back to his desk. “You like music, Babs?”

  “I suppose.”

  Now I just felt sorry for her. Peter behaved like this around any woman younger than himself — a demographic which, perhaps not wholly coincidentally, encompassed most of the female percentage of our office.

  “I’ve just been on the web booking tickets for a few gigs. You ever heard of a band called Peachy Cheeks?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Boner?”

  A shy little shake of her head.

  “Arse Bandits?”

  Barbara thought for a moment. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  Peter shrugged. “I’m not surprised. This stuff’s a little out there. It’s…” He broke off for a stagey chuckle. “It’s not exactly what you’d call mainstream.” A hideous pause, then “All righty! Great to meet you, Babs. Any questions, my door’s always open.” And he winked.

  Good grief, the man actually winked.

  “Sorry about him,” I said once the door had clicked shut and we were safely out of earshot.

  “Don’t be. He seems nice.”

  “You’ll learn. Come on, let’s grab a coffee. I’ll get us a meeting room.”

  I found us a room, where we sat for a while, each staring awkwardly into our cups. “I’d better say something about what we do here,” I said at last. “What did they tell you at the agency?”

  The girl looked apologetic. “Not much.”

  “We’re filing people,” I said, starting the usual speech. “Our job is to catalogue every document the civil service produces.”

  “Sounds riveting.”

  “It has its moments. Record retrieval can be surprisingly interesting.”

  “And how long have you been here?”

  “Me?” I said, stalling for time — as though she could possibly have been referring to anyone else. “Oh, about three years.”

  “You’ve been a filing clerk for three years?”

  “It’s a living,” I protested. “Anyway. On your feet. You ought to see where the magic happens.”

  The largest of our filing rooms was the size of several tennis courts but still felt cramped and claustrophobic thanks to the enormous metal cabinets which took up every available inch, crammed next to one another like stainless steel commuters. Filled with moldering paper, packed end to end with dead statistics, old reports, putrefying memos and long-forgotten minutes, the place had the air of a second-hand bookshop which never makes a sale.

  “It’ll be nice to have some company in here,” I said before going on to explain the filing system (a needlessly complicated business of acronyms, mnemonics and numeric codes) whilst Barbara did her best to stifle a yawn.

  “
This stuff’s just the tip of the iceberg,” I said. “This is just a fraction of it. Of course, a lot of the older stuff’s in an annex in Norbiton but even there we’re running out of space. It’s getting to be a real problem.”

  “You’ve really been doing this for three years?”

  I tried a grin. “For my sins.”

  “Don’t you get bored?”

  “Sometimes.” Sighing, I admitted the truth of it. “Every day.”

  For the rest of the morning, Barbara stood by my side as I filed a batch of records, ostensibly watching me work (“shadowing me,” as Peter had put it), though, as I kept catching her sneaking glances in my direction, I wondered if she wasn’t spending more time looking at me than at the work. I wasn’t at all sure how to take this, although I had my suspicions and it’s almost certainly not what you’re thinking.

  At ten to one, we were back at my desk and I was tussling with a more than usually insubordinate spreadsheet when the telephone rang.

  “Henry? It’s Peter. Could you step into my lair?”

  My desk was seconds from his office but he seemed to derive pleasure from making me come running.

  When I went in, he barely looked up from his screen. “New girl settling in OK?”

  “She seems fine. Very competent.”

  “Good, good. I’ve just had a call from Phil Statham. He’s got to do some induction thing with her this afternoon. Safety training. Two o’clock in the conference room?”

  “I’ll let her know.”

  “I’d like you to sit in as well.”

  I cleared my throat. “I’ve already done the safety course, Peter.”

  “Sure, sure. But after last month’s little blunder…”

  I blushed.

  “You see what I’m getting at?”

  “Of course.”

  “All righty. You kids enjoy yourselves, OK?” And he waved a cheaply bejeweled hand to indicate that my audience was at an end.

  I prefer to eat lunch alone. I like to find a bench, unparcel my sandwiches and lose myself in the flow of the Thames. I can spend an entire hour gazing at the river as it gropes and claws at the banks, watching the scummy hitchhikers who float on its surface — the plastic bottles and the crisp packets, the used condoms, the sodden paper and all the random metropolitan junk which bobs on the black water to be tossed ashore or sucked under. Often I’ve made myself late watching that liquid history, wondering who has come before me and who shall come after, who has watched that same stretch of river, that same water ebb and flow in its endless mysterious cycle.

  On that particular Tuesday, however, I had Barbara with me. She hadn’t brought any lunch so we had to go to a sandwich shop, where she blew an hour’s pay on a cheese baguette.

  The riverbank bustled with London life. We passed flocks of suits and clusters of tourists — the first group strutting with jaded impatience, the last ambling, filled with curiosity and exaggerated wonder. We passed a homeless man juggling for pennies, a crocodile of schoolchildren on a daytrip and a shaven-headed young woman who hassled us for donations to charity. There was a power walker who scurried feyly past, his head set at a comically quizzical tilt, a blind woman and her dog and a fat man in a bobble hat selling early editions of the Evening Standard and bellowing out its headline. This was something about the Queen, I think, although I wasn’t moved to buy a copy. At that time (my apologies) the royal family had never interested me all that much.

  Barbara picked a bench close to the gigantic Ferris wheel of the Eye, and after some desultory attempts at small talk, we settled down in silence to watch its stately revolutions.

  As she chomped through her baguette, I couldn’t help but notice that she persisted in sneaking little looks at me, shy, curious, sideways glances.

  At last she came out with it. “Do I recognize you?”

  So that’s what it was.

  I was spooning out the last of my yogurt. “I’m not sure. Do you?”

  I let her flail about for an explanation. “Did we go to school together?”

  We did not.

  “Do you know my father?”

  How would I possibly know her dad?

  “Did you used to go out with my friend Shareen?”

  Actually, I’ve never been out with anybody, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  She chewed her lower lip. “I’m stumped.”

  I sighed. “Don’t blame me. Blame Grandpa.”

  “Do you know,” she said, “I thought it was you?”

  This happens from time to time. I can usually tell when someone’s about to recognize me. They tend to be the type who watched a lot of telly as kids, who were regularly dumped in front of it by their overworked parents before dinner. I sometimes wonder if there might not be an entire generation who, in some weird Pavlovian way, are actually able to smell fish fingers and chips at the sight of me.

  “What was it like?” Barbara asked.

  “Oh, great fun,” I said. “Mostly.” I swallowed. “By and large.”

  “God, you must have had a riot. Did you even go to school?”

  “Course. Mostly we filmed during the holidays.”

  “Will you do the catchphrase for us again?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Oh, go on.”

  “Don’t blame me,” I said, and then, again, eager not to disappoint: “Blame Grandpa.”

  For two years, between 1986, when I was eight, and 1988, when I was ten, I played the part of “Little” Jim Cleaver, the wisecracking son in the BBC’s family sitcom Worse Things Happen at Sea. That said, I’m a terrible actor and I freely admit that my casting was entirely down to nepotism.

  It was Granddad’s show, you see. He wrote all the scripts, his only major credit after twenty-odd years toiling in the Light Entertainment department of the BBC, something tossed to him as a favor by mates who wanted to give the old guy a break. My catchphrase (actually, often my only line in an episode when they worked out that I couldn’t enunciate for toffee and was pathologically unable to emote) was: “Don’t blame me. Blame Grandpa” — this invariably delivered on my entrance, as I trotted through the door to the family home and onto the main set. Although gales of prerecorded laughter followed on its heels, I never actually got the joke nor met anyone who did.

  After two years of contrived coincidences, pratfalls, one-liners and painfully convoluted cases of mistaken identity, the show was mercifully cancelled and that was that. Just as well, as it turned out. There was no way I could have carried on.

  I got ill, you see. I needed to have some operations.

  Most days, it all seems like a dream, like something which happened to someone else and not to me, but even now there are times, when I’m channel-hopping at two o’clock in the morning trying to find something worth watching, that I’ll catch a clip of it or an old episode running on some misbegotten cable channel. And there’s a Lilliputian version of myself, wisecracking in falsetto. “Don’t blame me,” he crows. “Blame Grandpa!”

  “You must get recognized loads.”

  “Not loads, no.”

  “Still acting?”

  “I’m a civil servant now,” I said firmly. “I’m a filing clerk.” I made a big show of checking my watch. “And it’s time to get back.”

  At two o’clock we were sitting in another meeting room watching a man with a whiteboard talk absolute nonsense.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m Philip Statham and I’m the safety officer for this department.” There were only two of us in the room but he spoke as though he was delivering his address to a packed-out lecture hall.

  Barbara was making dutiful notes.

  Philip Statham, she wrote. Safety Officer.

  Statham sounded like a stand-up comic of the old school about to launch into the best loved part of his act, some creaky routine his audience could recite by heart. “You might think,” he began, “that an office is a safe place to work. You might think that just because you’re not dealing with anything
more lethal than a stapler, a fax machine or a ring binder that nothing can happen. You might even believe that accidents don’t happen here. That somehow they don’t apply to you.” He paused, for what I can only imagine he believed to be dramatic effect. “You know what?” He sucked in a breath. “It ain’t necessarily so.” He tapped the whiteboard with his marker pen for emphasis. “Accidents can happen. Accidents do happen. Every office is a potential death trap. And over the course of the next two hours and a bit I’m going to be giving you just a couple of pointers on how to stay safe.” He arched an eyebrow, flared his nostrils. “On how to stay alive.”

  We had sat through two videos and a PowerPoint presentation and were about to embark on something Statham ominously referred to as “a little bit of role play” when my mobile phone gave an epileptic shudder I my pocket.

  “Sorry, Philip,” I said, thankful for the distraction. “Got to take this.”

  Statham glared as I scuttled gratefully into the corridor but when I saw the caller ID which flashed up on the screen, anything that was left of my good humor ebbed away.

  “Mum?” I said. “You mustn’t call me at work.”

  “The old bastard’s dead.”

  My heart clenched tight. “What did you say?”

  And she said it again, more firmly this time, not bothering to suppress the smirk.

  “The old bastard’s dead.”

  Chapter 4

  The first time I saw Granddad again I didn’t recognize him. He had been with me for the whole of my life and I couldn’t pick him out in a room full of strangers.

  Too cut-up and jittery to risk using my bicycle, I caught the 176 bus opposite the station and sat, anxious and impatient, as it edged its grudging way through the grimy streets of Waterloo, the tarmacked monotony of Elephant and Castle and the minatory neglect of Walworth and Camberwell Green. Down by the river, surrounded by sightseers, gift shops and the eager bustle of commerce, it is easy to forget that the city has teeth, that it has a certain hunger. Out here, it is scarcely possible to forget it.