by Simon Ings
I showed Stacey the piece: a fragment of biography for her to play with.
She said, ‘That man looks like you.’
I leaned over to see. Accompanying the article was a photograph of one of the Society’s former members.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s going to be a party.’ Stacey’s enthusiasm for my past was something I had not predicted and did not want.
The picture was of Anthony Burden, the subject of The Idealist. This book – the author’s first foray into biography – was, according to the paper, the surprise hit of the literary year. ‘This is your chance to take me to something,’ she said. She had opened up her life to me, but had seen precious little of mine.
Poised midway between Senate House and the Fitzroy pub, the Society had not only survived the years of my absence; it had flourished. Its combination of academic fustiness and public library had matured into something more eclectic and engaged. Its rooms were washed and repainted, the staircases stripped and stained ink-blue. The basement had been leased to a small juice-and-falafel chain called Open Sesame.
By the time we arrived, the party – to celebrate some literary award or other – had spilled onto the pavement. There was no one there either of us knew, but everyone recognized Stacey Chavez. I introduced her to Miriam Miller, the society’s receptionist, secretary and general factotum. It was obvious Miriam did not remember me. When Stacey pointed out the uncanny physical similarity between me and the subject of her biography, Miriam blinked at her as though she was mad. She spoke to us for exactly three minutes, then passed on through the crowd.
I had expected a little happy reminiscence; at the very least, I had imagined wandering between the stacks of the library where I had worked for so long. But the collection had been sold off years before. So I watched with something like admiration as Miriam and Stacey, the two women in my life, the old and the new, worked their different and eccentric orbits around the room. At a loss, I hunted down the table where Miriam’s book was piled high.
I read: ‘ Anthony Burden was as much fascinated by people as he was afraid of them.’ I skimmed ahead, looking for pictures. There were pages and pages of them: faithfully reproduced sketches of shells and ferns and matrices, natural patterns and what looked like, but could not possibly be, computer code. None of it seemed remotely fathomable, and I wondered how on earth Miriam had found a publisher willing to foot the expense of so many plates and photographs.
Miriam’s stabs at exegesis seemed as stilted as the articles she used to write for the Society’s pamphlets: ‘Anthony Burden was as much fascinated by people as he was afraid of them. The patterns they made as they went about their business daunted him. Their movements seemed very unpredictable to him, and he imagined these movements were more complicated than his own. Society wasn’t just bigger than he was. It was More.’
The nostalgia I felt while skimming this tosh was, I imagine, similar to the rush of feeling one experiences for a doughty elderly relative once they are past the point where they can damage anyone. I looked for more pictures of her subject. There were very few, and none which resemble me so closely.
Stacey passed behind me, chatting to a short, swarthy man in a T-shirt too young for him. ‘We visited a hospital—’
I recognized, in her earnest cadences, the overture to one of her favourite anecdotes: the documentary she had made for Comic Relief. ‘… A regional centre for the treatment of landmine injuries.’
Manhiça, north of Maputo, this was. I followed a pace or two behind, listening in.
‘… This half-human, half-plastic mass. All the ways they had of moving around. One stick. Two. Wheelbarrows. Skateboards made out of crates.’ As though the more Stacey told this story, the more weight it would acquire. The truth, as she had told it to me, was that she had been very little moved by her journey. The suddenness of her arrival and departure, the technical difficulties attending the shoot, never mind her own disorientation, so recently released from the clinic, had conspired to place her at several removes from the things she had seen.
‘I never expected it to remind me so vividly of the clinic I had just left. Its head-height mirrors and curtainless showers. But the cupboards stocked with limbs, the injuries, the burns. The little boy without hands.’ She was speaking of the experience the way one speaks of a particularly gut-wrenching gallery exhibition. The pair paused to have their glasses filled by a teenage girl in a white smock. ‘I was not upset,’ Stacey said. She noticed me. She held her hand out for me, drawing me in. ‘I have spent so long among monsters,’ she said.
Do Goliata’s farmers, crippled by anti-personnel mines, ever visit the graves where their limbs are interred?
As summer wore on, I found it harder and harder to concentrate on my work. I lost whole days sometimes, driving for hours through the spoiled southern countryside of my childhood. When I came to, it was late afternoon, the low sun was dazzling, and the clean, mathematical shapes of the rolling hills stood out dark against the sky. I would take long glances out the side windows and in my mirrors, looking for a glimpse of the walls of this world, and the hills changed shape as I passed between them, remoulding themselves, tightening, relaxing, like graphs representing a series of mathematical formulae.
I can only explain these excursions as an attempt – late in life, and hopelessly – to evoke dim childhood memories: the South Downs above Horndean, their rolling, rain-soaked slopes, their valleys boxed off into tiny irregular rooms by overgrown hedgerows.
My past: my missing limb.
3
Saturday, 13 March 1999. I have not slept. I’ve tried calling Nick Jinks back but he isn’t answering.
Around four this morning I found our lorry, abandoned in a lay-by outside Fort William. There was no sign of Nick Jinks. I hadn’t the nerve to break the trailer’s TIR seal and look inside. After so many hours, what would be the point? I drove our spoiled shipment south, parked it safely, hired a car and went to drum up some assistance.
Ferrer’s Grange. The company name is spelt out in stainless steel letters fused alchemically to the granite. Underneath, scuffed into the stone, a sans-serif assertion: ‘We Make a Meal of Farming’. In the yard, a fingerpost in white weather-resistant plastic points the way to reception, where the girls – school-leavers from faceless greenfield conurbations outside Spalding and Stamford – have the sallow patina of high-street travel agents.
From inside the Portakabin, with its cheap, crunchy carpet, I can hear the packing houses: the dentist’s-drill syncopations of Lincolnshire light industry, plastic bearings squealing in the rollers of stuttering conveyor belts, the squeak-snap of table-top shrinkwrap machines. Every one a sound of protest, barely an honest rumble or clunk anywhere.
‘Have you been here before?’ the receptionist asks.
Oh yes, I know these places, these draughty barns stacked high with plastic trays, rolls of corrugated paper, brown, purple, green, reams of colourful print, dusky smiling island women, buxom farmer’s daughters, headscarves, shell necklaces, capulanas slit to the thigh, cheap, badly registered three-colour pornographies of ripeness and increase; in another corner, industrial-sized bails of Clingfilm, boxes of sticky labels; underfoot a smeared confetti, Class I, Class II, Union Jacks, tricolores, dinky little ‘Farm Assured’ tractors, marques regionaux; and beneath them, ingrained, immune to the twenty-four-hour schedule of broom and vacuum, blue-green crumb of broccoli, shred of carrot top, imprinted yellow leafshape of Brussels sprout, liquefaction smears, tomato pips.
The receptionist hands me a yellow plastic hard-hat, a dayglo jerkin, fluorescent gumboots and a laminated name badge: ‘Visitor’. In this motley, nothing can mark me; they can always wipe me clean.
‘I need a breath of air. I’ll just be outside. All right?’
The fear these words plant on the receptionist’s face suggests that hers is the sort of job where you have to account for every toilet break. She starts gabbling the company’s safety policy. I might trip.
I might slip. I might wander into an Orange Work Zone and, intoxicated into madness by the whirl of industry, hurl myself giggling into the shrink-wrap machine.
‘I can surely wait outside the office?’
‘Oh,’ says the receptionist, and because I am already through the door: ‘All right, then. Don’t go far.’
Beyond the packing houses lies a crackled criss-cross of tractor and trailer tracks. And there they are, Chisulo and Happiness, picking Sweethearts out of the smashed earth.
Happiness is younger than her husband. Her skin is pale and freckled, her blood bleached by a globe-trotting Danishman, her fly-by-night dad.
Felix, on the other hand, is old and dark, and all his life in this country the Azungu – his old-country word for the whites he has grown old among – have congratulated him on his black twistedness. ‘Like mahogany,’ they say, which proves, he says, they are no carpenters.
Thorn would be a better choice; Felix is as twisted as though a mountain wind has sculpted him. When he sees me, he stands and smiles, because it is the custom of his people to smile. It signifies no friendliness whatsoever.
It is a strange sort of service I have done these two, and nigh-on impossible to explain to the natives of this merrie shopkeepers’ England, where making one’s voice heard above the din has become the highest good. I have erased them – and as a consequence, there is much that Chisulo and Happiness cannot do. Banks refuse to handle their meagre earnings. Public libraries choose not to lend them books. On the other hand, there is much they cannot be made to do, and this, in their lives, was a welcome novelty – at least at first – for they came from a place where the State gives little, and asks much.
Happiness, working beside her husband, looks up, and though her freckled face is a blank, her eyes are full of stratagems. But this is, in turn, merely the customary look of her people, the people of Djibouti, that hell on earth where people chew leaves incessantly like cows simply in order to have something to do.
I tell them I have a job for them, and I pick a figure to turn their heads, but not too extreme: I don’t want to scare them off.
Still they hesitate, for they have good work already here. Come the days of high yield, ordinary human sweat can earn them up to £1.50 an hour.
It’s Chisulo who relents, finally: ‘I’ll go and fetch Asha.’
Asha is their daughter. An unwelcome complication, but I don’t want to spook them now by saying she can’t come.
Leaving Happiness to her pluck and drop, I follow Chisulo down the hill. The whole valleyside is one huge field, planted everywhere with melons, melons for every taste, here green stripy Sweethearts, there crazed yellow Passports, further down the hill the phallic wrongness of Caroselli di Polignano, towards woods the managers keep in the bottom for the shooting of great tribes and nations of grouse. (The company’s recreation division call this venture ‘The Lucky Brakes’, but I doubt whether their city-analyst clientele know enough country lore to pick up on the pun.)
We enter the woods, deep enough so that the light begins to gutter. I can’t imagine where their daughter must be, among these tangles and paths criss-crossing, these fallen trees.
Chisulo turns sharp left, past a fallen oak – and there is a caravan, a dilapidated Hurricane, abandoned wheel-less among the furthest brakes, the plastic airstream bubble over its rear window long since smashed away, the trellis skirting round its bottom kicked in at precise intervals, suggesting the tantrum of a strictly governed child.
There has at some point in its history been a half-hearted attempt to paint the sides of the caravan Windsor green. Concrete breeze-blocks make steps up to the door, and from inside comes the laughter of children.
The concrete blocks wobble under Chisulo’s feet as he climbs. He opens the door.
From the foot of the steps I glimpse children. One of them, a boy, his skin a curdled Balkan colour, is waving a metal contraption over his head, out of the reach of a black girl in a green polyester party dress with a silver ribbon round her waist, undone now and dangling, the ends scuffed and dull where she, along with everyone else, has trodden on them.
The girl hops, panting. This is a game, she is smiling. No, she is not smiling, she is panting, she is exhausted.
She is hopping. She only has one leg. The boy is swinging the other above his head.
Chisulo says something in a language I don’t recognize, and smartly, without a trace of fear or embarrassment, the boy hands him his daughter’s leg.
Asha hops to the door and Chisulo gathers her up in his arms and steps backwards, gingerly, down the breeze-block stairs. The boy swings the door shut. I catch a glimpse of the caravan’s interior: its wallpaper, its mobiles, the pink tricycle, the space-hopper; empty boxes, piled into a half-hearted den.
Chisulo wants to put Asha’s leg on, but there’s no time. She wouldn’t be able to walk across the field anyway, the ground is so uneven.
‘We can put her together again in the car,’ I tell him.
We ride the A14 – Happiness and the girl in the back, Chisulo riding shotgun beside me – and half an hour later I pull in ‘to rest’.
So here we are now, staring numbly out of the window of the service station, blowing on coffee that is both scalding and tasteless. How am I supposed to say what I have to say with the little girl sitting here between us like this? I am still puzzling this through, muzzy from lack of sleep and too many hours behind the wheel, when Asha says, ‘Chipsss. I want chipsss.’
I go and buy her some chips.
Then she says, ‘Can I have ketchup with my chipsss?’
‘Over there,’ I tell her, sitting down again. ‘See? Those packets over there.’
Asha returns with a fistful of sachets of tomato ketchup and a woman in a giant dishcloth smock running after her because she has not paid for them. They are seventeen pence each. I hand the woman a pound coin, but she says she has to put the sachets through the till – she means scan them. I tell her to use some initiative, pick a sachet from the can by her till and scan it through a few times, but she says she cannot do this, so I ask for my quid back, but she does not want to give me back my money, so I tell her to fuck off.
The till operator returns with the manager. The manager gives me change from my pound and tells me not to make further purchases from his food hall.
‘Chipsss!’ says Asha, eating them. Chips vanish without effort, without chewing – even without swallowing, it seems – down the little girl’s gullet. Watching her, Chisulo’s eyes grow grey and wet: windows on stormy weather. (Two years before, back home, Chisulo was studying law. But they were all something.)
‘Carsss!’
Asha is done eating; now she pulls on her mother’s sleeve. ‘Carsss!’
I ask Happiness, ‘What cars?’
‘The games,’ Happiness replies. ‘The games, she means, downstairs, the games with cars. No, Asha.’
‘The arcade games,’ says Chisulo. He stands.
‘Stay where you are. I want to talk to you.’
Chisulo sits but, as he does, Happiness stands: it is like they are being operated off the same pulley.
The girl takes her mother’s hand.
‘Go with her, then, Happiness,’ I tell her, ‘It’s fine.’
‘Carsss!’ the girl chirrups, hand in hand with her mum, clunktapping away over the dog-hair-thin industrial carpeting towards the arcades.
‘What is it, boss?’
I never expected to charge them so high a price for their freedom. But what can I do? Fifty-eight men, women and children. Imagine. The volume of human flesh. It is too much for one man to manoeuvre, let alone conceal.
Stripping, handling, wrapping, packing. Plastic and tape. After months spent trimming and stacking groceries at Ferrer’s Grange, Happiness and Chisulo will find the whole process eerily familiar.
4
My hands frozen to the wheel, heavy with nostalgia, sick with it, I hacked back and forth over the South Downs, through villages wit
h names like Hurtmore and Noning. The hills of my childhood had been scrubbed clean. It was a modern, monochrome landscape now. The soil was so thin, modern ploughs had cut great gobbets out of the chalk bed and left the fields flecked white and grey. From a distance, it was as though someone had gone over the land with sandpaper, revealing a grey primer beneath. The crops, when they came, were a sickly yellow-green, and rounded off the imperfections of the hedgeless hills, leaving them as smooth as the features on a golf course.
I could not go back. I would have to go forward. I thought about that.
I had grown bored of the modern arrangement Stacey and I had fallen into. Its lack of commitment was exhausting. I decided to do something selfless, if only for the sake of the change. I tried to make myself, if not useful, then present: a silent partner, someone for Stacey to turn to, to rely on.
But she already had Jerom, and how could I compete with him? Jerom had all the advantages: education, youth, a sense of humour, a missing ‘e’. No sooner did I try to participate in their lives, than Stacey and Jerom set about seeing to my every need, hoping perhaps that I would leave them alone.
When I wrapped my BMW around a bus near St Katherine’s Dock, Stacey took me to a showroom in Mayfair and bought me a replacement. ‘What do you think?’ she asked me as we drove back to Wapping along the Strand. I said something about the positive feel of the controls, the hard ride, the snugness of the seat: anything to paper over my wretchedness.
Just then her phone rang. Jerom dug it out of his pocket; Stacey never took her own calls. ‘Well, hello, Jeff,’ Jerom cooed, wriggling into the leather of the back seat. Since I had decided to be Stacey’s best friend, Jerom never seemed to leave her side.
He was not so petty that he did not allow me to make some contribution to the household. I took charge of the coffee machine and the herbal teas. I kept house. I swept and tidied. I threw away newspapers before Jerom was done with them, wanting him to stop me, itching for an excuse. This was how I stumbled on the other key story of my year – though this was harder to miss; John Gridley’s worn muzzle splashed across the front of a Guardian pull-out.