by Geoff Dyer
059
When I woke up the next morning I had no idea where or who I was. Gradually I realised ‘I was at Freddie’s – he’d gone away for a few days and had lent me his keys – and that I was someone whose circumstances were enviable only from the perspective of total dereliction. No job and nowhere to live. The slippery slope. I lay in bed and wondered at what point somebody actually becomes derelict? You can see how it starts (a run of bad luck; losing your job, having nowhere to live, slipping through the social security net) and how it ends, but the long interim tends to take place invisibly. That is probably the most painful part: when you are still tormented by the thought that one last effort of will might improve things. From then on time means nothing; there is only weather, benches and booze.
With this in mind, I spent the rest of the day re-activating my social security claim. Since I’d last been to the DHSS offices a month before, they’d spruced the place up a bit. In particular they’d put in a thicker plate-glass partition and lowered the claimant’s side of the counter so that you actually ended up on your knees and yelling, as if praying to a deaf and bureaucratic God.
I left the dole office and shook my head at the pavement-faced guy selling a revolutionary tabloid. Across the road the pale sun brightened the colours in the huge Nuclear Dawn mural showing a spectral figure of death clad in stars and stripes, striding over the dwarfed, fish-eyed landmarks of London. Bricks, their colours slowly warming in the weak sun, would have looked nicer but that was probably not a relevant consideration any more.
Immediately behind the mural was the railway bridge. After the uprisings the local traders paid for huge ‘Welcome to Brixton’ hoardings to be hung from the bridge. Now only a few tatters were left to cover the blank boards. A train clanked overhead, pulling a long freight of dangerous-looking, toxic-coloured containers towards some unspecified zone where no one was sure what happened. An innocent possibility of horror, the train clunked and screeched past. Further off, visible over the moving freight, were the large letters ATLANTIC forming a balcony on the roof of the pub.
Outside the pub Luther shook his coffee jar and asked for money. Years ago I used to see him in the George Canning, wearing a combat jacket and selling his paintings which were bright and colourful. People who hadn’t seen him before were fascinated and he always managed to shift a few. Then, after seeing him in the boozer selling the same paintings night after night people stopped taking any notice. The more trouble he had selling paintings the harder he hustled. The landlord barred him and things began going badly. I saw him in various places, wearing the same green combat jacket but looking less like an artist and more like somebody with time not paint on his hands. By the time of Band Aid he was reduced to roaming around Brixton with a coffee jar, an optimistically wide slot cut into its green lid and a label saying BAND AID: PLEASE GIVE GENEROSLY. ETHIPIA FAMINE. The jar was never quite empty; there were always a few bronze coins in the bottom like half-an-inch of beer in a glass. After Band Aid he rationalised his enterprise still further by taking off the label and throwing away the lid.
Until today I hadn’t seen him for a couple of months and in that time he’d slid a few inches nearer to destitution. His combat jacket had big rips in it; one sleeve was in shreds as though he’d been mauled by a spiteful dog. He shook the tin at me, still trying to maintain that he was not begging but collecting.
‘Who’s it for?’ I asked.
He paused for a moment, looked me up and down and mumbled, ‘Nicaragua.’
I dropped some coins into his jar. Back at Freddie’s I circled the phone and played the start of some records, looked out of the window at the nothing-happening grey of the sky, turned a tap on and off, read one and a half lines of the paper and then put it down again. I turned on the TV and found horse-racing on both sides. I watched for about twenty minutes, ignoring the horses and concentrating instead on the suburban hinterland in the background: a place where it always drizzled, a place that didn’t look like anywhere. I turned the TV off, picked up one of Freddie’s books and studied the Olympic coffee rings on the cover. I rehearsed things I might say if someone turned up. I rang Fran and left another message. I called Freddie, heard the engaged sound, tried again and then remembered that I was actually at Freddie’s and had dialled my own number. I called Steranko and a voice said he was out. I called Carlton but there was no answer. Where was everybody?
The doorbell rang just as I turned on the TV to watch the news. I trudged along the hallway and opened the door.
‘Fran!’
‘Hi!’
We kissed and held each other.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘I was in Brixton anyway. I called home and they gave me your message.’
‘I’m so glad to see you. I’m so miserable.’
‘Why?’ We were walking back along the corridor to Freddie’s kitchen.
‘I got sacked from my job.’
‘Again?’ Fran laughed. I nodded. ‘You’re going to end up in the Guinness Book of Records.’
‘It’s not funny.’
‘No, I know. I thought you said it was an awful job though.’
‘It was. Now I’ll have to get an even worse one. What will I say when a prospective employer asks what I’ve been doing for the last two years? That I’ve been in prison, studying for a sociology degree with the Open University?’ I put my arms around Fran: it couldn’t be described as a hug – I just put my arms around her and leaned.
‘You feel thin,’ she said.
‘So do you.’
‘We’re a thin family.’
‘Built for speed,’ we said together, quoting our mother.
Fran was wearing a beat-up suede jacket, very baggy light trousers rolled up above her ankles, old suede shoes and faded yellow socks. Her hair looked like it had just been cut. I filled the kettle through the spout and sat down, resting my head on my hands.
Fran and I didn’t meet up regularly. Often I wasn’t even sure where she was living and would go a couple of months without seeing her. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder what had happened to her, when I was wanting quite badly to see her, she’d turn up or we’d run into each other.
‘Why are you holding your head?’ she said suddenly.
‘Not because I’ve got a headache.’
‘That’s a weird answer. OK. Why aren’t you holding your head?’
‘I am,’ I said and stood up to make the tea.
‘What were you doing?’ Fran said. ‘When I arrived, I mean.’
‘Lamenting my lot – my little. And thinking about the slippery slope.’
‘What about it?’
‘I was wondering where you slipped to.’
‘A blind alley probably – through there to a park bench and meths. What else were you thinking about?’ She was leaning against the door frame, one foot resting on the thigh of her other leg.
‘Nothing really. I was just waiting for time to pass.’
‘Time is money,’ said Fran. ‘I saw that sprayed on a wall near my house a couple of days ago. Then today I saw that somebody had changed the ‘is’ to an ‘isn’t’. People spray weird things these days. You see something like that sprayed on a wall and suddenly it looks like some kind of prophecy. You wonder if you know what it means.’
‘Well, if time was money I’d have paid this afternoon into my account. I bet there are people who’d give their right arm for an extra couple of hours. I’d have been happy to loan them a couple of mine – I’d have given them away. Anything to have got them off my hands.’
‘You should have been with me yesterday,’ Fran said. ‘I was sitting on a park bench and this man asked me where some road was. I didn’t know exactly where it was but I pointed in the general direction. Then about ten minutes later the same man came charging up in an absolute fury. “You sent me the wrong way you silly bitch,” he was saying. Absolutely furious. “You owe me ten minutes. Ten minutes, and I want them now!” I thought he was
going to kill me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I jumped on a passing bus.’
As I washed out some cups Fran walked by the kitchen table and banged her hip on the fridge.
‘Ow! That hurt,’ she said, absently rubbing her hip and sitting down. She was always banging into things or knocking them over. When we were kids our father used to tell her not to be so careless and to look after things but you could tell that really he was worried about Fran hurting herself. As Fran got older this concern subsided into a bemused and tender attention to the way she navigated her way through the world. I had more or less inherited this tendency of his and often found myself fascinated by her movements, wondering what would happen next. There was something graceful about her awkwardness. Several times I’d seen her knock a bottle off the edge of a table and then catch it before it hit the ground. For her part Fran paid little attention to these bruises and knocks – as if even when things hurt her there was some level at which she didn’t feel them.
I poured the tea. Fran took off her jacket and threw it on the floor (something else she used to get told off about). She was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and men’s braces.
‘What’s this?’ she said suddenly, turning up the volume on the TV. ‘Oh it’s that Van Gogh painting they’re auctioning at Sotheby’s.’
The bidding got up to eight million fairly easily, stalled for a few moments and then soared upwards again.
‘He ought to make a special offer: for fifty million you can have the whole of England too – industry, agriculture, health service, the lot,’ I said.
The bidding continued for a few more millions and when it was over no one knew who had actually bought the painting. It was as if the escalating logic of the auction had generated this final bid independently of human intervention so that the painting was now the property of the auction.
‘A bid without a bidder,’ said Fran. She was sitting on the chair with her legs tucked up under her, sawing away at a loaf of bread. I watched the muscles move in her arms, heard her bracelets jangling together.
‘Have you got any butter?’
As I reached inside it the fridge shuddered and rumbled quietly.
‘Have you heard of this new kind of butter that you don’t even have to spread?’
‘No.’
‘It’s part of an exciting new range of products.’ I watched her scrape the cold butter on to the bread.
‘D’you want some jam?’
‘Hmmn. What sort have you got?’
‘Apricot.’ There was something unusual about the word as I said it, as if there were more sounds in it than could be logically accounted for.
Splodges of jam dropped on to the kitchen table as she hooked it from the jar and on to the bread. In a moment of sudden clarity I said, ‘I hate stickiness.’
‘Me too,’ said Fran, sucking jam from her fingers. ‘What about this evening? Have you got any plans?’
‘None at all.’
‘Let’s have dinner then. I’ll pay. That bread’s made me hungry. We can drive somewhere in your car. Is it working?’
‘After a fashion. You know what it’s like. It won’t get out of second gear but the bloke at the garage reckons there’s no mechanical fault – I’m thinking of having it psychoanalysed.’
I’d bought the car for seventy pounds – while the balance of my mind was temporarily disturbed – from an unscrupulous drug dealer in Tulse Hill who felt it was time to expand and diversify. Most of the time people like Freddie and Steranko used it as a wastebin for tins of beer or a mobile observation lab in which they could get stoned and see the capital rush past in a blur of colours and near-misses. As far as I was concerned it was a millstone round my neck. Actually that’s not true. A millstone around my neck would have felt like a loose-fitting polo-neck by comparison. I couldn’t go out in it without getting lost and I couldn’t get lost without losing my temper in sympathy. I often lost my temper almost as soon as I’d folded myself into the driving seat – only a few seconds after it had broken down, in other words. The only time it didn’t break down was when it wouldn’t start.
As luck would have it, on the night of Fran’s visit it was working perfectly – so perfectly that the kids who stole it made barely a sound as they drove off. I must have only missed them by five minutes which is a shame because I would like to have thanked them personally.
While I got changed Fran went down to get the A-Z to work out where we were heading. When we left the house a few minutes later the car was gone. It’s odd, that elusive sense of non-presence when something just disappears. It takes time to establish that something’s not there and for a couple of minutes we paced up and down the street as if the car had just been mislaid – Fran even peered beneath another parked car as though it had rolled under there like a lost coin. Maybe the car was around somewhere and we couldn’t see it. Maybe it had never been there. Maybe it was somewhere else.
‘It’s been stolen,’ said Fran eventually and we set off for Brixton police station to report it. Only a few minutes from the house we ran into a policeman who put out an A.P.B. on the missing vehicle. I started to explain that it was extremely unlikely that the culprits could travel more than a couple of miles in it, that it was a fucking useless car and I wished I’d never bought it but the cop held up his hand in a halt sign and said there was no time for that because I still had to go to the nick and report the theft officially. We hopped on a bus to save time.
‘It’s like a Hitchcock film,’ said Fran. ‘Always a bus when you need one.’
I jumped off at the traffic lights opposite the police station. A few seconds later, as the bus accelerated away, Fran jumped off too, crashing into the arms of a moody-looking guy with long locks.
‘Man, you ought to keep her on reins,’ he said.
They were doing a lot of business at the police station that night – so much that you wondered if somebody was selling grass under the counter as part of the community policing project. The queue was pub-sized, hardly a queue at all, just a scrum of bodies, three or four deep, pushing to the counter. It took me fifteen minutes to get to the bar – the counter, I mean – and as I began telling my story the message crackled over on short-wave that a squad car was pursuing my vehicle down Streatham Hill.
‘You can listen to it happen,’ said the lager-complexioned copper behind the counter. ‘Just like on the telly – metaphorically speaking anyway.’
On the wall to my right was a noticeboard covered with MURDER posters. In Westerns, posters like these always showed the murderers; here it was the victims, all but one of whom were black. Men and women; one aged nineteen, another in his forties, the rest in their twenties. Stabbings, an axe murder, someone beaten to death, a shooting in the early hours of the morning. The faces of the victims had something of the random, anonymous quality of their deaths. None of the photographs had reproduced properly; they looked like photocopies of photo-fit assemblies. The format made the victims look guilty, as if they were being sought in connection with their own deaths.
The airwaves sang with the crossed wires of distress and crime, the coughs of static giving way to the delta-tango zero-niner dialect of break-ins, pub fights and muggings. Then in a rare burst of clarity it came over the radio that my car had been brought to a standstill by a brick wall. A few minutes later we heard that the two kids who had ripped off the car were unhurt but the car had taken it full in the face.
The loss of his first car is a big moment in a man’s life and as such he is entitled to a lavish display of grief. Since I appeared totally unmoved by this mechanical castration it was assumed that the trauma had already plunged me into deep shock. A policewoman offered me a cup of tea with lots of sugar. As we left she whispered to Fran that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on me for a few days.
‘Well that’s a load off my mind,’ I said as we stepped through the door.
Outside I caught a quick glimpse of a twitching grey squirrel, high up in
the dusk of a tree.
‘Look,’ I said, touching Fran’s elbow and pointing. At school they had taught us that the red squirrel was cuddly and lovable but that it was being forced out of business by vicious greys. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a red squirrel but as we watched I was struck by how cute this grey one looked with its munching jaws and bushy tail.
‘Soon it’ll probably turn out that even the greys are endangered, that their survival is threatened by a new, savage mutant of the species, perfectly adapted to life in the inner city,’ I said.
‘The scag squirrel,’ said Fran in the hushed tones of a TV naturalist. ‘Capable of living off dustbins and the dried blood from old syringes, its graffiti-patterned coat enabling it to blend in perfectly with its natural habitat of windswept tower-blocks and crumbling window sills.’
As we walked on it occurred to me that in the last month I’d lost my home, job and car. Each loss bothered me a little less than the previous one. I mentioned this to Fran as we sweated over plates of chicken madras in the local Indian.
‘I’m becoming immune to catastrophe,’ I said.
‘There’s a good side to all of this as well.’
‘How?’
‘The house was terrible, the job was boring and the car hardly worked,’ she said, reaching out and touching my hand.
‘Thanks Fran, I appreciate that. Hey, I thought you were a vegetarian.’
‘I am – a meat-eating vegetarian,’ said Fran. Then she told me about her latest scrapes.
Fran had a knack of getting into scrapes and then slipping out of them, bewildered but no worse for wear. A couple of months ago she had popped out from her house to buy some milk and had ended up on the outskirts of Barcelona. Most of the time Fran emerged from her encounters completely unscathed but I was always worried that one day something was going to happen that she couldn’t handle, that she was going to find herself completely out of her depth. Whispering over our curry she told me how she’d stolen a hundred pound necklace on impulse from a jewellers (‘the next thing I knew I was out of the door’) and sold it to someone she happened to meet in a nightclub. I made a point of never going shopping with Fran; it was too nerve wracking. She regularly lifted clothes, shoes and books from shops and had always told me stories of scams, deals and stealing but this was on a different scale altogether. It was when she told me things like that that I wondered what was going to happen to her.