by Geoff Dyer
042
It was a Sunday afternoon, cold and raining, the sort of afternoon when what you most want to do is spend four or five hours in the cinema, eating cake and taking in a double bill of French films with nice photography and plenty of sunshine. On offer was a triple bill of black-and-white Bergmans so we ended up playing Ludo for money at Freddie’s place. Warmed by a gas ring on the cooker Steranko, Freddie and I drank tea and waited for Carlton, picking up bits of the Sunday paper and throwing them down again unread.
‘What a lot of shit this paper is,’ Steranko said, tossing down the colour supplement in disgust. ‘I mean, look at this: part two of a pull-out history of ratatouille through the ages.’
Freddie and I didn’t bother to reply. That’s the kind of afternoon it was. Steranko was wearing a thick and expensive cardigan that a friend of his had ripped off from a shop in Chelsea where he worked. Steranko had the sleeves pulled down over his hands and cradled a steaming mug of tea between them.
There was a ring on the door-bell. Freddie went to answer it and came back followed by Carlton who was wearing a red baseball cap and some kind of thick American-style car-coat. Freddie poured him some tea and Carlton struggled out of his coat, took off his cap and pulled a bright, turtle-neck sweater over his head. Underneath he was wearing another thick sweater.
‘You warm enough?’ Steranko asked.
‘I would be if I could afford a two hundred quid cardigan.’
‘I told you: this guy can get you one for fifty quid.’
‘I can’t even afford fifty quid.’
‘You’ll have to freeze then won’t you?’
‘Yes boss.’
‘C’mon, let’s play some Ludo,’ Freddie said.
Freddie’s living-room was icy cold so we set up the Ludo board on the kitchen table. After half an hour we’d all put about three quid in the kitty – ten pence every time you threw a six or were unable to move – and no one showed any sign of winning. We were all much keener on sending each other back and forming hindering blocks – at one point Carlton had all his four greens piled intransigently on one square – than we were on getting our own tokens home.
After about an hour, following a fluke throw of five sixes, Steranko – blue – was way ahead: he had three counters home and his last was three-quarters of the way round the board. The only person anywhere near him was Freddie who had a red counter nine places behind. He threw a six (‘ten pee in, fuckhead,’ shouted Steranko) and a three, sending Steranko back to base. After that Steranko sunk without trace. Unable to move or throw a six he had to put in ten pence every time he threw the dice. He chucked in two pounds in a matter of minutes while the rest of us were skooting quickly round the board.
‘Oh for fuck sake,’ swore Steranko, rolling his fourth five in succession.
‘Ten pee in,’ said Freddie, ever watchful.
‘Shit, I’ll have to change this,’ he said, pulling out a large coin none of us had seen before.
‘What’s that man? A Krugerrand?’ Carlton asked, wide-eyed.
‘I’ve got a whole load of them at home. They’re quite tricky to get rid of these days. People are a bit sensitive about them,’ Steranko said, chucking the coin into the kitty and pulling out some small change. ‘Jesus, haven’t you lot seen a two pound coin before?’
None of us had.
‘I’ll tell you something else as well,’ Steranko said. ‘The half crown is no longer legal tender: we’ve gone decimal.’
‘C’mon get on with the game,’ I said, throwing a three and thereby forming a pyrrhic block of two yellows.
The game ended up with Freddie and Carlton both needing to throw a one. While they threw a succession of fours, fives and threes Steranko finally succeeded in getting his last counter out and staged a late dash around the board (‘Yes! Two sixes! Three sixes – that’s eighteen – and a one. Shit!’) Eventually Freddie rolled a one and won. The rest of us looked on enviously as he counted his winnings.
‘Fifteen pounds twenty!’ he said with a big grin.
‘What a shit game,’ I said.
‘Superb game,’ Freddie said. ‘Tactical – a game of skill.’
‘Right Freddie,’ Steranko said. ‘Now you can go and look for a shop where you can buy some cake. Then you can have a nice little tea party for your friends.’
‘Nowhere’s open.’
We settled for more tea and digestive biscuits (‘probably the most boring biscuit in the world,’ Freddie conceded) and sat there slurping.
‘God, what an afternoon. The pubs are shut, there’s nothing on at the Ritzy, there’s not even any football on telly,’ said Steranko.
‘Isn’t there a film on TV?’
‘Yes there is,’ said Freddie, consulting the paper. ‘“Carry on up the Congo”: an adaptation of Heart of Darkness with Kenneth Williams as Marlow and Sid James as Kurtz.’
‘Very funny Freddie,’ said Steranko, using his sleeve to wipe clean a patch of the wet, steamy window.
‘Is it still raining?’
‘Pouring. Why the fuck do we live here?’
‘Because we’re English.’
‘I tell you, this country is getting very close to being uninhabitable. The sheer delight people have in saying “no” to things. It’s unbelievable the quality of life you have to put up with sometimes. For at least six months of the year it’s virtually impossible to have a good time. I don’t know how we put up with it.’
‘Nothing else to do,’ said Carlton. ‘When I was working at the bakery a couple of years ago – it was a terrible job but I needed the dough –’
‘I could see that one coming. I was sitting here waving it on.’
‘Anyway, I was pissed off all day long. Then one day I just said to myself “Ah fuck it”. And then I wondered what to do now that I’d said “Ah fuck it”. Nothing. There was nothing to do. It was like having a paralysed leg. In the end you go on and on saying “Ah fuck it” day after day.’
‘Yeah, you’re right man,’ Steranko said, looking out of the window at the rain. ‘Shit. I can’t think of anything I want to do this afternoon.’
‘I just want to stroke my winnings,’ said Freddie. ‘How much did you say those cardigans were Steranko?’
041
I spent the next week working with Carlton, decorating a house near Camberwell. The job took longer than expected and it wasn’t until Friday afternoon as we walked home up Cold Harbour Lane that we found the time to drop in at the dole office to sign on. What with the work and the dole office being open such limited hours we’d both missed our signing days. The woman behind the reinforced plate glass asked me why I was two days late.
‘I had a job interview,’ I said.
‘What about you?’ she said to Carlton.
‘I had a job interview,’ he said. She gave us a warning each, smiling as she did so and not bothering to comment on our paint-splattered clothes. She wrote down our next signing date which was in just under two weeks’ time and that was that.
With the exception of my brief period of above-board employment my dole had been running smoothly for years. Once your money is coming through regularly – housing benefit included – the essential thing is to keep your life in a state of perpetual stasis as far as the DHSS is concerned. Avoid any change of circumstance since even declaring a few days’ work can lead to massive complications. Dealing with that kind of thing makes life more difficult for the people working there so they much prefer you to keep any change in your prospects to yourself. Every now and again I got a visit from someone concerned at the way my career seemed to have made no progress at all in the last two years but I told them I was keeping myself occupied (‘I use the library a great deal’) and not contemplating suicide and they went off reassured. A couple of weeks previously, though, I’d had to attend some kind of interview down in Crystal Palace – failure to attend, said the notice, would result in my benefit being stopped – where an understanding, polite but suspicious-looking wom
an grilled me about what I was up to, why I’d been sacked from my last job, and what sort of work I wanted. To each question I gave precisely the answer I thought likely to preclude any further questions but she persisted for about twenty minutes. I persisted in resisting her persistence, assuring her that my attitude towards finding a job had improved considerably.
‘I’ve got my mind straight,’ I said. ‘I’ve had some interviews and some very encouraging rejection letters. I really think things have started to move.’ That seemed to satisfy her or at least satisfied the criteria she had to satisfy in order to bring the interview to an end. She gave me some leaflets and wished me luck. I thanked her warmly and left, less pissed off than I might have been in the circumstances.
Carlton was meeting Belinda in Franco’s, the pizza place in the covered market. I was worn out from the decorating and said I’d see him later.
Effra Road felt like a flight of stairs and the closer I got to home the wearier I became. My legs were heavy as rucksacks, my eyes full of hot grit. I envied my shadow for the way it was able to just slide and crawl along the ground.
My neighbour, George, was coming out of his flat just as I was unlocking the door of mine. He was about sixty and lugubrious would be an over-energetic way of describing him. For the last twenty years or so, as far as I could gather, his main ambition in life had been to get out of the rain. Everything else – such as what he did once he was out of the rain – was secondary.
‘How’s it going then George?’ I said fiddling with the lock.
‘Oh mustn’t grumble,’ he said and went on to grumble about anything that came to mind.
‘Looking forward to Christmas though?’
‘Not really son, not really.’
I opened my door and said to George that I’d see him later.
‘Oh well, plod on, son.’
Back in the flat I stumbled into a scene from a low-budget horror film. The mess was too much for the cockroaches: one, the size of a half crown, was in the sink doing the dishes, another was hoovering the floor; a few anonymous amoebatype things were taking it easy in the bath; dead wasps and flies which I’d swatted over the course of the preceding two weeks but neglected to clear up were petrifying on window sills or glueing themselves to the panes. The airing cupboard smelled like I’d been frying hamburgers in it; the cooker was covered in a solidified yellow ooze which I judged to have come from some mackerel I’d tried to lightly baste in butter a few days previously. Near the black sack that I used as a bin, looking as if it had failed in a last ditch bid to escape from the rubbish and find a more hygenic resting place, lay the partially eaten carcass of a chicken. In tin foil containers the remains of a vegetable curry looked like transparent earth in which could be seen potatoes, carrots and cauliflower, the whole scene garnished with a light confetti of pilau rice. Old peaches in a bowl wore thick fur cardigans of mould.
Stripped down to my boxers, I threw out all the rubbish, piled all dirty clothes into a bin liner and cleaned up everything I could see. I de-greased some kitchen utensils and prised loose some of the cups that had got glued to the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a squelching bag of potatoes which were the source, I now realised, of the odd earthy smell that pervaded the whole kitchen. Close to the potatoes, a bottle of olive oil had sprung a leak and a couple of lumps of meteorite cheese lay basting in a pool of it. Wearing rubber gloves I disposed of a piece of radioactive cauliflower and then threw the rubber gloves out too.
It was not a perfect job but it was certainly an improvement. Even so, it was difficult to see how things had got to quite this state. With each week I seemed to descend another few rungs on the evolutionary ladder. To reverse the process I filled the bath brimful with hot, clear water and plunged in. I dunked my head under and held my breath, feeling my hair float up like cropped seaweed, and then rose a couple of inches until I could breathe through my nose, hippopotamus-style. I writhed around for a while, then pulled the plug and let the water drain away around me, becoming amphibious, mammalian and then, finally, when there was no water left and only a circle of pond-scum to reveal where it had been, human.
Seconds later the phone rang and there I was, right back in the late twentieth century again.
040
I dropped in at the Effra and found the lounge bar packed. The only people in the public bar were half a dozen police and a guy lying on the floor, bar towels soaking up his blood. A woman crying. It had happened five minutes before I got there. The barmaid was seeing to him, wringing out the towels with red hands. That left only one other person serving. It was quarter to eleven. Nobody grumbled about having to wait.
I asked what had happened but there was nothing to know. These things are always the same: an argument over who’s next on the pool table, someone talking to someone else’s girlfriend, a spilt drink, somebody looking at somebody else. A scuffle, tables going over, glasses smashing – and suddenly someone’s getting their guts cut out.
The ambulance arrived ten minutes after the police. I remembered something Freddie had said one evening when we were both drunk: ‘There are two kinds of tragedy: the ones that don’t happen and the ones that needn’t have happened.’
I thought of the guy being loaded into the ambulance and hooked up to a plasma bag, of the nurses and doctors who would be waiting for him in their masks and gloves, and of all the other people queuing half the night in casualty departments with all their blood and pain and helplessness. I thought of dawn breaking over the broken glass, the indifferent streets and curtained windows.
The regular drinkers talked stoically about what happened. Spend enough time in pubs and you get used to most things. After a while you’re unlikely to see anything that you haven’t seen before. Someone said: ‘Get into a fight round here and you’d better be prepared to die of it.’
I drank my beer and didn’t speak to anybody. I was thinking about my liver and kidneys doing whatever it is they do invisibly and without complaint. I hoped I would never get stabbed. Or get my nose broken, or my jaw, or my teeth knocked out or my face slashed with a stanley knife. But most of all I hoped I would never get stabbed.
At home I watched Mike Tyson smashing the shit out of someone and then listened to Callas singing Lucia. As I listened I knew that nothing could be as perfect as the memory of her voice, not even love or betrayal – especially not love or betrayal. Maybe, to her, that was the meaning of tragedy; maybe that was the meaning of all tragedy.
039
We were travelling by taxi from a party in north London: Steranko, Foomie, Freddie, Belinda and I. After about ten minutes the driver pulled over and said the engine was fucked. We bailed out over Westminster.
It was one thirty in the morning. The sky was almost purple. A slight mist. We cut through St James’s Park, passing a flotilla of ducks. Nothing moving, not even the dappled lights on the surface of the pond. We walked along an avenue of trees and caught dark glimpses of statues. Foomie and Steranko were walking slightly ahead of the rest of us; her arm was through his, her head angled slightly towards him. We passed a bulbous, black statue of Churchill.
A few minutes later Foomie called out: ‘Look, Christmas!’ and pointed to a Christmas tree decorated with red, yellow and blue bulbs.
We walked through Whitehall, through all the empty architecture of power with its austere ornamentation and inscrutable attractiveness. Wide streets, discreet trees. A sign said ‘Churchill’s War Cabinet’ and an arrow pointed down some steps. The whole area had the feel of a museum. Suddenly we were tourists. There was no one else around.
The windows in the buildings did not look like windows. They shared the same texture as the walls and were not there to be looked in to or out of. What impressed most about the walls was the suggestion of discreet thickness. There was only one impulse behind these buildings: they were built to last – and to last it was necessary not only to be impregnable but also to impress. Vandalism was not even an issue. These buildings created their own tim
e. They did not defy time, they consolidated it. Their foundations were deep in an unshakeable past; their walls were the habitation of a perpetual present. The buildings had turned the symbolic power invested in them into an active, brooding patience that rendered surveillance superfluous. The archaicism of the buildings was the chief source of their potency. The buildings had the same weight – the same feel – as the war memorials we passed: solid, carefully angled blocks of rock on whose sides the names of men had been scratched. Even the pavement felt more permanent here.
The streets commanded respect. Most things were out of the question here. All sound except that of the ministerial clack of steel-tipped Oxfords and brogues briskly mounting steps was inappropriate. Steps. All the time our tread was led persuasively upward. We felt that we were being drawn towards the heart of something without ever arriving there. A sense of conviction grew. Each street or arrangement of steps led to a statue: a rearing horse, a hussar waving a sword, an august statesman surveying the streets and stamping them with unbending authority.
The sound of Foomie’s laughter floated back to us on scarves of breath. We walked towards Big Ben. Looking up we saw first the vertical, black railings; then the chaotic branches of bare trees; behind the branches was the intricate decoration of Parliament; above that the sky which, oddly, still seemed purple.
We walked past a square manhole cover. Sharp green light glinted through two small access holes. Curling our fingers through these holes Steranko and I pulled back the cover. Immediately, like the glare from a treasure chest of jewels, our faces were bathed in electric lime-coloured light. A metal ladder ran down from the pavement to the green-bathed room below. A single red dial winked silently in the green room, as obvious as a drop of blood on grass. Extending from this room a small tunnel ran beneath our feet, at right angles to the kerb.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know.’ We lowered the cover, careful not to trap our fingers.