MONDAY
Erwan saw Emmett approach the doors at the base of Alanbrooke Hall. His room was situated directly above the entrance.
He flung open his window.
‘Hey, Emmett!’ he shouted.
Emmett looked up and waved.
‘Is the door open for you?’ asked Erwan.
‘Hold on I’ll see. Yes. What floor are you?’
‘Two. Room ten.’
‘Ok, see you in a minute.’
Erwan waited like a mollusc curled into its shell. A knock came on the door. Erwan sprang out and Emmett cheerily greeted him.
‘Come in, come in,’ said Erwan, eager to make his guest feel at home. He offered Emmett the cushioned chair. Erwan sat on the bed.
Emmett cast a look round and approved of what he saw: Itchy and Scratchy posters, a Beatles poster, the cover of Cream’s ‘Wheels of Fire’ double album.
‘Very nice!’ he said, nodding.
Erwan shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess. I don’t like it all that much. The rooms are a bit soulless. I can’t store milk in the fridge without someone stealing it.’
‘Bastards.’
‘Yeah, bastards!’
They grinned at each other.
Emmett stretched his legs, adjusted his seat, swallowed, looked about the room, and then looked back at Erwan.
‘Yeah, nice room,’ he said. ‘Seems odd I haven’t visited you up here before.’
‘Well, the Big Pink has more going on, doesn’t it?’
‘Am I the first to visit?’
‘You have that privilege.’
Erwan, like many of his generation, had inherited a weird instinct about hosting. He never felt himself when he invited people into his home, whether that was his folk’s home or this little room in the Halls. There was always this feeling, like a door jarring that wouldn’t be budged. He started worrying about his hostly duties, uncertain what they might be. He felt a strange urge to keep offering things and give the visitor a grand tour. In this room there was not much to see; everything was already visible from where Emmett was sitting.
‘Want a cup of tea? I mean, normal tea. Although I do also have some of Dessie’s finest dogshit if you care to partake.’
Emmett indicated neither yes nor no. He said: ‘I thought you couldn’t smoke in here. Doesn’t it set off the alarms?’
‘Hm. Oftentimes yes. Burnt toast – or even making your tea too strong – can set this alarm off. There’s a rumour that it won’t detect dope but I haven’t tried it out.’
‘Do you smoke in here?’
‘Every now and then.’
‘How?’
‘Ah ha!’ said Erwan. He now felt a trifle embarrassed and proud. ‘Well, I made myself a pipe.’
‘You made yourself one? Class!’
‘Yeah.’ Erwan was now very embarrassed, but he enjoyed the sensation. ‘Yep. Here it is, my magnificent creation.’
He swung off the bed over to the windowsill where his homemade pipe hid behind the curtains. He lifted it gingerly and presented it to Emmett. He laughed and Emmett did too.
‘Jesus Christ man! Very good. Does it smoke?’
‘Like a, em, napalm bomb.’
‘Hm. Well, excellent. We should light that up later.’
‘All right.’ Erwan replaced the device in the windowsill. He would have preferred a more exact date and time, but later was good enough. He lounged back on the bed.
Meanwhile Emmett had had another look round. He saw the guitar leaning in the corner, 15W amp, waste bin with scrap-paper sticking out, sturdy desk with scratch marks all over it, blank cream walls with posters stuck, clothes draped over the wrought-iron radiator, bedside table with books lying on, glass of water, paper and pen, cds lying in boxes on the floor, stereo system on desk, clunky grey Macintosh computer with monitor occupying half the desktop surface.
Emmett pointed to the small fold-up aerial perched on top of the monitor. A lead ran from it to the back of the computer.
‘Can you watch TV with that?’
Erwan grinned. ‘Yes. There’s a TV card in it, my da got me that for my birthday last year. I can pick up BBC no problem; ITV and channel 4 not much; channel 5 not at all.’
‘Cool.’
‘Actually,’ said Erwan, rising and picking up the slim Observer TV guide that came each Sunday, ‘I’m going to watch a new TV version of ‘Crime and Punishment’ tonight. It’s on at … 9. Should be good, if you want to check it out.’
Erwan looked at Emmett encouragingly. Emmett looked interested and asked what it was about.
‘Oh, this guy Raskolnikov gets wound up, alone in his tiny wind-blown attic room day after day, fed gruel by his landlady, gets more wound up … I don’t really want to give much away. It’s by Dostoevsky, one of those mental Russian realist writers. Its good.’
‘Hm,’ said Emmett. ‘Yeah, I know that. Levin was reading it around Christmas.’
‘Aye. I gave it to him. He thinks its class.’
‘Ok,’ said Emmett, now catching Erwan’s enthusiasm and running with it. ‘All right, let’s watch it!’
‘Cool!’ Erwan glanced at the watch on his bedside cabinet. ‘Time for a quick jam?’
‘Have you guitars here?’
‘I’ve got the acoustic as well as the electric.’
‘Aye, why not.’
They took guitars, swapping occasionally, playing in that focused, concentrated style that had developed between them. Eventually Erwan stopped and stretched. He glanced at his watch.
‘Would you care for a little smoke?’
Emmett glanced at the device on the windowsill, and smiled nervously. ‘Yes,’ he said. He stood up.
Erwan advanced to the window.
The pipe was the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet tissue. One end had been affixed with a doubled-over square of tinfoil. A small hole about the width of a little finger pierced the cardboard one inch from the sealed end. Tin foil wrapped this hole and many little pinpricks dotted the crater to make a gauze. Another pen-sized hole split the end foil. It had all the elements necessary and nothing more.
‘This is not a pipe,’ said Erwan, holding it up as if it were a tribute to the gods.
He put it on the windowsill, opened the window, and scavenged a small plastic tube from his right jean. The plastic tube contained a worn sphere of brown resin. He took a cigarette lighter from the windowsill and burnt little shards of brown dope off the ball dropping them into the pinpricked depression formed in the roll. He placed a generous amount.
He held it up. ‘It’s a bit rough,’ he apologised.
‘I admire your ingenuity,’ said Emmett.
Erwan lit up, holding the pipe sealed at the pinhole with his left hand, sucked the flame down taking his finger off the pinhole holding the smoke then exhaling out the window. He motioned to Emmett. Emmett got up, nervous curiosity smiling on his face. He repeated Erwan’s actions to a tee. Then he coughed.
‘Rough,’ said Erwan.
‘It definitely is,’ said Emmett. ‘I think you need a proper gauze.’ He thumped his lungs to dislodge the burning particles of dope. ‘Ah fuck.’
‘Yeah, its all right.’
Erwan took another drag; then did Emmett; then did Erwan. By that point only ash remained. Erwan set the device down gingerly, his head beginning to swim. He shut the window and closed the curtains, returning to sit on the bed.
He looked at Emmett. The man seemed slightly pale, but content.
Erwan glanced at his bedside watch. ‘Oh. It’s nearly time for Crime and Punishment.’
He got up and turned the computer on. It took an eternity to load, rattling and screeching and burring in the way of the clunky beast. He stared at the keyboard trying to think through the sequence of events needed to pick the signal up. It was complex: like most events on a computer in those days, a meaningless series of arbitrary steps had to be performed to exact even the most simple objective.
Three minutes later the desktop picture appeared on the m
onitor: Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta were pointing Magnum .45s at a location just down and to the left of Emmett’s shoe.
‘Cool,’ said Emmett.
Various folders and files appeared scattered across the screen. Erwan selected a small bar from the top menu that slid revealing coloured blocks. He selected one that represented but did not resemble a TV. This opened a window that he promptly closed. From the file menu he reopened the window, and then from the options menu he deselected two ticked items. Then he went to the pre-tuned menu of TV channels and selected the one labelled ‘bbc2’.
‘I have to do it this way, or the whole thing crashes,’ Erwan said. ‘If I do anything in any different order it freezes and I need to restart the whole computer.’
‘Euh,’ said Emmett. ‘Restart the computer….’ A pause. ‘How did you discover the right way?’
Erwan smiled uncertainly. ‘I can’t remember – you just mess about until it starts working.’
‘Cool,’ said Emmett, as the grainy image of BBC 2 came onscreen.
Erwan made it full-screen and rotated the aerial 45° clockwise. This removed the ghosting and rendered the image surprisingly sharp.
‘Not bad,’ said Emmett, genuinely impressed.
Erwan plugged the external speakers into the headphone socket in the back of the computer under the table. Then he struggled back up again, just as the presenter was finishing:
‘… new two-part BBC rendition of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.’
Title music began.
Erwan and Emmett settled themselves on their seats to watch.
Some time later, an unknown time later that was not much later but somewhat stuffed all the same, Emmett began to feel somewhat uncomfortable, as if someone was stuffing him, full of sausage rolls and pastry snacks of evil. On screen Raskolnikov, this crazy impoverished starving student with raggedy beard, was hunting down this old haggard woman pawnbroker with an axe, a goddam axe – and what did he mean to do? He was going to beat her head in.
It was relentless. Raskolnikov this twisted guy, twisted from normality one moment into craziness next. Emmett couldn’t see the dividing line. There was not one, no clear one. Emmett could not tell where Raskolnikov was going wrong. And perhaps he wasn’t. And now this most uncomfortable scene: Raskolnikov to crack open the brains of a defenceless old woman in her own home and it might be the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to do. She was a leach on society.
Raskolnikov was crazy.
He advanced closer and closer, hiding, panting behind the door partition. Sweat beaded on Emmett’s brow. The music was become darker and darker, deep swirling trombones and screeching double bass disharmonies.
‘This is too dark,’ he said for the fourth time, clutching the armrests of the chair.
Erwan turned and nodded again, smiling enthusiastically. Emmett saw that the man plainly didn’t get it, didn’t realise what a depth of badness they were stinking in. He realised with sinking heart that he just wasn’t going to be able to stick it out. He got up.
‘Man I’m going to have to go I’m afraid,’ he said.
Erwan rose, taken aback, clearly anxious in case he had neglected some hostly duty.
‘Why? Is it really too much?’ said Erwan.
‘Aye man. In my present fucked state.’
Erwan hesitated, then turned the sound down on the monitor. Emmett could still see the dark shapes out of the corner of his eye. He stared at Erwan, grinning.
‘Aw! I’ll turn this off.’
‘No. You wanted to watch it. I should probably go home anyway, lectures and shit tomorrow.’
Erwan glanced out the window. ‘Dark out. Watch you for axe murderers.’
Emmett winced; the warning did not make him feel better. ‘Mm, thanks.’
‘One for the road?’
‘Mm – No. I’m grand man. Anyway, it’s been really class coming up here and seeing your place. I’ll pop up here again sometime. We’ll have another jam.’
‘Yeah, sure. You should read the book by the way, it’s really class.’
‘Sometime I will. All right man!’
‘Ok, see you later!’
Erwan was alone with the TV. He settled back immediately to watch the show, enjoying it but thinking it a pale imitation of the book. It ended at 10.00 pm with the voice of BBC promising to show the final instalment at the same time next Tuesday.
Erwan ate a few slices of bread, idly read a few pages of philosophy, felt mildly but pleasantly stoned, resisted the temptation to smoke more before going to bed. It was perfectly healthy to smoke alone, yes, perfectly healthy – but all the same, he’d have the chance tomorrow or the next day to drink a deliciously strong cup of tea.
He read in bed until, two hours later, he woke with his cheek mashed in a book.
The Big Pink Page 16