With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  2

  They find a stash of empty pop bottles beneath the sink in the scullery of the half-timbered house near the church, abandoned for years, the bare rooms filled with traces of sheltering tramps. There must be a hundred at least, some with labels and some without. They work it out. Three pence a bottle makes twenty-five shillings, a fortune. He brings his wheeled cart and together they load the bottles into it; it takes them a good half-day to rinse them out in her garden shed. They carry them to the pub, the only place they can collect the deposit. The landlady looks at the bottles as they’re lifted and stacked on the counter, then looks at them. They wait.

  3

  He’s waiting for his father to get home, standing on the sofa beside the bay window that looks onto the street. When the car comes round the corner he waves and jumps up and down. His father drives past the window and beneath the arch that leads into the yard, then storms into the house. He’s furious. He walks across the room and grabs the arm of his son, who’s still on the sofa, and pulls him off until the boy is half-standing, half-crouching on the floor. His father slaps him round the back of the head. By the time his mother comes in they’re both shaking. That sofa’s new, his father says. He must think I’m made of money.

  4

  When his mother buys a shop he’s introduced to the idea of credit, or ‘tick’. He learns that some people are good for credit and others aren’t, and that those who most need it, people who live on brown sauce sandwiches and have budgerigars flying free in their lounges, are those who most often are denied it. His mother says this can’t be helped. His father says money doesn’t grow on trees, but it seems to him that those with trees are those who have money, and that those whose gardens are filled with broken prams and dog shit and no trees are those who need credit, and don’t get it. Maybe his father is wrong. Maybe they’re all wrong.

  5

  His father collects old pennies. He has a boxful, some of them older than he is, curved and worn thin and black as coal, and a book containing lists of their values. Some pennies, he says, are like stamps, like Penny Blacks, and are worth more than they say they’re worth, as though some magic has been done on them. They have their own value and another, magical value, and his father has the book of spells that confers this value. Each night, he polishes his coins and organises them into piles, then checks them against the book. He’s too busy to talk to anyone. He’s convinced that one day he will find the penny that will change their lives.

  6

  A friend of his becomes obsessed by one-armed bandits. He spends whole evenings in the Castle, his bitter glass balanced on the top of the machine as it shakes and whirls its unholy trinity, as it eggs him on, his spirited and unlikely partner, until he can feed it no longer. His aunt was also addicted to fruit machines, her pension, and then her house, devoured by them. But he’s never been taken in by gambling; convinced of his natural luck, he won’t have that conviction dented. When he buys a lottery ticket and doesn’t win, it’s as if he’s lost something already his. He feels both cheated and incredulous, betrayed in his way as his aunt was in hers.

  7

  He’s going through some old papers when he finds a manila envelope from his university days. It’s full of cheques, from the days when a bank would give its customers back each cheque they’d signed. It’s the nearest thing he possesses to a diary of those years. The sums are small, often no more than a pound, and the frequency more or less daily. It’s a pity they don’t have the time they were cashed. He’d bet now most of them were scribbled and taken to the bank next door to his college at some point between three and three fifteen. And so his day would start, as he learned the value of money by signing its mystery into life.

  8

  His first year in Milan, in the city’s shops and bars, he’s given scraps of paper bearing the names of one-branch banks from southern towns, dirty and creased, their colours smudged. Like toffees and telephone tokens, they’re standing in as change. The coins they replace have been recycled as the backs of cheap wristwatches, or melted down into their component metals. These so-called mini-assegni are tokens of trust in as pure a sense as can be imagined. When that trust fails, what you have is shabby confetti, only redeemed by travelling to the constellation of single banks that issued them, a thousand kilometres south. One day, you take the train, your pockets stuffed with paper as the bare heat builds.

  9

  For five months, waiting for his first salary, he lives on a roll with jam for breakfast, a roll with cheese for lunch and a plate of spaghetti with garlic and tomato sauce for dinner. Each day he drinks a half-litre of milk and a litre of local wine. He’s worked out that he can live like this for the rest of his life. He buys his rolls and cheese from the grocer’s beneath the flat and his wine from the enoteca opposite. He’s thrilled by the way he looks in photos, like a dissident in a gulag. He dreams about money the way other people dream about alien abductions. When he’s paid he stands in the street and cries.

  10

  His horoscope says he’ll experience periods of wealth and periods of poverty. He doesn’t believe in horoscopes, but, deep down, he does believe, just as he doesn’t believe in money, but deep down, he does believe; he has no choice but to believe. He feels the protection money can offer and then withhold until he’s learned some useful lesson. He puts his hand in a pocket one day and finds a five pound note when it’s needed. He’s the only person around one August to take on a job that changes his life. He doesn’t save. He hopes. He likes the story about the two loaves of bread, how one loaf is eaten, and the other exchanged for a flower.

  1

  One morning, he takes a ten shilling note from his mother’s handbag. He cycles into the next village and buys ten No. 6 ‘for his aunt’. On his way out of the shop, he’s spotted by his aunt, on her way into the shop. She asks him what he’s up to so far from home. Nothing, he says and gets on his bike. Halfway back, he throws the packet of cigarettes into the ditch. He cycles another quarter mile, then flings the change from the cigarettes across the hedge into a field. His mother never notices the money is missing. His aunt never mentions seeing him. He goes back three days later, but can’t find the cigarettes or the money.

  2

  They go into the fishmonger’s, pretending they don’t know each other. One of them asks for half a pint of whelks. While the fishmonger fetches the whelks from a fridge at the back of the shop, the other student reaches into the tank in the window and lifts out a lobster, then runs into the street with the lobster hidden beneath his jacket. Walking back to the counter, the fishmonger hears a startled yelp from outside the shop and glances at the first student with a puzzled look on his face, but doesn’t notice there’s a lobster missing. After they’ve treated the nip on the thief’s hand with antiseptic, they throw the lobster into a pot and watch it die.

  3

  Dawdling on his way back to the changing room after football, he’s last boy out of the showers. He starts to get dressed but he can’t find his underpants. The only pair he can see, lying on his bit of the bench, are some torn and greying Y-fronts, elastic gone at the waist, a fresh skid mark at the arse. Too embarrassed to say anything he waits until all the other boys have gone, then puts them on. When his mother spots them on his bedroom floor she hits the roof and calls the school. At morning assembly next day, the headmaster threatens everyone with detention until the missing underpants are returned. Everyone turns to stare at him, ashamed, humiliated.

  4

  He’s spent all night at the station, heaving sacks of Christmas mail from trains onto the platform. When he clocks off at six o’clock, he’s coming down from a big fat line of coke and has a terrible thirst. At the bus stop, he picks up a milk bottle from a step. It’s half-empty when a police car pulls up. He’s arrested and charged with theft. Three and a half weeks later he’s in court. He’s fined six pounds and the cost of a bottle of gold top. He pays by cheque. By this time Christmas is over and he no longer has a job. He use
s the summons to roll a joint that doesn’t draw, however hard he sucks.

  5

  One afternoon, he takes his mother around town in a wheelchair. After sharing a BLT at Costa’s they go to a charity shop near the statue of Prince Albert in Queen’s Square. His mother asks him to hand down all the size sixteen tops from the upper rail. He stands beside the chair and hands them down, one after the other. It’s not until they leave the shop and his mother wants her compact from her handbag, which he’s placed in the detachable carrier at the back of the wheelchair, that he realises the handbag’s been stolen. Someone must have taken it in the charity shop while he was distracted. Some charity, the policewoman says. They ought to be shot.

  6

  During morning break he steals a packet of tampons from the corner shop while his friends are buying sweets and chocolate bars. Around the corner, they rip open the box and unwrap a tampon, shooting it out from the cardboard tube with gusts of laughter. At school, when everyone has seen the tampons and nobody shows any further interest, he sneaks down to the teachers’ car park during lunch and ties a tampon to each of the door handles of the cars belonging to the headmaster, the deputy headmaster, both men, and the history teacher, a woman. They go down to the car park after school to see what will happen but someone has removed the tampons, and nothing does.

  7

  He’s working at a summer school for foreign teenagers. Sorting through their washed laundry one day he finds the underpants of a boy from Como. The boy is the son of a famous industrialist, who was kidnapped once and then released. Like all the boy’s clothes, these were made for him by a tailor. They are modelled on the standard Y-front design, but are hand-stitched and feel as if they contain silk. They are monogrammed across the buttoned fly. He thinks of the measuring and the boy’s skin, which is uniformly golden, and has an erection. When he has sorted the rest of the students’ clothes, he picks up the underpants, folds them neatly and slips them into his pocket.

  8

  They get the munchies one night and decide to see what they can find. Two of them sneak into a communal kitchen on the next landing up and are caught by a born-again Christian, red-handed with two eggs and a slice of cheese. They put them back where they found them, mumbling about charity, and return to their room for another joint. A quarter of an hour later, the third one reappears with an untouched quiche Lorraine on a plate. They ask him where it came from and he giggles. From inside someone’s room. The next day they’re having lunch in the canteen and they hear someone tell his friend about a quiche-eating ghost. He says, I’ll never sleep again.

  9

  He’s standing on a bus in Rome when he sees a good-looking lad glancing his way. The bus is crowded. As more people get on, he edges his way down the aisle until his thigh and then his arse are pressed against the lad’s leg. He lets the bus jolt him against the leg as it shifts and flexes. He has a hard-on by now. He can feel the lad’s hand adjusting his trousers, pressing against him. He pushes towards the exit, the lad close behind him, hot and hard, exploratory. When the bus stops he gets off and turns to smile but the lad’s not there. He’s struck by a sense of loss. He checks his back pocket. Empty.

  10

  The first time he waits to pay for the book, but no one comes to the till, and he leaves with it in his hand. The second time he slides the book into his pocket after glancing around. After that it’s simple. Soon, he begins to steals on commission. He’s crouched down with his bag open and his hand on a book about the Hittites when some movement catches his eye. He looks up and sees a man he knew, who died three years before. The man is smiling and looking towards another part of the bookshop. Following his eyes, he sees a floorwalker heading his way. He puts the book back. He leaves the shop. He never steals again.

  1

  They’re painting in her mother’s laundry. It’s a room with a washing machine and a dryer and the air is damp and warm. Kneeling together on the floor with tubes of colour and paper, neither of them is sure what to do, but her parents have paintings in the house and the pressure to produce is strong. They’ve acquired the idea that art is self-expression, which doesn’t help. Their knees are beginning to hurt. He writes the word Pain in blue letters and then adds a ‘t’ to make Paint. The cleaning lady comes in with a basket of dirty washing. If you haven’t got anything better to do, she says, you can help me peg out the last lot.

  2

  A friend of his mother’s studied art. She has a painting hanging on the landing. It’s hard to say what it shows, it is colours and shapes, but he can’t not look at it. He touches the surface to make sure it’s real and not a print, and the paint is rough, and ridged, and alive. He lingers at the top of the stairs after using the bathroom, until his mother’s friend comes to see what he’s doing. Did you make this? he says. She shakes her head. Beautiful, isn’t it? she says. I’d like to be an artist, he says, and make paintings like this. She strokes his hair from his forehead. Let this be our secret, she says.

  3

  Art class is on Tuesday afternoon. They’re supposed to have drawn a pencil sketch of a pair of shoes. He’s planned to tell the teacher he’s forgotten his sketch pad, but two other boys before him use the same excuse, so he decides he’ll risk the truth. He spent the entire weekend searching out shoes, his plimsolls with the elastic tabs, the wellington boots his father uses to clean the henhouses, his mother’s court shoes with the heels too high for her to wear, his sister’s Startrite sandals, but none of them inspired him enough to want to draw them. His first lesson. I didn’t ask for inspiration, his teacher says, clipping him round the ear. I asked for shoes.

  4

  They’ve found a thin white book of Botticelli reproductions to copy from. They laugh about the name for a while, then start to look through the plates, the word they’ve learned to use for pictures. The book is part of a series called Masters of Colour, although the colours in this one are nothing compared to the ones in the Chagall. Chagall’s stuff also looks easier to copy and they’re on the point of opting for a picture of a flying mermaid when he flicks through the Botticelli a final time and sees the man with his hand on his hip reaching up into a fruit tree. He’s holding what looks like a fly swatter. Let’s copy this, he says.

  5

  He has a Pre-Raphaelite period in his mid-teens. It’s the levelling out of attention that intrigues him, as though no leaf mattered more than any other, no person mattered more than any leaf. It goes against what he knows of nature so violently that he feels at home in the bright vermilion splashes and acid green lichen of the rock where the scapegoat wanders. He lies like Ophelia herself, submerged in improbable water, his skin indistinguishable from the flowers, a sort of madness on him. And then, just as soon as it came, the madness leaves him and he rises from the water and walks back into the house, freed, focused on some necessary thing, with everything else a haze.

  6

  The Blind Leading the Blind. He buys a poster of the Bruegel painting for the space above his desk and sticks it up with Blu-Tack, though he’d have preferred to have it framed. Other people have Magritte, or Dali, or David Hamilton, but he likes the realism of the Bruegel, its harshness and humour, the way the faces already resemble skulls. He likes the idea of an artist painting the image of a man who cannot see, of a string of men. He likes the cynicism of it, and the hopelessness. He’s young enough to find pleasure in these, and the church that no one will enter, and the fact that the cause of each man’s blindness can be identified.

  7

  He’s introduced by a friend who makes pressings of sheets of slate to a group of Austrian artists. He hears about how they use blades and knives and ropes to break down the defences of the bourgeois body. He sees pictures of human heads disfigured by ordure, of piss and entrails and genitals. He’s shocked, disturbed, alerted to desires in himself. He wants to know how art can be made irreversible by the artist’s removing his own arm, his own tongue. His penis. He sees for the first time the body as a site of
outrage, and of power, and then he doesn’t want to know any more, and pulls away from the place they’ve tried to lead him into.

  8

  There is more than one way of being mad. He walks around an exhibition of magical writing and armies of marauding schoolgirls, of endlessly repeated vehicles of war. An artist whose work he first saw in a book his parents gave him when he was ten is now making images of cows from dust and what might be dung, and cities from the same materials, and cars and people, and they’re lovely, childlike in their shameless, apparently artless engagement. And then there’s Warhol and the same face over and over again, and ideas of fame that are new, although it’s hard to believe that now, three decades on, with the madness at full pitch and the armies at every door.

  9

  The line between art and the intricate wonder of the new toy grows finer. But all is not lost. Among the medicine cabinets and the lacquered poodles, the labia and the lingam, the tangles of monumental wire, there are human-sized quilts sewn by women in territories ravaged by men’s wars, and other quilts made in Margate that test the heart. Sometimes, he thinks, it’s the women who most disturb; the washing, the plates, the spider a tribe could shelter under, the tights filled with foam, the cuddly toys like trophies around the neck of a soldier, penises, ears, a string of dung dyed wedding red. The whole bloody mess of the home, like a secret he has kept from himself.