by Edward Docx
As I saw it (from the bottom of my tear-swamped pit) the big question was this: if this was life, how the living fuck did someone like Madeleine stand it? Intelligent, attractive, absurdly well-travelled, nobody’s fool – how did she fit in? How did she cope? Perhaps, I reflected, the problems were all mine. Perhaps I needed to do as William suggested and get myself to a shrink. Perhaps my adult life had been one long psychological condition – I was ready to admit as much. But surely, I thought, surely I was not alone in the world: surely, so-called advertising planners are the most fraudulent people alive; surely the price of property is the least interesting subject available to humanity; and surely, surely, surely viewer-vote-in television talent shows are utterly inexcusable life-insulting excrement. Surely, out there somewhere, all but forgotten, the truth is still standing, on a lonely mountainside perhaps, cragged and tall in the mist?
Eventually the end came – and with it what I mistook at the time for a thin strand of hope.
Phil was talking to me. ‘That’s a bit harsh, mate. Just because someone doesn’t share your taste in music you kill him.’
But Madeleine answered for me. ‘Jasper’s a bit anti-relativistic when it comes to the arts but I’ve got him on a programme to widen his horizons – oh yes, that reminds me: you remember that band I told you about? At the Empire in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s actually this Thursday. Can you still make it, Jasper?’
‘Yes. I think so. I mean –’
‘I’ve got a lunch that day but we could meet there or something.’ She smiled her killer’s smile in Phil’s direction. ‘And hey, who knows? Maybe pretty soon you’ll be coming with me to one of Phil’s nights in Old Street.’
And he grinned back. ‘Are you gonna come down next weekend, Mad?’
‘Sure,’ she said.
I broke in: ‘What are they called again?’
‘Who?’ Madeleine turned.
‘The guys at Shepherd’s Bush.’
‘Oh … they’re called Groove Catharsis.’
Rachel sat up drunkenly: ‘Boys are so much more competitive than girls. Don’t you think?’
I left them together when Rachel’s minicab arrived. For a while, I lingered in the street, choking on exhaust fumes and stillborn dreams as the car pulled away. Then I walked home. The night was black and cold.
15. The Message
Send home my long strayed eyes to me,
Which (oh) too long have dwelt on thee,
Yet since there they have learned such ill,
Such forced fashions,
And false passions,
That they be
Made by thee
Fit for no good sight, keep them still.
I stand alone on the grim grim grass of Shepherd’s Bush Green and wait for London’s oily night to smother me in its slick. Nearly ten o’clock and still the light won’t call it a day – hanging on, determined to stick around as long as possible as if to make some kind of a point.
Dead ahead, outside the fading Empire, the ticket touts have long ago knocked off and the three or four that remain talk among themselves in leather jackets halfway up the entrance stairs. Outside the burger bar, the young tramps hold hands and pray for money; and someone switches on the whirling blue light above the door to the minicab office.
I sit back down on my grimy bench. Here is no place to be waiting. Resentment is running things in this part of town, taking over, spreading out, claiming both elbow rests, demanding justice. Even the sign by the bin warns ‘Don’t feed the pigeons because it encourages the rats’ as if to suggest a degree of bitterness on the part of other residents about anyone getting any sort of encouragement about anything. The bin itself is on its last legs, pleading for urgent rescue before it chokes to death on cold kebab and rigid potato and bright red copies of ‘The Daily Gutter Sludge’ – ‘Match the Botty to the Totty’.
On the top decks of buses, which burp clockwise around my sentry post, gangs of youths point me out to other rival gangs of youths and they bury their differences and laugh. I am, I realize, thrice encircled: dog dirt, diesel dust, and an unbroken ring of fast-food joints: Shepherd’s Bush Green.
At least the pigeons don’t give a shit. At least the pigeons haven’t noticed. Listen, pal, we’ve got three hundredweight of kebab to process here before we hand over to the vermin for the night shift and – yeah – we appreciate you’ve been stood up and that’s tough, but we are seriously fucking busy right now so can you get out of the way or at least move your foot, for Christ’s sake? Jesus. Thank you.
And believe me, on Shepherd’s Bush Green there is a lot of shit to give. Tonnes of the stuff. Hillocks. Mountains. Ranges. So much so that I cannot believe that it is 100 per cent locally sourced. There just can’t be that many dogs in W12. They must be radioing for back-up. Pets from all over the country must be jetting themselves in around the clock to keep the place covered in shit.
Ten-thirty and now she’s two hours late. In another fifteen minutes Groove Catharsis will have finished their set and the audience will be coming out. It’s far too late to call her, of course. But I wish it would rain or the wind would get up or something.
Send home my harmless heart again,
Which no unworthy thought could stain,
But if it be taught by thine
To make jestings
Of protestings,
And cross both
Word and oath,
Keep it, for then ‘tis none of mine.
A sleepless night listening to the ghost of a summer storm go stealing through the city.
Yet send me back my heart and eyes,
That I may know, and see thy lies,
And may laugh and joy, when thou
Art in anguish
And dost languish
For some one
That will none,
Or prove as false as thou art now.
And so to Friday morning. An envelope on the doormat of number 33 Bristol Gardens, handwritten and addressed to me. Suspiciously, I open it.
Jasper,
So so so sorry. Tried to call but you were out – obviously. And don’t have your mobile. (Have you got one?) Got stuck at Casualty with a friend. Broken arm. Nothing serious. Give me a ring. Sorry, sorry and sorry again,
M.
Her handwriting is hideous, especially her Ys and her Gs and her thin, serpentine S.
16. The Apparition
When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink,
And then poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I; …
One of the most striking differences between the human mind and a computer is that the human mind has no ‘delete’ facility. Once you have an image on your hard drive, that’s it. Until you die.
I didn’t call her. I waited until the moon was in the garden then I climbed from my garret and stole across the grass barefoot to lay at her window a wreath of freshly cut tears.
Just kidding.
I went out and got absolutely fucking arseholed with Don’s big brother, Pete.
Don, who had last been in the country around the time of my birthday, was, as I mentioned then, a fellow student of philosophy now living in New York (but not Brooklyn). Pete, his older brother (who was also at my birthday dinner), had quickly become a good friend after he first came up to visit Don at college ten years ago. We saw each other infrequently but he and I had travelled abroad together several times and the day after the Shepherd’s Bush f
iasco, he was the man I called. I had an extra reason: six years ago, much to everyone’s delight, Pete had ‘given it all up’ to become a fashion photographer. (Must have been tough.) And he therefore knew and was adored by lots of seriously attractive women …
Of course, I used to do quite well with seriously attractive women. But that was long ago when I was cool. The night after Shepherd’s Bush, I couldn’t have talked a hooker into giving me a hand-job with two million, cash, up front. That Friday: forget about it.
Oh sure, I tried it on with the Vanessas and the Tessas, the Pollys and the Hollys, and even a Giselle. But did they want to know? Not a chance. I might as well have been a long-haul live-calves trucker with the whole deck: body odour, halitosis, dandruff, acne, athlete’s foot, nasal hair and ungovernable wind. That Friday I slept with the dawn traffic and the drizzle and bits of yesterday’s paper.
Obviously, I was superhumanly drunk, which probably means I was extremely rude, which probably didn’t help. And obviously I took all the drugs that I could physically get into my body, including (I seem to remember) some weird, light brown-coloured cocaine that might just have been cinnamon. And obviously, I was suicidal.
The full details simply are not available. There are a few picture grabs and some unsatisfactory amateur footage but no proper coverage of the night’s events. It seems I left Pete at whatever nightclub we were in quite early (or it could have been quite late) with a plan to say hello to an Argentinian I knew (or maybe I didn’t) who often hung around one of the secret drinking dens at the back of Tottenham Court Road, dancing salsa with her pals. But I’m not sure I made it. I have a frame of me offering a cup of coffee – still in its saucer – to a woman through a taxi window. Then some blurry husband shit happened. I was definitely in Dick’s for a while, telling people to fuck off while they still had a chance. Which puts me still in Soho after three. And I do remember a woman with dark hair (but it may well have been a man). Did we kiss? Who knows? I don’t think so. (I have good tranny-resistor functionality when I’m sober but you can’t be sure of anything when you’re running on backup power sources and everything is continually crashing.) If she was a woman, I wish her well and apologize if I went straight to tongues. If she was a man, well then the fucker should have known what was coming.
After that – who knows? I have some more shaky snapshots of a man who looks like me soldiering through Soho in the dead-of-the-morning dark (when even the refuse men refuse to share a joke and the all-night tramps start to shake their heads as if to say that you’d really better pull yourself together, bud, get a hold of your life and tell it who’s boss) but I am also pretty sure that I decided to catch some sleep beside the Marylebone Road – so I may have quit town much earlier (or later) than I thought.
In any case, it was a complete waste of time. The very first image that came into my head when I awoke was … Madeleine. Full screen. Close up. Undeleted.
Four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. And the phone was ringing.
‘Jasper?’
‘Will.’
‘Hi, it’s me – Will.’
‘I know.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I am trying not to die before the world has a chance to forgive me.’
‘Problems?’
‘Uh.’
‘What’s happening with you know who?’
‘Toilet.’
‘Toilet?’
‘The whole thing is in the toilet.’
‘Christ. That bad?’
‘Best friend syndrome.’
‘Oh God – no.’
‘I think.’ A desert wind blew mournfully across the line. Then my hangover screamed, angry that my attention had wandered. ‘What do you want, William? I have been out all night and I really have to go back to bed. Please, is there a point on the horizon?’
‘I want a nice farmhouse in the country where we can settle down together. You could paint your manuscripts – or whatever it is that you do – and I could tend orchids and keep my bees and write wry letters to the newspapers and all our friends would be secretly jealous and –’
‘For Christ’s sake, I am very seriously ill. And I haven’t done any work for days so will you please fuck off.’ I almost hung up. I should have hung up. In the next life, I shall insist on better friends.
‘Well, how about a party in Notting Hill to make you feel better?’
My heart sank – as hearts so often do.
‘You can tell me your shit and we’ll think of a plan,’ he added.
I could barely speak. ‘I feel too ill. Honestly, Will. I was out last night with Pete.’
He continued, cajoling: ‘Wall to wall with devastatingly attractive women and all of them calling me on the hour, every hour, to say that only you – only you personally – can really make them feel better. We could meet beforehand for a drink if you like. Catch up on the latest gossip from our Yoga classes.’
‘Oh Will, you know how much I hate Notting Hill.’
And so it was that at seven-thirty on a Saturday evening, clean-shaven, though still feeling jaded, faded, weak and deeply weary, I stepped out on to Bristol Gardens once again and set my course for Warwick Avenue, there to find myself a cab from the rank.
I slammed the door shut.
‘Notting Hill, please,’ I said. ‘By the Tube.’
‘You wanna get out and be sick?’
‘No,’ I replied, mildly alarmed at the speed of the question. ‘No really, I’m fine. Just a little queasy – I’ve got a big hangover still. From yesterday.’
‘Right.’ We pitched into the traffic. There was a moment’s silence then two pale eyes appeared in the rearview mirror, stagnant pools in the wet limestone of a face. ‘Because if you wanna be sick, mate, then you’ve gotta get out of the cab, right? Because I’m not bloody clearing it up.’
‘OK, OK. Honestly, I am not going to be sick.’
We swilled around the Paddington basin a couple of times and then surged over the canal bridge towards the station itself, the black hackney sluicing through the traffic lanes like a blood clot in search of the heart.
No doubt about it, I wasn’t looking my best. And the monster, though loathsome, nonetheless had a point. I was not feeling well. The sleep deprivation, the poisons, the relentless behavioural adaptation – it all exacts a toll. And now and then I do get car-sick, especially when I am already feeling ill before the journey begins. And especially when I get the hideous drivers … the sproutings, the dandruff-speckled collar.
‘Good day? Bad day?’ I asked, as matter of fact as I could manage.
‘What’s that?’
I raised my voice: ‘I was just asking: has it been a good day or a bad day?’
‘Shit. All day. All week.’
‘Oh.’ The taxi banked left as we coursed into another traffic stream and I rolled sideways across the back seat, the nausea rolling through me in noxious waves. ‘What do you put it down to?’
‘What’s that?’ He lifted his hand to cup a grisly ear.
I raised my voice again. ‘What do you put it down to? I mean, why is business slow at the moment?’
‘Don’t know, mate. Time of the month. Heh heh.’
I left it there for the time being and focused my faltering mind on the splendid views. We were cleaving our way through the various cars, buses, trucks and vans that swirl ever faster about Paddington station itself, as if looking for some plughole into which to pour themselves and so be gone forever. We came to a stop at the junction with Praed Street and the light changed suddenly as the sun slipped out from behind a cloud, so that for a moment it was possible to see the air itself, grimy as a mechanic’s cloth, before the eye readjusted and transparency was restored. Gathered on the corner by the lights, smashed and raw like some final delegation of lunatics picnicking between bedlams, the London drunks gnashed and swore at the stationary vehicles. The buses belched by in the bus lane. All around, life staggered on like some grim-faced marathon runner beari
ng news of defeat.
Periodically, the creature glanced up at the mirror. He was watching me. But I didn’t care. I was holding my head in my hands, massaging the temples with my thumbs. Or clasping my stomach. Or clutching my knees.