- Mephistophilis
(Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus)
Harold hadn't been down to the homeless shelter for several weeks. I asked about him, asked anyone that I knew to be a friend of his if they'd seen him, and got only shaken heads and frowns in reply. "Think he might've gone up north," was one suggestion, but I knew Harold: with winter approaching, the last direction he would be heading in was northwards. London, for all its faults, at least had the advantage of being a few degrees warmer than Manchester or Newcastle, and once winter set in Harold stayed here usually until the first buds appeared on the trees. More to the point, he never left the city for long. A week or two, three at the most, and then, his wanderlust satisfied, his footsteps would turn towards the capital again, London a Saturn whose heavy gravitational pull he could not escape.
No, there was definitely something wrong, and once I had begun to fear the worst, every little symptom of poor health that Harold had exhibited the last time I'd seen him took on a new and sinister significance. That cough of his - it had been getting worse, hadn't it? Had been turning bronchial, definitely. And the sore on his forehead - just a lesion? Or a sarcoma? God, I'd lost count of the number of times I'd heard about one of the shelter regulars turning his or her toes up overnight, for no reason other than that the unending hardships of the vagrant lifestyle had finally taken their toll. Harold had been in no worse shape than most of them, but that didn't mean he couldn't still be lying undiscovered beneath a shambles of newsprint in an alley somewhere, clenched in a foetal knot of death.
I missed him, and though I didn't give up hope that he might still be alive, quietly, privately, I began to mourn him. Of all the strange and mad and sad and extraordinary human beings who passed through the doors of the homeless shelter, Harold was perhaps the most remarkable. In his time, before answering the call of the road, he had been a fireman, a trawlerman, a professor of linguistics at a minor provincial university, war correspondent for a French magazine, and campaign manager for a Colombian presidential candidate; he had worked as a missionary in Zaire and had also enjoyed a career as a petty criminal back here at home; he had fitted curtains, carpets and men's suits, had sold double glazing, life insurance and Jesus door-to-door, and had earned an Olympic bronze for pistol-shooting, a gold disc for a song he co-wrote that was made popular by Marti Wilde in the sixties, and the respect of a number of peers of the realm for his sound advice on the preservation of British wetlands (his suggestions led to a Bill being passed in Parliament). And these were just the achievements I knew about. Harold darkly hinted that there were more, and that he had done some things so shady, so hush-hush, that if he told me what they were he would have to kill me. He said that he had run errands for people so nebulously important and powerful that even politicians in the highest echelons of government didn't know they existed, and that his eyes had passed over official documents the contents of which were so alarming they would have turned my hair white. He said this in that calm, cultured voice of his that only served to reinforce the impression that he was truly au fait with the secret workings of the world, the unseen cogs which turned the hands on the clockface of everything that ordinary people perceived.
He was, of course, lying his arse off. Everybody knew that. Even I, who was born with the word "gullible" stamped across my forehead, had ceased to believe anything Harold told me after the first couple of fables I had fallen for. Harold lived to lie. It was his craft, his art, his true vocation. He did not do it idly or maliciously, to start gossip or spread a rumour or destroy a reputation. He lied the way you or I might collect records or read books. It was his recreation. It took him out of himself. It cleared his head of mind-junk, spring-cleaned the attics of his brain. It was a diversion, an entertainment, a stage act. Harold didn't expect anyone to believe his stories, but he told them anyway, and out of politeness or admiration or a weird kind of gratitude no one turned round to him and said, "Shut your mouth, Harold, I can't breathe for the stink of your bullshit." Once you'd been seduced by a tale of his - and Harold was always careful to hook a new listener with one of his more plausible lines - you couldn't help but admire the eloquence and the unselfconscious audacity with which he wove his webs of untruth, and marvel at the lengths he would go to in order to keep you, and himself, amused. Nothing in Harold's imaginary world could be proved. Nothing, equally, could be disproved, so it was foolish to try to reason or argue with him. Any objection would only be met with a bigger lie, and if you persisted in protesting, claiming that what he was telling you contradicted another story he had told you earlier or else was blatantly impossible, his tales would just grow taller and taller and taller until he had built a wall of mendacity so high it could not be scaled, and you gave up, exhausted. Resistance was futile. It was easier simply to accept what Harold said at face value and, if you were in the mood, perhaps let drop a well-chosen question that would encourage him to yet more outrageous flights of fancy. And maybe, just maybe, if you got lucky, this lifelong liar might trip himself up and accidentally find himself telling the truth. You never know.
I've always thought that Harold would have made a fine novelist or playwright. He had the vocabulary for it, the skill with language. He spoke the way most people write, in well-formed, thought-through sentences, which made it all the more logical for me to suggest, as I did once, that he set the story of his life down on paper (by which I meant compose a work of fiction). Harold's reply was uncharacteristically straightforward and self-effacing: "What would be the point, Mark? If I wrote it down, who would believe it?"
And now he was gone, or so it seemed. As the days shortened and the trees shed and the sky turned hazy like a cataracted eye, and still Harold did not show, the hope that I had been nurturing like the last ember in a grate gradually dwindled and cooled. Every evening, having left the office and arrived at the shelter in time to help with the dinner shift, I would walk slowly along the rows of tables, checking each bearded face I saw, smiling if its owner caught my eye and offered a greeting, but smiling without any joy or conviction. And then, as I doled out food to the shuffling, murmuring queue, each face would come under scrutiny again. Harold might, after all, have shaved his beard. He might have got rid of - far more likely lost - the battered, greasy Homburg that never left his head, even on hot days. He might even have had to part company with his army-surplus greatcoat. But however he looked I would have recognised him instantly, had he shambled up to me, plate outstretched, to receive his helping of mashed potato. You do not easily forget the face of a friend.
Finally I became so concerned that I called the police, though I knew they would tell me that there was about as much chance of tracking down a missing vagrant as there was of finding a lost sock at a launderette. Which they did, albeit somewhat more tactfully. I gave them a description of Harold and a list of his known haunts, and was assured that an eye would be kept out for him. This was the best I could hope for, but it didn't prevent me from feeling aggrieved and frustrated. Vivian, the shelter supervisor, sympathised but pointed out that someone like Harold, who had fallen through a hole in the net of society, would always be in danger of slipping out of sight altogether. "These people have already, to a certain degree, disappeared," she said, raising a wise eyebrow. "There's little to stop them taking a last little hop, skip and jump to the left and vanishing completely."
I didn't understand precisely what she meant, but I accepted the basic truth of the statement. In desperation, I pinned my home and office phone numbers to the shelter noticeboard, with a request to the other volunteers to get in touch with me, no matter what time of day or night, should Harold show up. And winter deepened, and a rare December snow came down in thick flurries and left London with an ankle-deep coating of sooty slush, and Christmas came and went, and a New Year crawled over the horizon filled with the promise of much the same as last year, and January turned bitter, and the last spark of hope that Harold might still be alive winked out, and I learned to live with t
he fact that I would never see him again.
Then one morning, around about four o'clock, the phone rang, and the voice of one of the damned croaked my name.
The tiny portion of my brain that never goes to sleep knew who it was straight away, but the bit that thinks it does the thinking needed longer to place the identity of the caller, so, playing for time, I muttered something about the ungodliness of the hour and told whoever it was that he had better have a bloody good reason for waking me up. There was a long silence at the other end of the line, but even though I thought the connection had been cut, something prevented me from putting down the receiver. Then the voice spoke again. It sounded as though each word was being forged only with great effort and pain.
"I saw your note on the board. I must speak with you."
My conscious brain finally engaged gear with my subconscious. "Harold? Jesus, is that you, Harold?"
"It is."
"Well, I mean... What's happened? Where have you been? Are you all right? No, OK, listen, you're at the shelter, right? I'll be straight over. Man, I really thought I was never going to hear from you again. Wow. OK, Harold, stay put. I'll be right there."
"Listen," Harold said and, from the effort of concentrating so much energy into the command, left himself speechless again. There was breathing - sore, laboured breathing - and then the pips went. I shouted at Harold to give me the number of the payphone so that I could call him back, but he managed to insert a coin in time.
"This is how it is, Mark," he said. "I'm not at the shelter now. I've been there and I got your number there, but I didn't stay long - I didn't want anyone seeing me. I'm coming round to call on you at your place. I need the address."
"OK." I gave it to him and said I'd have a hot cup of tea waiting for him when he arrived.
Either he didn't hear or he didn't care. "I'll be about an hour," he said, and hung up.
After a shower and a shave, I sat down in front of the television. A Bollywood movie was showing. The hour passed slowly, with me drifting again and again towards the threshold of sleep and just managing to snap myself awake each time, with the result that my impressions of the film were a bewildering, fragmented chaos of blue gods, portly heroes in polyester shirts and women dancing sinuously. At last the doorbell rang. I switched off the television, lit the gas beneath the kettle, and buzzed Harold up, leaving the flat door ajar. The concrete staircase that served all the flats in the building was uncarpeted and Harold's slow shuffling footfalls echoed all the way up. When he reached the landing outside my door he hesitated, pondering, breathing hard, and then, with a feeble knock, he entered.
Nothing could have prepared me for the profound change that had come over him. It wasn't just that he had lost weight, more weight than a man in his circumstances can afford to lose. Nor was it the unkempt straggliness of his hair and beard, which he was normally at pains to keep brushed and trimmed and tidy. It wasn't that his once-pristine greatcoat was mud-stained and had a number of torn seams, or that frostbite had left three of his fingertips black, shrivelled and hard. It wasn't even the way he walked, stooped over where once he had carried himself with dignified erectness, bent as though bearing an invisible boulder on his back. It was his eyes that shocked me the most. While the rest of him had been somehow lessened, his eyes were larger and wider than I remembered them, and stared, crazy-veined, with a despairing emptiness from oyster-grey sockets. They looked without seeing, and when they finally found me standing by the stove in the small kitchen area of the living room, it took them a while to focus on me and make sense of me.
Forcing on a smile, I pretended that there was nothing different about him. "Hey, man, how're you doing? It's good to see you. I'm glad you're alive."
His reply was dragged up from a moss-encrusted well of misery: "I'm not."
Without saying another word he plodded over to the living-room window and, with some effort, drew back the curtains. The street was misty, the milky air tinged orange by the streetlights, the houses opposite blank-windowed and cold-shouldering. It was the dead hour of the night, when the pavements belong to cats and foxes, when no cars disturb the stillness and you can almost hear the burn of the neon bulbs in their casings. Harold gazed out for a long time. It was almost as if he couldn't bear, or didn't dare, to take his eyes off the city for a second. The kettle burped steam and I made us tea, and it was only when I nudged Harold on the shoulder with a full mug that he turned away from the window and, with a nod of thanks, accepted the mug, made his way over to the armchair and settled down. I took to the sofa, and in the eerie small-hours quiet we sat without talking and sipped without tasting. The pain that had been clearly audible in Harold's last remark kept me from asking him anything. Though I burned to know what had happened to him, and though I was deeply concerned about the state of both his physical and his mental health, I realised I would have to wait for him to speak; the only way he was going to give up any information was by volunteering it. And while I hated myself for even giving them head-room, the words "cancer" and "AIDS" did flit across my mind. What else but a terminal illness could so ravage a man, suck so much of the juice out of him, make a husk of him in such a short space of time?
"You want to know where I've been, don't you?" Harold said at last, haltingly, like a man treading barefoot over sharp stones. "Gone all this time - must be dead, right? Sometimes, you know, I think I am dead. I feel dead, that's for sure. If this isn't how it feels to be dead, I don't know what does."
"I was worried. We all were, all of us at the shelter. You'd never been away for so long before."
Harold didn't seem to care that someone cared. "I'm going to tell you something now, Mark, and you'd better listen, because I'm never going to tell another living soul. I'm not even sure I should be telling you."
"If this is a matter of national security," I joked, "perhaps I shouldn't be -"
"This is real." From beneath the brim of his Homburg Harold fixed me with his eyes. Briefly they gained a lustre, though it was not the pleasant twinkling light that accompanied his forays into falsehood; this was a mean light, bitter in its brightness, harsh and hard. "This is something that actually happened to me, and I'm telling you because I have to tell someone. Because I'll go mad if I don't. I regret, for your sake, that it has to be you, but of all the people I know you're the one I trust most to remember and believe. Everyone else will think I'm making it up. Everyone else will think this is just another of Harold's stories."
It was the first time I'd heard him even come close to admitting that the tales he told about himself, the tales he maintained in the face of all opposition were true, were lies. While it didn't amount to an outright confession, it was near enough to one to make me sit up and pay attention, which was perhaps what Harold had intended.
"You know me, Mark," he continued. "I've been wandering London for a fair old number of years now. I think I know this city pretty well. As well as a husband knows the body of his wife, you might say. There's not a street I haven't been down, not a square inch of pavement in the Greater London area that hasn't seen the soles of my feet. I've worn parts of this city away with walking. It's worn parts of me away in return. I really thought there was nothing new in it, nothing that could surprise me. It turns out I was mistaken.
"It happened last October. Nice, wasn't it, October? Mild, mellow, calm. Trees putting on their autumn firework display. Lovely weather to be out in, all the more lovely because you know it's not going to last. Well, I'd strayed into the suburbs, south of the river. Down Balham way. There's a couple of churches round there that open their crypts at night to let us sleep in them. One of them has a health-care place attached to it, you can get seen by a doctor almost straight away, and I'd had a cough that had been bothering me for weeks, you probably remember. The doctor said it was nothing serious and gave me some antibiotics for it, and I left the health-care place feeling pretty good about myself, the way you do when you're ill and you've just been to see the doctor and he's given you
something that you know is going to make you well again. I'd got a meal inside me, too, from one of those charity vans that do the rounds. Soup and sandwiches: God's way of saying, 'Cheer up, old fellow, things aren't so bad.' And I'd picked up a pair of trainers from a skip - these trainers I've got on here - and they happened to fit me just right. Air-cushioned soles, nearly new. That put a spring in my step, all right. So I had just about every creature comfort you could think of, nothing whatsoever to complain about. I wonder if that had something...? No, never mind. I'll just tell you the story straight. It hurts too much to think too hard about it.
"London lives. You know that, don't you? Perhaps you don't. It's true of every big city, of course, but it's something you're only aware of if you know that city well, and the way to get to know a city well is not to travel across it by bus or tube, not to drive around it in a car, but to walk through it. That's when you're moving at its own pace, do you see? Contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing fast about cities. The people who live in them may rush around all the time, but cities themselves grow and change so slowly, it's hard to see it happening. It's like mould forming, like a rising-damp stain spreading across a patch of wallpaper. A building goes up, a building comes down, and most of the time we're whizzing by too quickly to notice. Haven't you ever found yourself strolling down a street you know well, only to be caught up short because a house you didn't even realise was being demolished has gone? Whish! Like a conjuror has magicked it away. And I'm sure there have been times when you've stumbled across a brand-new block of flats or a brand-new shopping centre and, when you stop to think about it for a moment, you realise you've been passing that site every day and not once did you spot even one piece of scaffolding. Shops are changing hands all the time, aren't they? Façades get repainted. Sooty brickwork gets sandblasted clean. And all this goes on around you, and yet only occasionally - usually when you're out on foot - does it ever strike you that the city is constantly renewing and reshaping itself, that it's not just a great mass of brick and stone that sits there mouldering and decaying, that the place you live in is something that breathes, pulses, has a heartbeat, may even have some dim kind of sentience."
Imagined Slights Page 12