by Adam Nevill
‘Due to overcrowding at Finsbury Park we have severe delays in both directions on the Victoria Line.’
The directional board is still promising a train to Ealing Broadway in one minute, like it was when I got here. I’m pretty sure a train pulling up would have snapped me out of a doze. No one has moved from the bench.
I get to my feet, reminded of how the suppleness has gone from my knee joints.
The billboard on the other side of the platform is advertising mineral water, and even though the giant bottle of water on the poster is so stained by soot that it looks undrinkable, it still makes me groan at the idea of liquid passing my lips. To my shame, I even shake an old can of Coca-Cola that I spot under the bench. But the tin is as dry as the skin of the chap sitting above it, who seems to be just as puzzled by the same crossword clue that he was staring at when I sat down a couple of minutes ago.
I pass through the short interconnecting tunnel between Central Line platforms Eastbound and Westbound.
‘There is a good service running on all London Underground lines.’
Oh, at last. Maybe we’ll all get somewhere now. The morning’s service has been a damn disgrace.
I pull back the sleeve of my overcoat to check the time. Jesus, I must have rubbed the cuff of my shirt sleeve against something filthy.
When I wipe the face of my watch and check the time I see that it’s already 9.15 a.m. That gives me fifteen minutes to be at my desk. Not going to happen. No chance. I’ll be bloody lucky if I get there for ten.
The Angels of London
Still a little surprised such things were tolerated in the city, Frank stared at the mess.
At the base of the lamppost on the street corner, rubbish bags spilled their entrails across the pavement. Someone had once dumped a bin bag. Others followed their example until a pyramid of refuse rose up the lamppost to waist-height. The core of the structure had since rotted as if the body of the king that the pyramid honoured was poorly embalmed. A mattress had been thrown against the pile too. Rusted springs were visible and watermarks formed continents on the quilted fabric. Now a broken pushchair, with canvas rags hanging from the aluminium frame, augmented the installation. A disturbing element of squalor and human fragility, something London’s occupants became immune to or a part of. He wasn’t sure which of the two paths he would follow: indifference or collaboration.
He thought of submitting the entire mess to the Turner Prize but never had the energy to smile at his own joke. And he had no one to share it with.
Above his head the pub’s sign creaked. It was wooden, the mounting of iron nearly rusted through. He wondered how long it would stay up there. It was amazing how many old and broken things just kept going in the city.
The actual picture of The Angel of London was painted on the wood inside the corroded frame. The paint had weathered and given the picture a wholly different aspect from the one originally intended. With its scaly-looking face, tight skullcap and wreath of leaves, the angel now resembled something Francis Bacon might have painted. Whenever Frank saw the hideous peeling face he knew he was home.
The pub was dead, had been closed for years. Through the grimy window panes he could see the silhouettes of wooden chairs placed upside down upon tables, a bar that resembled an unused plinth inside a dusty tomb, and a poster for a long-expired competition connecting rugby to Guinness.
Indicating a high turnover of tenants in the rooms upstairs, a mass of uncollected post was slung upon a shelf inside the door next to the bar. Why was the old post not forwarded to past residents? Or did the current tenants operate a wilful resistance to the outside world? Few of his questions about people in the city were ever answered.
There was no post for Frank. Someone was taking his mail; not even junk reached him.
After four months as a tenant in a room above the derelict bar, Frank acknowledged that he was vanishing from the world entirely. Becoming a thing withered, gaunt and grey, shabby and less substantial. Anxiety about money, finding the right kind of work, his future, isolation – all of it was intent on reducing him to a ghost. And one that only a few dimly remembered.
He wondered if his image in photographs was disappearing too. If he didn’t find a better job and get out of the building, he imagined himself disintegrating into a stain on the murky wallpaper of his wretched room. He’d already disappeared from the social radar of his two friends. A relocation to London to catch up professionally still hadn’t landed him a job anywhere near the film industry. His plummet to the bottom had been immediate.
London had golden rules. Never take the first accommodation you view, but he had done so because the room above The Angel in Dalston was the only place he’d found on Gumtree at £100 a week, all that he could afford. Never take the first job you’re offered, but he had done so because the one grand he came to town with was gone in a month. He worked security in Chelsea, on shifts, which was nowhere near Dalston. Poorly paid jobs for the semi-skilled were plentiful, but affordable accommodation in the first three zones was scarce enough to not exist.
Frank wearily made his way up through the dimly lit dilapidation to his room. Familiar smells engulfed him: damp carpet warmed by radiators, cooking oil, an overflowing kitchen bin.
When he reached the first floor, Granby was waiting outside his room.
Frank jumped. ‘Fuck’s sake.’
Fright subsided into loathing. Granby knew what time he came in from work, had surreptitiously learned his movements by watching him from inside the building. When a tenant came out of their room, if he listened carefully, Frank would always hear the click of Granby’s door on the third floor. Like a spider behind a trapdoor the landlord appeared to do little but watch his captives. Frank had never heard the murmur of a television, or music, coming from Granby’s attic room; had never seen him prepare food in the sordid kitchen either, or even leave the building. The landlord was so thin he didn’t appear to eat.
‘Right, mate,’ came the whispery voice out of the gloom. Granby’s bony face, watery eyes and peg teeth were barely visible. The figure sniffed, was always sniffing hard up one nostril. Frank knew what was coming.
‘Need to speak wiv you ’bout the rent, mate.’ Granby had no conversation beyond insincere small talk and attempts to scratch money from the people who barely existed within the building.
Frank had come to wonder whether The Angel was an abandoned building that utility companies had forgotten to disconnect. Maybe Granby had assumed proprietorship of the rooms upstairs. Whatever was going on was some kind of dodge, and it contributed to his doubt that Granby had any right to charge rent for the squalid rooms. He’d once attempted to start a conversation with Granby, but the shifty creature never revealed any details about himself, or the property, beyond claiming that The Angel had been in the hands of his family for years.
After deductions from his wage packet, Frank took home nine hundred pounds a month. Nearly half of that went to Granby. Food took another two hundred, and credit-card debt one hundred. That left a hundred for transport. Frank saved as much of the remaining hundred as possible for a deposit on a room he hoped would be less wretched than the one he lived in at The Angel.
ATM machines informed him he had saved three hundred pounds, but Frank hadn’t seen a bank statement in four months. He suspected Granby was opening his mail to learn about his finances. Which would mean the lies he had told Granby about his savings his landlord would now be wise to. Granby must know about the one hundred he saved each month and wanted it for himself.
The small figure moved in front of his door as Frank released his keys from his jacket pocket. ‘Ain’t just you, mate. Times is hard for all of us. But fings go up, like. For everyone.’ The weasel’s harassment was predictable.
He had no idea how old Granby was. He could have been thirty or sixty. His movements were agile, his voice wasn’t aged, but his face was worn. The eyes had seen too much. The spirit inside them was blunted and only occasionally enlivened
by feral intent when money was being discussed; acquiring money was his only purpose. The same vulpine self-interest applied to the teeming millions in the city.
But what was most remarkable, or memorable, about Granby’s features was that they reminded Frank of a particular kind of working-class face: the type you saw leering out of a black and white photograph taken during the Second World War. Granby’s face was not contemporary at all. But the white sport leisure wear and curly hair were utterly incongruous and made Granby look ridiculous. He was like a person from the forties masquerading as someone from the eighties.
‘That right?’
Frank’s irritation cooled when he detected a tension in Granby’s wiry arms, and a narrowing around his eyes. When angry, Granby paled in a way that was horrible to behold. Resistance to Granby took things to a new level, quickly. When his loquacious wheedling for money fell flat, physical confrontation never seemed far away. Frank suspected there was a great capacity for violence in the man. Granby communicated the sense that everything was at stake, that he would be ruined if Frank didn’t meet his demands.
Frank intended to leave The Angel anyway, and within four weeks. But four weeks was an eternity in the same building as a man determined to make life a condition of incremental blackmail, with insinuations of terrible consequences if his extortion was not placated. But, for once, Frank’s inherent caution around unstable people took a back seat. ‘We’ve been through this before, Granby. There’s no shower. One bathroom. I’m washing in a sink.’
Granby didn’t like the disadvantages of The Angel being pointed out to him by the tenants. ‘Everyone has to put up wiv it, mate. That’s life. What you fink you should be in, some top hotel for a hundred a week? You is having a laugh, mate.’
‘What improvements have been made that can justify another rent hike?’
Granby was also a firm believer that if a conversation remained one-sided for long enough, then the tenant would see his point. His Cockney voice rose to drown Frank out. He started bouncing on his heels like a wiry puppet, or something much worse: a bantam-weight boxer. ‘I gotta look after my family. My family’s the most important fing in the world to me. If our personal financial situation is freatened, I tell you something, mate, I don’t know what I’d do. What I’m capable of.’
Frank had never seen any evidence of this ‘family’. The hard-pressed ‘family’ had initially been used as a sob story during the second month of his tenancy, when Granby first asked him for more money, with tears in his doleful eyes. Frank had only enjoyed one harassment-free month to get settled in. Something that also stank of a well-rehearsed tactic.
‘What fucking family?’
Granby’s fists clenched; Frank sensed they would feel like wooden hammers against his face. He lowered his voice, but kept an edge in his tone. ‘There are four tenants in this building all paying you four hundred quid a month. For what? Half the lights don’t work. The furniture’s either totally wrecked or barely serviceable. My post isn’t delivered. Or is it? And you’ve got nearly two grand a month coming in. For what?’
‘What you mean, two grand a mumf? Vat’s got nuffin’ to do wiv you.’ Granby started walking backwards and forwards. He took his white tracksuit top off. Rolled his head around his shoulders as if preparing for physical exercise. ‘Nuffin. Nuffin. That’s personal. Now you is going too far.’
‘There’s no inventory. No contract. Cash-in-hand. Do you even have a right to collect money on this place?’
‘What you talkin’ about? Eh? You’re freatening me? You is freatening my family. You need to watch your mouf. I’ve warned you.’
‘I’m leaving. This last month’s rent comes out of my deposit.’
‘You’re going nowhere. Free months’ notice. We agreed.’
Sleep deprivation from night shifts, three hours a day travelling on the bus to and from work with a dark shabby room at the end of the journey, the ever-present sight of his clothes on the floor because there was no chest of drawers or wardrobe, the endless trips to the laundrette, the indifference of strangers, being dead on his feet, never having any money, the fidgeting anxiety that accompanies failure like a crowd of persistent children, the cold terror about his future: all of this rose through him and became a terrible pressure. It would soon release in a steam he could no longer cap.
‘Agreed? We agreed one hundred a month! In my second month you try and hike the rent twenty-five quid a week. So am I to stay here for as long as you decide, while you keep upping the rent? And making threats? Do I subjugate my life to your “family”’s financial security? You don’t scare me, Granby. One visit to the police, the DHSS, whoever, and your little operation’s over. I bet you’re signing on too, eh? You’ve not done a day’s work in your life, have you?’
By the time he’d finished, Frank knew he’d gone too far; he’d tripped every wire in the little man’s mind by using off-piste words like ‘subjugate’, by sub-legal diction like ‘rights’, and adopting a sarcastic tone about the man having a family. There was no place for a concept like fairness at The Angel. The Angel was an extortion racket, run like a prison, and the tenants were inmates.
Granby circled him. ‘I gotta go. I gotta go. Get out my fuckin’ way.’ He made for the stairs. ‘You is taking me for a cunt. A cunt! There’ll be trouble. There’ll be trouble if I don’t go right now.’
At first, Frank assumed Granby was all mouth about not being held responsible for his actions, and was possibly backing off. And he felt triumphant as if a bully had been faced down, a petty tyrant dethroned. But Granby’s bloodless face and glassy eyes, the muttering of the lipless mouth, the repetition, also suggested that Frank had committed a terrible offence.
Granby had just barked at him as if he were less than human. ‘Cunt’ wasn’t just a word to Granby, it was a statement of an unfairly conferred status, a belittling judgement. Frank’s protest would surely be countered with the most severe reprisal. Frank understood this in a heartbeat. Once you’d taken someone like Granby for a cunt, anything could be done to you. That’s what the word meant down here. In places like The Angel.
He also had a suspicion that direct action, one-on-one, might not be Granby’s style either. Frank’s neck prickled at the thought of his throat being slit in the night. Or maybe the curly head would move swiftly through the dark, with peg teeth grinning, before the steel went deep into the meat as Frank bent over the sink to wash his armpits.
What a time to realise this now. Frank’s words could not be taken back or ameliorated.
Granby had keys to his room.
He should leave now.
But what about his stuff? If he abandoned his CDs and books they were gone for ever. They were all he owned. And where could he go? Were there any couches he could borrow? Three nights in a London hotel was his limit, so what came after?
‘Look, Granby. Hang on.’
Granby was on the staircase and rising to the second floor. Was he going back to his room to get a weapon? Recent news stories of people burned alive, of acid thrown in faces, of knifings, closed Frank’s throat and made him feel sick. He wanted to make amends and hated himself for being craven.
Granby’s feet bumped up two flights of stairs. At the top of the house a door slammed.
Frank let himself into his room.
In less than a minute there came a gentle tapping at his locked door. Sat immobile on the end of his bed, Frank swallowed but failed to find his voice.
‘Frank. Frank.’ It was the Irishman, Malcolm. An old decorator with haunted astigmatic eyes, who hung off the payphone in the entry most evenings, muttering into the plastic handset, usually in defence of his involvement in some protracted dispute that Frank only heard one side of. The two men were on nodding terms, but rarely spoke despite sharing the first floor. London was that kind of place. The other tenants of The Angel were either uninterested in him or wary of a new arrival.
Frank approached the door. ‘What?’ he whispered back.
; ‘Can I speak with you? It’s all right, Granby’s back in his room.’
The insinuation that he was hiding from Granby behind a locked door made Frank ashamed. He opened the door. His hand trembled on the handle.
‘Can I speak with you?’ The man’s eyes looked in two directions and the skin of his face was yellow-grey from smoking. The first floor reeked of hand-rolled cigarettes, amongst other things.
Frank let his neighbour inside, closed the door and locked it as quietly as he could.
The small man spent a few seconds looking about the room, studying the walls. There were no pictures, just wallpaper thick with paint the colour of sour milk. There was little else to look at, if you discounted unpacked boxes of possessions, and the incongruous office chair before a sash window that overlooked a yard, the space filled with broken furniture.
Without looking at Frank, the man said, ‘Oh, you’re all right, son. For a few days. And he won’t come down to sort you out. Don’t operate like that here.’
‘Then how does it operate?’ The question was out of his mouth before he could consider it.
Malcolm turned to face him. Frank didn’t know which eye to look at. He chose the one that wasn’t dead and bulgy and always directed at the floor. ‘You want to be careful, son. You don’t want to mess with Granby. You might have a day or two to straighten this out, but not much more.’
‘I’m not letting him rob me. We agreed a hundred a week. He tried –’
‘I know. I heard.’
‘So?’ Frank held out his hands, questioningly, at the man’s presence in his dismal room. If he’d just come to reiterate Granby’s threats he might as well leave.
‘Take it from one who knows, my friend, you best pay the man what he asks to avoid trouble. Serious trouble. He’s very upset now.’
Frank opened his mouth to protest. Malcolm held up one thick-fingered hand. ‘You have to adapt. You’re with the Angels now, my friend.’ The man’s use of ‘with’ confused Frank, as if his neighbour was suggesting he’d joined a community established around angels. ‘With the angels’ was also a phrase that had an uncomfortable association with death.