However, I eventually overcame these difficulties, and was able to drive to work in the same state of forgetful bewilderment I was sure I shared with my fellow commuters.
I still sometimes thought about my Giro, but the numbers printed in the little rectangle on the right were indistinct and smudged, and I could not quite make out the amount.
After all, I had been able to forget most of my girlfriends.
When I had been at the shop for about a year I was in the novel position of manager. I had both a professional and, to a lesser extent, a personal authority over two key workers who I referred to as my team, and two receptionists, one of whom also worked as my secretary.
In the morning I would look through the photographs of tattoos that had been emailed to me, choosing those which I considered would be quickly resold, or that were particularly artistic and would fetch higher premiums. Most of the surgery (or ‘hackwork’, as we in the team referred privately to it) was now undertaken by my colleagues, but I still preferred to handle particularly large or prestigious pieces.
After choosing that day’s purchases and authorising money transfers, I tended to spend an hour or so with my money, moving it from one place to another, in a manner that resembled a ghost playing Patience. I had never seen my money, but I was reassured by the sequences of digits on my computer screen and drew pleasure from watching them increase.
At lunchtime I would walk to my usual restaurant. I had tried almost everything that had ever been on the menu, but my favourite remained spaghetti Bolognese, and my white napkin caught splatters of salsa di pomodoro as I ate.
The afternoons were largely occupied with administrative matters. I was now comfortable with A4 paper, but as biros still nagged at a haunted attic of my mind I preferred to use my computer and printing machine, signing letters with a fountain pen.
Quite often I would spend the evening with the receptionist who also worked as my secretary. We had sex in my new flat, where she would attach me to my bed with ties and belts before taking my erect penis into various parts of herself.
For a few frightened moments after my orgasm had subsided I worried that she would refuse to untie me, and I would be found by archaeologists of the future on the rusting iron springs of my bed, my flesh mummified on my emaciated frame.
*
I now regularly bought newspapers, and felt comforted by the vast prairies of knowledge that I had assimilated. Often I would dispute political matters in restaurants and at the dinner parties I attended. Frequently I found myself with words falling from my mouth that I barely recognised, but as they met with approval or enthusiasm I did not worry much.
At night, when I was not fucking my secretary, I would spend many hours in the passenger seat of my car, looking out of the window at the interior of my garage, which shimmered in my eyes, my bicycle shadowed on the bricks, interrogated by the fluorescent striplight.
More time passed, and I was being paid considerably more money whilst actually having less to do. I now often visited other people’s offices, and they often visited mine. I became adept at handling biros, A4 paper, and the use of argument and persuasion. I was pleased that many meetings proved successful if held in restaurants, particularly if we all got drunk.
I decided to extend the franchise overseas, and asked my people to arrange it. This happened easily, without my having to alter my habits very much. I found air travel less harrowing than I had first imagined, as I had a propensity for queuing.
Deluges of A4 paper were used in a deft manoeuvring of intangible properties, and the numbers I surveyed on my computer screen grew laterally. I was now rich, and wondered what my face would look like in photographs.
*
And then my life fell into small pieces. The letter from the Department was delivered, after being redirected four times, to my new offices. I was choosing the paint, but the subtleties of green were forgotten when I recognised the logo on the envelope. I requested that the interior designer should go away by making a gesture I had copied from television. With shaking fingers I opened the envelope and pulled from it a piece of A4 paper, folded twice.
It generically congratulated me on my new job, and had a computer-printed signature. There was also a questionnaire to fill in. Was I happy in my new employment?
I dropped the piece of paper, and stood in my new office, a wealthy and successful man. Something immensely sad passed through my mind, my Giro fluttering for ever out of my reach.
I walked a little way and sat down on a bench between two saplings, and stared at the dust between my feet. I sank my face into my hands and began to moan quietly.
Here Be Dragons
I was somewhere south of somewhere, north of somewhere else, east of everywhere and west of nowhere at all. I had been wandering along endlessly straight roads and tracks that dissected peroxide-bright prairies of barley, which the wind lashed into yellow oceans on which long, low, black ships sailed with their unseen slave cargo of caged poultry.
I’d made some kind of mistake, I now knew. I had begun with the idea that my world – encircled and delineated by diaries, deadlines, telephones, newspapers, emails, bank statements, bills, invoices, tax demands, mortgage payments – might be a creation merely of my own. Perhaps simply by removing myself from this apparently scripted existence I could discover a species of reality that had been previously invisible to my blinkered senses.
In some ways I wished myself in an era when the known had faded at the edges, where civilisation petered out into blank spaces occupied with the superstition of the unknown: here be dragons. But England had long been charted in exhaustive detail by Ordnance Survey maps; maps that showed every building, each gradient, each brook and pond, every pylon. Useful, doubtlessly, but also somehow imprisoning.
And what happened was this: browsing the Ordnance Survey map section in a bookshop one morning, I had first been annoyed and then intrigued by the absence of a certain sheet number. I crossed town to another bookshop. It wasn’t there either. To be certain, I checked at the library, where it was also missing. I began to feel excited. More than anything, I wanted to be off the map. I imagined the roads becoming track-like, sketched roughly over the terrain like tangled spider silk. I saw trees larger, hedges wilder, the shapes of distant mountains torn against a perfect sky. Above all I saw no people, no animals, and no birds.
I studied the map of the area just to the south of the empty zone where I determined to stake my nebulous claim. And I resolved to travel there.
By train, bus and walking I took myself to the top of this sheet. There was no road north, just a brambled gap in the hedge. I pushed through the clinging stems and looked north with a broad smile. I had told no one where I was going.
I walked for a long time.
Later, much later, I began to worry if I was anywhere at all. I had no idea when I would reach somewhere with a railway station. Or a bus station. Or a bus stop. Or a minicab office. It became so quiet I hoped for a jet to split the mocking sky. That evening I travelled into what seemed a kinder landscape; the lanes began to meander and sink between hedges as the sun sank lower and the air cooled.
My rucksack was heavy and painful on my sunburnt shoulders, and it was clear that I would soon have to find somewhere to put up my tent. At the brow of a gentle decline I saw ahead of me a dark wood massing about a mile distant. It was there, I decided, I would spend the night. The wood began at a fork in the lane where a small cottage lay beneath the purpling shade of the twilit trees. At the gate stood what I thought was a man, bent with age, holding a scythe upright, the blade swinging idly above his head.
I walked on, into the chilly shadows of the trees that grew along one side of the lane. I walked until I was out of view before I lurched off the road into the wood. I squeezed through the shrubbish undergrowth, picked my way through a head-high tangle of brambles, and found myself alone in the wood. It was the most silent wood I have ever been in. It gave the impression of being dead, despite the verdan
t appearance it had given from outside. The dense leaves of the wood had been forced skywards by the burgeoning deadness of its interior. The expired leaves and twigs beneath my feet cracked like chicken bones. There were no birds. There was nothing here.
Yes, I’d made some kind of mistake. I was here by mistake. I knew this with a certainty that was shattering. But night was irreversible, my situation was irreversible. I could do nothing except unpack my tent, erect it, and crawl inside. I couldn’t do anything except that. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think of anything except the distant, faded sound of a stone sharpening a blade. I thought I heard or I heard chicken bones snapping and a rusty gate that creaked painfully on its decrepit hinges. I lay in my sleeping bag with my clothes on, with my shoes on, staring straight ahead, defencelessly conscious of the sound of my breath, horribly awake, off the map and out of sight and away from the map.
Silently I begged for the dawn. Trees, skeletal in their naked brittleness, swept down, brushing the fragile canvas of my tent. There was some grotesque sort of distant footfall, or anyway a noise I couldn’t account for. And occasionally but always, the slow, sly, shrill cry of the gate, opening and closing impossibly in the cloaking darkness of the dead of the night. Maybe a sound formed itself into the shape of my name, twisted itself and warped its voice into a terrifying parody of my name and of my ideas and of my plans and of my future. Maybe a sound slithered into my tent shaped like footsteps or knife-sharpening or chasing or a hollow realisation of the impossibility of escape. Maybe that’s where I still am, cocooned in a flimsy, fabricated defence against what it is that I desire most; a damned region that lies off the map, unpeopled, empty of birds, bereft of animals, where the sky is torn from the land, and where I am caught for ever, desiccating, last week’s insect caught in forgotten, dusty spider silk, suspended across a corner of somewhere that will never be visited again.
Peace and Quiet
On a darkening winter evening I sought cover from the rain in a pub on either Fleet Street or High Holborn. I can’t remember which. It had been raining incessantly, and I was wet, which was my own fault. I had left my umbrella at home and didn’t want to buy a new one. I had spent the day walking around the back streets, unclear about what it was that I was looking for. I stood transfixed outside St John’s Gate watching an aeroplane scratching the underside of the shredded clouds. Later, I came upon a dead market; a few hooded figures picking at the skeletons of the stalls, torn polythene struggling to escape with the wind as the rain pasted it to the tarmac. And I stood for some time at Ludgate Circus, staring at the yellow lines drawn as diamonds on the road, hypnotised by the endless passage of black tyres hissing through the rain across them. By this time the scant grey light that had accompanied me on my perambulations was fading, and I was extremely wet. I don’t recall which direction I took but, as I say, I ducked into a pub somewhere nearby.
The place was quiet; a warren of rooms, it seemed to me. I peeled my raincoat from myself and eased off my soaked hat. I found a small table next to a gas fire that sputtered warmly below the red ‘appliance condemned’ sticker, and took out my notebook. I was partway through what was becoming an interminable project that was frustrating me further with every turn that it took. I didn’t know if any of these turns were the right ones, or if I was wasting my time.
My soaked clothes began to gently steam by the gas fire in the pub, though I felt cold, chilled deep to my core. I held a biro over my open notebook as I tried to make something useful of the small events of the day. The old walls of the building muffled the traffic’s roar, and my thoughts seemed likewise faded. The yellow light from the tasselled shade reflected against the frosted glass in the window. It was a black night outside. The fire continued to wheeze and choke. I looked down at my notebook. ‘There will be no Quiet. There will be no Peace.’ My pen was poised above the final full stop. I frowned, unable to remember writing the words. For the first time I gazed around the room. When I had come in I’d thought the small room was empty, but now I saw that a man was sitting at another table, his back to me. He was wearing a cheap-looking chalk-striped suit, with scuffed black patent-leather shoes. Leaning against the wall next to him was an umbrella, water pooling darkly where the ferrule rested on the floor. His greying hair was slicked back from a balding head, and the lines on his face continued round the back of his neck. He was wearing glasses. I realised I was staring, and looked away. Sighing, I closed my notebook and tucked my biro back in my pocket. I wondered if it was still pouring outside. I gazed around the room, seeing wood panelling and a few Victorian fox-hunting prints. The man at the other table had opened a briefcase that he had in front of him on the table. From it he pulled a sheaf of A4 papers, which had what looked like monochrome photocopied passport photographs on them, about nine to a page. There were about four or five lines of what I guessed were details about each person printed under each photo. He shuffled quickly through the papers, as if to count them, then started to look methodically at each. His pen paused a few times over certain of the pictures on each page, but he evidently decided not to mark any of them. The light glinted in the portion of his glasses that I could see, and suddenly I had the uncomfortable feeling that he could see my reflection in them, and that he had noticed that I was looking at him. But he made no sign that he had. He continued to slowly leaf through his papers. Nevertheless, I looked away.
But I couldn’t stare at the ceiling for ever, and I had no interest in the fox-hunting prints. I found my eye was drawn back to that shabby man in that small, yellow-lit room. He had begun to spend longer on each page, bending towards the photocopied images, carefully reading whatever it was that was written beneath them. I had finished my drink, and gathered my wet things, about to leave, when I glanced once more at the man. He was closely studying an image on one of his papers. I now felt coldly certain that he had been aware of my scrutiny, and at that moment he turned his lined face towards me, studied me for a moment, nodded slowly and slightly, and mirthlessly smiled. He turned back before circling a photograph with his red pen.
I rushed past his icy presence, bolted from the room, along the passage and out into the cold rain of either High Holborn or Fleet Street. But not before I had recognised the face in the photograph, and read, unmistakably, my own name beneath it.
Condiment
So one day I began collecting: I urinated into a large jar. I masturbated and scooped my ejaculate into a second jar. I took a knife from the drawer and made an incision on the end of my finger and squeezed the blood in thin trickles and fat drops into a third jar. I sat down with a fourth jar on my lap, and thought of sad things. Then I wept into the jar. I repeated these actions every evening, each fluid into its appointed jar. After a month, I emptied the contents of the jars into small saucepans, which I heated carefully until I had evaporated the liquid. When the pans had cooled, I scraped the residue, with the aid of a funnel, into separate salt cellars. I then tasted each of my personal salts, judging which would go best with what food.
My experiment was a resounding success. The salts seemed to impart a subtle intensity to spicy dishes, and a freshness and zest to even the most homely soup. And so my restaurant began to attract many more patrons as increasing numbers of adulatory reviews appeared in some of the Sunday supplements.
Obviously, I had to continue to produce the salts that had made my culinary creations such overnight successes. My establishment was now being patronised by celebrities as well as politicians and the merely rich.
My difficulty lay chiefly with eliciting sadness on demand. On some nights I would sit in my chair, the fourth jar on my lap, and start laughing with joy at the success of my restaurant. I would have to force myself to envisage a starving child or departing lover. I knew that there was boundless, ceaseless suffering on this earth, but I found it more and more difficult to identify with it myself, while the prestige of my restaurant grew higher, and with it my bank balance.
I found that the most efficacious manner
of forcing tears from my eyes was to think of love; loves lost, love’s tragedies and love’s hopelessness. And so it was that I began to have trouble with the second jar. Latterly, my attempts at masturbation were rather more difficult, as my erotic thoughts staggered and tumbled into the despair I needed for the fourth jar. Not infrequently, I found it impossible to distinguish between sorrow and love.
After five months, I caught myself ejaculating into my lap, upon which rested the jar meant for tears. I began to find sorrow arousing, and could not cry without getting an erection. Conversely, I could not find a woman attractive without starting to weep.
I worried about my salts, for my supplies were running low. Moreover, the quality of the salt from the first jar was beginning to decline, as I attempted to find solace in alcoholic abandon. I would drink deeply; and laugh, and cry. But my urine suffered. It became thin and pale, copious but worthless. The salt I extracted was tasteless.
The reputation of my restaurant would keep its fortunes buoyant for a while, but I knew that sooner rather than later the decline in the quality of the seasonings would be noted. I sank lower into despair. I could not run the terrible risk of sharing my secret with anyone else. I had only one reliable source of salt – that which filled the third jar. The third jar never ran out. The menu had to reflect this, and there was a preponderance of rich, red, meaty dishes, lavishly enhanced with the salt of my blood, trickled – or sometimes drunkenly spurted, gushed – from my fingers, thumbs, wrists or arms every evening. But I was weakening.
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