by Tim Pears
James began to jog daily up and back down the road; he had breakfast most mornings in the Café Milano; he played football with kids on the grass in front of the Health Centre; he shared a can of beer with unemployed youths on the bench outside the Community Centre. Whenever he had spare time he descended to the street. And, having taken portraits, and given prints to the subjects, he found he was now free to take the spontaneous pictures he preferred. He had permission.
* * *
Lewis was one of those friends who’d left two or three messages on James’ answerphone and then – receiving no more than James’ vapid postcards in return – let it go. For a couple of years they didn’t see or speak to each other. How large, James wondered, does a town have to be for familiar people to lead entirely disconnected lives?
Then one day in December James met Lewis on the street, and they arranged to go to a home game of the town football team that Saturday. Lewis picked James up, parked close to the ground, and joined bescarved fans on foot. Lewis walked with a lazy, reluctant-looking lope; James scampered to keep up beside him.
The team were in the fourth division of the football league. The standard of play was atrocious; the ball ricocheted around the pitch, players chased and hoofed it blindly, as if punishing it for its waywardness.
James and Lewis stood on the terraces in the main stand. There was one black player in the opposition team. Every time he gathered the ball the home fans made noises like excited monkeys. There were two black players on the town side, but it seemed that the colour of their skin was not apparent: the fans cheered or booed their contributions just like everyone else’s.
After ten minutes Lewis stopped responding to the game. He became still and stiff, and guardedly alert. When the whistle blew for half-time he said: ‘Let’s go,’ and James followed him out.
They walked to Lewis’s car in silence, and he drove James home without saying a word. James invited Lewis in for a cup of tea but Lewis shook his head.
‘They’re morons,’ James said, before he got out of the car. ‘Fuck them, Lew.’
Lewis remained staring out of the windscreen. ‘They’re English.’
‘Sure,’ James agreed.
Lewis sighed. ‘When I was tiny and Mum took me shopping, sometimes when we passed a group of West Indian women they clicked their tongues at Mum, and hissed at her. Only when there was a bunch of them, mind you. You know my sister’s a nurse?’
‘Of course. She stitched my hand.’
‘A few months ago this patient was brought in, and she told the sister that she wasn’t having that coloured nurse touching her.’
‘Gloria? Jesus, what a dumb cow.’
‘Yeh, and what’s more, this patient was a middle-aged Asian woman.’
Robert never told anyone of his comings and goings. He was secretive by nature: when he wrote something, even signing a cheque, he cupped his other arm around his writing hand in the manner of a suspicious schoolchild. He was a ghostly presence in the house. He was the only one who still had the same room as in his childhood, up on the third floor. Around the time Alice married Harry, Simon had moved down into a large room on the second floor, where Charles and also Natalie already resided. Robert took over his siblings’ old rooms, where he stored boxes of unknown content that came and went up and down the back stairs, and where invisible guests would stay for periods of mysterious duration.
Only Simon had the courage – and the persistence – to question his taciturn brother, when Robert made a rare appearance at breakfast.
‘Those vans that woke us up last night, were they involved in some criminal activity?’ he demanded. ‘What on earth do you do, Robert?’
‘A bit of this and a bit of that,’ Robert replied, without taking his eyes from the toast he was spreading.
‘And these footsteps we hear,’ Simon continued. ‘Are these people in hiding? Is our home being turned into a safe house of some kind?’
‘A couple of mates,’ Robert mumbled through a mouthful of toast and marmalade.
‘Leave your brother alone,’ Charles told Simon. ‘Sounds like the ruddy Inquisition.’
None of the family entered Robert’s domain on the third floor. They weren’t invited. If they had to communicate they’d leave notes or, in urgent cases, telephone him on his private line, which had been installed at the same time as Harry’s children’s, by unanimous demand: Robert was the most taciturn of men, yet he was in the habit of hijacking the telephone and conducting endless inconsequential conversations with a nagging, playful undertone.
Even the cleaning lady stopped going beyond the second floor: she hoovered the stairs as far as the landing; beyond that the carpets had a tangled strip of hairy fluff at the angle of each tread and step.
Robert came and went as if he inhabited a parallel dimension within the house. Yet he would sporadically, suddenly, be there at Sunday lunch, or would appear at one of Simon’s gatherings in an incongruous suit, leaning against a wall, eyeing the women in the room with guarded interest.
The fact was Robert moved between worlds. He was most at ease in the company of men on the roughest estate out on the west side of town that was notorious locally for its social degradation: statistics for unemployment, truancy, illiteracy, single-parent families, car theft and other crimes were batted back and forth across the council chambers from one side to the other in order to prove opposing arguments.
Many of the cars that Robert did up he bought from unemployed men with a wad of notes and towed home along with dubious vehicle-registration certificates and incompatible stereos. The men of the estate – some of them old comrades and adversaries from Robert’s boxing days, like Docker and Weasel – were famed for their hardness. They had haircuts that would make a paratrooper blanch; wore T-shirts in the depths of winter without shivering; regarded a smile as evidence of homosexuality; and liked to display their machismo by taking as pets Dobermanns, Rottweilers and Pit-bull Terriers.
The hard men liked to accompany their women (who wore miniskirts in winter) to the shops with their chests puffed out with pride, while casting glances around to spot any man who dared to look at the source of their pride. They neglected their illegitimate children, except to cuff small sons for displaying emotion or daughters who expressed an opinion. And they believed that art in all its forms was another sign of homosexuality, regarding the tattoos with which they adorned their bodies as an honourable exception, since they were unaware that every art imposes pain of some kind.
Robert felt at ease in their company, and after haggling over the price of the cars he joined them for a drink in the Long Barrow, the main pub on the estate, which consisted of one large, rectangular room. They conversed by means of insulting each other while drinking copious quantities of lager, until all of a sudden at a certain stage of inebriation – and to the accompaniment of Country and Western songs on the jukebox – all pretence fell away, and the hard men leaned on each other’s shoulders telling filthy jokes, threatening violence to gain the right to buy the next round, and initiating arm-wrestling contests that no one minded losing because they ended in proclamations of undying friendship.
With women, too, Robert moved between worlds and seduced them in each. Introduced to those in his family’s social circle, they took in his disdainful, hooded eyes and his rough, hard workman’s hands. He didn’t have to say anything, all he had to do was smile, and they vanished like magic soon after he did, to follow him up the back stairs to the third floor. With his friends, however – out-of-work mechanics, leather-jacketed bikers – women would see Robert’s feet under a car and wait for him to come up for air so that they could listen to his anomalous accent, intrigued by the maverick son of the man-in-charge.
Robert’s family knew more about his life from hearsay than from his own lips. He was still, it was said, fascinated by locks. He was able to break into a lover’s house while she was out: she’d come home and go about her business in the privacy of her home, until she became flesh-cr
awlingly aware that an intruder was sitting in the dark, waiting for her.
What with Charles’ complicated schedule, Simon’s diets, Robert’s fridge raids, Natalie’s shifts at the refuge, Alice’s vegetarianism, Harry’s taste for spices and their children’s whimsical palates, Laura had to develop her mother’s flexibility in order to stay sane.
The most troublesome diet of all remained Simon’s. He still seized upon some new fad as the panacea for the ills of existence – sometimes it was one he’d already tried years before and forgotten – unable to accept that his natural weight was that of a Sumo wrestler, or that, as his GP maintained, he was as healthy an individual as ever entered the surgery.
‘I demand a second opinion,’ Simon grumbled, and returned to a curative diet of his own devising. At night, though, he’d creep into the kitchen (where he sometimes bumped into Robert) and binge till he was sick. Then he’d go on week-long, contrite fasts that left him dizzy and disorientated, and gave his body the aroma of hot metal.
Simon was so sensitive that he was both the healthiest member of the household and the most often ill. He could feel every twanged muscle and twinged tendon, each approaching virus or impending ache; the faintest rumour of indigestion deep in his gut would send him anxiously to the bathroom cabinet.
It was perfectly obvious to everyone else how healthy Simon was. Hehad the physical radiance of wealth, because he spent a good proportion of his salary on eau-de-cologne, manicures and pedicures, and had his hair trimmed once a week along with a luxurious shave. He also went to the exclusive health club in Northtown whose customers paid by gold credit card. Simon paused in the doorway of the gym, broadcast exhortations of encouragement to the thrusting executives and the gorgeous, bored housewives submitting themselves voluntarily to machines based, he told them, on the designs of medieval torture apparatus.
‘Confess!’ Simon demanded as a parting shot, and tittered to himself all the way to the sauna, where he sweated impurities from the pores of his ample flesh, and from which he recovered with a full-body massage given by the resident masseur.
Simon swam in the warm pool, in a pair of outrageous swimming trunks, and then he returned home a glowing beacon of health, only to complain that he’d just caught a cold in that bloody club’s draughty changing-room.
It was inevitable that sooner or later Simon would realize there was more than one way to skin a cat, as Laura indelicately put it: around that time Simon began to make friends of fellow hypochondriacs in the waiting-rooms of various clinics around town, which had opened in recent years; like Mr Smith, a skeletal man whose stomach didn’t seem able to digest nutrition from food; or the bald woman, who wore a wig. The giggling secretaries became a thing of the past, to Charles’ disappointment: Charles was still waiting for his son to provide legitimate offspring of the Freeman dynasty. Within a short time the sitting-room of the big house resembled a waiting-room as Simon’s new friends came straight from the chiropractor or the homoeopath, the voice therapist or the spiritual healer.
Charles was infuriated to find his house infested with shirkers and malingerers (who reminded him of Mary’s poetry group meetings), but this time Simon stood his ground, pointing out that most of them were respectable professionals like himself.
‘Anyway, Father,’ he explained, ‘you can’t get this sort of thing on the NHS: it might be alternative but it’s also private medicine.’ And since that was something of which Charles approved, he left his eldest son alone.
They met after work and swapped their experiences of Japanese shiatsu, Chinese acupuncture and Indian yoga – being joined, briefly, by Zoe, who was always keen to find out about new teachers, until she came to the conclusion that Simon and his cronies were less spiritual questers than cranks.
‘The body is the temple of the soul, darling,’ Simon tried to explain to her.
‘Yes, Simon, and he that’s born a fool is never cured,’ she replied.
Simon was unabashed; though sensitive to the minutest change in temperature or pollen count, he was immune to slander. He returned to the sitting-room, where he was master of ceremonies, and his friends sat in a circle discussing parts and functions of the human body as if describing exotic places on foreign travels. And they were explorers, searching for the unknown sources of human ailments. One of them would make some new discovery and return to the house with the news that there were such things as meridians, invisible to the blunt instruments of modern medicine, which get blocked up with nasty knots of energy that cause illness; or that there are 70,000 nerve endings in the sole of each foot and only intensive massage can be expected to keep them in good condition.
Some of the group’s discoveries were radical new cures, but most were ancient medicines from distant, purer cultures. As soon as the group were told about one they promptly felt the very symptoms it was supposed to cure, for the first time in their lives.
‘Yes, it’s true!’ the bald woman remarked. ‘I can feel my liver ache when you press there. It works! Do it some more!’
Just as Zoe had the habit of dissolving an aspirin in a cup of strong coffee, thus causing and curing the same headache, so Simon and his friends joyously greeted cures for ailments they’d never known existed.
Harry Singh was never ill – not at least since the food-poisoning episode of his honeymoon. Maybe he was protected by the cardamom seeds he chewed. Harry certainly didn’t look healthy: he’d inherited his father’s sad complexion, and the same bruised eyes. But he had the robust constitution of a workaholic; Harry simply didn’t have time to be ill. He’d converted a Georgian house in a genteel neighbourhood in Northtown into offices, and moved his business there. The only evidence that the house was something other than a comfortable family residence was a small brass plate beside the front door saying: HARRY SINGH ASSOCIATES. Who his associates might be, or if they existed at all, no one knew.
Harry spent sixteen hours a day there. House prices had rocketed to unprecedented levels, and Harry sold his properties, realizing extraordinary profit. Then, however, against all common wisdom (if not advice, since he never sought any), instead of spreading his investment Harry not only spent his entire capital on buying more houses; he also negotiated loans from every bank, building society and mercantile credit company that would listen to him, in order to purchase every house on the market. And he didn’t sell those ones or rent them or do them up. They just lay empty, while Harry went seeking further loans.
The only person Harry confided in was his brother, Anil, who ran the stores while their father still served behind the post-office counter at the end of the shop. Their mother had retired upstairs, succeeded at the till by Anil’s Indian wife. Harry often dropped in on his way home from work to buy chocolates for Alice.
‘You’re mad,’ Anil told him. ‘Loopy. And irresponsible, too. You’ve got a wife and kids now, it’s all very well going bankrupt and off to prison, but what about them?’
‘I’m not going to prison,’ Harry told him.
‘Even I know property’s reached the top. It’s got to drop now.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Harry confided.
‘Totally unrealistic, these prices are. Everybody knows that. What makes you think they can keep rising?’
Harry looked away from his brother. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘It’s a gut feeling.’
Harry may not have known, but he kept his nerve; and he proved to be right. Prices kept rising, and Harry sold his second phase of houses six months later. Many were bought by people moving out of London, who commuted on the morning train, and other people desperate to own their own home whatever the cost: the more expensive houses became, it seemed, the more people desired to buy them, with a doomed and dangerous lust.
By the time Harry sold his last properties (keeping back half a dozen houses for accommodation to rent) prices had reached their peak. People hardly had time to catch their breath from the meteoric rise in their standard of living and social status than they found the
mselves sliding backwards, with equally breathtaking speed. Businesses closed, redundancies rose, shops all over town changed hands with inexplicable regularity. The flamboyant Chancellor of the Exchequer resigned – citing discord with the Prime Minister – just before everyone else realized what was happening: it was another recession.
Many of Harry’s houses reappeared on the market the following year, their owners unable to keep up the mortgage payments. Harry resisted the temptation to re-buy them, despite the fact that he could have done so with loose change. Even after paying off his loans he was hugely wealthy, though his only concession to such status was to replace the plaque at his offices with one a little smaller and more discreet. This one said simply: HARRY SINGH. His mysterious associates had disappeared.
Over a whisky with Charles and Simon, Harry told Charles that his career as a glorified estate agent was over, and for the one and only time in his life – affected as he doubtless was by the watered-down whisky – ventured to offer Charles a word of advice.
‘The future branches before us in unpredictable directions,’ Harry declared with his customary (if swelled by alcohol) pomposity. ‘Clever men might predict it. But men of destiny dictate it.’