‘D’you remember when Jimmy Cannon used to play?’ someone asked the room to murmurs of assent.
‘They’re too young to remember, Albie,’ said Blades.
‘No I’m not,’ one of them said.
‘When were you born then?’ asked Blades.
‘Seventy-eight.’
‘Ha!’
The blond man came back with the bottle opener and his beer.
‘If you were my age,’ said Blades, ‘you’d remember Jimmy Cannon properly. He was a hero. You still see him sometimes up in the boxes. Player of the Century for Palace.’
There was a pause, before the 34-year-old said, ‘No he wasn’t.’
‘What?’
‘Player of the Century was Ian Wright.’
‘Don’t be stupid. You think they’d pass up Cannon for some gold-toothed nigger?’ Blades laughed and so did the blond man. Pete kept his eyes on the game. The guy next to me took a swig of his beer. There was no one black in the room. I didn’t know whether this made it better or worse. ‘Look at you, flinching at the word nigger,’ Blades went on. ‘If I see a spade, I call him a spade.’
‘Wright was the best forward we ever had, before he went to Highbury,’ said the 34-year-old, trying to bring the conversation back to safe ground.
‘Yeah, he was good,’ I said. He must have been, if I’d heard of him.
‘Don’t be fooled, Günter, he’s the same as the rest of them. When it suits them they play off this image that blacks are really cool, they can all dance and they’ve got big dicks. And then when they want something, they play the minority card, they’re all, “It’s very hard growing up in Bongo Bongo land,” and they end up getting the job over a decent, hardworking Englishman.’
‘He’s all right,’ said the 34-year-old, aggrieved.
‘He’s a foreigner.’
‘He grew up in Brockley.’
We sat in silence until the second minute of injury time, when a couple of guys stood up to go to the bathroom. The 34-year-old was one of them, and he didn’t come back.
‘Good riddance,’ said Blades. He turned to the blond man. ‘Impossible to find a red-blooded workforce these days. He’ll have to go, too.’ The blond man nodded. ‘It’s a wonder we get anything done. Still, we’ve got to stick together.’ Blades caught my eye and gave me a little nod. I didn’t nod back, but it felt too awkward to contradict him.
After the game recommenced, people started to expound their various perspectives on the players, and made predictions about the final score. Sixty-seven minutes in, everyone seemed to have sunk into boredom, and when the opposition side scored in the seventy-first minute, boredom was replaced by a kind of fatalistic anger.
‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it?’ said Blades, swigging violently.
I left as soon as the game was over. I didn’t want to hear the post-match debrief, and I’d taken a dislike to the blond man. I hated football anyway. It was just a kind of tribalism, none of them understanding that the team they had pinned all their hopes on and built up in their mind was no different to any of the other teams; none of them were innately better or worse, none of them destined for greatness or relegation. It was just the amount of money they had, and the way they had been divided up. They could have been divided any number of ways, but it happened to be the town they came from, and nowadays the town you came from didn’t make much difference to the place you ended up. It was an almost random process of constant buying and selling, each team held together by nothing more than physical continuity. How could you believe in a club when you knew each of its component parts had been replaced? What was left of the original, other than the story of its existence, reprised for the benefit of its young? At its heart was tribalism,52 nothing more and nothing less.
I reached the main door of my building at the same time as the lady with the hemp bag. She wasn’t carrying her hemp bag. She was wearing a sparkly dress and faded lipstick. I held the door open for her. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how she looked – worried, perhaps.
‘Hello,’ I said.
She smiled as if she might run away, but she got in the lift with me.
‘So, how is it? Living with the German man?’
‘Well … quiet, really. I don’t see him except on Fridays, and I’m out at work most Fridays anyway.’ I assumed this would become true over time.
‘I always thought he was a bit of a funny one.’
‘It’s just his mannerisms. I think deep down he’s the same as everyone. He just wants to be liked, wants to make something that outlives him.’
The woman started to cry.
‘Oh dear, was it something I said? Why are you crying?’
‘I’m not crying!’ she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
‘But your face …’ I began.
‘Well now I’m crying!’ she cried. A hand rooted around in her bag. The lift pinged. I held it open while she found herself a tissue.
‘Would you like to talk about it?’ I asked. She nodded sheepishly and rooted around in her bag again for keys.
Inside her flat, we sat at the kitchen table. She offered me tea but I only wanted water. Pure, clear, cold water. She sat down, her black eye make-up smudged rather prettily, like a sad panda.
‘May I ask, is it trouble with a man that you’re having?’ (I could ask these sorts of questions now, as something of a relationship veteran.)
‘Yes – well – man, men. I went on this date, he seemed nice online but he turned out to be an utter – anyway they all are. I mean no offence, you seem lovely, but they are, aren’t they? And I only really need to find one nice man to settle down with and have kids but I’m a bloody lawyer so the only men I meet are lawyers and who wants to marry a lawyer?’ She reminisced into her tea. ‘When I was a little girl, I wanted to have eight babies. Eight! Imagine. But at least I’d have had a full house. Right now I just feel so empty. I know it’s just the hormones, everyone gets broody, don’t they? but it feels like I have another stomach inside me and there are no pipes attached so it just sits there empty and hungry all day, every day. I have all this love and nowhere to put it. I make cakes with love, I love characters I see in films, I imagine that they’ve got lost out in the cold on London Fields and I bring them in and give them blankets and make them soup.’
‘Perhaps you should try to weave your way into something bigger than yourself. A cause, something more permanent. Something pure, something that doesn’t just blow away in the wind.’
She looked at me as if I hadn’t listened to a word she’d said.
‘Like what.’
‘Well … Take this glass of water. It’s probably as old as the earth itself. I drink it and it merges with my body, becomes a part of me. It’s pure, unchanging, simple, clear. It doesn’t matter what happens to me, I will always …’ I could tell I was losing her. ‘Look, what do you most want? What one great thing do you want to be able to hold up and say, “I was a part of this”?’
‘I don’t know. Love,’ she said sadly.
I did something quite uncharacteristic, then, by standing up, going over to the woman and giving her a hug. I didn’t normally hug people. She cried a bit and I did too, in sympathy, I suppose. It seems very hard to bear, the idea that all life is flashing by without ever returning: events, people, buildings, everything, blinking in and out of existence quicker than anyone could track them.53
I lay in bed that night awake for a long time, listening to the darkness. Just beyond my thin wall, there was a woman who was very uncertain about the world. It was comforting to know that she was there. After a while I heard her close her bedroom door. She unplugged something from the wall and then plugged in something else. A phone charger, I guessed. Then I heard nothing for a little while, until there was a light brushing, like someone stroking the wall. I stroked it back. I didn’t know if it made a sound on her side. But I was here and I was human. It was something.
I woke up with sunlight warming my nose. A cold Friday, b
ut a sunlit one. The Steppenwolf finished grilling his mackerel and we sat together at the kitchen table, shared a pot of coffee and chatted. This was the first time we had made any small talk – about the weather (temperature and light conditions), our work, a good place to buy socks (Marks & Spencer, apparently).
‘This kind of conversation, is it important, do you think?’ he asked me.
‘I suppose so. It’s not really what you say, it’s just …’
‘The fact that you have taken the trouble to say it. Yes.’ He scribbled phatic function on the tablecloth with a biro. ‘For a long time I ignored conversations about the weather. I thought it was simply English people being inconsequential. Then I realised these exchanges are at the very core of humanity. It is a peculiar skill, to be able to converse without communicating anything at all. To put your conversation partner at ease. I cannot do it. I never learned.’ He smiled yellow and I got caught in the crosshair of his halitosis. I had learnt to stand not-quite facing him, at an oblique angle, but this was impossible at the table.
‘I’m sure you’re not as bad as you think,’ I said.
‘Yes! That is a great example. Thank you.’
He scribbled some more. I reached for the coffee and put my elbow in a puddle of blue paint.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask, why is there always paint everywhere? I thought you were writing a book.’
‘Ah yes, but sometimes I paint instead. I cannot stop working or I will not finish in my lifetime, but sometimes I get tired of words, and as they say, a change is as good as a rest.’
‘Maybe that’s why I like books with pictures,’ I said. We mulled silently over our coffee for a while. ‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask – any chance you’re an expert on cagoules?’
‘I know everything that is useful, and nothing that is not.’
‘All right then, try and solve this one –’
‘A riddle?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t solved it yet.’
‘I will put on my lateral thinking hat.’
He duly went off and came back to the table wearing a battered bowler.
‘What could a cagoule have to do with fascism?’
‘A cagoule? Or the cagoule?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The cagoule, or la cagoule?’
‘What, is the Holy Grail disguised as some kind of mystical French raincoat?’
‘La Cagoule. With a capital C. Otherwise known as the Comité Social d’Action Révolutionnaire. It is better translated as the Hood.’
‘And what was the point of this hood? Did someone wear it, or …?’
‘It was not about items of clothing. It was a French underground society. Right wing. Terrorists in the French sense, they wanted to create order in society through terror, like Robespierre.’
‘It’s not an actual cagoule?’ I asked.
‘No. A secret fascist society. They liked to explode people. They used false flag tactics, meaning that they would kill their own allies to make their enemies the Communists look like unhinged murderers. Truly ironic, to have to commit a crime on behalf of those you wish to be guilty. I have a book somewhere…’ He got up and wandered over to the bookcase, the Post-its swaying like narcissi on a faint breeze, and walked his fingers along spines. ‘It is not alphabetical, I am afraid. Alphabetical is a good system, you know, Dewey is fine, I started to develop my own indexing system based on Boolean, but these … it should be here somewhere … You see, we have entered an age of fractal specialism, as access to knowledge becomes freely available and new technology is built on the foundations of past specialisms. More and more we see people who devote whole lives to tiny branches of branches of branches of thought. In some ways it is best to write books on one thing only … but that is why my book of life is so necessary … no one to turn all the little puddles of knowledge into a reservoir.’ He now seemed to be mounting the bookcase, like a randy spider.
‘I’ll borrow the book later, shall I?’ I asked.
‘Yes, yes. Quite an interesting case in fact …’
False flag tactics. Good thing that sort of thing didn’t happen these days. I stared at the toast in my hand, threw it down in disgust and went to the cupboard for a waffle.
15
Tissue of Lies
Lieve texted me: I want to see you. I considered playing hard to get while I took out my bike, which had already grown cobwebs, and cycled across town to Lieve’s. Everyone on the road seemed very angry with each other – cars with buses and vice versa, pedestrians with everything that was moving and vice versa, cyclists with the world in general, except for those on Boris bikes, who pottered obliviously. By the time I got to Baron’s Court I was sweating like a hairy pig, so I decided to dry off in a café.
I found another one of those fake French cafés. It had the same wicker chairs and the same ‘Chat Noir’ poster in the corner. I had another coffee. I had had a lot of coffee, having already shared a cafetière with the Steppenwolf, and my hand was beginning to shake a little on the cup. After that I went into a perfume shop and made a great pretence of sniffing at a few bottles before liberally applying one of them to my neck and arms. Eau Sauvage, apparently. Smelt like a bath bomb to me, but then you could fit what I know about perfumes on the back of a stamp. Lieve answered her door in full soothsayer regalia, floaty clothes and wide hoop earrings.
‘Why don’t you wait upstairs? I’m just finishing up. You look twitchy.’
‘Yes, I am quite. Did you know those coffee chains put two espressos in each coffee? No one told me.’
She leant in. ‘You smell different.’
‘It’s a new aftershave,’ I said.
‘I prefer your natural odour.’ She smiled to herself and hurried back through to the lounge, where I saw a nondescript-looking man in a grey suit. He was holding up a Tarot card and inspecting it. She shut the door on me just as the man turned round, so that he didn’t see me.
I walked up the stairs and decided to relieve myself (often, going to the toilet is no cause for relief, but, after all the coffee, this time I felt it flooding through my bloodstream). I went to the basin to wash my hands, and since there was a wastepaper bin there I decided to throw away an old train ticket and a chewing gum wrapper. In the course of this mundane act, I saw something extraordinary: there was only one thing in the bin, and it was a pregnancy test, wrapped up in tissue paper. I didn’t know whether I should unwrap it to find out the results, especially since it had been comprehensively soaked in urine.
In the end I left it, partly because hygiene has always been important to me, and partly because not knowing the answer was almost the same as not knowing the question had been asked.
I padded back through thick carpet to the bedroom, which was decorated plainly in comparison to the bedouin tent below. A small grey stuffed penguin sat over in the corner by a row of perfumes. It could have been there for any number of reasons.
I thought about opening her drawers to look at her things. If she came in now, it would not be easily forgiven. I checked the time. I thought about getting in the bed, but I had only really had two proper dates with her, and wasn’t sure if this was a bit presumptuous, so I just sat on the edge.
After a few minutes I decided that I might as well find out the results of the pregnancy test. I crossed the landing again, went into the bathroom, got down on my knees and opened the bin lid. I picked out the damp tissue and began to peel it away from the test. The extreme dampness of the tissue had compromised its structural integrity, and it broke apart as I tried to peel it off; on top of which my hand was shaking from the coffee. Nevertheless, I saw that it said ‘+’ very clearly on the blue display. A cross like the little baby Jesus, perhaps. Or a little tombstone to indicate that another little egg had passed over. Or a plus, meaning that she had tested positive for baby-chemicals. Although, perhaps in our Malthusian modern world, it was considered a plus not to find oneself pregnant, and the sign indicated the all-clear.54
&
nbsp; I sat there for a minute, holding the pregnancy test and trying to calm myself by recalling the various folk methods of diagnosing pregnancy, such as weeing on toads. It was definitely something like that.
As I got my phone out to look it up, the door opened and the man in the grey suit strode in, having already half-undone his flies. He only noticed my bulk crouched by the cistern as he was undoing the button on his underpants and I made a small noise of alarm. He stood, holding his penis, staring down at me as I stared back up at him, one hand full of wet tissue and a pregnancy test, and the other holding my phone. He was evidently in shock because he seemed rooted to the spot. I decided to take the situation into my own hands.
‘Please can you stand outside and wait until I have finished?’ I said in a low voice.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Yes, of course. Sorry to – didn’t mean to bother you.’
‘Not at all.’
He backed out of the room, shell-shocked, fiddling with his crotch. I locked the door, wrapped the pregnancy test back up and disposed of it again. Then I washed my hands with soap, dried them, washed them again, dried them, and then smelt them. They smelt of soap.
We glanced at each other meaningfully as I exited. I understood the look to mean, let’s keep this between us. I had exchanged a similar look with my father on the way back from the glass museum as a child. The look that said mother wouldn’t understand, nor should we ask her to try. I went back to the bedroom, where I listened patiently to the sound of a flushing loo, and the sound of rushed pleasantries by the front door.
Lieve opened the door to the bedroom as she removed a large hoop earring. She kissed me on the mouth before removing her top and stepping out of her skirts. I felt touched to have been included in this simple intimacy. She put on some jogging bottoms and a T-shirt. It didn’t fit with my image of her, but I suppose everyone has to let their hair down, and at least she didn’t seem to own jogging bottoms for exercise. I never knew why people went running. It was pointless. Either you ran in a big circle, ending up where you started, or you ran on a treadmill, which was as dystopian a vision as I could imagine. To run without having anywhere to be is depressing enough, but to be made to run by a shifting floor without even moving from the spot was a Sisyphean nightmare.55
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