She sat down on the bed and pulled me to her, putting her arms around my waist. I held her too, and slipped my hand under her T-shirt, beginning to fiddle with her bra clasp. Perhaps if we got nude, we wouldn’t have to talk.
‘I have some big news.’ She paused while I retracted my hand. ‘Are you ready?’
‘As I’ll ever be.’
She raised her eyebrows in anticipation of my surprise. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Oh! Pregnant, you say?’
‘Yes. I just found out.’
‘Right. So I guess you must have taken a pregnancy test or something.’
‘Yes Günter. That’s how people find out.’
‘Yes of course. And is it—’
‘Don’t even think about asking that question.’
I stalled. ‘So, well. Obviously I didn’t mean to, um … So. What shall we do? Can I … help? In some way?’ I asked eventually.
‘I’m just telling you as a courtesy. It’s not something for you to worry about. It’s my body and I’ll take care of it myself. I just thought you should know.’
‘Well, yes, of course. Especially after everything you’ve been through. It can’t be easy, you know. So if you want me to be there. When …’ I trailed off.
‘Thank you. God. I’ve been so worried about telling you. I can’t tell you how much it means to know you understand. You’re a very special person, Günter. Very special.’
My window of opportunity for nudity seemed to have passed, but I didn’t mind. I had found the only woman in the world who was willing to speak openly in a language I could understand, and that was good enough for me.
‘I’m going to get you a glass of water,’ she said. ‘You look like you’re on drugs.’
True enough, my hands were still shaking and I had a bit of a cold sweat coming on. I saw now that caffeine was cruel. It enhanced nothing, only contaminated the purity of my senses. Perhaps I should cut it out of my diet altogether.
Lieve brought me a glass of water and I felt it spread down my throat like menthol, clearing out my sticky throat, quelling my bubbling stomach. Pure water. I looked through the bedroom window at the sun sailing through the sky and wanted to be back up there, lifted out of the chaos and noise, scraping at the sky. The air was cast in a cobalt blue of such calibre that my eyes couldn’t quite settle on it. I stared into it and saw spots. No clouds – only the endless theatre of the sky.
‘What are you watching?’ she asked.
‘Oh, nothing in particular.’
I tore my eyes from the sky and turned to her. She started to cry. I kissed her softly, my lips a cushion against hers, which had tensed as if forming an ‘m’. I brought my hand up to her cheekbone and it was cold.
‘I’m sorry. Sorry. It’s the’ – she waved at her stomach – ‘I’m not normally like this.’
‘You don’t need to apologise.’
She shook her head and pulled away from me. ‘Look, thank you for being so honest and straightforward with me’ – I thought back to the moment that her client had discovered me with my hand in her toilet bin – ‘and for coming round at such short notice, but I have another client coming in ten minutes. I’ll see you soon, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘I’m glad we could talk about this.’ She put her hand on my knee. Was there still some hope of nudity? Probably not.
The hemp-bag lady must have heard me fumbling with my keys, because she came out of her flat as soon as I arrived.
‘I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for the other day, unloading on you like that. I hope you don’t think I’m awful and desperate!’ she laughed nervously. ‘You just caught me at a funny time, that’s all.’
‘Please, don’t worry about it. I was happy to listen. And it was nice to meet you properly …?’
‘Emma.’
‘Glass,’ I said. ‘Günter Glass.’
We stood in silence and I got the impression that she was testing my surname in her head to see if it sounded nice after ‘Emma’.
‘Well, I’d better get in,’ I said.
‘Yes, I’ve got to get to court,’ she said, straightening up.
‘Oh dear, what did you do?’ I asked.
She laughed and touched me playfully on the arm as if I’d made a joke. ‘Really, I should go. See you soon, Günter.’
As I reached the other front door I remembered that she was a lawyer. I never seemed able to remember these things during conversations, only afterwards. It worried me occasionally that I didn’t seem to be able to understand events until after they’d occurred. Only when I was up high did the world feel immediate, like it was all really happening to me, there and then. I smiled as I recalled the picture of me clutching the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. Up in the air, I was like a hippo in water. Up there I could really breathe.
I unlocked the front doors, put my keys down and opened the fridge absent-mindedly. There was nothing in it but a book: Murder in the Metro.56 There was a Post-it on the book which said, No More Eating! You are fat. Here is the book. Do some cleaning.
I tried calling Dad, but with no luck. It just rang and rang. I doubted somehow that he had left the house, which could mean that he had become so apathetic he was no longer prepared to move. It was still morning, so there was a possibility he was still passed out from the night before. Or he had committed suicide. He probably hadn’t committed suicide. But I should try again later.
I lay down on my futon with the book. It would be nice to have some furniture. I opened the book and a little clipping fell out from the middle, where it had bookmarked a certain page. I picked up the clipping – another one of the Steppenwolf’s little essays.
Chapter 690a – on the genealogy of racism
That peculiar subcategory of European supremacism is based on the erroneous assumption that women are commodities, and thus misogyny and racism are at root the same problem. As the white Western colonists would have it, the black man is more physically capable and less thoughtful than the white man (because of course, the two are inversely proportional), and therefore, whilst the black man makes a good labourer, he also presents a physical threat to their women. Asian people are seen as less physically capable. Thus the greatest fear for the colonist was that their women might be seized by black men, which would undermine their rule; the keystone of the colonist’s power was to sleep with the black women – we saw this dynamic occurring frequently during times of slavery. The cultural perception is still weighted so that Westerners believe a black man can snare a white woman easily, or a white man can seduce an Asian woman – the latter irony being that most people living in Asia don’t care enough to contribute to a debate on the matter. To much of Asia, white people are known as ‘ghosts’, rendering them ironically incorporeal. As is so often the case, the white colonist’s carefully constructed self-image has served only to humiliate and emasculate him. On the Jewish people, more presently.
I wondered if he might have lost this section, so I slid it gently under his door. There was a flurry of sound like a burrowing animal and the door flew open, the Steppenwolf before me in rags, incandescent with rage.
‘I have a system! Do you mean to bring about my undoing’
‘I – you left it in the book. I thought you might need it,’ I mumbled.
‘It is there for a reason! And no I do not need it! This is part of draft five!’ He glared at me, his eyeballs popping so far that I was sure I could see near enough the whole globe of them; he bared his yellow teeth, snatched the extract from my hand and ingested it, chewing furiously as he stared at me. The overpowering smell of rotting fish emanated from his mouth and I flinched on his behalf as he swallowed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
He went over to the bookshelf and took down all forty-five volumes of a book by an author called Adolf Wölfli. The books looked much older than me, older perhaps than the Steppenwolf himself. Having piled them high in his room, he shook his head at me supercilio
usly and slammed the door.
Was this just what happened when you got a flatmate? Was this behaviour utterly bizarre, or had I myself been blown off course? My mother would know. My mother, who insisted that we all sit as a family to dinner, and who washed my clothes as soon as I had taken them off, who gave me right and wrong, ambition, love, like these were the only things worth worrying about. She had been a standard against which I had measured others, a wristband to remind me: what would Mum do? And yet all the time that I had deferred to her was time I had spent cowering under her wing. Now I had been pushed out of the dizzy heights of the eyrie, and I was picking up speed, and I was only just unsticking my own wings from my side. The ground was coming to meet me, and all this time I had thought I’d known how to flap because she made it look easy, but it turned out there was so much more to it. What if no one noticed that I tried to be good? What if no one saw me hit the rocks? Would there still be something left at the bottom, if I hadn’t done anything to weave myself into the story of the world? What if I already had, and it was a boy? Or a girl?
I remembered when Dad was clearing out the loft and he found a little girl’s dress. He’d put it in the charity pile and Mum had shouted at him because it was a dress she’d made in her O level class. It was a tiny little yellow polycotton thing, with a white yoke and buttons down the back. On the front was embroidered a cartoonish bunny. She’d made it, and kept it, in wait for the little girl she would one day have, but she never had. She had me, and I didn’t fit the bill, and she tried again, and Max had his challenges, and they stopped trying. I tried to imagine her reaction if I told her I was having a baby girl. She wouldn’t smile; the feeling ran too deep. It would be like a dream which had stared across at her clifftop nest, unfolded albatross wings and flown off twenty years ago, travelled the world, and finally found its way home again. And if I had a boy … She was careful never to seem disappointed. She would smile, and squeeze my arm, and say, ‘Another boy? Another Glass. He’d better have a good German name.’
But I was making it up because it comforted me. I didn’t know what she would have wanted, or what she might have said.
I lay back down on my futon next to the Cagoule book, and picked it up, staring at the cover. Maybe if I could figure out how the Cagoule fit into Blades’ web of words, I might be able to figure out what made him tick, maybe even change his mind. I picked it up, and spent a couple of hours reading up. What I gleaned was this: in the late twenties and early thirties, there was a national recession in France, which was part of a wider global recession. Banks had been failing all over the place. People’s faith in the economy had been destroyed. As resources became stretched and people lost jobs, the ruling centre-ground parties disagreed on how to make things better and through disagreement became increasingly polarised. Soon there were parties on the extreme left and right – and the extreme right parties were terrified of the apparent success of communism further east, in Russia. They began to mistrust many of the liberal institutions on which the French state had been founded. When a liberal chap called Blum was voted into power, a fascist called Eugene Deloncle formed a party whose main tenets involved racism and extreme nationalism. President Blum banned Deloncle’s party for being fascists, so they went underground and founded the Cagoule. They stockpiled weapons and killed anyone who stood in their way, including a woman called Laetitia Toureaux, who had been acting as a police informant from inside the organisation. On 11 September 1937, the Cagoule blew up a building as an act of patriotic false flag terrorism. They tried to blame the attacks on the extreme left and use the bombings as a call to arms for the far right.
The scariest thing was that the Cagoule seemed to have links to some pretty massive companies: Michelin, the Banque Worms and some French oil company. The founder of L’Oréal had been one of the heads of the Cagoule. I used their shampoo every day. I hadn’t realised I was perpetuating a fascist dynasty. All I had wanted was to control my dandruff. If it was hard to be good, it was really, unbelievably, incredibly easy to be bad.
The bombings had come to be known as the ‘terrorist attacks’ or, more commonly, the Etoile57 attacks. In a way, I thought, every star was a time bomb. It would go off when it was due. Each star had helped to create the universe, and would help to end it. Perhaps it mattered less that anything was permanent, and more that there was meaning in its birth, and its death.
I met Blades for a pub lunch in the Glassblower just off Piccadilly. I wouldn’t have thought it was the kind of pub that Blades would like, but perhaps it fit in with his man of the people act. The walls were dark and the lights yellowish, and Blades was installed at a large table near the back. I couldn’t see Frank, but he must have been nearby. He always was.
Blades got up and shook my hand as I approached the table, and he ordered us pie and chips and a couple of pints. His shirt was unbuttoned to below his chest and I had an urge to reach over and button it.
‘I drove past the IMAX the other day,’ said Blades by way of conversation.
‘Oh yes?’
‘It looks good. Really good. We did a stunning job.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘By the time we were done I could have mistaken those windows for the sky itself.’
‘You’re good at what you do, Günter. I haven’t seen a natural like you since a young boy called John waxed his father’s car all those years ago.’ He raised his eyebrows and pointed at a bare patch of his chest. I often got the feeling that he thought I was in some way mentally unsound.
The pie and chips arrived, and I watched those canines cutting through a mouthful of pastry shell like hot knives through butter.
‘I didn’t have you down as a pie lover,’ I said. ‘I’d have thought you’d only dine where there were Michelin constellations.’
‘You’ve got me all wrong, Günter. I would say that I enjoy food more than anyone else on the whole planet, and here’s why.’ He pointed his knife accusingly, in the manner of the self-made man. ‘Everything is about scale. These gourmet cooks can’t taste how good their food is because they’ve got nothing to compare it to. To truly appreciate Michelin star food, you have to eat KFC the night before. You walk in, you’ve still got that feeling in your mouth that’s somehow both stringy and powdery at the same time, and someone brings you an asparagus mousse. It’s asparagus, but it’s a fucking mousse, Günter. It’s so light you only know it’s there because the flavour hits you like a punch from an angry whore. It’s a ball-tease, Günter, I tell you.’
‘I see.’
‘Anyway, we’ve got something very exciting coming up, Günter, very exciting.’
‘Great. Just say what it is, and I’ll do it.’
‘I need to know I can trust you,’ he said, dousing the pie with a great gulp of beer. I dutifully sipped at mine.
‘Of course.’
‘There’s no room for fuck-ups this time, okay? No badly tied ropes, no fooling around with weird sprays.’
‘No,’ I said deliberately.
‘Because this is the big one. This could put us on the map internationally. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this my whole life.’
‘What’s the job? Not Canary Wharf?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘The Gherkin?’
‘Bigger.’ His eyes shone.
There wasn’t anything bigger. My mind raced. What did he mean? Something in Russia? Or Manhattan? I tried to look at the photocopied file on the table in front of him, but he closed it when he saw me looking. The front page just said ‘Northwoods’, which must be the group managing the site.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘They want us to do the Shard, Günter.’
He sliced his biggest chip in half and dunked it in blood-red ketchup while he waited for it to sink in. The Shard. The mother of all jobs. We could tickle the gods from there. We could blow on the clouds.
‘I can’t even tell you the square footage we’re looking at. I don’t think even the Mace grou
p know. They want us to clean it from top to bottom ahead of the official opening. If we play it right, we might get offers from New York, Dubai.’ He caught himself. ‘Günter, I want us to make this a spectacular event. A one-off.’
So if Mace were managing the site, what was Northwoods?
My phone rang. I wanted to throw it at the wall, but I didn’t want to encourage any suspicion in Blades that I was mentally unsound, so I made a quick apology and stood to answer it.
‘Glass Cleaning, how can I help?’
‘Am I speaking to Mr Günter Glass?’
‘You are. How can I help?’
‘We’re just calling up about your tax return.’
‘I haven’t done a tax return.’
‘That’s a large part of the reason we’re calling.’
I held my hand up in apology to Blades and took the call outside. ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.
‘We haven’t received any tax from you since you were made redundant over a year ago. But our information indicates you’ve been earning money since then.’
‘Not very much. I’m only just finding my feet. If you call back in a few months—’
‘We do need to know how much you’ve been earning.’
‘I haven’t really been keeping track.’
‘We’re going to need your bank statements, for a start.’
‘I wasn’t putting any of it in the bank.’
I heard a strange sound, a bit like a pencil snapping in half. ‘In that case we need to set up an appointment to talk it over in more detail.’
I gave him a day in a couple of weeks’ time and went back in to my tepid pie.
‘You know, I have a very good accountant who could probably help you avoid most of your tax,’ Blades said, quaffing a few fingers of my beer.
‘Thank you, but I might as well pay what I owe. I’d much prefer to pay my taxes than to have to start filling in my own potholes and setting my own broken bones.’
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