by Alexei Sayle
Very confused, he took ages to figure it out. Slowly the fact dawned that those people who marked the exam papers from the exams didn’t know him. Or rather they couldn’t see him. Staring at his face in the mirror and trying to imagine how he appeared to others he saw that the stillness, the blankness with which he held his features, added to the way the planes of his face fell, the bright clear blue of his eyes, the sharp, straight line of his nose, the firm cut of his mouth, made him look really, really, really intelligent. Patrick thought, turning his head from side to side in the pitiless light of the shaving mirror, that if he didn’t know the true ordinariness of his own mind he’d ask himself for advice on all sorts of difficult and baffling matters.
Beneath Patrick’s spread legs, on her eighteenth lift the woman’s strength did suddenly leave her and she found herself unable to straighten her arms, and the silvery bar barely held by shaking limbs began slowly to descend on to her windpipe. While the customer gurgled and gagged, her legs waving in the air, Patrick mulled over what might happen if he became a successful personal trainer. He assumed that if he did a good job for Harriet she might recommend him to her friends, then to her whole social circle and if he did a good job for them too then they might want him to be their friend. He knew this because sometimes he liked to eavesdrop on the customers at the gym and from time to time he’d hear the women discuss the valued people who came to their houses. ‘You really must use our painter and decorator Vaclav, he’s more of a friend than anything else,’ he’d heard them say more than once, or ‘We’re spending our summer holidays with the, nanny’s family on their farm just outside Kraków,’ or ‘We’re taking our Colombian cleaner to a comedy club on Saturday night, she doesn’t speak any English so we’re not sure how much she’ll take in, but still …‘
Only if they were good though, they didn’t seem to recommend those who were bad; he imagined people didn’t say to their friends, ‘I’ve found this really unreliable, incompetent and expensive plumber, you really must use him as soon as he’s finished wrecking my central heating.’ Mind you, from what he heard at the gym most plumbers still seemed to be unreliable, incompetent and expensive anyway so how did that happen? It was another mystery.
Not for the first time he wished Martin was there so he could discuss these things as they had done so many times in the past. He’d tried again to e-mail Martin last night but the satellite uplink wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t been for the last month and a half.
From beneath him Patrick heard a strange gurgling sound, a final death rattle from the female weight-lifter; he looked down and easily lifted the chromed bar from the woman’s throat just as she was heading towards the white light and the welcoming outstretched arms of her mother.
3
Three years before, on her second day of property ownership, still settling into the shop and the flat above it, slowly sorting through boxes of books and wondering where to hang pictures and just about deciding to set fire to the whole lot and start again, Harriet had noticed through the big shop window a smartly dressed man of about thirty-five standing at the bus stop a little way along the parade talking animatedly into a mobile phone. As she got to work on her very first job, repairing several knife slashes in the ballgown of a transsexual, she saw a number of the little red buses that served the stop race up and rock to a halt, she saw their doors hiss open and the man shake his head, refusing to board; the driver would shout some insult or exhortation then, getting no response, would drive off in a fury, the bus often becoming airborne as it crested a nearby speed hump. Throughout all this the man continued to talk rapidly into his phone.
At lunchtime, guiltily skipping next door to console herself with a large shawarma and chips at what had then been a place called Shashlik Happens and was now Mon Fromagerie, Harriet passed near to the man and heard him describing somebody to whoever it was he was speaking to on the other end of the phone. ‘Yeah, he looks like one of those big Irish farmers,’ the man said, ‘that never marries then fails to commit suicide with a shotgun in the mouth, huge hands, probably a repressed homosexual …‘ Following the man’s electric gaze up the road she saw that the big repressed homosexual, failed suicide Irish farmer person he was referring to was Toby lolloping towards her along the pavement, making the first of his many visits to the shop and now beginning to wave a cheery hello at her with his huge hands. In turn the businessman shifted his gaze to see who Toby was greeting, moving his head in a stiff arc like one of those silver-painted street performers she’d seen that terrible time she went to Barcelona for the weekend on her own, who made money by impersonating robots. The man with the phone stared directly, disturbingly, into her eyes. Unable to take the intensity of his gaze, she looked away slightly and saw that what she had taken to be the smart metal-effect mobile phone which he had been holding to the side of his face was in fact an unopened tin of sardines.
‘Gotta go …‘ the man said, before slipping his tin can phone into an inside pocket of his jacket, then, crossing the road with stiff movements, walked straight into the park where he was soon swallowed up by the moist grey-green vegetation.
Now three years later the Tin Can Man was still at the bus stop most days or walking up and down the parade or striding along the perimeter roads of the park; though his smart business suit was now filthy and torn, he still clutched his sardine can to his mouth and would still generally be describing those around him. ‘Big, enormous, porky girl, can hardly breathe she’s so fat, greasy black hair, gigantic gig lamps, obviously not been fucked for years …‘ was what Harriet heard him say about her one afternoon, forcing her to laugh out loud when he said it, since there was really nothing she could find to argue about in this portrait.
Though she was inclined on occasion to get extremely upset with those she thought had insulted her, much to her own surprise Harriet never felt any fury towards the Tin Ca-n Man. When thinking of him she recalled the look briefly observed in his eyes on that first day when she had seen his ‘phone’. A look of sadness and panic as if the words were saying him rather than the other way around.
Also sometimes, usually if returning to her flat late at night, when she heard him talking he appeared to be involved in a different kind of conversation over his imaginary phone, where he listened more to the other person and his tone was unlike the bombastic, crazed voice of daylight hours.
The Tin Can Man was caught up in one of these calls as she shut the side door of the building on her way out to meet her two best friends Lulu and Rose at the pub on the corner.
‘No, Lynn …‘ the Tin Can Man was saying,…. yes, I understand that, darling, it’s just that I’ve got to do the … yes, Lynn … yes, Lynn … please I wish you wouldn’t … yes, Lynn … but please, darling, if you’d just listen for a second I can …’
His pleading tone carried with Harriet up the road for once almost unheard and unnoticed; instead there was a rushing sound of fury in her ears. About ten months after she’d moved into her shop the building next door had been acquired by a housing association dedicated to the interests of elderly Namibian women. At first things had gone terribly well, the elderly ladies were an interesting mixture, the majority African of varying shades of blackness but a few of Indian or Pakistani extraction and one or two stiff old white women in cardigans and pearls. In their brightly coloured robes, their saris and salwar kameez, they had regularly visited her in the shop, bringing baked yams, onion pakora and sponge cake with them. They would often tidy up the chaotic workroom while Harriet devoured the food they’d made and sometimes the women might do little pieces of intricate embroidery for her to cover a particularly difficult hole.
However within half a year the young grandsons and the great-nephews of the Namibian ladies found out that Granma was living in a spacious, freshly decorated, rent-subsidised, architect-designed flat and moved in whether they wanted them to or not. Rapidly the old ladies died from the upset or moved back to Whitechapel or Totteridge or Africa so that soon the
entire building became occupied by rough young men who played loud music and held mysterious parties late into the night and didn’t appear to have regular jobs. Despite the absence of the grannies the meals on wheels still came every day delivering stacks of dinners in foil containers and the pavement outside was blocked by BMW 3 series coupés and Subaru Impreza Turbos allowed to park freely on the yellow lines because of the disabled parking badges the young men had coerced out of their grandmothers’ doctors, insisting that they regularly took Granny down the hospital, though if they went anywhere the cars seemed most regularly to be parked outside nightclubs in Wood Green and Crouch End.
All of this made Harriet furious, she hated the injustice and the cruelty of it and she missed the little old ladies. Most of all though, she objected to the way the boys who lived rent-free in the adjoining house constantly piled rubbish bags and mounds of rotting food against her front step. As she stepped over the garbage she’d felt herself seethe with rage, a rage that was swiftly followed by a crushing sense of powerlessness. Harriet fantasised often about confronting these rough-looking boys with one of those electric gatling guns you saw in Hollywood movies, laughing insanely as the bullets ripped into them and feathers flew from their big puffed-up jackets. Outside her head she scuttled out of their way and said nothing and kept her head down, since they seemed to be so many and she was frightened of enraging them. Harriet suspected some of the boys had pushed their own grandmothers down the stairs, so there was no knowing what they’d do to her.
A few months before, she had been burgled and the police said that it was most likely the Namibian boys who’d done it, since there were CCTV cameras that covered most of the pavement, though not the adjacent front doors, and nobody suspicious had been spotted approaching her place. She felt another huge rush of hate for the young men as she thought about the brooch, her only memento of her mother, which they had stolen. Harriet’s fury wasn’t cut off until she stepped through the doors of the pub on the corner.
Until the year 2000 the pub had been a typical north London boozer called the Admiral Codrington, then it was gutted like an organic salmon and began serving a different kind of food and drink to the new people moving into the area. A few old-time drinkers hung on still, never moving out of an area of stripped wooden floor that had once been the public bar, though now they had to nurse pints of Czech Staropramen Pilsner or a stout from the Aleutian Islands called Gleck in place of their fizzy keg London bitter.
‘Hello, Jago … Hello, Alaric,’ Harriet said to the barmen, ‘pint of Gleck please.’
Her two friends were already there, seated at a pine table, a half-drunk bottle of white wine between them. She picked up the beer — it was cloudy and the greasy glass was only three-quarters full but she still paid the price of a budget flight to Corsica for it — and went to sit down. Rose had been on the same fashion course as Harriet at the college in Middlesex that they had all attended. Now she was a successful costume designer working on TV programmes and films. Though she lived alone, while she was away on location she often had affairs with married men on the crew, usually a senior electrician or the cameraman. Once Harriet had asked her, ‘Don’t you feel guilty about having sex with all these married men?’
‘D.C.O.L, darling,’ Rose replied.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘D.C.O.L., — Doesn’t Count On Location.’
‘Right …‘ she said. ‘Y.H.A.G.B.A.’
‘Eh?’
‘Y.H.A.G.B.A. — Your Heart Always Gets Broken Anyway.’
Lulu had been a star at college, a student on the popular drama course that the school ran, tipped for success, but somehow she had not done very well in the outside world as an actress, so in her mid-twenties Lulu had retrained as a psychologist. Now she was very much in demand, she had her own busy private practice and was often called on to testify in the law courts, where her hammy acting skills were perfect in that arena of bad theatre. From what Harriet could see Lulu’s job was to attest that clearly deranged killers were no danger to society and should be released immediately, or to ‘affirm that obviously kind, loving parents must have their children taken off them by social services without delay. Like most psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists and counsellors that she’d met — and Harriet had met a good number, having been paying for various forms of therapy all her adult life — Lulu possessed no clue as to the reasons behind her own actions so she continually behaved in a manner well over the borders of sanity. Harriet reflected that Lulu was fortunate in respect of her career choice, since out of simple professional courtesy no other mental health care professional would ever agree to have her sectioned.
Then of course inevitably she felt guilty .over thinking bad things about Lulu so decided to extravagantly praise the other woman’s jacket (which was horrible). There was a chain of shops with branches in all the therapist-infested areas of north London — Hampstead, Muswell Hill, Crouch End — called Medina De Muswell Hill that seemed to sell clothes only to women psychologists — huge tent-like dresses, jackets made out of sacking and long scarves seemingly decorated with trails of acidic vomit.
As it turned out Harriet didn’t get a chance to say anything to Lulu since as she sat down Lulu was staring with a furious expression on her face at a blurred woman right across the other side of the pub. ‘That woman over there’s talking about me, ‘she hissed, ‘she’s saying I’m a bastard.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Harriet said, having grown so used by now to Lulu’s outbursts that she hardly noticed them. She took a tobacco tin out of the pocket of her dungarees and began to roll a cigarette, before remembering with annoyance that she was no longer allowed to smoke in the pub.
She hoped they wouldn’t talk about their personal lives tonight: Lulu was obsessed with a married Greek Orthodox priest whom she’d seen once in a shop and Rose was conducting a romance with somebody she wasn’t quite sure was a man over the internet.
For a while she’d been planning not to turn up at the pub, to leave her friends wondering where she was and when they phoned to ask why she wasn’t there to pretend to have forgotten about the whole thing.
If Harriet was mad at the neighbours for stealing her mother’s brooch, she was also overcome with relief that they hadn’t found her most secret shameful thing hidden in a secret compartment in the bottom of the sewing machine. It wasn’t spiked nipple clamps or a signed Phil Collins CD but a small notebook. On one half of each page in neat, precise handwriting was a column headed ‘I’ for incoming calls and a column headed ‘0’ for outgoing. Beneath each column was a list of the same initials. ‘R’, ‘L’, ‘P’ and ‘K’ and next to each initial was written something like ‘1 txt, 2 pc or 4 ems’. This simple code was a list of her friends and a record of the incoming phone calls, text messages and e-mails they had sent to her and the number of the same she had sent to them. When the entries in the ‘0’ column vastly outweighed those for the ‘I’ column Harriet broke off contact until they more or less balanced out. (She was prepared to accept a twenty-five per cent imbalance in outgoing over incoming as being more or less an equality.)
The entry for ‘K’ was a man called Kevin Macardle who’d come into the shop two months ago to pick up a repair and had asked if she wanted to go out for a drink, maybe, sometime, whenever. The ‘Outgoing’ column read: “‘K” 27 txts, 19 pcs, 46 ems’; the ‘Incoming’ tally read: “‘K” 0 txts, 0 pcs 0 ems.’
Harriet thought there were so many ways now in which people were able not to get in touch with you. When she’d been a student there’d only been a payphone on the hall landing and it was easy to tell yourself that friends had rung and left a mess age with some drug-addled engineering student or confused African who’d forgotten it in the very moment of being told. Now, though, there was your mobile phone with message icons for both verbal and SMS Text to remain unlit, e-mail in-box that stayed empty and even the dear old fax that vomited out missive after missive about how you could buy a cheap panel v
an or go on the lemonade diet but never a kind word from a friend. And to make sure that absolutely nobody had called you at home while you were out there was always 1471 to dial up simply to check that you were surely-alone in a collapsing universe.
Up until the night before there had been an imbalance of over thirty-six per cent in outgoing communications between Harriet and both Lulu and Rose but an hour and a half phone call from Lulu the night before during which the battery on her cordless phone went dead, she descended two floors to the shop in order to pick up the other handset, switched it on and found Lulu still talking, evened things out.
‘So, you looking forward to the big workout?’ Harriet asked.
‘What?’ queried Rose.
‘The personal training with the guy?’ she replied.
‘What guy?’
‘Oh shit, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.’
‘Forgotten what?’ enquired Lulu.
‘The guy from the gym, you remember? You two were saying you really wanted to get fit, you were determined to do it this time and nothing was going to stop you. So I said I would book this kid from my gym to come round and give us some personal training next Wednesday afternoon.’
‘I don’t remember anything about this,’ said Rose. ‘Anyway I can’t come, I’m going to Wales to work on a film about Methodists.’
‘And I can’t go,’ added Lulu, ‘because it’s the Greek Orthodox festival of Santa Kyriou and Constantine might need me to erm … to do something for him.’
Harriet knew better than to mention that Constantine was unlikely to need her to do anything, since he wasn’t aware of her existence and mentioning that inconvenient-fact would only provoke one of Lulu’s rages. She was less certain whether Rose’s excuse was true or not but again it would be difficult to challenge her on it since she would go to extraordinary lengths to back up the most outrageous lies, even producing forged documents and dragging out obviously bribed witnesses to back up some minor lie she’d been challenged on.