His head swivelled from side to side when he walked, as if crossing a busy street. It seemed part of his gait. It made no difference where he was, indoors or out. He did it while climbing the stairs to his flat, checking left, then right, left, then right, perpetually on the lookout. The condition was chronic, and contagious. Soon I was checking my back too.
He unlocked his door and switched on the lights. ‘Go on ahead,’ he instructed me. ‘Be witcha in a minute.’ I couldn’t find the right words to decline and stepped inside. He shut the door behind me.
There were no books on his bookshelf. I ran a finger along the spines of his collection of video nasties, which was extensive. He was urinating noisily down the corridor. There didn’t appear to be a bed in the room. Looked like he slept on the couch. No sign of my bike, either, that I could see. My hair was still wet from the shrubbery. I found a leaf snagged in it, which I tucked into my pocket, I don’t know why. Scared of offending him, I suppose; scared he’d decree the leaf accusatory on some level, a reproof for what he’d done earlier. Hard to tell what would set him off.
I raised a corner of the grey wool blanket which was nailed over the sash window. Giz had a fine view of the square, for all the good it did him. His communion photograph was displayed on top of three television sets, stacked high in the alcove like a totem pole. I took the picture down to examine it. The standard-issue cloudy-sky backdrop, brown and gold cardboard frame — there was an identical one of me at home on the mother’s sideboard. The seven-year-old Giz was dressed as a miniature man in a three-piece off-white suit. Black shirt, white tie, red rosette, hands pressed together in simulation of prayer, a rash of blotchy freckles across his nose. The camera had caught him with his eyes squeezed shut. A new set was drawn on his eyelids in red marker, crooked like a Picasso. The toilet on the landing flushed. Giz entered the flat and plugged in the two-bar heater.
‘That’s funny,’ I said to him, ‘my eyes were shut in my communion photo too.’ I don’t know why I said this. It wasn’t true.
‘I made a hundred and eighty quid that day,’ he said. ‘How’d ya get on yerself?’
‘I don’t know. Twenty, I think.’ More like half.
This pleased him. ‘Retard.’
A plastic bottle in the shape of the Blessed Virgin stood on the windowsill. Her crown screwed off like a toothpaste cap. She was half full of holy water that had gone fibrous with age. On the floor was a tin of beans, one of sweet corn, and a box of Coco Pops — food that came in pellets and didn’t need to be cooked — all lying empty on their sides. Under the table was a Scalextric set. One link missing.
Giz swiped a section of the sofa clear of crisp packets and bedclothes and indicated that I should sit. I didn’t disobey. He pulled up an armchair and set about rolling a joint. This procedure demanded his full concentration and most of mine. We did not speak for the duration. A religious ritual might have been under way. His nails were bitten so close to the quick that his fingertips ballooned over them, tiny bald scalps. Homemade black dots tattooed his knuckles, the workmanship poor. He took a lump of gum out of his mouth and placed it on the table where it sat like his brain; small, grey and chewed.
There was a whirring sound in the corner followed by a mechanical clunk. We were plunged into darkness. The electricity meter had run out. ‘Fuck!’ Giz shouted, ‘fuck!’ He kicked the coffee table and something hit the floor. The bars of the plug-in heater glowed like a Sacred Heart. I scooped a palmful of coins out of my pocket and picked out the five-pence pieces as best I could see them in the residual light.
‘Here,’ I said, holding them up, stacked like gambling chips, but he was already out of the armchair, knocking things over in his wake. ‘I’ve more upstairs,’ I added for no good reason. There was no disguising the fear in my voice.
Giz crossed the room in silhouette and grabbed something from the shelf. It glinted orange in the dying light of the heater. He climbed onto a chair and got to work on the electricity meter, ratcheting away at it as if jacking up a car. The glow from the heating elements was fading rapidly, as was the outline of Giz. He expanded towards me in the darkness, loomed inches from my face.
The lights flickered on again. Giz shrank back to his regular dimensions, angry and compact. He cast the butter knife aside and jumped down from the chair, sighing like a man knocking off the night shift. I began to laugh, with relief I believe. I had seen strange forms in the dark.
The two-bar heater began to hum convivially once more, resuming its interrupted conversation. Giz picked up the ball of chewing gum and put his brain back in. ‘Where was I?’ he asked, standing hands on hips over the conjoined Rizla papers. He sat down and bent to his work again, childlike in his absorption. I watched him at his labours.
Somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about how to get out of there and settled into the couch as the joint passed between us. The buzz and fizzle of the two-bar heater was the very sound of cosiness. I pointed at the section of ceiling that supported my bed. ‘There’s my bed,’ I told him, as if introducing Giz to a member of my family. ‘And that’s my desk.’ I indicated the space by the far window.
Giz screwed his eyes up against the smoke. ‘I know.’ Of course he knew. He’d broken in once. Nothing to steal, but buckled the door, scribbled his name on the wall. ‘Here, d’ya wanna buy a Sony Walkman?’
‘You’re alright, thanks.’
He nodded as if he couldn’t blame me.
‘Tell us,’ he said later, ‘how’s your book?’
He made it rhyme with puke. He’d sunk so deeply into the armchair by then that his knees — cobalt blue and shiny in the silky tracksuit — were higher than his chin. A muscle in the hollow of his jaw flexed.
‘Me buke,’ I repeated, testing the pronunciation, trying it out for myself. When had I told him about me buke? He was holding the flame of a match to the tip of his cigarette but couldn’t get it to ignite.
‘Giz.’
‘Wha?’
‘Wrong end.’
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and saw that he’d been trying to light the filter. He held it up for my inspection. ‘Wrong end,’ he told me, then we laughed for, I don’t know, an hour. His shaved cuttlebone skull. It was a head-butting head.
When the doorbell rang downstairs, an hour or so again after that, Giz went to the window and raised a corner of the blanket to look out. He cursed when he saw who it was and pulled on his leather jacket. ‘I’m expectin a client,’ he told me, and I nodded to indicate that was fine by me and shoved up on the couch. It took a few moments to cop that Giz was throwing me out. ‘Aw, slick,’ I said, like he’d outfoxed me fair and square in some game of wits we’d been playing. I hauled myself to my feet. It was cold out there on the sagging corridor. For some reason, we shook hands before parting.
15 How can I protect you from this crazy world?
A full forty-eight hours elapsed before the north wind finally dropped. The flag mounted over Front Arch collapsed, flayed and crucified upon its pole. The sun shone fiercely throughout the day. I do not remember it faltering for so much as one second. The flash floods had receded, leaving tidemarks of detritus behind. We had gathered upstairs in House Eight in advance of the first workshop of the year.