I watched for a second or two, then followed.
‘You’re Marge, aren’t you,’ I said when I had caught up with him.
He gave me a doleful glance. ‘It’s supposed to be a joke.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘They haven’t told you?’
‘No.’
He shook his head. ‘That Horowicz. He thinks he’s so clever.’
As we hurried back towards the Cliff, Marge told me something of his life, often stopping in mid-sentence to scrutinise the sky. Once, when the sun broke through unexpectedly, he looked wildly about and then flung himself beneath the bench in a bus shelter, where he lay quite motionless, eyes staring.
His real name was Brendan Burroughs, he said, and for as long as he could remember he had believed that he was made of butter. I thought I had misheard him, but I chose not to interrupt. Instead, I just watched him carefully, as before. That was why people called him Marge, he was saying. They thought it was funny. He had always known he was different, though, right from when he was a small boy, but he’d never found a way of telling anyone back then, not even his parents. Especially not his parents. If they had learned the truth about him, how could they have looked their neighbours in the eye? They would have been so embarrassed. He had been forced to live in a kind of solitary confinement, with no one to turn to for comfort or advice. He’d had to take great care at all times. In the summer, for instance. He shuddered. How he used to dread the summer! When it got hot, he would seek out the coolest places — the garden shed, the cupboard under the stairs, the cellar. Sometimes, when his parents were out, he would empty the fridge and climb inside. The presence of other butter on the shelves reassured him. His mother opened the door once when he was curled up in there. She screamed and dropped the bowl of trifle she was holding. He could still remember the look of all that sponge and jelly on the floor. As if something had been slaughtered. She asked him what he was doing. I don’t want to go bad, he said. It was as close as he ever came to revealing his secret.
Chunks of white sunlight had appeared on the street ahead of us, and Brendan had to be circumspect, avoiding the bright areas as a child avoids the cracks between paving-stones. Climbing down into a strip of scrubby parkland, we followed a shallow gully for a while, the stream at the bottom coated with a frothy brownish-yellow scum. Sometimes the stream would burrow under a road, and we would join up with it on the other side. Above our heads the clouds seemed to be merging into a single gloomy canopy. Relieved, perhaps, Brendan became talkative again. He spoke about the dangers of winter — open fires, hotwater bottles, central heating … Once, when he was a teenager, he had accidentally leaned against a radiator and he had felt the backs of his thighs start to melt.
‘You can’t begin to imagine,’ he said darkly, ‘what that feels like.’
I agreed that I could not.
‘Where were you before this?’ I asked him.
He had spent most of his life in the Blue Quarter, he told me. They had seen his reticent behaviour as evidence of passivity. His caution they had taken to be indecisiveness. No one had ever suspected him of being melancholic — well, not until the greaseproof-paper phase began. That was four or five years ago. He had started wrapping himself in greaseproof paper before he went to bed. He thought he would stay fresher if he dressed like that. Looking down, he grinned and shook his head. He’d really given the game away, hadn’t he?
When I asked if he felt he was in the right place now, he nodded. He was more likely to be understood in the Green Quarter, he thought, than anywhere else. There were others like him — or not dissimilar, anyway. Also, people were more inward-looking, less meddlesome. They tended to ignore you. Except for Starling, that is. The other day Starling had come at him with a lighted match, the bastard.
As I followed Brendan up the path to the front door, he thanked me for keeping him company. He had enjoyed our talk, he said, but now, if I would excuse him, he thought he would go up to his room and lie down. He was feeling a bit soft around the edges, a bit rancid.
Shortly afterwards, I was formally incorporated into the household, and in a manner Brendan would himself have recognised. One night, as we were eating supper at the kitchen table, Horowicz turned to me. From now on, he declared, I would be known as Wigwam. ‘Why Wigwam?’ he said before I could open my mouth. ‘Because your initials are T.P.’ Despite the laughter that accompanied this declaration, the name stuck. I became Wigwam — or Wig, for short — not just to Clarise, for whom it was a huge relief, since she’d never been able to bring herself to use my first name, but to all the men living at the Cliff, and even, after a while, to myself.
Christmas was coming, Christmas in the Green Quarter, an event that filled the entire population with fear and dread. Everybody was aware of the statistics: some people would commit suicide, some would sink into severe depression, and so on.
‘There’s only one way of dealing with it,’ Clarise told me on a dark December morning as I was helping her with lunch. ‘Get drunk, then go to sleep.’
‘With a bit of hanky-panky in between, maybe,’ Horowicz said.
He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, just a few feet away from her. The space between them filled with the glint and glitter of his small sharp eyes.
But Clarise didn’t even look up from the shortcrust pastry she was rolling out. ‘No hanky-panky,’ she said. ‘Not for me. Not any more.’
Without another word, Horowicz rounded the table, hauled the back door open and slammed it shut behind him. A bird flew diagonally across the window like something chipped off by the impact.
Clarise turned to me. ‘You see? It’s starting already.’
Wind flooded round the edges of the house, making the lights in the kitchen flicker, and for a few moments the spirit of Christmas was in the room with us, glowering and baleful — pitiless.
Some years there would be three or four men who she felt might try and do away with themselves, but the only person who troubled her this year was Aaron. Did I know him? I shook my head. I’d had very little contact with Aaron. Whenever I spoke to him, he would look at me much as a statue might, with blank eyes. I had assumed he was heavily medicated, a fact which Clarise now confirmed. All the same, she was going to put a camp bed in his room, she said, and she wanted the rest of us to take turns sleeping in there, just to keep an eye on him.
That week, we drew numbers to see who would spend which nights in Aaron’s room, each number representing a date between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day. Much to the relief of the other men, I was lumbered with twenty-five.
We sat down to Christmas dinner at half-past three. Afterwards, we gathered in the front room, which had been decorated with sprigs of holly and bunches of cheap balloons, and Jack Starling, who wasn’t one to miss an opportunity, served a punch that he had concocted especially for the occasion. I never found out what the ingredients were, but within an hour Lars had passed out under the tree — somebody tied his ankles together with tinsel so he would trip over when he stood up — and Bill Snape, a man known for his scholarly ways and his reserved demeanour, was attempting a headstand on the top of the piano. I had been watching Aaron surreptitiously ever since breakfast. He had drunk almost nothing. Once the meal was over, he sat on the sofa examining the two sides of his hand, his air of studiousness contrasting oddly with the yellow paper crown he was wearing.
Towards eleven, with the party in full swing, Aaron went upstairs. I waited a couple of minutes, then I followed. Though Clarise was already pretty far gone, she caught my eye and nodded in approval. When I opened Aaron’s door, a wedge of light from the landing showed me that he was lying on his back in bed with his eyes open and his hands behind his head.