I always knew I’d come in the end to this place. I’ve no more connection with it than any other. I passed the house so many times in the course of my ramblings, looked up at the windows, making statements I trusted would never have to be justified. But the change in my life has been a magical one. I have to believe that. I do believe it. I have never been so vulnerable, so content. It’s risky: I am finally getting the things I said I wanted.
There’s not much furniture: a settee under a dust sheet (better left that way), a draughtsman’s desk that runs the length of the room. A desk for a team of draughtsmen. Lloyd left this behind, but will almost certainly get around to claiming it back for one of his other properties. You might even recognize the thing. Lloyd featured it in several of his staged photographs. (What do they go for now? What’s the swap? A car? A year’s water rates? Another house?) What else? The usual cardboard boxes and black polythene rubbish sacks. Odd glasses, half-empty bottles, a pram. Bits and pieces scavenged from old performances and reinvented for domestic purposes: an illuminated globe, an oil lamp from the operating theatre in Southwark. And projects. On the desk, pillows of white paper. Sketches, notes, clean thefts. The time to work it all out. That’s what I’ll never have.
The proportions of our room are peculiar, but satisfying. I relish the knowledge that this was once the living quarters of a Rabbi and his family. I welcome the tradition, without the obligations. The synagogue beneath our feet has been converted into a storeroom for sides of salted fish, brightly labelled tins, hot spices. The Ladies’ balcony is heaped with sacks of Patna rice. The last recorded sighting of David Rodinsky, so Sinclair tells me, was in this room: a party of some kind, a ceremony, bar-mitzvah, Kiddush. ‘It was as if he had become another man,’ Sinclair wrote. He found some letters about it in Princelet Street. ‘The familiar self-consciousness left him. He was fluent in Middle Eastern tongues. What had once appeared a caul of sullen idiocy, stood proud: a performance of wisdom that touched on arrogance. He shone. He seemed to know his own fate.’
I’m convinced: the agent of transformation is still active within these walls. I recognized, but did not fear it. I avoided mirrors. I breathed slowly, with comical deliberation. I knew I would have to come back, sooner or later, to this trap. All those years picking at the scabs of Whitechapel, fondling safe (confessed) images, visiting the butchered sites as if they were shrines: paddling in mysteries. I held off the frenzy, stayed out of it, within rigidly defined margins of safety: a well-informed tourist. I faked it, molten orgasms of righteous indignation. There was always another house to return to, a home, locked within never-revealed systems of protection. It’s terrifying how quickly all that can change. A few abrupt twists of fate. A phonecall extended beyond the demands of courtesy. A third drink. I’ve paid my dues to the furies. And here we are, on set, in the long room, looking affectionately down on the business of the streets; or back, the hidden courtyards, the sleepers on the roof. Shameless. I live here. I belong.
I tasted my coffee. The jiffy bag lay unopened on the desk. I had no desire to break this moment and unstaple the honey-crusted package. Sinclair’s runic scribble: it gets smaller all the time. He has to write now. The phone’s been cut off, and he daren’t set foot in Whitechapel. With his bald dome and spectacles, his notebook, he might be mistaken for Salman Rushdie. They’d hack him to pieces on the cobbles of the brewery. The atmosphere has been fouled up for ever. Gang fights. Banners. Burnings. Aggravation. We all feel guilty, guilt as a constant, a hangover of guilt: even if we haven’t read a word of it. There are no sides to take.
The padded envelope, with its franked red exhortation, is obviously a communication from Sinclair’s publishers, used for the second time. KEEP COLLINS INDEPENDENT. ‘Colin’s what?’ I ad-libbed compulsively. Sinclair thinks I can’t punctuate or spell, that my lips move when I read. I don’t disillusion him. That’s one of the least offensive of his fictions. This portrait of me as a genial drunkard (lowlifer, mutant, dabbler in the black arts) is all nonsense: a shorthand convenience. I’m no Jonsonian ‘Humour’, ready for my knockabout interlude when the narrative drive is flagging. But I go along with it. It leaves me free to pursue my own much fiercer self-interrogation. It’s too comfortable to present ourselves through our flaws, to play them up, become clown, dupe, holy fool. Like a type in a medieval passion play, you finish by impersonating a single quality. ‘The Man Who Stutters’or ‘The Man with One Leg’. You are gulled into wearing a mask that somebody else has selected for you from the literary prop basket. You are the failure of another man’s inspiration. I want to fail in a grander cause.
It amuses Sinclair, after three or four Russian stouts, to pretend to believe my name is really Jobard, the French for ‘ninny’, ‘simpleton’. Joblard (sic) is how he has addressed the jiffy bag.
It might be a book. I’ll have to open it. I’ll risk a squeeze. At least, it won’t be a bill. The electricity can’t be cut off. We haven’t got any. We live by the natural rhythms of the day. Even among all this chaos — especially among this chaos — everything is slow and calm. Dust motes spiralling in trumpets of sunlight. The persistent drip of water wearing away the basin. We are waiting on the unhurried dictation of an unborn child.
The large jiffy bag contains a smaller one, too small to hold a book. It is addressed to Sinclair in a hand I do not know. What could this second bag have contained? Sinclair has nothing but books. He eats books. He pays with books. He sleeps on them. He’d probably sleep with them if he could. He begets books. There’s also a letter. I’ll save the letter. One thing at a time. Heat more water in the pan. We still have gas — until the end of the month. Another filter paper, another mug of coffee. Getting weaker with each infusion: no more than an aide-mémoire, recalling the sensation of previous cups; and — by way of that sensation — the cluster of thoughts and images, the day dreams, floating to the surface as I sipped before, and as I sip now; my eyes firmly closed in creative indolence. Somewhere, there is half a Gozitan cigar to be found: marking my place in a notebook, shredded by the opening and closing of the hinges, perfuming the creamy paper with dark and oily resins.
I dig out the staples from the fat lip of the envelope — one by one, with a fork; lay them around the circumference of my plate. The hooped silver bones of a centipede. I study the arrangement. Pick up one of the staples and lick it. Uninteresting, flavourless. I shake the packet. Something wriggles out, falls reluctantly on to the table. This is much better, the colour is superb. A bruised purple, infected with carmine: that must have been the original state. Soutine’s impasto. Colour that’s hung on a hook until it’s ready to declare itself. It shifts. It prevaricates. It broadcasts its history. Dies, regresses into a morbid, flagellant blue. A slate licker’s punishment. I lift it on my fork, bring it close to my lips — as a rasher of dead veal. A grey corpse cut. Waggling. Six inches of meat fallen from a hanged man’s mouth.