Whittle had swum towards her, his form undulating through the wrinkled hide of toughened glass, as she stood on the cool stone stairs. In the hidden crevices of the apartment block she heard children's voices, the whirring industry of domestic cleaning, large dogs barking in small places.
‘Yes?’ Richard was pulling Ian's two days of sleepy dust from the corner of his eye — it even felt that way to him, the solidifying gunk of another's oblivion. The doorbell had hooked Richard, then reeled him in from riverine sleep. It had landed him here, back on the mud bank of his own life.
‘Oh — hello,’ said Jane, taken aback, struggling to compose herself. No matter that she had prepared herself for this, the Whittle face was still an awful sight, a collection of weeping infections, hot-pus springs boiling in slow motion. ‘I'm from the DDU. I'm not a social worker, or a psychiatrist, I'm a volunteer. Dr Gyggle sent me to see if I can help you in some way, but I can come back another time if now isn't convenient, or not at all if that's what you'd prefer — ’ The words had spilled out of her, precipitate, stupidly revealing.
Richard was disarmed — and laughed. ‘. . I see. You'd better come in and have some. . have some — tea!’
Improbability had piled upon improbability, as Jane's skinny junky host came up first with tea, then with milk, and finally ever-so refined sugar. Given his circumstances this was as preposterous as if he had produced a willow patterned plate piled with neatly decrusted cucumber sandwiches.
Seated in the resolutely unfitted kitchen, they had eyed one another over mismatched cups. Whittle was brown-haired, with close-set green eyes, a snub nose, low brow and an undistinguished little pointy chin. He surprised Jane by making conversation, asking her about her work, her flat, whether she had a boyfriend. He seemed pathetically unaware of the awful impression he made, with his spotty face, his greasy unkempt hair, and his outfit of dirty striped pyjamas and an American collegian's sleeveless kapok anorak.
Tiring of it she had cut across his chatter. ‘Dr Gyggle tells me that you have a court case coming up — when is it?’
‘Not for another four months. If they're lucky I might kark it before they have to hear it. That would save them both the trouble and the cost.’ He had smirked, a little boy still finding his own cynicism profound. Jane bit her lip — did she need this? Was this really someone who either wanted or deserved to be helped?
‘I don't think that's either a clever thing to say, or true.’
‘What exactly do you know about me, Jane Carter?’ He had addressed her thus, using both her names, as if somehow to place her more exactly, define her as a player.
‘Only what Dr Gyggle has told me.’
‘The man is a fucking charlatan.’ He was vehement, but didn't raise his voice. ‘All the fucking DDU people are charlatans. All of them posturing, getting their pro-fess-ion-al kicks from lording it over scum like me — smackie scum.’ He reached his striped arm across the table at this point, and freed a filtered cigarette from a prison of ten. Jane caught sight of some more of the scar tissue that featured so prominently on Richard Whittle's medical record.
‘But you're kicking the habit, aren't you? Isn't that right?’
‘Yeah, then I'm going back into the wine business. I'm gonna be a master of wine. Go every summer to fucking Jerez, to the Dordogne, to Bordeaux, every-fucking-where, tasting, living it up.’
‘Is that what you really want to do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you had any experience?’ Even to her own ears Jane sounded oppressively schoolmarmish. There couldn't be more than five years separating them in age.
‘I used to work in an off licence in Richmond. I know all about wine, I read about it all the time.’ He pointed in the corner where there was a stack of glossy magazines. Jane had followed his finger and spotted, next to the battered meat safe on the grot-speckled work surface, a glass in which there rested the powerless trinity of teaspoon, squeezed bit of lemon and holy hypodermic syringe.
‘I see,’ she had said, and then, trying to be oblique, ‘Are you taking methadone?’
‘No, but I brush my teeth with fluoride fucking toothpaste.’ Whittle tittered annoyingly, sillily, and revealed long-unbrushed teeth, coated with green plaque. Jane had felt that enough was enough. She commenced the search for her heavy handbag, with every intention of quitting Richard Whittle's life for ever.
But then, he got up and as he wonkily orbited the kitchen, said, ‘I'm sorry. You see I can't really talk much more about all of this.’ He shaped a hand, encompassing the kitchen's work surfaces, like some junky lecturer telling the story of his short unsuccessful life, with the assistance of a series of horizontally mounted exhibition boards. ‘I'm all talked out. I talk to my parents, I talk to my brother, I talk to Giggly — the prat, I talk to my GP. I've got nothing left to say. For fuck's sake, I even have to talk to people in my dr—’ He stopped abruptly, a cautious look coming over his face.
‘People in your what?’
‘No, no, no one else. I just talk to all these people — and it never does any good.’ Whittle let his eyes fall forward, and, surveying a callus on his palm, he made ready to pick at it. A silence had welled up to cradle them, while outside on the sunny Heath, Jane could hear children screaming and screaming and screaming.
‘So you don't see a lot of point in talking to me?’
‘No, not really.’
Then the strange unknowable thing had happened. There was a scatter of very loud, clacking footfalls, which sounded on the parquet floor of Whittle's hallway right outside the kitchen. Next, the front door slammed with a rattling bash of glass and wood. Without having been conscious of making the decision to do so, Jane found herself running behind Whittle's slack behind, as he bolted towards the break-out.
They had both ended up jammed against the banister, leaning over to catch sight of the intruder as he fled. The sharp footfalls were still ringingly loud, like steel on stone, but it wasn't until whoever-he-was gained the penultimate flight of stairs that Jane caught sight of him. Later, attempting to recall precise detail, she could only picture the man's head — or at any rate the hat he wore. It was so distinctive, so bizarre. A shiny purple hat, covered in black polka-dots. A top hat.
All over London The Fat Controller's creatures, his confrères and familiars, his agents and accomplices, his licentiates and legates, were stirring. They were feeling his presence — or maybe it was the anticipation of his presence, as it were, his pre-presence — as someone might sense the coming of a thunderstorm. First the fall in air-pressure, then the build up of humidity, then the agonising apprehension that everything presages something else, that all there is is this awful, close waiting. But when at last it comes — what a disappointment. Rain is, after all, only rain. Sky piss. And thunder is, after all, only thunder. Just God, like a troubled pensioner, a little bit ‘confused’ and indulging his second adolescence by imagining that a rearrangement of the serviced flatlet's furniture will somehow engender a new charisma.
Harumph! D'ye see what's happening? It's time for you to retroscend again, you, Belial's babies, the cuties of the cabal, toddling down the diminishing aisles of Mothercare. It's time for you to join me, pick out a man-made thing and follow its course, use it to plot history's convention. Naturally, I don't want to give you the hard-sell on this. It could be that you have better things to do with your time than scour out the commercial scorings, follow the shooting stars of shelved lives. Nonetheless, I do guarantee some insights that would not be forthcoming were you not to indulge me. Indeed I offer, Free And With Absolutely No Obligation Whatsoever, twenty-jive percent more in the way of insights than you gained the last time you were compelled to retroscend.