Carlton was meeting Belinda in Franco’s, the pizza place in the covered market. I was worn out from the decorating and said I’d see him later.
Effra Road felt like a flight of stairs and the closer I got to home the wearier I became. My legs were heavy as rucksacks, my eyes full of hot grit. I envied my shadow for the way it was able to just slide and crawl along the ground.
My neighbour, George, was coming out of his flat just as I was unlocking the door of mine. He was about sixty and lugubrious would be an over-energetic way of describing him. For the last twenty years or so, as far as I could gather, his main ambition in life had been to get out of the rain. Everything else — such as what he did once he was out of the rain — was secondary.
‘How’s it going then George?’ I said fiddling with the lock.
‘Oh mustn’t grumble,’ he said and went on to grumble about anything that came to mind.
‘Looking forward to Christmas though?’
‘Not really son, not really.’
I opened my door and said to George that I’d see him later.
‘Oh well, plod on, son.’
Back in the flat I stumbled into a scene from a low-budget horror film. The mess was too much for the cockroaches: one, the size of a half crown, was in the sink doing the dishes, another was hoovering the floor; a few anonymous amoebatype things were taking it easy in the bath; dead wasps and flies which I’d swatted over the course of the preceding two weeks but neglected to clear up were petrifying on window sills or glueing themselves to the panes. The airing cupboard smelled like I’d been frying hamburgers in it; the cooker was covered in a solidified yellow ooze which I judged to have come from some mackerel I’d tried to lightly baste in butter a few days previously. Near the black sack that I used as a bin, looking as if it had failed in a last ditch bid to escape from the rubbish and find a more hygenic resting place, lay the partially eaten carcass of a chicken. In tin foil containers the remains of a vegetable curry looked like transparent earth in which could be seen potatoes, carrots and cauliflower, the whole scene garnished with a light confetti of pilau rice. Old peaches in a bowl wore thick fur cardigans of mould.
Stripped down to my boxers, I threw out all the rubbish, piled all dirty clothes into a bin liner and cleaned up everything I could see. I de-greased some kitchen utensils and prised loose some of the cups that had got glued to the kitchen table. In the pantry I found a squelching bag of potatoes which were the source, I now realised, of the odd earthy smell that pervaded the whole kitchen. Close to the potatoes, a bottle of olive oil had sprung a leak and a couple of lumps of meteorite cheese lay basting in a pool of it. Wearing rubber gloves I disposed of a piece of radioactive cauliflower and then threw the rubber gloves out too.
It was not a perfect job but it was certainly an improvement. Even so, it was difficult to see how things had got to quite this state. With each week I seemed to descend another few rungs on the evolutionary ladder. To reverse the process I filled the bath brimful with hot, clear water and plunged in. I dunked my head under and held my breath, feeling my hair float up like cropped seaweed, and then rose a couple of inches until I could breathe through my nose, hippopotamus-style. I writhed around for a while, then pulled the plug and let the water drain away around me, becoming amphibious, mammalian and then, finally, when there was no water left and only a circle of pond-scum to reveal where it had been, human.
Seconds later the phone rang and there I was, right back in the late twentieth century again.
040
I dropped in at the Effra and found the lounge bar packed. The only people in the public bar were half a dozen police and a guy lying on the floor, bar towels soaking up his blood. A woman crying. It had happened five minutes before I got there. The barmaid was seeing to him, wringing out the towels with red hands. That left only one other person serving. It was quarter to eleven. Nobody grumbled about having to wait.
I asked what had happened but there was nothing to know. These things are always the same: an argument over who’s next on the pool table, someone talking to someone else’s girlfriend, a spilt drink, somebody looking at somebody else. A scuffle, tables going over, glasses smashing — and suddenly someone’s getting their guts cut out.
The ambulance arrived ten minutes after the police. I remembered something Freddie had said one evening when we were both drunk: ‘There are two kinds of tragedy: the ones that don’t happen and the ones that needn’t have happened.’
I thought of the guy being loaded into the ambulance and hooked up to a plasma bag, of the nurses and doctors who would be waiting for him in their masks and gloves, and of all the other people queuing half the night in casualty departments with all their blood and pain and helplessness. I thought of dawn breaking over the broken glass, the indifferent streets and curtained windows.
The regular drinkers talked stoically about what happened. Spend enough time in pubs and you get used to most things. After a while you’re unlikely to see anything that you haven’t seen before. Someone said: ‘Get into a fight round here and you’d better be prepared to die of it.’
I drank my beer and didn’t speak to anybody. I was thinking about my liver and kidneys doing whatever it is they do invisibly and without complaint. I hoped I would never get stabbed. Or get my nose broken, or my jaw, or my teeth knocked out or my face slashed with a stanley knife. But most of all I hoped I would never get stabbed.
At home I watched Mike Tyson smashing the shit out of someone and then listened to Callas singing Lucia. As I listened I knew that nothing could be as perfect as the memory of her voice, not even love or betrayal — especially not love or betrayal. Maybe, to her, that was the meaning of tragedy; maybe that was the meaning of all tragedy.
039
We were travelling by taxi from a party in north London: Steranko, Foomie, Freddie, Belinda and I. After about ten minutes the driver pulled over and said the engine was fucked. We bailed out over Westminster.
It was one thirty in the morning. The sky was almost purple. A slight mist. We cut through St James’s Park, passing a flotilla of ducks. Nothing moving, not even the dappled lights on the surface of the pond. We walked along an avenue of trees and caught dark glimpses of statues. Foomie and Steranko were walking slightly ahead of the rest of us; her arm was through his, her head angled slightly towards him. We passed a bulbous, black statue of Churchill.
A few minutes later Foomie called out: ‘Look, Christmas!’ and pointed to a Christmas tree decorated with red, yellow and blue bulbs.
We walked through Whitehall, through all the empty architecture of power with its austere ornamentation and inscrutable attractiveness. Wide streets, discreet trees. A sign said ‘Churchill’s War Cabinet’ and an arrow pointed down some steps. The whole area had the feel of a museum. Suddenly we were tourists. There was no one else around.
The windows in the buildings did not look like windows. They shared the same texture as the walls and were not there to be looked in to or out of. What impressed most about the walls was the suggestion of discreet thickness. There was only one impulse behind these buildings: they were built to last — and to last it was necessary not only to be impregnable but also to impress. Vandalism was not even an issue. These buildings created their own time. They did not defy time, they consolidated it. Their foundations were deep in an unshakeable past; their walls were the habitation of a perpetual present. The buildings had turned the symbolic power invested in them into an active, brooding patience that rendered surveillance superfluous. The archaicism of the buildings was the chief source of their potency. The buildings had the same weight — the same feel — as the war memorials we passed: solid, carefully angled blocks of rock on whose sides the names of men had been scratched. Even the pavement felt more permanent here.