The loss of his first car is a big moment in a man’s life and as such he is entitled to a lavish display of grief. Since I appeared totally unmoved by this mechanical castration it was assumed that the trauma had already plunged me into deep shock. A policewoman offered me a cup of tea with lots of sugar. As we left she whispered to Fran that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on me for a few days.
‘Well that’s a load off my mind,’ I said as we stepped through the door.
Outside I caught a quick glimpse of a twitching grey squirrel, high up in the dusk of a tree.
‘Look,’ I said, touching Fran’s elbow and pointing. At school they had taught us that the red squirrel was cuddly and lovable but that it was being forced out of business by vicious greys. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a red squirrel but as we watched I was struck by how cute this grey one looked with its munching jaws and bushy tail.
‘Soon it’ll probably turn out that even the greys are endangered, that their survival is threatened by a new, savage mutant of the species, perfectly adapted to life in the inner city,’ I said.
‘The scag squirrel,’ said Fran in the hushed tones of a TV naturalist. ‘Capable of living off dustbins and the dried blood from old syringes, its graffiti-patterned coat enabling it to blend in perfectly with its natural habitat of windswept tower-blocks and crumbling window sills.’
As we walked on it occurred to me that in the last month I’d lost my home, job and car. Each loss bothered me a little less than the previous one. I mentioned this to Fran as we sweated over plates of chicken madras in the local Indian.
‘I’m becoming immune to catastrophe,’ I said.
‘There’s a good side to all of this as well.’
‘How?’
‘The house was terrible, the job was boring and the car hardly worked,’ she said, reaching out and touching my hand.
‘Thanks Fran, I appreciate that. Hey, I thought you were a vegetarian.’
‘I am — a meat-eating vegetarian,’ said Fran. Then she told me about her latest scrapes.
Fran had a knack of getting into scrapes and then slipping out of them, bewildered but no worse for wear. A couple of months ago she had popped out from her house to buy some milk and had ended up on the outskirts of Barcelona. Most of the time Fran emerged from her encounters completely unscathed but I was always worried that one day something was going to happen that she couldn’t handle, that she was going to find herself completely out of her depth. Whispering over our curry she told me how she’d stolen a hundred pound necklace on impulse from a jewellers (‘the next thing I knew I was out of the door’) and sold it to someone she happened to meet in a nightclub. I made a point of never going shopping with Fran; it was too nerve wracking. She regularly lifted clothes, shoes and books from shops and had always told me stories of scams, deals and stealing but this was on a different scale altogether. It was when she told me things like that that I wondered what was going to happen to her.
I looked at her face, at her brown eyes and the tiny scar just above one eye. When she was nine and I was eleven she banged her head on the corner of a table and I wrapped a clumsy bandage around her. Later she had four stitches above her eye in hospital. We sort of looked alike. I looked at her and saw myself reflected in her eyes. In her face I saw our history, our parents.
‘What now?’ said Fran, hands on her stomach and tilted back in her chair. ‘God I’m full.’
‘Up to you.’
‘I’d like to go back to the place you’re staying and get really wasted,’ she said. ‘How about you?’
‘That’s great. There’s an offie just round the corner.’
Fran insisted on paying for the meal and for the expensive Japanese lager we picked up from the off-licence. Even as a kid she was generous with money. Our father used to call her a windfaller.
Lugging our booze back to Freddie’s we saw a guy up ahead smashing a four-foot plank into the corrugated iron that fences off the old synagogue on Effra Road. We crossed to the other side, keeping an eye on him as we drew level. As he hurled the plank round his shoulder and crashed it into the metal he screamed and shouted: Nyaargh! Nnnnagg! His head must have been like a shaken can of beer, ready to explode all over the place. We walked fast, not wanting to attract his attention, the bash and clatter of bent metal ringing in our ears as the distance between us increased.
Back at Freddie’s we drank beer and smoked Fran’s sinsemilla until we were almost legless. Just as there was an odd combination of elegance and gawkiness in Fran’s movements so her fine-boned features concealed a considerable physical resilience. She looked like a dancer and had the constitution of a pit pony.
We listened to early Coltrane, moving fast and easily through the contours of bop. We played one record after another, concentrating hard until we were existing only in the music and pursuing whatever train of thought came into our heads. We danced to whichever song came next and bottles got kicked over. When I say we danced I mean we hung on to each other, slugging back beer and crashing over the sofa or on to the floor. Neither of us cared. Then we sat down again for a few songs. Fran’s eyes were shiny and wet from laughing.
‘You OK Fran?’
‘I can feel a lot worse than this and still feel fine. How about you?’
‘I can feel a lot better than this and still feel bad,’ I said as I got up and lurched to the toilet.
‘I hardly know where I am,’ said Fran when I got back. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this point.’
Eventually the beer ran out. Neither of us threw up. I drifted off to sleep and woke up in bed, unable to remember how I got there. It was six a.m. and my bladder felt like a hot-water bottle that had been filled to bursting. In the bathroom I pissed and gulped down mouthfuls of water. I looked in the main room and saw that Fran was asleep under a sleeping bag.
058
Fran had already gone by the time I got up the next morning — sleep was something she snatched at odd intervals like coffee from a vending machine. Propped up against an empty packet of Rice Krispies was a note scrawled in her appalling handwriting:
‘Had to rush. See you soon. Don’t worry about the slippery slope. Love F.
PS: That Japanese beer! I’ve got a hangover like Pearl Harbour.’
I felt pretty bad too and if my current form was anything to go by I’d be lucky not to finish the day feeling a good deal worse. Extrapolating from the events of the last few weeks it seemed likely that I would end up either in prison or hospital within a month. The only good thing about the way things had worked out was that in my current circumstances it was logically impossible to get burgled.
Joints creaking like floorboards beneath the weight of my hangover, I made my way to the bathroom and stood beneath the tepid drizzle of Freddie’s so-called shower for ten minutes. Back in the kitchen all I could find to eat were eggs. I swallowed one raw and began pouring hot tea down my throat. It wasn’t until the fourth cup that I noticed a letter addressed to me lying on the table. It was from Enterprise Estates: I’d applied to them for a flat in one of the blocks nearby and given Freddie’s as my current address. I ripped the envelope apart and there it was: the offer of a flat I’d looked at a couple of weeks ago, just around the corner from where I used to live. I raced through the details: unfurnished, bedroom, living-room, hundred pounds a month, vacant as of now.