Steranko, on the other hand, had all sorts of tools and accessories scattered around his studio and I dropped in to borrow his drill and anything else that looked as if it might come in useful. Back home half an hour later I realised that the drill wouldn’t reach from the socket without an extension lead so I headed back to Steranko’s, slightly frustrated but still looking forward to the labour ahead.
Extension lead in hand, I stopped off at the DIY shop. I hovered around waiting for my turn and then realised that the guy behind the counter — a big white bloke with a triple chin — had been waiting for me to say what I wanted. He didn’t say ‘next please’ or ‘can I help’; he just leant forward, both hands on the counter, jutting out that gut of a chin a fraction of an inch and raising his eyebrows as if to say ‘yeah? Fancy your chances do you?’ His face was clean-shaven, red and sore-looking as if he used a sandpaper flannel and Ajax aftershave.
I made him even more sore by not knowing what I wanted. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know what it was called in the hermetic argot of the building trade and as far as he was concerned that meant I was wasting his time. He assisted reluctantly, all the time making me feel like a piece of china in a bull ring. He threw screws from his hand into a bag, trudged around the shop heavily and yanked stuff out from dark recesses as if I was making him late for the heart attack that he’d planned on having for elevenses. When I’d got everything I wanted he did the eyebrows and chin bit again and stood his ground like a nightclub bouncer.
‘That’s the lot,’ I said.
He took the pencil from behind his ear and added everything up. It came to a small fortune. Then he slapped VAT on top and the total took another leap upwards. I handed over the money and the guy said ‘thankyou’, pronouncing it so that it sounded like rhyming slang for ‘wanker’.
Back home — Jesus, I seemed to have been in and out of the flat about ten times already — I set about reinforcing the door. At the old house we’d been burgled so many times that by the end of our stay we’d turned cut-price home security into a science. Other people knew about parquet floors, loft conversions and double glazing; what I knew about was low-budget impregnability. With a top-floor flat like this it was no problem: most of the kids who broke into places resorted to the simple expedient of kicking the door down and that was easily remedied. I fixed a long metal strip up the entire length of the door-frame with three inch screws every six inches so that the frame wouldn’t give way. Once that was done the problem was that the lock itself could get kicked through the door so I fixed two large metal plates around the lock. That left the other side of the door as the weak point and I screwed two heavy right-angled brackets into the wall so that they rested against the hinges. Finally there was the door itself which I reinforced with a thick metal strip down its entire length.
The whole business took close on two hours and by the time I stepped back to admire my handiwork my arm was aching and I’d lost a good deal of my earlier enthusiasm. It didn’t look pretty — with all those rusty metal strips and protruding screws it looked like nothing else so much as a medieval dungeon — but it certainly was secure. A bit too secure I discovered a few moments later when I tried to open the door and couldn’t. I’d screwed the brackets so close to the hinges that they wouldn’t rotate so the door could only open a couple of inches.
Rectifying things took another hour and by that time both arms were numb with fatigue; all that remained of my earlier enthusiasm was the spreading sweat patch on my shirt. Shelving my plans to put up shelves I put on a clean shirt and went round to see Carlton instead.
Carlton lived in a large, bare flat in a house near Brixton prison. The front of the house was white except for a band of about two feet just below the roof, which had been painted red. Before the paint had dried it had bled down into the white in deep arterial drips along the entire length of the house.
‘Welcome to the House that Dripped Blood,’ said Carlton in a creaky hinges voice as he opened the door. ‘The landlord’s trying to do the place up.’
‘Nightmare on Jebb Avenue. You busy?’
‘I’ve got to go out in a minute but come in. We’ve got time for a coffee or something. . What you been doing?’ Carlton said as I hurried up the stairs after him.
‘Trying to sort my flat out. What a headache. Somebody ought to come out with one of those magazines: Yoga and DIY in fifty weekly parts building up into a complete encyclopedia of how to remain calm in the face of mounting chaos and runaway expense.’
Music was playing quietly in Carlton’s flat. I finished making the coffee and picked up some small barbells while Carlton searched for a pair of socks. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that looked dazzling white against his dark arms. There was a mattress on the floor, a stereo, some open drawers, a rail of clothes; nothing on the walls.
‘What’s the record?’ I said, pouring coffee into large white mugs. ‘You have about five sugars don’t you?’
‘Roland Kirk,’ said Carlton tying his shoes and tossing me the album cover. ‘Three. I’ve cut down. You know about Roland Kirk?’
‘No.’ I picked up the cover which showed him in profile, playing about four saxophones at once.
‘He went blind soon after he was born,’ called Carlton from the bathroom. ‘When he was in his late thirties he had a stroke that paralysed one side of his body. Even after that he kept playing. He died when he was forty-one. You could start a religion with a life like that.’
The music twisted and writhed and breathed, searching for a way out of itself.
‘There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you Carlton,’ I said. ‘And this seems as good a time as any.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘How come there’s never any dust in your flat? How come your clothes never smell? How come your cups and everything are so clean? Are you a closet cleansomaniac?’
‘It’s my insomnia. I tidy up my flat when I can’t sleep and I’m too tired to do anything else.’
‘How often d’you have trouble sleeping?’
‘Every night virtually. I tell you, a squeal of brakes or a shout from the street at the vital moment make all the difference between about four hours sleep and none at all.’
‘Sleep is something I have no trouble with — I can do it with my eyes shut. Sometimes I think I only get up to get tired enough to go back to bed again.’
‘I only go to bed to get restless enough to get up again. Even when I’m asleep I sometimes think I’m awake.’
‘D’you dream?’
‘I haven’t had one for a while — not a new one anyway. They’re all repeats. I know them off by heart. Sometimes I nod off in the middle of them, they’re so boring.’ As he spoke, Carlton — like me — was lifting a mug to his lips with one hand and a barbell to his shoulder with the other. It was as if we were in an advert for strong coffee.
‘I got these homoeopathic tablets from the hippy shop. They had three kinds. I went for the ones that sounded like wholewheat Mogadon. They didn’t do anything at all. Rubbish.’
‘What d’you think about when you can’t sleep?’
‘My flat.’
‘What about it?’ The doorbell rang.
‘I wonder if it’s clean enough,’ he said, going to answer the door. I heard voices on the stairs and then Belinda followed Carlton into the room. She wore glasses and used foul language and after five minutes in her company you felt as relaxed as if she’d seen you pee your pants in infants’ school. She had beautiful manners. We said hello and smiled.
‘Are those new trousers Lin?’ Carlton asked.