And then again. That’s better. Good to pull taut the clothesline. It’s awfully depressing to see those grey many-times-washed aertex shirts. Trailing their cuffs in the dirt. Ha! Ha, ha … We bought a company, off the shelf. I like that ‘off the shelf’. Makes me think of neat wire boxes full of miniature executives, all stacked on racks. Not quite like that. Our company, that is, Gavin’s and mine: Ocean Ltd. Formerly trading as plankton farmers, for fish food, you see. Pet fish. Estuary — somewhere. Now, ours. And fitted out with new directors: Gavin, myself and Mr Rabindarath. Unwittingly in this last instance. He never leaves his room except to pick up his prescription. Gavin kindly relieves him of the bother of reading any of the correspondence relating to Ocean Ltd. And, indeed, of his responsibility as Financial Director thereof. Good of Gavin. Mr Rabindarath is a hopeless neurotic. He would worry.
I feel a lot better. Well enough to take on the kitchen. The purple edging around everything has stopped furiously oscillating. Either that or it now vibrates with such frequency that it appears static. At any rate, objects have achieved a crystalline purity of line. This beer can, for example. Have you ever seen a purer beer can than this? Why, the drawing of the Castlemaine Brewery in Brisbane is so sharp, one might be standing right outside of it. I drink. That flat taste. Absolute purity of line.
I lift myself from the chair. A little stiff. To be expected. Cigarette ash forms a network of lines pointing to my crotch. It’s a crotch rubbing! Ha! Ha, ha …
Walking, like most other human activities, requires a great deal of assurance. If you want it to look right you have to undertake it with tremendous confidence and verve. You can usually spot a young or inexperienced walker by their lack of style, or their assumption of a style which is too old and complex for them. Pretentious walking can be a real problem. But here, I stride into the hall quite naturally. I’m on my way to the kitchen … ‘Spicy mushrooms,’ you say? Well, to hell with them, is my reply. You were taken in by my bullshit.
There is no discontinuation of floor covering between the front room and the hall, which is comforting. The careful two-cornered ascent of the staircase in the corner is reassuring as well. I bought this watercolour, hung centrally on the wall, over the oval hall table, in Betws-y-Coed. It depicts a stone cottage, in the mid-ground. In the foreground there is a field and a dry-stone wall; in the background, clouds. It’s tremendously homey, this watercolour, as is the table, bought in Beccles, which looks dark and woody in the light that spills through from the front room. It imparts a mahogany, old solidity to my house, which it doesn’t really deserve.
Even the children, the fruit of my labours, look innocuous enough here, viewed in receding twos, marching up the treads of the staircase and huddling around the door to the cupboard under the stairs. They’ve lost their militaristic mien. I can pause here, tent my hand casually on the oval table, pinning down some junk mail, and recount.
Gavin says that this house is a cluttered little cabinet of lower-middle-class knick-knacks. That it betrays my yearning for respectability. All I know is that I could never be comfortable in his minimal environment: spotlights, wire-wooled mouldings, varnished wood, little rugs, that’s all.
When I bought this house, a necessary bit of deficit financing for Ocean Ltd, I was determined that it should be a place of real respite. At the time I was spending almost all day sitting up against freestanding baffles covered in sheeny grey fabric, talking to men whose hair pointed and whose gestures were punctuated by little stabs with aluminium ballpoints. Coming back to this house was an escape. I’ve only lived here a few months, but it really feels like home.
Setting up lines of credit for Ocean Ltd was the easiest thing in the world. Gavin was utterly convincing; there is nothing forced in his manner, he simply makes people want to be his friend. As a consequence people are his friends, and the way friends do, they do Gavin favours. He talks to them with his confident mellow voice, which has only the faintest aftertone of social superiority. It’s all in the after-tone; people don’t hear it, but they absorb it subliminally and respond. Ocean Ltd effortlessly borrowed its operating capital.
‘Not everyone responds to a glossy brochure,’ said Gavin, nudging his whisky sour with an extended finger — I noticed the tuberous bulge of plastic flesh where the cuticle should have been — ‘but it has to be there.’ Ocean Ltd had a glossy brochure: receding panels of textured paper, spot-varnished duotones of our babies looking sleek, tiny squares of copy and typefaces pulled this way and that, and the Ocean Ltd logo: one of the babies, stylised with ripping lines.
There’s a nasty ripple in the air here, in the hall. It’s too close, that’s the problem. I’m becoming absorbed with detail. Gavin tells me that that’s my problem. ‘You’re a classic anal-retentive,’ he says, ‘tirelessly absorbed by minutiae, anankastic in the extreme — it’s lucky you have to deal with the broad sweep of things, to do the abstract thinking.’ That may be so, but Gavin’s abstract thoughts have led to remarkably concrete things, like the Bloomsbury flat, the Oyster Perpetual, the suits from Bromsgrove, shirts from Barries. While my concrete mentality, my eye for detail has led me …
… to the kitchen. Yaaah! … Bloody fool. A white flash of light. I punched the wall switch, the strips flickered once in too-late warning and then sprung into full, flat light, hammering down on my tissue-paper retinas. I am a pin-hole camera. Ugh! … Everything is lit up. The dresser is exposed in the corner — an old woman taking her clothes off. There are spice jars here like the moon, one side silvered, the other buried in perpetual darkness. Everything in the kitchen is lunar, polarised. On the rectangular melamine table sits last night’s supper; those devilish spicy mushrooms crouch, warbling in their foil. In the flesh they are far less terrifying than I had imagined. I feel a slackening off, my heart surfaces from the bottom of the empty stomach-pool that it jack-knifed into when the light went on. I’ll just go to the sink and get a glass of water.
Hu, hu, heu, ggh … I’d forgotten. I’m gagging. I can barely contain myself. I feel a bitter sewage-gorge rising up my neck. I can only seize a can from the fridge, hit the light and retreat back across the hall to the front room and my seat by the window. I’d forgotten the tandoori chicken wings, they were lurking on the draining board. Just the sight of those bent red limbs in filmy bondage, wet turmeric paste pressed all around. It was enough to destabilise me. I’m sitting in the chair. And nothing makes any sense. Any more. I’m sitting vertiginously. Tipping forward. Looking down on the looking down, looking down. And how I regret those purple pelmets. And the malignant wart, that little hard nodule of pain in the pit of my arm is throbbing fit to bust. It’s no simple organic pain, this is a pain the insidiousness of which undercuts the very idea of flesh; it’s a pain that speaks of a future when we will have all evolved into cybernauts; the wart is a bolt screwed into the template of my arm, casually mashing rusted tendon cables …
‘As you were, as you were.’ I must drill this transitory army of occupation and then set them at ease with myself. When they arrived yesterday afternoon their custodians couldn’t quite believe where they were to take up residence. Standing in their pseudo-denim windcheaters, company names emblazoned on their breasts, the men squinted at my semi and then rang the descending chimes. One of them held in his solid mitt the flapping sheaf of onion-skin invoices.