A Shock

by Keith Ridgway

  He was falling asleep. He snapped out of it suddenly and shifted. His back was sore against the divider. He wondered if he should lie down. But he shouldn’t sleep. Why did he always need to sleep? He was worried about snoring. Someone had told him once. He didn’t much believe them. But he was full of involuntary noises. The coo and the fart and the burp. Why not the snore? She wouldn’t hear him. Even if she did. Those noises don’t register. Who is in their house, in their bed, and they hear a noise and they think oh my god there is someone farting in the attic? He laughed, stopped. Smiled while his belly jiggled. He couldn’t laugh, he couldn’t fart, he couldn’t snore. Ok!

  Sometimes a car went by, voices, footsteps. He could hear it all clearly. But nothing from inside. He became bored. He thought about the porn magazines, and immediately stopped thinking about them. Don’t make a bad situation stupid. A couple of times he thought he heard her and he stopped breathing. But it wasn’t her.

  Maybe he should go and wait. Get up, go through the hatch. Even put all the clothes back the other end of the attic before he went. Bring the jug down. Wait in the kitchen for her. Hi there, yeah, I know, I know, misunderstanding with Ronnie, he thought I was making my own way home. He locked up. Thinking I’d already gone. I know I know. No, I don’t have a phone. I don’t believe in them. I like to read books. I’m pretty faggy to tell you the truth I don’t even carry a knife. I know, I know, what sort of youth. A non-prospering youth, that’s what. Ok, you have a great evening, take care now, all the best, god bless.

  He stayed where he was.

  After a while he lay down.

  When he woke it was to the sound of the front door slamming.

  His brain reassembled the world in an instant.

  So he was doing this.

  He stayed very still. Footsteps to the kitchen. Reading the note. Quiet for a while. Then her running up the stairs. A click. Another click. Light switches. She was looking at the bathroom.

  — Fuck’s sake, she said, quite loudly.

  They had not done much that day.

  She was right under the hatch. He imagined her looking at it. No, she was in the bathroom. He could hear her on the boards. She cleared her throat. She was talking to herself but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then she seemed further away. Her bedroom. Just for a second. A little silence. Then she coughed again somewhere much closer and his body tensed. Feet. Her footsteps. She went downstairs. He breathed and wiped his head, and his hand glistened in the dark. It was dark. A foggy grey light showed him next to nothing of himself.

  So here it was. Here he was. For the duration.

  He needed to shift his position but he waited. The downstairs toilet flushed. He could hear the radio. It seemed to move around. She took it to the kitchen. He heard pots and pans. He lifted himself and scuttled out from the divider, lay down on his back. Tried to get comfortable. This was it. He was here. This was where he was.

  Perhaps he never leaves.

  He was pressed between the flat of the floor and whatever he put on himself. He was face down. Then he was on his back without moving. In the dark he was crushed without moving. On his back, his brother’s body lying on him, legs and hips and belly to legs and hips and belly, laughing at him, making as if to spit in his face, in his mouth, and rolling off then, Pigeon pushing him off, acting like he was pushing him off, but it was his brother who rolled, who left it, who said sorry later on. One time. He thought of the man from France, and now he’s face down, that big man with the cold belly who had lain on his back in the heat so that he could barely breathe, checking all the time, looking at him, and every inch of him covered by every inch of him, knees in the back on his knees, cock in the crack of his arse, cold belly in his back, shoulders on his shoulders, pressing him like a ball of blue tack. He put other men on his back. So that he could not move. Faceless men. Pale bodies in the attic. He did not want to know their faces. Just men. And so his brain flashed their faces at him and the cop was strongest and he just smiled at that claptrap, that nonsense. This is what the mind does, what the cock do. This nonsense. Tries to scare you, shame you, give you what you don’t need as if it’s something that you secretly want, when it’s not. When it’s not.

  He thought of Mr Guptha’s thighs and his big neck, his bunched up cords, the bulge in his crotch you could see sometimes when he walked down the aisles — one way looking at faces and the other way looking over shoulders — and you could feel him getting closer like a sound wave, like a pool wave, hitting you, flattening you, and he would go past and Pigeon would crouch in his desk like he was on top of him. On his back. He was rock hard, he realised. Not then, now. He realised it when it suddenly hurt and he had to lift his hips and get his hand down there and straighten himself out. Hard and fucking wet. Jesus. He imagined his cock poking through the ceiling, through the lady’s ceiling, pointing at her out of her ceiling like a light fitting. He imagined her standing on her bed to see what it was, and licking it, putting it in her mouth. All those men on his back. All that woman sucking his cock. He fell asleep like that, seeping out a pool of hot wet mess into his M&S briefs and his canvas work trousers that he knew were sexy. He fell asleep and dreamed of dying at the bottom of the sea, part of the world at last, part of its mulch and its mess, its waste matter, its sag and decomposition, living forever in the soil of the future, living forever like a slice of what happened, a single thin slice of time, cut out and put down.

  In his sleep he did not snore. But the coos came before dawn. And when she woke it took a while to make them out, but they reached her and she lay there and listened. Then she got up to go to the gym and shower. She dressed. She made some sandwiches for the plumbers. For the polite older man, and the sullen younger one. Not the brightest people she had ever met, not the fastest workers. But you get what you pay for.

  She went outside and locked the front door and heard the coos again, above her head. She looked up, puzzled. A pigeon looked back at her from the eaves.

  The Meeting

  There was talk in The Arms. Ronnie had been in, defiant. Harry asked him straight out had he really locked that young lad into a house and left him there? Ronnie leaned sideways against the bar and looked at no one in particular and said that no, it wasn’t true. It had been a misunderstanding, and that Daniel Salisu was a liar and a troublemaker and that socialism was too cowardly to ever hold sway in the United Kingdom where it took hard work and early rising to prosper, and Pigeon Salisu had never risen early in his life, he was incapable of waking, he was lost in a dream of idleness, and he had left his phone in the van and how was Ronnie expected to know that?

  — Pigeon name, pigeon life.

  Harry laughed, shook his head. Stan scowled at Ronnie and Ronnie scowled back. But he left after one drink, muttering.

  Later, when the others arrived, Stan went to the bar for his second pint before starting.

  — Anna isn’t going, said Harry, but Stan didn’t know what he was talking about.

  — Anna who?

  — You don’t know Anna? She comes in sometimes.

  — I don’t think so.

  — Well, she’s not going, but Yan probably is.

  — Yan?

  — Yes, Yan.

  — Who is Yan?

  Harry laughed, shook his head.

  — You know him. His name is a bit . . . variable. Yan. Always here. Except tonight. Yves, Yan, Yanko? Priestly sort of oddball. You hate him.

  — Stoker.

  — Right. He’s going. He’s harmless you know.

  And Harry went through to the back bar.

  — Going to what? Stan asked no one. He sipped his beer. The place was quiet. He checked his phone for Maria, gathered his thoughts, was about to turn away when Harry came back through, talking.

  — You having a meeting?

  — Yeah.

  — Want the backroom? I can turn
the music down.

  — Nah you’re all right. It’s fine in here. Just a few of us.

  — Here, Stan.

  Stan put down his beer. Leaned on the bar.

  — What’s the name of the older guy? I can never get it.

  — Prentice?

  — Prentice. That’s it. Bit of a muppet.

  — What happened?

  Stan looked towards the table where Prentice was chatting with Sal and Fatma. Andrew had arrived as well. Sanjay was outside smoking.

  — Ah nothing. He’s just an awkward sort. You know Ronnie?

  — Not really. I know Daniel Salisu though. He’s a good guy.

  — So are you going?

  — To what?

  — To the fucking party.

  — What fucking party?

  — Jesus Stan. I told you not five minutes ago.

  — No you didn’t. You started telling me who was going and who wasn’t going but you never told me to what.

  — The party. Those two, that couple, always in here, not always. Gay couple. Northern, one of them. They’re having a party. They were in last night and told me a bunch of people to invite. Including you and yours.

  — Oh that’s nice of them.

  — Nice lads. Probably Tory.

  — And drinking in here?

  — I serve everyone.

  — Not a very Tory sort of establishment Harry.

  Harry gave him the details and Stan picked up his pint and went back to the beginning of the meeting.

  An email from Sanjay, announcing a full meeting for the Thursday, had gone out late, on the Tuesday afternoon — just two days notice — and there had been a string of back and forths about that, on email, in WhatsApp, on Slack, and in The Arms on the Tuesday night when Prentice and Hilda had bumped into Sanjay, and then Flo, and all of them complaining — well we won’t get anything done if people don’t come to the meetings; and what sort of notice is two days have you not heard of childcare, shifts; and then, it’s just a matter of making arrangements; and, lots of people aren’t going to be able to make this one; then, there’s always someone who can’t make a meeting, you have to question people’s motivations really; and, well actually you don’t we’re all coming with different motivations and different abilities and resources and this is something that has to be respected.

  Prentice went up to the bar and spoke for a while with Harry, trying to persuade him that as a Jew he would be very welcome to join their local group and Harry explained, a little baffled, that he wasn’t a Jew. Which in turn baffled Prentice.

  — Hilda told me you were Jewish.

  — No I’m from Nottingham.

  — Well, I mean, there are Jews in Nottingham, I’m sure.

  Harry laughed.

  — I’m sure there are. But I’m, well I don’t know what I am, Church of England I suppose, I’ve never really thought about it.

  — Church of England also very welcome, said Prentice.

  — Why does people’s religion matter though? Harry asked him.

  — It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t at all. I just thought you were Jewish. That would matter. You know. Well, it wouldn’t matter, but given the, given the situation. It would be good to have more Jews really, locally, involved, to head off, well, to demonstrate that we are not anti-Semitic. I mean, we’re really not. You’re in the party though?

  — Barely.

  — Well, would you join us?

  — I don’t think so mate.

  Prentice went back to the others and entered into furious consultation with Hilda. He told her that he’d never been more embarrassed.

  — You can’t be embarrassed without being assed, Hilda said.

  — What?

  — You can’t say embarrassed without saying assed. It’s part of the word you see. So don’t be assed and you won’t be embarrassed.

  — I’m embarrassed I married you.

  Hilda laughed wildly at this which seemed to reassure Flo and Sanjay and Janice — who had just turned up as well — huddled together at a slight distance trying to eavesdrop.

  About ten minutes later on WhatsApp Stan told everyone that a meeting with two days’ notice was not practical and that it had been scheduled without a full meeting of, or consultation with, the steering committee and it was therefore cancelled. He then called a meeting of the steering committee for the next night, the Wednesday.

  Sanjay went outside to call him. The others watched through the window as Sanjay paced and smoked and argued, and then was mostly silent, nodding, and, towards the end, smiling, as he wandered towards the edge of their field of vision, and then wandered out of it, and didn’t return.

  — Bit of pantomime, that, said Prentice.

  — Where’s he gone?

  — He’s hung up on him. That’s what’s happened there.

  — Stan hung up on him?

  — How do you know?

  — Well I don’t Janice, it’s conjecture.

  — He’s left half his pint.

  — Stan’s embarrassed him.

  — He’s embarrassed himself.

  — They’re as bad as each other.

  Janice and Flo left together and walked down towards Peckham on the main road, complaining, mostly about Stan. Neither of them was on the steering committee, but Flo pointed out that they could be if they wanted to be, given that there wasn’t currently a gender balance and that there was at least one open position for a woman which either of them could probably just take, and then have it confirmed by acclamation at the next full meeting. Flo tried to persuade Janice to put herself forward, and Janice tried to persuade Flo, and by the time they got as far as the fire station they had decided that they would bring it up at the next meeting and decide closer to the time which one of them should take it because it was becoming a joke now, this constant bickering between Stan and Sanjay. They thought it was a stupid male thing, a pissing competition. Dickering, said Janice.

  — Not bickering. Dickering.

  And they laughed.

  Janice lived in the Pelican Estate. Flo walked on towards her place off Peckham Hill Street, but she stopped into the Spoons for a last couple because it was only just gone eleven and she wasn’t tired, and the next day was just a matter of getting the kids out, and her shift at Boots didn’t start until one because it was Thursday. She quite liked Sanjay. He had persuaded her to get involved, which took some doing, so he must have something going for him. In Spoons she did her sums and bought a pint of the second cheapest lager and sat on a high stool at a high table and tried to work out what was happening on the muted television. There was a game that sometimes got going in The Arms, when people would pretend that they’d just got a news alert on their phone and they would call out what it was, what they wished it was.

  — Prime Minister dead.

  — Vatican on fire.

  — The President has fallen down the steps of Air Force One and is lying mangled at the bottom, bleeding out, and no one’s coming to help him.

  — Beyoncé buys flat in Peckham.

  — Queen seeks divorce.

  — There’s a fucking meteorite. Size of Camberwell. About to hit Camberwell.

  Always got the loudest cheers, those ones.

  Flo sat there with a grin on her face staring at nothing and was startled, flustered, nearly knocked over her glass, when Sally Morris tapped her on the shoulder and asked could she join her. Sally was peculiar, but Flo thought it was nothing very much, just the grind of things, a little punch drunk from living, something Flo sometimes reeled from too, so much time pushing back against the bullshit that when suddenly and briefly there was nothing pushing you and you fell over and looked like a tit. Sally was single now, far better for it, but wasting her evenings in the Spoons was not smart she told Flo.

 
— I need to get a hobby, she said. Do you have a hobby?

  — Trying to improve the lot of the working classes, said Flo, and they both had a good laugh, and Flo stayed much longer than she’d intended.

  Around the corner two kids crashed a stolen moped into the side of a parked Zipvan and one of the kids shattered his kneecap and the other ran off, leaving the stolen moped blocking the road and his friend trying not to scream and trying to stand up, eventually giving up on both and lying by the kerb making a racket while passers-by called an ambulance and the cops came first and turned the boy over like they were flipping a burger and put a knee between his shoulder blades and cuffed him. He had nothing in his pockets but a smashed-up phone and a balled-up fiver and a house key.

  Prentice was still in The Arms talking a little to Harry. Prentice wasn’t really following, but Harry seemed to be telling him about how the pub worked. Prentice hadn’t asked him that. He’d asked why they’d started serving food earlier in the year and then stopped after about a month. But Harry was talking about his tenancy and his contractual obligations to the owners, who were, he said, effectively a property company who made him serve a range of shit beers and blamed him when no one drank them.

  — Is it the mice?

  — What?

  — Did you stop serving food because of the mice?

  — Fuck off mate. Kitchen is pristine. Kitchen is pristine. Get the odd mouse during the autumn but they come in the front door like all our customers. Really mate, who told you that?

  — No one. I was guessing.

  — The food guy didn’t work out. Don’t start telling people I have mice. I don’t. Might start doing some Thai stuff during the winter. I’ve been talking to these guys. They roll up with all the gear. Little van. Very efficient. Lovely stuff too. You like Thai?