Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  You sensed a man’s anxiety when he had to return to the bar and shove and wave folded banknotes at the keeper of the lacerating Muscadet; by the time he’d got wine and forced his way back to the woman he’d prised away, her group had recombined, made new unstable combinations and his girl was blocked: a man with a camel coat over his shoulders was dangling Jaguar keys and making her simper.

  After an hour of standing next to the same two women, I knew that no one had yet spoken to them. I suppose I’d drunk a bottle and a half of the house red by then, and I said something to the one in the leopardskin trousers. She gave a single-word answer. I offered her and her friend a drink from my bottle and they backed off as though appalled – as though I’d suggested that they’d come to this seething, deafening room on Friday night to be – what was that expression – to be . . . picked up! They turned their backs on me. I left the remainder of the bottle on the corner of the bar and went back to the 1100. I thought of pulling over in Star Street, rolling down the window to a waiting tom and asking her to get inside. It might have been worth it just to see her face; it might have been worth it just to see if she’d say, ‘What do you take me for?’

  Last weekend Julie came up to stay for a couple of days. She’s nineteen years old now and works in the brewery offices. The ‘signs of promise’ at school didn’t come to much and my mother needed more money to help with the house. I met her at the station and walked her over to my room.

  ‘It’s nice, Mike,’ she said, turning round in the small space, looking for somewhere to put her bag down.

  ‘I’m getting somewhere bigger soon,’ I said. ‘With my big new salary.’

  I made some tea while she sat on the bed.

  ‘Where’s the toilet?’

  ‘At the end of the landing. Here. Take this.’ I threw her a roll of paper. At least I didn’t, like the landlord of the Tickell Arms, make her pay for it.

  She wanted to watch Jim’ll Fix It on television, and I made some tea while a whey-faced lad from Bolton got to spend the day as a steward on a cruise ship going to the Norwegian fjords.

  ‘Can I meet your friends, Mike?’

  ‘I’m not sure if anyone’s around this weekend,’ I said. ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘Oh, you know. Up and down.’

  Jules seemed a bit nervous. She was sipping tea from a Beecham’s mug I’d been given at a press conference.

  ‘When did you last come to London?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve only been the once. You know that, Mike. That time we all came up. When Dad was still alive. When we went to Madame Whatsits.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘And you bought me that model of a bus.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes. You were always generous.’

  I wondered where I’d got the money. ‘You gave me nice presents, too.’

  ‘Remember the Donny Osmond tee shirt? Mum was a bit shocked!’

  She was wearing a cheap skirt that was tight across her knees as she perched on the edge of the bed.

  I felt terribly sorry for her – with her funny little face and the wavy hair that she’d had cut like the dark one in Abba – too long and with too many layers. She had a velvet choker and a tight sweater and clumpy shoes.

  ‘Have you got a boyfriend, Jules?’

  ‘I’m not telling you, Mr Nosey!’

  She blushed at her own daring and I looked away, feeling I shouldn’t have asked. What was her life like? All the junior execs and accountants at the brewery probably ogled her, made half-hearted passes. She wasn’t anyone’s dream girl, but at the Christmas party, after a few drinks, she’d probably do. Was she still what Jennifer would have called ‘virg int’? I hoped she’d put the right value on it, so she could marry a notch or two above herself.

  ‘And have you got a girlfriend, Mike?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘I’ve never met any of your girlfriends.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘There’s a girl works at the brewery with me. I think you’d like her. She’s clever – you know, like you. Uses long words, knows lots of things.’

  ‘Useless information?’

  ‘No, no! She’s ever so nice, Mike, really, you’d like her. She’s called Linda. She’s head of accounts. She went to university and everything.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-seven, I think. Same sort of age as you. She just split up with her boyfriend.’

  ‘So I could go in-off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll look her up in when I’m next in Reading.’

  Might be fun. We could talk screw-cap economies in the old light-ale market.

  I offered Jules a Benson & Hedges, which she accepted with an appreciative murmur. I couldn’t think what on earth to do with her. We couldn’t really drive round the pubs, though maybe . . .

  ‘Would you like to see King’s Road?’ I said.

  It was a winter evening, dark already. One thing I like about London is that when you step out into the night, it just swallows you. It’s democratic, too. You can sweep past the palace, roar through the ‘royal’ parks, down the white pillared terraces of South Kensington, and no one stops you; no one stands in your way like Baynes and says, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  We drove through the park, which I thought Jules would like, down to a pub I knew off Cheyne Walk. She drank gin and bitter lemon, thinking, I suppose, that that was what London girls drank. In fact, the London girls in Cheyne Walk drank cheap wine, vodka and tonic and draught Australian or American lager, made ‘under licence’ (as though there were a patent on water, flavouring and carbon dioxide) and transported in metal-barrelled mega-tankers that could barely squeeze down the narrow Chelsea streets, past Carlyle’s old house, maybe shaking the very fireplace where Mill’s maid had used the only manuscript copy of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution to get a good blaze going. (Interestingly, it was Carlyle, I read, who later had to comfort the distraught Mill.)

  Jules swivelled her eyes round the pub as she kept the glass stuck to her top lip. I didn’t think much of the place, but I suppose if your movement is limited to Trafalgar Terrace, work, and back again, then anything else can look seductive. The yellowish light in the bar was good; some of the people were residents, they weren’t all tourists or strangers, like me; you could feel, like Stellings with the title song of Saturday Night Fever, that there was something going on. Then we went to another place I knew, hidden in a square, but I sensed Julie was getting hazy with gin – or, given pub measures, more likely drunk on bitter lemon – and we went up to a bistro on King’s Road, Dominic’s perhaps, with a strong sense of people spending their week’s money.

  Julie wanted avocado with prawns, so I ordered it too and she looked happy.

  ‘Do you remember Dad?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’

  ‘It’s been so long.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, pushing a piece of buttered brown bread between her lips. She wouldn’t have wine; I had to order a Coke for her. Coke with shellfish. God.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ I said. ‘You were only – what – four when he died.’

  ‘No, not really. Tell me about him, Mike.’

  I poured some wine for myself. ‘Dad was . . . I don’t know, Jules, how do you ever know what it’s like to be another person?’

  ‘Oh, please, Mike. Do try.’

  ‘I think Dad was someone who lived like an animal.’

  ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t think he could ever lift his eyes from the ground. Like a badger. Do you think a badger knows there’s a sky? Do you think a mouse has seen the moon? Does a dog even know that it’s a dog?’

  Jules laughed, a little nervously. ‘You are funny, Mike.’

  ‘We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  I could feel her looking at m
e.

  ‘I don’t think Dad ever reached a level much above a dog’s. He’d been beaten and he beat. He was beaten by his life as a slum child, as a young man in the navy, then a worker in a factory. He was caught and he could never look up. He could never lift his eyes. He had no freedom of action. He didn’t really miss anything because he never knew it was there.’

  ‘What do you mean, “he beat”?’

  ‘Did he ever hit you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He beat me. Not that often, I suppose. The funny thing is, I can hardly remember it now. The first time was when he was angry. He hit me in the face with his hand open, like this. Then he hit me with a walking stick, like a schoolmaster.’

  ‘Why was he always angry with you?’

  ‘He wasn’t. It became a habit. But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It’s like everything that happens to you. It doesn’t feel real.’

  Julie didn’t say anything for a long time as she worked through her steak, well done.

  Then eventually she said, ‘I miss him, Mike. Now it’s too late. I remember how he used to ruffle my hair and that. That’s about all I remember really. And at the time I just thought . . . I just thought that’s what life’s like. Everyone has a dad. Then he wasn’t there any more, and I felt like all my life had been just a dream. Then I’d woken up. But maybe I’ll wake up again. Do you know what I mean, Mike? It’s like I could be in a dream now. Still.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I do know what you mean. It’s what I meant with Dad. That he probably never woke up at all.’

  I didn’t want to talk about him any more. I said, ‘Do you ever feel you’ve lived before?’

  ‘Like reincarnation?’

  Julie liked to give ideas a name familiar to her, and get them into boxes small enough to handle easily.

  I smiled at her.

  ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘It’s my greatest fear,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s too bleak,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you another day. Have some sweet. Take another look at the menu.’

  ‘Go on, Mike, tell me.’

  I looked at her. ‘Well . . . I see a child in the back of a car . . . A face behind glass . . . And it might be me again . . . All that I know now, I’d need to learn again . . . And I look at the child’s parents and wonder if they’re kind . . . I saw a mother slap her child in the supermarket, hit him round the head and scream at him . . . And that’s the only world he knows . . . He’s in a nest of boxes he can never, ever climb out of . . .’

  I was rambling a bit. ‘And, Jules, I feel it’s my fault. When I used to see the old men in the institution and the lights come on in the grey corridor . . . I feel I’m trapped in some loop . . . Some loop of time . . . I can’t face coming back and being one of them next time. Or that child.’

  I don’t think she understood what I was trying to say, and anyway it was difficult to put into words.

  London’s burning. You can hear the thudding of the helicopters in the night sky. South of the river you can see an orange stain of fire in the sky. I blame Wyn Douglas.

  The police went to help a black boy who’d been stabbed by another black boy. A group of youths thought that instead of helping him to hospital they were beating him up. They broke police car windscreens. It stopped there, but stayed tense. Police saturated the area. I happened to be in the mag office, Friday, in the afternoon, and Wyn came on the phone to Jan.

  He was very excited, I could hear. He kept saying, ‘It’s going to go off, it’s going to go off.’

  Jan said to me, ‘If it happens, get down there.’

  It didn’t seem to me the right sort of story for Michèle Watts, who was currently doing a four-parter on tampon-related toxic shock syndrome, but Jan said she wanted all available staff to ‘get their arses to the Frontline’.

  I parked the car near Clapham Common Tube and walked down Clapham Park Road. It was quite a hike, but I didn’t want the 1100 being overturned and torched. I’d seen police versus black activity before, during the Notting Hill carnival when I was sitting outside a pub in Talbot Road. A cop came and told us they were about to charge. He shepherded us all into the bar and slammed the door from outside. It’s the first time I’d been to a police-sponsored lock-in.

  There were signs of trouble in Acre Lane, before I even got to Railton Road. There was a look of joy on the faces of the young men, mostly black, who were kicking in windows and carrying stuff out. I got to Mayall Road and saw police vans on their backs, aflame. By the railway bridge another was burning under an ad for Golden Virginia tobacco that said: ‘Get the economy rolling’. Good place to sell roll-up gear, Brixton.

  I didn’t take out my notebook or anything. I guessed I was meant to ‘mingle’, but I didn’t look black enough. What I remember is a bit patchy . . .

  There are bricks in the air and a white boy is hit. Black boys help him. I don’t know whose side I’m on. There’s fighting with truncheons and fists. Head wounds and bloodstreams. Stunned people sitting in the gutter, holding themselves with blood running through their grasp. I run away into Coldharbour Lane where a Special Patrol Group Vehicle is on its roof with black smoke rising. I see a young man break the window of the jeweller’s shop. Then there are cheap earrings and necklaces all over the pavement. Next door is a ‘consumer advice centre’, whatever that is. My consumer advice to him is: help yourself.

  Personally, I don’t want any of this stuff. A bathroom shop is gaping, but I don’t need any basins. A motor accessories shop is open house, but the 1100’s been running fine lately. It’s unbelievably loud, you can’t concentrate. All the shop alarms have gone off. The shops are screaming. The car alarms are panicking and shrieking and the police are hammering their shields as they regroup on Railton Road. They’re trying to seal off one end and make a charge, I think.

  Black boys are shouting that someone’s killed a cop, but I think it’s just a rumour. A boy runs past me with a big stereo; the window’s being kicked in by an old lady. It could be his gran. There’s something in there she really wants, because she has to kick it several times before it gives. I can hear a police charge beginning in the next street. I can hear the thunder of the truncheons on their shields.

  You get the feeling no one knows where this is going to end. We’re in uncharted country. For several hundred young men this is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened, ever will, ever could. It could be war, there could be a thousand dead.

  I ought to go home, but I have this odd desire to do the story right, plus I really want to see what happens. But I might get killed. It’s dark, it’s smoky, choking rubber tyre, petrol and bitumen; it’s night-time and it’s going to hell. It’s unbelievably exciting.

  So I think what would make me feel better is a drink, and I have this idea I’ll go to the Windsor Castle, where Wyn had that party, so I’m doubling back up Mervan Road to get to the Frontline. A policeman on a horse is chasing a black youth towards me and I step aside. I remember that the first British action in the Great War was on horseback, at Mons, with swords.

  When I get to the Frontline there are three lines of cops with their shields up. It’s raining bricks. They really should have pulled these buildings down, not left the job half-finished. A Molotov cocktail is thrown onto the shields and fizzles out. The other side of the road is a barricade of burning vehicles, a literal no-go area. Down Mayall Road, I finally push my way to get a view of the pub, but it’s on fire. It’s like newsreel of the Blitz, Victorian brickwork flaming, the skeleton of the building showing through.

  I told you they didn’t like it here.

  Before my eyes the pub collapses, brought to its knees like a prehistoric animal too heavy to survive. It just falls.

  The fire from the ruins is the only light because along Mayall Road the electricity has failed. The houses are in darkness. There’s just the wah-wah howl of sirens and the beating sound of modern war.

  Seven

 
I haven’t thought about Jennifer Arkland for years. I’ve been preoccupied, and the idea of her hasn’t been able to push itself into my mind – or at least not into the main auditorium there.

  Your brain can only have one thought at any time. It’s odd, that, isn’t it? We accept it as normal because we’re so used to it. But when you consider how many million memories our brains can store, and with what ease, it’s rather surprising that we can only think one thing at any time. It’s like a Maserati whose windscreen washer works fine – but not if the engine’s running. What on earth are those gazillion unused synapses doing at any one time? Redecorating? Dozing? R and R?

  That’s what people believe, anyway. Personally, I’m not so sure. I think I’m capable of having two or more thoughts simultaneously. I’m not talking about ‘beliefs’ here. You can believe many things about one subject; you can even, as George Orwell had fun pointing out in Ninety Eighty-Four, believe two mutually contradictory things at the same time. But beliefs are what you ‘hold’; they’re like memories; and you only become aware of them when you explain, revise or put them into words. Everyone does that.

  What I can do – and I gather this is rarer – is have two or more conscious thoughts at the same time. It’s as though the auditorium of my conscious brain has a split screen. Generally, of course, there’s just one picture; but frequently there are two. Each has its own soundtrack; each runs happily at its own pace; they do not snipe at, quote or contradict each other.

  Also, they don’t depend for their existence on the relative point of view of the observer or any of that stuff. They just exist and run autonomously and I am equally conscious of each. Occasionally, my screen redivides and I can manage to be thinking three or four things at the same time. More than that, however, is troublesome. It’s tiring, and there comes a moment when I ask myself what I’m doing. Then all the thoughts tumble, like the batons of a juggler who has become self-conscious.

  Given that capability, it’s a bit surprising that I haven’t thought of Jen – especially when you consider all the nonsense – all the guff – I’ve given mental houseroom to.