by Will Self
‘What was all that about?’ I asked Jim as we turned out of Houghton Street and walked down towards the Strand tube station.
‘Nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.’
‘Come off it Jim, you owe me an explanation. Those blokes weren’t doing a late pick-up. At least I didn’t see you sign for anything. They were talking about me.’
‘Yeah, well I did tell them that you might be interested …’
‘In what? Interested in what?’
‘In meeting this Carlos fellow.’
‘I don’t even know who he is. How do you know I’d be interested in meeting him?’
‘Well, you were interested in Stein’s lecture. And Carlos isn’t dissimilar, excepting that he’s something of a leader, as well as a teacher.’
‘Leading what? Who does he teach?’
‘This little group of motorcycle couriers. I suppose you’d think it was all a little bit cranky. Another facet of my overriding obsession. But these bikeys have cottoned on to almost the same set of ideas as I have myself.’ He paused. ‘They’re fed up with waiting.’
‘Well, I’d be fed up with waiting if I were a despatch rider. It must be an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Doesn’t it have one of the highest occupational death rates? I’m sure that’s because they get frustrated and then they make mistakes.’
‘You don’t understand. These people are operating at the limit.’ Jim was getting worked up. He was going into rant mode. He stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me, arms akimbo, twitching. ‘They’re shooting methedrine, or basing coke, or snorting sulphate. They’re driving at all hours of the day and night, existing at a level of frayed neural response that we can only faintly imagine. They’re operating not at the level of other traffic, a straightforward level of action and anticipation, but at the level of nuance, sheer nuance. They perceive the tiniest of stimuli with ghastly clarity, and respond. Think of it, man. Weaving your way through heavy traffic astride a monstrously overpowered motorcycle, always pressured to meet a deadline, the ether plugged into your helmet. They have to mutate to survive!’
After this little outburst we carried on walking in silence for a while. We were going down Essex Street past one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Between the slats of a three-quarters-closed Venetian blind I could see a man in shirtsleeves. Still crouched, at this late hour, over a flickering monitor in the pool of an Anglepoise. As I glanced at him he pushed a button and the figures on the screen scrolled upwards in a stream of green light.
Jim was breathing heavily, but he’d calmed down a little. I didn’t know what to say, I was curious but I didn’t want to provoke him. For the first time I had the sense with absolute clarity that Jim had teetered over that fine, fine line between eccentricity and madness. Eventually I spoke. ‘These despatch riders, Jim, do they believe in “waiting” as well?’
‘Of course, of course, of course. They are the real waiters. Waiting is ground into them. Every moment could be an arrival, at a pick-up or drop-off, or the ultimate dropoff, death itself! No wonder they understand what is happening. They exist at the precise juncture between the imminent and the immanent! Carlos has seen their potential. He is a man of extraordinary powers, he understands that the future will belong to those who clearly articulate the Great Wait!’
We were standing in the forecourt outside the tube. A few late office workers mingled with the eddy and flow of tourists, who moved in and out of the entrance in their bright pastel, stretchy clothes. It was a clear night and the neon sign above the National blipped its message across the flat water. I took Jim’s upper arm in what I hoped was a firm, avuncular sort of a grasp.
‘Jim, don’t you think you’re letting all this rather get to you? I think you’re overtired and overworked. I’m sure you’re not spending enough time with Carol. Why don’t you take a rest for a few days? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, the world will wait for you.’ His response surprised me.
‘Well, yes, er … you could be right. She has seemed a little distant recently. She can’t cope with my insomnia, you know. Perhaps you are right. But even so, you should meet Carlos, he isn’t a crank, or a freak. His powers are real enough, believe me. I’ve never had any truck with any kind of cults or mystical twaddle, have I?’
No, he never has, I thought to myself, after we had parted and gone our separate ways. And perhaps there is something in what he says. My eyes flicked across the tracks, between which lay the typical refuse. I picked out Jim’s figure at the far end of the platform. His shoulders were hunched and he’d inserted his body between a dangling sand bucket and a coiled, canvas hose in a wooden cabinet. It was as if he was trying to restrain himself. It was clear from his posture and his blank stare what he was doing. He was waiting for a train.
I tried not to think about Jim for the next couple of days. If he was having a breakdown of some kind there was probably very little I could do for him – and if he wasn’t. Well, after Norfolk and Stein’s lecture I didn’t really want to see him for a while, anyway. I needed a change of company; I needed to spend some time with people who were a little less heavy. I went out in the evenings to films and parties, I got tipsy, I had yelping conversations with people I had just met. Conversations in which each yelp seemed, at the time, a touchstone of empathy. At the time, that was.
But try as I would I couldn’t shake Jim. He nagged at me and I knew it was because I should at least try and help him. The image that stayed with me most clearly – appearing as a flickering ghost when I switched on my terminal in the morning – was of Jim in the old lecture theatre, his arms clutching the seat back, his face distorted.
After a week I was really anxious. Jim hadn’t been in touch, which was unlike him. I resolved to go and see Carol, his wife. After all, I reasoned, before the whole ‘waiting’ thing took off we used to see quite a lot of one another. I had been in the habit of regularly having dinner at their house. Childless couples have a tendency to adopt single people and try and feed them up and marry them off. And this is the way it had been. Carol had invited me to a series of Tuesday evening affairs where I’d eaten spinach and tomato lasagne and met a number of her female colleagues.
After a while the Tuesdays had petered out. I missed them. I missed the atmosphere of somewhere where people cooked on a regular basis; and I missed seeing Carol, who I liked. And who, despite my failures as a potential pair-bonder, never seemed to judge me. She was one of those people who had a tremendous sense of containment about them, her physical presence constantly emitted the quiet message that she was fine just as she was, she was content to do x or y, but it wasn’t really necessary. When she and Jim had married their friends had called it ‘a marriage of opposites’. It was significant that over the years no one had seen fit to add to this observation.
Carol worked at home as a freelance editor. So I could be sure of finding her in if I called unannounced. I took the morning off work and the train out to Wandsworth. Their flat was across the Common from the station. As I walked over I felt the morning’s catarrh slop and gurgle in my chest. I had a bitter, old iron taste in my mouth and felt considerable premonition.
Jim’s Sierra was crouched on the steep camber of the road outside their flat, like a beetle redesigned by committee. I walked up the tiled path along the privet hedge and pushed the intercom buzzer. After a while there was a crackle on the speaker.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, Carol. I need to talk to you, about Jim.’
‘Hang on a minute, I’m not up yet.’
I waited for more than a minute. But when I saw, through the glass door panel, the door of their flat swing open, it wasn’t Carol who emerged. It was a young man. A tall young man, who came to the door, opened it, and walked past me with a cheery nod and a cheerier ‘Good Morning’. He tucked his arms energetically into his windcheater and jauntily walked off down the road, implying that he was off for a day’s hard work. One that he was looking forward
to.
A few minutes later Carol came and let me in. She was wearing a dressing gown patterned with pastel blooms. She was superficially groomed but there hung about her the subtle, sour smell of someone who’s been making love in the morning. I followed her down the corridor and while I sat at the kitchen table she made me a cup of coffee.
‘So what about Jim?’ Carol panted, vigorously depressing the stainless steel plunger of the cafetière.
‘Just that I think he’s having a breakdown, Carol. I think he needs help of some kind. I haven’t seen him for the past week; the last time I did he was absolutely raving.’
‘I haven’t seen him either. I haven’t as much as clapped eyes on him. You know he’s cabbing in the evenings now?’
‘Cabbing? What on earth for? Not for money, surely.’
Carol laughed and pulled a twist of inky hair away from her face. ‘Oh no, not for money. To relax him. That’s why he does it. He says it relaxes him.’
‘He’s mad.’
‘Maybe, maybe, but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, believe me.’ She said this earnestly, and sat down opposite me, an identical coffee mug cupped in her hands.
I believed her. Whatever part the young windcheater played in her life there was no doubting her affection for Jim. If she couldn’t influence him, no one could.
‘He comes back from work every evening and goes straight out again. I don’t think he actually takes a lot of money. He’s more intent on keeping in touch with his friend Carlos.’
‘So you know about that.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And the despatch riders. What do you think?’
‘Well, strictly speaking, I suppose he could be right, but it strikes me that there’s enough that’s obviously wrong with the world without becoming obsessed by the intangibles.’
I took the train back into town. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was expected at work. I thought I might walk into Soho and drink some espressos at the Bar Italia. The clear, sharp light of the morning had given way to the kind of intense sepia tone and gritty air that precedes a summer storm in London. The sense of rising barometric pressure was tangible. I felt oppressed and confused by my talk with Carol. I still couldn’t accept that there was nothing to be done for Jim. It was if those who loved him were just waiting for something awful to happen.
I trailed my damp, stinging feet along Oxford Street and turned into Soho Square. There was a gust of wind and a peppering of grit flew into my eyes. For a moment I was blind. I leant against a wall while the tears gathered and flowed down my face. When my vision cleared I saw Jim.
He was standing, leaning on the inside of the door of his car, talking to another despatch rider. This despatch rider was even more singular than the others I’d seen with Jim. He had the regulation jacket and bright, vinyl tabard. But instead of boots and leather trousers he had on baggy, green cords and battered trainers. He was propped on his bike, a battered, black 250 MZ, regarding Jim with slight disdain. His head was quite repulsive. He looked like a failed albino. His hair was the palest of gingers, his face putty-white, his features were soft and vestigial, his eyes the pinkiest of pinky-blues.
I crossed the street and hailed them. The failed albino turned to look at me, I could see his hand clutching the handlebar. It was as flat as a skate, the nails – dirty little crescents of horn – were deeply recessed into the flesh.
‘I was just at your house, Jim, and I saw the car outside. Were you there all the time?’
‘No, mate, I was out on the Common doing my exercises. I just went back, picked up the car and came into town to meet Carlos.’ He indicated the failed albino with a twist of his hand.
‘Why aren’t you at work, Jim?’
‘I could ask the same of you, mate.’
There was something rather light and cheery about Jim’s manner that I found reassuring. I suppose in retrospect I should have been scared by the change in him. After all, the last time I’d seen him he’d been utterly driven, but, despite the mood swing and the weird company he was keeping, I was pleased to see my friend looking a little more like his old self.
‘Carlos is taking me on a run today. Do you want to come along?’
But before I could reply, Carlos broke in, ‘Can he come along, James? May he please come along? That is the question.’ Carlos had a high, fluting voice and spoke with the accents of a comic Welshman. It was immediately clear that he always spoke facetiously and that all his questions were rhetorical.
‘Carlos, this is the man I was telling you about. My old friend. He’s the one I went to Stein’s lecture with. He knows most of it already.’
‘There’s a difference between knowing and seeing, isn’t there, James? Now I don’t suppose you’d deny that, would you?’
I wasn’t really paying that much attention to this exchange. Carlos struck me as a ludicrous figure. I had to get back to work. I was suddenly angry with Jim. Everything he said was clearly a manifestation of what I now saw as an illness. It was strange, but I could feel falling back down my throat the level of choked emotion I had invested in Jim. I should never have tried to help him. He was someone I knew only vaguely. I could do without Jim. He was receding fast.
‘What are you waiting for, man?’
‘What’s that?’
Carlos was addressing me. ‘Why don’t you come and see, then? I value Brother James’s opinion very highly, very highly indeed.’
‘Look, Carlos. I don’t really know what you and Jim are talking about. All I know is that my friend here’, a jerk of the thumb and special, heavy emphasis on ‘friend’, ‘has developed a dangerous and cranky obsession. He has tried to draw me into the fantasy world that he’s constructed around this obsession, but I’m not interested – I think he needs help. Apparently you are an active player in this fantasy world. Therefore, I can only choose to adopt the same attitude towards you.’
As soon as I’d finished speaking I felt ridiculous. The words had sounded all right as I was saying them. But now, as they hung in the air unwilling to disperse, they constituted a reproach. The failed albino and my twitching former friend stood there, both of them still propped up by their vehicles. Jim’s hazard lights clicked. In the square, female office workers, hobbled by tight, mid-thigh-length skirts, lay on the grass eating sandwiches, their legs free from the knee down. They were like some species of crippled colts. Jim and Carlos regarded me quizzically.
‘Come and look.’
The pink, flaccid Welshman had a voice of insidious, quiet, insistent command. We walked in single file up to Oxford Street. Standing on the inside of the pavement, grouped stiffly together, the three of us formed an odd little protuberance, around which the great stream of pedestrians flowed. Carlos leant up against the window of Tie Rack. He’d left his helmet on the bike, and his pale hair fluffed out around his ears. As he pressed backwards, his plastic tabard rode up above his shoulders. His eyes seemed to disengage; they unfocused, slid out of gear, and became simply oval, colourless blobs stuck down on to his blurred, colourless face. Jim and I stood either side of him, awkward and still.
After a while sweat began to well up from Carlos’s temples. His eyes quivered. I had never seen anyone sweat like this before – the sweat coming straight out of the exposed skin, rather than trickling down from the hairline. It was as if a boot had been ground down into a peaty, boggy surface. The sweat ran down his temples, milky against the pale flesh. I felt utterly nauseous and afraid. Then, as quickly as Carlos had gone into the trance he snapped out of it with a chilly shiver.
He turned to me.
‘How good is your knowledge?’ I was taken aback.
‘Good enough, I suppose. I know my way around.’
‘How quickly do you think you could drive from here to the Hornimans Museum via Shootup Hill?’
‘Well…’ I looked around me. It was nearly 1.00 and the streets were thick with lunch-time traffic. The stodgy air boiled with blue exhaust.
I computed routes, thought about the ebb and flow of cars, transit vans, lorries and buses. I tried to visualise the roads I would travel down. ‘If you were lucky you might do it in an hour and twenty minutes, but I’d allow an hour and a half.’
‘We’ll do it in forty-five minutes.’ Carlos was emphatic. He wiped his temples with a big red handkerchief and turned on his heel. Jim and I followed him back to the square. A traffic warden, neat in dark uniform and fluorescent sash, was tucking a ticket behind the Sierra’s windscreen wiper. As Carlos mounted his MZ Jim tore it off and shredded it. The traffic warden shrugged. The central locking chonked and I took my place in the passenger seat, immediately conscious of the interior of the car as another, separate place.
We peeled away from the kerb and followed Carlos off round the square, turning left into the alley that leads to Charing Cross Road.
‘Pay no attention to the Secret Police of Waiting.’ It was a flat statement. Jim made it through hard-pressed teeth. I paid no attention. I was stuck in a kind of torpor, all I could focus on were the flapping sides of Carlos’s corduroy trousers as he moved ahead of us through the traffic.
Jim drove with his habitual, flattened ease. The boxy modern car clumped and tchocked through the streets. Carlos hovered ahead on his bike. It was as if he were attached to us by some invisible, umbilical cord. He didn’t lead us through the traffic, we moved in concert.
Across Gower Street and then right, past the Royal Ear Hospital, to the top and then left and right, on to Tottenham Court Road. There was no delay at the Euston Road lights, we went straight up through the estates behind Hampstead Road. I noticed idly that the council, instead of pointing some of the older blocks, had taken to cladding them with caramel slabs. Our little convoy accelerated through the half-circuit of the Outer Circle. Nash terraces were reduced by speed to a single, tall, thin house. We skittered across the bridge that led out of Regent’s Park. Down Belsize Road; for a moment we were poised alongside an old Datsun 180D, bulbous, red and rusting. It plunged with us towards the elbowed bend, where the road narrows to one lane. The cord tightened between the MZ and the Sierra. We pulled ahead of the Datsun. In the wing mirror, the surrounds of its blind headlights, conjunctival with rust, were sharp and then gone. We tore through the aggressive signing of the one-way system between Finchley Road and West End Lane. Then dropped down the other side into a trough of squats and second-hand furniture shops that in turn disgorged us on to the great, raddled, calloused, Kilburn High Road.
