Breathing deeply, John gradually formed each word. It took an immense effort. He felt very tired, and his eyes kept blinking.
In a couple of minutes Melissa returned to the shop with a taxi in tow. When she saw John slumped on the step she felt intensely sorry for him. Steve said, ‘Come and help him up at the other side. I don’t know whether we shouldn’t send him to hospital.’
John shook his head violently at this suggestion. He drawled, ‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’
Together they lifted him up and eased him into the taxi. John helped as best he could although he felt very drowsy and ineffectual. Melissa said, ‘Maybe I should go home with him, Steve?’
John said, ‘No, I’m fine!’ as emphatically as he could, putting out one of his hands in the gesture a traffic warden might use to stop oncoming traffic: palm flat, arm outstretched. Steve handed the taxi driver the paper that he’d written the address on and said, ‘Are you sure that you’ve got the money to pay for this taxi?’
John nodded very determinedly although his eyes were closed, and patted at his jacket where his inside pocket was located with a floppy hand. He said, ‘I’m fine,’ and waved sloppily. Steve slammed the door shut and thanked the taxi driver. He also added by way of explanation, ‘Don’t worry, he’s not drunk, he’s a diabetic.’ The taxi driver nodded and answered cheerily, ‘I don’t mind what he is so long as he doesn’t smoke or vomit.’ He then performed a three-point turn and sped away.
Melissa and Steve stood together on the pavement watching the taxi disappearing into the traffic at the top of the road. Steve said, ‘God, I really feel bad about this. We’ve been so fucking insensitive and awful. Maybe it’s our fault.’
Melissa had entirely forgotten that she was angry with him. She wiped the corners of her mouth furtively with her first finger and thumb to ensure that her red lipstick hadn’t bled or smudged in all the excitement. Then she stared at him with her deep brown eyes and said, ‘What do you mean? I said I’d get him some material and I will.’ Steve snorted, ‘It’s not the bloody material that’s the issue here, Melissa, it’s the way we both behaved. We must’ve seemed really rude. We obviously confused and distressed him. We upset him and I think that’s why he got ill.’
Melissa looked bemused. She said, ‘What are you talking about, Steve? We were only having a bit of fun. He wanted some material and I phoned for him, which is more than most people would’ve done.’
Steve felt helpless and furious. He looked into Melissa’s eyes and frowned. ‘I can’t work out if you’re just stupid or if you’re simply insensitive. I think the scales are weighed quite heavily in both directions.’
She smiled humourlessly, ‘That’s an appropriate image. I’m a Gemini.’
Steve turned his back on her and re-entered the shop. Eventually Melissa followed him in. He had made himself a cup of tea and was talking on the phone. After a few seconds he hung up and said, ‘I was getting that guy’s phone number while I still have his address in mind.’ He had written John’s address and phone number down on a till receipt in tiny writing. Melissa frowned. ‘What are you doing that for?’ Steve shrugged, ‘So I can phone him when I’ve got some information on the material. Anyway, I think that it’d be nice to know that he was OK.’
Melissa slammed her hand down hard on the top of the till and said, ‘I didn’t mean “what are you doing that for?”, I meant “what are you doing that for?” He’s my customer, I’ll deal with him over the phone.’ Steve laughed nastily. He said, ‘It’s a bit late to be getting all possessive, don’t you think? You’ve already said outside that you don’t give a shit; well I do.’
Melissa’s face was angry and blotchy. ‘I said no such thing! Of course I’m concerned. I said I’d get him the material and I will.’
Steve grabbed his tracksuit jacket which was slung over the back of the chair. He put it on and half-zipped it up. As he walked to the door he said, ‘I’m going out for a walk and to get some lunch. Can you manage alone while I’m out?’
Melissa had picked up the till receipt and was studying it. ‘Of course I can. I think I’ll try and phone again while you’re gone.’
He didn’t bother responding.
John remembered very little about getting home. When he awoke he felt as though he had been asleep for several hours, but when he looked at his watch it was only twenty past two. His lunch break had formally ended about an hour earlier. He was stretched out on his living-room sofa, cushioned by numerous pieces of paper. Under his shoulder were a couple of pencils and a ruler. He chucked them on to the floor with one hand and arranged himself more comfortably. His body felt stiff and tight. He shut his eyes for a while and rested. Inside he felt bad about not returning to work. Usually he was extremely responsible and reliable. He debated the possibility of returning into town but then decided that in his present condition it might be more sensible for him to phone in and explain his relapse.
Slowly he sat up and swung his legs on to the floor. He still felt weak. His hands were clenched into tight white-knuckled balls, and he endeavoured to clench them harder, as though these fists would generate power and momentum. He reached groggily for the telephone which he had put on the floor next to the sofa the previous day when he’d been rearranging things. He picked it up and phoned work. It only took a second. He spoke to one of the receptionists. The hand that he’d used to dial was still closed, except for the finger which he’d used to press the buttons. As he made his excuses he studied this hand. Although it remained slightly numb he was still capable of feeling the sharp sensation of a ball of paper crumpled up inside the fleshy palm of his fist. He opened up his hand and inspected it. It was the page of a book, a torn out leaf. On one side he saw his address. On the other side, written in a large messy scrawl, were the words THIS GUY IS SOME KIND OF MEDIA SALESMAN. I BET HE SELLS CRAP ON THE PHONE. HE’S GOT THAT SORT OF SMOOTH VOICE. EAT SHIT ARSEHOLE. John pondered the meaning of this for a few seconds after he’d put the telephone receiver back down. Gradually Melissa’s face – a blurred cartoon characterization of it with blood-red lips and hair dripping in oil, slicked back like Dracula’s – returned to his memory. He remembered her writing something down on the front page of a book. It confused him though. He lay back down on his side and re-read it. It was clear to him that what she had written was a description of himself, but he failed to understand her motivation. All that seemed feasible was that the two of them had had a bet on or were playing a game. He relaxed his head and looked sideways at the ceiling. He thought, ‘It doesn’t really matter why she wrote those things, the terrible thing is that she did write them. In a matter of minutes, in the shortest of exchanges, she managed to discover with perfect accuracy the details of my life. I must be as transparent as an amoeba under a microscope, a walking, talking, living, breathing telesales man; nothing more. I may feel inside that I am more significant than that, that I amount to more, but I don’t.’
He thought of what she had written again. THIS GUY IS A NOBODY, HE SELLS CRAP ON THE TELEPHONE, HE HAS A SMOOTH VOICE. HE IS A PHONY. THE WORLD WILL TURN WITHOUT HIM. ‘God!’ he thought, ‘I’m so dispensable. I’m so insignificant.’
The telephone started ringing. He sat up and reached out for it, grasped it in his hands and jerked it violently away from its connection in the wall. Its slim plug slipped out of its socket. It stopped ringing. In the new silence he threw the telephone at the wall several times and was struck with wonderment at its hardiness. He resolved that during the remainder of his life the telephone would be an anathema. That chapter was closed.
When Steve returned from his lunch hour Melissa was serving a couple of customers. After they had gone he said, ‘Did you get through?’ Melissa shook her head. ‘It was a bit odd. It appeared to ring for a short while and then the tone switched to disconnected. I phoned the operator and she said that the number was temporarily unobtainable.’
Steve sighed. ‘Maybe try again later. I suppose you gave it your best shot.’
&n
bsp; Melissa smiled. ‘Can I gather that we are now friends again? You don’t seem as uptight with me as earlier.’
He smiled back. ‘I’ll make some tea.’
As he pottered around at the rear of the shop, filling the kettle from their tiny sink and plugging it into the wall, she said, ‘I made a decision while you were gone, by the way.’
Steve frowned. ‘What sort of decision?’
She squatted next to him as he put a couple of tea bags into mugs which were balanced on the tray with the kettle, and said, ‘Well, I got through to Stephanie on the phone and she said that she bought that fabric at the Material Centre down on Berwick Street. So after work I’m going to go and buy a length and then tomorrow I’ll take it around to his place.’
Steve shook his head as he stirred the tea and grasped the tired, boiled bags in two tentative fingers before tossing them into the bin. ‘Firstly, it’ll cost you a fortune, secondly, how will you know what quantity to buy? Thirdly, don’t you think it’s a bit risky going around to the house of a strange man who you’ve hardly met before?’
All these things were true. Melissa shrugged and said, ‘Forget about it, OK?’
John spent the afternoon building his work-bench. Intense physical activity was probably best avoided in his present condition – he’d never been a physical person and although he’d always been naturally skinny and relatively well-proportioned, the closest he ever came to regular exercise was an occasional swim – but building the work-bench seemed an excellent initiation into the world of carpentry. It was also a necessary distraction. He felt very depressed.
When he’d completed the bench he stared around the room for a moment and contemplated his new pile of tools, then tried to organize them into a neat and tidy display against one of the walls so that they wouldn’t get lost or broken as he worked. When everything was arranged he grasped a large chunk of wood and dragged it on to the work-bench. It was extraordinarily heavy. He took his new plane and slid it back and forth over the surface of the wood. Initially the thick bark came away, then paler shavings curled away from the wood with almost erotic precision. They were so thin and delicate. After a few seconds he stopped and picked up a handful. He sniffed them and they smelled like a cageful of school gerbils, musty but clean. Dropping the shavings, he went and sat down on the sofa again. He pulled at his shirt collar; he was still wearing his office clothes although he had removed his jacket and tie and had rolled up his sleeves. He rubbed his eyes, which felt sore, and picked up a few of the coffin designs that he’d made the previous evening. Some included very ornate side-panelling and lids which were intricately carved. He put these aside; they seemed rather ambitious. His coffin had to be a practical proposition, not a dream. He had to face the fact that his time for construction would be limited and as a reflection of this new practical realism, to curtail his more extravagant and fanciful notions.
After a while he went into his hallway and squatted next to his bookcase where he pulled out a few of the coffee-table art books that he had managed to accumulate over the years but which he had actually never read. He carried five back into the living room and sat down to peruse them.
As he paged through them he sensed the downy silence in the house, a quiet interrupted only by the brutal slicing sound of the turning pages. He had carried his television upstairs when he was building his bench because space had suddenly been reduced to a minimum. He went into the kitchen and picked up his little portable radio which he listened to in the morning while making breakfast, and carried it through to the living room where he balanced it on top of the mantelpiece, and tuned to Radio One. He felt as though he needed the blare of chat and music to lift him up and propel him into the world of physical labour; the challenge of practical creation. He returned to the sofa and his design books. Nothing immediately took his fancy. Although he liked much of what he saw, very little seemed appropriate for a coffin. Coffins were, after all, rather formal in design. Boxes.
He entertained the idea of a coffin that was merely simple and brightly painted, but that wasn’t quite enough. He entertained the notion of a theme coffin, something based on Picasso’s blue period for example or maybe even a Cubist coffin. If he had a Cubist coffin he decided that it wouldn’t have to be a straight box. Instead he would build it so that it moved in an angular curve, and his body would be laid out inside it in a comfortable banana shape.
After considerable thought, however, he was forced to face the possibility that his body might not be very pliable in death and that this arrangement might not show him off to his best advantage. He didn’t want his body to look as though it had merely been jammed into his coffin at a convenient angle. The formality of death necessarily involved the body being laid out in a specific way, and he had no real desire to flout this tradition. He had never guarded a secret desire to be buried face-down, for example, in a coffin like a cheese dish.
The very idea of a coffin was, he supposed, to display the body at its best in a deathly repose. He thought, ‘The coffin is, after all, about the body. The body is what gives it meaning, no matter what ideas have been generated over the centuries about the coffin as an independent entity, its only simple and necessary function is as a display case. It is also like a file which holds in papers and keeps them in order. It is a limited space which, practically speaking, is on a par with a yoghurt carton or a can of beans.’
He immediately threw down the book he was looking at and picked up another from the pile. He flicked through its pages very rapidly until he found what he was looking for and then stared at it with great fixity for several minutes. Then he repeated quietly to himself, ‘It’s a limited and very practical space which, to all intents and purposes makes it just the same as a yoghurt carton or a can of beans.’
What about a can of soup? He returned his gaze once more to the Warhol print and debated how difficult it would be to make a coffin that was shaped like an old-style Campbell’s can. Obviously there would be practical difficulties, especially given that he had had very little practice at carpentry over the last twenty odd years.
He impulsively began to roll down his sleeves as though preparing to smarten himself up to go out, but as he fastened his first cuff it occurred to him that after his earlier difficulties it would be inadvisable to venture out in case he felt unwell again or over-exerted himself. Although he was now intensely keen to get some appropriate books on practical woodwork – creating a surface that was perfectly curved or circular was going to be highly problematic – he decided instead to spend the early evening composing a letter of resignation for work and preparing a small meal. He felt quite hungry.
It was just after four o’clock on Thursday afternoon when Melissa stepped out of Mile End tube station and into the rain. She was carrying a large carrier bag full of material, which she held close against her body so that it would keep as dry as possible. That morning she had inspected an A to Z so that she would know which direction to head off in.
She walked for several minutes, becoming increasingly damp even though she wore a bright yellow transparent raincoat which was covered in a design of brash white daisies. The raincoat was, it appeared, more fashionable than practical.
Eventually she was able to locate the correct road and then the right house. It was a small place made out of old red brick which had grown dark and dirty over the years because of London smoke and exhaust fumes. It looked in its simplicity every bit like a drawing that a young child might make of a house, with four small windows and a door almost in the middle; except that this house was not alone in a garden with a tree and an outsize sun, but was flanked on either side by identical houses which ran off down the road like different sections of a long centipede.
It was a dull afternoon, so inside the house the lights were on downstairs. Melissa uttered a sigh of relief. On the tube she had worried that he would be out and that she would be forced to call again. Drawing up close to the door, she put out a wet hand and rang the bell.
John was busy in his living-room tacking a series of woodwork-made-simple illustrations on to the wall. Next to these were a selection of illustrations of Warhol’s work, and of course, centrally positioned, an illustration of his Campbell’s soup cans. These he had enlarged on a photocopier earlier that day.
That morning John had been out shopping. He had bought a comprehensive selection of brushes and paints which he had selected with painstaking attention to colour.
His entire body shuddered when the doorbell rang. He wasn’t expecting a call and he had no desire to see anyone. He felt like a tiny sea mussel which was snug and moist inside its charcoal shell, waiting for the sea and yet not waiting, independent, serene.
The doorbell rang again. He pushed the last pin into the wall and then hurried to answer it. When he opened it his immediate thoughts were, ‘Who is she, and what the hell is she doing here?’
Melissa could barely recognize the man she had spoken to the day before. He looked entirely different. He seemed a lot thinner and younger out of his suit. His brown hair was obviously unbrushed and his face seemed worn and wary. This effect – she decided – might have been exacerbated by the slight shadow of a beard that he had grown overnight.
After he had opened the door he stared at her for a moment and touched his chin with his hand. She said, ‘Hello. I don’t expect that you’ll remember me but I was at the shop yesterday when …’ – she paused for a moment – ‘… when you wanted to buy some material.’ He frowned and rubbed his chin some more. She added, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted you but I’ve got some of the material that you wanted.’ She indicated the bag with a slight movement of her head. He said, ‘I haven’t shaved today,’ and before she could reply he added, ‘but then why the hell should I? I’m my own boss.’
Love Your Enemies Page 15
