Hey, hey, c’mon! Cut it out!
The boy launches the bottle into the grass.
You’ve got to give us money, he says, nodding at his small friend in confirmation, Or we’ll report you.
Penny for the guy, repeats the girl, laughing again. She dances back behind Lewis, whispering something as she passes.
Dirty old . . . guy, she says.
This time, her hand trips along his shoulder, making him fly up off the bench, whirling, clutching his kitbag and shouting.
Clear off! he says, feeling his heart banging with fright, Go fuck with someone else.
They openly laugh at him. Even the little one is brave now, jumping from one leg to the other and letting out a high, false giggle that seems to echo through the trees. A woman passing with her dog stops to take in the scene. She gives Lewis a long look, as if she will need to remember him. Cars are queuing on the road that cuts across the green. Lewis throws his bag over his shoulder and walks fast, not caring that he’s heading straight into the traffic, feeling his face and neck burning hot. Something bounces off his back, and again something hits him, and then a third missile flies past his head. Chips. They’re throwing their chips at him. They’re throwing their chips and they’re calling him names.
FOUR
So, what d’you think?
Brendan pushes back the metal door, revealing his handiwork to Anna. She’d texted him from Great Yarmouth station to tell him the news, and before she had even got on the train, he’d texted back: BIG suprize @ home.
He led her straight through the garden—which had not been altered—and across the yard to the lock-up.
It’s my car, says Anna, Just where I left it.
You mean you can’t tell the difference? God, you’re going blind as well as deaf. Take a closer look.
Anna walks round the car. The outside has been washed and polished, and there’s a new badge on the bonnet. Anna pings it with delight.
New badge, says Brendan, pointlessly, I got the man from Merc to take the old girl away for a day or two. He took that badge off a wreck. He was very helpful.
Did he fix the leak? asks Anna, running her hand over the bonnet.
No, he couldn’t be bothered . . . Of course he fixed it, that’s why I called him in the first place. That—and one more thing. Look inside.
Anna opens the door. The interior has been valeted and the passenger seats cleared of debris. It smells of fake pine, but underneath is the more familiar, warm scent that Anna loves: old car.
CD player, says Brendan, Thought we’d bring you into the twenty-first century.
Brendan, it’s fantastic. How much do I owe you?
Let’s call it a gift, he says, but before she can thank him, he adds, Well, okay, then, let’s call it rent.
Rent, she nods, suddenly catching on.
Because you’ll want to rent this place out while you’re gone, Brendan muses, leaning a hand on the hatch, And I can’t think of anyone more trustworthy, and—aw, no!
He holds his fingers close to his face and sniffs them, Is nowhere sacred? Those squirrels crap on everything.
How do you know it’s the squirrels? says Anna, Could’ve been a rat.
Trust me, he says, I know. All my washing got ruined. No wonder you don’t use that clothes-line.
How have they been? she asks, watching as Brendan scuffs his hand against the gatepost. Even though she’s been gone just a couple of days, she feels a peculiar sense of guilt at abandoning them. Brendan’s face fills with horror.
A great big fella came and knocked on the kitchen window yesterday morning. I tried to ignore him, but he kept knocking with his paw—do you call them paws?—honest, what’re you supposed to do?
Ah, smiles Anna, That’ll be Kong. I usually throw a handful of muesli out. They’ll leave you alone once they’ve had their breakfast.
Breakfast? I’ll be getting myself a water pistol, says Brendan, Speaking of which, how’s mater?
Mater is as normal as she can be in the circumstances. Some old thesp called Vernon Savoy is ‘looking after’ her until I go back up.
The Vernon Savoy? Brendan’s face lights up.
Is he famous, then? Asks Anna.
Is he? He is the famous Vernon Savoy. Don’t you remember him? Saturday Night at the London Palladium?
I didn’t do much telly watching as a kid, Brendan, says Anna, Too painful on the ears.
Brendan laughs at this unintended joke.
You’re not kidding! And didn’t he have a dummy in the act for a while? What did he call him? You know, the butler, with the s-s-stammer. What was he called?
Brendan, I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Vernon Savoy’s only famous in my book for sponging off my mother and wearing awful waistcoats.
He doesn’t! cries Brendan, And has he still got that ludicrous moustache?
Ludicrous, nods Anna.
It sounds a riot, he says, Anna Calder, confidante to the stars! I bet it’s just like The Good Old Days.
They’re a complete embarrassment, the way they carry on, says Anna, You go and stay with them if you don’t believe me. See how long it is before you’re sectioned.
Is it really that bad? asks Brendan.
It’s worse. But I’ve been left with no alternative.
They both stare at the car for a minute. A fine drizzle starts to fall, sprinkling them with tiny beads of rain. Brendan puts his arm around her as they turn back towards the house.
Oh, look on the bright side, he says, At least we didn’t bother wasting time on that scrap of dirt you call a garden. And give me bedlam over boredom any day.
FIVE
The idea Lewis had—of returning to Cardiff, of finding his mother again—seems pointless now, in the middle of the day in the middle of a busy London street. He stands on the corner and tries to regulate his breathing. He’d run non-stop from the common until he realized he was drawing attention to himself: a man fleeing down the high street in broad daylight. It wouldn’t do. It would look weird. He sees himself as a stranger might; chaotic, dishevelled, wild-eyed: like an escapee from a mental ward. Trying to behave as a normal person would, Lewis tags on the end of a queue of people waiting for a bus, half-sits on the low wall, just like the man next to him, like those two girls further along. His legs are trembling, he has to fight the urge to cry. He rests his back against the railing and puts his kitbag on his lap to stop his knees from jumping. He wants to be no one again, the invisible man, but the confusion—and then the realization—washes over him like sweat: he’s run away from one bad situation, and straight into another. For a second, he sees himself as if he’s been tied on a long piece of invisible elastic, getting catapulted from one place to the next, only to return twice as quickly. He fights the thought. More like a wrecking ball, he says, under his breath. But if he isn’t on elastic, what is he doing in Clapham, directly opposite the Café Salsa, the very place where the rot set in?
Lewis had been living in a basement flat off the high street, doing jobs for cash, some house clearance, odd bits of decorating, which was how he first met Vivienne. He’d been employed to paint the interior of the café; there was two week’s work in it if he took his time. Vivienne was a fixture, beautiful to look at, always in the middle of a crowd of admirers: would-be poets and bit-part actors and young men in suits, who would twirl their car keys and offer to buy her drinks. She had breakfast in the café every morning, and she’d still be there at lunch-time, chatting on her mobile, scanning the small ads in the paper. During the afternoon, Viv would disappear for a few hours and come back in different clothes: always some black outfit, and heavy pieces of glass jewellery hanging from her ears and her throat. She’d sit at her table in the window, in the candlelight, glinting like a scarab.
Viv made the first move. He’d been painting a trompe-l’oeil effect on the back wall: a menagerie of yellow parrots and green monkeys copied from a print the owner had given him. He hated the work; it was vul
gar, he thought, but he made no comment because he got paid daily, in cash. She turned to him one morning from her seat in the window, and asked him if he was gay or straight. That was how it started.
Later, she would say she was attracted to his profile; that he reminded her of an actor she vaguely knew. He wasn’t pleased with the idea of looking like someone else until he saw a picture, and then he considered that it could be worse. It was Viv, in the end, who forced him to get help with a problem he was hiding, although at the time he didn’t take it in.
They’d been seeing each other for a couple of months, casually at first—going out to watch a film or see a gig—and then more intimately, sharing the evenings together at his flat. She was keen to progress the relationship, as she put it: she suggested that they should try living together. No sooner had she vented the idea than her bags were piled up in the hall. Even though it was her suggestion, from the very first hours Lewis felt as if he were undertaking some kind of trial. Viv brought his problem to the surface in a manner he hadn’t anticipated; it grew quietly inside him, a slow inflation of rage. It was the way she had, of untidying the space around her: leaving cutlery on the drainer where the stains would dry in splotches, shampoo trickling like slime down the tiles in the shower, her underwear hanging off the radiators. At first, it induced in Lewis a sense of panic. He told himself to think in broad terms: it was he who was abnormal; this was how people lived all the time, surrounded by their mess. He’d seen other people’s houses, and this wasn’t so bad by comparison. He tried to behave as though it didn’t matter: she was beautiful, and glamorous, and as long as they loved each other, it would all be fine. For three months, Lewis managed to persuade himself that this was a fact, stepping around her, smoothing out the jagged edges of their shared life.
In the evenings, when he came home from work, he’d find Viv in front of the television in her pyjamas with her pouch of dope, her glass of wine, her TV Times, flicking through stations with the remote control while she talked on the telephone. Or she’d be sitting at the computer, her hair backlit like an exploding star, her collar turned in on itself as she scratched aimlessly at the nape of her neck. She called herself an actress. When she wasn’t searching her name on the Internet or watching television or talking on the phone, she was in the bath, surrounded by a mass of guttering candles. At these times, Lewis would stand outside on the steps and breathe the air, the stinking London air, so much sweeter because it didn’t proximate to Viv.
He came to the realization he really didn’t love her one morning when he saw, amongst the thick bangles and droopy earrings, her hairbrush on the dressing-table. The long hairs wafted from it; embedded in the teeth was a coiled mesh of dusty auburn, like the nest of an insect. It made him cringe. His own hair was shorn, every three weeks, by a barber on the high street. He couldn’t even touch the hairbrush. He nudged the handle with the edge of a coat-hanger she’d left on the ironing board, until it fell off the dressing-table and into the wastebasket. Liberated by this, he swept his arm across the surface, scattering the jewellery, pots and powder, perfumes and cotton wool buds and assorted debris onto the carpet. It was such spectacular freefall, he felt he could run over the roof. He could knock the walls down, he could rip out the sky. He felt giant.
He woke face down on the bed, opening his eyes to see Viv, scrabbling around on the floor. He couldn’t work out what she was doing until he lifted his head; she was throwing things at random into an open suitcase. He didn’t know how long he’d been there, but the sky was darkening through the window. He felt the faint breeze of evening on his skin.
She must have been in the room a while, because the wardrobe doors were open and her clothes were strewn all over the carpet, and slumped in heaps against the wall and the bed, inches from his feet. He could tell when he looked at her face that she was angry, but there was another thing he saw there which made him mute: it was fear. He couldn’t find anything to say to that. His head felt light and scattered, as if it had been filled with confetti. While she went about her packing, Lewis stared at the mirror above the dressing-table; it hung at a crooked angle, with a perfect smash in the centre, catching the light like a rose in the rain. To the left, the net at the window lifted once in the breeze; it revealed a more angular smash in the pane. He dared not look at his fists.
Viv snapped her case shut and got to her feet.
I’ll be round for the rest in the morning, she said, her voice tight, So I’d prefer it if you weren’t here. Actually, I think you need help. I’ve left an address on the table.
But Lewis wasn’t planning to stay, either. Early next morning, he took his kitbag, pushed the key through the letter-box, and walked free into the wide, clean air. He didn’t take the note with the address on it; didn’t want anything of hers, not even a scrap of paper. And it was an easy thing to remember a street name. The last he heard of Viv, she was living with some artists in a shared house in Battersea. He thought it would suit her well.
On his own again, Lewis tried to counteract what he began to think of as his migraine attacks in a new way. He discovered that organizing his personal world relaxed him: the build-up of pressure inside his head abated. He rented a furnished room in a tall, near-derelict building opposite the railway station. Two other men occupied bedsits on the same floor, and another, small space under the eaves was used for storage. The men shared a kitchen and bathroom. Lewis started on his regime by listing everything he could see in his room, slowly, like a breathing exercise. Sometimes he would move the objects into a systematic panorama; it could be alphabetically based, or purely dependent on the estimated age, or actual size, of the object. He liked the concentration this required; he thought of it as environmental mathematics.
After a while, he became convinced that the objects had fallen out of alignment—the lampshade was too far to the left, the ashtray had been slightly uncentred on the coffee table. He had no explanation for this; unless someone else had a key, or there was subsidence: objects did not move themselves. This was how the panic resurfaced, as a growing turmoil, like iron filings swirling around inside him; and all because of an ugly lampshade or a chair in the wrong place. He would need to take action.
One evening, the man who had the bedsit near the stairwell knocked on his door. The sound shocked Lewis: no one came calling, no one ever knocked. The man had come to complain: Lewis’s furniture was blocking the way.
It’s a fire hazard, mate, he said, craning his head round Lewis and staring into the room, It’s a nuisance, no one can get past. The other lads are grumbling.
Lewis stood his ground, puzzled by the expression on the other’s face.
I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said, What fire hazard?
He motioned to Lewis to follow him out onto the landing. The space under the eaves was crammed with pieces of furniture: a bed-frame, easy chairs, a coffee table, a television set, all piled up on top of each other. The ugly lampshade was crushed underneath it all, the stand sticking out into the hallway like a broken limb. Lewis recognized these pieces from his room. He must have put them there.
No offence, mate, but normal people like to have stuff, the man said, Even lifers in prison have a bed. If you wanted unfurnished, mate, you should’ve told the landlord.
Lewis decided that if the man called him mate again, in that fake way, he’d have no choice but to hit him.
Weeks later, leaning on the bonnet of a stolen van on the edge of the ring-road and watching as the fire engines screamed past, he made another decision: he needed help. The man was right, as Viv had been right: he was going mental.
Lewis had never been to a shrink before. He pictured an elderly man with half-moon glasses sitting behind a large desk; opposite would be a low leather couch, which Lewis would lie down on. Viv had had an appointment with her therapist every Monday for as long as he knew her. But Viv believed in witchcraft too, bought candles from Brixton market with incantations printed on them, burned papery curses in the fi
re grate late at night. As sceptical as he was about therapy, Lewis thought it must be preferable to Black Cat Bone.
The therapist turned out to be a young woman who insisted he call her just by her first name—Katy. He didn’t ask whether she knew Viv, and understood, anyway, that even if she did, she wouldn’t tell. They sat facing each other in easy chairs, under a gauze-covered skylight, in a room painted pale green. There was hardly any furniture in it, which made Lewis feel quite relaxed, but during their introductory session, Katy leaned over and twice touched his arm, for no reason that he could see. It wasn’t as if he’d invited it. Lewis regarded this touching business as a behaviour, just like his own—therapists were bound to have them too—and tried to explain that he didn’t feel comfortable when she did it. He asked if it might not be part of his problem. She didn’t say she wouldn’t touch him again; she said she hoped they could agree in the first instance not to focus on ‘problems’ and not to resort to ‘labels’.
But Lewis was keen on labels: he actively craved them. When he told Katy at the next session that he was having difficulty visualizing the problem—unable to find a better word to describe what it was he was suffering from—she relented. She rattled out a line of jargon.
It may be that you’re suffering from a form of anxiety disorder instigated through childhood trauma and augmented by lack of closure, she said, Or, just as likely, it may be nothing of the sort. That’s what we’re here to find out.
Immediately he could see the words lined up, like beads on a string; he could taste them. When he told her this, repeating the phrase with the exact same intonation she used, she simply raised an eyebrow, as if to say, See, that’s trouble with labelling, isn’t it?
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