by Ian McGuire
‘Summer’s our slow patch of course,’ Rupert explained. ‘That won’t be a problem will it?’
‘No, not at all.’ Morris didn’t want to risk any kind of derailment. ‘I’ll be glad of the break.’
On the bus home he thought about the next two months. The idea of another temporary job appalled him, but could he really manage on the building society account? There was £250 in there. After rent he would have £17 a week. It would be tough, brutal even, but the thought rather excited him. He would have to cut his life down to the bare bones: tinned food, plastic bread, candles even. It might be invigorating, purifying. It would prove, at least, that he could survive alone on his inner resources, that he didn’t need anything else.
That evening he ate plain spaghetti and spent three hours writing out a minutely calibrated budget. Around eleven-thirty one of the Afghans threw a gas cooker off the fourth-floor balcony. It hit the communal car park with a pandemonic bang. After a few moments of shocked silence a roar of East European invective rose around him from every side. Doors slammed, there was scuffling in the corridor, children howled, a fire engine arrived with sirens. (The gas cooker had not been disconnected before being hurled.) Amidst this tumult Morris sat silently on his foldaway chair and looked with a startling sense of inner peace at the rows of precisely pencilled numbers. This, he thought, might just be the making of me.
For the first week Morris came in under budget every day. He had bread and long-life orange juice for breakfast, nothing for lunch and something boiled for tea. He spent the days in the local branch library, carrying out a careful rereading of the collected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the evenings he felt empty, mildly bored but quite tranquil. He slept deeply and dreamt of desert islands, empty planets, mountain peaks. By the weekend he had accumulated a surplus of £2.50. He put the three coins on his small kitchen table and looked at them. He picked them up, polished them thoughtfully with the edge of his T-shirt, then put them back. They were a vindication, he thought, proof that he could manage. He stored them in an old jam jar on the shelf above his bed.
The next week, although officially he stuck to the same budget, unofficially, surreptitiously, in a secret plan fully revealed to no one (not even paradoxically himself), Morris aimed to beat his previous record, to smash it. Instead of the off-peak student haircut he had budgeted for, he shaved his head with a Bic razor. He washed his clothes in the shower, he substituted tap water for the orange juice. By Friday night he had £5 on the table and a line-by-line mastery of The Wreck of the Deutschland.
On the third Monday of his new regime, feeling light-headed from lack of food and unable to concentrate properly on ‘The Windhover’ (just what the fuck, he thought irritably, is a sillion?), Morris left the library earlier than normal and walked briskly home. In the communal car park, near the rough-edged crater left by the gas cooker, there was a rusty skip, part-filled with crumbled plasterboard and broken council-issue furniture. As he passed, Morris noticed in one corner, under the remnants of a pine-look video cabinet, an old and greasy portable television. He reached in immediately without shame or hesitation and started tugging. After a minute or so the television came away with a creak and bang and a smell of rubbish and cement. Once upstairs he plugged it in. It fuzzed. He rotated the aerial, fiddled with the knobs on the back and, after a long woooow, the snow solidified into a picture – The Weakest Link in black and white.
‘What is the highest mountain in Africa?’
‘Kilimanjaro.’
‘Correct. What is the meaning of hirsute?’
Morris stared. His heart was racing. It felt like he was watching signals from an alien world, a world of chirpiness and plenty. He switched the television off and boiled some rice with a chicken stock-cube. When the rice was ready he sat on the bed, the steaming bowl hotting up his knees, and looked at his new acquisition. Had it been a mistake to pick it up, he wondered? Might it sully the purity of his whole budgetary project? Perhaps he should return it to the skip, or give it to the Al Houjas. On the other hand, he had pulled it from a skip, an asylum-seekers skip at that. This was not luxury. After a day of ‘hurling and gliding smooth on the bow bend’, an hour or so of free entertainment was hardly a matter for guilt.
That evening Zoe Cable appeared in Morris’s bedsit. He came across her by accident. Tiring of the show-jumping from Hick-stead, yet with more than an hour to go before his prearranged phone call to Molly, he twisted the channel changer and there she was. Her hair was dark brown, she was wearing black-framed glasses and an off-the-shoulder trench coat. Morris clutched his knees and stared. It was a half-hour discussion show, chaired by Adam d’Hote, on the shortlist for the Schumacher Prize.
Zoe dominated the discussion. Her comments were consistently witty and delicious. Her performance was even better than it had been three months before on Going Critical. She was developing a TV manner, Morris could tell, easing into the medium. There was no hesitation now, but neither was there an unruly urge to make her point. She was domineering without being shouty. Their break-up, he also noticed, had clearly not affected her at all. There was in her appearance and manner no hint of personal trauma or emotional unsteadiness. No facial tics, no lines or bags, her fingernails were lengthy and unbitten. She looked as replete and knowing as always. Her career was bounding ever onwards – Channel 4, the BBC. There would soon, he could tell, be weekly columns, features, interviews. And what did he have? Trident Education. Morris felt sick with envy and self-contempt.
When the discussion was over he switched off the television and looked about his room. It was smelly and derelict. This was where they had brought him: Zoe, the Crocodile, E. This was their fault. The thought occurred to him that hurling a gas cooker off the balcony was not such a bad idea after all. But why stop there? He would happily toss away everything he had: the mini-fridge, the bag of dirty clothes, the alarm clock, the television, the books. Destroy them all. His eyes fell on his carefully pencilled budget.
Tuesday dinner: day-old barm cake, half a can of Sir Savalot cola, chips and scraps. 70p.
Seventy pence for dinner. He thought of sticking a corkscrew into his upper arm and twisting, twisting, twisting. Where would Zoe be now, he wondered? In a taxi going to Heathrow? Or perhaps she had more Hub business to conduct – unwinding at the Sheraton, chumming it up with Adam d’Hote. As he sat there on the single bed with greying sheets he could smell her: lavender and petrol. He could taste the salty folds of her breast, the glycerine slickness of her lip gloss. It was time to call Molly. The queue at the communal pay phone was even worse than usual: men with thick black bristles and phone cards, peasant women with scarves and plastic shoes. The thought of waiting made his anger nearly uncontainable. He walked furiously past the queue down the stairs and out of the building. He did not stop walking until he reached the Chaudhary Brothers Grocery and Off-Licence, where he wordlessly purchased a four-pack of Superbrew and a quarter bottle of Wee Hamish. By the time he got through to Molly he was terribly drunk.
‘Have you seen the Queen?’ he shouted. (They were staying in London with E’s parents). ‘Have you seen Prince Philip?’
Molly didn’t say anything, but he could hear her breathing. She would be shaking her head, he knew, or nodding. That was what Molly did on the phone, shake or nod. It was not an ideal form of communication. He thought bitterly of E watching at the other end, rolling her eyes, laughing.
‘Have you been to the zoo?’ he yelled. ‘Have you seen the elephants?’
Her breath was a gentle push and pull, a see-saw of air.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget that. I’ll see you very, very soon. I love you.’
His money ran out. There was a clunk of change being taken and then a long ridiculous beep. Morris looked at the phone for a moment – it was gnarled and worn with use – then replaced the handset. As he walked back to his bedsit past the long staring line of refugees, tears were dripping from his chin.
A week later Mor
ris was leaning against the Chaudhary Brothers’ newly installed ATM, trying to remember his PIN number. He had a cigarette in one hand and half a can of Superbrew in the other. He was squinting suspiciously at the prompt. Was it 0925 or 0926? His father’s building society account was empty. He had spent it all on Superbrew, top-shelf pornography and takeaway food. Now he was trying to rifle what he could from the joint account which he had promised E he would never, ever touch. 0…9…2… He gritted his teeth … 5. Yes! Cash Without Receipt. He pressed the £100 button. Insufficient funds. He checked the balance. There was only £42.63 in the account. He took out £40 of it. As he did so he noticed an unwelcome crackle of cognitive activity above his left eye. Despite all his efforts at befuddlement a message was coming through. Something about the £40 and E and Molly, something about solitude, divorce and brutal loneliness. Morris took this as a firm signal that he needed to drink more. He bought more Superbrew, a litre of Wee Hamish and a hundred cigarettes. As he walked back to his bedsit it began to rain. He was wearing a T-shirt, the trousers from his interview suit and a pair of plimsolls. That morning he had tripped in the shower and blackened his eye. At the same time his scalp was covered in nicks and gouges from an unwise attempt to reshave it the previous night. As the rain stiffened, diluted blood dripped from his head wounds into his good eye. Morris opened the Wee Hamish and took a drink – the gag reflex, the burn and then the long slide of pleasure. That was how it always was. That was how it should be.
The bedsit still smelt from when he had set the curtains on fire. As he walked to the bed there was the rustle of old kebab wrappers and the chink of empty Wee Hamish bottles. His gas cooker was topped with a black, volcanic-looking beret of tar and grease, which Morris, though he couldn’t exactly remember, imagined had something to do with an earlier effort to make pancakes. Sticking out of the green-rimmed toilet was a half-melted wok.
Morris turned on the television and started to drink. Camcorder Calamity was on. As he watched, Morris was attacked by thoughts and memories. He tried to fend them off – Wee Hamish with a Superbrew chaser was like being hit on the head with a rubber mallet. He dealt himself blow after boinging blow. But that evening the ideas seemed especially resilient. They came back at him in waves. They attacked from behind, from the side. They slipped through his defences. He felt besieged, infiltrated. What had he done? What had he been doing? Had he really failed so utterly? Had he really lost so much? He thought of Dirck van Camper, that second of resistance as Morris reversed. He thought of Zoe Cable coming into his room at the LA Body Conference, grabbing his dick, latching on like a breastfeeding baby. He thought of his father’s corpse being carried from the house, bagged up like a new suit. He thought of E, the flailing foetus-baby roiling her skin. He thought of Molly making faces, pulling out her lips, showing off the pink of her eyelids. Was it all lost? Had he squandered everything – job, marriage, even his father’s building society account? He drank a quarter of the bottle in one go and came up panting. The news came on.
Rain blew through Morris’s open window, soaking the charred curtains, causing the kebab wrappers on the floor to wilt and release their pong of papery grease. Morris blinked and lit a cigarette. Vision was becoming a problem. All he could find to eat in the mini-fridge was a tub of margarine. He ate it with a knife. Sections of his book came back to him. He dug out the manuscript and read from Chapter Three.
The ethics of vampirism may be most teasingly reimagined if we realise that the undead are also in a vital post-Nietzschean sense the ungood. It is only via such a redescription that the full, scandalous, sacramental implications of the vampiric bite can be thought dialectically as both true and false and so simultaneously retained and reneged.
The news ended. Morris ran out of whisky. He tottered into the bathroom and threw up into the wok. He wiped his mouth on the wet kebab wrappers and fell back on to the bed. He was sweating. There was a sharp, itchy rawness in his lungs which he could only compare to a pulmonary version of athlete’s foot. His mucus was bright green and gelatinous. Unmarked images were swooping through his mind: Bernard on an exercise bike, Molly with the weeping eyes of Mordred Evans. He couldn’t be sure but he thought he saw Zoe Cable on television again. He dropped to his knees and peered into its hideous black and white face. Was it the right day for Going Critical? He had no idea. Wasn’t it her though? She was wearing a leather bikini top and a jacket that was stitched together from the hides of ancient Barbie Dolls. He leaned towards the screen and kissed her. Her lips were dusty and cold. Morris’s eyebrows (the only hair left on his head) stood on end. He closed his eyes and entered the churning netherworld of drunken sleep.
On the television screen, visible above the blood-streaked dome of Morris’s skull, Zoe Cable addressed the camera with a twinkle.
‘Well, on that pusillanimous note we have to finish for this week. Next week, in a programming decision little short of treasonous, Going Critical will be replaced by coverage of World Championship darts, but I assure you we will be back the following week, when our guests will discuss among other things the new Dragoslav Rankovic film, The House at Hough End, based on a little-known novel by obscure Edwardian novelist Arthur Alderley. We’ll see you all then.’
The tootle of cool jazz was drowned out by Morris’s high, mucal snoring. As the night deepened the rain became heavier. It formed a puddle on the layers of kebab wrappers and began splashing against the TV screen, dripping through its plastic cooling slots. Just past midnight there was a fizzle, a strong smell of burning and the screen collapsed to blackness.
Chapter 27
E pushed another pillow under her ankles in an attempt to mitigate the throbbing from her varicose veins. She had avoided them with Molly, but this time they seemed to have arisen almost overnight. Her calves looked like they had been carved from blocks of Stilton. From downstairs she could hear Molly bossing her grandfather about.
‘Stop it! Naughty Grandad.’
E’s father was chuckling and making plaintive noises of complaint. Inside E’s womb the foetus-baby was jigging like a breakdancer. She couldn’t get comfortable. Every position came with its own battery of aches and pains. Once again the afternoon nap, which she looked forward to, which, indeed, she craved more than any peculiar or exotic food, was evading her. Why couldn’t she sleep when sleep was all she wanted, when she was draped all day with tiredness, varnished by it? It was Morris, of course, she knew. Morris had stolen her sleep. These days it was always Morris. In his absence he was omnipresent, a lingering, clamouring ghost.
She gave up trying to fall asleep. Externally this made no difference. She continued to lie motionless on her parents’ spare bed, her limbs, back and breasts curved around her huge belly, hugging it, holding it, like the brim on a bowler hat. Internally, however, it was a relief, a relief to stop chasing this soft, evasive cloud. At last she could relax. Something inside her cracked gently and her tiredness began to seep out of her, leaving behind a peaceful, neutral numbness. She coughed, wriggled a little, then dozed off.
She was woken by someone touching her face. It was a tentative, quizzical touch like the touch of a blind person, like a dog’s first sniff. Morris, she thought. It was Morris, still half-asleep, feeling his way back to wakefulness; warmed up, she imagined, softened by a half-erotic dream. The fingers came and went; she turned slightly to allow them fuller access to her neck. They wisped against her throat and ear. Ummm. They took hold of her nostril and yanked. She opened her eyes.
‘Molly, no!’ she yelled.
Molly looked shocked, and then with a movement as slow and inevitable as a Central American mudslide she gathered herself to howl.
The noise of her daughter’s crying filled E as fully as a moment before she had been filled by the soft emptiness of sleep. She grabbed Molly and hugged her. They rocked woefully back and forth.
It was almost four o’clock. E’s mother padded upstairs to offer tea and to prise Molly away with offers of lollipops. E pivoted herself
into an upright position, selected one from her depressing range of smocks and made her way downstairs to face another evening.
As she entered the living room her father was standing beside his armchair, holding a small notebook and a pencil. He looked like an over-eager cub reporter.
‘There are messages,’ he announced.
E yawned and slumped on to the sofa. She still wasn’t sure how to respond to her parents’ obvious excitement at her return – that she was here, with them, indefinitely, that in her time of need she had actually come back.
‘Fire away,’ she said. They had an answering machine, but it was never needed. Her father carried his cordless in a calfskin holster: people rarely made it beyond the second ring.
‘Morris,’ he said. ‘He sounded drunk again.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t say that. What proof do you have?’
‘He slurred his words.’
‘Some people slur their words, father. That’s how some people speak.’
‘That’s how drunk people speak, Eugenia.’
‘Not only drunk people.’
‘Are you suggesting that Morris has aphasia? He mispronounced anathema. He said athanema. I heard it distinctly, athanema.’
What was she supposed to do now, she wondered, defend him? And what kind of conversation could they possibly have been having which required the use of the word ‘anathema’ anyway?
‘What did he say?’
‘Well it was rather hard to follow.’ E clenched her jaw. Her father noticed and quickly carried on. ‘But it was something to do with money. He seemed to want to apologise for taking money out of your joint account.’
