The View From the Tower

by Charles Lambert

  8

  Before leaving the country he buys himself a single-lens reflex camera. It is more than he can afford, but how else will they believe him? Without the lens his eye is drawn by what moves, by skin and sinew and eyes and mouths, by the shifting of an arm against a table or the way one shoulder lifts without the other, but he’s too inhibited to photograph what he sees. He’s scared it might answer him back. Through his lens what he sees is the perfect empty symmetry of doors and windows, and the way light catches the concrete of a bollard a boy has been sitting on moments before, the light still there, the warmth refusing to be held.

  9

  They live in a rented house with a billiards room, a spiral staircase and a ghost. The local laundrette is filled with drunken Irish poets. It is cold, and getting colder daily. When they’re forced to move, traipsing knee-deep in snow through the back streets of London, they take a single trophy with them, a Chinese duck with a pewter body, and brass wings and beak. The duck splits into two across the middle; they use it to keep dope, papers, all they need to hold the misery of their failure at bay. It is their stash duck and they love it. Everything else from that time has gone, everything except the ghost. The ghost is alive inside the duck.

  10

  His father keeps his ties in a flat wooden box. Each tie is tightly rolled, with the wide end at its heart. There are ties of all widths, all styles. His father throws nothing away and will never leave the house without a tie. The ties are held in place by a wooden grille, placed over them before the lid is closed. His father dies and he finds himself with the box of ties, many of them gifts he has bought at airports or hurriedly in shops he would normally avoid. He opens the box and rolls the ties open across his bed, their silk and wool a reproach to him as they wait to be taken up and worn.

  CLOTHES or UNRIPE STRAWBERRIES

  1

  His first pair of long trousers are rust-coloured jeans his mother buys him from a catalogue. He’s ten years old, his legs are sweaty. He rolls the jeans up at the bottom, cowboy-style, and wears them with a brand-new green pullover from the same catalogue, then goes to play with his friend next door. He’s tense, excited. He feels that he has finally grown up. His friend’s mother opens the door to him, before calling up the stairs to tell her daughter he’s here. I hope you aren’t planning on doing anything dirty, she shouts, flicking ash into her free hand. Your little friend looks ready to muck out stables. He blushes. He hates the woman with all his heart.

  2

  He wants a velvet frock coat like the ones worn by The Kinks. He’s seen them in a shop down the road from Beatties called Loo Bloom’s. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now he stands outside the window and stares at the mannequins for hours at a time. His favourite coat is burgundy crushed velvet, with metal buttons that go from the collar to the waist. He has no trousers he could wear it with, but that doesn’t matter, not yet. It will soon be Christmas. His mother hasn’t said no, which gives him hope. Christmas morning he unwraps a double-breasted jacket in dark green corduroy, which he hangs in his wardrobe that evening and will never wear again.

  3

  His friend next door has a room at the top of her house with chests full of clothes her family has collected. They spend whole days there dressing up – as pirates, duchesses, washerwomen, spies. Sometimes, alone in the house, they wander from room to room, inventing stories about themselves, inventing selves. One afternoon, they leave the house. His friend chooses a cocktail dress that belonged to her mother, baggy at the chest, red stiletto heels. He wears a long gypsy skirt and a sort of bonnet that covers much of his face. If anyone stops them, they’ll say he’s her long-lost American aunt, but no one does. That evening, his father forbids him to see her and won’t say why.

  4

  It is July, but he still won’t take his blazer off. The playground is used by the first three forms at school; there are ninety boys in all. He is one of the youngest. They all have the same school uniform: grey trousers, white shirt, brown blazer with the brown-and-yellow badge, and yellow-and-brown striped tie. Even the socks have a brown-and-yellow stripe around the top. At morning break they are allowed to remove their blazers and tuck their ties into their shirts, but he stands and watches the other boys in their white shirts and grey trousers, the younger ones like him still in shorts, and he won’t take his blazer off. He feels safer with it on. He’s sweating.

  5

  He roots through his mother’s clothes until he finds one of her tops, a fine wool crew-neck pullover, salmon pink, identical to one Keith Richards is wearing in the November number of his Rolling Stones fan club magazine. He holds it against himself in front of his mother’s dressing-table mirror, then takes it into the bathroom to try it on. It’s cold, there’s no heating in the house. He shivers as he takes off his shirt and pulls his vest over his head. He puts on the top. His nipples poke out like disgusting unripe strawberries. He rips the top off and screws it into a ball, throws it behind the toilet. He’ll be in trouble but he doesn’t care.

  6

  He gets a Saturday morning job at Skinner’s hardware store, selling garden implements, screws and nails, buckets and brooms, household objects of various kinds. When he’s saved enough he buys a pair of genuine Levi 501s, a size too large because they’re supposed to shrink to fit. He gets them home and locks himself in the bathroom, fills the bathtub with water as hot as he can bear, strips to his skin, then puts on the jeans. They’re hard and stiff, and so is he. He eases himself into the water, wincing at the heat. When he’s lying in a cold bath, he gets out. The lower half of his body is stained indigo. The 501s hang from his hips.

  7

  At university he opens an account in a bookshop and another one at Austin Reed’s gentlemen’s outfitters. The first things he buys with his cards are a book about the Cultural Revolution and a long green cashmere scarf. He twists the scarf twice round his neck, the fringed ends trailing like dangling vines. His hair is long and catches in the scarf; at night he picks out teasels of bright-green cashmere from the curls at the back of his neck, like decadent angel down. He’s sitting in the college bar and saying how much he would prefer to live in China. You don’t see people dressed like you in China, someone says. Really? he answers, put down but also flattered.

  8

  Each Saturday afternoon they leave their cold water flat by the Arco della Pace. They cross the park, walking past De Chirico’s stranded figures in the drained pool, they leave the Castle with the room they call the knotted room behind them and cross the square until the Duomo is to their right and they are walking into Rinascente, and Fiorucci, and the smaller shops of the Galleria, and along Via Montenapoleone. It is summer and people are dressed in the colours of sorbet and ice cream cups from the small provincial cinemas of his childhood. Pistachio. Lilac. They shop for T-shirts, jeans, belts and sweaters. It is hot, and so are they, and they have no idea how hot.

  9

  The night he meets his true love he’s wearing a jacket he bought in a second-hand shop in Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s blue check, unlined cotton, and has a retro American feel about it that makes him feel sexy and ironic. He’s wearing it with a baby-blue Lacoste and a pair of chinos the same beige as the beige in the jacket check, and Timberland boat shoes, without socks. It’s a warm evening, and he’s pulled up his jacket sleeves to show off his tan. It’s late April. Decades later, his only memory of what his lover is wearing is a cap, the kind people wear in Greece, and a smile, and the cap will be a false memory.

  10

  He visits the second-hand clothes market every Sunday morning, returning home with bargains he never wears, but discovers months later behind the sofa or under the bed, still stuffed into pastel-coloured plastic bags. A woman from Naples has a stall of suits, and he goes through a period of imagining himself as the type of man who wears nothing else, filling a section of his wardrobe with suits that are too small, too large, too formal, too spiv-like, too dull to wear. One day he finds a suit made
by Valentino, a grey so dark it’s black, a wool so light it floats from the hand, the pockets still sewn shut. Weeks later, he wears it to his father’s funeral.

  SEX or HONEY AND WOOD

  1

  He sits in the middle of the living-room carpet, piling up wooden blocks that have letters pasted on their sides while his mother watches Emergency Ward Ten on the black-and-white set. He’s spelling out his name when one of the nurses says something about sex rearing its ugly head. He doesn’t know what this means, but he can tell from the odd way his mother shifts in her armchair and glances down at him that it’s something bad. He waits for a moment, and then asks her why sex has an ugly head and what rearing means. She tells him he’s too young to understand. When he spells the word SEKS with his blocks she takes them away from him.

  2

  Visiting his aunt’s house, he plays with the daughter of the family two houses down. She drags him out of the house and into the outdoor lavatory, then lifts up her skirt and pulls down her knickers. They’re supposed to be where someone can see them, he says, but she reaches for his shorts and quickly, as though she’s done this before, unzips them and pushes them round his knees, then makes him sit on the lavatory. She squats on his lap, her shoulders against his jumper, and wriggles. He can’t see over her head. His face is pressed into the cotton of her dress as she leans back into him. Do you like it? she asks. No, he says.

  3

  They’re in the greenhouse. It’s tomato season and they’re surrounded by tomatoes when his best friend suggests they play nudist camps. They take their clothes off and then stand there not sure what to do next. They don’t touch. It’s hot and the smell of the tomatoes is almost overpoweringly strong. After a while, she suggests they play charades. He watches her growl, her chest as flat as his, then mount the handle of a spade the gardener has left in the corner and run with it pressed between her thighs. She puts the spade down and mimes the opening of a door. I’m a book, she says, but he can’t guess which one. He feels faint. Everything looks red.

  4

  Some weeks later they’re in her playroom, at the top of the house. This time they both take off their clothes and get into bed. It’s a single bed, beneath the window. They lie there, shivery at first, and then hot. She pushes his head down under the sheets until his mouth is on her tummy, then further down. There’s a sprinkling of hair he doesn’t expect, which tickles him and makes him want to laugh, but he’s scared as well. Kiss me, she says, and he does. Harder, she says, but he doesn’t know what she means. He struggles back up until he can see his watch. It’s time for Five O’clock Club, he says. I have to go.

  5

  They stand in the tent his father bought for him, a tall square tent like the kind you see in films about knights in armour. They all have their jeans around their ankles. The tent is made of some orange material. One of them has a handful of pigeon feathers. The boys push the hard end of the feathers into the ends of their dicks until they stick. The girls put the hard ends into their slits. They wriggle their hips to make the feathers move from side to side. He’s told them it’s what Red Indians did, to show they belonged to the tribe. Their skins are bathed in orange. They’re sweating. One of the girls starts to cry.

  6

  It’s a sleepover with one of his friends from school. They’ve been put in the same bed, a double bed, with a bolster and a quilted eiderdown. They start off in their pyjamas, but his friend waits until the house is quiet, then asks him if he’s still asleep. No, he says. Neither am I, his friend says. They lie together, listening to each other breathe. It’s hot, his friend says, and takes off his pyjama jacket. He sits up to do it, his slim bare chest turned silver by the moonlight. That’s better, he says. He gets out of bed and slips his pyjama trousers off, then gets back in. Aren’t you hot? he asks. His hand is hard.

  7

  It’s the afternoon of the boat race. His father wants them to watch it together, but he goes upstairs and lies on his bed. After a while, he opens his fly and reaches in, stroking himself until he’s hard. He carries on stroking and something strange happens, like soft white feathers pushing to come out. For a moment, he thinks he’s going to pee, to burst with pee, and will flood the bed, but then he’s moaning and he has some white stuff on his belly. He’s so excited he runs downstairs. He wants to tell his mother, but his father catches him in the hall, and he has time to reconsider. You missed a grand race, his father says.

  8

  He’s in the common room, between classes. One of the boys is being picked on by a group of other boys for being cocky. He keeps his head down, he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s had his eye on the boy for some time. Short blondish hair, solidly built. He’s never spoken to him, but he has had a dream in which the boy’s dick looked like honey and a piece of polished wood all at once, and he was stroking it. When they wrestle him to the ground, his shirt comes out of the waistband and his torso arches back, bare-bellied, taut. The whole world and his heart are blinded by the light of the boy’s white skin.

  9

  He buys Health & Efficiency from a newsagent’s where he isn’t known. He cuts out his favourite images of men and sticks them into last year’s Stoke Arts Festival programme, alongside the underwear pages from out-of-date catalogues, a photograph of Kevin Keegan, shirtless, running across an empty field, a smaller photograph, scissored from the paper, of the dark one from Starsky & Hutch dressed up as Houdini, wearing chains around his neck and wrists, and not much else. He’s hiding a new copy of H&E in his satchel the day his mother tells him about a piece of pig’s liver in some friend’s fridge, so riddled with cancer it wrapped itself around the milk. For the protein, she says darkly.

  10

  He’s sitting in the back of the car reading Brideshead Revisited when he hears the thwack of a leather ball against a bat. He glances up. His father is driving through a village and he sees a game of cricket being played. He hates cricket, but he has a vision of waiting beneath a tree, an ash tree perhaps, with a hamper of sandwiches and champagne, and his friend is walking towards him, his bat under his arm, his cheeks flushed. He flops onto the picnic rug, and his hair falls into his eyes as he reaches across, his hand barely brushing the knee of his friend, his lips slightly parted, his words the merest whisper. And so they come.

  Charles Lambert's haunting and highly original With a Zero at Its Heart is a sequence of short texts, each of exactly 120 words. Arranged by theme, including objects, clothes, sex, danger, travel, work, theft, animals, money and language, these form striking glimpses – comic, tender, shocking, enigmatic – of one man's life.

  With a Zero at Its Heart is published by HarperCollins imprint The Friday Project on May 22nd 2014.

  ISBN: 9780007545513