by Tim Pears
‘I’m going to publish them one day,’ he confided in James. ‘Keep it to yourself, mind, I haven’t told anyone else.’
‘Right,’ James agreed.
‘In a single volume. I’m going to call it “Journal of a Simple Man”.’
‘Sounds good,’ James encouraged him.
‘Well, it’s modest,’ Jim told him. ‘And ironic, mind,’ he added. ‘It’ll shake a few people up, I don’t mind telling you.’
The students at the top of the house – on the floor above James and Jim – unlike the other residents, shared a sink, stove and kitchen cupboards on their tiny landing. It was just as well they were on the top floor: the fumes of charred toast and burnt pans rose mostly upward, along with the sounds of three records, Dark Side of the Moon and Yessongs and Tubular Bells, which they kept flipping over and playing again.
Below James was a young woman, Pat, who spent days in her room but always emerged from it in a hurry, so that it took James some months to discover that she was, as she put it, an activist – at which he nodded sagely and wondered what that meant. She knew Zoe because she spent her dole money on seeing every film that showed at the cinema. She also told James about the man in the basement below her: a porter in the mental hospital at Middle-more. He suffered from insomnia, and when he couldn’t sleep he sawed wood in his room.
‘Doesn’t that keep you awake?’
‘Sure,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders and frowning at the same time. ‘I told him to pack it in, but he said if he couldn’t saw wood he’d go mad and what did I want, an occasionally noisy neighbour or a madman in the basement? And then he gave me a wad of cotton wool to use for fucking earmuffs.’ She shrugged again. ‘You get used to anything.’
Unlike Jim’s room, Pat’s was packed solid; a true bedsit, thought James, glancing through the door she’d left open to answer the telephone, because it looked like a houseful of rooms crammed into one: one wall a kitchen, another for clothes, on a third shelves of books above her bed, and against the fourth, beside the door, a desk covered with typewriter, files, papers, pens. Shoes were stacked on top of the wardrobe, cassettes scattered across the floor.
Next to Pat, in the room at the front of the house beside the front door, lived a woman whose name no one knew since she received not only no telephone calls but no post either. She was referred to by the other tenants as the Plant Woman, because her sill was filled with window-boxes and from the curtain rail hung not curtains but pots of hanging plants, and the only things inside the room that could be spied through the foliage were even more green leaves of various shapes and profusion. She was a middle-aged woman of immaculate appearance but she rarely stepped outside her room and so was seldom seen; although from the silent hallway she could sometimes be heard, her voice a pleasant murmur in some one-sided conversation.
Below the Plant Woman in the basement (beside the wood-sawing lunatic) was Shirley, a large woman of similar age to the Plant Woman but who in complete contrast appeared to be in a state of disarray: she dressed in clothes that were either too tight or else absurdly loose for her amplitude, as if she’d put on a large amount of weight overnight and had had to borrow other people’s clothes in a hurry. She greeted James cheerfully from the very beginning, although he never saw her before midday. Shirley was the most sociable of all the tenants: she went out every evening and staggered back late, unsteady on her feet but assisted by furtive men who shushed her as she giggled down the basement steps.
James was content with the nodding acquaintance of his fellow tenants. He preferred to construct imaginary pasts and present activities for them, these secondary characters in his own developing life-story: Jim, some exiled intellectual; Pat, a dangerous revolutionary; the Plant Woman, a genteel lady fallen on hard times; Shirley, a drunken prostitute; the nutty porter, one step from being a patient; and vapid, chaotic students on the top floor. The one thing they all had in common was a respect for each other’s privacy.
James liked living in one room; there was plenty of space. He had a chest-of-drawers for his clothes and a large bookcase for his photographic equipment, which consisted simply of cameras and lenses – he didn’t need a darkroom because he could use the one at work in the evenings. As for books he didn’t require any more space than the few built-in shelves above his bed. Unlike Zoe, he couldn’t see the point of keeping books you were never going to read again; the ones he read were borrowed from her or the public library, and the only ones he actually bought were photographic collections that he pored over for hours, while listening to Zoe’s Teach Yourself Italian tape.
In imitation of the Plant Woman he got a couple of pot plants, but their leaves soon went brown and withered, however much he watered them or fed them with Baby Bio. He felt guilty smoking, but not enough to stop, and eventually gave up on plants and began what would become a life-long habit of buying a bouquet of flowers after work every pay-day. It would still be a while, though, before he bought them for someone other than himself.
When he started on the newspaper James was paid an apprentice’s wages. Ten pounds a week went on rent, and after other expenses only a little was left over for a repetitive, loner’s diet of porridge for breakfast, cheese sandwiches for lunch and a tasteless stew for supper. The fact that the only cooking facility was a Baby Belling, and that instead of a fridge he copied his fellow tenants and put milk out on the window ledge, was no problem at all for James. His one extravagance was Colombian coffee from the covered market, where a machine ground the beans and funnelled the coffee into tight white paper bags. Each Saturday morning he bought a pound first thing and put it in his jacket pocket, and the gorgeous aroma accompanied him through the town until he got home.
Once he became a staff photographer James was given a wage rise. He found himself with surplus income, and his standard of living rose: he shaved with Boots’ foam instead of making a lather out of ordinary soap, and left his clothes at the launderette for a service wash rather than waste hours watching them spin. In the corner of the room that was his kitchen sunflower oil became virgin olive oil, margarine was replaced by butter, orange squash became fruit juice. His staple of apples proliferated into a varied fruit bowl. He bought croissants from the French-style patisserie that had just opened in Gray’s Road and wine from the deli near the cinema. James lived contentedly within his means. On account of his press pass and his camera, he got in free to music gigs, football matches and first nights at the town theatre. He rolled his own cigarettes (he’d got better with practice; Zoe no longer complained at the joints he rolled when he visited her) and shopped in jumble sales and charity shops.
One evening there was a knock on his bedsit door. He opened it expecting to find Pat or Jim but instead there was Simon. He peered around the side of James’ head.
‘My God,’ Simon exclaimed. ‘What an absolute bloody rat-hole.’
James made them both coffee and Simon demanded to know how long James was going to keep away from the family. ‘When you’re in a hole, darling, stop digging for God’s sake.’
‘I’m not going back there,’ James told him. ‘I’m going to make it on my own. That’s final, Simon.’
‘You are a stubborn little shit,’ Simon admonished him. ‘And by the way,’ he said, accepting that there was no more to say on the subject, ‘how can you bear to dress in dead men’s clothes?’
‘Someone else has already worn them in for me,’ James smiled.
‘Next time I visit,’ Simon said as he was leaving, ‘I’m taking you out for a meal. You’re like a bloody beanpole.’
It didn’t take James long to establish himself in the team of photographers on the paper. Whatever he lacked in self-confidence he made up for with his willingness to take on unpopular assignments, which initially meant the least exciting, bread-and-butter jobs of councillors planting trees, the façades of buildings in which stories had already taken place, and summer traffic jams around the ring road. Soon, however, they included early-morning storie
s and emergency call-outs in the middle of the night – which necessitated James installing a line for the newspaper inside his bedsit room after complaints from the other residents. The only jobs he resisted were those involving his father, and Roger tactfully assigned them to someone else.
Through 1975 James came to know the town he’d grown up in. As a child there were places, and pockets around them (home, school, friends’ houses, the swimming pool) and the routes out from home along roads and paths like bent spokes in a crooked wheel. Now, on a racing bicycle, his camera bag stuffed in a pannier, he got to know all the streets of the town and the flow of traffic as if he were a taxi driver, as well as the cycle- and footpaths, the towpath along the canal, a hundred short cuts.
He learned the geography of the town as a series of maps of particular significance that he could mentally plant like grids over a straightforward A–Z of the town, each imaginary map with appropriate places marked in one arbitrary colour: green for the parks and football pitches; red, blue and orange (and later another, darker, green) for the homes of the town councillors; yellow for schools; purple for the various local artists – writers, painters, singers, musicians; black for the darkness of pubs and clubs; and brown for the vantage points from which to get good views of that town in the valley.
Early on James acquired a nickname among his fellow photographers. Roger stooped over James’ contact sheets, pointing out mistakes he considered James was making and advising him on how to improve framing and composition in line with what was required, which was chiefly, as Mr Baker had once explained, simplicity. It was Roger who noticed that on almost every sheet there’d be at least one image slightly askew; and they were always ones taken in haste, captured on the run. ‘Look at the way he walks,’ Derek Moore pointed out. ‘See how he lurches. No wonder they’re skew-whiff. You’d have thought they’d all be.’
And so in those early days they called him Lurcher, scrutinizing his rolls of film for odd frames to corroborate the evidence; when they found a glaring example Keith printed a large blow-up and they pinned it on the wall of the office and then discussed it over tea in tones of mock-serious criticism.
‘You see the way Lurcher’s composed this one,’ said Frank; ‘tilting the frame so that the mayor looks like she’s about to slide out of the left of the frame.’
‘Aye,’ Derek agreed, ‘a subtle reference to the fact that the end of her term of office is approaching.’
‘And also, I reckon,’ said Keith, ‘a guarded criticism of the whole paraphernalia of pomp and ceremony. Isn’t that right, mate?’
‘It’s subversive stuff, Lurch,’ they told him. ‘It’ll never get past Mr Baker, but it’s a good try.’
James took it in as good heart as he could, smiling wanly, while concentrating on each assignment to eliminate this unwelcome quirk from his craft. At first the badinage – and even more the reason for it – upset him, and he confided in Zoe.
‘All I can say is: forget that advice I gave you,’ she said when she saw some of the lopsided prints.
James frowned. ‘What advice?’ he enquired.
‘To give up stills and make films. They’d be all over the place, James. Unless, of course,’ she faltered, her gaze drifting away, ‘unless you didn’t do any hand-held. Hey, maybe Bresson’s a lurcher, too.’
‘You’re not being very helpful,’ James complained, but Zoe didn’t take any notice.
‘And Ozu as well,’ she continued. ‘On the other hand,’ she mused, ‘that doesn’t explain why he shot everything from knee-height.’
‘What are you on about, Zoe?’ James moaned. ‘You’re not listening.’
‘Of course I am, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Look, James. Don’t worry what people say. Or at least take Cocteau’s advice: he said an artist should listen carefully to the first criticisms of their work, and note what it is the critics don’t like; it may be the only thing in the work that’s original and worthwhile.’
James frowned. ‘I’m not an artist. Anyway, who’s Cocktoe?’ he asked.
Zoe slapped her forehead. ‘Oh, the ignorance of the young! You are going straight downstairs. I’m showing a fabulous new film from Greece, about a travelling theatre company. It was only in the London Film Festival last week.’
‘I’ve got to go, Zoe, I’m meeting someone.’
‘Rubbish. You’re going to watch this film if I have to chain you in your seat.’
It was probably because they were too busy scrutinizing his photos for tilted frames that the other photographers took a long time to realize that James’ pictures, during those first couple of years, were growing bolder. Under the influence of the masters whose books he studied in his bedsit, he took close-ups of local politicians and other dignitaries in harsh light or half in shadow, depending upon what he perceived of their self-importance and mendacity, in the manner of Arbus or Brand; sent out to get stock shots of the town centre, he roved among shoppers and workers for hours, keen-eyed as a bird, seeking the significant moment of Cartier-Bresson; covering children’s sports days, he snapped the prize-winners perfunctorily but then hung around hoping to capture an image with the charm and humour of a Doisneau. His photos were still derivative; but in the context of the provincial newspaper they were radical.
It was Mr Baker who first questioned the orthodoxy of the prints James chose to submit to the subeditors. He summoned James into his office: three recent editions of the paper were laid out across his desk, opened at pages displaying three of James’ photographs. Mr Baker proceeded to explain once again his precepts for providing what their readership wanted – clarity and simplicity – and James listened calmly, politely, grateful for the correction, not saying a word until the editor had finished and James said: ‘Thank you, Mr Baker, I appreciate it,’ before leaving the room.
Since everyone knew that a summons from Mr Baker meant a mild rebuke, but one delivered in such a way that a sterner one would not be needed, it meant toe the line or look for another job, the other photographers became aware of James’ nonconformity. They assumed, however, that it was a youthful phase both spotted and put a stop to by their vigilant editor. It wasn’t. James had neither the courage nor the confidence to be a rebel, but the one thing he was – throughout those years of freedom and loneliness – was stubborn. His lurching was forgotten as his colleagues scanned his contact sheets instead for surreptitious images that, sure as eggs is eggs, were not the way things were done around here.
‘You’ll never get that past Mr Baker,’ Keith told him, staring at the wet print of the local Member of Parliament, on a long lens, addressing a garden party of his more loyal constituents, positioned with the sun directly behind him, creating a sardonic halo.
Keith was right on that occasion, but James wasn’t stupid: he always covered himself with more straightforward pictures. There was no point in being out of work; he had no intention of returning to his earliest adventures, with an empty camera. But he was sure his bolder pictures were better. As time went by he covered himself less and less.
It wasn’t until the long hot summer of 1976 that the inhabitants of the house on the hill began to notice how Edna had changed, because she’d never complained or made a fuss about things, coping over the years with no more than a raised eyebrow with the children’s whims, Charles’ impromptu parties, Simon’s fads and the endless unpredictable comings and goings that meant she never knew from one day to the next how many people would sit down to supper. Her quartermaster’s ability to eke out the contents of the larder while satisfying taste-buds with a mastery of pastries, puddings and pies, with unfailing good humour, was so unostentatious that everyone took it for granted.
It took even Simon – with his super-sensitive palate – a while to notice that Edna’s food was losing its flavour. He was unable to mention it to Edna, less because he was worried about upsetting her than because she had become unapproachable: he was so used to greeting her at breakfast or requesting a particular dish and being met with her fat wom
an’s compliant smile that when she stopped, it gave him a feeling of sad dread in his stomach. So he took Laura aside, and informed her of the tastelessness of her mother’s cooking.
‘I know,’ Laura agreed. ‘I think she’s stopped eating.’
‘That can’t be it,’ Simon said. ‘She eats the same as she’s always done,’ he maintained, because Edna still sat down to supper and dished out for herself the usual meagre portion of a sparrow. Laura had to point out to him that Edna used to eat more than anyone else, consuming mouthfuls of whatever she was cooking, without realizing she was doing so, simply checking the taste.
‘She’s stopped doing that,’ Laura explained. ‘She just works automatically now, measuring and weighing from recipes. She doesn’t even smell the food. When I try and tell her it could do with more garlic or coriander she tells me to go away.’
Laura decided to mention it to Stanley. She told him Simon’s observation of the loss of flavour, and that Edna no longer nibbled her way through the day. Stanley was relieved.
‘That explains why she’s losing weight,’ he replied.
‘Don’t be silly, Dad,’ Laura told him, ‘she’s not lost a pound.’
Laura was right, but Stanley’s misconception was understandable: something was happening to Edna and whatever it was bore a distinct resemblance to the symptoms of a fast: deep shadows appeared around her eyes, which took on a haunted look; her movements became blurred, as her once flowing limbs moved momentarily later than they should have done; and they would come across her in the kitchen sitting on a stool and staring into space, a mixing bowl in her lap, after a lifetime’s perpetual motion.
Gradually others began to notice too. ‘Auntie Edna’s face is all red,’ Alice – back home for the holidays – told Laura. ‘Is she all right?’
