“So the sixties don’t have a monopoly on gratuitous nastiness,” Mike commented. “Sssh,” snarled Carol. Lightning thrust a finger in the vault, prised it open; the monster shambled forth, bolts protruding from its neck like boils. “The first adequate shot in an hour,” said Mike to himself. The coachman was eating sausages in the kitchen; a huge fat man — Carol saw the manager of the Hotel Docherty. The monster peeped in the window. Another sausage went down whole. The monster strode through the panes. The man in front of Carol bobbed up and down, chortling. The film shook; darts and rings of light were sprinkled on it, and a bright thread was stretched across the frame. The hunchback appeared and shouted to distract the monster; the film jerked and his rubber hump bounced about the screen as if by magic. Carol groaned and punched his thigh. The coachman squashed silently and spread across the plaster cupids, then reformed as the projectionist whipped off the Cinemascope lens. The monster advanced — to break the snivelling fat man’s back, to tear off his head — but it merely strangled him; Carol deflated. “By the Almighty, sir, what have you wrought?” the hero cried as the monster charged through a cardboard wall and the castle collapsed. Bricks fell on the hunchback and one bounced off his hump; bottles of acid smashed on the doctor; the hero carried the girl into the dawn and looked back once. “He was a good man once, but he wanted power,” he intoned.
“I don’t see how you enjoy that sort of thing,” Mike said in the interval.
“It doesn’t hurt anyone,” said Carol. “Nothing you can’t touch can hurt you.”
The opera film about the umbrellas was stupid, Carol thought. A man drove into a garage and sang about his car. Carol thrust his knees up and tipped the ashtray into his lap; he galvanized upright. “Look at my trousers!” he cried, brushing. “Ah, merde!” sang someone on the screen. The student with the scarf laughed ostentatiously. “Look at all this,” protested Carol.
“How about watching the movie?” suggested Mike.
“But it’s stupid! Whoever heard of people singing everything?”
“My trousers still aren’t clean,” Carol said. “I’ll drop you a line sometime this week,” called Mike as the doors met. The tunnel drew the train into itself and Carol headed for the stairs, past panting late-comers. On the escalator heavy-eyed descending girls passed wide-eyed girls in bra and panties; Carol adjusted his camera, eyes averted. Fashion photographers must take a delight in degrading their models. Carol’s subjects were landscapes and friends — he’d have liked to have photographed Mike as an aid to memory. His heels clanked on the metal treads of cracked white-tiled staircases; he strode down dusty circular corridors under naked bulbs, swinging the penumbra of a camera. They’d made their way from the plaster cupids to the Charing Cross Road, a drunk on a doorstep swinging a bottle, a blonde in a mini-skirt rhapsodizing over Beckett, a cluster of umbrellas protruding from a crowd as from a flowerpot outside Better Books, within which Mike and Carol sheltered. “Why, hi!” said Mike, buying a copy of Midi-Minuit Fantastique. “These are the editors of Gothique and this is Mick Harris of Twylight, and this is Carol, my cameraman who wasn’t, folks.” An old man picked up papers from the platform, studied, them, dropped them muttering; Carol stared into the tunnel, where trains thrust and vanished like huge mysterious worms. They’d all wandered round the bookshops, talking films, ending up in the Golden Egg beneath the Royal Dental Hospital as the Leicester Square fountain dulled from molten in the sunset. Carol leafed through Mike’s horror-movie magazine, admiring the photographs but unable to understand a word of the French, and Mick Harris said: “Don’t tell me you side with our friends here on horror for its own sake!” Carol felt the focus of attention turn to him and argued — but he couldn’t talk about the supervisor at the duplicating firm, about the hotel manager. Then the play was caught from him; the argument was bounding back and forth across the table, never falling. Carol turned back to the magazine; he felt uneasy in a crowd, threatened by negation. The magazine — Once, reading Gothique in the lunch-hour, he’d sensed the supervisor’s chin almost on his shoulder, heard the soft voice: “You could see all these films complete in Paris, if you ever feel like a holiday. If you’re short of money…” Carol stamped his foot. The old man on the platform snarled something surrealistic and went off in search of unprotected scraps of paper. Mike and the others faded; from the horizonless desert of his life arose the familiar twisted figure, the hotel manager sharp and flat beside him. Carol hadn’t lost the supervisor in House of Dr Jekyll.
With an approaching drum-roll, the train emerged blindly from the tunnel. Carol sat down, placed his camera beside him, brushed at his lap, still stained. At Lancaster Gate he left What’s On in London on the seat; as the train continued, he glimpsed a man take his place and pick it up. The lift ground streetward and left him before the lone glittering bus-stop; behind it hung the moon like a stained light-bulb. He turned right toward the side-street and the Hotel Docherty. Five youths were dawdling toward him, elbowing each other, playing railings with umbrellas. He crossed the street and circled behind them to reach the hotel, swinging his camera. “What’s that you’ve got, darling, a handbag?” called one. Quickly bored with him, they jostled, punching, into the station.
Carol’s face burned; his fists clenched. Who did they think he was, the supervisor? All these men exaggerating their virility — it made him sick. He glared at each frosted front-door panel. How many rooms tonight in which some poor girl would suffer untold humiliation? Like the little Swedish maid — Perhaps she’d sensed his sympathy that morning; she knew he’d be gentle, respectful. He might meet her on the stairs.
His fingers on the key were frozen; he could barely fumble it into the slot. The radio was dead; the hall was silent. Immobile, a pen hung on a chain from the visitors” book; one link was open, hooked. Carol tiptoed by and upward. The landing window was stained black. On the first floor a line of cold white hostile doors reflected their doubles; no sound suggested that the rooms were occupied. Halfway to the second floor Carol passed a toilet. The Swedish girl was forgotten; he wanted to find his room, his bed, to forget ambitions, failures. On the second landing hung a static chandelier like a giant spider encrusted with ice. Beneath it was a staircase, training a threadbare carpet into darkness. Carol touched the wall; no light-switch. Top of the stairs. He padded into blindness; his elbow collided with a turn. Hot at the thought of awakenings below, he placed each foot with anguished care on the muffling carpet, wary of the fortified silence. His last step found no stair; his groping fingers chilled on a. smooth door. They ranged and traced: 3. His fingernails scraped on the lock, the key slipped in and the door opened. A box of midnight luminosity stood before him. He closed the door and switched on the light.
Thirty shillings? Even in London — A rust-red carpet edged by a walnut wardrobe opposite the door, to its left a bed beneath an open window, a straight chair beneath the bed’s foot and a washbowl, nothing to relieve the wool waste pitilessly lit by an unshaded bulb reflecting from the pale grainy wallpaper. Maybe he’d complain — but in the morning; he was tired. He tiptoed downstairs to the toilet. The black enamel of the fittings was speckled with whitewash. The hotel was still disquietingly quiet, uninhabited; at least he wouldn’t be required to strain for staircase conversation. As he closed out the foreshortened luminous parallelogram at the foot of his stairs, he found that the latch had been held back; he released it. It must have been unlocked when first he entered his room. He crossed to the washbowl. No towel lay across the dark-red scalloped counterpane. Carol unfolded his own, neatly packed into his coat pocket; he would never use towels which others might have touched. One corner yielded his toothbrush; he grinned mechanically at himself, freckled with someone’s toothpaste on the mirror. No tumbler — now that was too much. He knelt and caught the jetting water in his mouth, the plumbing twittering like machine-guns, like the Martian deathrays in The War of the Worlds, the fat man backing away, streaming sweat, running, mown down; his lips momentarily closed
over the tap. Then he stripped, doused himself with lukewarm water, towelled hurriedly, shivering, refolded his trousers on the chair, brushing at the stain. He thrust at the open window. It resisted. Well, he was man enough to stand it. He turned out the light, padded to the bed and pulled the blankets over his shoulders, enjoying the keen sheets. He drew his knees toward his stomach. His warmth lulled him.
Something soft and heavy moved across his face. He jerked upright into blackness, and his nails clawed at the curtain swaying in a frozen draught above him. The room formed before his eyes. A sheet of moonlight was hung up in the doorframe and stretched along the carpet to the window. Light glimmered in the mirror and painted Carol’s jacket on the chair as a pale rectangle like a headstone; the wardrobe was a mass of shadow to his left. Carol became aware that he was trembling with cold; his shoulder-blades were aching. He must have slept for several hours. He heaved at the window; his fingers slithered up the frame; beneath he saw parked cars, huddled like animals for warmth. His hands were trembling independent of his stoicism. He’d never sleep like this; he had to compromise. He swung onto the arctic carpet and tottered numbly to the chair. Grabbing his vest, which he could hardly see or feel, he struggled into it. His bare arms thrust from it and it fell about his body. The mirror framed its last quiver. Carol faced himself; he knew something was wrong. The length. Glancing down, he saw that he had not put on his vest at all. It was a girl’s slip.
The door opened soundlessly, and the manager came in.
As the closing door flashed in the frame of moonlight, Carol saw that the figure on the wood was not 3 but B. Good Lord, I’m awfully sorry, what must you think, he was about to say. But his lips were working silently toward a scream. He was shaking, not with cold but with terror, somehow not his own. Then he knew. The manager came forward from the moonlight into the thick darkness, and as he left the beam he leered. Carol felt the silent shadows close in to hold him helpless. The crimson face moved nearer, shining in the darkness like a demon. A voice pleaded brokenly with the hot approaching mass, but it could not be Carol’s; he did not speak French. His consciousness was flying off in fragments and something alien was rushing in to fill the vacuum. His body changed. He did not dare to look. He lunged desperately for the doorknob. A great shape threw its weight against the door. Carol’s fingers clutched the light-switch by the mirror. The bulb blazed on an empty room. The door was locked. Carol’s clothes hung on the chair. He closed his eyes as he looked down, then forced them open; he was wearing only a vest. Of the manager, those hands Carol could feel, there was no sign.
The wall turned blinding white; the switch swam forward, glaring silver. It was dawn. The first car sped through an amber shaft between the houses. Carol felt that he had sat on the bed, trembling though fully dressed, for years. At last he leapt up, thrust towel and toothbrush into pockets, dragged the door open and stood waiting. Up the staircase filtered the sound of someone searching radio wavebands. Through Carol’s mind flew thoughts: it hadn’t happened to him, it wasn’t real, it couldn’t hurt him any more than could a film — none of them more convincing in the curtained dawn than they had been all night, as he’d sat vainly waiting for the next onslaught. He had to talk to someone. He flinched into the hall, eyes on the office door. No radio: the calm before the shock-effect. He backed into the branching corridor, into the parallel hall, up the second staircase to his room at the top — bright geometric wallpaper, towels across the bed, soap and tumbler over the wash-bowl — and down again to the telephone which had belatedly registered. But Mike wasn’t in.
“How should I know when he’ll be back? I’m not his mother!” Mike’s landlady clicked and whirred.
Carol held the dead receiver. Women — he hated them, their soft helpless bodies, passively resisting, unattainable — even the little Swedish girl — No, he must think straight. He had to talk to her. She might be next. She could help him rid himself of the manager. He couldn’t be along in the London crowds again, pressed in upon himself; not yet. He descended to the breakfast room.
Faint tunes were strained from wall-speakers; yellow chairs and tables were spaced out across the floor and set with red plastic plates. Carol threw his coat on one chair and sat opposite. Toast was shelved in a plastic rack. Carol scraped butter on a slice, the sound resented by the silence. Then he left it on his plate. Why didn’t she come? He could feel the manager filling his body, jerking his reflexes. Suddenly he realized that he faced a cupboard door; the kitchen was behind him. He pushed his chair back. The runners caught on the lino. He heard the kitchen door open, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw the crimson face.
“It’s not every morning you’ll find me serving.” The red hand placed a plate. “It’s the Irish they say are superstitious, is it? Not the Swedes, eh?” The face bent toward him. “I’m telling you that girl wouldn’t go near our last maid’s room last night. Stayed with friends. You’d think nobody ever killed themselves in Sweden. I’m telling you, I’ll have something for her when she gets here. Just-because — ” The manager caught him and threw him on the bed. “There’s my wife calling. Top o’ the mornin’ to you!”
The kitchen door closed. Silence. Finally the faint music returned, somewhere outside Carol. By the time the girl arrived, Carol would be gone. There would be only the manager.
And the voice: “If you’re short of money…”
CONCUSSION
For some weeks Kirk Morris had been gnawed by the knowledge that he must die. He had tried to feign indifference; then, when he realized that at his death Liverpool, if not the rest of the world, would cease to exist, he had determined to return for one last confrontation of his memories.
That day a few private vehicles were coasting in the streets; he signalled one and heaved his case onto the seat beside him. The new transport must have hit a snag again, calling forth these vehicles in imitation of the bygone taxis. He sped across London. The high concrete-and-metal buildings were mobiles of sunlight which ached in his eyes. Since weather control had cleared the city skies the bleached bone streets had become yet more unreal to Kirk; his journeys through them had the obsessive quality of a flight down the corridors of some surrealist film. Nowhere could he find the overpowering solidity of the black grime-encrusted buildings, surrounding one reassuringly for miles, for which he had moved so long ago to London in an attempt to be convinced by his surroundings of their reality. Instead, he existed, robbed of referent and drained of emotion, on a lower floor of a stark rectangular housing block in the suburbs, occasionally meeting families in the lift or young couples at the meal dispenser round the corner, and it was partly the conviction that he would die unnoticed that had persuaded him to undertake this journey into nostalgia. Of course, he thought, shaking himself awake, this was nonsense; when he died they would cease to be, as much illusion as the GLCPT which had pensioned him off when the buses ceased to run. But if Liverpool was an illusion, why did he need to spend time and energy on the illusion of returning?
The vehicle drew up beside the gap in the buildings like slabs of sand which denoted Victoria Coach Station. Kirk handed a note over the driver’s shoulder; the man hesitated, looking unsure whether to be grateful for or insulted by the size of the tip — after all, he’d picked up Kirk out of sympathy, not to profit. But Kirk couldn’t believe in his indecision; it had been decades since Kirk had trusted anyone. He dragged his case onto the pavement. The passers-by looked shifty, as if smug with a knowledge they thought withheld from him. He’d buttonhole one and worm the truth out of him — then suddenly he giggled: non-existent money to a non-existent driver!
He had to drop the case three times before he reached what had been the coach station; a sheltered square of concrete approached by two lanes between the buildings flecked as tweed which rose toward another square, one of blue sky stained with spilled milk, invisible from beneath the shelter. Queues stamped, swayed and complained on the four platforms closing in the square, and Kirk joined that for Manch
ester and Liverpool. Preceding him was a young man, glancing frequently at the entrances, waiting for someone or perhaps merely keeping their place. He unbuttoned his 1960-style sports jacket — nostalgia was all the rage these days among the younger set — and cast it over his shoulder, flicking Kirk’s face like a challenge. Kirk recoiled grumbling and touched his cheek, feeling wrinkles which could never now be smoothed. He sat down on the concrete bench against the building; the stone was cold as a tomb through his trousers. Across the square a bus snored awake. It caught at Kirk’s throat with nostalgia, and after all the presence of the bus could only be related to the nostalgia of Kirk’s generation who were sick in other than surface transport and prepared to pay extra for comfort and the sight of a bus still on the ground. It was comfort Kirk sought — but the comfort of remembering the day he met Anne.
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