“I never have time to eat, old boy,” he says. “So I live on crisps and jars of pickled onions.”
I notice my drawings spread out in an area close to the miniature car park. They are slashed with thick red marks.
Alan munches on a crisp. “The boffins in Ruislip have a problem with your drawings, Barry.”
“All of them?” I ask.
“Even those that are not yet conceived. I’m afraid you’ve gone and stamped on the sausage, Barry, and you cannot mess with the boffins’ sausage.”
As usual, I do not understand his metaphor.
“Ad fucking oculos, Barry. Plain for the world to see.”
He picks up one of my drawings, a gully detail in the medium level decontamination area. “You made a right hairy dildo out of this one, old chum,” he says, dropping it into my lap. “It appears that the dimensions you’ve added to this drawing actually come from a different dimension. Draughtmanship, Barry, is like accountancy. The numbers must add up. Your numbers do not add up. I have an old sheepdog, Barry, and she could piss better information than you have on this sheet.”
I nod. I’m not embarrassed. I’m just amazed they didn’t catch me out sooner.
“We are both shallow men, Barry. I’m afraid I’m so shallow, sometimes my depths rise above my surface, but it’s my job to look after the sausage. I am the keeper of the sausage, Barry, the high-priest of the porcine tube, the ganger of the banger. I’m sure you understand.”
Not even remotely.
He lights a cigarillo and flicks the match towards the green tinted water in the Magnox Storage Pond. The match sizzles and goes out. Almost simultaneously, the rain starts tapping on the flat roof above our heads.
“Do you get much rain in Ireland? I’m quite geographically ignorant. Your lot could be going around in ponchos and sleeping under banana trees, for all I know. God I hate the damn rain. First thing to wear out on an English car are the fucking windshield wipers. I should visit some time. Ireland, I mean. I’ve heard Belfast described as Manchester with petrol bombs, or maybe that was Glasgow. Some places have always been a mystery to me, like Chingford. I’ve never been, but I imagine it’s full of Chinese.”
A crash of thunder sounds directly overhead.
“I wish it wouldn’t do that. It makes this whole business seem so damn ominous.”
“Any chance of a reprieve?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Afraid not, old bean. They’ll come down on me like a fat man on a ballerina if I don’t hack off your scalp and wag it out the window. The problem lies with the boffins, Barry, the boffins. We’re dealing here with the deadliest elements known to man – Polonium, Actinium, Rubidium, the stuff that hides underneath the periodic table and growls – and we can’t have some innumerate Paddy chewing his pencil and fucking with the laws of physics. Their words, not mine. Well, actually, they’re my words.”
He takes a thick rubber band off his wrist and flicks it at a cooling tower. It wobbles but does not fall down.
“We get paid according the number of bums on seats, but unfortunately, your bum has become unseated. I really don’t want to lose your bum. I like your bum. Not romantically – I’m happily married to a very unhappy woman – but fiscally and logistically, I need your bum.”
He bursts open another packet of salt-and-vinegar.
“When the Egyptians built the pyramids, Barry, they expected them to last for ten thousand years.” He points an outsize crisp at the Windscale complex. “We’ll have to bury this place for just as long to make it safe.” He looks around to make sure we are alone. “They’re blaming you for the fire,” he says.
“Which one?”
“July 17. Six men injured. Mucho Becquerels floating about the Cumbrian countryside. Don’t eat the grass and don’t drink the milk. They’re probably shooting the mad moo-cows as we speak.”
“I’m not responsible for that.”
“Of course not, but you know the old expression: ‘When in doubt, hang the Irishman.’”
I light a cigarette and Alan crunches his crisps. He wipes his lips with a greasy corner of his cardigan.
“Barry, old chum, my personal belief is that you should pursue a career somewhere beyond the boundaries of civil engineering, perhaps in the world of photographic modelling. You’ve got a damn fine chin.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Some wonderful careers have been built on chins. Our American friends are very keen on the mandible. I can see you on a Hollywood balcony, a Maserati in your driveway, a naked woman clad only in a pair of those strap-on angel wings lying on your tossed bed. The phone rings insistently. It’s your agent. A three-picture deal…”
Alan is lost in fantasy, but I don’t interrupt because, frankly, I like the picture he’s painting. If I had known being fired was this much fun, I would have done it more often.
“At the Oscars, Barry, you won’t thank the Academy. They’ll thank you. Starlets will write their telephone numbers on brassieres with red lipstick, and then catapult them in your direction. You’ll cruise Sunset Boulevard with the top down and the golden statuette perched on your dashboard.”
He crunches his last crisp.
“You’ll be sipping mimosas poolside in the Chateau Marmont while my missus has me hooked up to a catheter, watering the begonias. You’ll be at the end of the rainbow, Barry, and I’ll be a crock.”
The spark in his eye fizzles and goes out.
“That’s it then?” I ask.
“’Fraid so.”
The rain stops and the sudden quiet leaves an emptiness between us. Alan scrunches his crisp bag and tosses it, like a grenade, at the reactor casing. He makes a schoolboy exploding noise, followed by the wee-wah of an ambulance. He grabs my hand and it’s like squeezing a damp, pungent sponge. “Toodle-oodle old poodle.”
I leave the model room and walk back through the drawing office. Nobody pays me any attention. The glass door closes with a hiss of farewell. The Grand Union canal oozes under the Uxbridge Road as I walk up the ramp to the bus stop, but it seems crazy to wait for public transport when I’m on my way to stardom, fortune and fast Maseratis. I light up a joint and the air around me turns blue and shimmery. I flick back an expensive haircut and point a magnificent chin in the direction of Ealing Broadway. I move with a quickening click-clack of Cuban heels.
Into a golden future.
29
DUST
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1979
The last time I smoked PCP it nearly killed me. It was time to do it again.
Kaye stood in the middle of the living room and said, “Did I just say that? Did I?”
Blind Boy had no idea what she meant. “Did you just say what?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I thought you were listening. When some people talk, other people listen.”
The Phencyclidine was dragging her down into a bad place, a basement without stairs.
“You’re in a basement without stairs,” I said, and that really freaked her out.
“Why would you say that? What is this stuff?”
“PCP,” I said, “dust from the wings of an angel.”
“Angels are scary,” she said. “I’ve always been spooked by angels. I bet you knew that. I bet you did.”
“What about your guardian angel?” I asked.
“My guardian angel was a bitch. She did mean things. Once, she tried to push me under a lorry.”
We were in Wilkinson House, a pre-war block of flats that overlooked Kennington Oval. After the hippies tossed me out, I asked Blind Boy and his girlfriend, Kaye, if I could stay with them. Sure, they said, for a week. I liked that. Friendship with a time limit.
“I might have to go to the hospital,” said Kaye. “I’m hearing my ears. They’re making squeaky noises”
“Maybe you have mice,” I suggested.
Blind Boy laughed.
“Why are you laughing? Don’t laugh at me.”
Kaye went to the w
indow and pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
“Is she crying?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“She sounds like she’s ready to start.”
Kaye picked up a hairbrush from the sill and marched back across the room. “Here,” she said, thrusting the brush into my hand. “Brush my hair.”
“Are you talking to me?” asked Blind Boy.
“Hardly. You wouldn’t even be able to find my fucking head.”
“She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?” said Blind Boy.
“Why would I brush your hair?” I asked.
“Because it relaxes me and because you’re the one who messed me up with that fucking PDP.”
“It’s PCP,” corrected Blind Boy. “PDP refers to the Piecewise Deterministic Process, which is part of probability theory.”
“In all probability, I’m going to smack you if you say another word,” she said as she knelt down before me.
“I fancied Kim Sutton,” she said. “When we were at school. I was a class below her, but I fancied her like mad.”
Blind Boy’s mouth dropped open. “I didn’t know you had ‘tendencies,’” he said, but she ignored him.
“Once, she tied a ribbon around my wrist, a silky blue ribbon. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
“Did you ever do anything, the two of you?” asked Blind Boy, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth.
“What is that supposed to mean? I was fourteen years old! Look at your tongue. I wish you could see yourself.”
“Me too,” he said. “Me too.”
I brushed Kaye’s hair and watched it crackle with electricity. Blind Boy sat back and listened to the slow swiping noise. He never removed his dark glasses; he didn’t like spooking people. Kaye held up the palm of her hand in front of me, in a gesture that looked like a foreign salute. She took the index finger on my free hand and used it to inscribe slow circles on her palm. Blind Boy tilted his head. Could he sense the sex in the air? The bastard gave nothing away.
“When I listen to Margaret Thatcher,” he said, “I hear a woman who is disappointed with men. When she was young, she trusted men, she wanted them to rule the world, but when she found they were lacking, she decided to rule it herself.”
Blind Boy tilted his head to the other side. He was all over the place. “Do you see this watch?” he said. “People often wonder why I wear a watch. Why would a blind boy even bother?”
He tapped his wristwatch. Kaye and I continued our ritual of touch.
“I bought this watch with my confirmation loot. I paid for it with coins and stacked them on the jeweller’s counter. He had a satin mat that deadened the sound of the money. Three pounds, four shillings and sixpence. ‘Good boy,’ he said, every time I added a coin to the mat. ‘Good boy.’
“His wife came out from behind the counter, and the jeweller said, ‘This chap is buying a watch with his confirmation money, isn’t he the big man now?’
“I wasn’t that big. I could feel everything towering around me, especially the grandfather clocks. I ran my fingers over the watches and picked one out. The jeweller said, ‘Will you be okay with the Roman numerals?’ As if it made any difference.”
Kaye pressed her hand against my fingertip and mouthed three words: “I WANT YOU.” I mouthed the same three words right back.
“The watch had a metal strap and it needed a link or two removed. They led me into a little workshop behind a curtain. I could feel the wagging finger of a Bunsen burner close by. I could hear a snipping pliers and the sound of emery cloth rubbing on metal. He told me I would have to wind it every day, but I shouldn’t over-wind it.”
Kaye took my finger and pressed it against her torso. Her sternum felt hard, as if she were impaled on a steel post. She slid my hand sideways to her breast and circled the softness.
“’How will I know when I’m close to over-winding?’ I asked. ‘If you feel resistance,’ said the jeweller, ‘you may have already gone too far. In that case, just bring it back. I have ways of unwinding watches. I can turn back time.’”
I could feel the energy in Kaye’s nipple asserting itself through the cloth. The air tightened around us. Blind Boy continued to talk about his watch.
“I walked down the main street with one sleeve rolled up. I hoped that somebody would ask me the time, and then I would show them. I went to the bridge. I stood on the bridge and listened to the water. You search for a pattern but there’s never a pattern in the sound of water. A man stood beside me and said, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic dollies caught in that weir and they look like drowning babies. They’re blinking and smiling and waving.’ I think he was drunk. I held out my arm but he didn’t ask the time. I walked uptown, past the cake shop, the shoe shop, and the pawnshop, but nobody asked. People brushed past, but nobody asked and then the siren blew in the sugar factory yard and the whole fucking town knew the time. And there was no point anymore.”
Kaye opened her mouth and showed me her tongue. I slipped a finger into her mouth and the skin healed up around it.
“I’ve thought about losing the watch, dropping it in the street or a pub, but things never end well in this town when an Irishman leaves something ticking behind him.”
Blind Boy pulled off his dark glasses and I wondered if the two dead pits could sense what was happening, what had been happening since the night of my arrival. The games we had played in circles around him. The penetrating glances and the crude gestures a body makes when it needs another body. Did he know that Kaye left the bathroom door open when she showered? She washed as I watched through the steamy soft focus. Had he noticed the way we sniffed each other whenever we passed in a doorway? Could he hear the words we never spoke and the long, charged spaces between them? Treachery and deception crawled on its belly and brushed against his heels. Did he feel it slither? He was too nice a guy to know the truth. Deceit is the greatest drug of them all.
Without any warning, Blind Boy rolled up his sleeve and forced his arm between us. The watch face loomed as big as the moon, but I no longer understood the Roman numerals. What the fuck was “X”? Did it mark a spot? Was is a generation or a brand? A dirty movie? A kiss at the end of a letter? A failed exam? An illiterate signature? An unknown quantity? X-Ray, X-chromosome or X-fucking girlfriend? I stared at the watch and tried to make sense.
“Ask me what time it is, Barry. Go on. Ask me the time.”
His tone was hard and sharp. I slid my finger from his girlfriend’s mouth and it popped like a cork pulled from a bottle.
“What time is it, Blind Boy?”
“It’s time for you to leave, Barry. Time for you to fucking leave.”
I stood, wobbled, and left the flat. I didn’t look back.
I was homeless on Harleyford Street, a draughtsman without a plan. I headed towards the Oval. A black man in dreadlocks came bouncing towards me. He looked like he had springs in his shoes and hinges on his knees, and it made me wonder, why do Irishmen always walk as if they’re pushing a wheelbarrow?
“I have to go to France,” I declared.
“Bon voyage, mate,” he said.
I carried on walking around the Oval. The red-brick wall on my right held giant graffiti words, a backward sentence that stretched on forever. It asked a profound question that no one could answer: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SLADE?
I keep walking around the Oval, past Clayton Street and Bowling Green Street. I saw a man in dreadlocks coming towards me. Was it a new black man or the old black man?
“I have to go to France,” I said.
“I know,” he replied.
Outside the tube station, I started to peak. Every noise turned into a scream, every footfall was like a jack-hammer on the pavement. I grabbed a railing and held on tight. I was afraid if I let go I’d sink into the ground. I couldn’t catch my breath. Somebody asked, “are you alright?” and I replied, “never felt better.” I turned to see who was speaking, and it was Jesus. Not just a bloke with a beard, b
ut Hollywood Jesus with the golden glow and the Persil robe. I told him I wanted to believe in him again, but he said it was all right if I didn’t.
“I need to get to France,” I said.
“Mais oui,” he replied. “La Ville-Lumière vous attend.”
I was surprised. You never imagine Jesus speaking French.
“Will you help me?” I asked.
He smiled his godly smile and snapped his fingers. I felt something pop between my shoulder blades, a knot of muscle opening like a rose, bones fusing and forming into a magnificent tangle as my jacket filled with a great unfurling. I flexed and flapped and felt my toes lift from the concrete. I knew I could fly. I knew I could fly all the way to Paris because now I had the wings of an angel.
30
BLACK
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1979
The dental surgery was in Earl’s Court, next door to the Coleherne gay bar, and the air was heavy with the smell of poppers, Jack Daniels and holster oil.
Bob the dentist was Australian. He held the x-ray up to the light box. “You on any medication, mate?”
“No,” I said, even though my brain was puffed up like a kiddie pool.
“What you have here,” he said, “is a serious abscess. It needs to be drained, cleaned and treated.”
“Just take it out,” I said.
After a few weak protestations, he gave me a shot of something warm and fuzzy. “That good?”
“Oh yeah,” I said. “All I need now is a deck chair and some decent reggae music.”
He snorted with laughter as he lit me up with the yellow horseshoe bulb. “Are you completely numb?” he asked.
Been that way for years, I thought.
He stuck a heavy pair of forceps into my mouth and yanked until something cracked. “Fuck!” he said. His brow rippled and his lips tightened. The tooth came out in four jagged shards and each piece tinkled as it landed in the stainless steel pan. “What do you think of the English, Barry?”
A Ton of Malice Page 18
