by Luke Tredget
‘You’ve lived in a lot of places,’ she says, when he finally falls silent. He says it is because he has always put off settling down, and Anna is pleased to have impetus to make a speech of her own. She says that she was like that in her early twenties; everyone else she hung around with at uni went from being left-wing stoners and idealists to suddenly applying for law conversion courses and graduate schemes during their final year, perhaps to justify their horrendously expensive private-school educations. But Anna was content to do nothing. She moved to London after graduating, worked temp jobs, tried to set up projects and generally bummed around. Her peers complained of post-uni blues, but she loved it. She thinks maybe it was her happiest time, and managed to stretch it out for four or five years, culminating in a six-month stint in San Francisco, staying in her dad’s sister’s flat.
‘Four or five years is nothing,’ says Geoff. ‘I’m still stretching it out.’
‘Having said that,’ continues Anna, ‘having a proper job means you can take proper holidays. Go on real adventures. The Philippines, New Zealand, Iceland.’
‘But only once or twice a year. That’s nowhere near enough. The trick is to make your whole life a holiday.’
‘You do realise that I’m not a millionaire.’
‘I don’t mean literally jetting off on trip after trip. Holidays aren’t about a location. It’s a mood. A disposition, a way of interacting with the world around you. It’s not just something to be done during breaks from work; you can be on holiday while making money. And it can be anywhere. France, Italy, Scottish island. Even Vauxhall.’
He is turning his hand again, and his mentioning Italy conjures up in her mind an image of a life in the Mediterranean, scraping by in some whitewashed villa, doing bits and bobs of freelance work – it occurs to her that he is visualising the same thing, and she imagines an 81 flashing above his head. She would like to ask if he has ever lived in Greece, but Geoff turns around and holds his hand up to a waiter.
‘Wine’s done. Fancy another?’
Anna looks at her empty glass, the empty bottle, and for the first time since he arrived tries to assess her feelings. She considers going home, but this is a momentary thought, instantly rejected on the excuse that it feels like she just got here; the hour has passed in what seems like five minutes. But equally she doesn’t want to just sit there getting drunk.
‘No more wine. I’d like to, you know … go somewhere.’
His eyes narrow; it occurs to her that he might think she is suggesting they go and have sex. It occurs to her that she is.
‘I spend my whole life sitting,’ she says, hastening to continue. ‘At work, at home, in bars. I’d like to do something. I haven’t been dancing in months.’
‘You want to go dancing?’
‘That’s just an example.’
‘Okay. Let’s do something. Where are we? The Strand. Let me think.’ He looks downwards and becomes unnaturally still. Then he nods and says: ‘I’ve got it. Just the thing; short walk from here. Something a bit different.’
The bill comes and Geoff counts many £20 notes onto the table, then gives £10 directly to the waiter. This reminds Anna of something, and while sliding off her stool and following Geoff towards the exit, she thinks of how her father insisted on tipping everyone, and even once gave £2 to the fast-food boy in a service station, who merely pushed their dinner to them on a tray.
They walk east, towards Aldwych. The sky is a sagging white blanket, the breeze is warm and damp and fidgeting. Many people are on the pavement and Anna could easily be spotted by an acquaintance or colleague, but she feels absurdly invisible, as if this is happening in a different realm to her normal life. She thinks of a streamed video, and how the red line is like her conscious awareness of her actions, and the grey line is the plans and objectives that allow these actions to make sense; it feels like these two bars are moving through time together, the red and grey lines unfurling in tandem, the latter laying track that is immediately eaten up by the former, like flagstones being laid just in time for each landing foot. She smiles at herself and says: ‘I’m a bit pissed.’ Geoff laughs and takes her hand.
They cross Lancaster Place and Anna is disappointed when he leads her beneath the arched entrance to Somerset House.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says, as if hearing her thought. ‘I’m not taking you to look at Art.’
They cross the courtyard and go through open doors into the South Wing, where Geoff pulls her left past a sign saying ‘Private’. At the end of the corridor they turn onto the East Wing, then through double doors to a stairwell. They descend four flights, until the stairs open to a basement corridor with nylon floor tiles and electrical wire tacked to blank white walls.
‘If anyone asks,’ whispers Geoff, ‘say you work in Self-Assessment.’
Before she has time to ask why, he shouts: ‘Excuse me.’ The words echo around the bare walls, then a door opens ahead of them. A short, grizzled man steps from behind it, a caretaker of some kind, in a blue sweatshirt and matching trousers.
‘Sorry to bother,’ says Geoff, a peg posher than normal. ‘We were wondering if they were open?’ He points over the man’s shoulder towards a set of double doors at the end of the corridor. The caretaker looks along the corridor, and then at Geoff and Anna, appearing to size them up.
‘Oh, we’re not going to use the kit,’ says Geoff, chuckling. ‘Just a nostalgia trip. Showing the new guard how things used to be.’ He nudges Anna as he says ‘new guard’. After a moment the caretaker nods and, in heavily accented English, says they should follow him. They walk down the corridor to the locked doors, Geoff chatting to the silent man as he checks for the right key. On the other side of the doorway Geoff and Anna are sealed in almost total darkness.
‘What’s going on? Why did you say I was part of the new guard?’
‘Because it wouldn’t have helped if I hadn’t,’ he whispers, feeling about on the wall. ‘I had to establish you in a context he’d understand.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means,’ he says, flicking one, two, three switches, ‘free to those who can afford it. Very expensive to those who can’t.’
A gathering electrical hum, then a green corridor appears before them, lit by a row of gold sconces. The lower halves of the walls are panelled, the upper half are floral damask wallpaper. Every twenty feet or so there is a wooden door, giving the appearance of a hotel. The smell is of dust.
‘Where are we?’ she says, stepping along the worn carpet. She opens the first door and reveals more darkness and a thick, musty smell. After finding a switch – an old-fashioned brass toggle rather than a plastic plate – a square room appears before her, dominated by a billiards table and an oil painting of a white-wigged aristocrat from another century.
‘Believe it or not,’ says Geoff from behind her, ‘we’re in the Staff Gymnasium of the Inland Revenue.’
He leads her to the neighbouring chambers – a table-tennis room, a fencing court and – the pièce de résistance – a rifle range, which to Anna’s eyes looks more like a bowling alley. Geoff explains that the entire Civil Service was once based at Somerset House, and that while the Inland Revenue formally left for Whitehall ten years ago, it seemed some of the old boys didn’t have the heart to give up the gymnasium and lounge.
‘I was once embattled with the taxman,’ he says, stepping back into the corridor. ‘When I finally returned to Britain and was going to settle down, they hit me with some outrageous avoidance charges. And that’s when I read up about them more, and found out about this place. It felt poetic, to fight them in court during the day and use their steam room at night. Come on, time for my favourite sort of recreation.’
The final room in the corridor is the lounge, with armchairs surrounding low tables, oil paintings bunched close together in rows, and a carpet so thick it is like walking through mud. Geoff takes a decanter from a cupboard and pours amber liquid into two tumblers. She takes a sip – t
he gold liquid meeting her lips with a fierce kiss – and drifts away to the other side of the lounge, settling before a painting of a bald man with red cheeks and a shining pink head, forever locked in furious eye contact with the viewer.
‘This place is special,’ she says, raising her voice to carry across the room. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘Oh, this is nothing. London is full of places like this.’
‘Really?’
‘Not just London, all cities. All life, even. There’s treasure everywhere, if you know where to look.’
Anna steps sideways and considers a painting of a gentle, red-robed man who is staring benignly downwards and to his right, as if gazing directly into the very essence of Things.
‘Treasure everywhere,’ she repeats, mimicking his voice, and then laughs.
‘I don’t mean in an exotic sense,’ he says. ‘It’s just that people live constrained lives, given what’s on offer. Just think: every day you’ll pass women on the street who genuinely believe they can’t have an orgasm. Or that they can’t be happy.’
His saying ‘orgasm’ seems suggestive and makes her turn, but she only sees the back of his head while he looks at a painting.
‘It’s not that people don’t want to be happy,’ she says. ‘Or don’t want to have orgasms.’
‘I know that. The problem is they believe, on a very fundamental level, that it is due to a deficiency in themselves, rather than the ideology they inhabit.’ He continues making this speech to the painting in front of him, saying the problem has reached pandemic levels, especially amongst people her age. ‘I see people in their twenties who already think their life is behind them. They say things like “I wish I’d done this” or “I wish I’d been that.” They don’t realise that if they don’t like their lives, they can change them. It’s why so many young people take drugs.’
Again she stares at the cropped hair on the back of his neck; this time he turns to meet her eyes.
‘That’s not the only reason people take drugs,’ she says, thinking of her pills.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he says, ‘I’ve got nothing against drugs. I used to take them as well. But they’re vulgar. They offer a chemical shortcut to something that’s in your mind anyway. An acid trip is no crazier than the dreams you have most nights. It’s all in your head. The joy, the energy, the madness. It’s all there.’
The fact that she takes drugs just to feel normal makes Anna ashamed, and this sharpens into a desire to defend herself.
‘You sure that’s not the booze talking?’ she says, with edge. Geoff smiles.
‘Good point,’ he says, and then looks down into his glass sadly and, with an effort of self-control Anna herself feels, seems to resist the impulse to take a sip. She senses she touched a nerve and wants to be nice to him, to make up for it.
‘Well, you are British,’ she says. ‘Our whole lives are built on booze.’
‘True,’ he says, before turning back to his painting and beginning another speech, about how living overseas made him more British, rather than less, since the fact became his main point of distinction. He swirls his hand around, as if explaining this to the long-dead cavalier in the picture before him, and Anna has a mischievous thought. Silently she places her tumbler on a table, then treads out of the room while he speaks on.
The lounge is not the end of the Gymnasium, as she had thought, but its halfway point: the corridor turns left onto another row of closed doors. Anna walks quickly, and then, on a rush of childish excitement at being alone in a forbidden place, she runs. After opening several doors she finds a changing room, and after using the toilet she is taken by the reflection of her face, and leans close in to the mirror. She considers the downy white hairs that give her pale skin a dusty finish; her wide, full mouth; the bulbous end to her nose; the darker patch of sun-damaged skin on her forehead, legacy of her gap year. These are painless, tender observations. Even since the age of seventeen or eighteen, when she filled out after an awkward and lanky adolescence, she has quite liked her face. Boys and men have always seemed to like it, too. She grins, to assess her wrinkles, and is reminded that her thirtieth birthday is three days away. This makes her think of Pete and the Sahina article. It all feels of distant relevance, as if it is happening to someone else, in another city or country, to someone she barely knows. It’s a curious feeling, this being cut off from the facts of her life, and it reminds her of being on drugs – on real drugs, party drugs. She thinks of the Minuscule of Sound, and remembers having the same feeling then – at 5 a.m. the rest of the world seemed very far away, and she was free to be her best self. She remembers one time – perhaps one of the first times she took a pill – she went around the club talking to every person who wasn’t dancing, persuading them to ‘get involved’, feeling utterly fearless and charming, in love with the world and her place in it. Yes, that’s what she feels like now. But she remembers something else as well; something more distant and buried, memories from childhood. She stamps her boots against the bathroom tiles to gather sense data, and remembers that she regularly felt like this as a young girl, was often brimming with excitement and the desire to run and shout and show off, especially if her dad was watching her. There was one time in particular, when he had taken them to a giant adventure playground, complete with obstacle course and competitions, and she swung from monkey bars and rope swings and won the race she was selected in, while Josh – crybaby as ever – sulked because of their dad’s obvious preference for her. It is incredible how vividly she remembers this, and she wonders if there is something about Geoff that evokes this same feeling, and if this could be the basis for the 81 score – perhaps Kismet somehow knows about this submerged feeling and how it can be unlocked. The idea is too complex to process, and she puts it aside and gathers more sense data, this time clapping her hands and inhaling through her nose; at the end of her breath she catches a note of chlorine. She follows this smell through the changing room and into an adjoining black space that she knows, even before the light flicks on, contains a swimming pool.
Anna laughs out loud. The pool is perhaps ten metres long and is covered with a dark blue canvas attached to a roller. She walks around the lip and finds a hand crank which she turns a few times, causing the roller to rotate. She kneels and turns many more times, and like a giant lolling tongue the cover retreats onto the roller. The exposed water breathes cold air onto her face.
‘Anna 81,’ says Geoff, causing her to start. He is standing by the door at the other end of the pool, and is almost shouting. ‘I thought I’d lost you.’
Geoff hits another switch by the door and lights come on within the water, changing it from ink to turquoise.
‘Just exploring,’ she says. ‘Looking for treasure.’
‘I thought maybe you’d run away.’
‘To run away, to explore. Is there a difference?’
‘I suppose not.’
She thinks of something else to say, something aphoristic, and decides to venture an impression of Geoff’s posh accent and strenuous, up-and-down speech pattern: ‘Of course, you can’t get anywhere, without leaving somewhere first.’
His grin appears tiny, seen across the length of the room.
‘Very good,’ he says, then stands with hands on hips. She gets the impression her playfulness has thrown him, that he is momentarily out of ideas. But at the same time he seems to stare with a new animal desire. It is as if her impudence has rankled him, but also enhanced his interest, made him impatient to get to her. He puts his hands in the pockets of his trousers and walks slowly around the pool towards her. She also walks anticlockwise around the lip, away from him, and they come to a stop facing each other across the width of the pool. He grins at her across the water.
‘You know, I’ve always had a funny relationship with swimming,’ he says. ‘A love/hate relationship.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me.’
‘That I don’t like swimming?’
‘No. That you’ve
got a long-winded opinion about it.’
Geoff’s grin now appears fixed. She knows she is being rude, but thinks that on a deep level he is enjoying it, is willing her on. Besides, his saying the number has reminded her she can’t make mistakes; if the number is correct then her every instinct must be true.
‘You’re clever,’ he says.
‘You think?’
‘Clever and funny.’
She shrugs.
‘Some people think I’m a klutz.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘At work, especially.’
‘That’s because you’re in the wrong job. You’re chasing the wrong spectacle, for the wrong reasons. No wonder you don’t feel yourself.’
‘Is that right?’ she says, with mock credulity. ‘And how do I escape?’
‘You have to rearrange the co-ordinates of your life,’ he says immediately, as if this is a prepared speech, something he says ten times a day. ‘It is desire that gives shape to our existence and makes sense of the world. To escape ideology is to redraw the map.’
‘Sounds doable.’
‘But it will feel like destroying yourself.’
‘Ouch. Does this chat often work with girls?’
‘No. But you strike me as a special case.’
For a moment they just stare at each other, and there is no mistaking the desire in his eyes. She feels a familiar urge to flee, but she suppresses it and continues staring, riding the moment. It occurs to her that this was the point of the whole meeting, that this is the plan she has been working to all along, but subconsciously, only revealed to her now, and it immediately makes sense: she was going to spend the night with Thomas 72, so why not with Geoff 81? She takes off her boots then her socks; the pimpled tiles are freezing beneath her feet. Her toenails are in need of repainting. No matter. As she unstraps her watch Geoff continues walking anticlockwise around the pool; she does the same. They come to a stop at opposing ends, Anna this time by the door.
