“Jim, I’m going now,” Chloe’s voice echoes up from the hall, “I’m out with the girls tonight, so you need to collect Carl from football, OK?”
“Bye, Dad.”
He stares silently into his own eyes, listening to his wife and son downstairs as they pick up bags, coats, scarves, hats, keys, listening for a response from him, and finally, after a moment of quiet, there is the slam of the front door. He is aware of the noise from the extractor fan, which is activated by the bathroom light, so he reaches over and pulls the cord and then stands in the silent darkness, listening to his own breathing.
He thinks about light and the absence of light. He thinks about the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album, with the beam of light refracting through a prism. He remembers buying the album when he was twelve, with his paper round savings, the day his father had taken him to watch his first football match. It had been an amazing day: he’d bought the album from W H Smith in Islington, then they’d watched West Ham beating Everton 4-3; and – on the way home – they’d seen an amazing rainbow. A supernumerary, his dad had told him and then, in his typical physics teacher voice, he’d explained the wave nature of light, the importance of the droplet sizes and distance travelled through the raindrop, thinking that young James wouldn’t understand as usual. But, instead of sitting silently in the passenger seat, he’d taken the album from the W H Smith bag and said, in the most offhand way he could muster, despite his reddening cheeks:
“Like this.”
His father had actually laughed.
“Why yes, almost…”
It was the only time he could recall his father laughing with him.
He wonders if his father had had a mid-life crisis, had been brought to his knees on a Monday morning in the middle of his morning shave, sick with the horror of his own weakness, his own pathetic submission to a reality that had constantly pulled away from his will, his dreams, his control, leaving him emptied and drifting in a vacuum, with nothing but his material trophies to gauge his rank. Probably not. Doubtless his father had had mountains to climb: the loss of his wife, his inability to reconcile his science and his faith, his disappointment in his son for not sharing his academic zeal, but his father had never seemed to doubt himself. Maybe that was the burden of his generation. He thought of his son and Chloe’s constant assertions that Carl was autistic, or had Asperger’s, or SAD, or was hyperactive. Carl just seemed to enjoy the company of his computer more than people, as far as he could tell but, either way, whether he was an introvert or had a disorder, there was plenty of latitude for him to blossom into a fully dysfunctional and disaffected adult, standing in a darkened bathroom on a Monday morning, just like his old man.
He hears that cracking sound again in his head (or was it?) and quickly reaches out into the darkness to turn the light back on. He jumps to see himself now in the fully cleared mirror.
“Come on big boy, snap out of it.” He takes three deep breaths, splashes the residual shaving gel from his face, reapplies more and finishes shaving. He looks at the various bottles of facial moisturisers and aftershave balms that Chloe has bought for him and then opts for a splash of ‘Old Spice’ (his father’s preferred cologne) which Chloe says is cheap and nasty and detestable.
He steps out of the en suite, walks through the bedroom and into his walk-in wardrobe. Someone had once told him that Einstein (or someone equally famed for their intelligence) had only multiple copies of the same clothes in his wardrobe, believing that spending time deciding what to wear in the mornings was a waste of valuable mental energy. It was a philosophy that he had taken to heart, but he now looked at the rows of dry-cleaned, grey suits with little enthusiasm. What he needed was change. He rummaged in a box of his old clothes at the back of the wardrobe and found a West Ham shirt he had not worn since the 1990s that had somehow escaped Chloe’s charity shop clearouts, but no alternative to grey suit trousers.
He makes his way downstairs and pops a decaffeinated ‘Nespresso’ pod into the coffee maker and then takes the muesli out of the larder and pours some into a bowl. He goes to his expensive fridge and pours skimmed milk on top. He eyes his breakfast distastefully. Dusty rubbish was how he’d once described muesli to Chloe and now he ate it every day. He takes the bowl to the bin and pours the contents in, then puts the bowl in the sink. He goes to the coffee machine and takes his freshly prepared decaf and pours that down the sink. Next he rummages through the cupboards, eventually surfacing with a stovetop coffee maker and a coffee bean grinder. He locates some real Javan coffee beans at the back of the freezer and, once he’s got a fully caffeinated brew going on the AGA, he turns his attention to edibles. He is not surprised to find nothing in the way of sausage or bacon in the fridge but settles for a portobello mushroom, prosciutto, sundried tomato and Camembert omelette served with heavily buttered toast, brown sauce and ketchup.
His mood has improved considerably by the time he has finished his breakfast and, after putting another brew of coffee on, he goes to his office and there, concealed behind a copy of Paul Mckenna’s Stop Smoking for Good, is a pack of Marlboro Reds and a lighter. As he removes a cigarette from the pack, he sees one of Chloe’s hairclips on his desk. He envisages her taking it out as she flirts on the phone. With him? With someone else? He couldn’t blame her. More than twenty-five years of marriage had made them acutely aware of each other’s behavioural traits, both conscious and subconscious, an awareness that had slowly consolidated the fact that they were completely unlike each other in terms of their desires and what they had to give.
Chloe had always seemed so certain about her sexuality and was always very vocal about what she wanted and, because he was unable to reciprocate in this way, he had spent a long time believing that perhaps he wasn’t sexual; that maybe he had a low sex drive. Whenever he’d tried to take command of their sexual direction, as she constantly instructed him to do, he felt like a fraud. His doctor, his priest, his teacher, his domineering sadist, his pervy office manager, his hostage taking terrorist; every stereotypical sexual fantasy he could think of had felt contrived and, no matter how enthusiastically they played their parts, underneath the costumes and catchphrases, the performances were wooden.
He’d spent a long time trying to analyse what actually turned him on, but there just didn’t seem to be any pattern to it. His entire sexual history, both before and during his marriage, seemed to be a random scattergraph of events, the only predictable element of which seemed to be their apparent decrease in frequency.
He puts the hair clip back down on the desk. There is an email waiting to be read in his work inbox. It can wait. He goes back to the kitchen where the coffee is bubbling on the hot plate. He removes it from the heat before it runs dry, as his mother had once shown him, rinses his cup and fills it again. He opens the patio door and walks past the pool and the sauna, down to the large decked veranda that looks down over the small wooded area at the end of the garden and on to the Thames, which lies concealed in a thick mist. In the distance the Queen Elizabeth Bridge stands to the west, jutting above the river fog and beyond the city towers marking the edge of the horizon where the next queue of rainclouds rolling off the Atlantic are edging nearer.
He looks at the lawn stretching out below him and sees it for what it is: a rectangular expanse of green. He then thinks about what it also could be: he could walk down there and lie down on the grass, feel the cool dew beneath his fingers; he could look between the blades and see a microcosm of life, the smartly uniformed soldier bugs, the segmented detail of millipedes, coiling worm casts, the apple white lichens and emerald soft sphagnum moss; he could smell the dank sweetness of decomposing humus from the nearby woods; taste the citric sap of a dandelion leaf. The lawn is still the lawn.
He feels that he is approaching a pivotal moment; something of fundamental importance is nearby, and if he can just keep thinking clearly, he will be able to reach in the bag and pull out the album.
He takes a sip of coffee, ligh
ts his cigarette and blows cumulus clouds into the verdant misty morning.
He thinks of the scattergraph and he thinks of the lawn and he understands that his nature is chaotic: the things he finds funny, the things he finds sexy, the things he finds beautiful, are in a constant state of flux. He understands that his emotional response will be diminished whenever anyone tries to establish order over this natural chaos: he is not amused by stand-up comics and punch lines; he does not find strip teases sexy; he does not see beauty in mascara, lipstick and foundation. He suddenly understands that the seemingly random mechanics of his desire will always be drawn to that which is naturally impressive, to those individuals and elements that are without conceit and undemanding of attention.
He considers his life: his decaffeinated coffee, his fridge that produces two types of ice, his priest’s costume and anal beads, his steady job, Friday night at ‘Jongleurs’, his dusty fucking rubbish. The truth is, he is a mere spectator in Chloe’s world and living in the carefully planned structure of her world so deeply contradicts his integral nature, it is killing him.
He finishes his coffee and resolutely stubs out his cigarette. He walks back into his office and leaves the Marlboro Reds and lighter unhidden on the desk. There are now two unread messages in his inbox. Unusual. He opens the window and looks at the first:
> Deadline expired
He opens the second:
> Pluto en route
“Oh shit.”
The doorbell rings.
“Oh fucking shit!”
He looks around frantically, then pulls out a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War from his bookcase and removes a key attached to the inner cover. The doorbell rings again. He unlocks and opens his bottom left desk drawer and takes out a Beretta PX4 Storm 9mm pistol, which he then tucks into the back of his grey suit trousers. He walks awkwardly out of the office and approaches the front door, jumping as the bell goes again.
He opens it. A DHL woman is standing there with a van behind her.
“Mr Kent?”
“Yes?”
“Special delivery of a laptop?”
“Oh yes, uh, hang on a minute.”
He closes the door and breathes deeply, then takes the gun out of the back of his trousers and puts it on the hallway sideboard. He opens the door again and says to the courier:
“Sorry about that.”
“No problem. If you could just sign here…”
He hears that cracking sound in his head again and feels nausea creeping up his throat.
“What?” says Mr Kent.
“I said, it’s a lovely place you’ve got here. Are you OK, Sir?”
“Fine, here.”
“OK and here’s your receipt.”
“Thanks.”
“Have a good one,” says the courier, turning back towards her van.
Mr Kent walks back into his house and closes the front door slowly behind him. He picks up the gun and runs up the stairs two at a time. He enters the bedroom and walks straight into the walk-in wardrobe and, standing in front of his row of grey, he pulls off his West Ham shirt and takes a random suit from its hanger.
Skirt
Friday night gigs in the city centre are a lottery. It’s the moment when the city changes outfits, when the suits hand over the baton to the weekend crew and, if your timing is out just a beat, you can end up playing to a crowd of arseholed bankers, or, worst of all, you can fall between the two and play to no-one.
Audience is crucial. Plenty of these gigs are prepared to pay you, but only based on the number of punters you can bring along, so leftover suits and randoms don’t count. To drop a coin in your hat, customers have to tell the door they came to see you specifically. It adds a certain amount of pressure to the evening. Most of the time you’re not thinking about the music; you’re thinking about which of your friends are going to show and who of their friends they might bring along. When the inevitable stream of texts come rolling in at the last minute to say, ‘Sorry but…’ you tell yourself it doesn’t matter and you don’t care, and it doesn’t make a difference to your friendship. But deep down, you know different. A card has been marked and one day there will be a day of reckoning: when you’re sat in the life raft with limited space and the sharks are circling; when the lottery numbers roll in and you’re picking your friends to come along on an all-expenses paid trip to everywhere; when you headline at Glastonbury and you’re inviting people backstage for an after show party with all the other living legends – on that day, these cards will be checked, the loyal supporters will be richly rewarded and those that said yes when they meant no will be eaten, left behind and excluded. Usually, for gigs like tonight – Friday @ The Purgatory Club – we do not expect to get paid.
Another problem with Fridays is that you’ve all got to be at the venue early to have time for a decent sound check. Some places will actually specify times for bands to do their sound check, and if you miss your slot, tough shit, but at most of the gigs we’re playing it’s first come, first served, so everyone’s trying to get off work as early as possible to get ahead of the rush hour, get a decent sound check and then chill for a few hours before going on stage. Often as not, particularly with a big band like ours, you’re always missing at least one person, so the rest of you all just sit around getting tense: watching the other bands sound check; the drinkers drinking too much; the smokers smoking too much; the ones on the wagon wondering whether they should eat something to settle their nerves, then worrying that maybe this will leave them feeling bloated, so instead they fiddle around with their phones, leaving messages for people who are clearly underground, crammed next to disgruntled commuters who begrudge them the extra space their instrument cases are taking up. Eventually the sound engineer will usually say it’s now or never, because he wants to get some food from anywhere but this bar, so you sound check as best you can without bass, or drums, or lead guitar, or something else of equal fundamental importance. Usually your sound check doesn’t sound good because you’re missing something and because you were in the middle of eating when you were called up, which only added to the nerves.
I am beginning to think that London is not the place for us to make a breakthrough into the music scene – London is where you go to play gigs once you’ve made it. London doesn’t give a fuck – the city is saturated with music, and people are immune to anything they don’t recognise, picking out the familiar from the constant barrage of sound that emanates from buskers in the tube, a radio in a greasy spoon, a muezzin in a minaret, a 90 inch TV in an electrical store with surround sound, the overheard ticking buzz from headphones that you can’t quite identify, the boom-boom-boom from the darkened interior of an exhaustless UV police magnet, bird song at 3am whistling out of the orange sodium glow-lit streets. Music loses its magic in London, it’s just another heading in Time Out, another victim of the city’s enormity swallowed up in the listings. We made it to posters on telegraph poles and in chip shops when we played a gig in Dover. People listened. To a certain extent, they had no choice; there wasn’t anything else to do, except eat chips. Big fish in a pond or small fish in the sea?
I’m watching David stretching a string on his Gibson. He is an absolute pro. Of the six members of the band, three of us are good enough to play as session musicians; the other three are good at writing material, good at providing free rehearsal space, or just good fun. David is our lead guitar. Technically, he is unbelievable – his speed over the fret board, solid rhythm, diverse knowledge of music (he can play blues, jazz, reggae, rock, folk, even classical… and, of course, gypsy punk), but his real strength is his sensitivity to the rest of the band. Half the time you won’t even notice what he’s doing, because he’s making everybody else sound good. He tends to avoid long guitar solos. He would, I am certain, be a sensational fuck. I imagine he masturbates rarely and probably has wet dreams frequently. He works for the river police or something as a diver, but he’s not an asshole and smokes weed sometimes with the rest of the b
oys.
I’m the only girl in the band, which I like. I’m the lead vocalist. A lot of people say I look like Alanis Morrisette, which is fucking annoying, and we will often get asked to play ‘Ironic’ or ‘You Oughta Know’ and we sometimes have arguments about whether we should play some covers to capitalise on this fact. There’s more chance of me doing a duet with Elvis than sacrificing my artistic integrity to do a cover of Alanis Morrisette. This was essentially what it always boiled down to – in my humble opinion, any idiot can play covers, but what’s the point in regurgitating material that came from someone else’s heart, when you can say something uniquely your own (or in our case something uniquely Kenny’s own, who writes most of our songs)? At the end of the day, if I decide that it would be good for the band to play a cover song as part of our set – which, yes, I appreciate is what most bands do to help widen their appeal to Joe Public (as the scout for a record label that showed a temporary interest in us once pointed out) – it certainly isn’t going to be an Alanis Morrisette cover.
I actually used to like that Jagged Little Pill album, and they were some of the first guitar tunes I learned when I was eight, but that was also round about the time my life turned to shit. The only two things I think about when people ask me to sing Alanis for them now is the line: ‘And every time I scratch my nails down someone else’s back I hope you feel it. Well can you feel it?’ which ran on a loop through my head when, at the age of 15, I slept with my boyfriend-of-the-time’s best friend, because I thought my boyfriend had cheated on me (turned out he hadn’t, but he certainly felt the nails thing when I told him). The other is, Alanis doesn’t know what ironic means.
We’re waiting on Kenny tonight, which is unusual. Normally it’s Damien, who has to drive, because most drummers are arseholes and won’t share kit. When do guitarists ever refuse to lend their instruments? Guitars can cost as much as a drum kit. The usual way it’s supposed to work is that one drummer will bring a full kit for the night and then the rest just bring their steels, a snare and a bass pedal but, honestly, negotiating with these assholes to get permission to use their kit is like giving an elephant a pedicure and sometimes talks break down. I am responsible for talks. “He won’t thrash my toms, will he?”, “He’s not going to need a stool, is he?”, “He’s bringing his own hi-hats, isn’t he?”, “He’s not going to pick up my bass drum and slam it over an audience member’s head, is he?”. Unfortunately the answer to that last one, on one particular occasion, turned out to be yes. I mean, Damien is the nicest guy you could hope to meet most of the time, and he was mortified afterwards – paid for the damage, no qualms – but when he gets behind a kit sometimes, he can get overexcited. Sometimes it’s easiest to just tell him to bring his own kit.
The Laundry Basket Page 11
