Thank God for Hans von Pechmann, I thought, and got to my feet.
‘We need to drain the room,’ I said. ‘Nigel, get a pump and enough hose to run it back out to the river.’
Nigel nodded.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, and practically skipped up the stairs.
‘Put some clothes on before you go out!’ I called after him.
I told Merton that when we had the pump and the hose, he would have to cut a suitable hole in the door—near the top.
‘Will you need tools?’ I asked.
Merton eyed up the door.
‘I have what I need in my bedroom,’ he said.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’
* * *
It took Nigel the best part of the day to source the suitable equipment. In the meantime, I sent Merton out to the local phone box to see if I couldn’t rustle up another life- and kneecap-saving transaction. Ideally, I should have been making the calls myself but I didn’t dare show my face on the street—it’s a well-known face, even in South London. I spent the time cataloguing my wardrobe, alas much reduced by my exile, ironing that which needed ironing and casting away those items that had fallen out of style since my last purge.
Some things never go out of style—some things, thank God, will never come back. Let us hope that the lime-green acrylic aquiline button-down cardigan is one of them. I really don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it.
Apart from a spectacularly noisy toilet break, Lilith stayed blissfully asleep in the main bedroom until teatime and then vanished into the bathroom for the next two hours.
Once Nigel had returned with the pump and the hose, Merton used his hammer and chisel to cut a rough hole, six inches across, near the top of the door. Nigel had brought down the cream-coloured hostess trolley and mounted the pump on that to keep it out of the water. Once it was rigged we ran a hosepipe up the stairs, down the hall, across the kitchen and poked it out the back window. Merton stayed to supervise the outflow while I returned to the top of the stairs and gave Nigel the nod.
It looked ramshackle and was, indeed, held together with string and gaffer tape. But like most things that Nigel built, especially his improvised hookahs, it was perfectly adequate. The pump puttered into life, the pipe going through the hole in the door stiffened, there was a gurgling sound and I followed the passage of the water upstairs and into the kitchen. There, an arc of water shot from the hose and into the river beyond.
‘How long until it’s pumped out?’ I asked.
‘A couple of days,’ said Nigel.
When I objected, he pointed out that it was a small-bore hosepipe, that the cellar was large and that we didn’t know how the river water was getting in.
Some things you can’t control, I suppose, such as Lilith ‒ who I found sitting in the kitchen in a loose yellow kimono, drinking brandy and letting her assets hang out.
‘It smells different in here,’ she said.
I pointed out that the window was open to allow egress of the hosepipe and was thus allowing fresh air, to which Lilith was generally unaccustomed, to enter the room. Lilith grunted and said she was going out that evening to meet some friends in Soho.
I tried to talk her out of it but she insisted, and there was no stopping Lilith when she was set on something.
‘What if the Deplorables see you?’ I asked.
‘Darling,’ said Lilith, throwing an orange ostrich feather boa around her neck, ‘the Deplorables never frequent the places I do and in any case—I’m invisible.’
I was making another calming cup of tea when I realised that Lilith had been right. The kitchen smelt fresh and, oddly, sun dappled ‒ if you thought sun dappled was a smell. I went to the open window and took a deep breath. Not normally something I’d recommend given the foetid nature of the river—which still looked more like a canal to me—behind the house. The air was fresh and another thing I noticed was that the water shooting out of the hosepipe was clear. I pulled the pipe in a bit and had a closer look and then an experimental taste—just the tip of the tongue, you understand. It was plain, clean water. Perhaps, I thought, the cellar had been flooded by a burst mains pipe. If so, then there was a chance that much of my stock might survive relatively intact.
I also noticed that the house had a small back garden, or rather a side garden, an overgrown patch of weeds and brambles that filled a roughly triangular space between next door’s garden wall, the river and the side of the kitchen. I replaced the hose and went looking for the door that led to the garden. I’m not a horticulturalist myself, but to a man in my position, knowing there’s a back door—for egress in extremis—is always a comfort.
It took three days to drain the cellar, which passed as quickly as two quarters of Lebanese cannabis resin could make it. Now, I’ve never been one to get the munchies, but Nigel could consume an astonishing amount of fish and chips, and poor Merton was forced to make several supply runs. On the morning of the fourth day, Nigel declared that we could force the door and I went to fetch Merton.
Who was nowhere to be found.
His room was as he always left it, the bed made with military precision and knife-edge creases. Merton was a thoroughly institutionalised boy, but what institution—the navy, prison, the Foreign Legion—I’d never thought to ask. His clothes, though dull, were hung or folded with the same admirable care. His tool case was missing but the canvas bag containing his baseball bat, bayonet and the long wooden stick with the stainless steel barbs that I didn’t want to know the purpose of, was tucked into the wardrobe next to his two spare pairs of Doc Martens boots.
I returned to the basement corridor, which Nigel had mercifully mopped clean once the muddy water had soaked away. Nigel was standing by the door to the cellar, stock-still and staring at something on the floor.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Nigel pointed mutely at a battered blue metal toolbox sitting by the door. Its top was open and its trays expanded to reveal its rows of neatly arrayed tools and boxes of screws and nails.
‘He must have gone inside,’ said Nigel. His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. ‘Inside there!’
Since I had no idea why Nigel was so agitated, I reached out and pushed the door open. It opened a fraction and then pushed back—as if someone was leaning against the other side.
‘Merton,’ I said, ‘stop fucking about and let me in.’
I shoved harder and the door opened a crack and out poured a weird sweet smell like cooked milk. And with it a sense of outraged dignity which so surprised me that I jumped back from the door, which slammed shut.
‘Is he in there?’ asked Nigel.
‘Must be,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.
Neither of us could match Merton ‒ because that’s who it had to be ‒ for physical might. I mean, I employed him precisely because he could intimidate your average creditor just by breaking wind. So we trooped upstairs for a cup of tea and some pharmaceutical reinforcement.
‘Got any more black beauties?’ asked Nigel, who never could separate his biphetamines from his common or garden amphetamines. I swear, you try to educate people but there are limits. I gave him a couple of ludes, and given the day we’d had so far, took a couple myself. Lilith returned, fabulously drunk at two in the morning, and we all piled into bed and didn’t get up until the next afternoon.
The door to the cellar remained closed and Merton’s tool case was still where he’d left it. I tried the door, but it was stuck fast with no give at all. I even tried knocking it down, like they do in the films, but all I did was bruise my shoulder.
If Merton was in there, he wasn’t coming out until he was good and ready. And since I wasn’t getting in, I had to accept that I wouldn’t be realising any value from my stock of fabrics any time soon. Still, I’d already written down their value and put other deals in motion to generate cash flow—another drug deal, as it happens. A stack of Happy Bus LSD out of Rotterdam. A little bit riskier th
an my normal deals, but needs must as they say.
Without Merton, I was forced to rely on Nigel to go out and make the necessary phone calls. Unlike Merton, who followed instructions without question, I had to explain everything to him as if he were in a spy movie with Michael Caine. Once he had the gist, he darted out the front door wearing a RAF surplus greatcoat. As I watched him go from the upstairs window, I realised that his hair had grown long enough to reach between his shoulder blades and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed.
The next couple of days went past with no sign of Merton, and I only managed to keep anxiety at bay with the help of my dwindling supply of cannabis resin and long punishing nights with Lilith.
The door to the cellar remained closed.
When I had nerved myself up to go look, I noticed that something had been jammed into the cracks around the edge of the door—as if it had oozed out from inside the cellar in liquid form and then set on contact with air. I took a set of pliers from Merton’s tool case and worried a fragment out. It’s a long time since I’ve prepared a slide in earnest, but while I didn’t have a microscope I did have a jeweller’s glass I keep for checking crystal shape. Under magnification the fragment revealed itself to be a tangle of threads ‒ blue cotton, my good Egyptian cotton at a guess. I picked at the tangle with a pair of tweezers and a strange notion struck me—that the threads weren’t tangled randomly, that there was a pattern to the knots.
I could imagine a circumstance where the pressure of water could both shred the original weave of a cloth and then tangle the threads. I could even imagine water pressure forcing the threads around the edges of the door, but it seemed unlikely. Before I discovered fashion and pharmaceuticals, I did a degree in chemistry. Started a degree, to be precise—I stopped paying attention in the second year. But I’d always thought of myself as rational even when under the influence.
If I’d known what I know now, I would have run screaming from the house and taken my chances with the Deplorables. But I lived in a much smaller world in those days.
Although large enough for my Rotterdam connection to agree to a deal. Not only that, but it seemed my credit was good enough for me to procure a sample shipment on good faith. With the profit from that sale I could finance a larger shipment and thus dig myself out of my financial predicament and quit the squat—and its creepy basement.
The only catch being that I would have to provide my own mule to bring the sample in. Normally you don’t use your friends as mules, not even friends of friends. What you really want is a gullible person who’s been talked into it by someone you know only through business. I knew a guy who could meet a girl at a party one night and have her on a plane to Ankara the next day. He made a living recruiting mules and didn’t mind some wastage at all—right up to the point someone’s mother gave him both barrels of her husband’s grousing shotgun. The police never caught her and only Merton and I turned up for the funeral.
* * *
It wasn’t hard to persuade Lilith to fly to Rotterdam ‒ especially first class ‒ and the beauty was that wherever she touched down, she paid for herself. Or, to be strictly accurate, other people took care of her needs for her. The downside, of course, was that you had to allow her time to party—in this case, at least a week. You’d think without Lilith sharing the high thread cotton sheets of the four-poster I’d be getting more sleep, but I found myself spending most of every night staring at the underside of the bed’s canopy.
It didn’t help that I had to ration the Quaaludes—I needed them to keep Nigel functioning.
‘There’s something in the cellar,’ he said, and refused to go down into the basement.
I, on the other hand, found myself increasingly drawn to the cellar door. Especially when it started to flower.
It started with a spray of cotton around the door frame, overlapping triangular leaves of white and navy-blue cotton that stuck to the bricks of the wall as if they’d been glued in place. I took a sample and found that instead of a regular weave, the cloth was formed by the intertwining of threads in a complex pattern. Some of the threads amongst the white and blue were a bright scarlet and spread through the fabric in the branching pattern of streams into a river basin. Or, more disturbingly, like capillaries branching out from a vein.
I did make an attempt, cautiously, to scrape one of the ‘leaves’ off the wall with a trowel I found in Merton’s tool case. But even as I pushed the blade under the edge of the cloth I felt such a wave of disinterest—I cannot describe it more clearly than that—that I found myself halfway up the basement stairs before I realised what had happened.
The next day the cotton leaves had spread out at least another six inches and surrounding the door were tongues of crimson and yellow organza. Individual threads had begun to colonise the door proper—curling into swirling patterns like ivy climbing a wall. I spent an indeterminate time with my back to the opposite wall, staring at the patterns to see if I could spot them moving.
I wondered what it meant. Perhaps Nigel was right, and the Age of Aquarius was upon us and we had entered a time of miracles.
When I was upstairs I tried to put the cellar out of my mind and concentrate on plans for the future. I had fallen into drug dealing almost by accident and had always found it an easy and convenient way to keep myself in the sartorial fashion I aspired to. But if my run-in with the Deplorables was an indication of the future, then perhaps it was time to pack it in. A boutique of my own instead, one in which I could serve both as owner-manager and inspiration. Before, the merest thought of doing actual work, no matter how supervisory, had filled me with disgust but now… now it seemed attractive.
I didn’t trust the feelings.
I needed out of the squat. I needed to be strutting down the King’s Road or Carnaby Street. I wanted back out into the world, where I could be as dazzling and as splendid as the first acolyte of the goddess of fashion.
But you need working kneecaps to strut your stuff. And so I stayed where I was.
By the third day the door was completely obscured behind a tapestry of red, black and gold thread, and wings of cotton spread across the walls and ceiling. The organza had likewise spread and a third wave of pink and yellow damask now framed the doorway. By the sixth day the entire corridor was curtained in swathes of multicoloured fabric, so that it seemed a tunnel to a draper’s wonderland.
I no longer dared leave the safety of the foot of the stairs and yet I still found myself walking down them three times a day to look. The urge to walk into its warm comforting embrace was terrifying.
On the seventh day, Lilith failed to return. I started to seriously worry on the eighth; on the ninth, I fell into such a despair that no amount of near pharmaceutical grade Drinamyl amphetamines could lift me from it. On the tenth, a postcard arrived with four jaunty pictures of a tram stop, a fountain, a town square, a gigantic statue of a man holding up the sky and Groeten uit Rotterdam written across the front.
On the back Lilith sent me love and kisses, explained that she’d met a splendid sailor or three and would be staying on in the Netherlands for a bit, but not to worry because she’d found a perfectly wonderful Spaniard to courier my product back to London. Thoughtfully, she’d written the travel and contact details of the Spanish courier on the postcard—in plain English.
With a heavy heart I sent Nigel out to pick up the package and when he failed to return I was not surprised.
We live in a universe constantly assailed by the forces of entropy. Nothing good, pure or beautiful can stand up to the relentless regression towards the mean, the dull and the shabby. A minority have always striven to be a beacon in the gloom, a constant source of inspiration to those around them. Some worked through medium of paint, or music, or literature, but I have sought to make myself the living embodiment of style and culture.
God knows it hasn’t been easy.
But a man should always know when he has been beaten. That morning, as I sat in the kitchen futilely waiting for Nigel to
return, I realised that the time, for me, was nigh. I went upstairs, stripped myself down to my underwear ‒ not nylon and not frilly, thank you, Ray ‒ and, after taking a deep breath to steel myself, donned a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a matching moleskin shirt. A pair of Hush Puppies and one of Merton’s donkey jackets completed my transformation. I looked in the mirror—I was unrecognisable.
Stuffing the last of my cash reserves into my pockets, I headed for the front door. I paused by the basement door only long enough to ensure it was closed. From behind it came a noise that might have been a giant breathing, or water flowing, or shuttles running back and forth across lines of thread.
I shuddered and walked boldly out into the sunlight.
My plan was simple. Take the train to Holyhead, the ferry to Dublin and then, via a few contacts I still had, to America and freedom.
I didn’t even get as far as Garratt Lane before I ran straight into Cutter. I tried to brazen it out but somehow he recognised me instantly and called out my name.
I turned, ran back to the squat, slammed the door behind me and went for the back door. There I could escape via the garden, over the wall and run for Wimbledon Park station.
But Lead Pipe was waiting in the kitchen, with a cup of tea on the go and the Daily Mirror open to the back pages.
‘About time,’ he rumbled when he saw me.
Three guesses where I went next.
I was down the stairs and into the basement corridor before I even noticed that the walls had grown a fringe that glowed with a soft golden light. I was prepared to throw myself frantically at the cellar door but I found it open. I ran inside with no brighter plan than to barricade myself inside and hope the Deplorables grew bored.
Inside, the cellar was a riot of colour. The walls were arrayed with purple organza and burgundy charmeuse, while sprays of a brilliant blue habotai framed cascades of fabric woven in a dozen colours—scarlet, yellow and green—into tangles of vines, leaves and flowers. Globes of light hung suspended from golden threads in each corner, illuminating a bundle of gold and black embroidered silk suspended from tendrils of lace—like a cocoon from a spider’s web.
Tales from the Folly Page 9
