Me Again

45

2005-02-07T17:36:00.000Z

Drunk again, night again, alone again, I ambled along the edge of two worlds. Here the dry sand, still hot from the high-summer sun of the long June day, and not far beyond my uncle’s beach-hut and my home for this holiday with its bunk-bed and books. And then the shop where they always asked for proof of my age, the stale shower-block and cheap café, and soon past the other huts, the start of a snaky road that channelled from the cosseted Spit, through sparse woods and semi-cliffs and calm golf-courses, and back into the concrete and careers of the city. And, then, there, only a step away, the sodden sand, recently soaked and sieved by the suck and the stroke of the sea, and then beyond that thin threshold the rhythmic, slow, silvered sea itself, its horizon bleeding into the black of the night imperceptibly, dotted with starlight from distant, perhaps-dead solar-systems, rippling and running to its dark depths with planet-sprawling currents.

Of course, I was thinking of Laura. Not of her long, brick-brown hair, or of her shape in that ivory dress which I never saw her wear – but I stole a photo to show all of my friends back home. Nor of her little lips lifting up out of the darkness of a near-dream in that undergraduate single room to meet mine, sleepily at first, then sudden and hot, me mouthing my limp words of love no longer, silenced by the lick and tingle and touch and –. And, not of how she might be doing now, in her holiday still studying German and dreaming of a job in another country after graduating. And not of the shame of how my excited garble to the regular geezers down the usual boozer about my new, beautiful, brilliant babe (only to be icily dumped a month later forever) exposed my ignorance and optimism, naivety and idiocy, and the sheer embarrassment of being that nineteen-year-old fool of a me amongst them the men – no, I wasn’t thinking of any of that.

It was her voice. Small and sinewy sometimes, then childish and chirrupy, as she whispered to me the anecdotes of her ship-wrecked soul (a year of modelling and its the weirdos who wowed then worried her which bought her the money to study, her poverty-level family who ran a ramshackle farm out in the middle of nowhere, her mother who would tie her to a chair and beat her for no reason, her father who turned both of his blind eyes to television through a blur of cheap spirits, and her older sisters who had escaped long ago, one to make pottery, the other to start a family, and of a school that never once asked whether regular fainting and bruises had something to do with anorexia and assault) that she herself was saving through study; it was her voice.

Once, after an evening of vodka in the student union’s half-priced Russian night, after careering back to her kitchen for coffee, teetering into her tiny room, stripping shamelessly and collapsing under the covers, the ceiling a swirl, she spoke in another voice. As if hypnotized by headlights, staring straight ahead; or like a stutterer, striving to speak the raw sound of a rudimentary sentence, all passion lost to the purpose of proper pronunciation; or like a computer, coldly computing vowels and consonants without connotation – or, or, or…

Back on the beach, I didn’t dress in detailed description the nude facts. The farm wasn’t making enough money. Parents needed help. A local handyman would lumber past each day on his way from odd-job to odd-job, eying little twelve-year-old Laura with a smile and a hello. I have no idea what is name was; Harmer, let’s say Harmer. Harmer got chatting to mother. Harmer could help with the fencing, the draining, the plumbing, although he was a bit pricey – one job at a time, eh?

Harmer didn’t have a family of his own. Was a bit lonely, like. Would he like to have dinner? Very much would Harmer like to have dinner – and Harmer wasn’t worried about the money for fixing the gate after all. And after dinner, would Harmer like to take little Laura for a drive? Harmer would like that very much; and he had a spare hour or two tomorrow, could pop in and help with something or other. And Laura – there’s a good girl, now – little Laura would like another saunter round the local lanes in Harmer’s truck tomorrow night too, wouldn’t she?

And Harmer – it’s so very generous of you, helping us like this! Yes, like you’re one of the family now, after all these weeks. Now, did we ever tell you that, funnily enough, strange to mention it, but here it is, that little Laura’s always wanted to camp out in a field, and with us being so fatigued – you would? O – all this, and the work for free! What a love. And – and really, the electrics wouldn’t be too much to ask – and into her tent that night he went. And into her tiny mouth, through those lovely lips, one hand round her neck, one pulling down his pants, he went.

For months his work was paid by her mouth or hand, but it was her voice, her tiny, tragic, voice, a touch timorous in my memory, that I thought of that night on the soft, hot sand. Her clear voice as she concluded this cold tale: one afternoon she was off school sick, her parents off in their tidiest clothes to the bank in town, and there Harmer suddenly was at the front door, bringing around some parts. In he came. And soon in the kitchen, there he spoke his usual spiel: she really did love him, underneath. She really did want him, secretly, in spite of what she said. Would she not admit it, as he finally made full love to her, pinning her against the wall, tearing down her trousers, thumping apart her thighs, scratching at her sex, would she not tell him, as his cock crammed up against her child’s cunt – say it, as he edged to house himself inside of her –

Say it little Laura, say the word love, he insisted, not noticing that her fist had found a frying pan from somewhere, and was hurtling it down onto his head with all the life-force she could find, not imagining that he would be unconscious in an instant, that she would drag his deadweight frame through the house and shove him outside into the front garden, locking the latch behind him. That barren garden: where, presumably, he soon woke, wounded, worried, gathering himself together, and vowed never to return. Laura’s parents stayed silent, Harmer’s name a taboo, some understanding presumably reached, and on they all struggled on without him, in the pits of their separate ways, for the coming years.

Vivid her voice in my mind that night on the sand, centimetres from the swarming surface and cemetery-cold fathoms of the sea. I had phoned her a few times. She was glad to hear from me – but O, had to pop out in a minute. What’s my number again? She’d phone if she had some news. It was good to remain friends, of course it was! We would never speak again, of course. She spoke on the phone with the same voice she used the next morning, so hot and hungover, when she would not or could not remember, her voice as frail as a weak finger – but strong enough to silence this lip, then rein it in with a cigarette, as if a scarf of silk soothing a burning throat. Frail as a weak finger – but firmly on the lips saying shush now, shush; insistent as an old lady who will not be questioned by a child, shush now shush child.

The sea breathed softly beside me her music of murmurs. I saw in its shifting mosaic Harmer’s face, fantastically large and gnarled features, jeering and ghastly, as he travelled the countryside with eyes rawly peeled for schoolgirls. I saw it as he slouched in the village pub, saliva sated with sex and soothed by beer, the usual again is Harmer me old mucker? I saw it as he charmed a mother here, teased a daughter there. I saw it as I, with singular purpose, tracked him down along country-lanes, spied and made sure, and then unstoppably entered his favourite nook in his cosy local – the log crumbling in the fire, the ruddy landlord all red grins, a young couple in a corner winking over wine, all as sturdy and sane as a stereotype – I saw it as I, knife in hand, or chair held above head, marched over to him; and I saw his face break into a million pieces, the splinters of his skull shed about him, or I saw rampaging fingers ransack his ribs, or his shattered legs a tangle of tendons and the shrapnel of beaten bone and the shedding skin, and, all-in-all, I saw his final breath forced and beaten from his blood-drenched lungs, his crime of rape punished by utter ruin, his body broken the way cities are sacked in a world of war on TV.

It was the last luxurious, workless summer of such thought and sea and sand, the last of whatever confused lust or love or lunacy of mine that was Laura. We were studying at different universities she and I, all those years ago, met on a weekend organized around a pub-crawl by a charity in a city, all hello’s and snogs. That world went that summer. And the season simply passed with its flimsy festival of forgettable novels and fruitless flying of kites. And today for me, a heavy in-tray. And a laddy lunch with a loud buddy. And a jokey email from a chance new chum. And an office typing with the usual hum. And perhaps it’s a madman who is stood brewing up the coffee. Perhaps it is a Saint who struggles with a photocopy.

And a google search says Laura is now a lawyer living in some little English town doing a fine job of untangling red-tape for the construction trade and there’s a photo of her sat on a table of burly men with ties lustfully loosened celebrating some poultry award at a dull yearly ceremony but O, she’ll be married in the new year to Nathan who works in the same office, sat a slick computer no doubt much like mine – where a murder or a marvel is only click away. Where a circle of hell and a hint of a heaven only a touch away. Where an ocean of man-made misery and human hope laps up at our fingertips. A loveless inevitable ocean, an illogical ocean. Perhaps I have banished it, the ocean, as if an all-powerful King, from my orderly life. An orderly life; submerged in a shuffle of paperwork, buoying up the day with electronic messages, sent out to the world like vain love-letters, circulating amongst the confused lonely strangers of a vague little school. Perhaps it cannot be banished, that which pours so much salt into eyes and tongues and ears and pores, perhaps blessed are those blind and deaf to the roaring void of its massive flood.

44

2005-02-01T10:46:00.000Z

Sifting amongst the books, I was anguishing over more Austen, balking at the banalities of Banks, calmed by the cool, contemplative Calvino, delightfully detecting the delectable Doyle, estimating Eliot’s eschewing of evangelicalism, frowning at Franzen’s flictions, gaping at the gap of Garland’s gone, hugely hopeful about hundreds of Hemingway’s, inching past the ignoble I’s, jostling with the jinormous jenius of Joyce, kontinually kourting the konvoluted konfusing K’s of Kafka, loving that long-lost loser Larkin, mocking meddling middle-class McEwan, nabbed by Nabakov’s nefarious nymphet, ordering ’opeless Orwell orf, passing over the prick of Palhaniuk, quietly quaffing the quasi-Quixotic Queneau, reading Reading – couldn’t resist that fictional one, btw, scratching the surface of Salinger, tutting at that twit Tolkein’s turgid untailored tales, umming at the utter umbrage of the U’s – worst of letters for an author’s surname it seems, and yes, that includes you, Updike, veering my voyage avay vrom Verne, winking at weird and wonderful West, X-ing X, Yes-ing Yates – actually I can’t stand Richard Yates, however, for the sake of alliteration and expediency, a simple Yes following by a swift move on to the final letter of the alphabet seemed best – I hope you forgive me and agree? probably your impatience proves my point and so, and finally, and after all, and in conclusion, and last but not least, and now ladies and gentleman drum roll please, I zoned in on Zola and his zero-weight, zoom-lens look at Zeds, and wondered about maybe picking up an Auster instead.

It was then that I noticed Thomas: he was crouched down, and peeping at me through the stand of discounted calendars, his eyes amongst those of painted cats, dogs on bikes, dying pop-bands and gooney footballers. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and turned my back, marching off to Auster. I’d been in a bad mood on the rush-hour tube: bookless, and with him blathering on about how wonderful the tube is, but why didn’t the commuters talk to each other? or have a bit of fun even with each other? If my blunt, obvious answers had hurt his feelings, I didn’t want to face that now, meandering in a soothing mind-mist amongst the shelves.

Or perhaps he was upset because he was getting manoeuvred into a job in the post-room? I woke him this morning, lent him a shirt and tie, informally introduced him – and the interview proper is early next week. But spying on me from behind the calendars? Why was I making excuses for his weirdiosity, I thought – turning back to see Thomas jump – literally, jump – behind the shelf of novels running N – Q.

I decided to go and ask him what the matter was – but when I got back to N – Q, I realised he was gone. Not browsing at all. But was that a flash of his yellow jacket over near the magazines? I marched over – thinking I might have a look over the newspapers while I was at it – to see him creep out of the section via the bit with all the stuffy magazines – The Economist, The Ecologist, The Scientific American – that kind of thing – and then zoom through Cookery and up the stairs.

There, I finally caught up with him near the World Cinema DVDs – where he was kneeling in a corner, facing the wall.

“Thomas!”

“Ahh, you got me. Want to play again? No – enough’s enough.”

“Thomas, what’s going on?”

“Didn't you get my text message?!”

“Your text message?”

“Yes – on your mobile – I said I thought you needed some fun after a stressful commute, so let’s play hide and seek, like we were kids again - you know, the stuff I was going on about on the train. I sent it just after I’d checked to see if any posthumous Milosz was out – you didn’t? You didn’t get it? Then I’ve been – O no, how embarrassing! I feel so stupid!”

“No – you look as happy as Larry.”

“Well... Going to buy anything?”

“I can’t, for the life of me, remember,” I said.

43

2005-01-31T17:37:00.000Z

Sometimes someone emails you over something – and then you get chatting.

And sometimes you get to know a bit about her, her life in South Africa, her business and her dogs and her man, and sometimes she gets to know a bit about you, too.

And then you discuss other things, musical tastes say, and end up arranging to send each other tasters.

And then she’ll write – before you’ve sent it – that maybe she’ll learn more about Adam through his choice of music than through all the emails in the world.

And then as you sit burning the CD on Saturday afternoon, you wonder just what can you say about all this music?

1 Cassandra Wilson – Tupelo Honey

Lilting, lovely, relaxed, night-time music. Music To Ignore The Washing-Up With. If only there were more women singing to me such songs.

2 Paul Weller – Broken Stones

From an illegal recording of a live session: our student union markets were full of such pirate music. Mostly, you listened to them and realised the long haired man with the electric guitar really couldn’t sing and was an idiot. Like a monkey at a typewriter who got lucky, and typed out a lost sonnet of Shakespeare’s, this song from that period of my life has endured in my affections. Whereas the music of the big posturing overgrown adolescents, funnily enough, hasn’t. Except:

3 The Stone Roses – Going Down

A mythic band: hurtling from the hard, northern, working-class streets of Manchester into moody or groovy bedrooms everywhere. They were the fountainhead of several strands of new, ‘authentic’, musical subgenres, that became cool in 1990s, and which were a blessing to sincere male students across the land who wanted to belong to something, or feel like they did. This is a b-side and not one of their more famous or ambitious songs, but I’ve always liked it. It’s about oral sex.

4 Aretha Franklin – Call Me

That emphatic, powerful, tender voice making a masterpiece of truly naff lyrics, probably towards the end of the most successful part of her career.

5 Royksopp – Sparks

The football TV programme had this loopy, crazy tune they used in the stylized highlights. And an advert for a phone had this strange, edgy, electronic symphony, which accompanied images of a baby that were scattered throughout a city: on the sides of buses and buildings, in shops, in newspapers. A metaphor for picture messaging. Both were by Royksopp an internet search showed, but this is the song that I have ended up really liking from their otherwise disappointing album that tired quickly, neutered of the momentum that moving images provide. Funny how these things come about.

6 Presence – So Far Far Away From My Heart

I used to read a lot of music magazines, and have a lot of friends who were DJs or aspiring DJs or carried around their university work in record bags, at least. A lot of them liked ‘deep house’. Well, one magazine said Presence’s album was the best deep house album of the year, so back home during my summer holiday, I bought it. I didn’t like it much (it’s grown on me a bit now) but this particular track, a melancholic, late night cry, I do.

Back at university, it turned out Presence isn’t ‘deep house’: it’s tuneful house or garagey house or vocal house some other type of inferior house. What they meant by ‘deep’ was usually either intricate (i.e., some detailed thought went into the percussive arrangements) or better still, intricate with an emotional force (usually some sad instrumentals above the beats or something like that.) Although, probably what they really meant by ‘deep’ was, I’m deep for understanding and liking this stuff.

Where are they all now, the deep DJs? In offices, in banks, in pubs, their bedrooms stuffed with old records, if they haven’t overcome their nostalgia and sold them. Although to be fair, a few of them, fuelled by blind optimism and a sniff of cocaine to see them through the garish night, still make fools of themselves by entertaining at parties. Whatever. I like this tune. It doesn’t mean anything now, just that I like it.

7 Stevie Wonder – All I Do

Ok, I like 70s music. Great stuff. I have no idea if this tune is actually from the 70s (doesn’t Mr Wonder do the same thing in every decade, blissfully blind to the changes which time brings?) but it suits the coherence of my memory to say it’s from the 70s.

8 Daft Punk – One More Time

Probably the best kind of all-round house music: good to dance to, complex and groovy enough to listen to, if you can get into it. I’m really not sure if you’ll like this tune or not – some familiarity with the type of music makes it more accessible. I don’t know what you listen to out there in South Africa, on the other side of the world. Are Daft Punk famous, world-wide? Or just a little European phenomenon? I have no clue. Probably best played loud, on your own, when you can try to bop around a bit. But maybe you’ll hate it. If so, here’s the bad news: the next track is similar…

9 Cassius – Feeling For You

… although a bit more obscure. The type of people who really like this kind of music aren’t my type. It’s Saturday night music for people who’ve been in an office they don’t mind, are doing reasonably well in, but like to on the weekend indulge in something of the drugs and dancing available to them. Contented, normal, mostly-unthinking 20-somethings. They like to wear trendy clothes, have stylish hair, seduce each other randomly and promiscuously, proudly announce the quality of the drugs they’ve got, and then aggressively stride back to work on Monday, admittedly feeling a touch off-colour. But knowing they wear a knowing smile. And email each other accordingly, using code words.

But make no mistake – there’s nothing counterculture here, except the fact of illegality; there’s no spirit of rebellion, no dream of a utopia, no energy for meaningfulness. It’s an instant, intense, speedy, shared fun – with no pretences or desires to be more. (Occasionally the lyrics will suggest a little bit more – but this is an illusion, a mist. A mist suggesting magic. A mist thinly spread amongst the parochial utilitarianism of their particular fair, which is nested in no more than a village market, disguised as a world. Mist.) But some of the music is really good.

10 Nightmares on Wax – A Nights Interlude

Music for short people from the suburbs who want to dress cool, in a hip-hoppy way, and sit around stoned with music that has a bit of emotional content and depth. It says, “I may be a midget, but I have quite a mind, you know.” Handily for such awkward, self-conscious creatures, you can’t really dance to it either. I’m tall and was never really one of them, although some became my friends, and this is the only track from a whole album of this kind of stuff that I can listen to without being bored. Years later, I heard Quincy Jones’s version of ‘Summer In The City’ (?), and realised this whole song is basically an elaborated version of a section of that song, which is a much more interesting song. But I don’t have that tune to hand I’m afraid.

11 Roy Davis Jr with Peven Everett – Gabriel

A beautiful song I think, slow-paced for its genre, a dispersed jazziness interlacing with an ethereal, lamenting voice. I found it on an album of music that blurred the line between jazz and dance music, and which features many excellent, unusual tunes: Gilles Peterson & Norman Jay’s ‘Desert Island Mix’. Gilles Peterson is a famous DJ whom has introduced a lot of interesting, eclectic music to the scene in Britain. Unfortunately, it’s part of a mix, so the beginning is blurted, and has some stupid, ugly voice hectoring you to “Listen, Listen” and some other crap over the top. O well.

12 The O’Jays – Back Stabbers

I like quite a lot of tunes like this – some of which are a lot more disco-y, whereas this really is soul-pop music, I suppose, from the 70s. (Unfortunately, most of it is on tape – copied from a friend years ago – so I can’t record it for you.) The lyrics of love and the streets being tough, with people out for themselves, might sometimes form an evocative cliché. Useful for those who wish to suppose music gives them a connection with distant others, others whom for some reason have come to have a certain cachet. Black, tough, urban, American, but with a 70s strut and stomp – I suppose that is the particular cachet. And perhaps the attraction of this alien world has something to do with a lack of a feeling of authenticity for those growing up comfortably with dull parents, here in little old Britain. Anyway – most of the lyrics from this type of music, especially the more obscure stuff, can be a lot more interesting. My favourite, from an otherwise unremarkable song which isn’t on this CD, features a couple arguing about where to make love: outside or inside? Public or Private? The closet or the park? Duets, especially of this sort, are all too rare.

13 Donald Byrd – Elmina

I have always had an interest in jazz; my Dad liked it, I improvise at the piano, and used to play the trombone in a jazz band. This is a flukey find: an obscure album I picked up in a student union market. Perhaps it’s deservedly obscure, because the improvising isn’t that great. But what I like is the timbre – a fuzzy, lush mix of jazz and electric instruments, a warm but also energetic and perhaps even edgy sound, and also the complicated, fast rhythms that, remarkably, anticipate certain types of sophisticated 1990s electronic music. It’s slightly hard to listen to: going on for a long time and that. But it’s highly representative of a lot that I like. There’s no accounting for taste? Or the music you like says a lot about you? You tell me, my lovely Michelle!

14 Herbie Hancock – Dolphin Dance

I like a lot of the jazz from the 60s which is called, I think, hard-bop, and a lot of jazz tunes and artists from that period are rightly listened to still, it seems to me. The music is accessible and subtle, energetic and emotional, complex and tuneful – tricky binaries to achieve. Herbie Hancock was a master – but this tune is not so famous and somewhat atypical, being slower, odder, more spacious and more reflective. I think it’s a great song – but I know people who find it overlong and dull. I’ve never seen Dolphins; maybe it expresses something of the way they dance, or maybe it doesn’t.

15 Bill Evans – Some Other Time

I, naïve and ignorant, was at a university interview, and announced to my interviewer that I played jazz piano. He told me that I had to get hold of some Bill Evans, whom I confessed to knowing nothing of: in fact, technically the most brilliant and innovative jazz pianist ever. I have several of his albums now, which I like to different extents. This is my favourite song from my favourite album of his (‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’.) A lilting refrain, reflective, emotionally acute, but very calmed, I think. There’s nothing aggressive at all here; a similar number on the same album is called ‘Peace Piece’. I think it’s also an influence on Miles Davis’s everlasting masterpiece of an album ‘Kind of Blue’ – where Evans was also the pianist. Certainly track 5 of that album – ‘Flamenco Sketches’, I think it is called – is another version of this song. Also very beautiful. I can’t seem to locate it at the moment in my CD collection, but I’m sure it will turn up somewhere.

When I try to play jazz piano, sometimes I try to capture the mood of this track. (The style – slow, spacious and simple – is elementary to emulate, I should say.) Anyway, maybe I have even done that once or twice. When I was 21, at the end of November, my Dad died at the end of a long illness. A week or so later I was booked to go for a weekend away somewhere with some people from a creative writing course I was taking. I made a mistake I suppose, and went. The course was held in this beautiful mansion in the middle of the Welsh countryside – think rolling lawns, covered with snow on the second day, then woods, and a backdrop of mountains. Think dark-panelled rooms, old portraits, high ceilings, old-fashioned sofas, roaring fires. There was a grand piano in one such room, and it was the right kind of piano for me – not too diffuse a sound, quite clear and loud when you struck the keys – so I could use the pedals to hide my lack of a controlled technique, which makes my playing somewhat painful on much better pianos, such as Steinway’s.

One night a few of my friends were sat on the sofas, and I played my version of this song – or something like it, more melancholic maybe. I had a beer on top of the piano and was very drunk, and would swig from it when I wanted to give my right hand a rest and allow the lilting, lonely left to pose centre stage. My friends listened in total silence from over in the lounge area, and somehow I improvised without a single slip.

Afterwards I saw some of the sensitive women were crying a little, probably thinking of my Dad – all thoughts of whom I was desperately trying not to show, to them or myself. Later some of them would ask about him, trying to get me talk about it. I didn’t know them well, and didn’t do so. I’m not in touch with any of them now. At the same time, I had a new girlfriend whom I liked a lot (and still do) and was very attracted to. She had only known me two months I suppose, and our relationship was fresh and raw. She didn’t know how to speak to me about what I was going through, and avoided the subject like it was a tribal taboo. She didn’t even accompany me to his funeral, although perhaps in a sense that was appropriate; she’d never met him, we didn’t know what the future held for us.

Anyway, when she listened to the kind of music that is on the last track of this CD, or me playing the piano and trying to emulate it, which she deigned to do once, she would never say anything – about whether she liked it, or the emotional content, or anything. She’d sit stony faced, avoidant, unable to communicate anything – even indifference or boredom or dislike, which would at least have been an honest response... She liked political rock music, scruffy men shouting about what is wrong with The System. I should like to look back on the changes in me and on those missed opportunities and such differences in people with a sense of wonder – but it is only really in sadness. If this last track on this CD hints at a distant sadness from some other time in its emotional tone, then at least it is a sadness which has been resolved into something for other people to listen to. Sad whispers transformed into a beautiful, wordless thing – clear and pure and good after all.

42

2005-01-27T15:36:00.000Z

“Thomas, look. You’ve been staying at mine since – the 11th? And you haven’t found a job yet. And you don’t seem to have anywhere to move out to. And Dimtrios is back in a week – and he has to have his room back. And also, I don’t mind lending you my laptop while I’m out at work – I know it helps you writing your poetry and stuff – but I checked the websites you’ve been on. Porn? For an hour? So, young man, time to get a job and get a place and generally just get your damned act –”

“Hi Adam!” said Thomas, interrupting the little speech I was constructing in my head as he walked into my office. “I’ve just been having a look around the British Museum – God London is wonderful – and anyway realised you were near by – and just wondered if you’d like to go to lunch with me?”

“Well – I – ” I can’t think of any reason why not. “Sure.”

Soon we were in a Pret, me again trying to work out which soup would have the most soothing affect while Thomas was paying for his vegetarian salad.

“O no,” I heard him suddenly say from the till. “I’m seventy pee – Adam! Hold on – I –” I passed my blushing cousin some extra change and soon he was sat down while I was ordering. Soon he was sat down – next to the beautiful temp, as it turned out. The beautiful temp called … whose name is …

She picked her head out of her book and spotted me just as I was walking over.

“O hi Adam!”

“Hi there,” I said. “I’m just having lunch with my cousin Thomas here.”

“Hello there,” she said, smiling her beautiful smile at him.

“This is,” I said, fumbling my soup with a pause.

Silence.

“This is – look actually you looked very absorbed in that book. Are we disturbing you?”

“No, no, it’s pretty boring anyway!”

“He usually is,” said Thomas of the author, masterfully.

Silence.

“Anyway, Thomas. This is – Te – Th – I’m sorry, how do you pronounce your name?”

“Teresa.”

“Yes – I thought – never mind. Thomas, Teresa.”

And soon he’s recommending some Ian McEwan novel or another instead and telling her about the poets he likes and that he’s a poet and that cuz Adam here (touching me on the shoulder) is putting him for “a while” – a while – and –

“That’s kind of you Adam,” said Theresa, turning back to Thomas. “Very supportive. Just what a young poet needs.”

“Thomas is looking for temp work, actually. Know of anything, Theresa?”

“Well – no – I –”

“Actually Thomas that reminds me. There’s usually some spare work going in the post-room – the people they have down there are pretty unreliable sorts – not that well paid – a bit grotty – but for you –”

“You may as well have a look, Thomas” said Theresa. “Don’t look so doubtful! Heh – I’ll show you where it is on the way back.”

And suddenly I want to say that I wrote a poem once, while I was at university and slowly working out why Marx could be fun but wasn’t for me and I didn’t think he had it all worked out right at all and even why Lukacs was wrong in his famous statement and in a quiet moment in a café on my own how I worked out the little feeling I had about it all and I never even showed anyone it once – and – and – and now I’m back at my desk, having dug the thing out of some old discs I keep locked away in a draw, mementos of distant memory, with nothing better to do than let go of it all. And wondering if I should offer Thomas my bedroom floor for a few weeks more when Dimitrios returns.

The Other

2005-01-27T15:32:00.000Z

When the curtain of reason finally falls
and the cup of knowledge is full to the top
with God’s secrets and the essence of man,

and from earth’s confused and violent lands
the borders and flags have gone forever,
and ever-ripe gardens hold no trace, no scar

of history and its endless nightmare,
and universal truth is the speech of all –
the universities of false philosophy

as quietly dead as forgotten tongues,
and the things I have wondered upon all my life
are little problems cleared up in Primary School,

if Primary Schools are needed at all –
and when the books I’ve suffered or enjoyed
are unmasked as devils of a wrong belief

whom played upon my eyes to make me blind
to the horror of the world and the truth
of the need for violent change,

then this wandering poem about you,
O complete being of the perfect future,
this uncertain and disorderly thing,

this deceived dream and shallow whim,
this failure of artful knowledge,
will speak silence on that which I wish to say
of me, of this, of that, of the other.

40

2005-01-27T01:11:00.000Z

Last thing at night now, and first thing this morning is the one thing on my mind:

“George here, Adam,” said the voice of my superior on the end of the phone. “Working from home this morning and can’t find my notebook, the grey one. Think I left it in C69. Important stuff. Have a look for it please and phone me back in five.”

“Seen a grey notebook in here?” I soon asked the temp, having her coffee alone in the room. “Ahh there it is!”

“Good morning, Adam!” she said.

“Hello! Sorry to dehumanize you like that, first thing in the morning!”

She smiled a fragment of her beautiful smile and said: “Actually, do you mind if I ask you a question? I have to take something to the post-room and can’t work out where it is!”

O, how angelic, how polite, how swift I am, as I tell her: “bottom of building over the road. I can show you if you’re not sure.”

But she is sure. It was a different story when bursting into my office like the door is just a tube station gate, some French woman blurted out: “C69! Where is that?”

“69? Rings a bell – yes. yes,” I replied idly. “Now… You know the double doors you’ve just come through?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Well you took the wrong turn there. See, rooms one to fifty are always on this side of the building – the rest the other. Now, 69. Go back through them. Remember the photocopying room opposite the lifts?”

“Yes – I think so – I –”

“Go around that. You’ll come to the stairs again. Now, C69. You did say C, didn’t you?”

“Yes, yes –”

“Not B?”

“Yes!”

“Yes you said B?”

“No – yes – C – B –”

“Not B? Not D? Because they’re different –”

“C69!”

“Right, C69. C69. What you want to do is – ahh, that’s right, there’s another set of double doors just after the stairs. Probably you missed them. They have a sign saying rooms 50 to 80 above them, and – well, go through them. Follow the corridor around. It branches off into a little kitchen area on the right. Don’t take that. You don’t want to go into that kitchen! Anyway. Carry on a little bit. Not too far, just past the post-box for internal mail. The blue thing. Then there’s a lift. Take it down one level, and –”

“And it’s there?”

“Sort of. It’s –”

“Right I’ll find it.” And out she stormed, forever hopefully, as if storming away from a malfunctioning ticket machine in a tube station.

“You’re smiling like a little devil,” said a little voice from an obscure corner of the office.

39

2005-01-20T18:34:00.000Z

“Here, have my seat” says the young man to the pregnant lady, rising from his tube seat with a homely smile. Always nice to see? Even when she and her huge belly have been stood in front of him since Holloway Road, and now he’s getting off the tube anyway, a good five minutes and two stops later at Kings Cross?

A family unit, negotiating the rush-hour tube at Holborn, all worried looks and checks on each other, with mum manoeuvring a push-chair behind and father up ahead with twin-boys hanging off him. Always a sympathetic plight, the sight of such innocent, close-knit explorers, braving the big city? Even when Thomas politely tells the woman she keeps running over his feet, and she stings back with, “you pushed ahead of me at the top of the escalators, mate”? And when Thomas looks sickened and strides off?

A deliberate act of minor violence from a mother against a perfect stranger: always a horror? When Thomas hasn’t shut up for the last hour about how ‘wicked’ the tube is? How some ‘beauty’ at some shoddy temp agency excited him by suggesting, ‘marketing’? That euphemism for slave-wage telesales? And when Thomas sits in my chair each night, as deserving as a pregnant woman? And hasn’t said when he’s going to move out? And when I ask him which couch is next in his sofa surf, says, “something will turn up, Adam, I’ve got lots of friends here”? Friends whom he never seems to see? Preferring to stay in and bond with his family? Meaning me? Each night?

At Holborn, we make it over to the central line platform without further incident. I was ready with pins of sarcasm with which to puncture various bubbles. But Thomas had sad eyes and a fallen smile, I saw there on the platform, and then on the tube. “At least it wasn’t the wheels of the train,” I say, as we crawl on to his false, temporary home, at mine.

38

2005-01-13T17:36:00.000Z

Two men standing in a packed tube-train, one accidentally kicks the other, says, "I'm sorry about that." "That's quite alright." "Oh, ok - I'll do it again then." :D

One man walking down a street, brushes past a meandering cutie, says "I'm sorry about that." A vague scowl and away she turns. Oh - I - :(

Daily the city delivers one thousand unnatural knocks, lapping up around eyes with a small sea of such shocks. And the mind just notes it all down. And the face just plays along, like an obedient emoticon - an immortal jester, no skull beneath.

37

2005-01-12T16:13:00.000Z

How to sleep, after this:

Midnight, and finally the doorbell rang. Did it wake Alexa? Creeping down the stairs I think not. And it rang again. Longer.

“Adam,” cried the weary voice of the confused, beautiful Greek from her bedroom. “The door’s binging. Thomas at last.”

“Got it.”

No need to creep down now.

“Thomas,” I said answering the door to the unfamiliar face of my cousin – staying for a few weeks (no longer) with me while he finds his feet in London, if not his watch. “Welcome!”

“Thanks, Adam. Sorry I’m a bit late.”

“Three hours late. What happened?”

“O, you know – trains.”

“I was worried, but didn’t have your mobile number,” I went on, lugging loudly up the stairs a heavy bag of his stuff. “Neither did Mum.”

“O, I don’t have a mobile,” he said, slumped in the lounge now, in my favourite armchair. “They destroy conversation.”

Text me, phone me, someone, I thought, distract me before there’s a murder. No-one did. Go to bed Adam, now, I told myself; then told myself I’m hardly calm enough to sleep.

“Speaking of conversation,” on went Thomas, “I’d love to catch up with you. It’s been – how long?”

“Since we were kids.”

“Since we were kids. I don’t, to be honest, remember anything about you, Adam,” he went on, as though smiling brashness made for humourous charm.

“Me either,” I lied. Had I remembered the fat, sweaty eight year old at that wedding, who ran around and around and around, then glooped down glass after glass after glass of wine some bridesmaid fed him, then puked and puked and puked in a plant-pot, perhaps he wouldn’t be here now. That was Thomas, I realised, looking over the plump, red-faced infant spread out uncomfortably all over my chair.

“So man to man, family being family, we should get to know each other. What are you – what do you do?”

“Well,” I stumbled out. “I have an admin job at—” and go on to explain it’s dull, but pays the bills, just about, but not enough to buy a place, but enough to have fun on the weekend – that kind of waffle. Twenty-something London stuff. “Er – what about you? Where are you at?”

“Well, actually… I’m a poet,” he said. “A poet. My influences are Allen Ginsburg and Ted Hughes, mainly. Your Mum said you read a bit of poetry – so you know what I mean. I’ve been published in” – and I forgot the few, obscure names he listed, on purpose. “And while I’ll have to work for now in London, it shall not be for long,” he stated. “I hope – I dream – of course, because who really knows,” he added, falsely.

And then I knew how I could get to sleep: type out his crap for this blog. Exorcise the stupidity and rudeness and irritation of it all, by making a mild joke out of Thomas; Thomas, my companion for the next few, two, three, eighteen, nineteen, no more than twenty-one days. Twenty one days!

Hardly days: brief corridors of passing contact, between coming home and going to bed, nothing much. And soon he will be gone. And soon it was time to sleep. And soon breakfast and the beautiful fact that Thomas is slow, quiet and dull in the mornings. And too soon the post; to expel the night before, grim-faced for grim-time tonight.

36

2005-01-06T13:00:00.000Z

“Any gossip? From the political world, I mean?” I asked Becca last night, her sprite features shadowed in our cosy, quiet corner.

I’d just been telling her my favourite bad old joke for my new year’s resolution. Do not die of a heroin overdose in the next twelve months. And I’d just been complaining about the looming stay of my long-lost ‘kid’ cousin Thomas. And we’d already exhausted the tragedy of the tsunami, the obvious football talking point, whether Strada pizza was better than Sapori, exchanged more than one bad joke, discussed how to best roast potatoes and where to get goose fat, the rise of London train prices, indoor gardeing for life in rented flats – and what we’d been up to over the holiday – and were now half drunk and in a nice pub and in a good mood. It was getting late.

“Only – well, you probably know this already?” she replied, drawing herself forward. Try and concentrate on what Becca’s saying, I told myself, Becca, Becca. Becca … cleavage.

“Heck, I’m out of political loops proper – let alone gossipy ones.”

“Well, you remember the Hutton Inquiry? It’s sort of to do with that.”

“Of course I remember it,” I answered, trying to remember it over the waves of wine. “I’m not that out of it! The BBC, the scientist, and the war in Iraq.”

“Yes – whether Blair had lied about intelligence in the build-up to the war, that kind of thing. Well, this isn’t really gossip,” Becca related on. “The night before Hutton’s report was published – Blair’s teenage daughter – she’s still at school – fifteen or so I think … she attempted suicide.”

“What?”

“She attempted suicide.”

“No, no – I heard the first time. I mean – ?”

“She gets bullied mercilessly at school. You can imagine – given the public view of her father, and the war – terrible isn’t it – you know what kids are like – but anyway,” Becca went on. “The gossip, although it’s not really gossip, well that’s not it. Remember all that stuff in the papers about Blair will resign soon, and Brown is in the ascendancy? Probably you didn’t notice. Well anyway, that actually was the plan, but the real reason Blair wanted to resign was because of his daughter. Except then he was cleared by Hutton and his advisors convinced him not to go. Brown’s lot were hopping mad, of course. Don’t know about his daughter.”

She paused her ramble, sat up, and then announced like a newsreader nobly concluding a speech: “The media know about her troubles – and it’s by no means just that one night – but they choose to keep it quiet. The public may be interested, but it’s not in the public interest.”

There was a certain silence as she regally observed my responses.

“Is her troubles why Blair stayed on holiday this Christmas, despite the emergency?” I asked. “The papers say that is unusual. I’ve noticed that, at least.”

“Well I can hardly know that now,” Becca answered, obviously.

“No.”

“But such things don’t stay private secrets for long, in our lovely day and age.”

“No?” (No.)

We chatted briefly on, about that and other things, and soon our separate ways off we went. It seemed appropriate that the thin sheets of a newspaper or two lined the floor of my tube carriage; muddy footmarks stamped over the scattered pages of barbed headlines, dramatic pictures, clear simple diagrams, sports news, bold advertisements, the gloss and colour of the lifestyle sections.

35

2005-01-05T10:50:00.000Z

Occasionally, I’d unfold a little leaf of information myself:

“Alexa’s had her friend I don’t like staying again in December –”, or,
“be quiet in the flat in January – Dimitrios’s not back in the till the end of the month–”, say.

But more typically, for stems our talk had small things like:

“So I was watching that chat show late last night, and”, or “for lunch, fancy –”, or “whatever happened to that guy from school –”.

And immediately, the big instant bloom would be something like:

“Ooh Adam could you hear me snoring through the ceiling I bet you could you know because after three glasses well alright maybe four I’m always off and I was sound off straight away as soon as down my old head went down and out like a light it went out and I slept ever so sound until guess who why yes of course Petal woke me snuggling against me at three in the morning it was snuggling and meowing and I was still snoring and there Petal was dribbling and purring and I hope I didn’t wake you or spoil your programme for you…”

Or:

“Not cheese, no, you’ve had enough cheese well you can have some cheese if you like I’ve got some of that nice Wensleydale left but you should watch your weight Adam you’ve put on a bit you know I saw it when you arrived home and cheese won’t help oh that red cheddar is delicious isn’t I was thinking of making cauliflower cheese for tonight you’d like that wouldn’t you course you would with potatoes they’re a bit fattening too not as much as cheese but so delicious and no don’t offer to help I don’t have you home often and how about some cheese for lunch now? You were going to suggest a salad, were you? With some nice feta? Well you can burn it all off in the New Year, back in London!”

Or – last one that doesn’t involve the plot of this entry, I promise –

“You know a new boy joined the top-set I teach English to last term and didn’t half remind me he had such a lovely smile really wide you could see all his teeth really just like yours although he’s a bit of tearaway only fourteen and got a girl pregnant already such a shame with such a smile and smart lad too just isn’t interested and no, I suppose he’s not really like you, but did I tell you that before, on the phone? I did did I O deary me O…”

Bored one late morning this Christmas holiday, trying not to picture cheese, whole cheese and nothing but cheese, as I lolled like a cat on the sofa, I quietly supposed such half-conversations of ours were like vase-flowers: fragments cut from abundant life elsewhere; fitting with the comfy furniture in the cloistered lounge; but going nowhere, half-dead even – dying in fact; in stagnant waters and misty glass, dying.

“Now,” my mother interrupted my muse, “I’ve brought you some nice cheddar, a bit of bread and pickle, some grapes and a cup of tea, and you’ll never guess who I spoke to the other day!

“No, not Elvis. Your kid cousin Thomas – well he’s not a kid anymore he’s 21 and he’s been through a bit of a rough patch one way and another but I won’t bore you with that but he’s a lovely lad reminds me of you in a way anyway I was talking to Thomas well his father your uncle you see and the thing is Thomas has decided to drop out of his Masters degree. It’s not that he’s not bright enough it’s just money I think or something anyway it wasn’t very clear – and he’s going to start looking for work in London and as Alexa has people to stay at yours and Dimitrios is away, I didn’t think you’d mind if–”

“He stays at mine?” I blurted. “Thomas? I haven’t seen him in years! And –”

“Well it’ll be a great opportunity then. He’ll be up on the 11th. Alexa won’t complain will she? Not with the number of times that friend of hers has stayed! Like you said. Anyway. It’ll only be for a week, or two. Or until Dimitrios is back, or – anyway. Until Thomas finds his feet.”

“As long as he doesn’t plant any roots.”

“It's only a short while and I'm sure he'll be as quiet as a mouse.”

“Makes me wish I had a cat.”

“Now, now, Adam. I’ll tell him that’s alright then, shall I? And I was thinking, I might come up one weekend – go to the theatre with you both perhaps and maybe lunch or dinner or perhaps…”

O well-arranged, predictable image of a vase, o orderly object, come back! All is forgiven! The disorderly family tree sways, reaches, grows; subject to such unpredictable weather.

34

2004-12-23T11:30:00.000Z

Someone somewhere is talking about santa. Good myth or bad lie? Ghosts of Christmas past drift about the conversation:

Davey McGrath has a secret to tell me. We clamber off the climbing frame, wander to a corner of the playground.

“Santa isn’t real,” he whispers into my ear, earnest and excited. “He doesn’t exist.”

“He does!” I tell him, scandalized. “I saw him last year.”

On the way home, I tell myself that my best friend has got this all wrong, terribly wrong. I’ve seen Santa’s hat – surely I did – bobbing past my window, as red as tomato ketchup. I heard the whinny of Rudolph, the scrape of the slay as it took off and soared up, up and away. I did, I did, I did!

But then doubts flood my mind: how could he get round all the houses? Why would he exist? How come that bike he got me last year - it had been stood outside the local second-hand-shop for a month before?

“What’s wrong?” mum asks when I arrive home. I tell her. Soon she is explaining: Santa’s part of the magic of Christmas for children. I’m growing up, so now it’s time for me to understand that. But I better not tell my baby sister.

Of course, I know straight away that I’m joining in with this game: it’s what grown-ups do! I’m seven years old, and the entire world makes perfect sense again.

Years later, I’m covering my chips with tomato ketchup in front of the TV. Long ago my father had given up trying to stop me drenching food in the stuff. All his warnings – that it’ll kill me, that it’s processed rubbish, that it drowns out taste, that it’s no good for you, full of E numbers probably (whatever that meant) – have been firmly ignored. The news is on: the light-hearted feature at the end. The image of a bottle of ketchup suddenly occupies the corner of the screen. “Surprising news from scientists now,” the announcer begins to say. My father looks stunned as the newly-discovered health benefits from the stuff get reeled off – including, even, protection from cancer.

Now, you might expect that I gloated, or we joked about it, or he started eating the it with everything, like I did; hell, you might be picturing a pantry with piles of the magic stuff, bought in bulk. Or maybe that he stormed off, changed the channel, dismissed the claims. But by this time, we already knew about the brain tumour – which, as it turned out, would kill him at the age of 51. There he sat, as fat as santa should be from all of the drugs, letting the cold irony pass in silence, and soon the sports news was on anyhow.

Santa: good lie or bad myth? Ghosts of the past drift around without answers, and the ghosts of the future hold unknown questions. My last day at work this year, and nothing is left to do. Except to wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

33

2004-12-16T14:05:00.000Z

"Not been writing that blog much, Adam?" said an old friend last night on the train. We were heading to Clapham Junction, for a dinner party in the sought-after part of town, where 20-somethings cluster around exotic markets and over-priced bars, exchange telephone numbers and sexual fluids, discuss the city or legal jobs they do so well, remember the university days and all those parties, remark on the smallness of the world bumping into old School pals, or offer to show them the photos from their gap-year mucking in for charity, or from their sponsored 10km run last summer. Lives lived as they should be: your teacher says these are your best subject, your parents say do this at uni, your careers advisor says this will earn you most money, and heh presto. Lovely life just falls into place.

"Writing bits and bobs," I answered. "Got a few unfinished entries. I hate posting anything I'm not happy with. Hate it. Don't know why."

"You shouldn't. It's only a blog. So what's been happening? You never even told the world, or all three of your readers at least, that you shaved off your beard."

"True. But who wants to know about that? Dull story: I decided to keep it, bought some clippers to trim it into shape, and started hacking at it this way and that, that way and thot. And then ten minutes later, an uneven mess stared at me from the mirror, while strands of hair settled on surfaces all over the bathroom.

"Shaving is easier. And now, what to do with the clippers I don't need? Skimp on the hair-dresser and go for a short hair-cut, or be naughty and break them and return them and ask for my money back?"

"Keep your hair long while it lasts," my friend replied, peering at my hair-line, and its slight - slight - retreat from my temple. The train was packed: I noticed a black woman, crammed facing the doors, newspaper held at her side, no space to read it, smiling at our conversation. In a nice way, I thought to myself, in a nice way.

"You know what I'm having trouble describing at the moment? I told you about the dog?"

"No."

"I keep getting bitten by a dog on the way to work. Happened twice now - yesterday and the day before."

"You're kidding?"

"About the dog? Or describing it?"

"The dog, Adam, the dog."

"No. You know my street ends at a right-angle, like an L-shape, into an alley? Well, the day before yesterday, I turned into the alley and walked into this dog. I jumped back, swearing, and the vicious thing sprinted forward, then sprung up at my leg. Gnashing, furious, claws out. Razor-sharp teeth, gleaming. Biting, attacking. Up, up it leapt - about as high as my knee, I suppose."

"About as high as your knee?"

"Yes... that was about as high as the evil thing's little legs could get him. I suppose it wasn't much bigger than a guinea pig, really." The black woman is laughing by now under her breath.

"And the same thing happened the next day? What did the woman say?"

"Same thing next day - almost exactly the same. I swore a lot at her. Jesus Fucking Christ mainly, I think. Then, she asked me to listen to her explanation. Apparently she and her husband have been away on holiday for a couple of weeks, so the poor little thing has been in kennels - sorta hotels for pets. He was a bit upset by it, and isn't normally like that at all, she said. In fact, he's more scared of me than I am by him! Or something."

"And what do you say?"

"Well, I could have said (all hurt and vulnerable) that I've had nightmares about dogs ever since I was a kid, but given that the mutt was no bigger than moderately-sized rodent, I didn't. I could have said (all sarcastic and clever) that if the poor little creature had been traumatized by a holiday, then by all means it has the right to bite me. In fact, why not aim higher? What are my privates compared to your dog's peace of mind? I could have said (all superior and moralising) that I have the right to walk to work without getting bitten, and what if I'd been a little kid or baby? And that if a dog bites someone it's a criminal offence and he can be put down by law - and so I'm calling the cops."

"And what did you say?"

"Jesus Fucking Christ. Can't you keep it on a tighter leash. That, I think.

"I suppose at least I said something, even if it was blurted, uncontrolled, rushed, embarrasing, ridiculous - but something. Although she wasn't there this morning." And on we traveled, amused, a few chuckles about us, to a night of photo-albums and chatter about politics and sport, and delicious chicken wrapped in bacon, cooked according to fine recipee, dictated by some distant and successful TV chef in a luscious, solid, hard-backed book.

32

2004-12-09T16:42:00.000Z

"You always tell me what you think, Adam," some friend or other was saying a while ago, "but never what you feel."

O. Let me think. Feel, I mean. No, or - ahh, you know. Well, here goes:

A strange encounter: The woman I sat next to on the tube last night, flicking through a holiday brochure, ticking various hotels or places of names with a blue biro, then putting boxes around others, then scribbling across the page, stabbing it, hacking at it, peering at it - all before she turned and stared and grinned at me with this crazed, mad, pale, so young and awful face. Right then, I suppose:

pity.

Or some nothing moment: A brash business man queue jumps at an escalator out of the tube:

hate.

A bolshy business woman queue jumps just after, and I watch her beautiful figure clamber up the stairs:

love.

Someone or other clearly in a real rush queue jumps with a sorry:

a pragmatic justice,

if that counts. Or some office moment: a phone call from someone asking for someone's phone number. "It's not on the internet? In the document I emailed you last week? And come to think of it, how come you always do this? Unlike anyone else? And I don't even work for you?" - is what I don't say, reading the digits off.

Irritation,

of course. In they come later, a Christmas card and some home-made biscuits I don't enjoy: a blip of lofty

benevolence

passes. Walking outside my office at lunch with such thoughts, feelings going blip-blip-blip, as I wade through meandering students and sniping chuggers and the suited masses, I wonder what I feel about them all. I'm in a bad mood. Maybe I feel about the whole world roughly what I feel about heavy metal: I just don't like it, and can't work out how anyone really could. People-cars-birds-litter-shops pass, and feelings go

blip

blip

blip.

Surely life isn't just a graph with two dimensions: one, stuff; the other what you feel about it, there on a grid, with speech the only attempt at the smooth line that connects the dots of reality that randomly pop up?

At some point I'm walking around the side-ways C of the Aldwych: and the traffic has stopped. And the road is cleared. And everyone at the bus-stop is staring. And lights are flashing. And ambulance men are rushing over. And a figure lies still, dying probably, in the middle of the road. Further along a white van is stopped, alone.

This should remind my feelings of the essentials of life, its fleeting, precious nature and sudden end, this should be the image that provides the perspective, that gets rid of the bad mood, clarifies the feeling. "I know who I hope it is," I think, and walk on.

30

2004-11-30T17:02:00.000Z

"Adam's Beard-o-Meter" stands opposite the reviews of teas. It reads:

Week 1. He says: Kicked off nicely. They say: What beard?
Week 2. He says: Feels itchy. They say: Looks it.
Week 3. He says: Looking good. They say: Has ginger tendencies.
Week 4. He says: Possibly needs a trim underneath. They say: Not for an Abraham Lincoln impersonation it doesn't.
Week 5. He says: Has the authority of Charles Darwin. They say: No, of Captain Birds Eye.
Week 6. He says: Ha ha ha. Ho ho ho. They say: Santa?

And now, decision time: to shave, or not to shave. Trim, or not to trim. It may have profound consequences, a symbol of ultimate power, or at least a statement of it over my own face; or perhaps some other consequence, as certain interesting, and probably single men, can attest to.

29

2004-11-26T17:28:00.000Z

These few days: why not stand around sipping at the wine and gulping at the beer, as if they were any other?

Now, it's time to go home. And still paper work to get through. Still emails to answer. I have been trudging all day.

Social engagements for tonight and tomorrow cancelled. A Thanksgiving party, starting at 4. A celebration of something in the usual bar. An offer of dinner.

Perhaps on Monday I will just be watching television, or eating a meal, or snoozing on a train, at the cinema, maybe, and 6.57pm that night will drift by unnoticed, like any other.

Just disappearing, just like that. Like what?

Like the breath of a man, unconscious and slightly green, laid out in a hospice bed, his brother, his wife, his son stood uselessly around him, like his breath that slows without deepening, once, twice (while a clock must say five minutes to seven one minute, and four minutes to seven the next, unnoticed) - and then the pause between each breath gets longer, and longer, each breath more and more shallow, fainter, going now - a great pause - a final attempt at breath - and then ending, forever. Just disappearing, like that.

So utterly desolate, I looked around the room that night, anywhere, for anything; at the flowers; my uncle's face; to the clock which told me the time - three minutes before seven at that moment, that evening, on Sunday the 29th of November in nineteen ninety-eight. Heh, this Monday, this weekend, however much I empty it out, it won't be like that.

28

2004-11-24T10:17:00.000Z

"Gloucester Road station," the announcer announced, "is closed due to fire-works. Customers are advised..."

Closed because of fire-works? What? Celebrations? At this time of the morning? Customers escorted off the trains, an amazing spectacular promised, the roof of the station rolled back, the sky as open as a basket, and then the mouths of the formal stuffy commuters gaping up in marvel, like captivated children, as the bang of gun-powder announces a million brilliant dots, each plucking a colour from the rainbow and placing it upon the sky?

Or, what? Closed because of a disaster? Some madman, seething at the indignity of it all or some crazy cause, crammed in at the end of a carriage; dammit, he mutters, dammit, I'll do it this time - and then the flick of a match, and a woosh, an explosion, and ... And clothes on fire. Faces on fire. Screams through flames. The tube screeching to a halt. And the slow drift of a smoke that is scented with burning human flesh.

"Once again," the voice repeated, "Gloucester Road is closed due to an earlier fire-alert. Customers..."

My mistake; my imagination. I left the tube to find the world as usual: the old buildings and the morning sky as grey as each other. Albeit with the occasional black stain, and dotted with the bold colours of the advertisements, flashing out such brilliant promises.

27

2004-11-18T17:44:00.000Z

We speak once, twice each week, and have done so for the last two, three years - since I've worked here; the plump, greying, always-suited, soft-voiced, smiley bar-manager and I.

Pretty much, it's either: "The usual is it? And how are you?" "Thanks. O, same as ever. Struggling on. Battling through. Yourself?" "Same. Surviving, just about." "Yeah. Thanks. See you." "Thanks, see you."

Else something like: "And how are you? Here's your usual." "O, thanks. Not bad actually. Work going well at the mo'. Yourself?" "Yeah - business is looking up actually. Good time right now." "Great. Thanks. See you." "Thanks, see you."

Last night it was one of those two again, with a "here's your change" as he passes the coins into my palm. And then a regular, sat opposite him at the bar, as I was walking away: "So you're into all that dominatrix stuff are you?" I turn a touch, stopped in my tracks, to see the bar-manager shrug his shoulder in subdued agreement.

He notices. "Problem with the change?"

"If anything," I say, "it might just be a bit too much."

26

2004-11-16T13:08:00.000Z

November, I hate you.

Last year – under your endless slates of cloud cover, the wind punching about your short frozen days, the rain pummelling your grey streets, and three months to come of the same – I said that I hated you then, too. And I did. I do.

For instance, for instance... The year before last, my girlfriend was a New York business woman. She was here on a study year out, staring into my eyes at night, lunching with contacts-cum-friends on afternoons, ticking off one more box from a list of museums and galleries each weekend, and lounging around pricey coffee shops, in classy London knee-length socks, while reading anything-but-politics. And she did not understand, November, that fight at a party over nothing, in front of all her friends, or when I turned up stoned to meet her parents, or dumped her just for not being right for me (twice, and each time right out of the blue), or forced her to try a restaurant that I must have thought she would hate, her being a Jew. November, it's true: it can’t be her fault. So I’ll blame you.

But that was nothing, really, November.

Remember, remember.

A phone call to an office bureaucrat about the tax I pay: it ends in swearing, shouting, slamming. And stares from all over the open-plan.

A drunk student, his arms spanning entire width of the door of the train as it pulls into Putney: he gets pushed out and pinned against a wall, told never to get in my way again.

A towel on the back of the door shoots upwards as I fall downwards: two hours later I come round on the floor of the bathroom, someone from the party has been banging on the door, wondering whether they should get a screwdriver and take off the hinges. I was trying to fucking sleep, I tell him, dizzy and slurring.

Shop-lifting, even! And the personal emails left unanswered, culling a few distant friends – all for what? Only for you, November, and I hate you.

Seven November’s ago, I did not know what I know now: that I hate you. O, my second year at university. The nights lit by disco lights, the days dozing in a warm daze. A dingy bedroom, a cheap wine or whiskey hardly touched, and the flame-red shirt of she from the lecture slips from her shoulder like a shadow. Then, a free weekend and the student loan just in? To London! To Amsterdam! To Paris!

But the year after was different. The November when I first hated November. I was only 21: I didn’t think to quit University to be with my father; I didn’t know that getting a mobile – so I could rush home in an emergency – was a token safeguard that guaranteed only bad news, and that however short a future is, more should be asked of it than that; I didn’t even know, deep down, really deep down, that when the Doctors told me that “he has a couple of weeks, a month at the most”, they actually meant it, nor that they were right.

November, kicking about in your leaves, why have I never looked for consolation? In their symbolism say, or a joke. Their yellows, their reds, their rustle underfoot: such a beautiful, massive death that only happens in November, that only happens to leaves, dropping like hair from a cancer victim.

25

2004-11-03T17:13:00.000Z

At first, I thought this:

Four more? Unbelievable. I knew this would happen. Up and down the platform I muttered to myself: murder, murder, I could murder someone. That businessman flicking past the pink pages of his paper - he'd do. The half-stoned student buying sweets from a machine - him perhaps. The man in the blue uniform lazing by the dirty wall - anyone. All these unfazed others, casually waiting like me on this grey platform of dull light, for a machine to hurtle out from the black tunnel, slow for a few arbitrary exits and entries, then hurtle on unchanged. Why aren't they, like me, hopping mad?

Murder, murder: a four minute wait at this time in the morning? Unbelievable. Of course those thoughts go nowhere in the stuffed carriage of strangers that eventually arrives. Stupid to feel all that, when we are all here collected under the same artificial light, swung along with the same bumps, our lungs sifting the same dirt, all late, late, late; but all with a hidden faith in getting there. The train sweeps in and out.

Then looking around on the train, I thought this:

All the millions underground: each of us have that power in us, to go mad, pull a lever, shout; any one of us could step off a platform, jump under a train, push a stranger. Of course, we all judge ourselves safe, there on the tube, with a hidden faith in strangers. And what good to do it? The power to take action is not the power to make consequence, and as the train speeds into the inevitable darkness, whose hand will deliver good things, whose distribute bad stuffs, is unknowable. Someone folds up a newspaper with a fatalistic headline. And as the future speeds on after a brief wait at a platform, like a train into a tunnel, who knows what murder or marvel nests in each coming moment, minute, year, set of four years.

24

2004-10-29T17:41:00.000+01:00

So, much chatter could have crammed this clear silence.

But long days have been left to die unwritten, as if slept through like nights of forgotten, but tumultuous, dreams.

24.1

2004-10-29T17:40:00.000+01:00

There were lots of little tales I could have typed here, and didn't.

Here’s one. The effete and single Russell at a party, all night like this with the boys:

“Monica is a hotty, isn’t she? I know she’s engaged. But Greg says her man Mike is working in Brasil. Think I should try with her? You do? I will then. It’s been too long for me – and too long for her I bet – ! I’d love to get her bed. And you definitely think I should give it a go? I will then. After a few more drinks, that is.” Hours later, a “hello.” Soon, Russell is attempting to flirt, every now and again his head swivelling furtive glances back at the boys, like a snake dancing out from his blankets in a box, panning the crowd, then returning to his master, who plays a tune on a flute or whistle.

At the end of the evening, Greg overhears Monica asking Russell back to her's. Russell would love to he says, but has to be up early next morning. (Visiting someone or other, somewhere or other.) On Monday over lunch, he explains: turns out he really likes her. More than a one night thing, so he decided not to. When’s he going to call? Not sure. His mobile sounds and her name is on the display. He doesn’t answer. Not in the mood. Tuesday over lunch: she’s called twice without leaving a message, and has now sent him a text message. “She’s so keen! Like a stalker. Better give this one a miss.”

Single and sexless he is once more! – but you know what judgement we all silently decide upon. And we all know that at the next party, he will be equally as excited and convinced in talk - and that he will sleep alone later, deceived and fruitless.

24.2

2004-10-29T17:39:00.000+01:00

Ah, there have been a few sights in these weeks, months.

I could have noted this one:

An early morning meander via the heath and its pond, heading for a paper. And there in mid-air, a crow, spinning and bobbing. This way – but only a bit. That way – but only a bit. Swinging with the bursts of the breeze. Then faster, then a swivvle, a turn. Then still. All above the pond. Its wings were splayed as if for flight, but they were not flapping. Its black beak was open but was silent, not squawking. An amazing sight I wandered towards than morning – how did it do that? – why? – and then I spied the fishing line.

A mistake, slung by clowning children perhaps? Either way, slung too far; caught on the branch of the tree that overhangs the pond, and just left there. An invisible slice of wire, sharp as razor, a tight little line of death above the pond. The crow had severed its neck on it, the crow must have flown right into it, everything totally stopped in just one second. Horrible thing, I watched it for a while, suspended like a piece of lifeless plastic art in some contemporary exhibition – before heading off to scan the headlines about terrorism and football.

24.3

2004-10-29T17:38:00.000+01:00

Perhaps you would not like some nasty story, out of the blue and just like that.

Instead, there is my new housemate. A friend of Alexa’s from Greece called Dimitrios. He tells his Grandma that he only applies for jobs on Wednesday. Wednesday is his lucky day of the week. She told him so in the letter which flew-over with a bundle of food. Dabbing olive oil with bread and picking at feta and tomatoes (with a sprinkling of oregano) he sits around stoned a lot while we beat him at cards.

24.4

2004-10-29T17:36:00.001+01:00

Get it while it’s hot! When the man in the Indian takeaway shakes your hand, when the guy in the fallafel place stops you in the street to say hi, when the Chinese boy not only knows your name but you also know what Universities he’s applying to and why, when you can’t recall the time you did a weekly shop, it’s definitely time to get back to the gym and get on a diet. (I must have thought that first a month ago; perhaps when passing by the pizza place with the police sign outside it – the one asking for witnesses to the murder of the delivery biker to come forward.)

24.5

2004-10-29T17:36:00.000+01:00

Another tale? Perhaps I have been avoiding something.

I had not seen my uncle for six years until six weeks ago. Slimmer than before, dapper, too, and no longer smoking. I know this about him:

As a boy, he once threw his younger brother into a canal. And he once in the backgarden tied his younger brother up, neck to foot, in rope. And then prodded my father’s shoulder ever so gently – just to watch him fall, ever so slowly, and ever so inevitably. Then he left school, an unqualified bully, and joined the merchant navy. He cooked all over the oceans of the world, fighting and screwing in how many ports. At some point he ended up living again on the south coast of England. Marriage, two kids, a job doing computers at the local Coastguard centre. Even after she left him and the kids moved away, I think he was happy: canoeing to work, windsurfing at lunch, the sheer fact of the beach, visiting relatives on the weekend. Lots of romantic dalliances: He has a photo album of different bikini-clad, posing women that proves it.

And what has happened in the last six years? His job moved to the regional HQ miles away: now he catches the train, now he wears a pin-stripe, now he sits in a grey cubicle, now he battles a war of attrition with clueless IT guys and a distant, sluggish management. On the day he became a grandfather a few years ago, he saw in a little burst of excitement and happiness that he had been depressed for so long a time. (Perhaps from before his brother’s death, even.) Before the birth he had watched TV only for the majesty in nature documentaries, which he stored on a library of videotapes. Now he watched for clues... He decided upon a diet to help him out... Eventually, he picked up the phone to the family whose Christmas cards he’d not replied to for years. And he realised he had to end his latest romance: Beth, all garden centres and weekend papers, made him feel old. And cigarettes had to go: he needed his lungs back to start windsurfing again. And...

And there he sat in mother’s lounge, spouting off about office frustrations half-amused, half telling himself not to take it seriously. There he sat, alert and jovial, advocating a life of fruit and vegetables (except potatoes) and fish and sea sports, like a pastor at peace in the little garden that was all his own idea. Youth once more? The return of spring? That must be some kind of victory for a man nearing sixty, so long tossed around uncertainly on changeful seas. At last, at last, a home of sorts – little, but as solid as a continent. Either that, or some kind of comment about the confusions of this world: that the elixir of knowing what to wish for, and knowing how to make it work, took all of this time.

24.6

2004-10-29T17:33:00.000+01:00

Perhaps it was last week or the week before. I was sat in a quiet hotel bar, hoping Katy wouldn’t return from the loo for a little while longer. A guest has a conversation with the barman. Football flickers in the background. A porter passes through. In the corner, someone flips through a foreign newspaper.

We had been talking, talking, talking, about everything that had happened. Already a second bottle was waiting, sat breathing on the table. I wanted to work out what to say next, how to make something of what happened, how to conjure hurt into meaning, how to make sense of it all. I didn't do so, and neither does this.

Anyway, we had gone over much of it already. This is what had happened:

After her Spanish holiday, Katy had returned immersed in tales of woe.

A restaurant: Pamela had made them wait for an hour for an al fresco table. Outside at last, and it started raining. Then the rabbit was disgusting... A bar on the second night: some guy had been chatting them up and Katy told Pamela she wasn’t interested. Pamela disappears for ages to take a phone call, explaining she thought Katy was really interested... Then there were the phone calls. Pamela to her fiance: she couldn’t wait to see him. She missed him so. The holiday was great, although they kept getting so much attention from men. Tell me you love me? Pamela to the guy she’s having an affair with: she couldn’t wait to fuck him again. Katy was here, she’s seen a photo, thinks you look hot. Yeah, we should all meet up... Pamela eating: cramming as much as possible as fast as possible into her enormous body. Pamela walking: slow, cumbersome, sweaty, breathing hard – let’s call at taxi. I know it’s only five minutes but it’s my holiday and if I want a taxi –... Pamela complaining: she could do with some cocaine. What was wrong with these Spanish people? Did no-one know where to find it? And what did Katy mean, she didn’t want to try the next bar because it was two in the morning? Katy better not forget they were here to have fun, and just who had paid for this holiday, afterall: yes, her, Pamela, who right now was thinking about going home early on the next flight because of all this... Spain, Katy told me: never again. And Pamela: not for a long while.

Katy had told these tales for weeks. Countless friends had listened to the lists of grotesquiries. Most had found it funny. Some, afterwards, had admitted it was strange to hear Katy being so mean. Katy was never like that. They were a shallow victory for me, her recent ex: told you Pamela was no good. Those weeks after the holiday ... There was that week-long argument. Katy came home and used some ex for sex, and told me about it as if confessing and apologising all at once. “Adam, don’t go mad.” “It’s not big deal,” I told her. “You’ve been like that since I’ve known you and we’ve split up. So what if you’re promiscuous?” And in the week that followed, I got dictionary definitions of promiscuous, I got the one opinion of her million friends emailed to me (along with a internet forum discussion,) a detailed itinerary of her sexual decisions, what a casual use of one little word said about me. An apology or a change of subject was never good enough.

It was toward the end of work on a Tuesday when the gasping phone call came through. Katy had sent me an email earlier that day: we were meeting up on Friday, and she had something serious she wanted to tell me. It was about the holiday in Spain, but something different to before. “Adam!” she said on the phone. “What’s wrong Katy?” “It’s Pamela. She wants to see me again. I can’t!” “Why? What’s wrong?” “I’ll tell you on Friday. I can’t breathe!” “Please, tell me what it is.” “No – but you’re so busy this week – and I know you have plans – Friday – I –” “Tell me now.”

Soon, prowling up and down the tube platform, I thought of those with such directionless anger they push strangers onto the track; I thought of the relentless burning rage of animals primed for fighting who are kept in cages. “Sexual assault!” The phrase pounded through my skull like banging blood. Soon, Katy was opening her door to me, teetering there with a beer in her hand, her pale face wearing a ridiculous grin – forced and false like a clown’s, or like that of a child caught being naughty, and who can plead only with the charm of their face for forgiveness.

Soon, the story. How on that first night in Spain, Pamela and her had been out getting drunk. They’d gone back to their room, to yatter about sex under the covers in dim light and comfort. Pamela had been telling Katy about this new guy: Extremely good in bed, and what an appetite! What fun. He’d be up for a threesome, you know. O, revealed Katy, she had a threesome once! A mistake to say that, she knew as she said it.

Pamela wanted a threesome with her guy, Pamela said. And he knew all about Katy; he’d be up for Katy. If Katy had had one before, she should try it again. Pamela was her friend, a good friend (heck, she’d done her a big favour in paying for this holiday!) – and what’s wrong with them, anyway? It’d be fun. Didn’t she find the thought a turn-on? Come here; let’s try something now. Go on. We’re friends, aren’t we! Do me a favour.

On, on it went; Katy saying no, Katy trying to sleep, Katy trying not to upset Pamela, on it went. Drunk at the edge of control, tired at the edge of indeciveness, Katy told me after what she had thought at the moment she gave in to the bullying, at the moment Pamela’s face was kissing her, as her hands were moved to Pamela’s breasts, as Pamela’s fingers jammed inside of her: When will this end? I can’t ever tell Adam. You have to forget this.

We were out on the balcony, shivering, exhausted and huddled together. The sun had set over Notting Hill. The street was bustling with people still, interuped by the occasional siren. Of course I moved my hand over her hair, fondled through it, stroked at her cheeks; of course I kissed her on her forehead, wrapped my arms around her; of course I put my hand on her shoulder, gripped her; she moved toward me. Kissed me a little. Then more. In bed before sex: “I know what this is Katy, and I know what this isn’t.” The morning after: cold, and not a second of eye-contact before rushing off. I watched her march away. Who would have thought she had the ghost of a monster drifting beside her? Its chill wisps about her body, swirling, encircling, unseverable.

After that, Katy managed to write Pamela two letters, telling her what she had done, and why the friendship was over: She didn’t miss out fitful sleeping, she didn’t miss out that she wanted revenge, that she couldn’t stand the thought of Pamela, and wouldn’t care if she died tomorrow. I told my friends this seemed to bring Katy to terms with it; that after sending them, after dealing with Pamela’s one call, Katy was less hateful; down, true, but more like her old self.

When Katy returned from the loo, we talked some more about how I’d gotten that wrong. The memories that came from nowhere; daggers in the darkness stabbing suddenly. The questions that swirled: why her? Was it even assault, or rape, words she used that slice through the air like a sword?

Katy had never thought one of her friends could do what Pamela did – and if Katy had insisted no, they may still be friends. Katy – a beautiful 28 year old secretary who had drifted from New Zealand to London via Scotland and partying and endless drugs and casual-sex and a-marriage-for-a-passport and friendships sprouting everywhere like flowers – had never supposed that she could be thrown like a little girl with a delightful smile from such a carousel onto a slice of such spikey railings.

The lifts at the tube station were not working. We clamoured down the bare metal staircase, spiralling into the grimy tube tunnels beneath London, entering the innards of a vast, indifferent mechanical beast together. “You missed something funny back at the hotel, when you were in the loo,” I tell her.

It was the sort of little moment that could have made a little blog entry a while ago – had my mood had been different; the sort of instant dotted through the city and its years, like a trail of sweets across some dark forest floor.

“One of the guests came in to speak to the barman. They’d obviously gotten to know each other a bit during his stay. He came in to say goodbye – it was his second to last day staying there, he said.”

“Right,” said Katy, turning with a smile for the punch-line.

“And the barman looked at him and asked, ‘so when is your last day?’” I could remember clearly the dumbfounded look of the guest; the vacant stillness of the barman’s waiting face.

Katy laughed. “What did the guest say?”

“There was a pause. He said, ‘Tomorrow.’ Another pause. Then the barman said, ‘O.’ That was it. They shook hands, and the guest departed.”

Different directions on the tube at the bottom of the staircase. I tell her we’ll talk later in the week, I’m here for her, call me if and when she wants, she’ll be ok – the ordinary things of friendship, for all that it is worth in this world.

22

2004-08-26T10:13:00.000+01:00

Her hands caress my satsumas. Toying with them slowly, painfully slowly. Finally, finally, the sultry young woman places them onto the cold, hard metal.

"Say something," I think. "You've been waiting fifteen minutes for this moment. Tell her this is wrong. And that it's always, always, like this."

"Shout," I tell myself, "shout that there's ten of us waiting, here in a line, just for her. Ten of us. And what did that other woman do? We saw her come out, wanted her help like a goddess. But rather than rescue us, she fiddled about with the flowers. Fifteen minutes! Ten of us! Flowers! Fifteen minutes!"

"Sorry about the wait," she says suddenly, flashing me a look. Such a pretty face!

"O," I answer with an automatic smile. "No problem at all!"

I pass by the line of shoppers on the way out. Women, flicking through magazines, or fiddling with a mobile phone. Men, fuming like volcanoes, muttering, muttering. A few give me a look, as if to ask, why didn't he say something? What's he got to smile about? And I answer to myself, lovely satsumas!

21

2004-08-24T17:00:00.000+01:00

I'm not evil, am I?

This morning: the usual street from the tube to the office - but a blind man ahead, tap-tap-tap with his walking stick - and ahead of him - some metal barriers - stacked up from a recent whatever - and him heading straight for it - and me beside him or almost beside him - and coming up to the stack - tap, tap, tap - almost there - should I say something? I don't, the stick flicks them just in time, his body stops, shudders, shakes, his mouth gasping open as bolts of fear and horror thunder through his frame.

I'm a good person, right?

The other night: dawdling up to the tube entrance, not far now, jolly with cava, thinking back to some clever joke or whatever, and goodness! Look at that homeless man. Slumped against the entrance railings like he's lost the will to live. Should give him some change. Once in a while, it doesn't hurt. Have a bit from the pizza we ordered. Get it ready - here he is now ... and he's not a man at all, but a black rubbish bag.

Now, the end of another day in the same office. Papers shuffled about, taking turns for coffee, filing a few things, nothing in the post. Outside this orderly world, the chaos of city streets, and everyday mistakes waiting to pounce. Nothing to measure the ancient simplicities of good and evil with, as I post my blog, turn off my PC, take my umbrella from the back of the door, and head for home unwitnessed, just like most days from these weeks, these months, these years.

19

2004-08-17T11:16:00.000+01:00

Dr Freud: not needed to explain this dream.

An office: papers strewn about like rocks, and a silence like a still desert night. Faces flood to the door. Hands – that are free, that know not torture, know not slavery – welcome them in, usher them in, like a butler his master.

These hands, these hands.

The hum of the chatter sweeps in, like a sea over harbour sand. Each swollen swirl of mouth is a whirlpool – spreading sound like steam, clattering together like clowns, blind like brass instruments – blaring – blurting – and an orchestra of out-of-tune trombones marches through sleep and into the morning.

New job: needed.

18

2004-08-13T17:15:00.000+01:00

With every second sheet the machine jamming, with the machine exhaling a constant, hell-like heat, with sweat flooding out, with empty boxes getting kicked into pieces, with passer-by’s getting scowls, this morning in the photocopying room defined rage. And only a few days back. Friday 13th. Rage.

O (I managed to think, in the odd moment of calm) – to be resting once again in the graveyard, the ancient little graveyard at the end of my street. To be lounging across the faded tomb – the tomb of Joseph Mitchell or Milosz, I have half-guessed-half-decided – and in the spread of summer heat that hint of a breeze – a breeze whispering its shushes in the leaves floating above – the flux of the leaves filtering the sun – the sun a sparkling flow of a patchwork light – woomph, whir, hum – and that stammer of bleeps again. Paper stuck. Section D. Please open...

O (I managed to think, in the odd moment of grace) – but think of the others in that graveyard, the bones of the dead, returned to the earth, think of those under the tombs, not above them, their times of trouble, love, work, family, fun, sex – everything totally gone for eternity. Or, even, think of those above them – the drunks wandering about the grounds, searching for a drink, for a bed, for cash, for a friend, for the soul they somewhere lost, even – as unenviable as the dead.

But try not to think of the kids playing football – whose fashions and speech are a mystery, of all the freedoms they hardly know they have, of all their futures waiting, futures to be half-found by them and half-forged by them, of their relentless energy and hormones, of all the unfucked dots of virgin cunts waiting just for them, pulsing and waiting under the skirts of teenage girls – girls cooing at them from the benches. And no machine to dirty, to darken their innocent hands with its squirt of black ink.

O (I managed to think, in a moment like a dream) – picture the roses, picture the rose beds in the graveyard, the roses fed by the soil and the dead below them, the rose with its layers of red, purple-red folds, perfect fold upon perfect, purple-red fold, spiralling to the minute dot of their centre, the source of their flowering, and the little sigh of their scent. O, to live in a dream of a rose – a symbol of the female genitalia – as mysterious and luscious as no name can capture.

The drunks in the graveyard, living in their alcoholic dreams, still have bodies that need to piss. One, a big guy in his mid-30s and always track-suited, has a favourite spot amongst a bed of roses. Hidden from the road, trees behind it, with a view of the rest of us, there at a rose he adds to the world a stench from himself, a poison.

Someone walking past him, someone trying not to watch him, someone smelling the rose in ignorance after he’s gone – that someone might have felt annoyed, angry, something approaching rage, even. Or, perhaps, they might have sensed the symbol of a sad collision. A collision of the perfect world that can flower eternally only in the forms of a dream, colliding with the world and its moments that march machine-like on – stuttering or not – the space-spun world that is always turning, always tumbling; sensed how ideas alive behind eyelids drown in a flood of cold facts. Then caught between two realms are human hands – hands that are praying, sweating, groping, to make work the tools of this world, to find good use for the tools of this world, perhaps.

(But don’t forget the human feet, that almost kicked the life out of a photocopier, this ordinary morning.)

17

2004-08-11T13:53:00.000+01:00

The smell of smoke in my school uniform, love-bites, alcohol on my breath, bags of marijuana, drug-dotted eyes, phone calls to this or that girl - and her noises later in the conservatory, badly-written books praising like a god the psychedelic-self, alcohol in my stride: surely, days of having something naughty to hide from my Mum were long gone?

On Saturday afternoon, I arrived at the train station back home waking from a doze, vague about what happened the night before. Why was my tongue hurting even more than my stomach or head? Why had I stunk, really stunk, of booze this morning? What exactly had happened last night? There in the toilets, I inspected my mouth. And there it was, about half-a-millimetre long, something between a scab and a cut. Queenie! She had bitten my tongue! That was right! And chucked a drink on me! For no reason! Surely, days of giggling about drunken escapades were long gone, too?

Back home, Mum started filling me in on all the neighbourly news. Teenage pregnancies and divorces mostly, one kid going off the rails with drugs, two deaths from old-age, some child and the grades he needs for University. "What are you smiling about?" she asked, out of the blue. A shrug of the shoulder, a noise meaning "dunno" - all with my mouth shut. "You're strangely quiet Adam." Just a bit tired, I explained, through thinly opened lips, stifling a smile at how ludicrous I must seem to be.

Eventually, it's time for the usual, inescapable video: the hospital drama she watches religiously once a week, and has nearly all of taped, too. I tried suggesting a game of something instead, but that's never interested Mum. "You'll love it if you just give it a proper go, Adam," came the usual plead. "This episode is a classic."

"What's that?" she says, about the book with me.

"Walt Whitman? A poetic celebration of America's unique vitality?" she said, echoing the back cover. "Shows what he knew!"

Then she remembers that she saw that Johnny earlier, who I went to school with. I could do with someone to whitter on to about Queenie. How she used to work with me, there was always this tension, but I didn't bother - other people were around then and she knew it. Until last night, that was. In fact, I thought, I may as well chuck in Katy, Cath, Molly, Kat; can't have seen Johnny for over a year.

Johnny, as it turns out, was as keen as me to escape to the pub. On the walk up the hill to The Churchill, he lights a spliff. "Want a toke?" he offered after a few pulls.

"I thought those days of this stuff were long gone," I said while deciding. "But heh, why not?" Something else to hide.

"Damn," I spluttered, passing it back, "is that stuff strong or am I light-weight?"

"Both," says Johnny.

The pub is a strange place. Photos of Churchill and World War Two victory parades everywhere, bearing down on us. Quiet for a Saturday night. Too hot for most people to bother. Big leather seats. A fruit machine, silent, flashing, unplayed. A few men drifting about with tattoos and football shirts. We sit near a couple of girls who are finishing their huge meal, and catch up with gossip about school mates.

I remember one piece particularly because of the effect it had on Johnny after he'd finished telling it. I'd asked Johnny what he was doing now, how the lovelife was, and so on. "Still top secret stuff in military intelligence." Exciting? "You don't want exciting. Take old Bradley. You remember Bradley?" I lie and say I do, to keep the story shorter. For some reason, I was considering asking the prettier of the girls if her meal was nice.

"Police officer, old Bradley. On the beat. Complained for the first two weeks that the job wasn't exciting. One day, he's walking along. In front of him, a doddery old geezer with a walking stick stepped out in the road. Same time, car charging along same road, doing fifty in a thirty. Hits the old guy around the kneecap. Didn't break it, didn't bend it, didn't twist it. Sheared his lower leg right off. Sliced it. That's what that kind of speed can do. Bradley runs up, tries to save him. Within minutes - minutes - the old boy has bled pints. No chance. Gone. Dead. Bradley's loved the quiet life since, when he can get it. No more complaints about excitement, oh no."

The girl to my left with her unfinished chips, who was becoming astoundingly attractive, flinched, shifted away a touch. Winston stared on. Two guys arm-wrestled. Should have stuck with the hospital drama. The beer seemed to taste funny. And amidst all this vaguely spinning stuff, Johnny started opening up about his personal life. The affair he's been having with Jackie, his bosses wife. His boss who just got back from the middle east. How she ought, really ought, to leave that bastard James for Johnny. As the hint of a tear glinted out from the corner of Johnny's eye, it struck me as hilarious that all their names begin with J. Damn spliff. Something else to hide from someone else.

The pretty girl to my left, seemingly the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, while toying with a chip, was talking with her plump friend. Telling her not to worry about men. Especially if she would lose some weight, she was sure men would flock to her. Telling her they were only seventeen anyway. That she didn't have to worry about getting married and having babies, not just yet. Really, she didn't. She was sure she wouldn't end up alone. Telling her that she didn't mind having this conversation again, but why don't they talk about diets instead? Or applying to university? She really should, didn't she think? Well, mighten she warm to the idea as the year goes on -

- and "What do you think of the plan?" asks Johnny.

"The plan?"

"Yeah. To get Jackie. I can see that little half-battered brain of yours whirring away. What do you think?"

"Hmm." Nothing I can say, of course.

"Maybe that girl next to you," stated Johnny. "What do you think?"

"Maybe," I muttered, trying to hide my total lack of listening. "What do you think?"

"I think when Jackie sees me in the club, with her there with James, and me there with some bird on my arm, that bird I mean," hushing his voice. "And when Jackie can't do anything about it, and when I'm with that fit bird and she looks really up for it - Jackie'll go home and know she has to leave James. She'll feel exactly what I feel. She'll see me exactly as I see her. With someone else who's wrong. And I think the girl next to you is perfect. What do you think?"

That it's madness. And what I said was, "You know how in those computer games we used to play, you'd get more and more powerful weapons to use as the game went on, but gradually?"

"Yeah."

"You're going from pistol straight to bazooka." Johnny gives me a doubtful look. "Maybe try talking to her, and giving her time. She is married, you know."

"Yeah," said Johnny. "But I haven't had sex for two weeks." He looks sheepish.

I change the subject, kind of, and show Johnny my tongue.

"What happened to that?"

"I got bit last night, kissing this woman I used to work with. Very drunk. But I think she did it on purpose. I'm seeing her next week for her birthday anyway, I'll ask her then. I don't really remember."

"London," summarized Johnny. "Full of freaks. Never fancied it myself."

Later we get chatting to the two girls. Or rather Johnny does, mostly about being in the army. Looking at the perfect one, I conjure up the vague idea that I want to tell the plump one - the one worried about ever finding a man to make a family with, the one not sure whether she should go to university or not - that she is but a child on a hillside, staring over the valley of her future, staring over from her childhood home at the hillside on the otherside, staring over trying to see her future family home, dreaming that a man will come to fly her over the valley and straight to the hillside on the otherside - and that she should instead be readying herself for the valley, readying herself for lectures and parties and clubs and travels and jobs, readying herself by not staring over at otherside of the valley, and not by raiding the cupboards of her current, childhood home, but by preparing for the path through it, the path through the valley with all its sexual freedom and new friends and different places and whatever she wants - from which she will find what to take with her and make a new home with on the otherside, there on that future hillside home, and what she will leave be in the valley. And of course, in the valley she'll find men, lots more men, interesting men, different men. My head spins more. Have I been staring at the pretty girl too much? She sharply announced her boyfriend was driving up to meet them, soon. Night fell. A stumble home. Another spliff. A fall. A graze. Something else to hide.

Strange to be stoned again, ending up back in the bedroom of my boyhood. Ancient music magazines, faded photos, a few certificates, old tapes, the odd scrapbook, and a couple of games, dotted about. Life in London sits in a valley miles away, with its chaotic swirls of people and lights, and as flecked with human pollution and confusion as anywhere is. I look at my green, adult face in the mirror. The face that has been skiving work to play on the internet as if it mattered no more than a dull day at school. The face that has been playing around with women as if they made up a hand in a children's game of cards, and the prize no more meaningful than a payment of matches. And surely I am not just another card in the pack, being shuffled around randomly, getting dealt into arbitrary hands? With currencies and fires flickering around me without a care in the world? Surely this is just the drugs talking their tedious nonsense? Through the wall came snores, seemingly in agreement.

16

2004-08-06T16:39:00.000+01:00

I have spent this morning lying in a graveyard and mostly thinking, Whose bright idea was this? A week’s holiday at home. Or rather, a week’s holiday spent lounging about London. Doing the touristy stuff. Seeing the sights, dancing under the lights. Lunching out, catching up. Or something...

Omens were there at Katy’s little gathering, perhaps, the only major thing I’ve done this week. Funny how someone you think you know comes across differently when she’s amongst her other friends.

First off, there was Ewan. An actor! Great. But not acting in anything right now? Some work soon though? Yes. Great! What’s that? It’s work in a call-centre. O... another temp grandly declaring themselves an Actor, announcing the word Actor as though the essence of their being shone out from that word, that word a beam from a lighthouse across the choppy ocean of low-wage London jobs, announcing to the ship of their future the port of the stage is theirs, just sail in the right direction, faith in the breeze will bring you home. Good luck, I tell him of course, when he tells me about some audition for some course in Poland he’s got coming up. But I don’t really mean it. Anyone who’s worked in the lower levels of an open-plan office here has seen Actors drifting into the slavedom of middle-age administrative assistance, heard them preparing their excuses for their resignation from the stage, for their retirement from treading the boards, sometimes even disappearing to teach kids, kids who at least might remember that last insane piece of physical theatre without laughter or boredom.

“I’m so glad you chatted with Ewan!” Katy says much later, who usually spots when I’m weary or unimpressed before I do. “He’s an actor, you know.” I answer, “No, he’s not.” The smile falls from her face and she looks over my shoulder. Stood right behind me. But I tell myself he didn’t hear that, as he shakes with a hard squeeze my hand goodnight, and goodbye.

Second, Pamela. Enormous her body spreading out over three-quarters of the two-seater sofa, even disguised in that cascade of loose, flowing black clothes. “Got any coke?” she asks me. “Cola?” I say. “Are you joking with me about cocaine?” she snaps. “Obviously not very successfully,” I answer. Silence. “I don’t have cocaine, no.” Pamela turns to Katy, and asks her. “You could try Clay over the road,” says Katy. “Forget it,” says Pamela. What happens next vaguely mystifies me. Katy – funny as anyone Katy, not giving a crap about meaningless crap Katy, easygoing Katy – is so very, very sincerely impressed by Pamela’s new ring. By Pamela’s recent raise and how much she earns as a script-editor for BBC dramas now. By Pamela’s seven hundred pound handbag. Perhaps it’s gratitude, because Pamela is treating Katy to a break in Barcelona soon. “Getting a Pepsi,” I say, and on my return I sit elsewhere.

I sit, in fact, next to Ian. As we chat, I watch Katy moving amongst her friends. Making flirty, nervous puns with Hilary about that threesome we had back in April (which I didn’t think that Katy really liked), glancing over at me and Ian. Gazing impressed at Julian as he waffles on about Philosophy and then some Activism website. I sense a bad mood rising and don’t know why. Time to get to know Ian.

Ian, as it turns out, is new to London. He took a photography degree and tried to make it in his home town. A few exhibitions here, a bit of sponsorship, a few commissioned pieces there. His home-life sounded similar to mine – keeping from school just a few close friends, whilst laying low and letting the mass get on with their fighting, failing and fucking. And eventually, to London! London and its great galleries, London, its millions and its mystery, its mess and its majesty. Or, kind of: in fact, to London to work for a magazine for lads, the sort stuffed with interviews with the wilder of the football and film stars, asking them about birds and boozing, stuffed with pictures of girls in underwear dishing out their wisdom on the subject of the best sex in the world – and at the grand age of twenty-two, no less, stuffed with ludicrous adverts for razors, aftershaves, and body-building feed.

Ian says he’ll get back to proper photography soon, as he shows me some of his work in the magazine. Odd to think, as I look at the woman with her breasts blurting out of her blouse while she eats a curry, that metres away from her stands the guy sat next to me, who is wearing a Rolling Stones t-shirt and denim, and who has long, lank black hair, under which his pretty, nervous face is talking wistfully about the photos he used to take of his home town, of the canals and shoppers, photos of the fights outside the night clubs, of the struggles of local shops and provincial lives, of his home town, where with such false-confidence the fists of adolescent boys grope for wads of such bold, brightly coloured pages, and pay his wage while elsewhere, he forgets about them and rolls himself a spliff.

The conversation stops as someone very drunk announces they want to play a game. It goes like this. Someone picks three people, and you have to decide who you’d have a dirty weekend with, who you’d marry, who you’d kill. Katy kills Stephen Hawking in order to have a dirty weekend with Bruce Forsyth and marry Prince Charles. And so on. Eventually it occurs to someone to play the game with the people in the room. I get to marry Hilary, suffer a dirty weekend with Pamela, and Katy kills me. For my part, I kill them all and use my hand. “Play serious, Adam! We all are,” says Pamela, and I feel nauseous.

That was my excuse to leave to the rest of my unsatisfying holiday. Did I spend this morning mostly thinking, Whose bright idea was this? Or have I more been trying to work out why I like this graveyard so much? Or plotting about the drinks with Queenie tonight? Or deciding whether Saturday and Sunday in the country is a good idea? I don’t recall. Insubstantial thoughts swirl about like the drifting wisps from cigarettes, that disappear into the drunken dark of a party night. Perhaps I spent this morning mostly staring up at the planes – ants crawling across a bright blue surface. Little dots departing, their smoke-trails crossing, then darting apart and away so distantly. One of them containing Katy and Pamela. Off to Barcelona. One of them containing Katy, Katy whom I suppose for a week or so I have been wishing safe journey, bon voyage, adios, goodbye.

15

2004-08-06T16:31:00.000+01:00

“I know where we can shelter,” said my buddy and IT guy Chris after coffee, as the storm caught us, unleashing its dark horde of rain, and gusts of wind assaulted the coherence of umbrellas. “The internet.” A sprint and a phone call later, and I’m stood outside a huge building at the corner of a street. No door, no sign, no windows, no name. Just mirrors, a whole building made of mirrors, floor to roof, showing a city under water, with water pouring down them.

One of the mirror-panels has a line running down the middle of it, and a small panel to its side. Chris waves a card over the panel. It opens to reveal a pad. Chris puts his hand on the pad, and the pad flashes green. We push through the door and escape the rain.

Inside is a reception area. No-one is here. No papers on the desk, not files on the shelves. The draws are empty. A silver chair sits behind a silver desk. A telephone crouches on the desk in silence. Two chairs the other side of the desk wait indefinitely. The number “3” is projected on to the wall at the far end of the room, above a lift. The clank of our umbrellas as we hook them round the coat stand is shocking, like something clinking on a Church floor during prayer. Then, again just electricity quietly humming its monotonous song.

“Rare that anyone is ever here,” says Chris.

Another scan of Chris’s hand, and into the lift, a silver cube with four buttons. Up to the second floor. Outside, a corridor. The first door. Another scan. In we go. And there it is – stacked on rows and rows of grey shelves, from ceiling to floor, from left to right the width of the big building – the internet. Little lights are everywhere flashing on and off, endless the hum of electricity, and the faint sound of our human breath.

“We own eight of the shelves,” says Chris. “A fraction of a fraction.”

Strange now, to be typing on an internet page, knowing it is somewhere coded as little flashes of light on boards on shelves, surrounded by mirrors and not quite silent, and immune to rain and lightening. Strange to think of this lumped along with the terrible porn and high-class art-nudes, with the important news and the chatter about Buffy, with bloggers crying out for love and bloggers hitting out with cries, the political pages boiling over with hateful howls and the photo-albums of kittens, with film reviews and first schools, with... with what I know and what I don’t know. Amidst all that stuff existing in unpeopled rooms. Never to be summed as one, never to mean one thing to all people. And of course, whoever you are, you have flicked a few lights amidst those miles of electricity to bring you arbitrarily here, to pass your human eye over a story about sheltering from the rain that happened a couple of days ago, and then to go on, into the unknown, elsewhere.

14

2004-07-30T10:19:00.000+01:00

Was it really a year ago today, that first kiss with Katy? Meeting after work in a dusty bar, chattering on about this-that-and-the-other, later stumbling out of a restaurant door into the late July humidity - and her lips open in that huge smile, and her head so giggly and a touch wobbly - and the heat of it all - and those long, looping ringlets of her hair, my hand lost amongst them, as I kiss and kiss her - right there on that random street?

Or was it a year ago today that she sent me that email, explaining she'd just come out of a relationship ... bad timing ... the word 'friends' cropping up about twice a sentence?

Perhaps it was even six months ago today that we met up, as we had been doing for half a year, buddies sharing pizza and gossip, when right in the middle of nothing in particular, she leant over the table, took my face in her hands, pushed back my hair, and shut her eyes and kissed me, all out of the blue?

It was definitely today, just now, that she sent me an email inviting me to a gathering for a few of her friends, over at her place, tomorrow night. Aim for 8, ish. Earlier, if you like, Adam. And bring a bottle. Or two.

Today, a year forward from today? Who knows. Full of emails and fleeting memories? All this with Katy as distant as a dream, left for dead in the morning duvet, as the door slams behind me and off I go to work? Or something else entirely different?

13

2004-07-28T10:28:00.000+01:00

Scribbling in the diary on her lap, black scraggly hair, black skirt and grey jumper, as plain and formal as a school uniform, mid-30s, pale skin hung on jutting bones, steel-rimmed spectacles: Librarian, perhaps? That, or else it was a dead shrub that was taking the tube this morning.

As I sat down next to her, she was writing: "... Simon round again last night. Sat with M. & I; F. in the shop still. An hour or so. Tea. Why does he? To talk about the weather. Politics, work, school days. Then the gift as he said goodbye: chocolates. Awful. And that little touch on my elbow" - or pretty much. Then, later in the journey, as I remember it: "J. back from holiday today. Wonder how it'll have been. What photos there will be: him and that wife. Tenerife! What he'll say about the project. Done everything he wanted. J.'ll read it all today."

Next: "Ugly, strange man, reading (with an erection I think) you - my diary. Here on the tube. Over my shoulder this very minute. Have to stop writing you now."

And in a split second, I had blurted out: "I don't have an erection!" After which, an entire carriage of staring, unspeaking heads turned - pretty much in unison - to look at me. Heat flooded through my face. The woman next to me fixed her stare straight ahead, as if frozen.

As I left my journey early at the next station, I saw the man sat the other side of her. He had a slick of unwashed hair; jowly, booze-reddened features ... and a hand, deep in the pocket of baggy tracksuit bottoms. Good morning, London? Good morning, world?

12

2004-07-26T11:03:00.000+01:00

Late last night.

Scampering down the steps at Notting Hill Gate tube - to find the last Piccadilly line train gone. Back to Katy's? Or try my luck on the Hammersmith & City - chancing the change at King's Cross? Damn Katy, all let's-be-friends- but, oh! -you-can-stay-if-you-like.

Stomping down to the platform, there’s just one drunk guy sat there, stuffing two burgers into his face. A bad sign. "Know when the next one is?" I ask him. He makes some noises approximating "no". A bit of bun falls from his mouth. A minute goes past. And another. Katy is a text message then a ten minute walk away... One more minute. One more.

And then it comes. And it would crawl round the track. And it would stop for no reason in the middle of the tunnels. It staggers into King's Cross, eventually. Out I rush. One of the tube staff is resting by a barrier. I ask the plump, aging man if it's too late to get north.

"You'd be lucky!" he says. He takes a deep, sighing breath. Then: "'course in the old days, 'fore all this PPP lark - 'fore all these diff'rent companies running all the diff'rent lines - we'd make sure all the last trains waited for one another. If you got on one, you got home, awright. Not any more," he says, shaking his head sagely, pleased with his little speech. "Sorry mate." Damn him. Damn the tube and PPP, London, Katy, the entire universe. "What line you after, anyway?" he asks.

"Victoria, Piccadilly, or Northern," I blurt out.

"Oh yeah," he says. "They're still going awright. No problems there sunshine. Lucky you." And those are the only three lines that do go north from King's Cross, incidentally.

... and then this morning, I woke feeling as blank as nothing. I wish I could remember what I dreamt about, and whether the mood was loving, insane, hilarious, or murderous, whether I felt lucky, or unlucky.

11

2004-07-25T13:38:00.000+01:00

Into the poverty of a Saturday afternoon in Portsmouth. The train shudders to a stop. Uncle Richard is staring at the floor, waiting for me there on the platform. A cigarette lolls on his lip, dots of ash and smoke dropping off and drifting away. Up on the hill behind us, he lives with his wife, evil Auntie Anna who is dying.

"Not good, she's not good at all," he manages to say on the drive up. "But, pleased to see you though, that she will be," he stutters on. In goes a home-made mix-tape of soul classics. "Over the moon, over the moon." I ask him if Jeff or James have been down. "No." Got in contact? Richard shakes his head. And for the rest of the journey, he bites his lip shut so very tightly.

Flowers bloom, as organized as ever at the corners and the borders of the tidy lawn. Here orange, yellow marigolds, there blood red roses, and then the purple punk-heads of giant thistles. But the gloomy hallway is cluttered. Canisters of oxygen. Piles of out-of-date glossy TV magazines. A heap of supermarket bags, tied up, full with rubbish. "Had to let a few things slide," says Richard. As I edge passed it all and onto the lounge, the Darth Vader breathing noises grow louder. I stop myself from saying something stupid.

I go in. Odd that I can still remember Anna, glitter in her hair, dancing away in this room, Stevie Wonder singing from the stereo. Christmas day, fifteen years back, maybe twenty. All presents and crackers and feasting and music and fun. "Hello, Addy," she gasps, clasping a tube to her lips, a big white floppy cricket hat hanging over her scalp.

I'm sure she does not know that she was evil. That she does not think back to that one day when, out of the blue, bored of marriage to Tom, the boys getting more and more difficult, there at the end of her road, a man cruised up on a motorcycle. She does not think back to how, on a whim, she sauntered up to him, and asked Richard for a cigarette. Nor roaring out of town, a week later in the middle of the night, there on the back of his bike.

She knows that Jeff and James don't visit. But she does not know that my cousins - her sons - still call her wicked. Evil, for leaving them with Tom, Tom sipping his whiskey, Tom slumped silent on the sofa, night after night, year after year. Evil for not even leaving an address, a phone number. Nor does she know that she is a Grandmother, now. Or that we have all been told to keep such secrets.

She does know that she is cold. That it tires to breathe. That she wants a cigarette. Richard lights one for himself over on the sofa, having brought me a cup of tea. And for wisdom, she knows two things. "Life, youth - enjoy it while you can. Smoking, don't start." Amazing that she can conjure enough breath, just about, to say that to me. I can't think of how to reply, and turn to Richard, ask him how work at the Travel Agency is.

Perhaps James and Jeff see this dying from smoking as her punishment. That her flares of pleasure turned into a time-killing habit (mostly on breaks with other tellers), then blackened her lungs into ash. Perhaps. I've never asked. And why should I try and judge - try and reach back into that first home of hers, to the middle of a poor estate, with the 60s nearing their end, with rock and roll still like a new star, soaring across the night sky, burning away so very brightly; with her staying in each night with a quiet man, watching it all on TV, with noisy boys running about, with others elsewhere charting the path to the moon, with "All You Need Is Love" oozing from the radio, with her young and beautiful and unharmed, and with guys like Richard in black leather jackets turning up on street corners?

9

2004-07-22T15:53:00.000+01:00

The threat of rain, the spread of heat. Katy to call, the phone switched off. My desk, my desk: Paper piled to the right, feet resting to the left. Stuff to be done, corners of the web. Click, click; click, click. A dinner party on Friday, the ill relatives Saturday. Emails read, and remaining unanswered. The end of the week near, but not yet the weekend. Adult chores, childlike moods. The whole of London, and free this Thursday night. Everything in-between, uncertain what it will become: Storms, rainbows? Sunshine, turbulence?

By lunch, a thick heat had laid across the city, like a huge duvet across a tangled bed of bodies. And that was a fleck of rain just then, falling a mile to flick across my face, like a tiny lone parachutist into an obscure stubbly field. By Monday, and one way or another, the content of those clouds will have cleared. Monday, waiting just around the corner, with new horizons and unknown skies, to sun under, to tumble through.

Katy to call, Katy to call...

8

2004-07-21T13:42:00.000+01:00

Cure for a wine-hammered head? Cure for a heart, once again fluttering away? Surely, a 12-inch Subway meatball sandwich, with cheese. That was the plan for lunch. That was the plan to solve the problems.

And it was going oh so very well. Until the point at which my server, with her splintered English, said: "What salad you like in sandwich?" Me: "Everything except jalapenos and gherkins, please." She: looks confused. "This?" pointing to jalapenos. Me: "No." She: Spoons in the jalapenos. Me: Gives up.

O, unhappy head, o unhappy heart, screw the pair of you. My stomach speaks to me now, so much louder than the both of you. A new problem rumbles below my desk, this afternoon. To always be within a ten-second dash to the loo. For one whole day at least.

(And please, not for two.)

7

2004-07-20T10:05:00.000+01:00

Ceylon or Assam?

Lapsang or Earl Grey? English Breakfast or Traditional Afternoon? Since moving to London, the tall, pale, crow-faced South African has fallen in love - with Twinings tea. I spend more time with Deek than anyone else - bar Gabby - if watching Deek sniff the scent, swill the first sip, neck the rest, and pin notes on the noticeboard above the kettle, counts as spending time. I ask my superior how things are whilst he's engrossed in the fragrance of flowery Jasmine, attempting to decide whether it needs milk, or not.

"O, you know," he answers, distractedly.

"Umm ... no."

Silence. Then mutterings at Gabby about some copying.

"Went to feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square yesterday," he suddenly announces. (Another new love: monuments, etc.) "But no-one was selling feed. Looked it up on the web. Illegal apparently." Then he turns to me, and stops speaking into his tea. "And you know what else I found?"

"Umm ... no?"

Another new love: London stories. Deek starts to slowly relate, sniffing and slurping the Jasmine, the well-known tale of the pigeon-postcard woman. For years each day she came to the Square to feed the grotty birds. Always alone. There in the morning. Off in a tube by nightfall. And why famous?

Because of the picture-postcards of her. You know the sort - all black and white and moody. Ones where, above a hazy morning sun, which just filters through the lifting fog, the black outline of a solitary figure stands (slightly bent under heavy winter clothing) beneath the grandeur of the London skyline, beneath the monuments and ancient buildings, lone like the statues but ever so little, and surrounded by the birds, birds swirling about her, birds following the path of the grain that pours from her hand, birds this way and that way, birds soaring above and pecking below, birds dotting the sky and tracing her path, while she wanders alone through the square. One day, the ancient little lady, who had pigeons for friends and colleagues and family, was found dead. Old age.

The authorities discovered her name and address - written in the back of her coat - and went round. Her little home had shelves up to the ceiling in every room, and these were stacked full of two things. Pigeon feed, as you'd expect - and also cyanide. Lots of cyanide. Which she had, it became clear, been mixing with the feed. Not such a lover of the pigeons, after all. She'd spent her lifetime killing as many of the things as she could.

Deek finishes his tale and I laugh at the appropriate moment, trying to read in the corner of my eye an email from Katy about tonight. He's given Jasmine three out of five, and is brewing some Darjeeling. He stands before me - this man I barely know, newly in love with an old drink, with the sights of the city, with little London stories - this man surrounded by tea, bags and boxes of the stuff, there on the shelves, by the kettle, reviewed on the board - and asks me if I fancy a cup. I think twice. I really do.

6

2004-07-19T08:57:00.000+01:00

Touches of innocence and love on the tube this morning.

First, three suitcases, two tired parents, with one little girl running along the carriage, sprinting up to the door that divides them, where a drunk man holds his head out, out into the dirty, hurtling, cooling air; she wants to open the door, run through it, jump through it, keep on running, sprint the length of the train; her parents call her back, she doesn't care that the drunk man puts his hand on her ear, a friendly tweak, strokes her hair, then collapses back into the seat by him, to hold his red head in his shaking hands; and her parents don't notice, as they call her back, tell her something in Portuguese, perhaps to leave the nice man alone, and definitely to not go near those doors.

Second, the plump man in a suit, reading a book called 253, kindly holding it to his right, so his sullen wife sat there can have a view, her eyes - the crows-feet already at their edges - stare over it blankly, perhaps at the woman sleeping next to me, perhaps thinking back to the past, the day of their marriage maybe, or to the future, their divorce perhaps, and then he points out a passage, it takes a moment for her to realise her attention is required, she skim reads whatever bit he points to, smiles weakly, looks in his eyes, at his beaming grin, and as the train pulls in Holborn, as the heavy doors begin to open, she kisses him on the forehead goodbye, ever so lightly.

A touch of love? A touch of innocence?

5

2004-07-18T20:04:00.000+01:00

Saturday night.

With London at our feet - the chains of bars, their ludicrous teenagers, all alcopops through a straw and dancing on the tables to pop music, hilarious; the little illegal bar in the out-of-the-way gallery - and which corner is it round again - and which button is it to get in - and anyone remember the code-word for the top of the stairs - and what the hell is that stuff on the wall - and is that record really meant to be at that speed - and; a call to a shady buddy, then finding the convoy of cars, poised in a quiet, shadowy car-park, waiting to power out to a warehouse, in the middle of nowhere and full of who-knows-what; the latino bars, all the wiggling hips, and a cigar somewhere going around, the limes happily fizzing away in the bottled lagers; the house parties in Notting Hill lounges where girls fondle each other and all the pretty young people pass around free drugs; the late night cocktails on a balcony, perfect to see the lines of the cars conjure the picture of a string of Christmas lights, as they charge down the street; at some point - inevitable - the swaying kids on the tubes shouting friendly hello's and staring at strangers with crazy hair; the party boats, gliding up and along the river, past Big Ben and around the bend, Canary Wharf towering, the lights towering, the monuments towering, everything towering, London massive and shiny, amazing, the quiet lick and sway of the Thames below us - yes, with London at our feet, its people, places, lights, things at our feet, this Saturday night at our feet, Alexa, 'Mitri & I, are closing our curtains. We're staying in. It's been decided.

'Mitri will cook. Meat and rice with sauce. A Greek special. Alexa goes to lie down for a bit. Her fiancé starts telling me a long story about the girls in Finland. I try and listen. Alexa returns; he giggles. Some music goes on. A mobile phone gets answered. My housemates return to their home tomorrow, for six weeks: and this is our goodbye night, this Saturday night.

I tell Alexa she's looking better. "Not better enough to go out," she answers emphatically. Her tired, irritated eyes, wander over to 'Mitri. "The rice - it's been on long enough, no?" She looks stunning still, I realise, even in her pyjamas, that skin of hers, olive and taut below the sleek black hair. Stunning, even with that hint of a line of hair above her lip, even without her make-up or designer clothes. And those dark, intense eyes of hers are well enough to shoot a sharp, questioning look at her loved one and the rice.

"Addy! Try some, say if it's done. Or needs salt," answers Alexa's husband-to-be. With such a jolly smile he brings me a spoonful, lumbering his big old frame over from the hob, in his green shorts and bad t-shirt, which has some cartoon of a skate-boarder, big and bold, slapped across its centre.

An hour or so later the table is cluttered with cigarette packets, a half-empty bottle, glasses, plates, ashtrays, kitchen-paper, crumbs, remnants, debris. Someone should clean up. Long pauses. The CD drones on. Suddenly Alexa says, "Anyone know a card game?"

"I do!" I say. "Cheat."

The cards come down from the shelf. The clutter gets stacked to the side. I explain the rules and no-one understands properly and we play a game anyway. "Three tens," I say, putting down a joker and two threes.

"One seven," replies 'Mitri, slowly, laying a single card face-down.

"No," says Alexa, "nine, ten, or Jack."

'Mitri nods, slowly. He looks over his hand. "Nine, ten, or Jack?"

We nod.

"Jack," he says unsurely, laying down a card. It has a little tear on its back.

Alexa says she's put down two Jacks.

"Three tens!" I say triumphantly, slapping down three cards.

And 'Mitri looks up. His head twitches a touch, and he stares at me.

"Addy," he says, slowly, picking at his lips. "You laid that before! I remember! Cheat!"

Alexa seizes the cards, turning over the top three: all tens. Surprise and horror spreads across 'Mitri's face. He shakes it, laughing, as all the cards on the table are pushed toward him.

Then, "four Aces!" declares Alexa, slamming down four cards.

"Two Kings," I answer nervously.

"King," says 'Mitri, not for a moment considering my double bluff.

"Four Aces!" shouts Alexa.

"Cheat!" says 'Mitri. The top four cards are turned over again. Alexa covers her smile with her hand. The pile of cards is pushed toward 'Mitri. He slaps his forehead with his palm. Alexa leans over and plants a kiss into his hair.

"Four nines," says Alexa. It begins again.

"One eight," I say. 'Mitri looks suspicious.

"Two eights," the Greek eventually says.

"Another nine!" announces Alexa.

'Mitri takes a sharp intake of breath, turns to her, goes to speak - then stops, picks three cards from his hand and lays them on the table. "Three eights!" he says.

"Cheat!" says Alexa, ignoring her mobile phone, chiming from her bedroom. He gathers up the cards glumly.

Much later on, Alexa will declare three fives, while emptying her hand of around fifteen cards, and her loved one will have his moment of revenge. And I will put down a certain Jack, declare it an Ace, get caught out straight away by the both of them. And that will keep me laughing as I fall into bed, around midnight; a pack of cards having blurted laughter and painted sudden grins across our faces, as blurted and as sudden as a Jack-in-the-box, jumping out into the glimmering realms of childhood games.

... and before whatever brilliant dreams claim me, I can vaguely make out the noise of laughter and kissing and undressing filtering through the thin wall. I think forward to next Saturday. To all the London Saturday nights to come this summer. London, mad and hot with alcohol and style. The women and partying and music and everything. And me, with the whole of the flat all to myself, four walls all to myself; with the cards boxed away, put back on their shelf, pointless and powerless, waiting for new cheating hands and new flowerings of happiness.

4

2004-07-16T13:23:00.000+01:00

God?!

That wasn't you? Was it? Leaving me signs? In the toilet? The toilet? That teasing scent of lavender? The radiant warmth of the seat? The little caress of the breeze? That shaft of light streaming through the window? A glowing white book called "God's Last Offer", perched on the paper-dispenser? But you don't exist? Do you? God?

Or,

has all this got something to do with that gay guy, who is right now slinking along the corridor, in and out of the offices, dressed in purple, asking if anyone's found some book about global environmental dangers - he can't recall the title - that his friend David leant him?!

(Now, God. If you and he are the same, & if I decide to keep quiet and to hold on to the book - then, please forgive me. Or thanks for the gift. Or both, if you feel like it. Whatever seems right.)

3

2004-07-15T10:51:00.000+01:00

Tonight, somewhere in a Soho back-street, I'll be staring over cheap French food, an ashtray, a bottle of house white, a candle perhaps, at Becca. Her small, marbly blue eyes. Her pursed little mouth, flashing out the occasional giggle or grin. Her tanned arms. And the top of the path of her cleavage, as tiny as a hint, there in the opening of her red shirt. Always red.

I'll be thinking back six years - me a student, her an accountant - thinking back to the sex we had - to her dressing for work, me dragging her back to my bed, tearing her buttons open, grabbing at her flesh, her neck, her hair, pulling her toward me, on to me, the skirt wrenched up, the pants ripped down, the spanking, the kissing, my cock into her mouth, her cunt onto my face, then the fucking, the quick hard wet brutal basic fucking, and her face, agonized with pleasure, beautiful, as she comes. Then, a glance at the clock. She'll be late. Again. "Fucking hell, Adam. Why push my buttons when I'm going to work? Couldn't you wait?" And, all the times on the arm chair in the lounge. The times against the wall in the hall. All the times that my housemate, working late, never caught us.

I'll be thinking back five and a half years. Me having cooked her a mediocre meal, as best I could. Another random argument out of nowhere. Politics, music, the media? Something or other. (& had she been sacked by then, or not?) I'll be thinking back to Becca leaving half the plate of that pasta. To the look of disgust, dragging down the features of her face, her head below her neck. Silence. "Going to the loo." Off she creeps. I could have just put on the TV. Picked up a book. Opened another lager. But I stormed to the toilet and forced open the door, to shout at her. And there she was, head over the bowl, fingers in her throat, the smell of vomit, her horrified eyes turning toward me...

I'll be thinking back to the years in between then and now. Sex, drunk and occasional and intense and loveless. The stabs at a relationship that stabbed back. Fragments of conversations: How it began when her Father would laugh off her left-wing arguments over dinner. The secret ways of throwing up in silence. How to get rid of the smell. She was thirteen.

Eventually, the counselling. And eventually, declaring herself over it. Happy. And then the weight-gain, the massive weight-gain. And then the job in the Labour party, the guy she met there, all thinning hair and crooked teeth, who cooks for her and writes speeches for somebody or other. Our drifting apart. The occasional emails. And tonight - looking at her again, in a romantic setting, recalling the brutal facts of distant failures, making encouraging noises about gyms, with wine-glasses clinking over vague toasts to the future, but not to the past.

2

2004-07-14T10:16:00.000+01:00

A knock at my office door. "One moment", I call, closing down a few internet pages. "Come in."

It creaks open. Over the top of my monitor, I see the head of the man who I murdered late last night. It's Beng. As we exchange hello's, I picture what happened. Sat on wooden benches, sipping Corona's with a few buddies, flirting with a few women sat nearby - and in walks Beng. On his own. Beng, who interrupts my day at work more than anyone else with inane questions he should already know the answer to. Beng, who interrupts my day at work with the same questions - having forgotten or misunderstood the previous answers. Beng, who emails me with a question, gets an answer he doesn't like, then emails five other people with the same query, all of whom forward his emails to me to answer, with a cc to them, please. Beng. Thin, feeble, head-wobbling, never-looks-you-in-the-eye, Beng. Coming over. To me. On a night out.

"I saw you through window. Hope you don't mind, I have question," he said, sitting down next to me, shifting my Corona, and opening his bag. "In this booklet," he continues, flicking through it to find a page. "Oh wait. Not this booklet..." Soon the table is covered with paper and documents. My friends are laughing. The women are going.

When that's over, Beng asks me where the toilet is. I point him up the stairs. "Bloody hell," says Mikey, a banker, "wish I had your job!" The heat in my cheeks must be turning them scarlet. I say I need the loo.

At the top of the stairs are three doors: Gents, Ladies, and a dim, empty function room the pub hires out for private parties. Beng walks out of the toilet, smiles at me. "One more thing," he begins to say. I grab him by the back of his neck, and hit his head into the wall. For a moment, silence. For a moment, stillness. Then, I can hear his short shaky breaths, thinly gasping from his throat. His head starts to wobble. Kicking open the function room door, I drag him in, by his hair. A quick knee in the gut. Twice. And again.

On the floor now. I pin his face with my palm. Then a boot between the legs. A stamp to the ribs. Crack. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Crack, crack, crack. Tears, and those wispy breaths - but no blood, yet. Kneeling on him, tearing at his cheeks, his lips, his tongue, his eyes, tearing at his face with my ten fingers and their ten nails, I notice that he his no longer moving, that he is no longer breathing. A red slick is spreading over his head, spilling down his neck, and then on to his clothes, and then his bag, which, still, is at his side. Beng will ask no more of me.

Over the top of my monitor now, Beng's pale head glides toward me. "I am away now," he says, "may never see you again." I don't manage a reply. I can feel a false, hopeful smile pulling up my pulsing cheeks. "But one last thing," Beng's head says.

A burst of wind chills my office, to freezing. The rain outside spits suddenly sharper. The traffic goes quiet. Then Beng says, "I bring you goodbye present," rummaging around in his bag for something, grinning. Moments later, out comes a CD. He passes it over the monitor. "Try it do! It is a thank you for help," he says, walking his whole unwounded body around to my side of the desk. Soon my PC speakers are groaning out track 1 of "Woodwind Favourites". Beng is jiggling his unharmed body a bit, side to side. "O wait!" he says, "maybe you prefer volume two, or three," rummaging around in his bag. "Also, I have question..."

Under the table, invisible to Beng, I can feel my fingers tightening, gathering themselves into a fist. And the chorus of "Let It Be" slowly soars up, on a lone clarinet.

1

2004-07-13T16:32:00.000+01:00

"... had a very shiny nose!"

And, she's finished singing. For now. Next up, what's Fred's surname? His extension then? You know - the guy who collects the confidential waste. Perhaps one day we'll return to Evolution Versus Creation - the only serious thing we've discussed at length. (Especially now she has added ammunition there: a little book that shows her how her chosen religion has it all right, and how biology has it all all wrong.) But not yet. Instead, what should she cook for dinner tonight? Gotta be cheap, don't forget. Severed little yellow heads of baby chickens spring to mind. "Pasta and pesto," I say. Cue: questions about Italian food. Then, favourite food? And did I read that thing on the BBC site from earlier? Umm...

Next, "what do you think of Michael Moore?"

That's better. Smug, self-satisfied, fat, ugly. Someone who promotes provocative but limited facts and extreme opinions as some enlightened vision of contemporary history. Her view? "Don't know." Silence. Then, how do you make your own pesto?

Welcome to the conversations of my nine-to-five. Welcome to tentative forays into meaningless subjects, plucked from the internet and everyday life, like leaves plucked out on a solitary stroll around the wooded back-lanes: brief tokens of some contact with another living thing, soon dropped and forgotten. I spend more time with her than anyone else, fyi.