Exchange Place (5 page)

Atoms and Stars

Good trick, Bill, I said. Magic. Always a pleasure to do business, Ben, said Beringer. These were not our real names. He was John Beringer, I was John Kilfeather. We used to call each other John until one night after a smoke of Red Leb – how many years ago was that, Red Leb? – he came out with, Flobbalob, Little Weed. The
Flower Pot Men
. We spent a good hour trying to remember the children’s
TV
series of the 1950s and 60s. I’ve just looked it up online, and I here transcribe the Wikipedia entry:

‘Originally, the programme was part of a
BBC
children’s television series titled
Watch with Mother
, with a different programme each weekday, and all involving string puppets. The
Flower Pot Men
was the story of two little men made of flower pots who lived at the bottom of an English suburban garden. The plot changed little in each episode. The programme always took place in a garden, behind a potting shed. The third character was Little Weed, of indeterminate species, resembling a sunflower or dandelion with a smiling face, growing between two large flowerpots. The three were also sometimes visited by a tortoise called Slowcoach. While “the man who worked in the garden” was away having his dinner the two Flower Pot Men, Bill and Ben, emerged from the two flowerpots. After a minor adventure a minor mishap occurs; someone is guilty. “Which of those two flower pot men, was it Bill or was it Ben?” the narrator trills, in a quavering soprano; the villain confesses; the gardener’s footsteps are heard coming up the garden path; the Flower Pot Men vanish into their pots and the closing credits roll. The final punch-line was, “And I think the little house knew something about it! Don’t
you
?” ’

As I researched Bill and Ben I looked up another children’s
TV
series of the early 70s,
Mr Benn
. In each episode Mr Benn, wearing a black suit and bowler hat, leaves his house at 52 Festive Road and visits a fancy-dress costume shop where he is invited by the moustachioed, fez-wearing shopkeeper to try on a particular outfit. He leaves the shop through a magic door at the back of the changing room and enters a world appropriate to his costume. The series also appeared in book form, and I quote from one: ‘Mr Benn changed into the space outfit in no time. He looked at himself in the mirror and then headed for the door that always led to adventures. On the other side he found himself in a spaceship.’ Towards the end of the narrative, as always, the shopkeeper reappears to lead him back to the changing room, and the story ends. Mr Benn returns to his normal life, but is left with a small souvenir, proof of his magical adventure. I pictured myself in the changing room, looking at myself in the mirror dressed as an Arabian prince, about to embark on the
Magic Carpet
adventure.

As for the Flower Pot Men, they spoke a mangled idiolect which sounded like English but not quite.
Flobbalob Bill
.
Flobbadob Ben
. After the Red Leb episode, we referred to each other as Bill and Ben. Some people called us Bee and Kay, others, John and John, the two Johns. Red Leb, must have been around 1974, said Beringer, I think I remember someone gave me a blast of Red Leb after the Smithfield fire-bombing, and we began on one of our reminiscences of the vanished Smithfield Market and its glassed-over arcades, its nave and transepts crossed by narrow passages lined with sagging bookshelves, old furniture and bric-a-brac. It was in Smithfield that I first came across Cathal O’Byrne’s book about Belfast,
As I Roved Out
, and the Smithfield of my dreams would be haunted by his, a veritable rookery of hallways, alleyways and gangways, leading up to balconies – each with its nest of dwelling places – higher and ever higher. I glide through Smithfield like a revenant from the future. At a bookstall I look over the shoulder of the young man who stands immersed in a book, the reader who was me.

It’s like another world, says Beringer. For all we know it exists in another world where Smithfield didn’t get firebombed. As do we, only different, I suppose, you know, Many Worlds theory. Quantum incoherence, don’t expect me to give you the maths of it, but in layman’s terms, I mean our terms, it means reality is like a tree with an infinite number of branches, an infinite number of outcomes. Many Worlds accounts for that, as many worlds as there are possibilities. Didn’t you have something in that book you were writing, what was it called,
XYZ
, what ever happened to that?

He was right. One of the sources quoted or paraphrased in my abandoned book,
X
+
Y
=
K
, was the Irish experimental physicist Fournier d’Albe, who in his book,
Two New Worlds
, published in 1908, proposed a hierarchical clustering model for the structure of the universe which anticipated modern fractal theory. Fournier’s fractal was a snowflake pattern consisting of five parts; each of those parts was a miniature copy of that snowflake; those miniature copies were composed of still smaller snowflakes, and so on, in a dizzying blizzard of self-replication. Worlds lay within worlds in nested frequencies. Atoms and stars, electrons and planets, cells and galaxies all moved to the same measure. Clouds, earthquakes, river deltas, root systems, coastlines, music, fluid turbulence, the fluctuations of the stock market: all corresponded. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind, and a column of cigar smoke breaks into an anxious swirl. A pirouette of litter on a street corner heralds a tornado. A pin drops in an auditorium, a bomb goes off. Like patterns were apparent everywhere. The All was immutable, but the detail was ever new. The event, the incident, the individual was unique, unprecedented, irrecoverable; but the equilibrium was eternal, and death could have no dominion over the infinity of worlds.

Given these wide parameters, Fournier d’Albe thought it reasonable to assume that one could find a portal to that infinity of worlds, or at least to a parallel world. He immersed himself in the study of paranormal phenomena, including the mediumistic seances of the time. Of particular interest to me was the fact that in 1921 he investigated a spiritualist group in Belfast known as the Goligher Circle, centred around the sixteen-year-old medium Kathleen Goligher, who claimed to be in contact with a spirit world, the Other Side. Seances were conducted in the attic of their own home. Fournier d’Albe was curious to see if the phenomena that appeared to occur there could be replicated at a neutral location, and to that purpose he rented an unfurnished attic at 14 Exchange Place, a narrow lane – an entry, in Belfast parlance – off Lower North Street. After subjecting Kathleen Goligher to a series of rigorous controls he concluded that the ‘paranormal phenomena’ produced by her in collaboration with the Circle were nothing more than cheap conjuring tricks. Of further interest to me was the fact that John Harland had rented an attic at 14 Exchange Place for some months prior to his disappearance in the year 2001.

Blank Who

In Passage des Panoramas Kilpatrick stopped and ordered a coffee at a table outside Gocce di Caffè. The Drop of Coffee. From his briefcase he took out
Rue des boutiques obscures
, the Patrick Modiano novel he had bought in St Sulpice. Published by Gallimard, 1978. Gallimard also published the complete works of Jean Cocteau, he remembered. He read the blurb on the back cover of
Rue des boutiques obscures
.

Qui pousse un certain Guy Roland, employé d’une agence de police privée que dirige un baron balte, à partir à la recherche d’un inconnu, disparu depuis longtemps? Le besoin de se retrouver lui-même après des années d’amnesie? Au cours de sa recherche, il receuille des bribes de la vie de cet homme qui était peut-être lui et à qui, de toute façon, il finit par s’identifier:
What impels a certain Guy Roland, employee of a private detective agency overseen by a Baltic baron, to leave in search of an unknown man, long since disappeared? The need to find himself again after years of amnesia? In the course of his search, he recollects fragments of the life of this man who is perhaps himself, and who, in any case, he ends up identifying with.

He turned to the beginning of
Rue des boutiques obscures
and read the opening sentences:
Je ne suis rien. Rien qu’une silhouette claire, ce soir-là, à la terrace d’un café.
I am nothing. Nothing but a clear silhouette, this evening, on a café terrace. He wondered about his translation for the word
claire
. It was one of those words that might mean a number of things in English, and ‘clear silhouette’ did not sound like something one would say in English. Clear-cut? Clean? Sharp? Transparent? Limpid? These, too, did not seem quite right. And should
silhouette
be ‘outline’? Kilpatrick thought he knew what the expression meant in French, he could see the man in question in his mind’s eye, but somehow he could not find the proper English words. It was as if a fog intervened between one language and the other, the person who was thinking in one language lost to the one who thought in the other. His coffee arrived and he put the book away, thinking of himself as the unknown man sitting outside a café in Passage des Panoramas, a blank silhouette. Unknown, certainly, to those who passed him by, tourists, casual strollers, browsers, shoppers, others whose purposeful stride suggested native Parisians, for whom the
passage
was a short-cut, a matter of daily routine. Perhaps he was known in a manner of speaking to the man who had served him his coffee, for Kilpatrick had taken coffee there before, and the same man had served him then; but then he doubted if the man remembered him from among the hundreds of customers he must have served since then, and though he had nodded to Kilpatrick as he set his coffee on the table –
Voilà, un café, monsieur
– he did not think it was a nod of recognition. He finished his coffee and continued down Passage des Panoramas.

He stopped at a stamp shop called La Postale, one of several in the arcade, traditionally a philatelists’ haven. French stamps, naturally. As a boy Kilpatrick had collected stamps, specializing in those of Ireland and the British Empire, and only gradually realizing that France had had an empire nearly as extensive as that of Britain. His eye was caught by two stamps on a display card headed 1948, one commemorating Louis Braille, the other Louis Auguste Blanqui, bearing portraits of their subjects. Kilpatrick knew Blanqui from his reading of Walter Benjamin, Blanqui the revolutionary who during one of his many terms of imprisonment had written
L’Eternité par les astres
, in which he propounded a universe of infinite worlds and endlessly repeated variations, endlessly doubled lives. Kilpatrick had toyed with the idea that Blanqui could be translated as Blank Who. As for Braille, when he thought of Braille he thought of Louis Braille as a boy stumbling in his father’s saddler’s shop, clutching the stitching-awl that an instant later would blind him, and of Braille punching out the raised dots of his writing system with the selfsame awl. Braille sounded like an awl.
Une braille
.

At that instant he remembered the blind man he would often see crossing his path in Belfast, waving his long white wand from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector, the cane ticking against street furniture: lamp-posts, bollards, parking signs. Echo-location. Kilpatrick saw himself sitting outside a Belfast café, the blind man inclining his head towards him as he lit a cigarette; he supposed the blind man had heard the rasp of the flint lighter. Kilpatrick had not thought of Belfast since he had come to Paris – what was it, ten days, a fortnight ago? A month? It seemed like another world, the person he had been in Belfast someone else. Kilpatrick saw himself in his mind’s eye as the man in the navy linen suit, the man in the Harris tweed jacket, the man in tan Oxfords or oxblood brogues, the man in the herringbone Crombie coat, the man in the camel coat, the man wearing this hat or that, as if all these men were other men; and he saw the blind man infallibly wearing the same outfit, a grey army-surplus anorak, jeans and white trainers, hatless, always the same man, reliably threading his way through the city with a sure step, as if he knew where he was going better than Kilpatrick knew himself.

Kilpatrick continued on slowly down Passage des Panoramas, blind to Passage des Panoramas. In his mind’s eye he was in North Street Arcade in Belfast. Light poured in from the glass roof. He felt transparent, weightless. He would stop at a record store, a vintage clothing store, an art shop, a café. He would stop for a coffee before emerging into Lower Donegall Street and turning right, crossing the street and walking for some fifty yards before turning left into the archway that led to Exchange Place, where John Bourne had his studio. From the ticket pocket of his Donegal tweed jacket he would take out the old-style latchkey given to him by Bourne, unlock the heavy wooden entrance door and take the three flights of worn wooden stairs to the loft at the top of the building. As he entered Bourne’s room Bourne would nod without turning round and say, Kilpatrick, I know your step. Bourne, Kilpatrick would reply. Bourne would be standing at the easel, a cigarette in one hand and a brush in the other, looking at what he had just painted. The floor of the studio was covered with what looked like debris, the contents of a skip, though Kilpatrick knew that for Bourne it constituted a resource: books, pages torn from books, Xeroxes of images, wrapping paper, swatches of linen and cotton samples, coils of old film stock. It was all grist to Bourne’s mill. Kilpatrick would pick his way through the litter. He would stop and stand and look over Bourne’s shoulder. What do you think? Bourne would say, and before Kilpatrick could reply, Bourne would step over to the butcher’s block he used as a table, lift a boning knife and with two swift movements slash an X into the canvas. I don’t like it, Bourne would say. It’s not me.