Glass (14 page)

I unwrapped a new packet of Dutch waffles and took one out while I pulled up a new tab. I do love waffles. They're so sturdy. There is a reassuring weight to them, a corrugated, cast iron promise of their syrupy yield, like a honeycomb flattened. I spent a couple of hours looking up the tallest buildings in the world, most of which were in Russia, America and Dubai, and then there was the Shard, which was just being completed at London Bridge. At a thousand feet high, it was one great spire starting from the floor and converging somewhere under the clouds, scratching at the intense blue of the sky, a great temple to human endeavour. It would tower over St Paul's, the once vast cathedral glowering over on the north bank like a one-time school bully who'd stopped growing at fourteen. Imagine scaling the outside. It made me short of breath just thinking of it. A thousand feet wasn't height; it was elevation, it was altitude.

Blades had texted me to ask whether I wanted to come and watch the Palace game with some of the guys at his house. I had to accept the proffered olive branch – but if I was going to work with Blades, even in the short term, I had to know what I was getting myself into. I looked up the words I could remember from his whiteboard. ‘Falange' were the Spanish version of Fascists. But ‘cagoule'? At the end of the day, a cagoule was basically just a bin bag with sleeves. Rainproof: yes. Intriguing? No.

I texted back to say that I'd be there, and would bring ‘beers'.
⁵⁰
It is very important to conform in these situations, especially if you don't know anything about the sport in question, and perhaps more especially if you suspect your boss hates you.

I left the flat just as the sky's colours thinned and the shadows started melting into pools, stopping at the off-licence. There were youths hanging around outside the shop and one of them approached me. He looked at me like he wanted to kill me.

‘Buy us some tinnies will ya? Guy in there's a right—'

‘No,' I interrupted. ‘I don't know you, but if, as I strongly suspect, you are under age, what makes you think that you and only you should ignore the law? If we all ignored the law we'd all be dead by now. So if you're old enough, you can bloody well buy it yourself.'

He went back to his mates and told them I was a bender. I went into the shop, grabbed two four-packs (buy one, get one free – I'm not an animal) and took them over to the counter.

‘Can I see some ID?' said the man at the counter.

‘I'm twenty-two.'

He didn't say anything about this, so I showed him my licence.

‘I can't serve you if you're going to give it to minors.'

‘I'm not. I'm going to watch the game.' I hoped there wasn't more than one game going on. That would cause confusion.

‘I just saw you talking to that kid.'

‘I told him to go away.'

‘Sorry. They'll take my licence away.' He didn't look sorry. He looked gormless.

I found another place to buy beer, but I was very nearly late for kick-off by now. It was a posh French off-licence that mostly sold wine, and the only beer was imported and expensive. Mayfair was so pristine that I hadn't seen someone with bad skin for four streets. This was someone's version of purity, with litter and the homeless swept away, pressure-hosed masonry and tailoring from first principles. For my part, I had never felt more like a manual labourer.

When I rang on the doorbell it was 19.43. A severe-looking man with a shock of blond hair answered the door. For some reason I had been expecting Frank. I followed him through an atrium with a great marble fireplace and down a corridor, lined with arty photographs of the World Trade Center
⁵¹
and other famous skyscrapers, then through a door to a massive lounge. A home projector had been set up against one wall, and six Blokes were sitting on couches which had been pushed back to the wall opposite. Blades sat in a lazy chair in the corner of the room, and I saw Pete the Australian Greek squashed shoulder to shoulder on one of the couches. I sat on the arm and realised I didn't know where the bottle opener was – but too late, for the whistle blew and the game kicked off.

The match started hurriedly, with all the players keen to get an early goal and demoralise their opponents. This went on for fourteen minutes, during which time people were talking excitedly. There was a transition period of about four minutes during which people made the odd comment, and by the time we were twenty minutes in, the blond man was getting up to get another beer.

‘Could I grab the bottle opener?' I asked in what I hoped approximated football man talk.

He made a sound that was almost a ‘yeah' and left the room.

About thirty minutes in, there was a decent shot on goal, but it was saved easily. Not having much else to comment on, the TV commentators went over the shot, and then some statistics about the striker in question. The fans at home and in the stadium grew restless.

‘D'you remember when Jimmy Cannon used to play?' someone asked the room to murmurs of assent.

‘They're too young to remember, Albie,' said Blades.

‘No I'm not,' one of them said.

‘When were you born then?' asked Blades.

‘Seventy-eight.'

‘Ha!'

The blond man came back with the bottle opener and his beer.

‘If you were my age,' said Blades, ‘you'd remember Jimmy Cannon properly. He was a hero. You still see him sometimes up in the boxes. Player of the Century for Palace.'

There was a pause, before the 34-year-old said, ‘No he wasn't.'

‘What?'

‘Player of the Century was Ian Wright.'

‘Don't be stupid. You think they'd pass up Cannon for some gold-toothed nigger?' Blades laughed and so did the blond man. Pete kept his eyes on the game. The guy next to me took a swig of his beer. There was no one black in the room. I didn't know whether this made it better or worse. ‘Look at you, flinching at the word nigger,' Blades went on. ‘If I see a spade, I call him a spade.'

‘Wright was the best forward we ever had, before he went to Highbury,' said the 34-year-old, trying to bring the conversation back to safe ground.

‘Yeah, he was good,' I said. He must have been, if I'd heard of him.

‘Don't be fooled, Günter, he's the same as the rest of them. When it suits them they play off this image that blacks are really cool, they can all dance and they've got big dicks. And then when they want something, they play the minority card, they're all, “It's very hard growing up in Bongo Bongo land,” and they end up getting the job over a decent, hardworking Englishman.'

‘He's all right,' said the 34-year-old, aggrieved.

‘He's a foreigner.'

‘He grew up in Brockley.'

We sat in silence until the second minute of injury time, when a couple of guys stood up to go to the bathroom. The 34-year-old was one of them, and he didn't come back.

‘Good riddance,' said Blades. He turned to the blond man. ‘Impossible to find a red-blooded workforce these days. He'll have to go, too.' The blond man nodded. ‘It's a wonder we get anything done. Still, we've got to stick together.' Blades caught my eye and gave me a little nod. I didn't nod back, but it felt too awkward to contradict him.

After the game recommenced, people started to expound their various perspectives on the players, and made predictions about the final score. Sixty-seven minutes in, everyone seemed to have sunk into boredom, and when the opposition side scored in the seventy-first minute, boredom was replaced by a kind of fatalistic anger.

‘Well, that's it, isn't it?' said Blades, swigging violently.

I left as soon as the game was over. I didn't want to hear the post-match debrief, and I'd taken a dislike to the blond man. I hated football anyway. It was just a kind of tribalism, none of them understanding that the team they had pinned all their hopes on and built up in their mind was no different to any of the other teams; none of them were innately better or worse, none of them destined for greatness or relegation. It was just the amount of money they had, and the way they had been divided up. They could have been divided any number of ways, but it happened to be the town they came from, and nowadays the town you came from didn't make much difference to the place you ended up. It was an almost random process of constant buying and selling, each team held together by nothing more than physical continuity. How could you believe in a club when you knew each of its component parts had been replaced? What was left of the original, other than the story of its existence, reprised for the benefit of its young? At its heart was tribalism,
⁵²
nothing more and nothing less.

I reached the main door of my building at the same time as the lady with the hemp bag. She wasn't carrying her hemp bag. She was wearing a sparkly dress and faded lipstick. I held the door open for her. I couldn't quite put my finger on how she looked – worried, perhaps.

‘Hello,' I said.

She smiled as if she might run away, but she got in the lift with me.

‘So, how is it? Living with the German man?'

‘Well … quiet, really. I don't see him except on Fridays, and I'm out at work most Fridays anyway.' I assumed this would become true over time.

‘I always thought he was a bit of a funny one.'

‘It's just his mannerisms. I think deep down he's the same as everyone. He just wants to be liked, wants to make something that outlives him.'

The woman started to cry.

‘Oh dear, was it something I said? Why are you crying?'

‘I'm not crying!' she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.

‘But your face …' I began.

‘Well
now
I'm crying!' she cried. A hand rooted around in her bag. The lift pinged. I held it open while she found herself a tissue.

‘Would you like to talk about it?' I asked. She nodded sheepishly and rooted around in her bag again for keys.

Inside her flat, we sat at the kitchen table. She offered me tea but I only wanted water. Pure, clear, cold water. She sat down, her black eye make-up smudged rather prettily, like a sad panda.

‘May I ask, is it trouble with a man that you're having?' (I could ask these sorts of questions now, as something of a relationship veteran.)

‘Yes – well – man, men. I went on this date, he seemed nice online but he turned out to be an utter – anyway they all are. I mean no offence, you seem lovely, but they are, aren't they? And I only really need to find one nice man to settle down with and have kids but I'm a bloody lawyer so the only men I meet are lawyers and who wants to marry a
lawyer
?' She reminisced into her tea. ‘When I was a little girl, I wanted to have eight babies. Eight! Imagine. But at least I'd have had a full house. Right now I just feel so empty. I know it's just the hormones, everyone gets broody, don't they? but it feels like I have another stomach inside me and there are no pipes attached so it just sits there empty and hungry all day, every day. I have all this love and nowhere to put it. I make cakes with love, I love characters I see in films, I imagine that they've got lost out in the cold on London Fields and I bring them in and give them blankets and make them soup.'

‘Perhaps you should try to weave your way into something bigger than yourself. A cause, something more permanent. Something pure, something that doesn't just blow away in the wind.'

She looked at me as if I hadn't listened to a word she'd said.

‘Like what.'

‘Well … Take this glass of water. It's probably as old as the earth itself. I drink it and it merges with my body, becomes a part of me. It's pure, unchanging, simple, clear. It doesn't matter what happens to me, I will always …' I could tell I was losing her. ‘Look, what do you most want? What one great thing do you want to be able to hold up and say, “I was a part of this”?'

‘I don't know. Love,' she said sadly.

I did something quite uncharacteristic, then, by standing up, going over to the woman and giving her a hug. I didn't normally hug people. She cried a bit and I did too, in sympathy, I suppose. It seems very hard to bear, the idea that all life is flashing by without ever returning: events, people, buildings, everything, blinking in and out of existence quicker than anyone could track them.
⁵³

I lay in bed that night awake for a long time, listening to the darkness. Just beyond my thin wall, there was a woman who was very uncertain about the world. It was comforting to know that she was there. After a while I heard her close her bedroom door. She unplugged something from the wall and then plugged in something else. A phone charger, I guessed. Then I heard nothing for a little while, until there was a light brushing, like someone stroking the wall. I stroked it back. I didn't know if it made a sound on her side. But I was here and I was human. It was something.

I woke up with sunlight warming my nose. A cold Friday, but a sunlit one. The Steppenwolf finished grilling his mackerel and we sat together at the kitchen table, shared a pot of coffee and chatted. This was the first time we had made any small talk – about the weather (temperature and light conditions), our work, a good place to buy socks (Marks & Spencer, apparently).

‘This kind of conversation, is it important, do you think?' he asked me.

‘I suppose so. It's not really what you say, it's just …'

‘The fact that you have taken the trouble to say it. Yes.' He scribbled
phatic function
on the tablecloth with a biro. ‘For a long time I ignored conversations about the weather. I thought it was simply English people being inconsequential. Then I realised these exchanges are at the very core of humanity. It is a peculiar skill, to be able to converse without communicating anything at all. To put your conversation partner at ease. I cannot do it. I never learned.' He smiled yellow and I got caught in the crosshair of his halitosis. I had learnt to stand not-quite facing him, at an oblique angle, but this was impossible at the table.