Success (26 page)

‘Three pounds,’ said one to another. They stepped forward.

My legs disappeared. ‘I’ll get you
more!
I’ll — ’ Then two heavy hands seized me from behind.

I wheeled round, half toppling over. I felt my trousers go wet and hot. Inches from mine was a face with orange skin and no front teeth. It let out a shout of rank laughter.

‘
Hey
,’ it said — ‘he’s only
shit
himself. You can smell it. He’s only
shit
himself.’

The other three converged. ‘Don’t hit me, please,’ I said in tears. ‘I’ll give the money. Please don’t hit me.’

‘He’s
crying
now. Gor, you little
shit
. Hah! Shit himself! Poof fucking
shit
himself!’

And as I stood there scouring my pockets, even through the mist of alarm and humiliation, I realized that they were beggars only, and very sorry ones, young and sick, with no more strength in their bodies than I could summon in mine.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, holding out the money in cupped hands. ‘Believe me there is no more.’

The fanged one laughed again. ‘Keep it, shitty,’ he said. ‘You keep it, there’s a good little shit.’

I reeled away from them, stumbling into a run. They yelled until I could hear them no longer.

‘Go on, shitty. Go on, go on home and change your panties. Go on, shitty. Go on, you little
shit
.’

Two o’clock. I stood in my shirtsleeves at the kitchen table, the change and crumpled notes spread out before me. I had buried the trousers in the rubbish-bin. I had cleaned myself at the sink, with water, Squezy and the tissue roll. I turned to the blank window. There was my face, suspended among the rooftops and the beads of passage lights of the blocks higher up. It looked like me, I suppose, or like other people think I look. ‘You’re not at the bottom yet,’ I said. ‘There is a lot further you can fall.’

This month hides in unfamiliar places.

I avoided them for as long as I could — and with some success. (I couldn’t face them. The shame was mine too, somehow. Why?) In the early evenings and over the weekends I stayed away from the flat. I sat in coffee-bars with au pairs and transients, with self-possessed middle-aged women and trim, well-spoken middle-aged men, coffee-bars in which everyone knew all about everyone
else’s failures, and nobody had anywhere they would rather be. I lingered in bookshops and antique-marts and junk shops among the ponderous hippies, the cruel-faced spivs and the trusting students with their valuable plastic bags. I sat through films in the afternoons, next to noisy kids and sleepy pensioners, beside faceless unemployables and gibbering tramps (how can they afford it?
I
can’t). I try not to stay out later than nine or eight-thirty. I stick to the crowded streets, where the foreigners are still busy looting the shops. I have been keeping my eyes open. I have been looking round about me.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that approximately one in three of this city’s indigenous population is quite mad — obviously, openly, candidly, brazenly mad. Their lives are entirely given over to a bitter commentary on the world, the light, the time of day it is. In every busload there will be six or seven people who just sit there growling about nothing with tears in their eyes. Every café contains, at all times, a working minimum of two gesticulating maniacs who have to be shown or chucked out into the street, where they will hover and shout and threaten until someone redoubles their efforts to make them go away again. On every street you walk along you find the same proportion of people who do nothing but fizz all the hours there are, fizz with hatred or disappointment or grief, or fizz simply because they are ugly and poor and mad. They ought to get together. They ought to organize (they would form a very powerful lobby). They ought to organize, and make everyone else fucked up and
tonto
too.

Am I like that? No, not yet. But I’m treading lightly wherever I go now, testing all the surfaces. At any moment I expect to hear them crack.

Work is impossible these days. (It always was really, as you know, but it’s even more impossible now.) They bawl me out. They bawl me out when I come back late from delivering their shitty pictures all over town (perhaps I
should tell them about the Underground and me. Perhaps they would be kinder then). They bawl me out when I drop things, and I drop things quite a bit these days. Last week I dropped a teapot, and the fuckpigs made me buy them a new one. This week I dropped a picture frame; it was a hideous picture frame, naturally, but so valuable that not even they expected me to buy them a new one. They just bawled me out instead. Yesterday they bawled me out in front of some friendly students I was chatting to (apparently I had misaddressed most of the private-view invitations). ‘
Get
down to the stock-room,’ said Odette. The friendly students looked baffled. So did I. I cried for a while as I cleaned the frames.

You know what I had for lunch the other day? (Ah, thank you, good Emil, yes, the usual, please.) A Mars Bar. A fucking Mars Bar. Suck on that. Terry pays all the bills now. He doesn’t seem to mind. One day I returned from work to find that the powerful Grundig had disappeared from my room. I assumed the men had come for it (I couldn’t keep up the payments). I went downstairs and saw that it was in Terry’s room. I didn’t say anything about it.

I want to go home. I want to go back to that big warm house. I want to be among people who love me. I can’t find anything to use against people who hate me.

On the evening our lives sorted themselves out for good, on the evening when all came clear, I happened to pass Terry in the passage. I had just got back from work; he was putting on a new pair of gloves, getting ready to stroll out with a book for an expensive meal in Queensway.

‘How are you?’ he asked aggressively.

‘I’m okay,’ I said, without meeting his eye.

‘Good. And how’s the gallery?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good. Still doing well there, are you?’

‘Perhaps I won’t take off my overcoat,’ I said uncertainly as I began to move up the stairs.

‘Ursula’s in her room,’ he shouted, ‘moping about something or other as usual. Go and cheer her up, why don’t you?’

All that month I had expected to want Ursula to come to me, to come to me and ask for forgiveness. I knew things could never be good again, but perhaps I could find a way to stop hating her, a way to throw off this frenzy of solitude which mantles me now. I didn’t want her to come, though. I really didn’t. I knew that I could not tolerate it, that it was intolerable. I’m on my own here. Let’s face that.

I was sitting by my window. I was still in my overcoat (I often am these days. It means that I’m not here to stay and can bolt any time I like and, besides, I’m paranoid about putting on the fire). I was sitting by my window, staring out at the aeroplanes that wafted through the grey clouds. Then I heard the intimate footfalls.

‘Gregory?’

I could not turn. ‘Yes?’

‘It’s me.’

‘I know.’

‘Won’t you talk to me?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Won’t you ever talk to me?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Won’t you look at me?’

‘I can’t.’

‘When we were young we said we’d never be mean to each other.’

‘I know.’

‘Then why are you being mean to me now?’

‘Because I hate you,’ I said.

‘You
can’t
do that. What will become of us?’

And why is it always clichés that make you cry? I leaned forward on my table and gave vent to the saltiest tears I had ever shed. So much water flooding out — where
does it all come from? I felt her presence behind me. I turned, startled.

Her hand was raised, as if she would rest it on my shoulders. Her face was full of migraine. She moved nearer with her hand.

‘Don’t!’ I said. I was pleading. ‘Don’t. I’ll go mad if you touch me.’

Late that night the swirl of sirens came slantwise across my sleep. I turned over (shut the doors, shut the doors. Sirens are ten-a-penny round my way, where everyone is always getting fucked up or going
tonto
. Sirens always have to be waiting near by). I had dreamt I was walking down a bombed-out street; there were children playing, and the air was nostalgic with that forgotton concord — bat patting ball, the soft-shoe shuffle of hopscotch, the flick of a skiprope, the weak protesting trebles of their cries; I reached the house I had come to find; I knocked on the door and turned to enjoy the children; now all was silent, and I saw with a sob that they were not children after all, but mad old dwarves, every one, their faces boiling as they crossed the street towards me … The sirens yawled, screaming for blood. I opened my eyes. A blue light was shooting round my room like a spectral boomerang —
whoosh
,
whoosh
,
whoosh
. I sat up with a shiver. The sirens cried warning as I moved down the stairs. I opened the flat door.

Then all at once: the clout of cold air through the shattered glass, the men churning at the jaws of the ambulance, the snapped figure in the white nightdress.

I fell to my knees. ‘Terry,’ I said. ‘Someone please help me.’ The passage folded on to its side. I skidded down the floor. The blue light boomeranged above my head, coming closer, getting brighter, turning black.

Big deal. Do you want to know how
my
sister died? Suck on this.

Whoosh
. Terence at the square table in the corner of the front room, his homework fanned out on the green baize. In the chair by the three-bar fire, my father, tall, heavy, his thin, red, damp, smalltown hair ironed flat across his crown. Rosie is late. The smoke from his wet pipe formed a dusty shelf at table-height, and when I turned in my chair to look down on him through the tobacco trance — to see how mad he was getting, tell him something quickly about the other side — I felt as if I were on an elevated plane, like a god, or a scientist observing the behaviour of controlled animals. This is going to be bad, I thought; but of course another part of me (that perverse, reciprocating part) was thinking: this is going to be good. Where is the headache? Down there somewhere.

We heard the front door being tugged shut. I turned again as she came into the room — she came into the room, dropping things on chairs, saying hello to her father and to me, without fear. He showed no vexation at her lateness. He made no response. He sat before the fire, smoking his pipe — it must have been delicious, that sense of rightful anger deferred, letting the power trickle in through his mouth to feed the busy static. Rosie limped smiling to my table, where she sat and doodled
until it was time to eat. She felt well. She was seven.

My father, as always, prepared the supper — cheap, basic, complexion-ravaging foods, invariably fried — while my sister, as usual, laid the table (she was required to wash up, too, ever since my mother went), while I, as usual, did nothing. Did nothing, except listen to that old eerie tinkle, that scraping false clarity of sound, those noises that recede just as they seem to climb, and climb again, and then recede, and then begin to climb.

He eats with fastidious relish. Silence is commanded by the sure way he loads his fork, loads it with a representative of every foodstuff on his plate — sausage stub, bean cluster, white flap of egg, tomato seeds — and lets his head drop to devour it, loading his fork once more as he chews. He starts to speak, without looking up. He does not look up. Neither do I.

You were late again, Rosie.

Had to go to Mandy’s. I said I’d be late.

Don’t interrupt me, please. Never interrupt me again. You were late again, Rosie. You know how
angry
that makes me feel …

Dad, I told you.

And I told you not to interrupt me. Did I tell you not to interrupt me?

Yes, Dad.

Then don’t interrupt me, please. Now let’s start again. You are late. This makes me angry. I would not be angry if you were not late. But you are late. This makes me angry.

(I can barely hear him now. The room is so loud and he won’t look up, won’t stir or bend in any way … I wait for Rosie’s tears, although she never cries.)

You know what happens when I am angry. And I am angry because you are late. I am angry. You know what happens. But you are late.

He stands and turns. He is quite still, his back to us. He stands before the cooker, as if its dials might help
control what is happening to him. He begins again —

You know all this and yet you are —

And I look up to see that Rosie is on her feet. Her face is burning — with what? With outrage, with defiant, goaded outrage, as she moves down the table towards him and starts to say,

‘Stop
it,
stop
it, why don’t you
leave me alone —
 ’

Whoosh. He has swivelled and
crack
she is up in the air with a fluttery wriggle and down on the floor in an instant, used up in an instant, snapped, dead.

He turned again. He replaced the frying-pan on the ring. With deliberate movements he washed his hands. The air made my heart itch. I sensed I had fouled my trousers. He dried his hands and reached for his coat, hooked on the scullery door. He came towards me. I hope he can’t smell it, I thought — he’ll kill me if he finds out.

‘I’m going now,’ he said. ‘I won’t be back. Don’t worry. I’ll tell them. There’s nothing you can do.’ He gestured at the body. He hesitated. ‘It was her or you. I don’t know why. There’s nothing you can do.’

I changed my pants in the cold bedroom and buried them in the kitchen dustbin. I didn’t look at her. Then I went upstairs to hide. There was nothing I could do.

Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? Actually — between ourselves — the episode hasn’t retained much reality of a very pressing kind. Oh, it happened all right; I
was
there; it
was
real. But nowadays the memory seeks me out like a bore tapping on my shoulder, a vivid reel from an otherwise unremarkable film, an encumbrance, second-hand stuff. Goodbye, Rosie. You turned out all right in the end. Who needs you now? I don’t.