The Portable Door (1987) (7 page)

“Well,” Mr Tanner said, after a very long two seconds or so, “I’d better get on, or I’ll get spoken to. Enjoy your pizza.”

“Thank you,” Paul said, and backed away towards the checkout. Infuriatingly, a queue had materialised at the only open desk. Paul stood in line, the chill from the frozen pizza slowly numbing his fingertips, and cursed under his breath. It’d be just his luck if, before he worked his way to the front of the line, Mr Tanner finished his shopping and came and stood behind him, which would entail further and worse embarrassment. For two pins he’d have dumped the pizza on the floor and bolted like a rabbit out of the store; except that he knew that if he did that, he’d run into Mr Tanner again on the way out, and Mr Tanner would stare at him, breathless and pizzaless, and he’d probably die where he stood. Then a large woman came and stood behind him with a fully loaded trolley, and he knew that for the moment, at least, he was safe.

When his turn finally came, he paid for the pizza, fumbled it into a plastic bag (one of the type that you can’t get open unless you happen to have honey smeared all over your fingertips), took his change and made a dash for the door. Through it, and safe; except that Mr Tanner was outside (how?), standing on the pavement with his own plastic carrier in his hand, and looking up the street in the opposite direction.

By now, Paul was as freaked out as it was possible to be without external chemical influence. Above all, he didn’t want to have anything more to do with his employer until Monday morning at the earliest; preferably not ever again, not if he was drowning in the North Atlantic and Mr Tanner happened to float by in a rubber dinghy holding a lifebelt. Just then, a bus pulled up at the stop opposite the door. It seemed like the obvious answer, or at least a good idea, at the time. He jumped on the bus and it pulled away.

This is all right
, Paul told himself, catching his breath and balance as the bus gathered speed.
All I’ve got to do is hop off at the next stop and walk home, no big deal. If I’m lucky, I’ll be off again before the conductor comes round and I won’t even have to pay
.

“Where to?” said a voice behind him.

Oh well
, he thought. “Just the next stop, please,” he sighed.

“Next stop Highgate Village.”

“What?”

“Next stop Highgate Village.”

That wasn’t right. “You mean it’s going all that way before it stops?”

“Yep.”

“But that’s a quarter-of-an-hour ride. I just want to get off round here somewhere.” He looked over the conductor’s shoulder. There was nobody else on the bus.

“Next stop Highgate Village,” the conductor said, and demanded money.

It was, Paul decided, all the fault of that goddamned pizza; because, after he’d paid for that and his fare, he was left with twelve pence and the prospect of a long walk home in the rain. He nosed around for a bright side to look on, but the best he could come up with was the certainty that the pizza would’ve defrosted completely by the time he got back. It was something, but not enough to make up for the rain, or the distance, or the unpleasant discovery that there was a hole in his left shoe.

All in all
, he told himself, as he set out on the long march,
I’d have been better off at home in front of the telly
. That reflection reminded him of something he’d been trying not to think about; and at that precise moment, he caught sight of a little pink flyer taped to the inside of a shop window:

Highgate Amateur Operatic Society

presents

The Sorcerer

by

W.S. Gilbert & Sir Arthur Sullivan

Highgate Community Arts Centre

Saturday 17 December 6.30 a.m.

Admission £5.00

In other words, he realised, glancing at his watch, right now; and (he looked down the road) just over there, in that grey concrete building that looks like an abattoir.

Paul thought about it for a moment.
Fuck off
, he thought. And then he grinned; because, thanks to the frozen pizza and the bus ride, he didn’t have any money for a ticket anyway.
Didn’t think of that, did you?
he taunted the darkened heavens, as something fluttered out of the window of a passing Mercedes and settled placidly at his feet. It was, of course, a five-pound note.

That shook him, down to his soggy socks. He could feel a pair of virtual cross-hairs closing in on his forehead, as chilling as the defrosted pizza juice trickling down the gap between his collar and his skin. There didn’t seem to be any point in fighting it any more. No matter what he tried to do next, whether he ran or hid, the long spectral arm of Gilbert and Sullivan was bound to attach itself to his ear and reel him back, like a fish exhausted by its battle against the angler.

But he still had a tiny scrap of courage left, smeared under the rim of his soul.
No
, he thought;
I am not a light-opera buff I am a free man. I shall not go gently into the Highgate Community Arts Centre. In fact, I’ll cross the road, and—The
van missed him by inches. He jumped back onto

the kerb, trembling, and clutched a lamp post to keep himself upright.
On the other hand
, he thought,
it’s not like I’m doing anything this evening, and this Gilbert and Sullivan crap is supposed to be really good
. (At least, he remembered, his aunt Patricia was dead keen on it, though that wasn’t the kind of endorsement he usually put much stock in.)
If that’s what it takes to get me out of here in one piece, then why not? The worst that can happen is, I’ll wake up in the interval with a cricked neck
.

So, like a schoolboy unwillingly to school, he walked slowly towards the concrete façade. There were loads of the pink flyers pinned to the noticeboard outside, and the door was open. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do with the frozen pizza, but he felt curiously unwilling to relinquish it, even though it was arguably the root cause of all his misfortunes. (And then he thought:
Where in the Bible does it say, “Don’t go buying pizzas you can’t afford, or Gilbert and Sullivan will come and get you?
”) He stuffed it under his coat, and advanced into the stream of yellow light leaking through the doorway.

And then someone walked towards him, and by that yellow glow he saw who it was. She saw him a fraction of a second later and quickened her step, trying to get past him before he noticed her, but it was too late for that.

“Hello?” Paul said.

“Hello,” the thin girl replied. “What are you doing here?”

“I—” Truth is a luxury, rather like pepperoni pizza; those who can afford it insist on nothing else, while the rest of us just have to make do. “I was visiting my second cousin,” he said. “But he’s out.”

“Oh.” She looked at him. “Why are you carrying a soggy cardboard box?” she asked.

“It’s a pizza,” he replied. “I brought it along for my cousin.” The lights of a passing car raked her face, and to his amazement he saw that she’d been crying; the puffy red eyes, the tear spoor, distinctive as the silver slimetrail of a slug. “How about you?” he asked.

“Me?” she said, as if she couldn’t think of a more bizarre subject of conversation. “Oh, I was just—” She stopped, and for the first time looked at him as if he wasn’t the back end of a maggot she’d just noticed in her half-eaten apple. A tiny voice in the back of Paul’s mind assured him that he was going to regret this, but he refused to listen. “Nothing,” she said.

Ten doors down lay a pub, and Paul remembered he had a five-pound note in his shirt pocket. “Come and have a drink,” he said.

No, thanks
, she should have said. Instead, she said, “What about your pizza?”

“What?”

“If it defrosts it’ll go all soggy.”

“Actually,” Paul said, “I’m not hungry.” He stooped down and propped the box carefully against the wall of the Highgate Community Arts Centre, like a druid making an offering of mistletoe. “Come on,” he said.

And, amazingly, she muttered, “All right,” and nodded.

The pub was horribly full. They had to turn side-on to get through the crush round the door, and the bar was lost to sight behind the press of flesh. From somewhere out back came the unique collage of strange noises that only a British pub jazz band can make. Paul snarled helplessly; this wasn’t at all what he’d had in mind. Then, to his great surprise, he saw an empty table, tucked away in a corner next to the toilet door. He nodded at it, and the thin girl nodded back and headed for it.
Fine
, Paul thought, and started threading his way through to the bar.

All the time he was waiting to get served, and all the weary way back, clutching a pint of Guinness in a straight glass and a small Britvic orange, he was sure she’d be gone by the time he reached the far-flung table. When the shoulders and elbows parted and he saw her

still there, picking at her nose with a scrap of shredded Kleenex, he could have shouted for joy. He slid into his seat, put down the Guinness in front of her, and said, “That’s right, isn’t it?”

She looked at him. “Yes,” she said.

“It’s what you had in that pub after the interview,” he explained.

“Oh,” she said.

“Well, cheers,” he suggested. He sipped a tiny drop of orange juice, while she nibbled at the froth of her beer. The jazz band made a noise like a circular saw cutting aluminium sheet. A fat man pushed past on his way to the Gents. Once again, Paul had a strong feeling that he was being closely observed by an invisible peanut gallery, who were going to start slow-handclapping unless he got the show on the road. (But what show, and what road? The unseen watchers presumably knew, but he didn’t.)

“Fancy bumping into each other like this,” he said. The invisible audience didn’t think much of that; neither did the thin girl, and neither did he. He tried again. “Is this your neck of the woods, then?” he asked.

“No,” she answered, and she’d have been perfectly within her rights to leave it at that; it was a feckless piece of cross-examination, and even the lowliest junior barrister would’ve laughed in his face. But, quite unexpectedly, she went on, “Actually, I live in Wimbledon. I came to see my boyfriend in a play.”

The world tightened around Paul’s head like a drillchuck. “Oh,” he said.

She looked at him, and grinned sadly. “If you must know,” she said, “we’ve just broken up.”

“Oh,” said Paul. “I’m sorry,” he lied through his teeth.

“That’s why I’ve been crying.”

“Ah, right.”

She sighed, and looked past him, as if he wasn’t there. “I came all this way just to see him in his stupid musical, because he kept on and on at me about it, and then when I got here I thought, What’s the point? And so—”

“Just a moment,” Paul interrupted. “By ‘musical’, do you mean Gilbert and Sullivan?”

She gave him a look you could’ve skewered kebabs on. “All right, not musical, operetta. Do you like that stuff?”

“No.”

She nodded very slightly, as if forced to concede he’d given the right answer. “So I went round backstage and told him,” she said. “I said, there’s just no point in us going on any more, is there? And he said he didn’t know what I meant, I said, well, exactly, and that’s why it’s pretty pointless us just dragging along any longer, because we were both just lying to ourselves, there just wasn’t any—”

“Point?”

She nodded. “And then I gave him back the CD he gave me last Christmas and the pen he’d lent me four months ago when we went to the Earls Court Bike Show, and I walked out.”

“I see,” Paul said. “So, he’s pretty keen on Gilbert and Sullivan, this bloke?”

She scowled at him, then shrugged. “He never used to be,” she said. “All he ever used to care about was motorbikes and animal rights and the fight against global warming. Then, quite suddenly, about a month ago, he seemed to go all strange. Like, he started wearing straw hats and blazers and stupid embroidered waistcoats, and he told me he’d joined this amateur operatic thing and he was going to be the star in this stupid opera they were doing. It was like he’d turned into somebody else, just like that, without any warning.”

Paul thought for a moment, though at something of a tangent to what she’d just said. Rather than tell her what was on his mind, however, he said, “Sounds to me like he’s met someone else.”

She sighed. “That’s what I thought,” she said. “Only I don’t think so; like, he was always dead keen for me to go and see him at rehearsals or listen to him saying his stupid lines. I told him to get stuffed, of course, but he went on asking; so I don’t think he’s got another girl or anything.” She frowned. “And when I told him we were finished, he looked really surprised, like it was a total shock. If he’d found someone else, he should’ve been happy for me to break it off, wouldn’t you say?”

“I guess so,” Paul replied; and then it struck him, as though he were Sir Isaac Newton and he’d just been hit on the head by a huge, scrummy toffee apple. Yes, until fairly recently she’d had a boyfriend; but the boyfriend was just down the road in the Highgate Community Arts Centre, warbling away like a demented nightingale, while he was in this pub, with her. Furthermore, there was the timing of the thing to be considered. In her darkest hour, when what she most desperately needed was someone to talk to, Destiny had chivvied him up here from Kentish Town and put him in exactly the right place at precisely the right time. Suddenly, it all made sense, apart from the rather bewildering fact that Destiny had felt obliged to disguise herself as two dead purveyors of nineteenth-century popular culture; and if that was what lit Destiny’s candle for her, he wasn’t about to criticise. Each to his own, he reckoned, and it could’ve been a whole lot worse. “I’m really sorry,” he said, with all the sincerity he could muster. “You must be feeling awful.”

She shrugged. “A bit,” she said. “I mean, yes, I did like him, quite a lot at one point, but I always got the feeling that when we were together I wasn’t really being me, if you follow me; I mean, I wasn’t being the me I wanted to be, I was being the me
he
wanted me to be, or at least the me he thought I wanted to be; and I was trying to want to be the me he thought I wanted to be, for his sake, and neither of us was being ourselves, so we could never really be
us
, in a together sort of a way, and so it was all really pretty pointless, for me and for him. Do you see what I mean?”