The Quantity Theory of Insanity (30 page)

I crossed the street and hailed them. The failed albino turned to look at me, I could see his hand clutching the handlebar. It was as flat as a skate, the nails – dirty little crescents of horn – were deeply recessed into the flesh.

‘I was just at your house, Jim, and I saw the car outside. Were you there all the time?’

‘No, mate, I was out on the Common doing my exercises. I just went back, picked up the car and came
into town to meet Carlos.’ He indicated the failed albino with a twist of his hand.

‘Why aren’t you at work, Jim?’

‘I could ask the same of you, mate.’

There was something rather light and cheery about Jim’s manner that I found reassuring. I suppose in retrospect I should have been scared by the change in him. After all, the last time I’d seen him he’d been utterly driven, but, despite the mood swing and the weird company he was keeping, I was pleased to see my friend looking a little more like his old self.

‘Carlos is taking me on a run today. Do you want to come along?’

But before I could reply, Carlos broke in, ‘Can he come along, James? May he please come along? That is the question.’ Carlos had a high, fluting voice and spoke with the accents of a comic Welshman. It was immediately clear that he always spoke facetiously and that all his questions were rhetorical.

‘Carlos, this is the man I was telling you about. My old friend. He’s the one I went to Stein’s lecture with. He knows most of it already.’

‘There’s a difference between knowing and seeing, isn’t there, James? Now I don’t suppose you’d deny that, would you?’

I wasn’t really paying that much attention to this exchange. Carlos struck me as a ludicrous figure. I had to get back to work. I was suddenly angry with Jim. Everything he said was clearly a manifestation of what I now saw as an illness. It was strange, but I could feel falling back down my throat the level of choked emotion I had invested in Jim. I should never have tried to help him. He was someone I
knew only vaguely. I could do without Jim. He was receding fast.

‘What are you waiting for, man?’

‘What’s that?’

Carlos was addressing me. ‘Why don’t you come and see, then? I value Brother James’s opinion very highly, very highly indeed.’

‘Look, Carlos. I don’t really know what you and Jim are talking about. All I know is that my friend here’, a jerk of the thumb and special, heavy emphasis on ‘friend’, ‘has developed a dangerous and cranky obsession. He has tried to draw me into the fantasy world that he’s constructed around this obsession, but I’m not interested – I think he needs help. Apparently you are an active player in this fantasy world. Therefore, I can only choose to adopt the same attitude towards you.’

As soon as I’d finished speaking I felt ridiculous. The words had sounded all right as I was saying them. But now, as they hung in the air unwilling to disperse, they constituted a reproach. The failed albino and my twitching former friend stood there, both of them still propped up by their vehicles. Jim’s hazard lights clicked. In the square, female office workers, hobbled by tight, mid-thigh-length skirts, lay on the grass eating sandwiches, their legs free from the knee down. They were like some species of crippled colts. Jim and Carlos regarded me quizzically.

‘Come and look.’

The pink, flaccid Welshman had a voice of insidious, quiet, insistent command. We walked in single file up to Oxford Street. Standing on the inside of the pavement, grouped stiffly together, the three of us formed an odd little protuberance, around which the great stream of pedestrians
flowed. Carlos leant up against the window of Tie Rack. He’d left his helmet on the bike, and his pale hair fluffed out around his ears. As he pressed backwards, his plastic tabard rode up above his shoulders. His eyes seemed to disengage; they unfocused, slid out of gear, and became simply oval, colourless blobs stuck down on to his blurred, colourless face. Jim and I stood either side of him, awkward and still.

After a while sweat began to well up from Carlos’s temples. His eyes quivered. I had never seen anyone sweat like this before – the sweat coming straight out of the exposed skin, rather than trickling down from the hairline. It was as if a boot had been ground down into a peaty, boggy surface. The sweat ran down his temples, milky against the pale flesh. I felt utterly nauseous and afraid. Then, as quickly as Carlos had gone into the trance he snapped out of it with a chilly shiver.

He turned to me.

‘How good is your knowledge?’ I was taken aback.

‘Good enough, I suppose. I know my way around.’

‘How quickly do you think you could drive from here to the Hornimans Museum via Shootup Hill?’

‘Well…’ I looked around me. It was nearly 1.00 and the streets were thick with lunch-time traffic. The stodgy air boiled with blue exhaust. I computed routes, thought about the ebb and flow of cars, transit vans, lorries and buses. I tried to visualise the roads I would travel down. ‘If you were lucky you might do it in an hour and twenty minutes, but I’d allow an hour and a half.’

‘We’ll do it in forty-five minutes.’ Carlos was emphatic. He wiped his temples with a big red handkerchief and turned on his heel. Jim and I followed him back to the
square. A traffic warden, neat in dark uniform and fluorescent sash, was tucking a ticket behind the Sierra’s windscreen wiper. As Carlos mounted his MZ Jim tore it off and shredded it. The traffic warden shrugged. The central locking chonked and I took my place in the passenger seat, immediately conscious of the interior of the car as another, separate place.

We peeled away from the kerb and followed Carlos off round the square, turning left into the alley that leads to Charing Cross Road.

‘Pay no attention to the Secret Police of Waiting.’ It was a flat statement. Jim made it through hard-pressed teeth. I paid no attention. I was stuck in a kind of torpor, all I could focus on were the flapping sides of Carlos’s corduroy trousers as he moved ahead of us through the traffic.

Jim drove with his habitual, flattened ease. The boxy modern car clumped and tchocked through the streets. Carlos hovered ahead on his bike. It was as if he were attached to us by some invisible, umbilical cord. He didn’t lead us through the traffic, we moved in concert.

Across Gower Street and then right, past the Royal Ear Hospital, to the top and then left and right, on to Tottenham Court Road. There was no delay at the Euston Road lights, we went straight up through the estates behind Hampstead Road. I noticed idly that the council, instead of pointing some of the older blocks, had taken to cladding them with caramel slabs. Our little convoy accelerated through the half-circuit of the Outer Circle. Nash terraces were reduced by speed to a single, tall, thin house. We skittered across the bridge that led out of Regent’s Park. Down Belsize Road; for a moment we were poised alongside an old Datsun 180D, bulbous, red and rusting. It
plunged with us towards the elbowed bend, where the road narrows to one lane. The cord tightened between the MZ and the Sierra. We pulled ahead of the Datsun. In the wing mirror, the surrounds of its blind headlights, conjunctival with rust, were sharp and then gone. We tore through the aggressive signing of the one-way system between Finchley Road and West End Lane. Then dropped down the other side into a trough of squats and second-hand furniture shops that in turn disgorged us on to the great, raddled, calloused, Kilburn High Road.

I registered all these junctures, but only vaguely. There was an unreal, static sensation to the journey. The long London roads were panoramic scenery wound back behind us to provide the illusion of movement. The MZ and the Sierra stood still, occupying a different zone.

We reached Shootup Hill in about seventeen minutes. The facility with which Carlos had led us was unnatural. At every juncture where there was an opportunity for a choice, he took the right one. Time and again we turned one way and I saw in the rear-view mirror that if we had gone the other, more obvious way, we would have been frozen in a tail-back, eroding synchromesh for five minutes or more. Even stranger than that was the realisation that the idiosyncratic directions we did take, always took time off our journey. Carlos had not only apprehended every road, he had anticipated every alleyway, every mews, every garage forecourt and the position and synchronisation of every traffic light. He could not possibly know what he seemed to know – the only way he could have seen the route we took was from the air, and even then he would have had to have made constant trigonometric calculations to figure out the angles we seemed to have followed intuitively.

We were going up Shootup Hill towards Kilburn doing about forty, when suddenly Carlos put his right leg down and yanked the bike round in a tight turn. Jim followed suit, without even looking at the oncoming traffic, and before I’d had time to register the extent of the risk we’d run, we were heading back down and under the railway bridge.

The swish of an underpass, the whirr of an overpass, a long row of wing mirrors reaching out to us, the rise and fall of identically gabled roofs. Jim’s arms – the inside of the forearm pressed against the wheel – insectoid and manipulative. The child’s counterpane world of London’s roads – where a turned corner can mean a distant prospect, a sudden impression of pillows in the distance, or a dip into a hollow can completely enclose you in a tiny world where the light quality never changes and spindrifts of sweet-wrappers chase one another in a tireless pavane.

As we crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the water glinted for a second; to the right a glimpse of banked-up buildings, circumstantially pompous – an encrustation of administration which could belong to any city on earth – and then gone, back into the homogeneous, the undifferentiated London, where twee shopping parade succeeds arterial road, in turn flanked by the dusty parade ground of a municipal park where single, silent figures stand, tied to stuffed dogs.

No frenzy, no hurry. No giving anyone the finger. Carlos weaved and we weaved with him, cutting up whole files of traffic, ignoring feeder lights, insinuating ourselves on to roundabouts. The outward stretch to Shootup Hill had presented itself as an elegant piece of geometry. The downward swipe to Horniman’s Gardens was guile and
outrageous nerve. I felt chilly in the stuffy, corrupted car. Chilly and scared.

Through Dulwich Park the Sierra’s engine phutted into the cleaner air and Carlos’s trousers dappled in the sunlight that fell through the trees.

We pulled up at the Hornimans Museum exactly forty-five minutes after we had started from Soho Square. Carlos banked his bike on to the tarmac lip that curled up from the road and we followed suit. Behind us the prospect opened out for the first time since we had crossed the river. In the middle distance a ridge of crenellated, oblong buildings stood out above the sea of tree- and rooftops. Beyond them London washed away towards the northern horizon, bluer and greyer.

Carlos was pulling off his gloves as I jack-knifed myself out of the door of the Sierra in an attempt to jerk myself out of the strange trance. Carlos wore two gloves on each hand. The cheap vinyl of the outer glove had worn away exposing the tufts of the wool gloves inside. For some reason these worn patches fixated me, they were somehow anatomical. The blood rushed to my temples – I stared at the gloves. I felt sick. Carlos leant up against the signboard advertising the museum’s exhibits.

The irritating Welsh voice: ‘You see boy, when I trance like that,’ he rolled his eyes back in his head exposing a network of veins under the pink ball, ‘I assess the flow, at one location, for one brief moment. But because I know, you see, I know so much about this,’ he gestured towards the horizon, ‘it means that all the movement stands still. I know ev-ery-thing.’ He rolled out the syllables with fluting emphasis. ‘All the tail-backs, all the hold-ups, every burst water-main and dropped lorry load in the metropolis – at
that moment I realise them all. Take me to any street, any street in London whatsoever where there is a constant traffic stream and just by looking at it I can know the state of every other road in the city. Then there’s no waiting. You understand? I never have to wait.’

The albino’s leeched brow moved to one side, exposing the signboard. A poster was tacked on it, advertising some forthcoming exhibition of Amazonian artefacts. A double-decker bus laboured up the hill from Forest Hill Station. I looked at my watch, it was 1.50. The dreamlike state I’d been in since I met Jim and Carlos in Soho fell away as suddenly as stepping out of a bath. I started running for the bus.

‘Don’t you see!’ Jim was shouting after me, ‘he doesn’t have to wait! Don’t you understand, he’s beyond waiting; however far he travels he’s already arrived! Oh, you bloody fool …’

The last words were a scream. I paid no attention and swung myself up on to the platform of the bus as it pulled away from the stop and started the long descent to East Dulwich.

A week passed and then a month. There was no news from Jim and I made no attempt to contact him. Then a Post-it note appeared stuck to the keyboard of my computer. It asked me to ring a Mr Clifton at a Camden-based legal practice. Before I could respond, Clifton called me. He had an appalling phone manner, breathy and inaudible and his legalese sounded put on.

‘It’s concerning our client Mr Stonehouse.’

‘Oh, yes. Jim. What’s he done?’

‘He has been convicted of failure to stop; one count and two counts of aggravated assault.’

‘Did he do it?’

‘He made a statement to that effect to the police, he appeared before the magistrates’ court at Highgate who have passed the matter of sentencing over to Snaresbrook.’

‘I see, I see. That’s a bit rough. Still, I can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘Surprised?’

‘Well, he had been behaving rather erratically lately.’

‘That’s just it. It would appear that the best course of action for Mr Stonehouse would be for us to apply for further psychiatric evaluation.’

‘What if you don’t?’

‘It could be three to six years.’

‘I see, I see … What I don’t see is where I come into this …’

‘Well, as you said yourself, Mr Stonehouse has been behaving erratically recently and you’ve been a witness to this. A statement in court from someone like you, with your position, could be the deciding factor.’