The Red Men (2 page)

‘Please, it’s urgent,’ said Raymond.

Scratching at his new goatee with dirty fingernails, he had changed since our last meeting. That was how it went with Raymond. His identity was in flux during his manic phase: he was a Buddhist
then he was out on bail then he was Zen celibate then he was the spare man in a swingers enclave, all in the course of three weeks. I first met him when I was the editor of
Drug Porn
and he
was a contributor. Recently, he had taken up a tighter orbit, looping around the routines of my family life.

The first thing I said to him, straight up, before I let him into the flat, was this:

‘Shut up. Don’t say anything. This is a small place. Iona and El are asleep downstairs. You can come in, but first you must promise me that you won’t start talking until I am
ready, a state I will indicate by pointing at you, and saying the word “speak”.’

Since our last meeting, he had grown a neat swell of gut, inconsequential beside mine, but significant on his carpenter’s pencil of a figure. As he went by into the flat, I could smell the
sweat of alleyways, the urban dewfall of bus fumes and rotting garbage. He laid down a dosser’s bag, its zip defeated by the sleeping bag shoddily stuffed inside. He asked to use the toilet
and I indicated, through quiet pointing, that I would meet him out back when he was done.

I went down to check on El. The bedrooms were underground and dug out of the old coal cellar. She was drowsy, having been up in the night with our daughter. I told her to go back to sleep and
her dreaming self obeyed me. In Iona’s dark little room, sweetly stuffy from her child’s body, I checked her temperature with the back of my hand, adjusted the duvet around her
shoulders, caught my reflection in the pulsating obsidian monitor on the chest of drawers.

In the garden, Raymond rolled a small joint in the encrusted ridges of his trousers. I served tea and pointed at him.

‘Speak.’

‘I’ve been out all night. I can’t convey the importance of what’s happened to me. Sex and revelation. Well, almost sex. Certainly revelation though.’ He
whistled.

‘You are catastrophizing again,’ I said.

He considered my observation, rolled it around his palate with a swirl of marijuana.

‘Do you want some of this?’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t asked what my revelation was?’

‘Does it involve the end of the world?’

‘It is more surprising than that: I’ve decided to get a job.’

‘Who is going to give you a job?’ I asked.

‘You are,’ he said. ‘You’re going to change my life. I met this woman. She told me Monad is hiring writers and poets. I’m going to apply to work with you at
Monad.’

I was due at Monad in an hour. I would take the Overground train to Stratford then down to Canary Wharf and Monad’s offices at the Wave Building. Our garden backed onto the platform at
Hackney Central. The station Tannoy echoed apologies over the fence, interrupting our conversation. A train pulled in to the platform. The passengers seethed against one another; pressed against a
single window, among the human faces, was an Alsatian’s terrified chops. No one got off that carriage with their reputation intact. It was a commuter route for all trades: immigrants from
Eastern Europe, dusty with demolition work out West, snoozed against middle managers, who made every effort to close their senses against the press of fellow passengers. The nearly dead travelled
on this train too. Stabbed or shot in the Pembury or Nightingale estates, they bled into the upholstery on their way to A&E at Homerton hospital.

The train pulled away. The garden was quiet again, and Raymond resumed his talk.

‘It all started when Florence the poet asked if I wanted to come over for cunnilingus and pasta. I asked, “What type of pasta?” She said, “Fusili.” I said,
“Don’t mind if I do.”’

Raymond had been practising this conversation on the walk over.

I raised my hand.

‘Stop. I don’t want to hear about this. Just tell me about Monad.’

‘No. It’s all relevant. You’re doing exactly what she did. Florence. She put her finger on my lips and told me I could only speak when she winked at me.’

‘We have to do that. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of your conversation.’

‘That’s because I have perfect recall.’

This was true. Raymond was always bringing up something I had said half a dozen years earlier. He could rummage around in the brain gutters and memory drains to pull out clumps of throwaway
ideas, irrelevant asides, boozy promises that were never meant to live beyond closing time.

‘After the pasta we went to a reading at the Vortex. Then it was zzzzzzip’ – this exclamation a conversational tic to signify a jump cut in his inner movie – ‘and
me and Florence are drinking sherry in her bedroom. I told her I didn’t want to sleep with her.

‘“Come to bed, Ray-mond,” she cooed at me like a dove from under her duvet.

‘I said, “No, I can’t have sex. I have too much going on at the moment.”

‘She put her index finger to my lips and said, “I don’t want your objections. Shut up and give me head.”’

He was smoking his joint now, and it was having no effect upon him. The tetrahydrocannabinol could not compete with the charged juice running through his axons and synapses, it could not
insinuate itself into the quantum events operating in the microtubules of each and every one of his twenty-three billion neurons, the chorus of tiny mysteries that sang into existence the strange
consciousness of Raymond Chase.

I was puzzled as to how, via the infinite processes of the brain, he had come up with such a daft idea as to not have sex with willing Florence.

‘I was trying to have a conversation with her. Is it so wrong in this day and age that a man has something to say?

‘“Speak here, Raymond,” she said, hitching up her dress. “Tell it the alphabet, let your tongue go from A to Zed.” I was so busy telling her about my reality
filters that I hadn’t noticed she’d taken her knickers off.’

The phrase ‘reality filters’ was mine. When he was manic, reality was everything at once and it was all connected to him: Raymond became the junction box through which many currents
flowed. Instead of walking the street with the filters in place, one spotlight of consciousness on the pavement before him, all the lights were on in Raymond’s head. It became difficult for
him to tell where he ended and other people began.

At the end of the garden, the winter sun glinted off the spears of the metal security fence. Emaciated trees shivered in the breeze. He was talking about inclining his head toward
Florence’s exposed labia, taking one lip between his lips.

‘I still had plenty to say at this point, but I confined myself to licking every letter of the alphabet into her. She liked L. She giggled at M. I nipped her with V, then shook her with
W.

‘She said, “Focus on me. Forget everything else.” The cowl of her clitoris was thrown back. I tried to narrow everything down to that red nub. I could feel her seeping into my
beard.’

Raymond ran back through the alphabet, and she started to pull him on top of her. There was some scrabbling with his trousers while she plucked a condom from the top drawer of the bedside table.
She flicked a paisley scarf onto the lamp for ambience. He tried to catch the look upon her face when she first saw his penis.

‘Stop.’ I raised my hand, and Raymond snapped out of his recollection. ‘It’s too early in the morning for this. Don’t give it to me blow-by-blow. Did you have sex
or not? Just a yes or no.’

The frustration crushed him: how could I understand what was happening to him if he didn’t show me every facet of the experience?

‘It’s not a yes or no thing. If you insist on getting all empirical, then yes I achieved penetration. But for penetration to graduate to full sex, I feel one or more of the
participants must achieve orgasm. Long before that eventuality, I was standing by the armoire, smoking a roll-up and finishing my observation about my reality filters.’

‘Which was?’

‘That they were clogged.’

‘By?’

‘Reality, obviously.’

‘What did Florence say when you stopped having sex?’

‘It was very sudden. I sprang out of her. She thought I’d seen something. A rat. The house has rats. It wasn’t a rat. I hadn’t seen something alarming. Rather, I’d
thought something alarming. Actually, it was an absence of thought. My brain seized up. There was complete silence in there; it was as if Florence had reached into my skull and shushed my
hippocampus, thalamus, frontal lobe whatever with her index finger. In place of the usual inner chatter there was a rush of information from the muscle sense, the inner ear. I could feel the
macadamized heft of my lung lining, the groaning sodden liver, the whine of knee cartilage and, most of all, the hesitancy of my heart. It was a non-lucid moment. I still had Florence’s
thighs over each shoulder, the pressure of her flesh against my ears. Clamped. Locked in the meat prison. I had to get out. So zzzzzzip I’m on the other side of the bedroom slapping my face
to get Raymond Chase back online.’

I was keen to get to work. Raymond had riddled me with his talk while failing, in any way, to impart the crucial fact: what job was Monad offering?

I made one last attempt to find out.

He replied, ‘Florence asked me what was wrong and I’ll give you the same answer. After this non-lucid moment, it took a while to coax my consciousness back into the pilot’s
chair. There was no question of continuing with the sex. I apologized to her for my problems, and explained that of late I’ve had some difficulty controlling the strength and direction of my
thoughts.

‘She said, “I had no idea you were off your rocker.”

‘I said, “Would it be alright if we just slept together?”

‘We perched on the bed, a cheap single bed you always get in rented houses. I tried to nuzzle her, by way of an apology. She turned over. Posters proclaiming the virtues of rationing lined
the walls. Hearty women in flannel dresses advertised the benefits to the war effort of eating less bread. Another poster showed a home guard ticking off a young lad in the Blitz ruins:
“Leave this to us, Sonny – You ought to be out of London.” A sentiment I approve of.

‘There was an old Dansette record player. I slipped out of bed and inspected the heavy vinyl records beneath it. Out of browning dust sleeves slipped long players by the Joe Loss Orchestra
and Charlie Kunz. The inevitable Vera Lynn. There was a rickety wooden writing desk with an ink well and a fountain pen beside it. Neat homemade volumes of her poetry were tucked in an alcove,
overlooked by a gas mask.

‘I mention all this just to convey how out-of-place the application form was, in an open silver folder, the front embossed with the Monad logo. It was a real shock to me. At first I was
appalled. What a sell-out! What a hypocrite! She makes her room a shrine to a bygone age then applies to work with Monad, of all people. But this is where the revelation came. I looked again at the
posters. The women clenched their biceps at me. They were determined to fight Hitler from their kitchens, from the fields, from the factories. They wouldn’t respect the likes of me, grubbing
around the pubs and the dole.

‘And I need money. Florence needs money too. We all do. Poets more than anyone. I still count out my change, on my bed, at night. You’ve got buckets of coins lying around your house.
I’ve seen you take money out of the cashpoint in units of a hundred. A hundred quid! That would transform my month.

‘As Florence slept quietly, I saw an alternate future for us both. If we were both working at Monad, then I could get a little bit of what you have. I could move out of the squat and wash
its stench out of my suits. I could even keep food in the house. Perhaps a wine cellar.

‘I flicked through the application form. It asked for references and that’s when I thought of you. You work for Monad, you could be my way in. So I left Florence a note –
“We’ll meet again” – then I was out in Hackney. It’s a new dawn and there’s no time to waste. I came right over to see you. You don’t mind do
you?’

The next time Raymond contacted me, I was being fitted for a suit. I told him that it wasn’t a good time to talk, that I had a tailor attending to my inside leg on a hot
day.

Raymond ignored me and said, ‘You promised me that if I ever really needed it you would move heaven and earth to help me. Exact words. Heaven
and
earth. I’d have been happy
with just one of them.’

Had I really promised him that? Yes, I remembered a party from late in the century, when I was the boss of
Drug Porn
and arrogant with all the attention that position attracted. I have
not forgotten taking Raymond under my arm at the bar. He was fierce and sharp and wrote candidly about the hilarious catastrophe of his daily life. Even then, it was clear that it would not turn
out well for him, that he had no talent for compromise.

I didn’t need to move heaven and earth for Raymond. I merely put him in touch with Monad personnel and they sent him a Myers-Briggs Jung Typology test, a standard questionnaire used by
personnel departments to determine personality type.

He called me for advice.

‘If the test shows I don’t have a personality, do I get the job?’

It was an entry-level position, that’s all I knew. As such, it was beneath Raymond but so were the alternatives: homelessness, starvation or living with his mother again.

A month later, Monad called him for an interview. The interviewer kept him waiting for an hour in the reception, a humid arboretum dominated by tropical plants and trees. He bided his time
showing an interest in the flora, inspecting glossy banana plants and picking at the dark green lobes of breadfruit leaves, the trunks strung with rootless ferns. When he got up from his leather
seat to read a description of these weightless epiphytes, trails of his perspiration flared up on the black leather sofa. His diffident front became harder to maintain as the minutes ticked by. He
was furious to discover he was sweating, the yellow collar of his shirt darkening to amber. I had warned Raymond that he would be observed from the moment he stepped into the building. He had never
spent time in office culture and was clueless regarding its etiquette. He would make the mistake of socializing in the reception, and wouldn’t be able to stop himself from chatting up the
receptionist, poncing a fag off the security guard or sharing confidences with the executive drivers as they idled on the sofas.