Winterton Blue (6 page)

Lewis had been living in a basement flat off the high street, doing jobs for cash, some house clearance, odd bits of decorating, which was how he first met Vivienne. He'd been employed to paint the interior of the café; there was two week's work in it if he took his time. Vivienne was a fixture, beautiful to look at, always in the middle of a crowd of admirers: would-be poets and bit-part actors and young men in suits, who would twirl their car keys and offer to buy her drinks. She had breakfast in the café every morning, and she'd still be there at lunch-time, chatting on her mobile, scanning the small ads in the paper. During the afternoon, Viv would disappear for a few hours and come back in different clothes: always some black outfit, and heavy pieces of glass jewellery hanging from her ears and her throat. She'd sit at
her
table in the window, in the candlelight, glinting like a scarab.

Viv made the first move. He'd been painting a trompe-l'oeil effect on the back wall: a menagerie of yellow parrots and green monkeys copied from a print the owner had given him. He hated the work; it was vulgar, he thought, but he made no comment because he got paid daily, in cash. She turned to him one morning from her seat in the window, and asked him if he was gay or straight. That was how it started.

Later, she would say she was attracted to his profile; that he reminded her of an actor she vaguely knew. He wasn't pleased with the idea of looking like someone else until he saw a picture, and then he considered that it could be worse. It was Viv, in the end, who forced him to get help with a problem he was hiding, although at the time he didn't take it in.

They'd been seeing each other for a couple of months, casually at first—going out to watch a film or see a gig—and then more intimately, sharing the evenings together at his flat. She was keen to progress the relationship, as she put it: she suggested that they should try living together. No sooner had she vented the idea than her bags were piled up in the hall.
Even though it was her suggestion, from the very first hours Lewis felt as if he were undertaking some kind of trial. Viv brought his problem to the surface in a manner he hadn't anticipated; it grew quietly inside him, a slow inflation of rage. It was the way she had, of untidying the space around her: leaving cutlery on the drainer where the stains would dry in splotches, shampoo trickling like slime down the tiles in the shower, her underwear hanging off the radiators. At first, it induced in Lewis a sense of panic. He told himself to think in broad terms: it was
he
who was abnormal; this was how people lived all the time, surrounded by their mess. He'd seen other people's houses, and this wasn't so bad by comparison. He tried to behave as though it didn't matter: she was beautiful, and glamorous, and as long as they loved each other, it would all be fine. For three months, Lewis managed to persuade himself that this was a fact, stepping around her, smoothing out the jagged edges of their shared life.

In the evenings, when he came home from work, he'd find Viv in front of the television in her pyjamas with her pouch of dope, her glass of wine, her
TV Times,
flicking through stations with the remote control while she talked on the telephone. Or she'd be sitting at the computer, her hair backlit like an exploding star, her collar turned in on itself as she scratched aimlessly at the nape of her neck. She called herself an actress. When she wasn't searching her name on the Internet or watching television or talking on the phone, she was in the bath, surrounded by a mass of guttering candles. At these times, Lewis would stand outside on the steps and breathe the air, the stinking London air, so much sweeter because it didn't proximate to Viv.

He came to the realization he really
didn't
love her one morning when he saw, amongst the thick bangles and droopy earrings, her hairbrush on the dressing-table. The long hairs wafted from it; embedded in the teeth was a coiled mesh of dusty auburn, like the nest of an insect. It made him cringe. His own hair was shorn, every three weeks, by a barber on
the high street. He couldn't even touch the hairbrush. He nudged the handle with the edge of a coat-hanger she'd left on the ironing board, until it fell off the dressing-table and into the wastebasket. Liberated by this, he swept his arm across the surface, scattering the jewellery, pots and powder, perfumes and cotton wool buds and assorted debris onto the carpet. It was such spectacular freefall, he felt he could run over the roof. He could knock the walls down, he could rip out the sky. He felt giant.

He woke face down on the bed, opening his eyes to see Viv, scrabbling around on the floor. He couldn't work out what she was doing until he lifted his head; she was throwing things at random into an open suitcase. He didn't know how long he'd been there, but the sky was darkening through the window. He felt the faint breeze of evening on his skin.

She must have been in the room a while, because the wardrobe doors were open and her clothes were strewn all over the carpet, and slumped in heaps against the wall and the bed, inches from his feet. He could tell when he looked at her face that she was angry, but there was another thing he saw there which made him mute: it was fear. He couldn't find anything to say to that. His head felt light and scattered, as if it had been filled with confetti. While she went about her packing, Lewis stared at the mirror above the dressing-table; it hung at a crooked angle, with a perfect smash in the centre, catching the light like a rose in the rain. To the left, the net at the window lifted once in the breeze; it revealed a more angular smash in the pane. He dared not look at his fists.

Viv snapped her case shut and got to her feet.

I'll be round for the rest in the morning, she said, her voice tight, So I'd prefer it if you weren't here. Actually, I think you need help. I've left an address on the table.

But Lewis wasn't planning to stay, either. Early next morning, he took his kitbag, pushed the key through the letter-box, and walked free into the wide, clean air. He didn't take the note with the address on it; didn't want anything of hers,
not even a scrap of paper. And it was an easy thing to remember a street name. The last he heard of Viv, she was living with some artists in a shared house in Battersea. He thought it would suit her well.

On his own again, Lewis tried to counteract what he began to think of as his migraine attacks in a new way. He discovered that organizing his personal world relaxed him: the build-up of pressure inside his head abated. He rented a furnished room in a tall, near-derelict building opposite the railway station. Two other men occupied bedsits on the same floor, and another, small space under the eaves was used for storage. The men shared a kitchen and bathroom. Lewis started on his regime by listing everything he could see in his room, slowly, like a breathing exercise. Sometimes he would move the objects into a systematic panorama; it could be alphabetically based, or purely dependent on the estimated age, or actual size, of the object. He liked the concentration this required; he thought of it as environmental mathematics.

After a while, he became convinced that the objects had fallen out of alignment—the lampshade was too far to the left, the ashtray had been slightly uncentred on the coffee table. He had no explanation for this; unless someone else had a key, or there was subsidence: objects did not move themselves. This was how the panic resurfaced, as a growing turmoil, like iron filings swirling around inside him; and all because of an ugly lampshade or a chair in the wrong place. He would need to take action.

One evening, the man who had the bedsit near the stairwell knocked on his door. The sound shocked Lewis: no one came calling, no one ever knocked. The man had come to complain: Lewis's furniture was blocking the way.

It's a fire hazard, mate, he said, craning his head round Lewis and staring into the room, It's a nuisance, no one can get past. The other lads are grumbling.

Lewis stood his ground, puzzled by the expression on the other's face.

I don't know what you're talking about, he said, What fire hazard?

He motioned to Lewis to follow him out onto the landing. The space under the eaves was crammed with pieces of furniture: a bed-frame, easy chairs, a coffee table, a television set, all piled up on top of each other. The ugly lampshade was crushed underneath it all, the stand sticking out into the hallway like a broken limb. Lewis recognized these pieces from his room. He must have put them there.

No offence, mate, but normal people like to have stuff, the man said, Even lifers in prison have a
bed.
If you wanted unfurnished, mate, you should've told the landlord.

Lewis decided that if the man called him
mate
again, in that fake way, he'd have no choice but to hit him.

Weeks later, leaning on the bonnet of a stolen van on the edge of the ring-road and watching as the fire engines screamed past, he made another decision: he needed help. The man was right, as Viv had been right: he was going mental.

Lewis had never been to a shrink before. He pictured an elderly man with half-moon glasses sitting behind a large desk; opposite would be a low leather couch, which Lewis would lie down on. Viv had had an appointment with her therapist every Monday for as long as he knew her. But Viv believed in witchcraft too, bought candles from Brixton market with incantations printed on them, burned papery curses in the fire grate late at night. As sceptical as he was about therapy, Lewis thought it must be preferable to Black Cat Bone.

The therapist turned out to be a young woman who insisted he call her just by her first name—Katy. He didn't ask whether she knew Viv, and understood, anyway, that even if she did, she wouldn't tell. They sat facing each other in easy chairs, under a gauze-covered skylight, in a room painted pale green. There was hardly any furniture in it, which made Lewis feel quite relaxed, but during their introductory session,
Katy leaned over and twice touched his arm, for no reason that he could see. It wasn't as if he'd invited it. Lewis regarded this touching business as a behaviour, just like his own—therapists were bound to have them too—and tried to explain that he didn't feel comfortable when she did it. He asked if it might not be part of his problem. She didn't say she wouldn't touch him again; she said she hoped they could agree in the first instance not to focus on ‘problems' and not to resort to ‘labels'.

But Lewis was keen on labels: he actively craved them. When he told Katy at the next session that he was having difficulty visualizing the
problem
—unable to find a better word to describe what it was he was suffering from—she relented. She rattled out a line of jargon.

It may be that you're suffering from a form of anxiety disorder instigated through childhood trauma and augmented by lack of closure, she said, Or, just as likely, it may be nothing of the sort. That's what we're here to find out.

Immediately he could see the words lined up, like beads on a string; he could taste them. When he told her this, repeating the phrase with the exact same intonation she used, she simply raised an eyebrow, as if to say, See, that's trouble with labelling, isn't it?

Over the next few sessions, Katy tried to encourage him to put things back into his environment. She called them ‘unblocking exercises', which made Lewis think of drains.

Start small, she said, Any ordinary object will do. But make it something you'll be bound to notice, like a picture. For example, you could put a framed photo on top of the television.

I don't have a framed photo, said Lewis, I don't have a television.

In another session, Katy asked him to concentrate on what he was hoping to achieve when he removed things from his environment. He supposed that it had something to do with his visual memory, his need to ensure that everything remained in its place. He told her as much:

If I can't know where everything is, then I get rid. That's it. The less there is, the less I have to remember. The less to forget.

But he didn't tell her what he really thought: that a life without objects is easier to bear, because objects store memories, and memories are like quicksand. They suck you down into a place that no longer exists, where events happen beyond your control. And no matter how hard you try to change the memory—make the rain fall and the sun not shine, make that bend in a leafy lane a straight, clear road—you can't. You can't undo. You can't not see what you've seen. Not once in all this did he mention Wayne.

Better to get rid, he told her, Wipe the slate.

Lewis understood that people forgot things all the time: their house keys, their cigarettes, their mobile phones; and he understood too, that it was perfectly normal. His brother Wayne was a forgetter. In turn, Lewis had become the one who could be relied upon to be responsible: he was the one who had to remember. Perhaps he took this too literally. But being unable to forget hadn't got him into trouble; not until he took that flat in Wandsworth. He had yet to learn that all space gives you is nowhere to hide.