All the Rage (14 page)

I am doing so as another man who looks and sounds impostorish, but is better than me, and that is okay. I've rarely cared how I look and always sounded like an impostor, so none of this matters. It's minor details. I'm a minor detail here.

Sometimes, mostly at night, traces of his personality, spasms and fears, rub between his brain and the interior curve of his skull. This was how he visualised the process. And he was almost convinced that the bones which protected his thinking, which allowed it a moist and warm security, were being worn away exactly and precisely by that thinking.

I mourn the passing of my thoughts.

And, whoever I am, this has been frankly a right pain in the arse and everywhere else.

No one to care except me, but even so.

Throughout his autumn he had stayed in most evenings. This wasn't unusual for him, but seemed an imposition when enforced. He'd been waiting for viewers to come and see his flat – as advertised with a fair degree of honesty in the customary ways. Mike had decided his home should be set beyond his reach and lived in without him, or his ornaments, or his dust.

He hadn't warmed to the prospective purchasers. For one thing, they knew they were in a buyers' market and could therefore act like jaded princelings and empresses.

They were a pack of weirdies.

They said that my windows were peculiar, in the wrong place, an unfortunate shape, needed cleaning, were painted a gloss white that wasn't quite gloss or white enough.

They would plod up the stairs as if I had put every tread in their way to be trying. How else did they want to reach the fourth floor? With a bosun's chair, on a pack mule, hauled aloft by servants of their retinue . . .?

And then they would tell me, ‘It's dark.'

Course it was dark; they only ever came after sunset and that's when it tends to get dark and why we have candles and torches and eco-friendly light bulbs and it's why we buy table lamps in the shape of nude women with tensed bodies and long 1930s' hips.

I've wanted one of them for years, since I was barely beyond a wean.

The setting of the sun is why we bothered to have the Industrial Revolution: we wanted to keep out the badness of the night.

We don't like badness. We can't stand the way it is worse than being blinded, how it paces and howls with fears.

He clapped his hands for no particular reason, beyond a need to hear something in his rooms. The CD player and, indeed, the CDs and old cassettes and saved vinyl and every part of his music had been jettisoned. This seemed a better idea every day: since his belongings had retreated into huddles, the whole place sounded peculiar and would have screwed up his tunes if he'd let them loose in it.

Once a tune's gone bad you can't save it.

This way the whole place hauds its whisht. I have my reasons.

He scuffed through to the kitchen. His inadequate kitchen, apparently.

The viewers wanted it up-to-date. But why would I bother with that? What if they found my blatantly new kitchen was also repellent? Then it would be more convincingly wrong than the knackered one that's here, and which only quietly asks to be replaced and will shrug when it's knocked to pieces and hauled away and not take it personally one bit.

Likewise with the bathroom – they all despised it.

But it isn't poky. It has never been found poky by those whose judgement I respect. Two people can manage well in that bathroom simultaneously. Three or four could be accommodated, but who would want that, who would need that? No one.

He'd had to agree there was an issue with the shower curtain.

Can't avoid seeming infectious, an unknown shower curtain. You stand and draw it across, close across, and you worry about the marks on it and what they might imply and, should it be spotless, you still freak out when it brushes you, possibly where it has brushed other bodies before. It has memories of contact which disturb.

But if I'd taken it down, then the bath would have looked too naked and as if I shower without protection and am odd and have exposed my joists and floorboards to hazardous levels of damp.

Someone didn't like the boiler. A man with stained ear-hair and ugly glasses looked at it askance.

I looked at him askance.

It's a new boiler. Newish. It is serviced. On its left-hand side is a printed sticker recording maintenance dates and showing signatures to prove that all has been repeatedly well, or mended and tended until it was well.

The sticker is almost full of tinily noted visits by trained personnel, mostly in the scribbly writing of the young engineer who's usually sent by the servicing company and who also checks the gas fire.

He once found a pigeon, dead at the back of the fire. I hadn't heard it being trapped or dying, but there it was. Unfortunate. I liked to think it had pegged out quickly. Birds can die of simple horror, they're frail that way. I had to bring in a pan and brush and washing-up gloves and hand them over before the guy would make a start on removing the little body, the maggots. He appeared likely to spew, although he held himself back, which was good of him.

I could have tidied up myself – both the pigeon and, for that matter, any spew. I'm not squeamish, but I didn't volunteer. Why pay a dog to visit and then piss on the carpet yourself?

Which isn't a good way to put it, is coarse and inaccurate, but then I am. Lately, this person who I am is boorish.

The servicing guy has changed, too. Each time, he gets thicker in his neck and face. As if he's maturing outwards in rings, as a tree would.

One viewer had a problem with the gas fire, too – didn't fancy its general attitude and demeanour.

Mike wondered if it had an atmosphere of doom about it, a sense that blowflies might ease their way horribly out from the dark behind it and have to be murdered each morning.

That happened for a while. Three or four flies in the living room each dawn, banging at the windows to get out and find further meat.

None of them prospered in the long term.

Then it stopped.

Mike was already sitting on his sofa before he realised that he'd wandered into the living room. He got up again and faced the fly-hampering windows and then kind of folded. He eased down onto the floor and came to rest with his back against the wall. The window glass was blank, night-filled, curtainless.

His armchairs were here with him, huddled in a knot. One might guess they were chatting and didn't wish to be disturbed.

He was tired.

And he was heavy-handed. This had endured – his ability to break things and be bewildered in his fingers. He rested his knuckles on the carpet as if he were setting down stones.

Van comes in the morning, hauls everything into storage. What's left.

It would be none of his business when, in the afternoon, a couple would show up and open his door with the keys that were presently hiding in his coat pocket.

Then they'll let themselves in and they'll let themselves in.

He wasn't going to wait for them, because that would be peculiar.

He wasn't going to say they ought to leave the kitchen as it is, because it has warm work surfaces which are good for making bread, and that loaves had been baked in its oven regularly and had smelled like love and been only beautiful to come home for.

He wasn't going to mention that they shouldn't repaint the walls – the scruffy, unimpressive walls – because they were important. The last time they were painted, he'd taken a week off to do it and so had Margaret and they'd uniformed up in cheap blue overalls. Hers were enormous on her: sexy, baggy, rolled at the ankles and wrists – smooth, fine ankles and wrists – and clearly there was a sense, a true sense, a provable, testable sense, that she was naked and shifting and warm there and surprising and understood – by him understood – and just there, so there, inside them. She was extremely there inside them. God bless all women with long 1930s' hips.

So deep it didn't hurt, never hurt, did not hurt anyone ever. We were the opposite of hurt.

And they'd bought themselves brushes, rollers, paint trays, paint and other practical gifts and they'd cleared and covered what they wanted to stay clean and so there was nothing to do but the fun part – starting in.

With music.

They tried different types.

R&B was good, it often suited, and sometimes they went slipping down the seam between it and the blues, pure blues.

So they hadn't painted, they had danced.

One week of dancing.

And the work rolled on, smooth with the rhythms, room after room, no effort, just heat. Easy. Although they'd complain in the mornings: stiff shoulders, tender backs; before the beats kicked up and Ray Davis helped them, Aretha Franklin helped them, C.W. Stoneking helped them, the early Stones helped them and the late Stones helped them and Justin Timberlake helped them and the Black Eyed Peas helped them. They had a lot of help, in fact – they kept it successfully varied.

They worked up a sweat. They got happyweary until it was evening and time to put on Simon and Garfunkel – a folky exception to their rules and suitable for winding down – and they'd lean back against songs that sounded unconsoled and broken, but happy with it. They made everything seem fine and mildly transcendent. Perfect.

Once the bridge had gone over the troubled water, Mike set the brushes to soak and cleaned the rollers and Margaret would unveil the room, be dramatic as she whisked back dustsheets and tore away masking tape.

Then they'd smile. Then they'd pause. Then they'd have to get tidy themselves, because that was simply necessary, anything else would be uncivilised.

They'd trot off to be with each other in the shower and search for signs of paint, get scrubbed down to new pink and as clean as weans and as grown as grown and lovely. This running of joy along their skin.

On their last day, he'd told her that they ought to start again, give themselves a new profession, be a couple who painted their flat forever, who'd hook and roll and sidestep for each other. He wanted to mainly spend his life making shapes to entertain her and watching her make them back and feeling her take it home, right home, right home for him.

But they did declare it over and finish. She said she felt wiped out the following afternoon, seriously exhausted, which was their first clue. Maggie didn't seem quite right to herself from then on.

And the doctors agreed when she saw them. She wasn't quite right.

And after that was badness.

Night.

And I can't stand it.

I can't.

So leave the flat.

Please.

Leave the flat alone.

Please.

Keep what's left of us safe without me, because I can't stay, because it was lovely, because I'm asking. You won't hear, but I'm still asking.

Because Maggie was the kindest person I ever met.

She was where I used to live.

Please.

EVENTUALLY HE'S GOING
to say it: ‘You don't love me any more.' You can see it in him – a panicky, bleaty light about his eyes – and a couple of times he's actually started the sentence.

‘You don—'

It's not that you interrupt him because he's wrong – you can't actually remember if he's wrong. It is true that you didn't think of him especially while you were away. Then again, you thought of no one especially while you were away.

There'd been nowhere for thinking while you were away. Close the doors and draw the blinds and block the chimney, that was the sensible best when you'd been out there.

Not that they'd had really any chimneys out there. Not the way she was used to.

‘You don—'

You don't mean him any harm. You wonder if you should tell him, for example,
Stay on known safe areas. Avoid verges.
This is good and accurately retained information, but may not be applicable from his point of view.

He is making you tense and perhaps attempting to bring on a confrontation.

‘You don—'

You don't have clarity. It is unclear – no, it is
uninteresting
whether you love him – and your main aim at the moment should be simply to prevent the argument and the ending.

You can't break up with him here.

Not in Blackpool.

You don't want to break up with anyone in Blackpool.

You don't want to be in Blackpool and commit an act you may at some later date recall. Not anyone, not anything, not at any time, not in Blackpool.

That should be the rule. Your rule.

What happens in Blackpool shouldn't.

Not in Blackpool
.

Not in fucking Blackpool
.

So hard to keep other determinations steady, but you're glad you can be sure that if Blackpool has touched a thing, then the taint will stick. This is a
macabre consideration
. There's someone you trained with who'd put it like that and where they've ended up since then you've no idea, not where you did, not where you have, that's sure certain. It's
macabre
but bloody funny, sort of, to picture yourself in your death's hour, your own death's moment, and your inner eye, you discover, ends up full of that postcard view of Blackpool Tower. That would be a joke. You'd lie there remembering sterilised milk and over-stewed tea – daytime here tastes of that – and if it wasn't the Tower you'd see your boyfriend's face, only not romantic. And they'll watch you – whatever observers are there – and they'll possibly guess you are staring at inrushing angels, heaven's glare, but it'll be all Blackpool stuff you're seeing and you'll want to piss yourself laughing and explain, but no chance there.