Fullalove (22 page)

‘Amen,’ the congregation said.

‘Amen,’ I said.

‘Amen,’ said Veorah Batcheller, who took the garnet-coloured flowers she had gathered earlier and placed them at the dead man’s charred door.

‘How did that happen?’ We were walking between high deeply concave dark hedges, a strong impression of the sea somewhere off to the left, completing our round-trip to Seaton. Shoulder to shoulder in the uncertain light. ‘Because you were there,’ she said. One foot in front of the other; breathing out and breathing in.

‘He was going to do it anyway, but you being there made it happen faster. Something in your personality, can I say aura, made it happen. You recognise the possibility of something happening, a man who functions in excitements other people create, and so it does. It’s sort of like sex. Some people give off sex and other people respond. It’s the same thing with madness or violence or whatever else. It’s in the air; it’s given off by certain people. You’re more like a medium. You give permission. You’re like an enabling factor.’

We parted at a municipal square on the promenade, Roman in intention, built as a spectacle, now semi-derelict, let go, people sleeping on the benches and in the shelters. I kissed her on the melted cheek and met living tissue rather than an advance outpost of death, a reminder of the death that is ensconced in the body, the first part of her to die.

The dog is doing nothing to let me down, showing gratifying signs of wear and tear, getting to look as dirty as a rag. I had agreed an extension with the hotel to six o’clock, which is how long this hit and run was going to take me: three hours tops. But it was after ten, my room had been given to somebo dy else and my travelling companion, my potchke, my fleutchke, my notchke, my motchke, was dumped nose-down on the top of my bag behind the desk in Reception, looking abject – orphaned and evicted.

But a few phone calls and a tenner in the right place got us this crib in an identical establishment down to the cockneys and the cooking smells a hundred yards further along the street.

I have been lying here for hours letting all of the above, Rohypnol or no Rohypnol, work through me, pelt past me, keeping me awake. Studying the curvature of the ceiling, mentally demolishing modern flushed surfaces, partitions, stripping the room back through its earlier incarnations, lying under only the top-sheet, thinking: Isle of View Isle of View Isle of View

Until a few minutes ago I got it. Simple. Isle of View. I love you.

I know too much. She has complicated herself beyond grasping. I know this much: I don’t know where to begin.

Day
28.
The noises from the other side of the wall that used to shock me awake, locked rigid, nerves peeled, have long since stopped. Have been stopped, I would suppose, for years. Doors slamming in the middle of the night, giggling, a booming bass, and then the sounds of slow, spirit-logged, smoke-in-the-hair, pre-dawn fucking. But I go on making my bed on the sofa in the living room anyway.

The choice to me seems simple: staying in the world, close to the safe comforts of the telephone, the television, the mini-fridge switching through its simple programme, the random acned array of electric indicator lights; or retreating to the back of the cave that the bedroom represents. The life and clutter of the one room standing in stark contrast to the inertness and passivity of the other. A dressing-table, a bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. On the bedside table a stopped clock, by the bed a beaten pair of leather slippers. The bed stripped back to the mattress, level, bier-like, under the plain faded coverlet. A room to be gazed at rather than inhabited, registering an absence of human spirit; a room with a suspended, tableau look, petrified, Pompeian, the sense of having intruded on a domestic scene not long abandoned. (A city in the volcano, houses under the ash, skeletons in the houses, furniture and pictures next to the skeletons.) And me putting my clothes on in there every morning a joyless ritual performed on an almost bare stage.

Few people meeting me now for the first time would have me down as somebody whose tastes once ran to clothes that made a positive, even attention-grabbing, statement about who I was and where I saw myself in the world. But it’s true: I was a snappy dresser; clothes were an issue in my life. I dressed – so of course I like to think – with some
esprit
and
élan
. But then middle age
grew over me like a thick skin on a custard. I physically thickened, my waist pushed yeastily up into the forties, my face became fatted with blanding prosthetic latex layers, the unclouded, undefeated me still gasping for air in there somewhere.

For some time I worked hard at persuading myself that the process was reversible; that it was something that could be turned in the opposite direction once I had recovered some kind of equilibrium; when my life had been hauled out of the ditch and made roadworthy again. Doesn’t happen.

I have stayed unindividuated, neutral, absorbed into the beige mass of the everyday walking wounded. I threw away foolish things – the suit from Tommy Nutter with the wasp waist and flared lapels, the Norfolk jacket made of burgundy velour, the look-at-me Mr Fish tie – and started to dress in accordance with my new status as a non-combatant. This has meant things picked up in the covered markets and shopping precincts and high streets of draughty small towns, where I have found myself with time to kill. (So much time to kill.)

The blue, the brown, the checked, the striped, the double-breasted, the zippered, the corduroy, the cotton; the one with the top button missing, the one with the fraying cuff, the one with the grease stain that never quite comes out. My life’s tatters, systematically sorted through and arranged on hangers on Sunday evenings, six hangers, six outfits, jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, an outfit for every day of the week: six alternative, inoffensive, pre-prepared presentations of the self. Six etoliated – six
vaporised
– Norman Millers coffined in a monumental wardrobe of walnut wood veneer.

The view from the bedroom window is across stunted narrow gardens to the backs of the houses one street over. Two floors down and diagonally opposite is the window of a woman who operates what a small sign by her bell describes as a chiropody ‘studio’, and on some mornings – this morning was one – while I’m putting my clothes on, I watch her moving in on the disembodied white foot in the DaRay halogen white light, light that
is purposeful; and clinical, fiercely non-domestic; the professional intimacy of the light-flooded foot against the nylon-sheathed thigh, the overall pulled tight across the muscular buttocks, her scalpel hand working swiftly, industriously, shredding the calluses and verrucas, stripping away the ravages of time and labour; the dead cells, the particles of necrotic tissue spinning ecstatically in the light, like an upturned snowstorm paperweight.

If it’s Thursday it must be the blue polka-dot-pattern tie and the charcoal jacket. Conversely (and much more usefully), if it’s the blue polka-dot-pattern tie and the charcoal jacket, it must be Thursday. The times beyond counting when it has got to that time of the day and a glance down at the colours rolling over the hump of my stomach has steadied me and given me a bearing; a hand-hold on the tilted deck, a fixed point in the churning chaos.

It is a trick that wouldn’t work for me today though, because today my neckwear is of the mourning variety, glummest black, in honour of a former colleague, Curtis Preece, just thirty and everything to play for, who is lying twenty-five feet away from me in a cedar casket, under a single tasteful cross of Arum lilies, before the altar of the church known as the ‘Printers’ Cathedral’, St Brides.

Curtis had come to the notice of Howie Dosson when he interviewed him, and many other prominent media figures, for his university magazine. He was on an instant upmove that left Sebastian-Dominic, to name one, looking as if he had never got out of the traps. Curtis made his name breaking the story of the Cabinet Minister discovered dining naked with three boys in chorister drag, had quickly become a familiar face on late-night television, and was already being spoken of as editor material. He had in fact just been appointed launch editor of a new through-colour, youth-oriented Saturday supplement (‘A
Nova
for the nineties’) when, a week ago, he removed his shoes, folded his jacket neatly on top of them on the platform, and jumped in front of a west-bound District Line train.

The original driver spotted him and braked in time, but he
walked on into a tunnel, waited at a bend, and then threw himself in front of a train where the driver had no chance to stop. It turned out he had left a single-line streamer message scrolling right to left across the screen of his terminal at the paper: ‘Perhaps you’ve confused me with someone who gives a shit.’ Seamlessly repeated, white on infinite blue, half-bumper sticker, half-suicide note.

The choir are singing something that, even inside their freakish blizzard of human noise, doesn’t sound like a hymn:

The order of service says that this is a song by Alice Cooper, although it is hard to believe. Printed below the lyric, for some reason, is Curtis Preece’s favourite recipe for mango chutney.

‘Brace yourself for the choir, man. They’ll cut your face off. They’re really loud,’ Heath had said when I was accosted by him on the way in. He was crouched behind a part of the graveyard wall at St Brides that gave him the cover he needed to snatch ‘gut shots’ of the brass of both papers as they were decanted from their Jags and Daimlers and Audis, the doors mock-deferentially held open for them by chapel fathers redunded from the print, bung artists, squarers, recidivists in vaulted mirror-peaked chauffeurs’ caps.

He was especially keen to get the proprietor and, more particularly, his
consiglieri
in their thousand-guinea winter-weight suits, recurring archetypal figures down the ages, whispering in the doge’s ear, drafting designs for the king’s gardens, official astrologers to the czar. Slipping from the in-car, air-conditioned
environment to the cool, candle-lit interior of the church, moving swiftly yet unhurriedly through the humidity and grit. A scene from a film by Roberto Rossellini – or do I mean Vittorio de Sica? – black and white, made on odds and ends of stock in the years straight after the War, ordinary people as actors.

The women are dowdied down, in keeping with the occasion. The men, though, seem pumped up, enlarged, ready to take on the beast in the jungle, should it spring out at them, and wrestle it to the ground. (A further, not-altogether-gratuitous cultural allusion, here. Minnie Kidd, Henry James’s maid, said she heard the Master on his deathbed shout out: ‘It’s the beast in the jungle, and it’s sprung,’ one of the most frightening things I have ever heard.)

Tosser and Ronnie Duncan arrived in separate cars wearing similar alumicron suits, solid-coloured at a distance but dissolving into tiny nailhead patterns, like billboard-scale posters, when you come close. Both wearing photo-grey tinted lenses and shirts with spring-metal stays in the collars; both reflecting the razor-edged geometry and hard bright colours of the new newspaper building, unrecognisable for the rumpled, crotch-at-the-knee slobs they were just a year ago.

Pacing up and down outside St Brides was Peter Conmee, taking alternate gasps on a kingsize cancer-stick and the nozzle of his Medihaler. Conmee, once a respected foreign editor, now given the job of vetting expenses, functions on half a lung. Even smokes in the shower, so legend has it, with the aid of a small umbrella contraption he has rigged up. Sarky remarks from people going in that he was unable to hear over the noise of his hawking up catarrh and his rattling cough.

‘I’d just stay here if I was you, old lad.’

‘“Take my breath away, awaaay.”’

‘I see you’re wearing Players today, Pete.’

Curtis Preece’s mother, the Anna Magnani figure, arrived escorted by Clit Carson, Clit in a floating, asymmetrically cut, wraparound black kimono affair. The Tube train driver is here in the wheelchair he has been confined to since the accident. Ashley
Cann and Annie Jeffers, it seems, have entered into some kind of life-swap and come as each other: he now wears a nose bolt and has moonlight-blond hair – platinum with the blue roots showing; her tufted, savagely cut hair is aubergine purple.

A sprinkling of Garrick Club ties; one Garrick Club bow-tie; the candlelight reflected in big chrome-rimmed bi-focals, old-maidish half-lenses with clear plastic, fun-coloured, tortoiseshell frames, several on retaining chains; standard blow-dries; silver hair cut quite wavy and long; red-faced men turning into toby-jug versions of their younger selves. A sudden choked-back sob; Clit’s fingers intertwining with the mother’s.

Ronnie Duncan steps up to the lectern to deliver the Address. ‘St Augustine was once asked where time came from.’ Fingers white-knuckled around the carved oak, arms tensed as if at the top of an up-push of his morning Canadian Airforce workout. ‘He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. “Man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither …”’

Tosser is irritably consulting his watch, scribbling memos to himself on the cuff of his shirt. ‘All of us gathered here this morning who had the good fortune to know Curtis will agree with me that he conformed as close as any of us to the heroic image of the journalist defending the truth against the many dragons of darkness in the modern world …’

Myc Doohan, in the pew in front, is wrestling with a fistful of Jack and Jills, transferring the totals, plus service, to a swindle sheet; doing slow-brained calculations on a piece of scrap paper. ‘… his death is yet a further tragic reminder that, in a world that is so fast, so unnatural, and so attractive, we all of us spend too much time human doing and not enough time human being …’ (Evidence of the hand of Robin Carson. Barely suppressed groans.)

The body (suspiciously light) is carried out to the choir singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, and borne off to a marble orchard in far north London trailed by a single earful of mourners.

As soon as it has gone there is a wild scramble into the cars, a race for taxis, the slightly druggy pace of fifteen frames a second wammied into fast-forward mode; out of the forties black-and-white shadows into sun-splashed no-grain Ciba-chrome. A dramatic exodus; a fleeing from a world now occupied by the usurpers of insurance, banking, commodities speculation; the familiar turned on its former owners, inducing feelings of sadness and dread; a world changed beyond all reckoning, the field of ruins.

Behind the stained facade of the old
Express
building, stockades of desks, telephones heaped like bones; the desk where I wanked away my promise every day for four years, the phone on which I had my first conversation with Even.

The tiered white wedding-cake spire of St Brides floats on the
Express
’s black deco curtain wall, gridded and fractured, like a deeply moulded shaft of light; like the spook they are all fleeing.

The
Express
building, popularly known as the Black Lubianka. Wren’s tallest spire rejoicing in the description ‘a madrigal in stone’.

In the brochurised version, the architect had a special tunnel excavated for the convenience of the stonemasons working on his masterpiece, invisibly connecting St Brides with the Old Bell. The cut or ginnel or alley that exists today is authentically lichen-walled and burrow-like, the rotting bases of the iron posts at eye-level, the wall of the crypt rising to above-head height.

Once at this time in the morning you could have expected the Bell to be heaving. But there’s hardly anybody in except Doohan and Ashley Cann.

‘“The whole country watched the agonised care of the eight guardsmen who carried the box. And vicariously shared their anxious pain. But perhaps most marvellous was the slow move up the turgid Thames. There were things like the gantries of cranes dipping in salute and the music of a host of pipers. There were generals in improbable uniforms and what looked like all the rulers of the world standing on the steps of St Paul’s as if this
were a family burial. A whole city looking in on itself as a dead body went by.”’

I recognise this. It’s the piece Patrick O’Donovan did for the
Observer
on Churchill’s funeral, probably five years before Ashley was born. It is my duty now – I owe it to Myc – to step in and stop him before he gets on to the wit that flew among O’Dono-van and his crowd (Anthony Sampson, Terry Kilmartin, Maurice Richardson) at Philip Hope-Wallace’s table in the back room at El Vino in the fifties.