Grey Area (10 page)

Repeat this exercise daily, or until you are thoroughly proficient.

Chest

The pavement outside Marten’s the newsagent was streaked with sputum. In the outrageously dull light of a mid-afternoon, in midwinter, in middle England, the loops and lumps of mucus and phlegm appeared strangely bright, lurid even, as if some Jackson Pollock of the pneumo-thorax had been practising Action Hawking.

There was an incident – of sorts – going on in the entrance to the shop. A man in the middle of his middle years, dressed not so much warmly as tightly in a thick, hip-length jacket, corduroy trousers, brogues, and anaconda of woollen scarf, was upbraiding the shop manager. His voice – which was in the middle of middle-class accents – would start off at quite a reasonable pitch, but as he spoke it would creep up the scale until it was a melodramatic whine. The shop manager, blue-suited, nylon-shirted, with thinning hair and earnest expression, kept trying – albeit with appropriate deference – to break in, but without success.

‘I can’t put up with this any more, Hutchinson,’ said the man, whose name was Simon-Arthur Dykes. ‘I’ve two sick children and an invalid wife, as well as other dependants. God knows how many times I’ve told your boy to bring the paper to the door and knock, but he still won’t do it. The paper is vital for my work – it’s useless to me if it’s damp and soggy, but every single day it’s the same, he just chucks it over the fence. What the hell does he think it’s going to do, grow legs and scamper up to the house?’

‘But Mr Dykes – ‘

‘Don’t “but” me, Hutchinson, I’m paying you for a service that I don’t receive. I’m a sensitive man, you know, a man who needs some caring and consideration. My nerves, you see, they’re so very . . . so very . . . stretched, I feel that they might snap. Snap! D’you appreciate that? The nerves of the artist – ‘

‘I’m not un – ‘

‘You’re not what? Unaware? Unsympathetic? Unaffected? All of the above? Oh, I don’t know – I don’t know – it’s all too much for me. Perhaps my wife is right and we need a redeemer of some kind, Hutchinson, a reawakening . . .’ And with this, Simon-Arthur Dykes’s voice, instead of climbing up towards hysteria, fell down, down into his chest where it translated itself into a full-bodied coughing. A liquid coughing, that implied the sloshing about of some fluid ounces of gunk in his lungs.

The shop manager was left free to talk, which he did, fulsomely. ‘No, Mr Dykes,’ he began, sounding placatory, ‘I’m not unsympathetic, I do feel for you, really I do. I can imagine what it must be like only too well. Out there at the Brown House, isolated, with the wet, exposed fields all around you, damp and encompassing.’ His fingers made combing motions, ploughing dismal little furrows in the air. ‘I can see what a torment it must be to receive a wet newspaper every morning’ – now the manager’s own voice had begun to quaver – ‘knowing that it may be the only contact that you will have with the world all day, the only thing to touch your sense of isolation. I don’t know. Oh Christ! I don’t know.’

And with that the manager’s voice cracked, and he began to weep openly. But the weeping didn’t last for long, for having given way to the flow in one form, the manager’s will to resist the ever present tickling in his own chest was eliminated. Soon, both of the men were hacking away, producing great caribou-cry honks, followed by the rasping eructation of tablespoon-loads of sputum, which they dumped, along with the rest of the infective matter, on the pavement fronting the newsagent’s.

A group of adolescents was hanging about outside Marten’s, for this was where the buses stopped, picking up passengers for Oxford, High Wycombe and Princes Risborough. They wore padded nylon anoraks, decorated with oblongs of fluorescent material and the occasional, apparently random, selection of letters and figures: ‘zx –
POWER NINE
’, was written on one boy’s jacket; and ‘
ARIZONA STATE 4001
’ on his girl companion’s. With their squashy vinyl bags at their rubber-ridged feet and their general air of round-shouldered indifference, the adolescents gave the impression of being a unit of some new kind of army – in transit. Part of a pan-European formation of Jugend Sportif.

None of them paid any attention to the two men, who were now reaching the rattling end of their joint coughing fit. They were all focused on one of the older boys, who held a small red cylinder attached to a valved mouthpiece. Mostly he kept the mouthpiece clamped in his teeth and breathed through the double-action valve with a mechanical ‘whoosh’, but every so often he would pass it to one of the others, and they would take a hit.

Straightening up the manager said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there, Kevin-Andrew?’

‘It’s oxygen, Mr Hutchinson,’ said the lad, removing the mouthpiece.

‘Well, give us both a go, Kevin, for the love of God. Can’t you see the state poor Mr Dykes and I are in?’

‘I don’t know if I can, Mr Hutchinson . . .’ The lad paused, looking shamefaced. ‘You see, it’s the family cylinder. I just got it recharged at the health centre and it’s got to last us till the weekend.’

‘If that’s the case, why are you giving it out to your pals like a tube of bloody Smarties!’ This was from Simon-Arthur Dykes. He too had straightened up, but was still gasping and visibly blue in the face. He shouldn’t really have expostulated with such vigour, for it got him wheezing again, and he began to double over once more, one hand clutching at the doorjamb, the other flopping around in the air.

‘Come on, Kevin-Andrew,’ said the manager, ‘give him the mouthpiece, for heaven’s sake. Tell you what, you can all have a belt off of my Ventalin inhaler, if Mr Dykes and I can just get ourselves straight.’

Grudgingly, and with much shoulder-shrugging and foot-shuffling, the youth handed over the small red cylinder. In return Hutchinson passed him the angled plastic tube of the Ventalin inhaler.

For a while there was a sort of calm on the wan stage of the pavement. The two men helped one another to take several much needed pulls from the oxygen cylinder, while the group of adolescents formed a circle around which they passed the inhaler. There was silence, except for the whirring whizz of the inhaler and the kerchooof! of the oxygen cylinder.

All the parties began to look slightly better than formerly. Their pale cheeks acquired an ulterior glow, their eyes brightened, their countenances took on the aspect of febrile health that only comes to those who have temporarily relieved a condition of chronic invalidism.

Simon-Arthur Dykes drew himself up in the doorway, passing the oxygen cylinder back to Kevin-Andrew. ‘Thank you, Mr Hutchinson, really I thank you most sincerely. You are a man of some honour, sir, some Christian virtue in a world of ugliness and misery.’ Dykes clutched the manager’s upper arm. ‘Please, please, Mr Dykes, don’t upset yourself again – think of your poor chest.’ The manager gave Dykes his copy of the
Guardian,
which he had dropped during the coughing fit.

Dykes looked at the paper as if he couldn’t remember what it was. His rather protruberant grey eyes were darting about, unable to alight on anything. His thick brown hair was standing up in a crazy bouffant on top of his high, strained forehead.

He took the manager by the arm again, and drew him back into the shop a couple of paces. Then he leant towards him conspiratorially saying, ‘It’s Dave Hutchinson, that’s your name, isn’t it?’

‘Ye-es,’ the manager replied uneasily.

‘And your patronymic?’

‘Dave as well.’

‘Well, Dave-Dave, I want you to call me Simon-Arthur. I feel this little episode has brought us together, and I stand in debt on your account.’

‘Really, Mr Dykes – ‘

‘Simon-Arthur.’

‘Simon-Arthur, I don’t think it’s at all – ‘

‘No, I do. Listen, I’ve just picked up a brand-new nebuliser in Risborough. I’ve got it in the car. Why don’t you come around this evening, and give it a try – bring your wife if you like.’

This invitation, so obviously felt and meant, softened the manager’s resistance, broke down his barriers of social deference and retail professionalism. ‘I’d like that, Simon-Arthur,’ he said, grasping the artist’s right hand firmly in both of his, ‘really I would. But I’m afraid my wife is bed-bound, so it would only be me.’

‘I am sorry – but that’s OK, just come yourself.’

‘I’ve got a few mils of codeine linctus left over from the monthly ration – shall I bring it with me?’

‘Why not . . . we can have a little party, as best we can.’

The two men finished, smiling broadly, in unison. Simon-Arthur took Dave-Dave Hutchinson’s hand warmly in his and gave it several pumps. Then they parted; and whilst Dave-Dave Hutchinson turned back into the interior of the shop, Simon-Arthur Dykes crossed the road to where his car was parked in the middle of the town square.

As he gained the herringbone of white lines that designated the parking area, Simon-Arthur felt a whooshing sensation behind him. He turned to see the 320 bus bearing down on the stop outside Marten’s. Observing the way the rows of yellow windows shone through the murky air, he jolted into greater haste. Darkness was coming; and with it the great bank of fog, that had hung two hundred feet above the ground all day, was beginning to descend, falling around the shoulders of the grey stone houses like some malodorous muffler.

Simon-Arthur kept his mouth clamped shut, but sniffed the fog judiciously with a connoisseur’s nose. Lots of sulphur tonight, he thought, and perhaps even a hint of something more tangy . . . sodium, maybe? He turned on the ignition. His headlights barely penetrated the thick fog. As he pulled out and drove off down the road Simon-Arthur avoided looking at the fog too closely. He knew from experience that if he peered into it for too long, actually concentrated on its twistings, its eddies, its endless assumptions of insubstantial form, that it could all too easily draw him down a darkling corridor, into more durable, more horribly solid visions.

But halfway home he had to stop. A heavy mizzle was saturating the air. The A418 was a tunnel of spray. Heavy lorry after heavy lorry churned up the fog and water. Simon-Arthur was jammed between two of these grunting beasts as he gained the crest of the hill at Tiddington. The vacuum punched in the air by the one ahead was sucking his flimsy 2cv forward, whilst the boil of turbulence pushed up by the one behind propelled him on. The wheels of the car were barely in contact with the tarmac. He dabbed the brakes and managed to slide off the road into a lay-by.

Sort of safe, Simon-Arthur slumped over the Citröen’s steering wheel. He felt more than usually depleted; and the thought of facing his family produced a hard, angular sensation in his gorge. Without quite knowing why he opened the door of the car and got out. If he had felt unsafe in the car – he was now totally exposed. Lorry after lorry went on slamming by, throwing up clouds of compounded gas and liquid.

Simon-Arthur lurched round to the other side of the car and stood transfixed by the hard filthiness of the verge. The bank of grass and weeds was so stained with pollutants that it appeared petrified. It was as if the entire lay-by had been buried in a peat bog for some thousands of years and only this moment disinterred.

Simon-Arthur stood, lost in time, ahistoric. He looked along the A418 towards his house. The road manifested itself as a serpent of yellow and orange, winding its way over the dark country. Each ploughing vehicle was another muscular motion, another bunching and uncoiling in its anguiform body. But if he turned away from the road he was enclosed in his lay-by burial ship. A Sutton Hoo of the psyche. The armour of mashed milk cartons and crushed cans, the beadwork of fag butts, the weaponry of buckled hub caps and discarded lengths of chromium trim. They were, Simon-Arthur reflected, entirely useless – and therefore entirely apt – funerary gifts, for his sustenance in this current afterlife.

He would have stayed longer, savouring this mordant feeling, but the fog was seeping into his chest, producing acute sensations of rasp and tickle that grew and grew until he began to cough. When he was underway again he had to drive with the Citröen’s flap window open so that he could spit out of it. And by the time he turned off the main road, up the track to the Brown House, he was as blue as any Saxon – chieftain or otherwise.

The house stood about twenty yards back from the track, in an orchard of diseased apple trees; their branches were wreathed in some type of fungus that resembled Spanish moss. The impression the Brown House gave was of being absolutely four-square, like a child’s drawing of a house. It had four twelve-paned windows on each side. As its name suggested, it was built from brown brick; atop the sloping brown-tiled roof was a brown brick chimney.

As Simon-Arthur got out of the car, he looked up at this and noted with approval that it was gushing thick smoke. The fog was so dense now that he could barely make out the point at which this smoke entered the atmosphere; it looked, rather, as if the Brown House were sucking in the murk that wreathed it.

He took a tightly sealed cardboard box from the back of the Citröen, and tucking this under one arm and his
Guardian
under the other he struggled over the buckled wire fence. There was a gate, but it was awkward to open and as Simon-Arthur was the only member of the family who now left the immediate purlieus of the Brown House, he hadn’t bothered to fix it. The fence and the gate had been Simon-Arthur’s stab at being a countryman. It was summer when he built it and Simon-Arthur, stripped to the waist, spent a sweaty afternoon hammering in the stakes and attaching the netting. He imagined himself like Levin, or Pierre, communing through labour with the spirit of Man. It was a vain delusion.

Even then the fog had been in evidence – albeit as a shadow of what it later became. That afternoon it gave the air a bilious tint. It made everything seem disturbingly post-nuclear, irradiated. When Simon-Arthur had finally finished and stood back to admire his work he saw an aching disjunction between what he had imagined he had achieved – and what was actually there.

The fence zigged and zagged and sagged its way along the track’s tattered verge. It looked like a stretch of wire looming up across the shell-holed sludge of no man’s land in an old photograph of the Somme.