Grey Area (3 page)

‘You’re a jerk, Fein,’ said Vaz; he gripped and twisted my collar, ‘the poor man’s having a breakdown, he’s really going nutty and you’re just goading him, making it happen. D’you like watching people suffer?’

‘Yeah,’ Rhamon concurred, ‘we’ve had enough of this, we’re going to talk to the Headmaster – ‘

‘Now hang on a minute, guys – guys.’ I was emollient, placatory. ‘I agree with you. I don’t like it either, but I still think we should settle it ourselves. End the rule of the Indian Army in our own way.’

I won them round. I stopped them going to the Head. I implied that if they did the full weight of both the Yids and the Yocks would come down on them. They had no alternative.

The bubble burst the next Thursday. Mr Vello was ranting about the abandonment of the Gold Standard when I gave the signal. The soldiers of the Indian Army took up their prearranged positions: at the door, the windows, the light switches. While they flashed the lights on and off I strode to the front of the class and deprived Mr Vello of his ceremonial ruler. He blinked at me in amazement, his eyes huge and bulbous behind the concave lenses of his glasses.

‘What are you doing, Fein?’ I couldn’t help giggling.

‘This is it, sir,’ I said. ‘What we’ve been waiting for. It’s the Indian mutiny.’

Mr Vello looked at my horrible, freckly little face. His eyes swung around the room to take in the rebellious sepoys. He sat down heavily and began to sob.

He sobbed and sobbed. His heavy shoulders heaved and shook. His wails filled the room. When Simmo opened the door to the corridor they filled the corridor as well. Eventually the Headmaster came with Mr Doherty, the gym teacher, and they led Mr Vello away, for ever.

So now you know how it was that I killed Mr Vello. Murdered him. You don’t think that’s enough? You think I’m being hard on myself? Children can be nasty after all – without meaning to be. But I meant to be, I really meant to be.

Last night I had one of my worst Mr Vello dreams yet. I was in Calcutta, it was 1857 – the Indian Mutiny was in full swing. Screaming fourteen-year-old sepoys broke into my villa and dragged me away. Their faces were distorted with blood lust and triumph. Dhiran Vaz hauled me along by the collar of my tunic. He and Rhamon took me and threw me in a cell, a tiny close cell, no more than twenty-feet square. And then they threw in the others, the other victims of the Mutiny: all my guests. All the guests I’ve ever had on
Fein Time Tonight,
one after another they came pressing into the cell, and each time one entered there was new roar of approval from the crowd of sepoy classmates massed on the dusty parade ground outside. I was pressed into the wall, tighter and tighter. My eyes filled with sweat but my throat was parched. I got a pain as sharp as a stuck bone when I tried to swallow. My thirst was oppressive, I longed for something, anything to drink.

And then Mr Vello arrived. He was in his Yorkshire County Cricket Club blazer, as ever. The chat-show guests passed him over their heads and then wedged him down beside me. He was still crying. ‘Why did you do it, Fein?’ he whimpered. ‘Why did you do it?’ And he was still whimpering when I buried my teeth into the leathery dewlap of his throat; still whimpering when I began to suck the life out of him.

A Short History of the

English Novel

‘All crap,’ said Gerard through a mouthful of hamburger, ‘utter shite – and the worst thing is that we’re aware of it, we know what’s going on. Really, I think, it’s the cultural complement to the decline of the economy, in the seventies, coming lolloping along behind.’

We were sitting in Joe Allen and Gerard was holding forth on the sad state of the English novel. This was the only price I had to pay for our monthly lunch together: listening to Gerard sound off.

I came back at him. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on this one, Gerard. Isn’t that a perennial gripe, something that comes up time and again? Surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’

‘You’re bound to say that, being a woman.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, insomuch as the novel was very much a feminine form in the first place, and now that our literary culture has begun to fragment, the partisan concerns of minorities are again taking precedence. There isn’t really an “English novel” now, there are just women’s novels, black novels, gay novels.’

I tuned him out. He was too annoying to listen to. Round about us the lunchtime crowd was thinning. A few advertising and city types sipped their wine and Perrier, nodding over each other’s shoulders at the autographed photos that studded the restaurant’s walls, as if they were saluting dear old friends.

Gerard and I had been doing these monthly lunches at Joe Allen for about a year. Ours was an odd friendship. For a while he’d been married to a friend of mine but it had been a duff exercise in emotional surgery, both hearts rejecting the other. They hadn’t had any children. Some of our mutual acquaintances suspected that they were gay, and that the marriage was one of convenience, a coming together to avoid coming out.

Gerard was also a plump, good-looking man; who despite his stress-filled urban existence still retained the burnish of a country childhood in the pink glow of his cheeks and the chestnut hanks of his thick fringe.

Gerard did something in publishing. That was what accounted for his willingness to pronounce on the current state of English fiction. It wasn’t anything editorial or high profile. Rather, when he talked to me of his work – which he did only infrequently – it was of books as so many units, trafficked hither and thither as if they were boxes of washing powder. And when he spoke of authors, he managed somehow to reduce them to the status of assembly line workers, trampish little automata who were merely bolting the next lump of text on to an endlessly unrolling narrative product.

‘. . . spry old women’s sex novels, Welsh novels, the Glasgow Hard Man School, the ex-colonial guilt novel – both perpetrator and victim version . . .’ He was still droning on.

‘What are you driving at, Gerard?’

‘Oh come on, you’re not going to play devil’s advocate on this one, are you? You don’t believe in the centrality of the literary tradition in this country any more than I do, now do you?’

‘S’pose not.’

‘You probably buy two or three of the big prize-winning novels every year and then possibly, just possibly, get round to reading one of them a year or so later. As for anything else, you might skim some thrillers that have been made into TV dramas – or vice versa – or scan something issue-based, or nibble at a plot that hinges on an unusual sexual position, the blurb for which happens to have caught your eye – ‘

‘But, Gerard’ – despite myself I was rising to it – ‘just because we don’t read that much, aren’t absorbed in it, it doesn’t mean that important literary production isn’t going on – ‘

‘Not that old chestnut!’ he snorted. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that there may be thousands of unbelievably good manuscripts rotting away in attic rooms, only missing out on publication because of the diffidence of their authors or the formulaic, sales-driven narrow-mindedness of publishers, eh?’

‘No, Gerard, I wasn’t going to argue that – ‘

‘It’s like the old joke about LA, that there aren’t any waiters in the whole town, just movie stars “resting”. I suppose all these bus boys and girls’ – he flicked a hand towards the epicene character who had been ministering to our meal – ‘are great novelists hanging out to get more material.’

‘No, that’s not what I meant.’

‘Excuse me?’ It was the waiter, a lanky blond who had been dangling in the mid-distance. ‘Did you want anything else?’

‘No, no.’ Gerard started shaking his head – but then broke off. ‘Actually, now that you’re here, would you mind if I asked you a question?’

‘Oh Gerard,’ I groaned, ‘leave the poor boy alone.’

‘No, not at all, anything to be of service.’ He was bending down towards us, service inscribed all over his soft-skinned face.

‘Tell me then, are you happy working here or do you harbour any other ambition?’ Gerard put the question as straightforwardly as he could but his plump mouth was twisted with irony.

The waiter thought for a while. I observed his flat fingers, nails bitten to the quick, and his thin nose coped with blue veins at the nostrils’ flare. His hair was tied back in a pony-tail and fastened with a thick rubber band.

‘Do you mind?’ he said at length, pulling half-out one of the free chairs.

‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘of course not.’ He sat down and instantly we all became intimates, our three brows forming a tight triangle over the cruets. The waiter put up his hands vertically, holding them like parentheses into which he would insert qualifying words.

‘Well,’ a self-deprecatory cough, ‘it’s not that I mind working here – because I don’t, but I write a little and I suppose I would like to be published some day.’

I wanted to hoot, to crow, to snort derision, but contented myself with a ‘Ha!’.

‘Now come on, wait a minute.’ Gerard was adding his bracketing hands to the manual quorum. ‘OK, this guy is a writer but who’s to say what he’s doing is good, or original?’

‘Gerard! You’re being rude – ‘

‘No, really, it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind. He’s got a point.’ His secret out, the waiter was more self-possessed. ‘I write – that’s true. I think the ideas are good. I think the prose is good. But I can’t tell if it hangs together.’

‘Well, tell us a bit about it. If you can, quote some from memory.’ I lit a cigarette and tilted back in my chair.

‘It’s complex. We know that Eric Gill was something more than an ordinary sexual experimenter. According to his own journal he even had sex with his dog. I’m writing a narrative from the point of view of Gill’s dog. The book is called
Fanny Gill or I was Eric Gill’s Canine Lover.’
Gerard and I were giggling before he’d finished; and the waiter smiled with us.

‘That’s very funny,’ I said, ‘I especially like the play on – ‘

‘Fanny Hill, yeah. Well, I’ve tried to style it like an eighteenth-century picaresque narrative. You know, with the dog growing up in the country, being introduced to the Gill household by a canine pander. Her loss of virginity and so on.’

‘Can you give us a little gobbet then?’ asked Gerard. He was still smiling but no longer ironically. The waiter sat back and struck a pose. With his scraped-back hair and long face, he reminded me of some Regency actor-manager.

‘Then one night, as I turned and tossed in my basket, the yeasty smell of biscuit and the matted ordure in my coat blanketing my prone form, I became aware of a draught of turpentine, mixed with the lavender of the night air.

‘My master the artist and stone carver, stood over me.

“Come Fanny,” he called, slapping his square-cut hands against his smock, “there’s a good little doggie.” I trotted after him, out into the darkness. He strode ahead, whilst I meandered in his wake, twisting in the smelly skeins betwixt owl pellet and fox stool. “Come on now!” He was sharp and imperious. A tunnel of light opened up in the darkness. “Come in!” he snapped again, and I obeyed – poor beast – unaware that I had just taken my last stroll as an innocent bitch.’

Later, when we had paid the bill and were walking up Bow Street towards Long Acre, for no reason that I could think of I took Gerard’s arm. I’d never touched him before. His body was surprisingly firm, but tinged with dampness like a thick carpet in an old house. I said, trying to purge the triumph from my tone, ‘That was really rather good – now wasn’t it?’

‘Humph! S’pose so, but it was a “gay” novel, not in the mainstream of any literary tradition.’

‘How can you say that?’ I was incredulous. ‘There was nothing obviously gay about it.’

‘Really, Geraldine. The idea of using the dog as a sexual object was an allegory for the love that dare not speak its name, only wuffle. Anyway, he himself – the waiter, that is – was an obvious poof.’

We walked on in silence for a while. It was one of those flat, cold London days. The steely air wavered over the bonnets of cars, as if they were some kind of automotive mirage, ready to dissolve into the tarmac desert.

We normally parted at the mouth of the short road that leads to Covent Garden Piazza. I would stand, watching Gerard’s retreating overcoat as he moved past the fire – eaters, the jugglers, the stand-up comedians; and on across the parade ground of flagstones with its manoeuvring battalions of Benelux au pair girls. But on this occasion I wouldn’t let him go.

‘Do you have to get back to the office? Is there actually anything pressing for you to do?’

He seemed startled and turning to present the oblong sincerity of his face to me – he almost wrenched my arm. ‘Erm . . . well, no. S’pose not.’

‘How about a coffee then?’

‘Oh all right.’

I was sure he had meant this admission to sound cool, unconcerned, but it had come out as pathetic. Despite all his confident, wordy pronouncements, I was beginning to suspect that Gerard’s work might be as meaningless as my own.

As we strolled, still coupled, down Long Acre, the commercial day was getting into its post-prandial lack of swing. The opulent stores with their displays of flash goods belied what was really going on.

‘The recession’s certainly starting to bite,’ Gerard remarked, handing a ten-pence piece to a dosser who sat scrunched up behind a baffler of milk crates, as if he were a photographer at one of life’s less sporting events.

‘Tell me about it, mate.’ The words leaked from the gaps in the dosser’s teeth, trickled through the stubble of his chin and flowed across the pavement carrying their barge-load of hopelessness.

The two of us paused again in front of the Hippodrome.

‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘where shall we have our coffee then? Do you want to go to my club?’

‘God, no! Come on, let’s go somewhere a little youthful.’

‘You lead – I’ll follow.’

We passed the Crystal Rooms, where tense loss adjusters rocked on the saddles of stranded motor cycles, which they powered on through pixilated curve after pixilated curve.

At the mouth of Gerrard Street, we passed under the triumphal arch with its coiled and burnished dragons. Around us the Chinese skipped and altercated, as scrutable as ever. Set beside their scooterish bodies, adolescent and wind-cheating, Gerard appeared more than ever to be some Scobie or Brown, lost for ever in the grimy Greeneland of inner London.

Outside the Bar Italia a circle of pari-cropped heads was deliberating over glasses of
caffe latte
held at hammy angles.

‘Oh,’ said Gerard, ‘the Bar Italia. I haven’t been here in ages, what fun.’ He pushed in front of me into the tiled burrow of the café. Behind the grunting Gaggia a dumpy woman with a hennaed brow puffed and pulled. ‘
Due espressi!
’ Gerard trilled in cod-Italian tones. ‘
Doppio!
’

‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian,’ I said as we scraped back two stools from underneath the giant video screen swathing the back of the café.

‘Oh well, you know . . .’ He trailed off and gazed up as the flat tummy filling the hissing screen rotated in a figure-eight of oozing congress. A special-effect lipoma swelled in its navel and then inflated into the face of a warbling androgyne.

A swarthy young woman with a prominent mole on her upper lip came over and banged two espressos down on the ledge we were sitting against.

‘I say,’ Gerard exclaimed; coffee now spotted his shirt front like a dalmatian’s belly. ‘Can’t you take a little more care?’ The waitress looked at him hard, jaw and brow shaking with anger, as if some prisoners of consciousness were attempting to jack-hammer their escape from her skull. She hiccupped, then ran the length of the café and out into the street, sobbing loudly.

‘What did I say?’ Gerard appealed to the café at large. The group of flat-capped Italian men by the cake display had left off haggling over their pools coupons to stare. The hennaed woman squeezed out from behind the Gaggia and clumped down to where we sat. She started to paw at Gerard’s chest with a filthy wadge of J-cloths.

‘I so sorry, sir, so sorry . . .’

‘Whoa! Hold on – you’re making it worse!’

‘Iss not her fault, you know, she’s a good girl, ve-ery good girl. She have a big sadness this days – ‘

‘Man trouble, I’ll be bound.’ Gerard smirked. It looked like he was enjoying his grubby embrocation.

‘No, iss not that . . . iss, ‘ow you say, a re-jection?’

I sat up straighter. ‘A rejection? What sort of rejection?’

The woman left off rubbing Gerard and turned to me. ‘She give this thing, this book to some peoples, they no like – ‘

‘Ha, ha! You don’t say. My dear Gerard’ – I punched him on the upper arm – ‘it looks like we have another scrivenous servitor on our hands.’

‘This is absurd.’ He wasn’t amused.

‘My friend here is a publisher, he might be able to help your girl, why don’t you ask her to join us?’

‘Oh really, Geraldine, can’t you let this lie? We don’t know anything about this girl’s book. Madam – ‘

But she was already gone, stomping back down the mirrored alley and out the door into the street, where I saw her place an arm round the heaving shoulders of our former waitress.

Gerard and I sat in silence. I scrutinised him again. In this surrounding he appeared fogeyish. He seemed aware of it too, his eyes flicking nervously form the carnal cubs swimming on the ethereal video screen to their kittenish domesticated cousins, the jail bait who picked their nails and split their ends all along the coffee bar’s counter.