“What would you like?” she asked. She was all smiles now, after the twenty pounds.
I ordered a bottle of expensive white wine and mixed starters and asked for a few minutes to decide on our main course. She nodded, still smiling, and walked off to the kitchen.
“Well!” I said. I leant back in my chair and drew my arms out wide. “Well!”
My homeless person watched me. He picked up his napkin and fidgeted with it. After a while I asked:
“Where are you from?”
“Luton,” he said. “I came here two years ago. Two and a half.”
“Why did you leave Luton?” I asked him.
“Family,” he said, still picking at the napkin. “Dad’s an alkie. Beat me up.”
The waitress came back with our wine. My homeless person watched her breasts as she leant over the table to pour it. I watched them too. Her shirt was unbuttoned at the top and she had nice, round breasts. She must have been about his age, eighteen, nineteen. We watched her as she turned and walked away. Eventually I raised my glass.
“Cheers!” I said.
He took his glass and drank from it in large gulps. He gulped down half of it, wiped his sleeve across his mouth, set the glass down and, emboldened by the alcohol already, asked me:
“What do you want to know then?”
“Well,” I said. “I want to know…Well, what I want to know is…Okay: when you’re sitting on your patch of street, sitting there wrapped up in your sleeping bag, with your dog curled up in your lap…You’re sitting there, and there are people going by—well, do you…What I really want to know…”
I stopped. It wasn’t coming out right. I took a deep breath and started again:
“Look,” I told him. “You know in films, when people do things—characters, the heroes, like Robert De Niro, say—when they do things, it’s always perfect. Anything at all. It could be opening a fridge, or lighting up a—no, say picking up a napkin, for example. The hero would pick it up, and give it a simple little flick, and tuck it in his collar or just fold it on his lap, and then it wouldn’t bother him again for the whole scene. And then his dialogue will be just perfect too. You see what I mean? If you or I tried that, it would keep slipping out and falling.”
My homeless person picked his napkin up again. “You want me to tuck it in my shirt?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “That’s not the point. The point is that I wonder, I just wonder, whether you’re aware of this. When you sit on your corner.”
“I don’t use no napkins when I eat,” he said.
“No! I mean, that’s not what I mean. Forget the napkin. It was an example. What I mean is, are you…When you do things—talking with your friends, say, or asking passers-by for money—well, are you…”
“I only ask them cos I can’t get any,” he said, putting down his napkin. “If I had a job I wouldn’t, would I?”
“No, look,” I said, reaching my hand out across the table, “that’s…” but my hand hit the wine glass. The glass fell over and the wine sloshed out across the tablecloth. The tablecloth was white; the wine stained it deep red. The waiter came back over. He was…She was young, with large dark glasses, an Italian woman. Large breasts. Small.
“What do you want to know?” my homeless person asked.
“I want to know…” I started, but the waiter leant across me as he took the tablecloth away. She took the table away too. There wasn’t any table. The truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins—but I didn’t go across to him. I watched him and his friends, their circuits down to his spot and back up to theirs again, their sense of purpose, their air of carrying important messages to one another. They swaggered territorially, spitting on the pavement, swinging their shoulders as they changed direction even more exaggeratedly than the media types before them, not even bothering to look round as they crossed the road to see if cars or bikes were coming. They had a point to prove: that they were one with the street; that they and only they spoke its true language; that they really
owned
the space around them. Crap: total crap. They didn’t even come from London. Luton, Glasgow, anywhere, but somewhere else, far away, irrelevant. And then their swaggering, their arrogance: a cover. Usurpers. Frauds.
I didn’t go and talk to him. I didn’t want to, didn’t have a thing to learn from him. Besides, I hate dogs, always have.
4
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER,
on Saturday, I went to David Simpson’s party. His new flat on Plato Road was on the second floor of a converted house. It was about a hundred years old, I suppose. Not a bad space. He hadn’t done it up yet: there were wires dangling from the ceilings and lines sketched out in pencil on the walls showing where shelves were going to go up, plus little diagrams scrawled beside switches showing the routes electric circuits were to follow. There were boxes everywhere too, full of clothes and books and plates.
“Oh! Hello!” David said as he opened the door to me. “I heard you were…you know, better.” His eyes were scanning my forehead just above my eyes; Greg must have told him about the plastic surgery on the scar.
“It’s over the right one,” I said.
“Oh, right,” he answered. “I hadn’t…Here, let me get you a drink.”
He’d made some kind of punch. It was pink and sweet—perhaps sangria. There were bottles of beer too, and wine. I sipped at the pink punch and moved into the main room. My name was called out: it was Greg.
“Hey dude!” Greg said as he threw his arm around me. He was already pretty drunk. “Where’s Catherine?”
“In Oxford,” I told him. She’d gone there for the weekend. She bored me enormously now. Everybody bored me. Everything too. I’d spent the days since my meeting with Matthew Younger pondering what to do with the money. I’d run through all the options: world travel, setting up a business of my own, founding a charitable trust, splurging it all. None of them appealed to me in the least. What kind of charitable trust would I have founded? I didn’t feel strongly about any issues. If I went out on a mad spending spree, what would I buy? I wasn’t interested in art, or clothes, or drugs. The champagne I’d had the other day had tasted acrid, like cordite, and then I’d only bought it because Marc Daubenay had told me I should; I’d tried
foie gras
once, in Paris: it had made me sick. No: I’d picked up all the options, held each one like a child holding a cheap and crappy toy for a few seconds until, realizing that it’s not going to spin, make music or in any way enchant him, he puts it down again. So I was bored—by people, ideas, the world: everything.
Greg lurched off to the kitchen to get more drink. I sat down on a sofa and looked around. It seemed a pretty boring party. I didn’t know many of the people there and wasn’t very interested in the ones I did know. David worked in PR or marketing or something like that; he bored me and his friends were boring too. I went and stood beside the window, two or so feet to its right. I stayed there for a while, then moved into the kitchen and topped up my glass. I’d hardly touched it, but it was something to do. I moved back to the main room and met Greg again.
“Hey dude!” he said, throwing the same arm round me. “So where’s Catherine?” He was slightly drunker than he’d been a quarter of an hour ago.
“She’s in Oxford,” I said.
He lurched off again and I moved back to the sofa, then to the spot beside the window. This second spot was a better one. I’d become good at sensing which are good positions and which aren’t when I’d been in hospital. It’s because you can’t move for yourself. In normal life, where you can move, you take being able to change your position for granted; you don’t even think about it. But when you’re injured and immobile, you have to go exactly where the doctors and nurses put you. Where they put you becomes terribly important—your position in relation to the windows, the doors, the TV set. The ward I spent most time in when I’d come out of intensive care was L-shaped. I was on the short side of the L, the foot, just inset from the corner where the long side hit it. It was a good spot: it had commanding views down both of the ward’s avenues, clear sightlines to the nurses’ enclave and the trolley station and the other little pockets of importance, crinkles in the flow of the ward’s surfaces. In the ward after that I had a really bad spot, in a bed facing the wrong way, facing nowhere in particular, just wrong. Position has been important to me ever since. It’s not just hospital: it’s the accident as well. I was hit because I was standing where I was and not somewhere else—standing on grass, exposed, just like a counter on a roulette table’s green velvet grid, on a single number, waiting…
I went back to the kitchen to top my glass up again, but realized that its level hadn’t sunk at all since the last time I’d filled it, so I just stood in the doorway while two girls beside the punch bowl looked at me.
“You looking for something?” one of them asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for a…for a thing.” I made a kind of twiddling motion with my fingers, a gesture somewhere between opening a bottle with a corkscrew and using a pair of scissors. Then I left the kitchen again.
I was heading down the hallway back towards the main room when I noticed a small room set off the circuit I’d been following up to now. I’d moved round the kitchen each time in a clockwise direction, and round the main room in an anticlockwise one, door-sofa-window-door. With the short, narrow corridor between the two rooms, my circuit had the pattern of an eight. This extra room seemed to have just popped up beside it like the half had in my Settlement: offset, an extra. I stuck my head inside. It was a bathroom. I stepped in and locked the door behind me. Then it happened: the event that, the accident aside, was the most significant of my whole life.
It happened like this. I was standing in the bathroom with the door locked behind me. I’d used the toilet and was washing my hands in the sink, looking away from the mirror above it—because I don’t like mirrors generally—at this crack that ran down the wall. David Simpson, or perhaps the last owner, had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was standing by the sink looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu.
The sense of déjà vu was very strong. I’d been in a space like this before, a place just like this, looking at the crack, a crack that had jutted and meandered in the same way as the one beside the mirror. There’d been that same crack, and a bathtub also, and a window directly above the taps just like there was in this room—only the window had been slightly bigger and the taps older, different. Out of the window there’d been roofs with cats on them. Red roofs, black cats. It had been high up, much higher than I was now: the fifth or sixth or maybe even seventh floor of an old tenement-style building, a large block. People had been packed into the building: neighbours beneath me and around me and on the floor above. The smell of liver cooking in a pan had been wafting to me from the floor below—the sound too, the spit and sizzle.
I remembered all this very clearly. There’d been liver cooking on the floor below—the smell, the spit and sizzle—and then two floors below that there’d been piano music. Not recorded music playing on a CD or the radio, but real, live music, being played on a piano by the man who lived there, a musician. I remembered how it had sounded, its rhythms. Sometimes he’d paused, whenever he’d hit a wrong note or lost his place. He’d paused and started the passage again, running through it slowly, slowing right down as he approached the bit he’d got wrong. Then he’d played it several times correctly, running through it again, speeding it up again till he was able to play it back at speed without fluffing it up. I remembered all this clearly—crystal-clear, as clear as in a vision.
I remembered it all, but I couldn’t remember
where
I’d been in this place, this flat, this bathroom. Or when. At first I thought I was remembering a flat in Paris. Not the one I’d stayed in when I did my course—that hadn’t looked anything like the one unfolding in my memory, inside or outside: there’d been no cats on roofs, no liver and no piano music, no similar bathroom with an identical crack on the wall—but perhaps someone else’s: Catherine’s, or someone we’d both known, another student. But we hadn’t visited any of the other students’ places. No: it wasn’t Paris. I searched back further in my past, right back to when I’d been a child. No use. I couldn’t place this memory at all.
And yet it was growing, minute by minute as I stood there in the bathroom, this remembered building, spreading outwards from the crack. The neighbour who’d cooked liver on the floor below me had been an old woman. I’d passed her on the stairs most days. I had a memory of passing her outside her flat’s door as she placed her rubbish on the landing. She’d say something to me; I’d say something back, then carry on past her. She’d been putting out her rubbish for the concierge to pick up. The building that I was remembering had had a concierge, just like Parisian apartment buildings have. The staircase had had iron banisters and worn marble or fake marble floors with patterns in them. I remembered what it had been like to walk across them: how my shoes had sounded on their surface, what the banisters had felt like to the touch. I remembered how it had felt inside my apartment, moving through it: from the bathroom with the crack in its wall to the kitchen and living room, the way plants hanging in baskets from the ceiling had rustled as I’d passed them, how I’d turned half sideways as I’d passed the kitchen unit’s waist-high edge—turned sideways and then deftly back again in one continuous movement, letting my shirt brush the woodwork. I remembered how all this had felt.
Most of all I remembered this: that inside this remembered building, in the rooms and on the staircase, in the lobby and the large courtyard between it and the building facing with the red roofs with black cats on them—that in these spaces, all my movements had been fluent and unforced. Not awkward, acquired, second-hand, but natural. Opening my fridge’s door, lighting a cigarette, even lifting a carrot to my mouth: these gestures had been seamless, perfect. I’d merged with them, run through them and let them run through me until there’d been no space between us. They’d been
real;
I’d been real—
been
without first understanding how to try to be: cut out the detour. I remembered this with all the force of an epiphany, a revelation.
Right then I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to reconstruct that space and enter it so that I could feel real again. I wanted to; I had to; I would. Nothing else mattered. I stood there staring at the crack. It all came down to that: the way it ran down the wall, the texture of the plaster all around it, the patches of colour to its right. That’s what had sparked the whole thing off. I had to get it down somehow—exactly, how it forked and jagged. Someone was knocking at the door.
“Hang on!” I called out.
“Hurry up!” a man’s voice shouted back.
I looked around. Beside the bathtub were two paint cans; lying on one of their lids were a tape measure and a pencil. I picked up the pencil, tore off a strip of paper that was still clinging to the wall beneath the window and started copying the way the crack ran. I copied it really carefully. Meticulously. The knocking came again: two sets of knocks this time.
“We’re bursting out here!” a girl’s voice called through.
“Yeah: hurry up!” the same man’s voice repeated.
I ignored them and carried on copying the crack. I had to start again two times—the first because I’d made the scale too big to fit the whole crack in, then once more when I realized that the flip side of the wallpaper was smoother than the bubbly side which I’d been drawing on, and so would make for a more accurate transcription. I copied it, meticulously, noting in brackets aspects such as texture and colour. After I’d finished copying the crack I stood there for a few more moments, letting the whole vision settle down inside me: bathroom, flat, staircase, building, courtyard, roofs and cats. I needed it to settle deep enough for it to stay. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, to see if I could see it in my mind, in darkness. I could. When I was satisfied of that I opened them again and left the bathroom.
“I’m bursting!” the girl told me again. It was one of the two girls who’d been in the kitchen earlier. She pushed past me into the bathroom.
“You been giving birth in there?” the man who’d told me to hurry up asked.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Giving birth. Is that what took you so long?”
“No,” I said. I took my coat and walked out of the party with my strip of wallpaper.
I walked down to the main Brixton intersection, where the giant box junction spreads across the tarmac from the town hall to the Ritzy cinema. It must have been midnight or so. Brixton was alive and kicking. There were red and yellow sports cars gridlocked on Coldharbour Lane, black guys in baseball caps touting for cab firms, younger black guys in big puffy jackets pushing cannabis and crack, black girls with curled and flattened hair and big round hips wrapped up in stretchy dresses screeching into mobiles, white girls queuing outside the Dogstar, chewing gum and smoking at the same time. They all came and went—people, lights, colours, noise—on the periphery of my attention. I walked slowly, with the strip of wallpaper, thinking of the room, the flat, the world I’d just remembered.
I was going to recreate it: build it up again and live inside it. I’d work outwards from the crack I’d just transcribed. The plaster round the crack was pinky-grey, all grooved and wrinkled from when it had been smeared on. There’d been a patch of blue paint just above it, to the left (its right), and, one or two feet to the left of that, a patch of yellow. I’d noted this down, but could remember it exactly anyway: left just above it blue then two more feet and yellow. I’d be able to recreate the crack back in my own flat—smear on the plaster and then add the colours; but my bathroom wasn’t the right shape. It had to be the same shape and same size as the one David’s had made me remember, with the same bathtub with its older, different taps, the same slightly bigger window. And it had to be on the fifth, sixth or seventh floor. I’d need to buy a new flat, one high up.