Ordinary Thunderstorms

19

WHEN YOU HAVE NOTHING, Adam thought, then everything, the tiniest thing, becomes a problem. In order to begin his begging life he had been obliged to steal — steal a felt-tip pen from a stationery shop. Then on a rectangle of cardboard ripped from an empty wine case outside an off-licence he had written with the stolen felt-tip: ‘HUNGRY AND HOMELESS. SPARE A PENNY. BROWN COINS ONLY’

On his first day he had settled down outside a supermarket on the King’s Road. He sat cross-legged on the ground outside the main entrance and propped his sign against his knees. Almost immediately, people began giving him their brown coins, as if relieved to get rid of their annoying small change, the near useless, purse-filling one- and two-pence pieces. Adam was pleased to see how logical his reasoning had been: there is nothing more irritating than heavy pockets and purses full of small-denomination coins. ‘Buddy can you spare a dime’ had been his inspiration. He took his jacket off and spread it in front of his knees so that potential donors could toss their coins on to its material rather than risk contact with his grubby, black-nailed hand. In thirty minutes he had made £3.27. He filled his own pockets with pennies and tuppences — there was the odd five-pence piece as well — and someone had given him a pound, impressed by the modesty of his need and the politeness of his demand.

Twenty minutes later, when he had crossed the £5 margin, a man came up and squatted beside him. He was young, very lean, thickly bearded like Adam and just as dirty.

“Mshkin n gsadnka,” he said, or something that sounded like it.

“I don’t understand,” Adam said, “I only speak English.”

“Fucking off,” the man said and showed Adam the blade of a Stanley knife in the palm of his hand. “I here. It belong me. I cut you.”

Adam left promptly and walked to Victoria Station where he found a patch of pavement between a cash-point and a souvenir shop. He made another pound or so before the owner of the souvenir shop came out and sprayed him with insecticide.

“Fuck off, you asylum scum,” the man said. And so Adam moved on, his eyes stinging.

He had made £6.13 his first day; he made £6.90 his second. Now, mid-afternoon on his third day of begging — situated between a newsagent’s and a small twenty-four-hour supermarket called PROXI-MATE — he had garnered another £5 plus. At this rate, he calculated, say £5 per day, he would make £35 per week, almost £2,000 per year. He was both relieved by this and depressed. It meant he wouldn’t starve — he could now afford to buy cheap un-nutritious food, and every now and then go to the Church of John Christ for a proper meal and, of course, sleep rough in the triangle by Chelsea Bridge. But it was early summer — what would he do in December or February? He felt ensnared, already — in a particularly impoverished poverty trap. He saw himself stuck in a barely tolerable circle of hell — underground, yes, undiscovered, yes — but something had to change. How was he going to recover his old life, his old persona? He once had had a wife, a nice, roomy, modern air-conditioned home, a car, a job, a title, a future. This existence he was living now was so marginal it couldn’t really be described as human. He was like the London pigeons he saw around him, pecking in the gutter. Even the urban foxes were better off with their warm dens and families.

He went to banks and bureaux de change to change his handfuls of copper coins to brass pounds. The tellers were not happy, though they grudgingly obliged. He ranged further and wider, trying not to revisit banks and bureaux too often so as not to make a nuisance of himself and therefore become memorable.

He paid to have a shower in the executive suite at Victoria Station and washed his hair for the first time in nearly a month. He looked at the gaunt, bearded stranger staring out at him in the mirror, as he combed his hair back from his forehead, and was struck by the strength of the conflicting emotions inside him: fierce pride at his resilience and resourcefulness; bitter self-pity that he should have ended up like this. Yes, I’m free, he thought, but what has become of me?

Clean, in his mismatched pin-striped suit, with newly purchased, fairly shiny, black lace-up shoes (_£i from a thrift shop), he went back to the triangle and collected Mhouse’s flip-flops. He wanted ordinary, civil contact with another human being (preferably female). In the last few days hundreds of people had given him tiny sums of money, some had even exchanged kind words, but he was more and more grateful to Mhouse for her suggestion of the Church of John Christ

— the church had been his salvation, literally — even in her fury she had somehow been thinking of him, he thought, and he wanted to thank her and keep his promise to return her shoes. She would be surprised, he reckoned — and maybe even touched — that he had honoured it.

He took a bus to Rotherhithe — another small inching up the ladder of civilisation — and stepped out at The Shaft. He wandered around the estate’s three quadrangles before he recognised the area where he had been mugged (the graffiti being the aide-memoire)

— he saw the trashed playground and the stairs beneath which he had Iain unconscious. An old woman, trailing a shopping trolley behind her with a wobbly wheel, came slowly towards him and as she reached him he asked if she knew someone called Mhouse.

“What unit?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then I can’t help you, darling,” she said, shuffling off.

He wandered deeper into the estate. He felt inconspicuous — a shabby, creased, bearded presence in cast-off clothes, like most of The Shaft’s male denizens. Two enquiries later secured Mhouse’s address — Flat L, Level 3, Unit 14—and he climbed the stairs to her walkway, feeling a little nervous and apprehensive, almost as if he were on a date.

He knocked on her door and after a pause heard her voice saying, “Yeah? Who is it?”

“John 1603,” he said — and of course she opened the door.

He held up the flip-flops.

“Brought them back,” he said.

♦

There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen-diner and a living room in Mhouse’s flat. There were no carpets or curtains and very little furniture: two mismatched armchairs, some cushions and a TV in the sitting room, two mattresses on the floor in the bedroom she shared with Ly-on. The kitchen had a stove but no fridge. In the other bedroom were some cardboard boxes filled with clothes and random possessions. Most odd, Adam thought, was the rubber tubing and electric cables that were fed through an empty pane of the casement window in the kitchen. This provided running cold water in the kitchen but not the bathroom. There was electricity in every room, however, wires snaking out from a cuboid structure of stacked adaptors on the kitchen floor. Mhouse brought Adam a cup of very sweet tea — she hadn’t asked him if he wanted it sugared.

“Ly-on, you sit on floor,” she said to the little boy who was watching the TV. He moved off his armchair obediently and sat on a winded cushion in front of the screen. He moved slowly, lethargically, as if he’d just been woken up. Adam took his seat and Mhouse sat opposite.

“That’s my son,” she said. “Ly-on.”

“Leon?”

“No, Ly-on. Like in the jungle. Like in lions and tigers.”

“Right.” Adam now remembered her tattoo: ‘Mhouse’ and ‘Ly-on’ on the inside of her right forearm. “Good name for a boy.”

Ly-on was a small boy, almost a tiny boy, with a large, curly-haired head and wide brown eyes.

“Say hello to John.”

“Hello, John. You come mummy to take going?”

“We’ll go for a walk tomorrow, darling.”

Adam noticed that although Ly-on was small and in no way fat he had a distinct pot belly, like a beer-drinker’s.

“You still in Chelsea, then?” Mhouse asked.

“Moving around a bit,” Adam said, cautiously. Mhouse had been his only visitor to the triangle, as far as he knew.

“How you like the church?”

“I think it’s…wonderful,” Adam said, with sincerity. “I go there most nights. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Yeah. I try to go, but, you know, it’s difficult, what with Ly-on.” She scratched her right breast, unselfconsciously. She was wearing a cap-sleeved white T — shirt with ‘SUPERMOM!’ across the front and cropped pale-blue denim jeans. She curled herself up in the armchair and tucked her feet under her. She was also small, Adam realised, a tiny child-woman — maybe that was why Ly-on was so small himself.

He looked down at him and saw the boy was now stretched out on the floor as if he was about to go to sleep.

“You get to your bed, sweetness,” Mhouse said and the little boy rose slowly to his feet and weaved off to the bedroom. “He’s just had his supper,” she said. “He’s tired. And I’ve got to get off me bum and get working. No, no, you stay there. Finish your tea. I’ll just go and get changed.”

Adam sipped his too-sweet tea and channel-hopped on the remote control. She seemed to have an interminable number of channels on her TV. When she came out she was wearing white shiny plastic zip-up boots, a mini-skirt and a red-and-black, tight satin bustier that pushed her small breasts up above the lace trim like round balls. Her make-up ‘was vivid: red lips and black eyes.

“Going to a party,” she said. “On a boat on the river.”

“Fabulous,” Adam said. “You look great.”

She looked at him sideways, quizzically. “Are you joking me?”

“No, seriously. You look great.”

“Thanking you, kind sir,” she said, rummaging in her handbag for keys. Adam looked at her hard cleavage and smelt the pungent chemicals of her scent, finding her suddenly extremely sexually desirable — recognising the simple efficiency of her outfit and the messages it was designed to send to people — to men. There was something impish, elvish about her — if you could imagine a sexually alluring imp, Adam thought — and her thin, hooded eyes added to this otherworldly effect.

She paused at the door. “You signing on?”

“Ah, not yet,” Adam said. “But I am making a bit of money, these days.”

“Tugging?”

“What?”

“On the game. Selling your arse?”

“No, begging.”

She thought, frowning. “I got a spare room here, you know. If you want. Twenty a week. Seeing as we go to the same church, like.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine for the moment. It’s a bit pricey for me, to tell the truth.”

“You can owe me.”

“Better not. Thanks all the same.”

“Suit yourself.” She opened the door for them both. “Thanks for bringing back the flip-flops. That’s kind, that is, that’s well nice.”

“It was kind and nice of you to lend them to me. And to tell me about the church. I don’t know what I would have done, otherwise.”

“Yeah, well…What’s being a Samaritan for, eh?” They stepped out on to the walkway and she closed and locked the door.

“Will Ly-on be all right?” Adam asked, unconcernedly, he hoped.

“Yeah, he’ll sleep to tomorrow lunchtime if I let him.”

They walked through The Shaft and then on to Canada Water Tube station. “See you, John, god bless,” she said when they parted and she headed off to find her platform. Adam watched men turn to look at her pass by, saw their eyes swivel and their nostrils flare. He thought he’d pop into the Church of John Christ — he was feeling hungry.

♦

“Soon I getting passport,” Vladimir said. “When I getting passport, I getting job. I getting job then I getting apartment. I getting bank account. I getting credit card, I getting overdraft facility. No more problem for me.”

Adam listened to him almost as if Vladimir were a traveller returned from a distant, fabled land — a low-rent Marco Polo — telling of unimaginable wonders, of lifestyles and possibilities that seemed fantastical, forever beyond his reach. That he had once been a homeowner himself seemed laughable; that he’d had a wallet full of credit cards and several healthy bank accounts an intoxicated dream. He bowed his head and spooned a mouthful of chilli con carne into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, thinking back. He was sitting at his usual table, Gavin Thrale also present, but no sign of Turpin.

“Where will you ‘getting’ this passport?” Thrale asked, offhandedly.

Vladimir then began a complicated story about drug addicts and drug dens in European Community countries — Spain, Italy, Germany, Holland — where, if an addict looked close to death, on his or her last legs, he or she was encouraged by ‘gangster people’ to apply for a passport. When the addict eventually died, the passport was then sold on to someone in the same age-range who vaguely resembled the deceased junkie. No forgery was involved, that was the benefit, that was the absolute beauty of the scam: they were impossible to detect.

Thrale looked highly sceptical. “How much do these passports cost?”

“One thousand euro,” Vladimir said.

Adam remembered he had once had a passport but he had left it in Grafton Lodge when he went for his interview. No doubt it had been impounded with the rest of his belongings.

“So,” Thrale continued, obviously intrigued. “You get one of these passports but you might have to pass yourself off as…as a Dane, a Spaniard, a Czech—”

“Is no matter, Gavin,” Vladimir said, insistently. “Most important thing is passport of European Community — we all the same now. Is no matter what country.”

“When do you get it?” Adam asked.

“Tomorrow, next day.”

“So you won’t be back here again.”

“Absolutely no!” Vladimir laughed. “I get passport, I get job, I finish with church. I was to training for kine, you know.”

“Physiotherapist,” Adam added for Thrale’s benefit.

“Of course. That was when your village in Ukraine collected all that money and sent you here for a heart bypass.”

“Not Ukraine, Gavin. Not bypass, new heart valve.”

Adam finished his chilli con carne — the servings in the Church of John Christ were copious. Bishop Yemi’s sermon that evening had lasted two and a half hours, expatiating further on this concept of John Christ as the leader of a small cell of freedom fighters struggling to liberate their people from the oppression of the Roman Empire. Jesus — loyal lieutenant — had sacrificed himself for John in order that the leader could disappear and the struggle continue. It was all there in the Book of Revelation if you knew how to decipher it. Then he had dozed off for a while — only the hungriest could sit the sermons out with full concentration.

“Anyone see Turpin?” Vladimir asked.

“Probably loitering by some nursery school playground,” Thrale said.

Bishop Yemi appeared at this moment and beamed down at his Johns.

“How’s life, guys?” he said, his smile unwavering, clearly indifferent to their reply.

“Fine, thank you,” Adam said. He felt a strange warmth towards Bishop Yemi: the man and his organisation had clothed and fed him after all.

Bishop Yemi spread his hands. “The love of John Christ go with you, my brothers,” he said, and wandered off to the next table. The congregation had been sparse tonight, barely into double figures.

“Why does the word ‘bogus’ suddenly come to mind?” Thrale said.

“No — he a good man, Bishop Yemi,” Vladimir said, standing. He looked at Adam and made a smoking gesture. “Adam, you want come? I have monkey.”

“Ah, no thanks, not tonight,” Adam said. Vladimir routinely asked him to go and smoke monkey after their evening meal — he must like me, I suppose, Adam thought — and Adam routinely declined.

Later, at the church door, Adam and Thrale stood together for a second, both of them looking up at the evening sky. There were a few fine clouds, tinged with an apricot glow.

“Cirrus fibratus,” Adam said without thinking. “Change in the weather coming.”

Thrale looked at him, curiously. “How on earth do you know that?” he said, intrigued.

“Just a hobby,” Adam said quickly, but he felt his face colouring. Fool, he thought. “Some book I read once…”

“How come people like you and me end up here?” Thrale said. “Hiding behind our beards and long hair.”

“I told you: I had a series of nervous break—”

“Yes, yes, of course. Come off it. We’re both highly educated. Intellectuals. It’s obvious every time we open our mouths — we might as well have ‘BRAINS’ tattooed across our foreheads.”

“That’s all very well,” Adam persisted. “But I cracked up. Everything fell apart. Lost my wife, my job. I was in hospital for months…” He paused. He almost believed it himself, now. “I’m just trying to put my life back together, bit by bit, slowly but surely.”

“Yeah,” Thrale said sceptically. “Aren’t we all.”

“What about you?” Adam said, keen to change the subject.

“I’m a novelist,” Thrale said.

“Really?”

“I’ve written many novels — a dozen or so — but only one has been published.”

“Which was?”

“The Hydrangea House.”

“I don’t rememb—”

“You wouldn’t. It — I—was published by a small press: Idomeneo Editore. In Capri.”

“Capri? In Italy?”

“The last I heard.”

“Right,” Adam said. “At least you were published. No small achievement. To hold a book you’ve written in your hand, your name on the cover: The Hydrangea House by Gavin Thrale. Great feeling, I would have thought.”

“Except I was writing under a pseudonym,” Thrale said. “Irena Primavera. Not quite the same frisson.”

“Was it in English?”

“It wasn’t called La Casa dell’Ortensia.”

“Got you. Are you writing another?”

They had wandered away from the church and were heading up Jamaica Road.

“I am, since you ask. It’s called The Masturbator. Somehow I doubt it’ll find a publisher.”

“Hasn’t that been done already? Portnoy’s —”

“My novel will make Portnoy’s Complaint read like Winnie the Pooh,” Thrale said with some steel in his voice.

“But,” Adam said, “if you’re a published novelist, what are you doing at the Church of John Christ?”

“Same as you,” Thrale said, meaningfully. “Lying low.”

Both of them went silent for a while. Adam paused to remove a sticky coin of chewing gum from the sole of his right shoe. Thrale waited for him.

“I used to make a fair living for years,” Thrale said, musingly, “stealing rare books from libraries. Maps, illustrations. All over Europe — posing as a scholar. Some of them extremely rare. Then I was caught and had to pay my debt to society.”

“Ah.” Adam stood up.

“My big mistake, once I was released, was to think I could bamboozle the ladies and the gentlemen of the DHSS — or is it the DWP now? Whoever. Anyway, I was signing on, but simultaneously working at various menial jobs. Somebody ‘shopped’ me, I was spied upon — it’s a nasty world out there, Adam — and my benefits were stopped. I am being searched for — charged with fraud. I don’t intend going back to prison.”

“Hence—”

“Hence my enthusiasm for Bishop Yemi’s fascinating conspiracy theory.”

They had arrived at Adam’s bus stop.

“See you tomorrow,” Adam said.

“How are you getting by?”

“Begging.”

“Oh dear. Desperation.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve taken up my old trade. I steal books — to order, for students.” He frowned. “I just mustn’t get caught again.” His frown turned into a fake smile. “I go this way. I live in a squat in Shoreditch with an intriguing mix of young people.”

Adam watched him saunter off, then he searched his pockets to see how much money he had left. It was a fine evening: he might as well walk home to Chelsea — save a few pennies.