The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

Mono-Cellular

I used to play a game as a child. Well, not so much a game, it was more of a pastime. Lying in bed, if I squinted at the shafts of light that streamed in through the curtains they became solid. Solid tubes of brightness. I could extend and contract these tubes simply by the degree to which I squinted. It was a sensation of the most incredible kind of control, a control of a peripheral world that lay behind the thin sham of mere workaday appearances. A secret world. Lots of things happened to me during my childhood. It wasn’t happy or unhappy, it was eventful, but what I remember best are those solid tubes of brightness.

I remember them best because they’re back, albeit in a different form. I’m sitting in the living-room and there are these solid tubes of brightness wreathing just about everything in sight. A blue haze runs over the back of the leather three-seater sofa against the far wall. It shimmers across the carpet, six inches above the surface of the Wilton twistpile, mimicking, in a ghostly kind of a way, the diamond patterning. Purple haze round the pelmets. Green haze pulsing gently in front of the wall unit. And through the double doors, with their distorting panes of toughened glass, I can see my misbegotten children in the diningroom. They are lying in orderly rows, their backs humped at angles, a militaristic school of miniature cetaceans. Above each one there is a little corona of black light. If I squint I can harden the corona to a cloud. If I strain it fades out to almost nothing, a faint retinal after-image, nothing more.

You see, my feeling is this: I’m going to sit here for some time. Probably for the next three hours. You see, if I move, there’s a little sort of wart of pain — a hard little thing — stuck in the crook of my arm. And I hate the way it bobbles and jostles me when I move. It does it even when I perform a very simple action like taking a sip of beer. God knows what it would do to me if I walked through to the kitchen and fried up some spicy mushrooms. That would be a real mistake.

It’s a mistake I don’t intend to make. I have adjusted my environment. I’ve erected a little bubble here. I’m like one of those children that are allergic to everything. I cannot leave my bubble. I would be risking death. The wrong sort of stimulation could be fatal to me at this point. I mark down especially the spicy mushrooms in this context. Although I am not subject to those mushrooms in any real sense. Nor their foil container.

There are a lot more of my children upstairs. They are sleeping quietly. When the morning comes and Gavin calls … they will be taken away from me. Into Care. Yes, I like that ‘Care’. With a capital ‘C’. They’re sleeping up there swathed in robes of bubbled plastic, girded with corrugated cardboard. But for this wart, this worrisome wart, I would join them. Lie for a while, in the small back bedroom. Go into the second bedroom and then disport myself in the master bedroom. Lie among them like a patriarch. Actually, I could do this. If I really wanted to. But I don’t. I want to be right here when the dawn makes the railings across the road fizz. When an aureole projects out from the statue of the naked woman at Henley’s Corner. When Gavin rings …

Actually. Actually, I think, I think Gavin will ring quite soon. It’s nearly 6.00 a.m. and there’s the time difference to consider. I’m worried about something, no, let me tell you. I’m worried that you think me needlessly cryptic: children, warts, spicy mushrooms, purple pelmets… but let me do it my way. Because I’ve already finished. As far as I can see, each sentence, each clause I utter contains the whole story. Beginning, middle and end. If I were to be true to my vision I’d shut up now. I could always shake my head and subside in a snowflake whirl of fragmented light … so let me be cryptic. If I hold out I can pretend that I haven’t finished telling the story and that makes it worth telling, you see.

There are a lot of books lying around this chair. It’s like a little village. They are all half open, spines upward. Little houses of knowledge. I’ve always liked books about How To Do Things. How To Do Economics, How To Do Finance, How To Form a Company, How To Enamel Jewellery, How To Build a Boat. Within the past hour or so I’ve looked at each of these books in turn. And in the next hour or so I’ll do it again. I’ve done the same thing with the swathe of magazines and newspapers in the wedge of space between my chair and the wall. I’ll come to the records later.

I look at each of the books in turn. I read a sentence or a short paragraph. And then, that’s it. I’ve built the boat. Made the pendant. Floated the company. I have the same problem as I do with my own story. Everything is contained within everything. But I don’t despair, I continue to pick up each of my books in turn, riffle through it, seize on a paragraph and then abandon it. Early on in the night the same was true of other rooms in the house. In the kitchen, before the spicy mushrooms gained their grip, I read cookery. In the toilet, humour. Upstairs it was novels. I daresay the books are all still there, abandoned villages.

I search the books and the newspapers for one fact, one piece of information, that will provide the key … but I already know it. What I’ve neglected to tell you is that I’m old, really old. Inhumanly old. I’m as old as a long-buried culvert. Bricks fall from my walls and expose the mud. I’m a huge wrinkled finger. I’ve been in the bath too long. My flesh hangs on me in wattled pouches. Every part of my clothing is a sweaty gusset. And I haven’t mentioned the pulsing sound. Or the booming sound. The great wash of the ocean that pulls my head around on my neck.

And then again. That’s better. Good to pull taut the clothesline. It’s awfully depressing to see those grey many-times-washed aertex shirts. Trailing their cuffs in the dirt. Ha! Ha, ha … We bought a company, off the shelf. I like that ‘off the shelf’. Makes me think of neat wire boxes full of miniature executives, all stacked on racks. Not quite like that. Our company, that is, Gavin’s and mine: Ocean Ltd. Formerly trading as plankton farmers, for fish food, you see. Pet fish. Estuary — somewhere. Now, ours. And fitted out with new directors: Gavin, myself and Mr Rabindarath. Unwittingly in this last instance. He never leaves his room except to pick up his prescription. Gavin kindly relieves him of the bother of reading any of the correspondence relating to Ocean Ltd. And, indeed, of his responsibility as Financial Director thereof. Good of Gavin. Mr Rabindarath is a hopeless neurotic. He would worry.

I feel a lot better. Well enough to take on the kitchen. The purple edging around everything has stopped furiously oscillating. Either that or it now vibrates with such frequency that it appears static. At any rate, objects have achieved a crystalline purity of line. This beer can, for example. Have you ever seen a purer beer can than this? Why, the drawing of the Castlemaine Brewery in Brisbane is so sharp, one might be standing right outside of it. I drink. That flat taste. Absolute purity of line.

I lift myself from the chair. A little stiff. To be expected. Cigarette ash forms a network of lines pointing to my crotch. It’s a crotch rubbing! Ha! Ha, ha …

Walking, like most other human activities, requires a great deal of assurance. If you want it to look right you have to undertake it with tremendous confidence and verve. You can usually spot a young or inexperienced walker by their lack of style, or their assumption of a style which is too old and complex for them. Pretentious walking can be a real problem. But here, I stride into the hall quite naturally. I’m on my way to the kitchen … ‘Spicy mushrooms,’ you say? Well, to hell with them, is my reply. You were taken in by my bullshit.

There is no discontinuation of floor covering between the front room and the hall, which is comforting. The careful two-cornered ascent of the staircase in the corner is reassuring as well. I bought this watercolour, hung centrally on the wall, over the oval hall table, in Betws-y-Coed. It depicts a stone cottage, in the mid-ground. In the foreground there is a field and a dry-stone wall; in the background, clouds. It’s tremendously homey, this watercolour, as is the table, bought in Beccles, which looks dark and woody in the light that spills through from the front room. It imparts a mahogany, old solidity to my house, which it doesn’t really deserve.

Even the children, the fruit of my labours, look innocuous enough here, viewed in receding twos, marching up the treads of the staircase and huddling around the door to the cupboard under the stairs. They’ve lost their militaristic mien. I can pause here, tent my hand casually on the oval table, pinning down some junk mail, and recount.

Gavin says that this house is a cluttered little cabinet of lower-middle-class knick-knacks. That it betrays my yearning for respectability. All I know is that I could never be comfortable in his minimal environment: spotlights, wire-wooled mouldings, varnished wood, little rugs, that’s all.

When I bought this house, a necessary bit of deficit financing for Ocean Ltd, I was determined that it should be a place of real respite. At the time I was spending almost all day sitting up against freestanding baffles covered in sheeny grey fabric, talking to men whose hair pointed and whose gestures were punctuated by little stabs with aluminium ballpoints. Coming back to this house was an escape. I’ve only lived here a few months, but it really feels like home.

Setting up lines of credit for Ocean Ltd was the easiest thing in the world. Gavin was utterly convincing; there is nothing forced in his manner, he simply makes people want to be his friend. As a consequence people are his friends, and the way friends do, they do Gavin favours. He talks to them with his confident mellow voice, which has only the faintest aftertone of social superiority. It’s all in the after-tone; people don’t hear it, but they absorb it subliminally and respond. Ocean Ltd effortlessly borrowed its operating capital.

‘Not everyone responds to a glossy brochure,’ said Gavin, nudging his whisky sour with an extended finger — I noticed the tuberous bulge of plastic flesh where the cuticle should have been — ‘but it has to be there.’ Ocean Ltd had a glossy brochure: receding panels of textured paper, spot-varnished duotones of our babies looking sleek, tiny squares of copy and typefaces pulled this way and that, and the Ocean Ltd logo: one of the babies, stylised with ripping lines.

There’s a nasty ripple in the air here, in the hall. It’s too close, that’s the problem. I’m becoming absorbed with detail. Gavin tells me that that’s my problem. ‘You’re a classic anal-retentive,’ he says, ‘tirelessly absorbed by minutiae, anankastic in the extreme — it’s lucky you have to deal with the broad sweep of things, to do the abstract thinking.’ That may be so, but Gavin’s abstract thoughts have led to remarkably concrete things, like the Bloomsbury flat, the Oyster Perpetual, the suits from Bromsgrove, shirts from Barries. While my concrete mentality, my eye for detail has led me …

… to the kitchen. Yaaah! … Bloody fool. A white flash of light. I punched the wall switch, the strips flickered once in too-late warning and then sprung into full, flat light, hammering down on my tissue-paper retinas. I am a pin-hole camera. Ugh! … Everything is lit up. The dresser is exposed in the corner — an old woman taking her clothes off. There are spice jars here like the moon, one side silvered, the other buried in perpetual darkness. Everything in the kitchen is lunar, polarised. On the rectangular melamine table sits last night’s supper; those devilish spicy mushrooms crouch, warbling in their foil. In the flesh they are far less terrifying than I had imagined. I feel a slackening off, my heart surfaces from the bottom of the empty stomach-pool that it jack-knifed into when the light went on. I’ll just go to the sink and get a glass of water.

Hu, hu, heu, ggh … I’d forgotten. I’m gagging. I can barely contain myself. I feel a bitter sewage-gorge rising up my neck. I can only seize a can from the fridge, hit the light and retreat back across the hall to the front room and my seat by the window. I’d forgotten the tandoori chicken wings, they were lurking on the draining board. Just the sight of those bent red limbs in filmy bondage, wet turmeric paste pressed all around. It was enough to destabilise me. I’m sitting in the chair. And nothing makes any sense. Any more. I’m sitting vertiginously. Tipping forward. Looking down on the looking down, looking down. And how I regret those purple pelmets. And the malignant wart, that little hard nodule of pain in the pit of my arm is throbbing fit to bust. It’s no simple organic pain, this is a pain the insidiousness of which undercuts the very idea of flesh; it’s a pain that speaks of a future when we will have all evolved into cybernauts; the wart is a bolt screwed into the template of my arm, casually mashing rusted tendon cables …

‘As you were, as you were.’ I must drill this transitory army of occupation and then set them at ease with myself. When they arrived yesterday afternoon their custodians couldn’t quite believe where they were to take up residence. Standing in their pseudo-denim windcheaters, company names emblazoned on their breasts, the men squinted at my semi and then rang the descending chimes. One of them held in his solid mitt the flapping sheaf of onion-skin invoices.

With the unhurried ease of labourers everywhere, who seek, on a daily basis, to escape the winding down of their own bodies’ strength, they brought the children in from the truck and stacked them all over the house. Box after box, one hundred gross in all, laid out in all the rooms. After they had gone I amused myself for a while by taking them out and playing with them, forming patterns, marching them up and down, and when that palled I lined them up in ranks. Especially next door in the dining-room where, at this moment, four companies are drawn up in tight formation under the table.

When they’d all been unloaded and the various invoices signed I wanted to stop the three men as they moved off to their orange truck. I felt a terrible sense of abandonment and strangeness. The whole grey afternoon possessed an awful thin reality that might slice into me. I wanted to call them back, but could think of no pretext. The air brakes hissed and they roared up through the gears and away towards the North Circular.

You see, I’m not convinced any more by Gavin. That’s the root of it. I’m suspicious. When we met David Hangleton two weeks ago for a ‘little Italian dinner’ in Hampstead, he was so much more convincing. I’ve never pretended to know anything about this. It was never my job to supply front or charisma for Ocean Ltd. I was the back-room boy who would square things away and make them look right on paper. But next to Hangleton, Gavin seemed insubstantial. It was as if, with Gavin, I had witnessed a clever pastiche of the real thing. Everything Gavin did, the gestures he made, the things he said, the suits he wore, was forced, it was a performance. Hangleton on the other hand was clearly a real entrepreneur, he meant it all. He was natural and unforced and his bragging related to funds that were, if not entirely his own, at least not subject to punitive rates of interest.

‘Buy something very cheap, with someone else’s money and then sell it, quickly, not so cheap.’ That was Gavin’s maxim and the motto of Ocean Ltd. He even made me get a little sign made up with this written on it and hung it over the computer.

‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

‘And the credit cards.’

‘And the credit cards.’

‘And the current accounts.’

‘And the current accounts.’

‘And the charge cards.’

‘Yeah, and the frigging charge cards.’

‘And pile the capital back into a real enterprise.’

‘Of course, this isn’t simply a stupid sting, is it. We’re businessmen, entrepreneurs.’

Businessmen, entrepreneurs. Gavin had certainly looked and acted the part. At least I had thought so to begin with. He was so good-looking for a start, with his neat sandy hair, his regular, even features. He had a nose that had such a tight little bridge, not like my flat lump of clay; and a flawless complexion, so flawless that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a seam running down the back of his neck.

When Gavin and I first became colleagues he took me out with him to meet his friends. They all had the same kind of manner as him, a sort of unforced and facetious ease. It was the kind of charm that I’ve always found myself a victim of. Gavin and his friends, with their minor public school slang, their games of backgammon and their saloon-car races round London’s arterial roads, reminded me of the nouveau riche kids I went to school with. They had the same consumer’s attitude to the business of living. Like Gavin they went straight to the bottom line without troubling to check the balances. I suppose the difference was that Gavin brought to the whole thing the strong implication of ultimate solidity, a four-square Virginia Water kind of security. Redolent of retrievers and women with seriously quilted clothing. He also had the knack of elevating you, making you feel special: ‘I’m telling you this because I know you can keep a secret and …’ Lengthy pause, ‘well, because I suppose I regard you as one of my closest friends.’ Eyes downcast to denote embarrassment and then briefly flicked upwards into your own to indicate complete faith.

Actually, you know, I’m wrong to rubbish Gavin like this. I’m wrong and I’m stupid. Very stupid. He’s out there alone in a hotel room, he’s staked everything he has on Ocean Ltd. I never had anything to stake to begin with. He’s been a friend to me — if a little capricious. But maybe that’s what friendship is, a slap and then a tickle. I suppose I’m nervous because I’m expecting the call and because the last thing I read in How To Form a Company was ‘Business partnerships can be very thorny indeed, even close friends should ensure that partnership agreements are vetted by an experienced solicitor.’ But of course we don’t have a partnership, we have a limited company, with directors. Mr Rabindarath and, of course, Sandy — although his identity could be said to be problematic.

I can see the corner of the garden out of the corner of my eye. Dawn must be coming. Gavin should call. It’s damp out there, a little wetness glistens in the orange light, on the privet and the flattened grass. In here it’s the same. My chair. The sofa. The wall unit, the triangular area between the side of my chair and the wall, full of loosely piled newspapers. The miniature landscape of the newspaper, up column and down advertisement. Who is to say that it’s really smaller than the room, the garden, or the world? If I rub my hand up and down the arm of the chair the pile on the cover moves from flat to prickily upright, to flat again. Co-ordination is the key here, foolish to look for wisdom in books, because they have nothing new to say. They contain everything in their one long sentence. Everything and nothing. Whereas in this simple ritual — rotating the chair-cover pile with the flat of my hand, whilst rhythmically breathing and, at the same time, running my eye carefully over the newspaper hillocks — I achieve control. I create a tiny ordered universe, which means that Gavin will call. He must call because the universe is ordered. The solid beams can be made to expand and contract in tight ranks. The children have all gone to bed quietly. The mushrooms lie swaddled in batter, the chicken wings subside into the polystyrene mattress. And the wart starts up as a dot, that flares into a portal. A ghastly door. Its subcutaneousness. Urghh … its layeredness. I hate the layers of my skin, because they’re all over and beneath them are layers of viscera. Someone has sprinkled sand between the layers of my viscera. And the beer is flat again. And I have heard this song a thousand times. Where is my control …

Actually, there’s nothing particularly awful about this song. It has a kind of folksy innocence, a wistfulness that rather suits my current mood. It could be ironic — but maybe not. I sit here, looking, I think, rather dapper for someone who’s been up the whole night. My clothes have a rather billowy aspect to them, perhaps it’s the light quality. I sit in the pool thrown down by the standard lamp, washed by the orange from the street lamp and tinged with the palest of grey flushes from the coming dawn. And the beams, those solid beams, which elsewhere in the living-room are orderly and controlled, dance and hum around me, weaving in and out of one another; I am their focus.

I am like some small, brightly coloured fleck of life, caught under a microscope. Beautiful, weightless, shrunk beyond the force of gravity or the effect of the sun, I swim in the amniotic air of the living-room. The wallpaper gently susurrates. And then, without warning, a hostile beam enters the room, plunges through the cornice, a beam unlike the others, not subject to my optical control: a beam of pure anxiety. Which probes me with its needle tip, touches me just once. Pokes a single time, into my soft midriff, the heliotrope heart of my pathetically simple organism. And I contract. I seize up. I clench and ball into a little jelly fist. Slowly, slowly I relax again, blob out, float in the limpid fluid that magnifies my transparent body. It happens again and again. I am but a single-celled creature capable of one, giant, knee-jerk reflex. This is a bit of a digression from my main area of concern, or at any rate the area of discussion, founded, as it were, on words like ‘pallet’ and expressions such as ‘bill of lading’ and ‘pro-forma invoice’. This area is coextensive with tarmac aprons bordered by chain-link fences. The world which Ocean Ltd inhabits is an active world of quantifiable phenomena, not some amoebic fantasy concocted in a suburban living-room at … getting on for 6.30 a.m.

And who exactly is to say that Sandy, Mr Rabindarath’s arthritic old labrador, with greying muzzle and shambolic walk, is not entitled to his place on the board of Ocean Ltd? Even if his identity had to be constructed for him, pieced together from headstone to birth certificate, to passport, to bank account. Mr Sandy Eccles is an accomplished fact now. His name appears on our letterhead. He is casually referred to by one and all and pictured periodically in the eyes of numerous minds, powering his Vauxhall down great swathes of motorway, listening to Radio Two. Shirtsleeved, his jacket dangling from a hook behind his head, confident that he’s going to close that sale …

I must say that I congratulate myself … well done, old chap! This living-room is a bold testament to your struggle against anxiety. Everything seems to be right in its place, there’s nothing that jars the eye. The village of books, the chair set at a precise angle, the wedge of newsprint, the fan of album covers, all good rugs of media. Nicely offsetting the restrained beige of the carpet. Magnolia may not be an inspired choice for wall-covering but it is restful. And as for the furniture, surely it is the right decision to play it down, keep it modern, but not too … After all, the shape of the room, the metal-divided, six-pane windows, none of it would support anything but angularity and pastels.

This folk song. I really hate it, it says nothing to me. But steady now, I’ve tried jazz, flirted with the classics, run through a gamut of rock, reggae, fusion and soul. They didn’t work; they all skittered out of the speakers as so much senseless timpani. I cannot hear rhythm or melody, I must confine myself to songs about battered children and alcoholic old men. They might be real. No time to change the record, anyway. It’s time for what the papers say …

And looking first of all this morning at last month’s Hendon Advertiser we see that St Peter’s Mount held a Bring and Buy Sale that was hugely successful and raised £176.000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Especial congratulations go … apparently … to Mrs Tyler, for organising the event and for baking no less than twenty ginger cakes. Hmmmn, hmm, a powerful lead story, strongly backed by items on new bus shelters, a mobility scheme for the elderly and the retirement of a long-serving school dinner lady. There she is on page five, beaming over an ornamental barometer. Editorial? Let me see … riffle, riffle, riffle. A-ha! Dog mess, as I suspected. That perennial and coiled question. It won’t go away, will it. It affects the polity of the Finchley municipality much as the Irish Question dominated late nineteenth-century Britain.

But the real news is at the very back of the paper. After full-page ads for shock absorbers and such, we find the small ads; and here is the full pathos of life. Pathos that inheres not just in the advertisements themselves:

Travelling suitcase, hardly used, clean inside and out.

£3.00.

671 0042 after 6.00 pm

or,

MFI shelving units. Seven 5′ x 1′6″.

£15.00. Will consider part-ex for coffee table/similar.

229 5389 (days)

and

Tit Bits, Nos 148–546. Suit Collector.

£40.00 ono

229 4917 after 8.30 pm

but also in one’s attitude towards them. I betray myself here. Gavin would never read the small ads in the Hendon Advertiser. He glances only at glossy spreads where women with hips so high they must know Dr Moreau undulate down the Promenades des Anglais, selling smelly water, Euro-box cars, whatever …

The serrated edge of the type on these little advertisements. It drags me down, and what’s worse is that I can see myself reading them and see myself seeing myself. All too vertiginous again. I’ll have to abandon the papers. And pick up a book … How To … How To … something … With a blue cover and white dots. The Dewey decimal system used for bullet points that shoot between my tired eyes. I’ve been up for too long to absorb:

1.21 Infrastructural debits cannot be handled by a day-to-day spreadsheet analysis.

Quite so … quite so … and it follows, so it does, that:

1.22 Invisibles must be separated prior to any medium-term strategic plan.

That’s been my mistake. Not separating those damn invisibles. Here am I, in a position of responsibility, a board member of a fairly substantial import/wholesale outfit, a certified accountant and I’m still really letting those invisibles get to me. Invisibles and intangibles — like the wet, iron-tasting squish of turmeric paste, or the small ads’ pathos, this is a retching matter. And I’m the man for it, with my inexhaustible supplies of salty bile, with my cheddar gorge. I can feel my diaphragm undulate … come now, not in front of the children, pas devant les engafangas. Concentration on some apparently useless but therapeutic task is what I need to pull me through. Rearrange the autodidactic village, so that all the roofs are parallel and rake up at the same angle. Yes, I can just reach them all from my chair. The blood is rushing to my head as I lower my miniature crane of a claw of a hand. Fucking wart! A pox on you wart! Hell’s bolt on my arm, an arm saturated like a sponge with seeping watery infection. The senselessness of the task. Don’t you realise I’m in pain here?

‘I’m not worried about security for this loan at all.’ The Child Banker sat behind the angled blotter, his face worryingly unlined.

‘Everything seems in order as far as already established collateral is concerned and …’ Coffee cooled uselessly in Star Trek beakers. Gavin shifted in his chair, his suit a vague swathe of blue in the Rembrandt brown of the Child Banker’s office, his attache case propped open on the corner of the desk. Inside it a miniature world: memo pad, filofax, brochures for Ocean Ltd, keys, pens and some of our different kinds of children. Currently fostered but, with the Child Banker’s assistance, scheduled for — albeit temporary — adoption. I watched as the Child Banker drew a pad towards him and affectedly added columns of figures with pretty strokes of his fountain pen. A little girl in a pinstripe suit floated in the gloom over his right shoulder, flicking digits on to a green screen that from time to time scrolled upward in bright streaks. The Child Banker turned the sheets of foolscap round so that we could see what he’d written; the bottom line was thirty-eight per cent. Thirty-eight per cent. We would have to bring those children up and send them into the world so fast, so bloody fast.

‘There’s no problem.’ Gavin unlocked the green door and we stepped into the clammy passageway.

‘Look here …’ Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post was loosely stacked, leaning up against the wall, on top of the plywood housing that covered some hernia of the aching house, the gas or electricity meter, bursting from the bellied wall. Gavin snapped open the envelope and scanned the letter.

‘They’re on their way, one hundred gross. The paperwork is with the shipper at the terminal. They’ll be here the day after tomorrow.’

Mr Rabindarath came footing round the bend in the stairs. Sandy, aka ‘Mr Eccles’, padding by his side. Mr Rabindarath wore a very long gaberdine mac that covered him to his feet. He headed on down and passed us, blank eyes recessed into his grey, eroded face. His prescription was clutched in one hand and in the other he held a child’s blue plastic spade which bore Mr Eccles’ toothmarks.

‘Not so good I’m afraid,’ Gavin was reading a letter addressed to Sandy in his capacity as marketing manager of Ocean Ltd, ‘they seem to be getting rather cold feet in Hamburg, I’ll have to go over. I’m sure they’ll be no trouble once I get there, Horst just needs a little babying. You stay here, transship the goods. No sense in warehousing them, it’ll simply eat into our profits. Keep them at your place. It’ll only be for a night …’

We left the house and walked down the North End Road. Gavin seemed not to notice the oppressively low sky, or the sad juxtaposition of tatty mullioned windows with dirty sheet glass. He was erect and going somewhere. But the city held me to it, like some dried and crusty discharge mirroring the Artexed wall, above the meter, where Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post had lain.

* * *

Gavin took me to the Savoy for a farewell tea and we ate crumpets and drank Earl Grey at the bottom of that great sunken swirl of carpeting. Waiters came and went with the softest of footfalls, bringing and taking thick crockery and heavy, stainless steel vessels. The crisp, white linen of the tablecloth and the crisp, white linen of my napkin, folded into each other on my lap. Gavin talked about Ocean Ltd and his sex life as if they were one and the same and chopped the air vigorously with his hands. Stubby hands with spatulate fingers and recessed nails, Gavin’s hands were like someone else’s shoulders.

I couldn’t concentrate. I became fixated by the details: the underside of a leaf on a rubber plant, the ridged rubber rim of a waiter’s shoe, the precise three-button belly bulge of a fat man at an adjacent table, and eventually by the green-gold pelmets capping the great swathes of drapery at the end of the room. A pelmet isn’t a piece of furniture, but nor, on the other hand, is it merely decorative. These pelmets were vast, adult versions of my little purple pelmets at home. The curtains cascaded down from them to the floor. They were fringed with hooks of gold thread. Gavin waved buttered toast about and I couldn’t wait to get home, to my chair and my bubble and the quiet part of the night.

That was thirty-six hours ago. For thirty-two of them, or thereabouts, I have sat here. Excursions to the toilet, the fridge, to supervise the unloading of the children. There has been one phone call from Gavin: everything is going well. I’m just to sit tight and wait for his call and then fill out the pro-forma invoice which coils out of the old Unwin on the dining-room table. An undemanding way to make a living, or so I think. I’m privileged in my house, which is only superficially attached to the other houses strung out alongside an isolated rectangle of green in the midst of the suburbs. My truncated garden is backed up by another, the same and the same to east and west. My house is built into the next one, but only brick deep. Inside it is a tardis, far larger than anyone can imagine. It is an island, separated from the rest of Brent, floating in a viscous bath of salty, crusted fluid.

Damn it all, I should make an EEC declaration when I transfer objects from one room of this house to the next, or even mental objects within my own head. Yes, that’s it. Declarations of intent: stating the purpose of the thought, its resale value and so on. The problem is not to attach such a declaration (in triplicate) to each thought. It is simply that there is no one there to check it, no customs men. Nothing new, except mile upon mile of dun-coloured tundra, unrolling under a sky that matches it, for flatness, for billowing featurelessness, excepting for here, and there, the brackish open sore of a peaty pool, fringed with sedge.

Breakfast television starts in half an hour. I’ve just checked my watch. There’s two certainties. Two pieces of evidence … that add up to … my control: real evidence of my control over my environment. There’s a certain homeliness about a cardigan … at 6.30 in the morning, worn by an avuncular man … on a screen. It’s the kind of assurance that I need. I must find that bastard child the remote controller … a complete misnomer. There’s nothing remote about the control I exercise with it, one push of the soft stud and the television will spring into life … I can check out the test card and the occasional notices they issue at this hour of forthcoming programmes.

Where is the bastard child? My fingers skate nervelessly over the carpet, sketching out the faint raggedy afterimage of those once firm and solid purple bars. Gone … gone … gonnie! Nothing now but the grey wash of near dawn and the fading yellow pool around my chair, marking the limit of my bubble. The pictures on the opposite wall, which through the long night appeared thoroughly appropriate … full of meaning … in good taste, are now old postage stamps and curling posters on an adolescent’s bedroom wall: Snoopy, woman in tennis dress scratching her naked buttock and worse. The colour scheme in here is as anonymous and inhospitable as a supermarket aisle, or the neglected lobby of a large corporation.

My hand is heavy with blood. I long to clutch its slim, cool blackness and feel the play of soft studs … so unlike … the wart! Which throbs in my inner elbow, a hard stud that promises nothing but pain. Imagine pressing it … eugh! Jesus Christ! Jee-suss Kerist! Hard, but squishy … and if I pressed it … what then … not control … but less control. Less control …

Well, bastard child. So here you are, snug in my hand, as if you’d never left, and the preview screen undulates gently across the room. 6.45 a.m., Good Morning Britain. And good morning to you … I say. A simple salutation. To breathe freely I have opened the window and a fresh draught of privety air is wafting in from the front garden. In the distance I can hear the swish and roar of artics as they make up for lost time along the North Circular.

It is dawn … If I stretch out from my chair the bubble that encloses me comes too. Stretching stickily around my hand. Cling-film adhesion that turns me into a Cyberman. Time to stand up again, free my clothes where they’ve melded to my body, move around the room a little, gently shaking my limbs. Another night… another dollar. What a doddle. Huh! Futile really to read so many books on self-improvement … Here … I’ll gather them up now and put them away on the shelf. What we need in here is a certain orderliness with which to face the morning. Ch-onk. They fall on to the shelves … and I’ll gather up these album covers that are fanned out over the floor … and stack them here … and now the free newspapers that silt up the wedge between my chair and the wall… voila. Now all I can see is a conventional room in a conventional house, with breakfast television about to be watched, by me: Company Director.

We went out on the town. That is, those directors of Ocean Ltd who weren’t rocking spasmodically in their rooms, or slavering over blue plastic spades. We had just finished opening the last line of credit we required in order to make the big purchase, and Gavin and I were in high spirits. We were just two more young men out on the town. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That feeling that you’re somehow connected, at the centre of things. You’re walking down Old Compton Street and this is your burgh, your village.

We fell in with some girls at a pub on Cambridge Circus, the way that sailors on leave do in Hollywood films. It had never happened to me before … I put it down to Gavin. They were red and brown in tailored suits and didn’t make a habit of this kind of thing and laughed a lot and had conspiratorial nods and catchwords which passed between them. And Gavin and I were interested in them and talked to them about their jobs and their flats and got to know them, because this was our night already and we were young bucks, as it were, loose on the town.

And I remember going on from the pub. This less concretely than before, everything still funny, but with an edge. One of the girls said, ‘What do you do then?’ And I said that we had this company, Ocean Ltd, and gave her my card — stupid really — because she wasn’t in business. Sitting in La Capresa scrunching on breadsticks and drinking red wine that grabbed at my throat. When they went off to the toilet — and God knows why I remember this because it really isn’t important — Gavin asked me to sign a guarantor release on the Ocean Ltd fund account. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. At the time I just signed it. He was always giving me things to sign in my directorial capacity, and on this occasion, being a young Turk, it seemed the right thing to be doing in La Capresa, taking out my thick fountain pen and snaking my bloody signature across the hairlined box … and then … that’s it. The rest of the evening was the rest of the evening. And I know I didn’t go home with one of those girls, because I never do … and I know that Gavin probably did, because he always does. And I don’t know why this business of signing the form is swimming at me now out of my memory, because it really isn’t important at all, is it?

Standing now on the oblong of stairway that is the half-landing. Appalled by the little banks of fluff that have accreted in the gap between the nap of the carpet and the corrugation of underlay. Appalled also by the thin dustfall on my children that dulls them. I’m a pale face at a window on a half-landing … I’m a half-remembered surreal poem, learnt by rote in school, years ago. I’m on my way upstairs to make a tour of inspection, but I can’t get further than this. Transfixed again by a miniature world, where the brass rods that hold tight the tread are Nazca lines on the floor of some delusory desert. Because everything, as it were, contains everything. And this half-landing has as much right to be considered the world as any other, wouldn’t you agree? That’s a rhetorical, rhetorical question, maybe the first of its kind, tee-hee! As long as you can be miserable in good surroundings.

Hoo … It might be a mistake to go upstairs, there’s something a little strange about the giant tortoise that my bed has become, stacked as it is with the fruit of Ocean Ltd’s labours. And I don’t think that I’ll be able to repeat my book-tidying act. I don’t want to be upstairs when Gavin rings, because I hate having to run to answer the phone. As it is I can float downstairs. I feel sustained by lines of credit, that flow like the purple bars, like the bright bars of my childhood, but lighter, filmier, wavier. I float downstairs at the centre of a net of lines of credit, they undulate slackly around me and then gather me together and whisk me back into the living-room. Breakfast television is on the cards and Gavin may phone at any moment. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s wearing lederhosen and standing in an international phone booth that looks like a giant, porcelain-sided stove. We’re in split screen: me in my chair, he in his stove; and he pushes his phone card — emblazoned with a double-headed eagle — into the cast-iron fissure … Clinks and kercherunks and whirrs as the line springs into action triggering circuitry across and over the continent… but no … no ring here. Perhaps he’ll ring in a little while.

Here’s the studio swimming into view. And it makes me feel nauseous. The unreal quality of that manufactured space, intended only to contain posturing presenters. Chipboard pouffes encased in oatmeal twistpile, turquoise striped banquettes … It is a slab for displaying human fish … I can’t bear to watch them swim into view and ‘O’ at me fatuously … I’ve more pressing problems, like flatness of taste … and the malignant wart … Have you met one another? I say here — and mark this — that this wart is cancerous. It represents a new and virulent form of cancer that is peculiar to me. This is an implosive cancer, other cancers infect cell after cell in a chain reaction, but this cancer works in on itself, nullifying cells which turn into heavier and heavier dead matter, glutinous matter, nailed into the pit of my elbow. The symptoms? Well, flatness of taste for one, flatness of mouth taste, eye taste, ear taste. Smell? Ferrr-geddit. The only palliative is chemotherapy … and the side-effects can be disturbing …

What I need to consider, as the television wetly observes me, is some kind of strategy that will make Gavin phone me, now. I’m sick of waiting. I’m aware that there are certain rituals that I can perform which will make him phone me. Never underestimate the power of magic. We may think that cause and effect are billiard balls that strike one another, but we know that we can tip the table. And that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to tip the table.

What is it that keeps me here, sitting, stiffening, in a repro Queen Anne chair, bought from a mail-order catalogue, when I could be asleep? I could be lying in between warm, brushed cotton sheets, enjoying that special, infinitely sweet, morning sleep, that turns one’s aching body inside out like a sock. Instead, I’m rigid, upright, staring, waiting. I’m going to compile a list of the things that stop me sleeping and act upon them forthwith:

1. The wart

2. Lack of appetite

3. Waiting for Gavin to ring

Appetite and the wart and Gavin are all intimately linked. I realise this now although it’s been staring me in the face all night. If I can do something about the former, the latter will fall into place. (I’m just kidding about all of this — really, believe me — just to keep me occupied. I don’t really think I can influence Gavin by acts of magic, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?) I see the wart as a hungry thing … actually as a hungry entity. You notice that I can speak quite openly and casually about the wart at this stage? That’s because the wart isn’t hungry at the moment. The wart is the bivalve that determines my cycle, my expansion and contraction. What I need to do is give it some real nourishment, something that will completely assuage it. Since the wart owes its very existence to the founding of Ocean Ltd, the act of sating its relentless hunger will necessarily bring about the completion of Ocean Ltd’s business. You have followed me so far I hope?

The wart takes in matter and massively condenses it. If you like, it is the biological equivalent of a black hole, infinitely heavy. And what about the meal it requires? Well, this must be a combination of real food: spicy mushrooms, tandoori chicken wings, stale bagels, morello cherry conserve, squares of processed cheese — and material relating to Ocean Ltd. To whit: invoices, bills of lading, delivery notes, customs declarations, spreadsheet analyses and a couple of brochures, one for the product — the children’s scrapbook — and one for Ocean Ltd itself.

I will have to travel to assemble the ingredients of my spell. Into the dining-room to fetch the Ocean Ltd material and then to the kitchen to get the food. Before I go, let me take stock. Is this the only course of action left open to me? Or can I get by with a plainer, more matter-of-fact view of my world? I say ‘my world’ advisedly, the truth of the matter is, can I make my world elide gracefully into being ‘the world’ again? A world of housecoats, washing-up brushes, bilateral agreements, tax returns, sexual encounters and stand-up comedians. Can I?

No. Emphatically not. Things have gone too far. I never should have started that nonsense with the solid tubes of brightness. I’ve made my epiphenomenal bed, now I’ll have to stand in it. Up. And to the dining-room. Gather the necessary papers and continue walking with an easy and unhurried, a supremely natural gait, into the hall. ‘Good morning, watercolour.’ ‘Good morning, table.’ The kitchen is quite light now but I have to see what I’m doing so I’d better put on the strip light. Aha! The mushrooms warble a greeting, the chicken wings hunch on the draining board. Off with their packaging!

I have everything assembled now. Lain out in a pattern on the table top. One question remains … how to eat it. Oral intake is inconceivable. For one thing there is the flatness … the wart’s fault … and for another the gorge which continually deposits freight lift-loads of metallic saliva in my mouth. No, I’ll have to absorb the potion through my skin. Sandwich a spicy mushroom between two invoices, package it like some strange dim sum and press it into the hollow of my neck, rub down its crinkly, greasy softness. Open my tired shirt … take squares of processed cheese and feel them bind into the spindly hairs on my chest … not long now … stale bagels are to be ground up in the hand and the crumbs dropped down the front of my trousers, together with torn squares of laminated 275 gsm art board … morello cherry conserve on my forehead … nothing is sticky when you immerse yourself in it … plaster the triple-leaved invoice on to the gungy mess … the best till last … the wart itself… the chicken wing… like a foetal arm … roll up the sleeve and spread the turmeric paste on to the wart … Jesus, that hurts! But yes it feels good … it feels good … What’s that! A trill in the living-room … a ‘spung’ and then a trill… the phone is ringing … it worked … I rush out of the kitchen … I can feel crumbs falling down around my crotch … the conserve gums up my eyes … emulsifiers and E207 additives are speedily imploding into the wart … I only have a limited amount of time …in the livingroom the first peal is sharp, hectoring, insistent … that was quick! I made it from the kitchen to the living-room in the time it took the phone to fully connect … but where is the phone … Where is the phone! … I can’t see it anywhere … I haven’t used it for two days… I don’t know where it is… Stop. Where’s the ringing coming from … Not in here at all … I can hear it through the floorboards … It’s coming from the bedroom upstairs … And I’m up there before the thought has even taken form … but I can’t find the phone anywhere … The ringing is coming from the testudo that covers the bed … it’s one of the children! I tear the packaging from its sylvan form with scrabbling nails, the plastic bubbles pop between my fingers … the corrugated cardboard is strangely slick … My Children … with their buttons and their bows … with their little rubberised penises … one of them is calling to me … But which one? Not this one … not this one … not this one … I tear off jacket after jacket … And now another one starts … and another … and another … Upstairs and downstairs … in the living-room … in the kitchen … in the hall … in the back bedroom … until all hundred gross of them are pealing away in a synchronous cacophony … pulsing like some insane electronic cicadas … pulsing in and out … expanding and contracting … expanding …