The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

Waiting

‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here.’ Jim was cradling the plastic rim of the Ford Sierra’s steering wheel in his forearms and staring blankly through the windscreen. I noticed, completely inconsequentially, that his forearms were angled as if they were part of the car’s controls — perhaps some kind of overarching indicator levers. And then he was gone; he elbowed the door open, slid sideways and jack-knifed his feet out of the car with a suddenness that sent the rest of his body pivoting after them. After that he was off and running. He vaulted the grooved steel barrier that divided the carriageways and bolted across the eastbound side of the motorway, narrowly evading the oncoming traffic which was whipping through the long, low chicane as if to purposefully taunt the banked-up vehicles not heading west. There was a chorus of Dopplered hoots which rose and then fell and he was gone into the close darkness.

The door rocked gently on its hinges and wafted a little more petrol and diesel fumes into the passenger compartment. The night was as warm and as vinyl as the interior of the car. It was as if the motorway, the central reservation, the screed, unfinished banks — all of it — were enclosed in some larger, staler, automotive interior. The sky was flatly two-dimensional; an all-encompassing, bug-smeared windscreen, stippled with dried, dirty droplets.

For a full three minutes after Jim had got fed up with waiting I thought that things might still pan out. By rights in a situation such as this, left, unable to drive, in the passenger seat of a car hopelessly jammed on the M25 in the middle of the night, the scene ought to fade out. It was a natural ending. But after three minutes the traffic started to edge forward and I panicked. Eventually, irate fellow motorists — family men, stock controllers and solicitors’ clerks — in beige leisure wear and patterned Bermudas, got out of their cars and pushed the Sierra across the two nearside lanes and on to the hard shoulder. Then they got back into their hatchback Daihatsus and Passat estates and ground off, with infinite pains, towards the tangle of striped cones and panting JCBs which marked the genesis of the jam.

I was left sitting. The knob atop the steering column of the Sierra clicked on and then off — what a drama queen — sending a false message of hopeful hazard, nowhere.

Two hours later a truly fat man buckled the belts round the car’s axles, pulled the lever on the back of the pick-up and an electric motor whined. The cable pulled taut and yanked the front of the Sierra up in the air. We got into the cab and started off towards scored and grooved exit roads, ranged around the orbital road like the revetments of some modern hill fort, marking our way back into the Great Wen. The AA were unsympathetic; the nominated garage man wanted cash. It was almost 3.00 in the morning when I woke Jim’s wife up. The source of the trouble was crouched, looking crippled on the steep camber of the road, its knob still clicking. To give her credit she paid up without a murmur. The truly fat garage man went on his way. Jim’s wife, Carol, gave me a blank look of sad resignation and shut the door quietly in my face.

Jim and I had spent the day up in Norfolk. ‘I like flat places,’ said Jim, ‘places where the sky has a chance to define the land. I’m fed up with the tiny proscenium arch of the Home Counties. If I wanted to act on my day off I’d join an amateur theatre company.’ He tended to talk like this — in the form of a series of observations, which hammered out a Point Of View. One that couldn’t be argued with, only acknowledged, or assented to. We had spent the afternoon wandering from village to village. Jim took a lot of photographs with his new camera. He was a good photographer, his photographs were always artfully uncomposed; they were visual asides. He only took pictures where objects in the foreground could insidiously dominate the scene. He wasn’t interested in people, or nature for that matter. Naturally enough, Jim had a view on photography as well: ‘It doesn’t mean fuck all. It’s a toy — that’s all — not some potent weapon for transforming reality. You point it at an object, you press the button, and a few days later you see the “thing”, and can’t resist a little gasp of wonderment.’

We started the drive back at about 10.00. As darkness fell, the promised cool of the evening failed to materialise. Instead, the sticky, humid afternoon gave way to a hot, close night-time. The first part of the drive was relaxing and apt. We swished across the Norfolk plain, our tyres whispering to the tangled verges, the Sierra’s boxy suspension flatly reporting over the potholes.

I sat rocking on the car’s offside, absorbed by Jim’s concentration as he drove. He sat low, the car seat raked backwards and at an angle. His disproportionately long arms gripped the bottom of the wheel at the unrecommended position of twenty-five minutes past seven. His eyes seemed to be roughly at the level of the top of the instrument panel. He was more intent on the green and red lights inside the car than those ahead. But he drove well, with an unforced and intuitive ease, as if the car’s controls were natural extensions of his own limbs.

However, by the time we reached the A45, things had begun to change. It was as if we were being sucked into some giant vortex of traffic. Although we were still over fifty miles from London I could feel the magnetic pull of the city. The cars that passed and repassed one another along the sections of dual carriageway were like iron filings, unwillingly coerced into flowing lines, all heading in the same ultimate direction. It felt as if we were no longer in a car at all, but in some miniature, mono-carriaged train. The track was laid out ahead of us. We could increase or decrease speed, but it was impossible to change direction. And when we reached junctions or roundabouts all the points had been switched in advance. We howled through the tight curves, wheel rims straining against the track, and on.

Thirty minutes later we pulled off the All into a petrol station. As Jim filled up the tank I continued to stare blankly through the windscreen. The forecourt was brightly lit. A sales display of garden furniture was set out near the cashier’s window, flower-patterned chairs and recliners with frosted aluminium arms and legs. There was a coming and going of leisure wear and Bermudas. A high octane stench combined with the wash of orange halogen light, spreading across the stained concrete pan. It was like some parody of recreation.

Jim paid with his company petrol card. He threw the crumpled-up counterfoil into the back seat where our jackets lay and we wheeled out on to the road. He let the Sierra pull us up quickly through the five long, low gear ratios and then hunkered down into his seat again.

We had long since ceased to speak when we neared the intersection of the Mil and the M25. I could feel Jim’s indecision in the way the car held the road. He was calculating routes back to south-west London. I knew he hated the M25, ‘The stupidest thing about it is its name. If a road is described as “orbital”, it’s a sure-fire guarantee that when you get on to the thing you’re bound to feel as if you’re in outer space.’

The alternative to the M25 was to keep straight on and join the North Circular at Gants Hill. Jim tensed at the wheel in a peculiar way. A body tenses up before receiving an expected blow. Jim tensed as if to ward off the heavy traffic congestion at the roundabout where the A404 meets the Great North Road. The Sierra skittered a little, and then it was done, we plopped off on to the exit road. There were two seconds when it was too late: one when we were on the exit road and the next when we saw the great yellow hoarding with its familiar legend, ‘Delays possible until late ‘91’. There was nothing for it now. It was as if we had been determined. The Cynics were correct, the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us. Nothing for it now, but to regard the motorway furniture with a baleful eye as we cruised gently to a halt and rocked into stasis at the back of the stack of cars snaking through the long, low, flat chicane.

‘A three-lane jam at midnight on a Sunday! I can’t fucking well believe it. I can’t believe it. I do not believe it. Look at these people.’ Jim gestured wildly at the yellow profiles receding into the distance like a frieze of minor Assyrians. ‘They simply don’t know what they are doing. They are waiting. Do you understand me? Waiting. And while they wait nothing is happening, and when they stop waiting nothing will happen either, and while they have waited nothing will have occurred — except, perhaps, for the collapse of some more carbon molecules. Mmmmm! Breathe it in, man.’ Jim encompassed some air with another ham gesture and drew it into his nose and mouth. ‘Finest destruction of the ionosphere, most perfect winding down of fossil fuel reserves. I love it! I love it! God speed, you future patina of grey chemical soot on the leaves of municipal gardens in Osterley, Egham, and for that matter, Stockholm! Mmm, my air sacs have never felt so good!

‘Hello! Hello! How are you? How about a little personal interaction here. After all, we’re all stuck in this together. Why don’t we break down some barriers here? My name is Jim. What’s yours?’ Jim was talking to the profiles, but they wouldn’t hear him, they sat on, acquiring verdigris in the wash of light from their fascia. ‘Hi kids, wanna play? Why don’t we start a game of cricket on the central reservation? Six runs if you can hit the ball off the motorway.’ But the kids didn’t want to play cricket. Their little budding mouths were glued to parental shoulders, grouted with congealed Tango and Sprite. And the parental shoulders were set square towards the future. Whenever the steel testudo unbuckled and coiled its way forward a few feet, all the drivers reverted to form and tried to switch lanes to gain the tiniest advantage available — because it was there.

Jim gave up on his attempts to foster communication. He took out his camera and rested it on top of the steering wheel. He squinted through the viewfinder while continuing to murmur under his breath, ‘Very slow exposure and we should get the picture. I’ll be damned, a three-lane jam on the M25 at midnight; this is it. This-is-it. Strained and ruckled, bumper to bumper, immanence and imminence. It’s all here. It’s all here …’ He was clicking away, his voice tending towards falsetto.

I swivelled in my seat and looked back. We had reached the bottom of the depression that the chicane had snaked through and there were as many cars piled up behind as in front of us. I had the strange feeling that there was absolutely no depth to what I could see. In both directions there was simply the flat pattern formed by car shapes. The traffic in the oncoming carriageway grew larger and diminished without extension. The cars were so many globs of multicoloured oil, expanding and contracting in a giant version of one of those risible Sixties lamps. Jim and I were the tiniest slivers of humanity, pressed in the microscope slide of the Sierra.

Jim turned to me, ‘You know why I like this car so much?’ The question was rhetorical. ‘Because of its quiddity, its whatness. It has no other quality; it is. It has no need to come into being — it is already utterly mediocre. They’ve sold 25,000 of these cars in the past year. Twenty-Five thousand! We could be in any one of them. We could still be on the production line inching forward. Any moment now an operative is going to come along and start bolting new prostheses on to you, new forms of biological engineering that you could never imagine. This car is not waiting. Do you understand that? This car has already arrived. We are where we’re going, this …’ He gestured at the Assyrians, the Daihatsus, the Passats, the orange night, ‘is home.’

He sat cradling the wheel for a while, inching forward with the rest. Tirelessly performing the heel-toe dance step of slow locomotion, and then: ‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here,’ and he was gone.

I worked about two streets away from Jim and the following day I walked over to his office during my lunch hour. I was determined to confront him over his behaviour of the night before. Everybody has a certain leeway with everyone else. Everyone is entitled to the odd bout of craziness. But Jim’s stunts were becoming habitual. I had witnessed his preoccupation with ‘waiting’ grow from the occasional rant — always amusing and good value as a party piece — into a full-blown obsession, and like all kinds of obsessional behaviour it was beginning to hurt other people. Jim was becoming a self-centred and destructive egotist. If our relationship was to continue he was going to have to recognise last night for what it really was: a neurotic, knee-jerk reaction. Rather than for what he would have it be: some profound statement concerning The Way We Are and The Way In Which We Live.

I found Jim at his desk, he was taking copy over the phone. The receiver was wedged between his shoulder and his ear, leaving both hands free to type. His fingers riffled over the keyboard at tremendous speed. He grunted into the mouthpiece and occasionally read back a line to check it. When he had finished and hung up he swivelled round to face me and held up his hand.

‘Stop. Don’t say it. Because I know, and I can tell you in advance that I’m ashamed and I’m sorry. I’ve been behaving like a self-centred egotist. I’ve become obsessive and my critique of The Way In Which We Live is nothing but the cynical, sour grapes of an emotional child.’

‘Has Carol been at you already?’

‘Yeah, man. She’s not a happy woman, but she accepts the truth of what I have to say.’

‘Oh, she does, does she. Well I for one don’t want to lose a friend in order to become an audience.’

‘Stop being such a sententious tosser. Come on, I’ll buy you some lunch.’

But I had to wait another ten minutes for lunch. The features editor of Jim’s rag appeared with an obese piece of copy that needed a crash diet. Jim obliged. He was the fastest sub I’ve ever seen at work. It was almost as if he could photograph a whole sheet of text mentally and then work on all the separate parts of it simultaneously. His knowledge of the twisted rules of English usage was also superb; he knew when to judiciously skate away from the received in order to achieve clarity, and how to make sure that every clause was just so.

Wherever Jim worked he soon became an invaluable practical asset, but unfortunately at the same time a devastating emotional liability. He could never hold a job down for long and now he’d managed to outstay his welcome with most of the nationals and was on to magazines.

‘To tell you the truth, I prefer working for Bicycling,’ Jim said as we clattered down the stairs to the street. He paused a few steps below me and struck an attitude. ‘Do you want to know why?’

‘All right, Jim. Why?’

‘Because I don’t have to wait, silly. All the way up to press day I’m keying copy into that little terminal there and I only have to walk around the corner to see it all nicely laid out on another screen. Even at Wapping I had to wait hours to see a completed page. But here it’s all format work. The hacks write absolutely to fit and I know what a page is going to look like even before I’ve started working on it.’

‘But Jim, that’s no fun at all, you might as well be subbing catalogues.’

‘Catalogues, mmm … you might have a point there. I’ve never thought of catalogues before, there’s a certain purity in them.’

I pushed the bar of the fire door and we fell into the street. High Holborn was pulsing and groaning with lunch-time traffic, wheeled and legged. The air was blue with exhaust fumes. People shouldered their way along the pavement and in and out of the cars as they inched towards New Oxford Street. Clerks and secretaries formed straggling knots of protein lacing the arterial strip, constantly harried by cruising antibody-streams of data-processing managers, bank tellers and shop assistants. Looking first up and then down the crowded thoroughfare, I had the same impression that I had had the night before on the M25. It was as if the whole scene were two-dimensional. I existed at a point that had no extension. Either side of me were flat slabs of pulsing colour.

Jim was in his element. He did a little pirouette on the kerb.

‘Look at this. Do you know what these people are doing?’

‘They’re having their lunch hour.’

‘Yes, yes. Of course they are in a manner of speaking. But what are they really doing? Look.’ He held up his hands to conduct an imaginary orchestra. His fingers extended to catch the most delicate modulations of the crowd. He held them there for a beat and a half and then brought them straight down. A forelock of brown hair flipped over his forehead and pointed down directly at the pavement. The passersby paid not the slightest attention.

‘There you have it.’ Jim was triumphant. ‘For that beat and a half I held them, I gauged them. The whole lot of them. I interrupted the cadence of the crowd; they were waiting.’

‘Waiting!’ I snorted. ‘Waiting for what?’

‘For the end of the lunch break, for a nuclear war, for the poisoning of the earth, for old age, for the millennium, for the last judgement, for their hair to turn grey, for retirement, for a big gambling win, for a strange sexual experience, for the hand of God to touch them, for their children to support them, for the right person, for a new car, for the interest rate to fall, for the next election, for their bowels to get back to normal. What does it matter? I’ve said it once, I don’t care if I say it a thousand times — everyone is waiting.

‘There are only two great feelings left in the late twentieth century. Two great feelings that have eaten up all the other, little feelings like love, loyalty, exaltation, anger and alienation; as surely as if they were krill being sucked into the maw of a whale. Immanence and imminence, immanence and imminence. Everyone is convinced that something is going to happen, but they don’t know what it is. Some people suspect that whatever it is will be some implosion of the numen, some great exposure of the transcendent. The rest don’t know … yet. But they will, they will.’

‘Jim, we were going to have lunch, and you promised to cut down on the ranting.’

He recovered himself and we went to get a drink and a sandwich at the Mitre. Jim was quite reasonable throughout lunch and I was almost prepared to forgive him his outburst in the street. There was no talk of waiting at all, even though the bar service was pretty appalling and there was a five-deep press of double-breasteds around the bar. On the way back over the viaduct I said to Jim that I’d see him around.

‘Yeah, you’ll see me around. Around 6.00 at Houghton Street; we’re going to a lecture.’

‘A lecture? What lecture?’ He shoved a crumpled A5 flyer into my hand. It was blue-bordered and had the University of London shield at the top. It read as follows:

Meaning and Millenarianism

Transition to Another Era

An open lecture by Richard Stein, Emeritus Professor of

the History of Ideas at the LSE.

6.00 p.m. The Old Lecture Theatre

&c.

‘All right, I’ll come.’ Jim looked shocked. ‘It’ll be a pleasure to hear someone else give a lecture besides you.’

I left Jim outside the doors to his office and walked on up towards the Central School on Southampton Row. I turned back at the corner to wave goodbye, but Jim didn’t notice. He was deep in conversation with two despatch riders whose bikes were pulled up to the kerb. One of them was short and ginger-haired with a slack, gap-toothed mouth. The other was black and angular, with his hair shaved into a tight triangular wedge on top of his head. Both of them were dressed in the couriers’ uniform: ribbed leather jackets, leather trousers and high rubberised boots, complete with ridges and crenellations. I studied them for a while. It was clear that Jim knew them well. The way the three of them stood, gestured and smiled indicated friendship; and yet I knew Jim well, I was a close friend, but he had never mentioned his despatch rider friends. I turned and walked back to my office.

Both phone calls and Post-it notes have a life cycle of their own. They are not mere servants of man, but clever parasites that use human industry to further their own growth as a species. That at any rate is the way I felt by the time I reached Houghton Street to meet Jim after work. I found him standing outside the Australian High Commission. He was standing at the tall, plate-glass window, staring into an aquarium of humans, as they snaked slowly towards the visa application counters.

I was expecting some kind of tirade, but he desisted and instead led me across the Aldwych to Houghton Street. However, rather than turning left into the main lobby of the LSE, he turned right into the Students’ Union Building. He walked as if he knew the place. Rounding a corner we came to a lift with a difference.

It was more like a vertical escalator than a conventional lift. A series of compartments moved slowly but continually past the landing where we stood. All we had to do to get on was jump through the opening. To the left the compartments descended, to the right they ascended. We stood for a couple of minutes in silent contemplation of this mechanical oddity, then Jim turned on his heel with a vague gesture and said, ‘No waiting.’ We started back towards the entrance.

The Old Lecture Theatre must have been purpose-built as such when the Houghton Street building was erected in the Thirties. It was far wider than it was deep, and curiously wedge-shaped, like a slice of cake a compulsive eater might cut themselves. The lecture was sparsely attended; up in the gallery I could just see the round heads of a few diligent students, already bent and scribbling, while the scattered audience we sat among in the stalls seemed to consist of an odd assortment of octogenarians and the kind of slightly featureless black and brown men who one can tell immediately are perpetual students from the developing world. Men who have been spending years on writing doctoral theses on public policy in Coventry, while diligently sending a proportion of their grant money home to the family in Bangladesh.

Professor Stein and the academic who was to introduce him were already seated up on the podium when Jim and I came in. The podium took up the whole front of the theatre and was faced in the same dark brown wood as almost every other surface in sight. The overwhelming impression was one of enclosure and stultification. A dusty decanter of water and a cut-glass vase of wilted flowers stood on the podium table, behind which the Professor regarded the audience with mild, mournful brown eyes as if he were a cow with no milk to give. In the hard, cramped, tip-up seat I tried to compose myself for sleep.

The chairman rose to his feet. ‘Errumph … It’s er … 6.15 and it doesn’t look like we’ll have too many more people coming so I think we’ll make a start.’ My eyelids felt gummy and heavy. ‘Most of you are, no doubt, familiar with Professor Stein’s work. For those of you that aren’t I must apologise at this juncture. The Professor has asked me especially to refrain from a long recitation of his publications and the academic positions he has held and confine myself purely to those works that have a direct bearing on the lecture he is going to give us this evening. That being so, let it suffice for me to say that since Professor Stein retired from the chair here at the LSE some three years ago, he has spent the vast bulk of his time on organising, administering and teaching at the Centre for Millenarian Studies which he himself founded at Erith Marsh. His publications during this period have reflected his preoccupation with the coming end of our era; I refer to his paper “Wittgenstein and the Arterial Road System in the Southeast of England” and, of course, “Mirror Image: Reductive Cultural Identity in Late Twentieth-century Britain”, both published in the BJE².

‘The occasion of this particular lecture is to give us all an opportunity to, as it were, preview Professor Stein’s new book Meaning and Millenarianism; and to hear from the author himself some of the arguments he puts forward in the book, in advance of its publication next week. I’d like to say at this juncture that there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion at the end of the lecture, but this period will of necessity be circumscribed as we need to clear the lecture theatre for the Students’ Drama Society, who, I believe, are rehearsing for a production of Oklahoma. Err … Professor Stein.’

The Professor mooched over to the lectern and stood for a while several feet behind it, regarding his audience with baleful eyes. I was shocked to see that he was dressed rather nattily for an emeritus professor in a sharp Italian suit with the narrowest of chalk stripes. He was also quite a bit more virile in appearance than I had at first supposed. Although over sixty his hair was still intact and ungreying, his jaw was set and two veins rode up his temples and seemed to visibly throb in the wan light of the lecture theatre. He hovered over the lectern as a surgeon might an operating table. He carried no notes.

‘Picture the future. Picture it like this.’ His voice was sonorous, insistent and persuasive, more spiritual than academic. ‘An orderly phalanx of flagellants some four hundred in number march down off the Marylebone Flyover. They chastise themselves with the precise, timed strokes of their leather lashes. They take up the entire inside lane of the road. The chastisement is considered and vicious. Each stroke on each back brings forth blood, which spatters the windscreens of the cars that are backed up in the two offside lanes, all the way from Lisson Grove. The morning air is full of a pink, frothy spray as the passive commuters put on their water jets and windscreen wipers in an attempt to stop their windscreens coagulating.

‘Or, if you prefer, picture this: Speaker’s Corner is in full swing on a Sunday afternoon. There are the usual crop of eccentrics — cranks and people with extreme political views — but on this Sunday, to their chagrin, they are wholly eclipsed by bands of ragged men and women wearing filthy grey shifts. These people move among the crowds enjoining them to enter a state of grace immediately and to throw off the restrictive chains of mere human morality.

‘ “Rejoice! We are already saved!” they cry. They shamelessly roll on the ground, fighting, copulating, and drinking to prove their point. Together with other adherents they are forming a secessionist commune in Hyde Park, dedicated to the anticipation of the Apocalypse.

‘Can you picture this? Or is it beyond your comprehension?’ Stein paused and raked his meditative gaze over the darkened theatre. I could imagine it all right, I was rapt. I hadn’t expected anything like this. Jim was clearly imagining it too, he sat hunched forward on his seat, panting. I looked round the rest of the audience: the octogenarians still slept, the perpetual students took notes. Stein continued, ‘My purpose in this lecture is to briefly outline the central argument of my forthcoming book. Obviously time will mean that this outline will be incomplete, but nonetheless I hope to make it reasonably clear that the kind of scenarios that I just asked you to envisage are not accurate predictions of the way millenarianism will affect the populations of Western societies as we move towards the third era since the death of the Christ-figure. These things may have occurred in the past, but I believe that there are now certain overriding factors that make a recurrence of such phenomena distinctly unlikely …’

And there I lost him. The rest of the lecture became increasingly involved, turgid and difficult to follow. Stein didn’t help matters by continually digressing from his central argument in order to inveigh against other academics in the same field. The digressions themselves had digressions. As far as I could gather they related specifically to the difficulties involved in the exegesis of certain recondite texts, penned in the closing years of the ninth century by monks scattered across Europe. Stein raised his voice, he moved out from behind the lectern and came to the front of the stage, as if intending to embrace his audience like an ageing singer having a Las Vegas comeback.

For me, it was all to no avail. The sheer weight of detail eroded my attention. His digressions began to resolve themselves into a series of Post-it notes stuck fluttering in my mind … I began to tune out. When I tuned back in again it was 6.50 and Stein was summing up.

‘… To sum up: The existence of the possibility of the destruction of the world by men themselves, in a number of different forms — nuclear war, ecological disaster, man-made pandemics — means that although in a sense we live in a time that is more acutely aware than ever before of the possibility of some form of the Apocalypse, nonetheless that Apocalypse is no longer in any sense evidence of the immanent; it is merely possibly imminent. In the past, the ending of an era, or even a century, was viewed with great fear and a spontaneous move towards salvation in one form or another, a move that can only be understood solidly in the context of the Judaeo-Christian cultural dialectic. The end of this current era will, I believe, be met with at worst indifference and at best with some quite good television retrospectives.’

Before the chairman could get to his feet and ask whether there were any questions, one of the perpetual students was already on his and asking. He was a grey-black man, tall and rangy in a slightly unravelled raglan sweater, with three neat fish-shaped scars on either cheek.

‘Professor Stein. Sir, to what extent, sir, can the arguments you have just presented, sir, be held seriously. In view of the fact’, particular emphasis on ‘fact’, ‘that such arguments have themselves been present in other cultures during the end of other eras. Does not the fact, sir, that this is not the first time that people have believed they had the power to destroy their own world to some extent invalidate your argument? Well, sir, what do you think of that?’

The cicatrised African sat down as abruptly as he had stood up. There was an uncomfortable pause. Professor Stein was straining forward. From the expression on his face it was quite clear that he hadn’t heard a word the African had said. At length the chairman leant forward and whispered into his ear. Stein nodded several times and then rose to his feet.

‘I think the answer is no. As to why, the answer is that although previous cultures have thought that they possessed the power to destroy the world themselves, they in fact didn’t. We are dealing in this instance with a reality which can be empirically verified.’

I was aware of Jim batting about in the seat next to me. He was sweating profusely and his long, mechanical arms gripped the back of the seat in front of him as if he wanted to rip it off the ground and throw it at the podium. Jim didn’t give the African a chance to respond to Stein’s reply — he was on his feet.

‘Professor Stein. You say that the difference between this and previous eras is that humankind now possesses the real ability to destroy the world in which we live — and that this fact means that the wilder manifestations of millenarianism are unlikely to occur as we move towards the 21st century. However, could this lecture itself not be said to be an even wilder manifestation in its own right? This surely is the first era in which the historically literate have felt free to say “Well, in the past people got over-excited about the millennium and expected Armageddon and all sorts of other terrible things, but we’re beyond that.” Is this not the purest form of hubris? Do you not agree that there is an aching feeling in our society, people are desperately waiting for something — anything to happen! Look at these people,’ Jim swept an arm around the lecture theatre to embrace the ancient Fabians and the perpetual students, ‘aren’t they waiting for something to happen? I don’t think your lecture, your calm, measured reasoning will serve to dampen down the great currents of expectation which are bound to flow with increasing strength throughout the population. Well, what do you think of that?’

Jim sat down, still quaking and sweating. I wasn’t sure that what he had said could altogether be classified as a question. However, Stein seemed to be taking it seriously enough. As Jim sat down, the Professor set down his pen and scrutinised us.

‘What you say has a good deal of emotional force, young man. And I think you may be right — but only in a very limited sense. The involutions of thought and reflection you draw our attention to are just that: thought and reflection. They bear no real relation to the motivation of the great mass of people. A few years ago when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks had ground to a halt and before the rise to power of the current General Secretary, there seemed to be some real cause for alarm and the manifestation of some fringe political groupings was undoubtedly millenarian, but now, pshaw! All the political crises of the past forty years have served only to underline the fact that the dialectic imposed by technological advancement is irrefutable, unstoppable; more primary than thought itself. Although you express yourself eloquently, young man, I am more inclined to view the seeming irony you draw our attention to as a perception of marginalised youth, contemplating the grey power of middle age. It is an attitude rather than a timely perception. And perhaps for that reason it is all the more to be admired.’

Jim didn’t wait for the end of Stein’s answer. He was already disappearing through the brown swing-doors. It was left for me to inch my way out of the row of seats where we were sitting, grating past, and offering my bunched crotch to a number of disapproving faces. The last thing I saw as I went out the door was the chairman doodling with a finger on the dusty tabletop.

Jim was pacing back and forth in the lobby, in front of a noticeboard covered with a tatter of posters, flyers and hand-lettered advertisements. A flyer for next week’s open lecture was prominently displayed. ‘An authoritative exposition of recent developments in the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Obviously the School’s policy was to offset one dull, minority interest lecture, against another, popular, general interest one. It was strange, it hadn’t really occurred to me before, but for a culture that was supposedly unaffected by the end of an era we certainly showed a lot of interest in esoteric theories. Jim shot an angry glance at me and shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect anything better from him.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, it didn’t seem like such a bad lecture to me. Admittedly I dozed through a lot of it.’

‘Oh yes, Stein is clever all right, but he just doesn’t understand. He’s an academic. Even if he does study contemporary events, he still renders them microscopic by looking at them through the wrong end of his theoretical telescope. Waiting isn’t like that. It’s an immediate, physical experience. If he saw Carlos in action, then he’d understand.’

Jim turned on his heel and walked off towards the exit. From behind I noticed how strange he looked, with his long muscular torso and silly little legs. He reminded me for a moment of nothing so much as a PG Tips chimp. His millenarian rants could easily have been a voice-over. Perhaps the real Jim had just been going, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ahh! Ahh!’ His tartan shirt was coming out of his trousers and the collar was dandruffy. He wasn’t looking after himself. I followed him out through the lobby feeling guilty, as if Jim had heard my thoughts about him.

Outside on the pavement. In the cold, dark, night-time canyon of Houghton Street, I found Jim standing with the two couriers I’d seen him with at lunch. Ginger was expostulating as I came up, while the character with the triangular hairdo stood back, arms folded. They were all too preoccupied to notice me. I heard the following:

‘Carlos doesn’t want anyone else in on it. Carlos couldn’t give a fuck about anything but the job.’

‘But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to convince. Sooner or later Carlos will need to reveal himself… and then …’

‘And then, cobblers!’

‘I’m not waiting around to listen to this bollocks.’

This was hairdo. He had a peculiar falsetto voice for such a large man. As he voiced the sentiment, he picked his helmet up off the saddle of his bike and pushed it down over his head, with a hermetic ‘plop’. This was effectively the end of the conversation. Ginger put his helmet on as well. And without any farewells the two of them turned over their engines and peeled off, out on to Aldwych. Leaving behind an acrid smell.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked Jim as we turned out of Houghton Street and walked down towards the Strand tube station.

‘Nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.’

‘Come off it Jim, you owe me an explanation. Those blokes weren’t doing a late pick-up. At least I didn’t see you sign for anything. They were talking about me.’

‘Yeah, well I did tell them that you might be interested …’

‘In what? Interested in what?’

‘In meeting this Carlos fellow.’

‘I don’t even know who he is. How do you know I’d be interested in meeting him?’

‘Well, you were interested in Stein’s lecture. And Carlos isn’t dissimilar, excepting that he’s something of a leader, as well as a teacher.’

‘Leading what? Who does he teach?’

‘This little group of motorcycle couriers. I suppose you’d think it was all a little bit cranky. Another facet of my overriding obsession. But these bikeys have cottoned on to almost the same set of ideas as I have myself.’ He paused. ‘They’re fed up with waiting.’

‘Well, I’d be fed up with waiting if I were a despatch rider. It must be an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Doesn’t it have one of the highest occupational death rates? I’m sure that’s because they get frustrated and then they make mistakes.’

‘You don’t understand. These people are operating at the limit.’ Jim was getting worked up. He was going into rant mode. He stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me, arms akimbo, twitching. ‘They’re shooting methedrine, or basing coke, or snorting sulphate. They’re driving at all hours of the day and night, existing at a level of frayed neural response that we can only faintly imagine. They’re operating not at the level of other traffic, a straightforward level of action and anticipation, but at the level of nuance, sheer nuance. They perceive the tiniest of stimuli with ghastly clarity, and respond. Think of it, man. Weaving your way through heavy traffic astride a monstrously overpowered motorcycle, always pressured to meet a deadline, the ether plugged into your helmet. They have to mutate to survive!’

After this little outburst we carried on walking in silence for a while. We were going down Essex Street past one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Between the slats of a three-quarters-closed Venetian blind I could see a man in shirtsleeves. Still crouched, at this late hour, over a flickering monitor in the pool of an Anglepoise. As I glanced at him he pushed a button and the figures on the screen scrolled upwards in a stream of green light.

Jim was breathing heavily, but he’d calmed down a little. I didn’t know what to say, I was curious but I didn’t want to provoke him. For the first time I had the sense with absolute clarity that Jim had teetered over that fine, fine line between eccentricity and madness. Eventually I spoke. ‘These despatch riders, Jim, do they believe in “waiting” as well?’

‘Of course, of course, of course. They are the real waiters. Waiting is ground into them. Every moment could be an arrival, at a pick-up or drop-off, or the ultimate dropoff, death itself! No wonder they understand what is happening. They exist at the precise juncture between the imminent and the immanent! Carlos has seen their potential. He is a man of extraordinary powers, he understands that the future will belong to those who clearly articulate the Great Wait!’

We were standing in the forecourt outside the tube. A few late office workers mingled with the eddy and flow of tourists, who moved in and out of the entrance in their bright pastel, stretchy clothes. It was a clear night and the neon sign above the National blipped its message across the flat water. I took Jim’s upper arm in what I hoped was a firm, avuncular sort of a grasp.

‘Jim, don’t you think you’re letting all this rather get to you? I think you’re overtired and overworked. I’m sure you’re not spending enough time with Carol. Why don’t you take a rest for a few days? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, the world will wait for you.’ His response surprised me.

‘Well, yes, er … you could be right. She has seemed a little distant recently. She can’t cope with my insomnia, you know. Perhaps you are right. But even so, you should meet Carlos, he isn’t a crank, or a freak. His powers are real enough, believe me. I’ve never had any truck with any kind of cults or mystical twaddle, have I?’

No, he never has, I thought to myself, after we had parted and gone our separate ways. And perhaps there is something in what he says. My eyes flicked across the tracks, between which lay the typical refuse. I picked out Jim’s figure at the far end of the platform. His shoulders were hunched and he’d inserted his body between a dangling sand bucket and a coiled, canvas hose in a wooden cabinet. It was as if he was trying to restrain himself. It was clear from his posture and his blank stare what he was doing. He was waiting for a train.

I tried not to think about Jim for the next couple of days. If he was having a breakdown of some kind there was probably very little I could do for him — and if he wasn’t. Well, after Norfolk and Stein’s lecture I didn’t really want to see him for a while, anyway. I needed a change of company; I needed to spend some time with people who were a little less heavy. I went out in the evenings to films and parties, I got tipsy, I had yelping conversations with people I had just met. Conversations in which each yelp seemed, at the time, a touchstone of empathy. At the time, that was.

But try as I would I couldn’t shake Jim. He nagged at me and I knew it was because I should at least try and help him. The image that stayed with me most clearly — appearing as a flickering ghost when I switched on my terminal in the morning — was of Jim in the old lecture theatre, his arms clutching the seat back, his face distorted.

After a week I was really anxious. Jim hadn’t been in touch, which was unlike him. I resolved to go and see Carol, his wife. After all, I reasoned, before the whole ‘waiting’ thing took off we used to see quite a lot of one another. I had been in the habit of regularly having dinner at their house. Childless couples have a tendency to adopt single people and try and feed them up and marry them off. And this is the way it had been. Carol had invited me to a series of Tuesday evening affairs where I’d eaten spinach and tomato lasagne and met a number of her female colleagues.

After a while the Tuesdays had petered out. I missed them. I missed the atmosphere of somewhere where people cooked on a regular basis; and I missed seeing Carol, who I liked. And who, despite my failures as a potential pair-bonder, never seemed to judge me. She was one of those people who had a tremendous sense of containment about them, her physical presence constantly emitted the quiet message that she was fine just as she was, she was content to do x or y, but it wasn’t really necessary. When she and Jim had married their friends had called it ‘a marriage of opposites’. It was significant that over the years no one had seen fit to add to this observation.

Carol worked at home as a freelance editor. So I could be sure of finding her in if I called unannounced. I took the morning off work and the train out to Wandsworth. Their flat was across the Common from the station. As I walked over I felt the morning’s catarrh slop and gurgle in my chest. I had a bitter, old iron taste in my mouth and felt considerable premonition.

Jim’s Sierra was crouched on the steep camber of the road outside their flat, like a beetle redesigned by committee. I walked up the tiled path along the privet hedge and pushed the intercom buzzer. After a while there was a crackle on the speaker.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Carol. I need to talk to you, about Jim.’

‘Hang on a minute, I’m not up yet.’

I waited for more than a minute. But when I saw, through the glass door panel, the door of their flat swing open, it wasn’t Carol who emerged. It was a young man. A tall young man, who came to the door, opened it, and walked past me with a cheery nod and a cheerier ‘Good Morning’. He tucked his arms energetically into his windcheater and jauntily walked off down the road, implying that he was off for a day’s hard work. One that he was looking forward to.

A few minutes later Carol came and let me in. She was wearing a dressing gown patterned with pastel blooms. She was superficially groomed but there hung about her the subtle, sour smell of someone who’s been making love in the morning. I followed her down the corridor and while I sat at the kitchen table she made me a cup of coffee.

‘So what about Jim?’ Carol panted, vigorously depressing the stainless steel plunger of the cafetière.

‘Just that I think he’s having a breakdown, Carol. I think he needs help of some kind. I haven’t seen him for the past week; the last time I did he was absolutely raving.’

‘I haven’t seen him either. I haven’t as much as clapped eyes on him. You know he’s cabbing in the evenings now?’

‘Cabbing? What on earth for? Not for money, surely.’

Carol laughed and pulled a twist of inky hair away from her face. ‘Oh no, not for money. To relax him. That’s why he does it. He says it relaxes him.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Maybe, maybe, but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, believe me.’ She said this earnestly, and sat down opposite me, an identical coffee mug cupped in her hands.

I believed her. Whatever part the young windcheater played in her life there was no doubting her affection for Jim. If she couldn’t influence him, no one could.

‘He comes back from work every evening and goes straight out again. I don’t think he actually takes a lot of money. He’s more intent on keeping in touch with his friend Carlos.’

‘So you know about that.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And the despatch riders. What do you think?’

‘Well, strictly speaking, I suppose he could be right, but it strikes me that there’s enough that’s obviously wrong with the world without becoming obsessed by the intangibles.’

I took the train back into town. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was expected at work. I thought I might walk into Soho and drink some espressos at the Bar Italia. The clear, sharp light of the morning had given way to the kind of intense sepia tone and gritty air that precedes a summer storm in London. The sense of rising barometric pressure was tangible. I felt oppressed and confused by my talk with Carol. I still couldn’t accept that there was nothing to be done for Jim. It was if those who loved him were just waiting for something awful to happen.

I trailed my damp, stinging feet along Oxford Street and turned into Soho Square. There was a gust of wind and a peppering of grit flew into my eyes. For a moment I was blind. I leant against a wall while the tears gathered and flowed down my face. When my vision cleared I saw Jim.

He was standing, leaning on the inside of the door of his car, talking to another despatch rider. This despatch rider was even more singular than the others I’d seen with Jim. He had the regulation jacket and bright, vinyl tabard. But instead of boots and leather trousers he had on baggy, green cords and battered trainers. He was propped on his bike, a battered, black 250 MZ, regarding Jim with slight disdain. His head was quite repulsive. He looked like a failed albino. His hair was the palest of gingers, his face putty-white, his features were soft and vestigial, his eyes the pinkiest of pinky-blues.

I crossed the street and hailed them. The failed albino turned to look at me, I could see his hand clutching the handlebar. It was as flat as a skate, the nails — dirty little crescents of horn — were deeply recessed into the flesh.

‘I was just at your house, Jim, and I saw the car outside. Were you there all the time?’

‘No, mate, I was out on the Common doing my exercises. I just went back, picked up the car and came into town to meet Carlos.’ He indicated the failed albino with a twist of his hand.

‘Why aren’t you at work, Jim?’

‘I could ask the same of you, mate.’

There was something rather light and cheery about Jim’s manner that I found reassuring. I suppose in retrospect I should have been scared by the change in him. After all, the last time I’d seen him he’d been utterly driven, but, despite the mood swing and the weird company he was keeping, I was pleased to see my friend looking a little more like his old self.

‘Carlos is taking me on a run today. Do you want to come along?’

But before I could reply, Carlos broke in, ‘Can he come along, James? May he please come along? That is the question.’ Carlos had a high, fluting voice and spoke with the accents of a comic Welshman. It was immediately clear that he always spoke facetiously and that all his questions were rhetorical.

‘Carlos, this is the man I was telling you about. My old friend. He’s the one I went to Stein’s lecture with. He knows most of it already.’

‘There’s a difference between knowing and seeing, isn’t there, James? Now I don’t suppose you’d deny that, would you?’

I wasn’t really paying that much attention to this exchange. Carlos struck me as a ludicrous figure. I had to get back to work. I was suddenly angry with Jim. Everything he said was clearly a manifestation of what I now saw as an illness. It was strange, but I could feel falling back down my throat the level of choked emotion I had invested in Jim. I should never have tried to help him. He was someone I knew only vaguely. I could do without Jim. He was receding fast.

‘What are you waiting for, man?’

‘What’s that?’

Carlos was addressing me. ‘Why don’t you come and see, then? I value Brother James’s opinion very highly, very highly indeed.’

‘Look, Carlos. I don’t really know what you and Jim are talking about. All I know is that my friend here’, a jerk of the thumb and special, heavy emphasis on ‘friend’, ‘has developed a dangerous and cranky obsession. He has tried to draw me into the fantasy world that he’s constructed around this obsession, but I’m not interested — I think he needs help. Apparently you are an active player in this fantasy world. Therefore, I can only choose to adopt the same attitude towards you.’

As soon as I’d finished speaking I felt ridiculous. The words had sounded all right as I was saying them. But now, as they hung in the air unwilling to disperse, they constituted a reproach. The failed albino and my twitching former friend stood there, both of them still propped up by their vehicles. Jim’s hazard lights clicked. In the square, female office workers, hobbled by tight, mid-thigh-length skirts, lay on the grass eating sandwiches, their legs free from the knee down. They were like some species of crippled colts. Jim and Carlos regarded me quizzically.

‘Come and look.’

The pink, flaccid Welshman had a voice of insidious, quiet, insistent command. We walked in single file up to Oxford Street. Standing on the inside of the pavement, grouped stiffly together, the three of us formed an odd little protuberance, around which the great stream of pedestrians flowed. Carlos leant up against the window of Tie Rack. He’d left his helmet on the bike, and his pale hair fluffed out around his ears. As he pressed backwards, his plastic tabard rode up above his shoulders. His eyes seemed to disengage; they unfocused, slid out of gear, and became simply oval, colourless blobs stuck down on to his blurred, colourless face. Jim and I stood either side of him, awkward and still.

After a while sweat began to well up from Carlos’s temples. His eyes quivered. I had never seen anyone sweat like this before — the sweat coming straight out of the exposed skin, rather than trickling down from the hairline. It was as if a boot had been ground down into a peaty, boggy surface. The sweat ran down his temples, milky against the pale flesh. I felt utterly nauseous and afraid. Then, as quickly as Carlos had gone into the trance he snapped out of it with a chilly shiver.

He turned to me.

‘How good is your knowledge?’ I was taken aback.

‘Good enough, I suppose. I know my way around.’

‘How quickly do you think you could drive from here to the Hornimans Museum via Shootup Hill?’

‘Well…’ I looked around me. It was nearly 1.00 and the streets were thick with lunch-time traffic. The stodgy air boiled with blue exhaust. I computed routes, thought about the ebb and flow of cars, transit vans, lorries and buses. I tried to visualise the roads I would travel down. ‘If you were lucky you might do it in an hour and twenty minutes, but I’d allow an hour and a half.’

‘We’ll do it in forty-five minutes.’ Carlos was emphatic. He wiped his temples with a big red handkerchief and turned on his heel. Jim and I followed him back to the square. A traffic warden, neat in dark uniform and fluorescent sash, was tucking a ticket behind the Sierra’s windscreen wiper. As Carlos mounted his MZ Jim tore it off and shredded it. The traffic warden shrugged. The central locking chonked and I took my place in the passenger seat, immediately conscious of the interior of the car as another, separate place.

We peeled away from the kerb and followed Carlos off round the square, turning left into the alley that leads to Charing Cross Road.

‘Pay no attention to the Secret Police of Waiting.’ It was a flat statement. Jim made it through hard-pressed teeth. I paid no attention. I was stuck in a kind of torpor, all I could focus on were the flapping sides of Carlos’s corduroy trousers as he moved ahead of us through the traffic.

Jim drove with his habitual, flattened ease. The boxy modern car clumped and tchocked through the streets. Carlos hovered ahead on his bike. It was as if he were attached to us by some invisible, umbilical cord. He didn’t lead us through the traffic, we moved in concert.

Across Gower Street and then right, past the Royal Ear Hospital, to the top and then left and right, on to Tottenham Court Road. There was no delay at the Euston Road lights, we went straight up through the estates behind Hampstead Road. I noticed idly that the council, instead of pointing some of the older blocks, had taken to cladding them with caramel slabs. Our little convoy accelerated through the half-circuit of the Outer Circle. Nash terraces were reduced by speed to a single, tall, thin house. We skittered across the bridge that led out of Regent’s Park. Down Belsize Road; for a moment we were poised alongside an old Datsun 180D, bulbous, red and rusting. It plunged with us towards the elbowed bend, where the road narrows to one lane. The cord tightened between the MZ and the Sierra. We pulled ahead of the Datsun. In the wing mirror, the surrounds of its blind headlights, conjunctival with rust, were sharp and then gone. We tore through the aggressive signing of the one-way system between Finchley Road and West End Lane. Then dropped down the other side into a trough of squats and second-hand furniture shops that in turn disgorged us on to the great, raddled, calloused, Kilburn High Road.

I registered all these junctures, but only vaguely. There was an unreal, static sensation to the journey. The long London roads were panoramic scenery wound back behind us to provide the illusion of movement. The MZ and the Sierra stood still, occupying a different zone.

We reached Shootup Hill in about seventeen minutes. The facility with which Carlos had led us was unnatural. At every juncture where there was an opportunity for a choice, he took the right one. Time and again we turned one way and I saw in the rear-view mirror that if we had gone the other, more obvious way, we would have been frozen in a tail-back, eroding synchromesh for five minutes or more. Even stranger than that was the realisation that the idiosyncratic directions we did take, always took time off our journey. Carlos had not only apprehended every road, he had anticipated every alleyway, every mews, every garage forecourt and the position and synchronisation of every traffic light. He could not possibly know what he seemed to know — the only way he could have seen the route we took was from the air, and even then he would have had to have made constant trigonometric calculations to figure out the angles we seemed to have followed intuitively.

We were going up Shootup Hill towards Kilburn doing about forty, when suddenly Carlos put his right leg down and yanked the bike round in a tight turn. Jim followed suit, without even looking at the oncoming traffic, and before I’d had time to register the extent of the risk we’d run, we were heading back down and under the railway bridge.

The swish of an underpass, the whirr of an overpass, a long row of wing mirrors reaching out to us, the rise and fall of identically gabled roofs. Jim’s arms — the inside of the forearm pressed against the wheel — insectoid and manipulative. The child’s counterpane world of London’s roads — where a turned corner can mean a distant prospect, a sudden impression of pillows in the distance, or a dip into a hollow can completely enclose you in a tiny world where the light quality never changes and spindrifts of sweet-wrappers chase one another in a tireless pavane.

As we crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the water glinted for a second; to the right a glimpse of banked-up buildings, circumstantially pompous — an encrustation of administration which could belong to any city on earth — and then gone, back into the homogeneous, the undifferentiated London, where twee shopping parade succeeds arterial road, in turn flanked by the dusty parade ground of a municipal park where single, silent figures stand, tied to stuffed dogs.

No frenzy, no hurry. No giving anyone the finger. Carlos weaved and we weaved with him, cutting up whole files of traffic, ignoring feeder lights, insinuating ourselves on to roundabouts. The outward stretch to Shootup Hill had presented itself as an elegant piece of geometry. The downward swipe to Horniman’s Gardens was guile and outrageous nerve. I felt chilly in the stuffy, corrupted car. Chilly and scared.

Through Dulwich Park the Sierra’s engine phutted into the cleaner air and Carlos’s trousers dappled in the sunlight that fell through the trees.

We pulled up at the Hornimans Museum exactly forty-five minutes after we had started from Soho Square. Carlos banked his bike on to the tarmac lip that curled up from the road and we followed suit. Behind us the prospect opened out for the first time since we had crossed the river. In the middle distance a ridge of crenellated, oblong buildings stood out above the sea of tree- and rooftops. Beyond them London washed away towards the northern horizon, bluer and greyer.

Carlos was pulling off his gloves as I jack-knifed myself out of the door of the Sierra in an attempt to jerk myself out of the strange trance. Carlos wore two gloves on each hand. The cheap vinyl of the outer glove had worn away exposing the tufts of the wool gloves inside. For some reason these worn patches fixated me, they were somehow anatomical. The blood rushed to my temples — I stared at the gloves. I felt sick. Carlos leant up against the signboard advertising the museum’s exhibits.

The irritating Welsh voice: ‘You see boy, when I trance like that,’ he rolled his eyes back in his head exposing a network of veins under the pink ball, ‘I assess the flow, at one location, for one brief moment. But because I know, you see, I know so much about this,’ he gestured towards the horizon, ‘it means that all the movement stands still. I know ev-ery-thing.’ He rolled out the syllables with fluting emphasis. ‘All the tail-backs, all the hold-ups, every burst water-main and dropped lorry load in the metropolis — at that moment I realise them all. Take me to any street, any street in London whatsoever where there is a constant traffic stream and just by looking at it I can know the state of every other road in the city. Then there’s no waiting. You understand? I never have to wait.’

The albino’s leeched brow moved to one side, exposing the signboard. A poster was tacked on it, advertising some forthcoming exhibition of Amazonian artefacts. A double-decker bus laboured up the hill from Forest Hill Station. I looked at my watch, it was 1.50. The dreamlike state I’d been in since I met Jim and Carlos in Soho fell away as suddenly as stepping out of a bath. I started running for the bus.

‘Don’t you see!’ Jim was shouting after me, ‘he doesn’t have to wait! Don’t you understand, he’s beyond waiting; however far he travels he’s already arrived! Oh, you bloody fool …’

The last words were a scream. I paid no attention and swung myself up on to the platform of the bus as it pulled away from the stop and started the long descent to East Dulwich.

A week passed and then a month. There was no news from Jim and I made no attempt to contact him. Then a Post-it note appeared stuck to the keyboard of my computer. It asked me to ring a Mr Clifton at a Camden-based legal practice. Before I could respond, Clifton called me. He had an appalling phone manner, breathy and inaudible and his legalese sounded put on.

‘It’s concerning our client Mr Stonehouse.’

‘Oh, yes. Jim. What’s he done?’

‘He has been convicted of failure to stop; one count and two counts of aggravated assault.’

‘Did he do it?’

‘He made a statement to that effect to the police, he appeared before the magistrates’ court at Highgate who have passed the matter of sentencing over to Snaresbrook.’

‘I see, I see. That’s a bit rough. Still, I can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘Surprised?’

‘Well, he had been behaving rather erratically lately.’

‘That’s just it. It would appear that the best course of action for Mr Stonehouse would be for us to apply for further psychiatric evaluation.’

‘What if you don’t?’

‘It could be three to six years.’

‘I see, I see … What I don’t see is where I come into this …’

‘Well, as you said yourself, Mr Stonehouse has been behaving erratically recently and you’ve been a witness to this. A statement in court from someone like you, with your position, could be the deciding factor.’

‘That’s it then — you want me to turn up in court?’

‘And supply us, if possible, with a written statement.’

‘Presumably you want that on a letterhead.’

‘It may well be a decisive factor.’

‘Can you tell me exactly what happened?’

‘I’m afraid not, it would be up to Mr Stonehouse to tell you the details. Were we to say anything, it would be in direct breach of client confidentiality.’

Jim called later that morning. He was wholly unrepentant.

‘Just a little bust-up coming off the Marylebone Flyover. It’s absurd really that the thing’s got as far as Crown Court.’

‘Your brief says that he wants you remanded for psychiatric observation.’

‘Yes, well, err … it does seem the best course of action. Personally, I don’t mind — I mean I could use a few weeks’ rest. You know, making ashtrays and rapping with some jejeune shrinks.’

‘What happened, Jim?’

‘Well, I was coming in to work. I’d stayed the night with Carlos in Acton and it was only about half-seven. I was on the Westway and everything told me that I’d be clear to go the full length and come off at Marylebone rather than taking the Paddington exit. But when I got to the top of the Marylebone Flyover the traffic was backed up solid, at half-seven in the morning! I don’t know, I guess I just felt humiliated. I sat in the stack waiting to get off for about five minutes. It was infuriating, the sense of being contained to no purpose, and it was all the fault of an intellectual decision. If I’d tranced the way Carlos taught me, I’d have been all right.’

‘What happened, Jim?’

‘Well, I was coming off the end of the flyover at last, when this character tried to muscle in from the left, from the slip road that leads to the Edgware Road. He was a short, fat creep driving one of those midget Datsun vans. I remember it distinctly, it had a dirty cream paint job and a badly stencilled sign saying, “Exodus Fruiterers, Crouch End & Stanmore”, then a phone number. This character was all pushy and hunched over the little wheel. A bundle of senseless dingle-dangles swinging from his rear-view mirror, rinky-dink bazouki music blaring out of the window, eugh!

‘I’d been in that jam for five full minutes! So I just sort of herded this little van man with my front bumper, just sort of herded him … across on to the side of the road. I didn’t damage his stupid van at all, just a scrape of paint, really, but he went absolutely mad, came out of it like a sweaty little grub. “Why you do that! Why you do that!” Over and over and poking me as well. I told him, “Because I felt like it.” And this enraged him more. He was a nothing, he was a Waiter, he meant nothing. So eventually I hit him, just to shut him up.’

‘Just to shut him up …?’

‘Like I say, he was a Waiter, he was a nothing.’

‘So explain why you’re pleading insanity?’

‘Well, when the police took my statement I told them the truth and they started grinning at each other and making silly faces — so it sort of suggested itself, logically, as it were. Let me tell you, this could be a lot more than a stupid assault case. This could be the end of waiting for a lot of people.’

There was a lot more of the same before I managed to get shot of him. I wasn’t convinced. I was becoming more and more inclined to think that he was bad rather than mad. The bizarre trip I’d been on with Jim and the fluting failed albino stayed in my mind as something sinister. I didn’t like Carlos and I didn’t like his influence on Jim. Jim was becoming twisted and distorted; he was a personality viewed in a ‘fun house’ mirror. His mechanical arms were getting longer, his epicene hips wider and fuller.

I resolved to write Jim his reference, but not to turn up at Snaresbrook, unless he showed a willingness to break with Carlos and the whole perverse philosophy of waiting that he had built up. I wanted Jim to admit that he needed help — and use it.

Over the next couple of weeks I called Jim a number of times, both at home and at his office. He was always out. Carol was very distant, but not unsympathetic. I think she felt as I did, but with the added twist of having shared a bed with the man for five years. I modified my position and told her that I would write the statement, but I still wouldn’t turn up in court unless Jim showed some willingness. I told her to give Jim the message. He never called back. I left messages for him at his work; he must have ignored them. Eventually, I washed my hands of the whole thing.

Mr Clifton wrote and thanked me for my statement — which stated quite clearly the way I felt about Jim Stonehouse — and told me the date he was due to appear and the court number. I did my best to forget this information. But on the morning itself I sat in my office completely distracted. I wandered around the room picking up the Post-it notes that were stuck to every available surface and mashing them up into thick wadges of yellow paper and tackiness. I knew I was right not to go to court, I knew it was the strong — and ultimately caring — thing to do. At 9.30 Jim called up.

‘Just called to say goodbye, I don’t expect I’ll be seeing you for a while.’

I was choked with salty guilt. ‘Jim, I’m sorry about this…’ I was about to relent.

‘No, don’t be sorry. Clifton’s got his own little ideas, but, really, I’d positively like to go down. Carlos was inside for a couple of years and he says it was the formative experience that really made him fully understand the nature of the millennium. It’s waiting in a class of its own!’ There was an exultant, manic edge to his voice. He was laughing when we said our goodbyes and hung up.

As soon as I’d put the phone down it rang again. This time it was Clifton.

‘I really would like to make one last appeal to you. Ignore what my client says; he is undoubtedly an unstable man. I have personal reasons for believing that he has fallen under the influence of people who are …’ his voice trailed off ‘… evil. I urge you to come to Snaresbrook for 10.30. Mr Stonehouse needs help. He is not a man who will adjust well to prison.’

When Clifton had rung off, I sat at the desk spasmodically ripping up my wadded Post-it notes. After a while I looked at my watch, it was 9.50. I ran out of the office and down into the street. I was on the Gray’s Inn Road before I managed to find a cab.

‘I need to be at Snaresbrook Court by 10.30 — do you think we’ll make it?’

‘Hard to say, mate.’ It was a flat, laconic statement. The cabby’s hand circled lazily and brought the cab neatly into the traffic stream. ‘We could do it, it really depends on getting through past Clapton.’

‘Why not head north and cut across the Marsh to Leyton.’

‘Nah, nah, not worth it.’

‘But …’

‘Trust me. Anyway, what’s the hurry?’

‘It’s a friend, he needs me as a character witness, he could go down.’

‘Oh, I see.’

We sat in silence. The cab juddered its way through the morning traffic, purring noisily like a vast, bronchitic panther. I fidgeted with my lip, my cheeks. Smoked and flicked, squinted out the window at the facades of buildings growing and retreating. The cabby took my advice after all. We turned off Green Lanes and cut across Stoke Newington to Tottenham High Road. The rows of semis and villas gave way to unfinished areas of warehousing and light industrial premises as we dog-legged round on to the Lea Bridge Road. It was 10.25. I sat forward in my seat, willing the traffic ahead to part for us.

‘What’d he do then, this friend of yours?’

‘He got fed up with waiting.’

‘Ha! If that was a crime we’d all be bloody banged up, wouldn’t we?’

‘Yeah, well, I suppose so. He reacted rather drastically though. He shunted some bloke’s van and then took a poke at him, then when the Bill came to get him he took a poke at them as well.’

‘I bet he did. Listen, that’s nothing. I was at this wedding on Saturday down the Roman Road, and one of the guests took a knife to the bride’s father ’cause he couldn’t stand waiting for a drink.’

‘Really …?’

‘Straight up. Gave him it in the neck. Poor man’s still in a coma. The bloke then ran out into the road. But some of the other guests caught up with him. They held him down and then one of them ran him over in his car. Now he’s in a coma too.’

‘Too?’

‘Like the bride’s father.’

‘Nice friends you have.’

‘Well, they weren’t anything really to do with me. The groom was a mate of my son’s. I just went along for the hell of it.’

‘That sounds about right.’

We relapsed into silence again. The cabby was doing his best. Every time we got mired in the traffic he got his A — Z out and started looking for a shortcut. It wasn’t his fault that this part of north-east London was one tortuous, twisting high street after another. There were hardly any alternatives.

It was 10.30. We were stuck in a jam on Leyton High Road. I’d more or less given up. There was sixteen quid plus up in red on the meter. An artic was stranded across the intersection. A roar from behind us and a file of motorcycles came dodging through the stalled traffic, very fast. A blur of dayglo faring, leather shoulders, dirty visors, vinyl tabards and in front, already fast disappearing, the flapping flares of some familiar corduroys.

There was a jolt in the queue. The lights changed and two minutes later we were pulling up outside the court. I leapt out and shoved some bills at the cabby. Jim was being sentenced in Court 19, in the modern annexe. I ran through the car-park and into the building. I slowed to a walk going up the stairs, labouring to capture my breath. In the upper hall a tall black man with a wispy beard approached me. It was 10.40.

‘You must be …?’

‘Yes, yes …’

‘I’m Clifton.’ He extended his hand. It was Jim’s brief. Carol was in a corner with a knot of people standing around a robed barrister.

‘But the case …?’

‘We’ve had to ask for a slight postponement. Mr Stonehouse isn’t here yet.’

‘Isn’t here! Then where the bloody hell is he? The judge is going to take a pretty dim view of this.’

‘I should imagine he will.’

I went over to the corner where Carol was talking to the barrister — a rather hepatitic-looking woman.

‘Oh, hello,’ said Carol and introduced us.

‘Didn’t Jim stay at home last night?’

‘No, I was just saying. He’s more or less moved in with Carlos now. He’ll have been coming from Acton. It’s a long haul across town.’

‘I hope he’s at least managed to put a suit on for the occasion.’

At that moment, the devil we spoke of appeared at the end of the room and walked down it, erect, head swivelling mechanically from side to side. He beamed contempt at the motley bunch of defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, witnesses and police who waited their turns.

‘Sorry I’m late. Got stuck in the lift. I had to wait for an hour before they let me out.’

Just at that moment the swing-doors from the courtroom swung open and a small throng appeared. The hepatitic barrister pressed through and I saw her lean over and talk to the clerk. I turned to Jim. ‘It looks like we’re on.’ We passed through and into the courtroom.

Jim took his place in a rather long dock to the right of the courtroom. In fact the dock stretched the whole width of the room; there was enough space in it to contain terrorist and stock market multiple defendants. Carol and I took our place at the back of the four rows of tip-up seats immediately to the right of the door we came in by. Together, the seats and the dock faced off two sides of the court. Opposite the dock was the bench; and in the main area, the pit of the court, were rows of desks for the lawyers. The whole place was well lit by flat, flickerless, strip lighting. Every surface — the front of the dock, the lawyers’ desks, the witness box, the bench — was fronted with a light varnished wood. It reminded me of the Old Lecture Theatre at Houghton Street, except that there, all was dark with obscurity. Here, everything was light: truth, the panelling seemed to say, albeit of a particular, restricted, keyline-boxed variety, is about to be pursued.

The presiding judge gave a diffident tap with his little mallet and the court was in session. The clerk of the court rose and read the charges:

‘… that you on the 21st of August did wilfully cause damage to the vehicle belonging to Mr Takis Christos of 24 Rosemount Avenue, Crouch End; that you did thereafter assault Mr Christos; that you did fail to report the accident or to stop after the accident; that you did assault a police officer who came to interview you concerning the accident on the 22nd of August at your place of work. How say you to these charges, guilty or not guilty?’

‘Guilty.’ Jim sounded like a large plastic doll, the word ‘guilty’ wheezed out of him in a breathy, strangulated voice about an octave higher than I’d expected. It was clear that all his bravado had deserted him, he was frightened. A sharp toothpick of compassion entered my heart. My friend was on trial. It was painfully ridiculous.

‘Mr Stonehouse.’ This was the judge, a dormouse figure perched up on his high chair. He was little and pink; a quivering snout quested out from under his wig, his pink eyes blinked as if they had been recently washed in tea. ‘Can you tell the court why you were late arriving here this morning?’ The judge had an incongruously weighty and judicial voice. Imposing and threatening in equal measure, he must have practised a lot when he was by himself.

‘I got stuck in the traffic, your Honour.’

‘I see. Where were you coming from?’

‘Acton, your Honour.’

‘And at what time did you set out?’

‘8.30, your Honour.’

‘I see. It took you nearly three hours?’

‘There were extremely bad road-works in Hackney, your Honour.’

‘I see, I see.’

The prosecution counsel came to Jim’s assistance.

‘There were indeed bad tail-backs through Hackney, your Honour, I was caught in them myself.’

‘All right, all right. This is a court of law not an AA incident room, let’s get on with it.’

The prosecution set out its case. Counsel, the policemen and even Mr Christos kept things brief and to the point. I sensed from the manner in which they gave their evidence that they all believed that Jim was cracked and didn’t really want to see him go down. There was little vindictiveness in the way they spoke about him, it was rather that they were all playing their part as subsidiary cogs in a well-oiled machine. At each juncture the QC asked the judge if he wanted to ask further questions — the only time he did ask one, it was addressed to Mr Christos.

‘I have a note here from the police saying that you have been unable to present your own licence and insurance documents, Mr Christos. Is that correct?’

‘It is true, yes, but I have them, but in the post like I say to them, from Swansea, like I say.’ Mr Christos was a very short individual, globular with tufts of hair protruding irregularly from a balding scalp. It was very difficult indeed to visualise him as a representative of that great, quiescent multitude which Jim believed to be awaiting the onset of the millennium in a lather of spiritual anticipation.

‘See that you present your documents as soon as they become available.’

‘Of course, of course, like I say …’ The judge cut him off with a paw gesture. The fruitier rejoined his friends who were sitting in the row in front of me. They were a couple of sharpish young men who looked like estate agents; and a plump woman in late middle age wearing elephantine slacks and a CND sticker on her raincoat.

I had no time to consider the implications of this. The hearing rolled forward. Jim’s hepatitic barrister got to her feet and looked yellowly around the courtroom, checking no doubt that all her witnesses were in place. The witnesses turned out to be me and a Dr Busner from Heath Hospital. Busner was the psychiatrist who had been charged by the Highgate magistrates with the job of assessing Jim’s state of mind. Busner took the stand.

‘You are Dr Busner, a consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital?’ There was a pause. Busner was an ageing hippy with grey, collar-length hair. He wore a striped poplin suit and a tie like a rag. I vaguely recognised him, but couldn’t pin down the recollection. I’d never seen him in the flesh before, of that much I was certain, but perhaps on television. He’d have to be a pretty damn good witness to justify turning up in court in that rig. If I was the judge I would have sent Jim down just on the basis of his expert witness’s apparel.

Busner stroked his chin, and for a ghastly minute it looked as if he was going to launch into some philosophical analysis of the question of his own identity, but he pulled himself together and answered, ‘I am.’

‘Would you like to give the court your professional view of the defendant’s mental state, insofar as it relates to the plea of mitigation on grounds of diminished responsibility.’

‘I have seen Mr Stonehouse for three hour-long sessions over the past month. During that time I have built up a fairly comprehensive picture of him as an individual. He has spent most of these sessions expounding in great detail a series of views he holds concerning the probable impact of the millennium on our society. Views he characterises as “Immanence and Imminence”. It is Mr Stonehouse’s contention that the two assaults on Mr Christos and PC Winch, and the damaging of Mr Christos’s van, were necessary revolutionary acts in terms of the propagation of his ideas.’

Busner paused again. At least it seemed like a pause to begin with, but after the pause had run on for a while it became clear that that was all he was going to say. A susurration of unease ran around the courtroom. The policeman Jim had hit, and who had already given his evidence, began whispering, quite audibly, to one of his colleagues. The judge, who was scrutinising Busner’s written assessment, didn’t notice that Busner had stopped speaking.

Jim’s barrister was obviously taken aback. Eventually she pulled herself together. ‘Is it your view, therefore, Dr Busner, that Mr Stonehouse was in full possession of his faculties when he committed these crimes?’

‘It’s difficult to say; either he’s right in what he says, in which case he was fully compos mentis, or else he is the victim of an extremely complex delusionary state, in which case he is clearly not morally responsible for his actions.’

The judge started at the words ‘morally responsible’ and began to pay attention to the proceedings again.

‘Well, is he or isn’t he?’

‘What, your Honour?’ queried Jim’s barrister, sensing that the battle might be lost.

‘Is he morally responsible?’

‘We think not, your Honour.’

A long sigh from the bench.

‘Mr Stonehouse, we have gone to considerable lengths to hear all the evidence in this case. We have heard from Mr Christos how you drove into his van and when challenged by him laughed and said,’ the judge scrutinised his notes, ‘ “I’m fed up with waiting.” We’ve heard from two police officers how you exhibited the same contempt towards the law when they came to interview you as you showed to Mr Christos’s possessions and person. All in all your behaviour has been reprehensible, immature and criminal. However, I’m swayed by the arguments put forward by … by …’

‘Dr Busner, your Honour.’

‘Dr Busner — and it is to him that I will entrust you for further psychiatric assessment and treatment if applicable. I will defer sentencing for three months pending reports. Mr Stonehouse, is there anything you wish to say?’

This was Jim’s opportunity to really louse things up for himself. I waited for him to take it. He stirred uneasily in the dock; his mechanical arms reached out and grabbed hold of the top of the barrier in front of him; he swept a lock of hair back from his forehead.

‘Only that I’m grateful to the court for giving me the opportunity to sort myself out for a while. I really have been under a lot of pressure recently.’

Only Carol and I and possibly Clifton and Busner could have known how unnatural Jim’s voice sounded when he said this. As far as the rest of the court was concerned it was an honest statement. But I knew that voice, Jim was bullshitting.

The court rose and we went back out into the antechamber. I walked over to where Clifton stood with the barrister, at the plate-glass window, looking out over the car-park.

‘Congratulations, that was quite a result, and you didn’t even need me to say my piece.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry you had to take the trip.’ Clifton brushed the tangle of hair on his lip with the top of a stack of papers. ‘But I’m afraid it really had nothing to do with us. Snape can’t afford to send anyone else down this session. Mr Stonehouse has evaded imprisonment because there isn’t enough room in it for him at the moment, not because of the merits of the case.’

‘Well, I hope you don’t tell him that. Hopefully this whole experience will help him to see some sense.’

From where we stood I watched as Carol came out of the main door of the court building and began to work her way across the car-park, threading her way in between the parked cars. As I watched she gained the outer edge of the tarmac, moved on to the grass to avoid a gaggle of motorcycle couriers who were standing around their machines smoking, and headed off towards the main gates. I turned away from the window.

Jim came up to me, pulling off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. He was grinning broadly. He took in the group of us — Busner had now idled over — and launched into a rant.

‘Well, that fixed them. I thought about it and decided that what waiting had to be done could be done more profitably out here. I will go to prison eventually, but for the moment it’s more important that I improve my knowledge. For this opportunity I thank you all…’ He began to bow stiffly from the waist, but paused in mid-salaam, and looked round at us. ‘Where’s Carol, didn’t she come out with you?’

I glanced down into the car-park again. Carlos was looking up at me. His pink head was glowing faintly in the flat sunlight. A withered roll-up dribbled from his lip; his vinyl tabard rode up around his shoulders. I turned back to Jim. ‘Yeah, she was here Jim, but I think she got fed up with waiting.’