0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (31 page)

'Are you
sure
you're all right?' Maria was asking, and Ari was saying something about getting me to a doctor when the door opened and there stood a small grey-haired man in a patterned cardigan and slippers. He had a pot-belly and rimless glasses. He looked like a retired accountant.

'Where's Midas?' I shouted. 'Is he in there?'

The little man shot a puzzled look at Maria, then back at me. 'What does she - ?'

I was hysterical now. 'Where is Midas Blake?'

'I'm sorry, Mr Blake,' Ari was saying, 'she's not been well and she -'

'Young lady, I am - '

'
Where the hell is he?
'

' - I am Midas Blake. I don't believe we've met before.'

'You're lying, you're all lying!' I pushed past the little accountant. 'He must be in here!' But the apartment was completely different, floral wallpaper, cheap padded leatherette furniture, no plants at all. 'You know where he is,' I screamed, 'why are you protecting him?'

They're all in it
, I thought,
he's got to all of them
. But he hadn't; I know that now. The grey-haired man in spectacles really was someone called Midas Blake, and he'd been living there for years. We'd never met.

He'd only ever had one party, the one Ari had so enthusiastically attended. If I had gone as well I would have realised the truth, but we had never bumped into each other.

The man I had known as Midas was someone quite different. I suspect he has many other names. He is the stranger who comes to lead us into temptation, the one who can give us everything we need in return for blind allegiance. He may appear at a certain co-ordinate on the map, to a certain type of person, when the skies are strange and the time is right, and to many people, stronger people, he may never appear at all.

An arid marriage, four years of loneliness, how ripe I had been for his attentions! There was no point in returning to Danielle Passmore and asking to see a photograph; his likeness would not be the same. He would never adopt the same guise twice.

One thing puzzled me. Why was I released from his power? Why did he allow the door to open, why did he not let me die? I can only assume he plans to come back for me. He thinks I am still weak enough to accept him. He is in for a surprise. Through the changing seasons I watch from my windows and calmly await his return, armed with a faith I never knew I had.

PERMANENT FIXTURE

No man is an island, but quite a few are peninsulas. I guess if you really hate people, it's easy to cut yourself off. You move into the countryside, never go to the cinema or a football match, avoid casual arrangements, lock yourself away. But it won't make you a happier person. A friend of mine called Margaret told me this story over lunch the other day, and I'm still not sure if all of it's true, although she swears it is.

In 1972 Margaret upset her entire family by marrying a man they all felt to be unsuitable for her. She was nineteen years old, an only child who had just moved to North London from the kind of small Hertfordshire village where everyone knows everyone else's business and doesn't approve of it. She knew nothing of city life and very little about men. Kenneth was her first boyfriend, and the courtship lasted just four months. They were married in a registry office in Islington, and no-one was allowed to throw confetti because of the litter laws. The ceremony was reluctantly attended by Margaret's father, who barely bothered to conceal his disappointment and left immediately after the photographs were taken. Margaret's mother telephoned during the reception to wish her well, but turned the call into a catalogue of complaints, and only spoke to her daughter on one further occasion before she died of a stroke seven months later.

Kenneth Stanford was thirty-one. He drove a Ford Corsair, collected Miles Davis and Buddy Rich recordings, worked in a town planning office and promised to love Margaret forever. He decided he had enough money saved to buy a house, and carefully chose where he wanted to live. The location he picked was in Avenell Road, Highbury, right opposite the gate of the Arsenal football ground. He had supported the Gunners since he was a kid, and had recently bought himself a seat there.

In typical London style the area hid its surprises well, for who would have thought that such an immense stadium could be tucked so invisibly behind the rows of little houses? In an equally odd arrangement, famous film stars and directors often visited the road to check on their feature prints at the nearby Metrocolor film processing labs, but the child who ventured to suggest that he just saw Mel Gibson passing the fish shop usually received a cuff about the head for lying.

So it was that Margaret moved into a damp Victorian two-floor terraced house in the shadow of a great stadium. She became pregnant twice in quick succession, and saw very little of her husband, who worked late, spent his nights drinking at Ronnie Scott's and his weekends attending football matches, with his mates. In accordance with the social etiquette of the day he never introduced his wife to his friends - the people he met at the jazz club to whom he wished to appear cool - or his mates - the people he met on the terraces to whom he wished to appear laddish.

Margaret had no interest in football. She regarded the red and white hordes who periodically trooped past her bay window as some kind of natural phenomenon, like a plague of frogs. She learned not to invite friends over for lunch on Saturday afternoons. She grew used to being segregated from fans in the Arsenal tube station, watching guiltily as they were herded into the separate tunnel of their rat-run. She became accustomed to the closed-off streets, the suspended parking bays, the colour co-ordinated families, the makeshift souvenir stalls selling booklets, flags, scarves, T-shirts and rattles, the neighbours who ran out into the road to collect the horse-droppings from the mounted police for their gardens, or who turned the fronts of their houses into tea and sandwich shops. The fans were just another vexatious and slightly mysterious part of life, like wondering why garages sell charcoal briquettes in winter or why Rolf Harris never gets any older.

So she lived with the sharp smell of frying onions and beefburgers, the nights being lit as bright as day, the packets of chips chucked over her gate, the cans of Special Brew lefton her front windowsill, the local supermarkets bumping up their prices on Saturdays, the Scots boys for whom her bedraggled front garden held eerie allure as a urinal, the spontaneous outbursts of singing, the great endless flow of generally good-natured people. She accepted it all as something that came with the house, a permanent fixture, like having a pylon in the garden.

Eventually she rather liked it. She liked watching fathers pass by with their hands on the shoulders of their sons. She had given birth to two beautiful daughters. It was no coincidence that Kenneth's interest in football and marriage ebbed from this point. Soon he became indifferent to the point of vanishing altogether, and Margaret raised her children alone. He let her keep the house, which was falling into disrepair, and moved into the more spaciously appointed Westbourne Grove residence of a sometime nightclub singer who appreciated his record collection.

And through the years Margaret watched from her window as the great red and white sea trudged back and forth. It seemed strange that such a vast cross-section of humanity could remain so placid, but there was rarely any trouble in the street. A grudge match against Tottenham Hotspur would occasionally create a small explosive pocket of anger ending with shouts and the sound of broken bottles, and on one late summer afternoon somebody slipped a hand through her open bay window to steal the handbag she had foolishly left lying on a chair, but such incidents were spaced far apart across the seasons.

The girls grew tall, developing in a curious way that mixed coarse humour with immaculate behaviour. By the age of ten they were already growing familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle, but also knew the words to popular songs like 'You're Going Home in the Back of an Ambulance' and 'My Old Man Said "Be an Arsenal Fan", I Said "Fuck Off, Bollocks, You're a Cunt".' They weren't really fans, but so much of their lives had been played out before the audience that ebbed around the house, they knew more about the Arsenal and its people than seasoned veterans.

Times remained hard for Margaret and her children. Her maintenance cheques had to be extracted with threats. She feared the future. One Saturday afternoon she sat in her front garden in the slanting autumn sunlight and cried a little. The girls were both out with friends, and she was feeling alone and saddened by the knowledge that she would one day lose them when a grinning young man called at her from the ocean of people shuffling past, 'Hey, cheer up missus, can't be that bad, come along with us and have a laugh!' and she smiled and wiped her eyes and got up, and got on.

After that, she never felt alone on Saturdays.

But she met a man, a red-headed minicab driver seven years her junior called Malcolm, and in her desperation to overlook his faults she ignored his worst; his disrespect for everything except her sexuality. After the first time he hit her, he apologised for hours and even cried, and quoted the Bible, and treated her nicely for several weeks.

The girls stayed out of his way. He was infuriated by the creativity of their swearing (something they did naturally as a consequence of where they lived) and forced them to attend services at a bleak little baptist church near his cab office in Holloway, although they only managed to go three times. It seemed to Margaret that he stared at her girls too hard, sometimes with dead-eyed hatred, and sometimes with a little too much liking. He was an unhappy man, embittered by his lot in life, yet he could be kind and supportive, and she needed him, and the affair drifted on long enough for him to be given his own front door key.

But there came a time when she wanted it back, and she wanted him out. She knew that he looked upon the three of them as godless and doomed. He nagged at Margaret to be a better mother. He complained that she was disorganised, forgetful, useless, a lousy housekeeper. He worked nights and slept days, forcing her to creep around and hold her breath each time she dropped something. He warned the girls against forming undesirable friendships after school, then enforced the warning with a curfew. He did not approve of Margaret's friends, who were Caribbean and Greek and Indian and nothing at all like the suburban couples his parents invited over for barbecues. Little by little the house in Avenell Road became a prison with limited visiting hours. During the day its atmosphere was sepulchral, colder and quieter than the street outside.

Then the new season began. The Gunners played well and ascended the league table, swelling the gate and filling the streets with more fans than ever before. There was to be a midweek charity match for a beloved retiring player. By half past six that Wednesday evening the tide of fans had risen to a deluge. Gillespie Road and Plimsoll Road were at a standstill. The floodlights had given the backstreets the brightness of Las Vegas. Malcolm strode about the living room shouting, and Margaret became frightened that he would smack her again. He was annoyed that she had allowed the girls to bring friends to the house while he was trying to sleep. She knew he took 'jellies' - tamarzepam - to sleep, and suspected that this addiction was the cause of his mood-swings, but she could not bring herself to discuss the matter with him.

'If I don't sleep I can't work, and that means no money for any of us, do you understand?'

'I don't take anything from you,' she complained. 'I provide for the girls.' To cut a long story short, she asked for the front door key back and he refused to return it. Margaret's oldest daughter was away on a school trip, and Caroline, the younger one, was hovering by the kitchen door chewing a fingernail, listening to the escalating row. When she heard the screech of furniture shifting and something - a vase? - knocked over, then silence, she ran into the room to find her mother sitting on the floor with a look of surprise on her face, as if she had just slipped over while learning to ice-skate.

When Malcolm advanced on her again she yelped and scuttled into the hall like a frightened dog, and Caroline was ashamed of her mother's cowardly behaviour. 'Fucking kill you,' she heard him say, and now he had something in his hand, a poker she thought, but by this time she had opened the front door and was calling out for help. He said something about 'everyone knowing our business' and made to hit her because she was embarrassing him, but Caroline pulled her mother through the door into the front garden and stared desperately into the relentless crowds.

Which must have helped because there he was right in front of them, the grinning young man in his red and white scarf, him or someone very much like him, calling out 'Oi, you wanna hand? Is he botherin' you?', and she must have looked grateful because here were outstretched hands, dozens of hands, lifting her and her daughter over the garden wall, and into the crowd, over the heads of so many fathers and sons, cresting the human surf faster and faster, bearing them away from danger on the same surf that turned to crash against her attacker, to push him back, and the more Malcolm tried to struggle the more they pinned him down, so that it appeared as if he had been thrown into a boiling river with his clothes stuffed full of rocks.

Margaret and her daughter were borne aloft by the living wave, away into the beating heart of the maelstrom. The crowd was singing as it worked to protect them. It was here that she saw she had entirely misunderstood the football match. The centre of this mighty organism was not the pitch, not the game itself but the surrounding weight of life in the stands, in the street, a force that made her dizzy with its strength and vitality. Yet the centre was as hushed and calm as the eye of a hurricane, and it was here that the crowd set them down. Watching the men, women and children dividing around them like a living wall she momentarily felt part of something much larger. She somehow connected with the grander scheme for the first time in her life.