Observatory Mansions (2 page)

Before the new resident arrived there was perfect stagnation. Years had sat on years and we had not been able to distinguish any difference between them. We were growing older, true, but since we saw each other every day, we had all (as if in conspiracy) not noticed, or pretended not to notice, the particulars of ageing. Our home was a different matter. It is probable that many of us were keenly aware of our home’s slow but gradual disintegration – on every floor large strips of the ubiquitous blue and white wallpaper had peeled itself from the walls, the carpets were faded and full of holes, the banisters on the top floor, where the cheaper, smaller flats were, had already collapsed. The plumbing was somewhat erratic. The electricity frequently failed.

We who lived in Observatory Mansions were a small and peculiar group of people. Group is perhaps the wrong word since it was only because we lived in the same building that we could in any way be thought of as belonging to one another. Or perhaps we had become alike after spending so much time in solitude, the more time people spend alone the more difficult they become. How strange the people are who, past a certain age, find themselves blocked in every direction, these people who are convinced they will no longer be employed, these people who live alone. And of course they spend their time working out how to get by or thinking about their pasts, but they have only themselves to reminisce with. And how dull that is, how painful it is when it is only, day after day, their own reflection that appears in the mirror. How they long to get away from themselves, not just to get
out of their own skins but to get out of their pasts and presents and futures; to leave, in short, everything that has anything to do with them behind for ever.

But I liked to think of these people as pure people, as concentrated people, or, to put it another way, as how everyday people would be if they were subtracted from work, friends, family and all the motions of life which we are told we should take part in. These people are obsessive; sometimes it is easy to spot them, sometimes not. Sometimes when you see them about the city their eccentricities make you laugh, but more often they make you feel miserable. They are a rare group of individuals, bizarre creatures, who seem to have walked out of strange, dark fairy tales, but they are real enough, they are about, they are to be found amongst cities’ Coca-Cola signs, evening paper stands, waiting for the traffic lights to change with the rest of us. We seven from Observatory Mansions were a little like that.

We seven
.

For years we had been used to residents leaving. Residents either packed up and left, or died in their flats and were taken away. After their departure the flats remained empty and with each vacation our home seemed larger and larger. It was well known to us that the value of our individual flats, though once good, had been steadily decreasing and that if we decided to sell we would be unlikely to find a buyer.

Observatory Mansions was designed to house twenty-four different families but, just before the new resident came, only seven individuals lived there. It was supposed that that number would be likely to gradually decrease but most unlikely ever to increase. All we were worried about was being the last person remaining. Living in our vast home, walking around all those empty flats, perpetually alone, was not something to look forward to. Though we were not happy together,
and though we were only intermittently friendly towards each other, though many of us lived in virtual solitude, there was some solace to be drawn from the fact that our misery was not borne alone. It was shared, between seven. There was a certain pleasure, or fraternity, to be gathered from living with people whose lives had ended as unspectacularly as each other’s. We had little to look forward to. Little changed. The only change was the occasional arrival of demolition experts who appeared, uninvited, and never stayed very long. On their first visit, some twelve years ago, we were naturally worried. The demolition experts arrived with representatives of the property company that owned Observatory Mansions, the company that paid the Porter. We waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. The fear, though, we had been able to share, between seven. For a while we communicated with each other, dividing our anxiety. When a suitable amount of time had expired, and it appeared to us that nothing, in fact, was going to happen, we each returned to our solitude. We shut up our doors, ended communication until the next visit by the demolition experts. Each time the visits caused us less worry. We had convinced each other that nothing was actually going to happen, so much so that on the last visit, before the new resident came, we paid no attention to our uninvited demolition experts and did not even consider opening our doors to each other.

We continued, waiting patiently for the moment when one of us would be the last person left in our home, for the time when there would be no one left to ignore. Solitude is only good when surrounded by other people. I, being the youngest resident, had the most to fear. I was thirty-seven at the time the new resident arrived. It may be presumed then that I would be glad to have another resident in our home, but that was not the case. It was not the case with any of us, and this is the great contradiction with the lonely. Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to
be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.

Though we did not necessarily enjoy our condition of loneliness, we were at least used to it. It was dependable, almost a friend. We wanted nothing to change. Though we longed not to be the last resident, we also longed for our anodyne days to remain the same. We wanted no noises. We wanted no sudden movements.

On the day before the new resident came we were all united in an all-consuming anxiety. We had not yet opened our doors to each other, but the option was there. We could feel the door handles twitching. We were restless. We entertained the possibility that the new resident might be a person, like us, who deplored sociability. We entertained the possibility that the new resident would be old or dying, and could perhaps even die during his first night here. We entertained the possibility that the new resident might take one look at our home and decide to leave. If that were the case we would be offended for a few minutes and afterwards relieved for eternity.

There was nothing we could do but wait and make his stay with us, which we were sure would be short, unpleasant. But no one was more worried than I, being the youngest resident in our home and subsequently the one, if the new resident proved neither to be old nor to be dying, most likely to suffer his company for the longest time.

The day came
.

It was a bright morning. It should not have been, it should have been overcast. It was a pleasant late spring day. It should not have been, it should have been shrouded in miserable winter pessimism.

I was up early, I had fed my mother, my father and myself. I suppose that many people would, if they woke up at the age
of thirty-seven to find themselves living with their parents, be filled with dread. To them, spending every day with their parents would be suffocating; those people would feel cramped, they would say that the air they breathed was somehow contaminated. Perhaps they would even kneel by their beds at night, as good children do, and pray that their parents be dead by morning, as bad children do. That was not the case with me, I was not unhappy living with my parents.

On the morning of the day that the new resident came to us, I crouched by the door waiting for noises. Silence. At half past eight I had to leave home to go to work. I climbed the stairs to flat eighteen, the door was open, the flat bare. He had still not come. The only life from the third floor was the friendliness pouring out of Miss Higg’s pet television set in flat sixteen.

I had to go to work.

The journey to work
.

I usually travelled to work by using the public bus service. Any person who could produce the correct amount of money on request was entitled to sit in its confines and endure the rather dubious comfort of its dirty and ripped seats. The dirt was, of course, perilous to my white gloves, and whilst on board I had to be careful not to touch anything. The bus was old, but it moved. It moved but slowly. Its driver was a young man who had surely failed all his school examinations and was thus forced to endure for the term of his working life the daily ignominy of driving this dinosaur of locomotion. This man had also to suffer the screams, giggles, dirt, loves and hates of the schoolchildren: the bus was the school bus too. It trundled all the local children to their hours of misery every day during school time. When school was on holiday it was possible to see who the bus’s other users were. There were various diagnosed imbeciles. Among the imbeciles was
Michael, a giant of a man, more sensitive, I believed, than the others. Michael was always observing, he examined each of his fellow passengers, considering them through his delicate blue eyes. The imbeciles went to school too, a different type of school. This school did not teach them history or languages, mathematics or science. This school taught them to be happy, to smile, to read their digital watches and, most of all, not to worry. The other passengers were mainly old men and old women, sometimes couples, mostly not. The old were off for a trip in the city centre where they would sit in cafés, underneath flashing electric signs, listening bemused to the vapid music, sipping tea and coffee, sighing and drooping. Two other passengers I found worthy of attention. The first was a small boy with bright fair hair, who was always accompanied by his dark-haired mother (though she barely deserves a mention and is easily forgotten). The boy wore glasses and one of the lenses was gummed over so that it could not be looked out of. This was because the boy had a squint. By using only his squinty eye, that eye was supposed to slowly repair itself. I do not think it ever did. The other passenger was a man in his forties, stunted by timidity. This man was a poet, he wrote beautiful odes to trees, flowers and country animals which he had not seen since he was a child. He was reminded of them by photographs he found in the city library. And it was the city library where the bus would drop him. And myself too.

The day of the arrival of the new resident was during school time and the sad bus was full of children. Some of the children were inevitably female. And some of those female children were inevitably pubescent. These girls would usually sit by the bus driver and stare at his hairy arms and talk to him, lift their skirts, make him laugh, encourage him to pinch them.

We passed the shops, the burger restaurants, still quite new to our city, with their clean plastic signs. We passed the
large supermarket, one of three we have here, each of which employs an army of pathetically thin, pale girls with peroxided blonde hair. What exotic delights there are to be found there: ostrich steaks, pulped papaya, a drink called Sex on the Beach. En route to my work that day I saw a curious sight, something new. A vehicle moving slower than our bus was blocking the traffic in the opposite direction. This vehicle was cleaning the streets. It is a fact that our city is dirty and repugnant. It is a fact that dust covers every object moving and stationary. This vehicle was in its slow but methodical way attempting to remedy the dirt of our city. I had never seen a vehicle designed to shampoo streets before and neither, judging by their reactions, had the other inhabitants of our city. The vehicle was new, it glistened. People stared in wonder at the machine and carefully stepped over the clean path it left behind.

After the school exodus and peace came the library. The poet and I descended. There is no darkness but ignorance, said a stone above the library’s portal. And by this threat bent people’s backs and kept the opticians in business. I walked to the door in the library labelled GENTLEMEN, for such a type am I, and behind the locked door of a cubicle, readied myself for work.

The work
.

There is, in our city, in the centre of our city, that part of our city most populated by people with a little excess money, that part of our city where people who are not from the city are most likely to visit, a plinth. A statue plinth. A statue plinth lacking a statue. A statue plinth which once had letters on it naming the statue that once stood upon it. The statue had gone, the letters on the plinth had been erased.

It was on that statue plinth, in the centre of the city, that I worked. The words erased on the plinth could perhaps have
said my name, for no one else used it but me. Had it said my name, it would have said: FRANCIS ORME. What was the work that I was employed in whilst standing on that statue plinth? I was a statue, I pretended to be a statue. For this occupation I earned enough money to feed myself, to feed Mother, to feed Father and even occasionally, when I felt the need, to feed a man named Peter Bugg.

I wore white. White cotton gloves, as has already been admitted, these I always wore, but, when busy at my employment, I wore whiteness everywhere, not just on my hands. White linen shrouding my body, a white curled wig to conceal my not-white hair, white trousers, white shirt, white waistcoat, white tie, white face. I painted my face white every day before work commenced. I blotted out all those little moles, freckles and the swollen bottom lip that signified Francis Orme. I stood without identity, a statue of whiteness.

I stood two feet from the ground, elevated by my plinth. Beneath me was a tin box in which coins were placed as the day’s work progressed. One other thing is necessary to mention: in my right hand I held a white enamel pot. In that pot was a small stick of white plastic with a wire hoop at its end. In that pot was a soap mixture. I stood still, holding the pot, with my eyes closed. When I heard a coin drop I would open my eyes, take the plastic stick with the wire hoop at its end from the enamel pot and blow out soap bubbles to the person who had dropped me the coin. The soap bubbles were an annoyance that I had to put up with. If people part with money they demand some compensation. Soap bubbles were the cheapest compensation I could think of. After I had blown out a soap bubble I would close my eyes, resume my pose and remain absolutely still until I heard another coin drop. Then I would open my eyes, move and blow out another soap bubble.