Observatory Mansions (8 page)

Strange events in the park
.

I could not immediately find the new resident in the park, though I did see a mother consoling her wailing son as the pair looked unsuccessfully, desperately, for a lost toy Concorde. When I did see the new resident, I noted to my dissatisfaction that she was near the broken fountain, looking at a chalk drawing created by the girl that I had known for two years. I was further betrayed that day. The new resident spoke to the girl.
The girl spoke back
.

What followed can only be described by that hideous word, chatting. They chatted as if they were long-lost friends. Words tumbled out of them both. Indeed it looked to me, sitting a safe distance away on a park bench, that they were having problems getting the words out fast enough. I was amazed how freely they conversed. The words moved up their bodies through pipes inside them and gushed out of their mouths. I had heard rumours of these sort of people. These people who could, seemingly without any effort, communicate with every single living person. These people who by their mere presence were able to open up the lid of the
most closed person and look inside, without causing any damage to the person whatsoever. In fact the person probably even enjoyed the experience.

I was so taken by the novelty of the uninhibited communication that day that I would have, had I not been Francis Orme, enjoyed the spectacle of it. It would have made me smile. It would have made me feel light and alive. It would have done, but it did not. Taking that joy of speaking and placing it inside Observatory Mansions, I saw dangerous times ahead of us. I saw doors opening, I saw secrets unearthed. It is known that such a type of conversation, as I was then witnessing, was relaxing, and relaxation is a danger. During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Finally, their conversation was over. The new resident went to another part of the park. To my delight, that other part of the park, that corner of patchy grass that she chose, was well known for being occupied by a certain terror of a person. A loather of humanity. A misanthrope on all fours. Twenty. Dog Woman.

A word about Twenty, Dog Woman
.

Twenty, we other residents believed, was to be greatly pitied. We had decided that she was the product of some unspeakable domestic unpleasantness. Probably, we thought, she was from the countryside. For in the countryside, isolated and quiet, so many unthinkable crimes can happen. We imagined her chained up as a child. Probably, we thought, in a dog shed. Probably, we thought, with only a dog for companionship. She was fed on scraps, we decided, which she shared with the dog. She had not been taught to speak. She was what is known as a feral child. At some point her parents, her keepers, must have died – or perhaps Twenty had escaped from them.
On this we were not decided, this we argued over. We were, however, collectively convinced that somehow she escaped her terrible predicament and, with her dog companion, had entered the city. The dog, as was well known, died in one of the ground-floor apartments of Observatory Mansions. Afterwards, she had decided to stay with us, in the place that was honoured by the dog’s grave.

We had read, admittedly rare, accounts of feral children in our newspapers. These reports encouraged us to decide Twenty’s appalling past.

Yes, Twenty was pitiable indeed.

The taming of Twenty, Dog Woman
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Twenty, Dog Woman, did not permit anything to trespass on to her piece of patchy grass. Occasionally dogs wandered casually up to it, generally to sniff at Twenty, but they were soon chased away. Humans found the piece of grass an unpleasant place to stop, and walked on. The piece of grass wasn’t the problem, it was what lay on top of it: a woman, dirty, greasy, with a dog’s collar around her neck, dressed in ripped clothes and dogs’ hairs, smelling of a sewer. She was an offence to the olfactory senses, a point which no doubt pleased her greatly, as anything did that kept human contact at bay. Dogs, however, seemed to find her stench fascinating, and would, when invited, happily nuzzle between her legs; the place, I presumed, where the strongest odours were kept. Twenty lay on her belly on the grass, lightly dozing, just as she had been when I saw her earlier that day. When the new resident approached, she opened her eyes and stood up. On all fours. The new resident sat on the grass – three metres from Twenty. Twenty at first looked surprised, then her backside went up (indicating her rising hackles) and she began to growl. But the resident did not move. The resident smiled. This smile may have worked on other people, may have
worked on the chalk artist, may have worked on the man with bathroom scales, may even have worked on the Porter. It did not work on Twenty. Twenty growled, her lips curled up, her eyes stuck out. She was offended. This was her patch after all, what right did this cigarette smoking, bespectacled biped have on it? Truly this woman was amazing. She was the sort of person who walked all over other people’s privacy; the sort of person who, when walking along a country path, would come across the inevitable sign saying PRIVATE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT and deliberately enter.

But Twenty was not allowing it. She barked. She bared her teeth. Black and yellow they were. She growled closer, so close that her nose was practically touching the new resident’s face. I thought I ought to call out to the new resident, tell her that she was in danger. I thought I ought to perhaps warn her that unless she moved she would surely be bitten. I thought I ought to take her away from that place, instruct her never to go there again. That is Twenty’s patch, I ought to have said, and no one goes near Twenty’s patch, unless you’re a dog and only then if you’re invited. All this I ought to have said and done. Instead I did nothing, I sat and watched. I smiled, I stroked my gloves and thought what really I ought not to have thought at all. I thought:
Go on, Twenty, bite her. Bite her! Make it really hurt
.

And Twenty did. Twenty bit her on the hand, and blood trickled out of the new resident’s hand and tears sprang up in her eyes, testifying that the bite certainly hurt. There, I thought, now you know. Leave Twenty alone, the pain will go away, the wound will heal up, go home, bandage your hand, dry your tears. But the infuriating new resident did not budge an inch, instead she raised up her hand to Twenty, Dog Woman, inviting her to have another go. It was as if she were saying – Go ahead, Twenty, Dog Woman, take the whole arm off for all I care, I have another. Twenty looked at the hand, considered it, considered what the offering meant. If she had
a tail she would surely have stopped wagging it at that instant, for the offering of hand, and arm too if required, meant only one thing: that the new resident was not frightened of Twenty. Twenty was confused. I, a short distance away, was confused also. The new resident looked determined. She pushed her hand towards Twenty’s face, and then the first extraordinary thing happened – Twenty backed away.

The new resident stood up, Twenty backed further away. The new resident raised her hand higher than Twenty’s jaw level, to head level. She placed her hand on the top of Twenty’s head, on Twenty’s hair. And then the second extraordinary thing happened – she started stroking Twenty, the Dog Woman. And Twenty, the Dog Woman, let herself be stroked.

Five minutes later the new resident was sitting down on the piece of patchy grass formerly considered Twenty’s property, with Twenty’s head in her lap, stroking, still, Twenty’s hair. Twenty smiled contentedly. (Now, I would not have touched Twenty’s hair for the world, I had my gloves to think of. I feared for the new resident’s hands.) In this manner, sitting an inconspicuous distance away, I watched the happy coupling for half an hour – the new resident stroking and smoking, Twenty smiling and sighing – until I was unavoidably distracted.

A brief history concerning passport photographs
.

My passport photograph collection began when I had ended my habit of going for walks in the city (shortly after Tearsham Park had changed its name to Observatory Mansions). I set off from home and looked about the city for an interesting person to follow. When I had found such a person, I would simply follow him or her, at a discreet distance. Sometimes I would follow a man, sometimes a woman. I made no preferences. The first interesting person that came
my way would be followed. Regardless of sex. Or of age. Or of race. I would follow the chosen person for as long as they walked. I would observe them, and as I observed them I imagined for myself the sort of life that that person was living. I did not much care if my imaginings were accurate or not. What mattered was that I felt at the end of the day that I had met someone new. These walks sometimes lasted a long period of time, hours perhaps, sometimes only a mere few minutes. It was not important. What was important was that I felt, however briefly, that I had witnessed a moment in an interesting person’s life. It may not have been an interesting moment. I did not care. I had been close to an interesting person, someone, perhaps, whom I might have liked to have made friends with. But I found friends were predominantly absent things. I had only one true friend, but I did not meet him until I had begun my employment at the waxworks. My walks through the city streets were, in a way, a consolation. Through them I came as close to interesting people as I was happy to come. I would not have wished those city perambulations, those city chases, to have terminated in a conversation, less still an exchange of addresses.

My city walks were ended on the day I began my employment at the waxworks museum. Then my days were full. Our working hours were long and we were employed for seven days of the week. I could not, therefore, walk the city streets in pursuit of interesting people any more. I was confined, admittedly happily, to the waxworks museum throughout the day. In the evenings, when my work had ended, I was too tired to spend the time roaming the city in search of interesting people. Though, I remember, I missed them.

A solution came to me one day on the way to work. On a street pavement I found an abandoned passport photograph. I picked it up. I considered the face. I conceived a history for that face. I kept the passport photograph. In time I had
enough passport photographs to form a collection. This collection, though admired by me, was never a substitute for my major work: the exhibition of objects to be found in the cellar, in that tunnel that led to the church (an exhibition which itself contains a passport photograph, lot 770). It may be realized that passport photographs are not common objects to be found on city pavements. After I had found the first passport photograph, I always walked to the waxwork museum with my eyes watching the city pavements, in search of passport photographs. After three months I had only found one other passport photograph, one other face to consider. I had to change my tactics. It did not take me long to think up a solution.

Every morning I changed my route to work to include a passport photograph booth. There I preyed on the impatience of man. Passport photographs once taken are not ready for collection for a good three minutes. That is the time it takes for the machine inside the passport photograph booth to develop the passport photographs. This time, a mere three minutes, is considered interminable by a good many people. This is where I took my advantage. By the passport photograph booth that I passed on my way to the wax museum were various shops, shops with window displays, window displays with which to pass away those three minutes while the passport photographs were being developed. Often people waiting for their photographs, and looking through the shop windows to pass away the three minutes, would spend longer than three minutes there. If I saw no one approaching the booth’s photograph dispenser when a sheet of photographs plopped out, I would seize the photographs, I would call them mine and (always careful of the still-drying chemicals) I would hurriedly, in case I was seen, continue on my way to the waxworks museum. I was only caught once and made profuse apologies to the man whose passport photographs I had stolen. I told him: I thought they would be mine, I felt
I had been waiting for such a long time. I returned the photographs and he accepted my apology.

In this fashion my passport photograph collection progressed to such an extent that I had at one stage one hundred and twenty-six different passport photographs of people I had never met. For one hundred and twenty-six different faces, one hundred and twenty-six different histories were conceived.

On the afternoon in the park when the new resident had tamed Twenty, Dog Woman, I spied a forsaken passport photograph by the park bin nearest to me. It was of a young man. Thirties. Black hair, in need of a brushing. Square face, in need of a shave. Denim shirt, in need of an ironing. I struggled to imagine his life from his face. Another human being, yet another I had never seen before. What did this one know? Was he happy? Was he cruel? Did he worry? The more I stared at his face, the less I understood him. This is not unusual, the same procedure happens whenever I examine a person either on photograph or in reality: in my first glimpses I always think I can read someone fairly quickly, that the snap judgements I make are surely accurate, but the more I observe the less I understand, the more I realize how difficult the art of judging a person is.

When I looked up again from the passport photograph I saw that Twenty was lying on her patchy piece of grass alone. The new resident had gone.

Outside the church
.

I could not see her anywhere in the park. I considered immediately returning to Observatory Mansions to warn Peter Bugg that I had lost her. But if the new resident had returned to Observatory Mansions then it was already too late. If, however, she had not, then she must still be somewhere in the city and Peter Bugg could continue his work in
flat eighteen uninterrupted. I had not looked far when I was halted by an idea. The new resident smoked a great deal, she had not yet been seen without a cigarette in her mouth or in her hand. When cigarettes are finished the cigarette stub is generally discarded, thrown casually on to whatever piece of ground the smoker happens to be crossing. I could therefore follow the new resident by means of collecting her cigarette stubs. I approached Twenty, not getting too close, to pick up a cigarette stub which had certainly belonged to her (careful not to let any ash fall on my gloves, using a pair of tweezers which I always carried with me). Printed on the cigarette’s paper in black ink, just by the filter, was a circle in which was written the words LUCKY STRIKE. Now I could follow her discarded stubs through the city until I found that place where they ceased being discarded, the place where the new resident would be. I noticed that her cigarette stubs bore her teeth marks. This was useful: it meant that I was unlikely to waste time following some other person who was not the new resident, but who also smoked Lucky Strikes.