The Quantity Theory of Insanity (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

‘Then we can pay off the loans.’

‘And the credit cards.’

‘And the credit cards.’

‘And the current accounts.’

‘And the current accounts.’

‘And the charge cards.’

‘Yeah, and the frigging charge cards.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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