The Quantity Theory of Insanity (25 page)

And who exactly is to say that Sandy, Mr Rabindarath’s arthritic old labrador, with greying muzzle and shambolic walk, is not entitled to his place on the board of Ocean Ltd? Even if his identity had to be constructed for him, pieced together from headstone to birth certificate, to passport, to bank account. Mr Sandy Eccles is an accomplished fact now. His name appears on our letterhead. He is casually
referred to by one and all and pictured periodically in the eyes of numerous minds, powering his Vauxhall down great swathes of motorway, listening to Radio Two. Shirtsleeved, his jacket dangling from a hook behind his head, confident that he’s going to close that sale …

I must say that I congratulate myself … well done, old chap! This living-room is a bold testament to your struggle against anxiety. Everything seems to be right in its place, there’s nothing that jars the eye. The village of books, the chair set at a precise angle, the wedge of newsprint, the fan of album covers, all good rugs of media. Nicely offsetting the restrained beige of the carpet. Magnolia may not be an inspired choice for wall-covering but it is restful. And as for the furniture, surely it is the right decision to play it down, keep it modern, but not too … After all, the shape of the room, the metal-divided, six-pane windows, none of it would support anything but angularity and pastels.

This folk song. I really hate it, it says nothing to me. But steady now, I’ve tried jazz, flirted with the classics, run through a gamut of rock, reggae, fusion and soul. They didn’t work; they all skittered out of the speakers as so much senseless timpani. I cannot hear rhythm or melody, I must confine myself to songs about battered children and alcoholic old men. They might be real. No time to change the record, anyway. It’s time for what the papers say …

And looking first of all this morning at last month’s
Hendon Advertiser
we see that St Peter’s Mount held a Bring and Buy Sale that was hugely successful and raised £176.000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. Especial congratulations go … apparently … to Mrs Tyler, for organising the event and for baking no less than twenty ginger cakes. Hmmmn, hmm, a powerful lead story, strongly backed by
items on new bus shelters, a mobility scheme for the elderly and the retirement of a long-serving school dinner lady. There she is on page five, beaming over an ornamental barometer. Editorial? Let me see … riffle, riffle, riffle. A-ha! Dog mess, as I suspected. That perennial and coiled question. It won’t go away, will it. It affects the polity of the Finchley municipality much as the Irish Question dominated late nineteenth-century Britain.

But the real news is at the very back of the paper. After full-page ads for shock absorbers and such, we find the small ads; and here is the full pathos of life. Pathos that inheres not just in the advertisements themselves:

Travelling suitcase, hardly used, clean inside and out.
£3.00.
671 0042 after 6.00 pm

or,

MFI shelving units. Seven 5′ x 1′6″.
£15.00. Will consider part-ex for coffee table/similar.
229 5389 (days)

and

Tit Bits
, Nos 148 – 546. Suit Collector.
£40.00 ono
229 4917 after 8.30 pm

but also in one’s attitude towards them. I betray myself here. Gavin would never read the small ads in the
Hendon Advertiser
. He glances only at glossy spreads where women
with hips so high they must know Dr Moreau undulate down the Promenades des Anglais, selling smelly water, Euro-box cars, whatever …

The serrated edge of the type on these little advertisements. It drags me down, and what’s worse is that I can see myself reading them and see myself seeing myself. All too vertiginous again. I’ll have to abandon the papers. And pick up a book … How To … How To … something … With a blue cover and white dots. The Dewey decimal system used for bullet points that shoot between my tired eyes. I’ve been up for too long to absorb:

1.21 Infrastructural debits cannot be handled by a day-to-day spreadsheet analysis.

Quite so … quite so … and it follows, so it does, that:

1.22 Invisibles must be separated prior to any medium-term strategic plan.

That’s been my mistake. Not separating those damn invisibles. Here am I, in a position of responsibility, a board member of a fairly substantial import/wholesale outfit, a certified accountant and I’m still really letting those invisibles get to me. Invisibles and intangibles – like the wet, iron-tasting squish of turmeric paste, or the small ads’ pathos, this is a retching matter. And I’m the man for it, with my inexhaustible supplies of salty bile, with my cheddar gorge. I can feel my diaphragm undulate … come now, not in front of the children,
pas devant les engafangas
. Concentration on some apparently useless but therapeutic task is what I need to pull me through. Rearrange the autodidactic village, so
that all the roofs are parallel and rake up at the same angle. Yes, I can just reach them all from my chair. The blood is rushing to my head as I lower my miniature crane of a claw of a hand. Fucking wart! A pox on you wart! Hell’s bolt on my arm, an arm saturated like a sponge with seeping watery infection. The senselessness of the task. Don’t you realise I’m in pain here?

‘I’m not worried about security for this loan at all.’ The Child Banker sat behind the angled blotter, his face worryingly unlined.

‘Everything seems in order as far as already established collateral is concerned and …’ Coffee cooled uselessly in Star Trek beakers. Gavin shifted in his chair, his suit a vague swathe of blue in the Rembrandt brown of the Child Banker’s office, his attache case propped open on the corner of the desk. Inside it a miniature world: memo pad, filofax, brochures for Ocean Ltd, keys, pens and some of our different kinds of children. Currently fostered but, with the Child Banker’s assistance, scheduled for – albeit temporary – adoption. I watched as the Child Banker drew a pad towards him and affectedly added columns of figures with pretty strokes of his fountain pen. A little girl in a pinstripe suit floated in the gloom over his right shoulder, flicking digits on to a green screen that from time to time scrolled upward in bright streaks. The Child Banker turned the sheets of foolscap round so that we could see what he’d written; the bottom line was thirty-eight per cent. Thirty-eight per cent. We would have to bring those children up and send them into the world so fast, so bloody fast.

‘There’s no problem.’ Gavin unlocked the green door and we stepped into the clammy passageway.

‘Look here …’ Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post was loosely stacked, leaning up against the wall, on top of the plywood housing that covered some hernia of the aching house, the gas or electricity meter, bursting from the bellied wall. Gavin snapped open the envelope and scanned the letter.

‘They’re on their way, one hundred gross. The paperwork is with the shipper at the terminal. They’ll be here the day after tomorrow.’

Mr Rabindarath came footing round the bend in the stairs. Sandy, aka ‘Mr Eccles’, padding by his side. Mr Rabindarath wore a very long gaberdine mac that covered him to his feet. He headed on down and passed us, blank eyes recessed into his grey, eroded face. His prescription was clutched in one hand and in the other he held a child’s blue plastic spade which bore Mr Eccles’ toothmarks.

‘Not so good I’m afraid,’ Gavin was reading a letter addressed to Sandy in his capacity as marketing manager of Ocean Ltd, ‘they seem to be getting rather cold feet in Hamburg, I’ll have to go over. I’m sure they’ll be no trouble once I get there, Horst just needs a little babying. You stay here, transship the goods. No sense in warehousing them, it’ll simply eat into our profits. Keep them at your place. It’ll only be for a night …’

We left the house and walked down the North End Road. Gavin seemed not to notice the oppressively low sky, or the sad juxtaposition of tatty mullioned windows with dirty sheet glass. He was erect and going somewhere. But the city held me to it, like some dried and crusty discharge mirroring the Artexed wall, above the meter, where Mr Rabindarath and Mr Eccles’ post had lain.

*     *     *

Gavin took me to the Savoy for a farewell tea and we ate crumpets and drank Earl Grey at the bottom of that great sunken swirl of carpeting. Waiters came and went with the softest of footfalls, bringing and taking thick crockery and heavy, stainless steel vessels. The crisp, white linen of the tablecloth and the crisp, white linen of my napkin, folded into each other on my lap. Gavin talked about Ocean Ltd and his sex life as if they were one and the same and chopped the air vigorously with his hands. Stubby hands with spatulate fingers and recessed nails, Gavin’s hands were like someone else’s shoulders.

I couldn’t concentrate. I became fixated by the details: the underside of a leaf on a rubber plant, the ridged rubber rim of a waiter’s shoe, the precise three-button belly bulge of a fat man at an adjacent table, and eventually by the green-gold pelmets capping the great swathes of drapery at the end of the room. A pelmet isn’t a piece of furniture, but nor, on the other hand, is it merely decorative. These pelmets were vast, adult versions of my little purple pelmets at home. The curtains cascaded down from them to the floor. They were fringed with hooks of gold thread. Gavin waved buttered toast about and I couldn’t wait to get home, to my chair and my bubble and the quiet part of the night.

That was thirty-six hours ago. For thirty-two of them, or thereabouts, I have sat here. Excursions to the toilet, the fridge, to supervise the unloading of the children. There has been one phone call from Gavin: everything is going well. I’m just to sit tight and wait for his call and then fill out the pro-forma invoice which coils out of the old Unwin on the dining-room table. An undemanding way to make a living, or so I think. I’m privileged in my house, which is only
superficially attached to the other houses strung out alongside an isolated rectangle of green in the midst of the suburbs. My truncated garden is backed up by another, the same and the same to east and west. My house is built into the next one, but only brick deep. Inside it is a tardis, far larger than anyone can imagine. It is an island, separated from the rest of Brent, floating in a viscous bath of salty, crusted fluid.

Damn it all, I should make an EEC declaration when I transfer objects from one room of this house to the next, or even mental objects within my own head. Yes, that’s it. Declarations of intent: stating the purpose of the thought, its resale value and so on. The problem is not to attach such a declaration (in triplicate) to each thought. It is simply that there is no one there to check it, no customs men. Nothing new, except mile upon mile of dun-coloured tundra, unrolling under a sky that matches it, for flatness, for billowing featurelessness, excepting for here, and there, the brackish open sore of a peaty pool, fringed with sedge.

Breakfast television starts in half an hour. I’ve just checked my watch. There’s two certainties. Two pieces of evidence … that add up to … my control: real evidence of my control over my environment. There’s a certain homeliness about a cardigan … at 6.30 in the morning, worn by an avuncular man … on a screen. It’s the kind of assurance that I need. I must find that bastard child the remote controller … a complete misnomer. There’s nothing remote about the control I exercise with it, one push of the soft stud and the television will spring into life … I can check out the test card and the occasional notices they issue at this hour of forthcoming programmes.

Where is the bastard child? My fingers skate nervelessly
over the carpet, sketching out the faint raggedy afterimage of those once firm and solid purple bars. Gone … gone … gonnie! Nothing now but the grey wash of near dawn and the fading yellow pool around my chair, marking the limit of my bubble. The pictures on the opposite wall, which through the long night appeared thoroughly appropriate … full of meaning … in good taste, are now old postage stamps and curling posters on an adolescent’s bedroom wall: Snoopy, woman in tennis dress scratching her naked buttock and worse. The colour scheme in here is as anonymous and inhospitable as a supermarket aisle, or the neglected lobby of a large corporation.

My hand is heavy with blood. I long to clutch its slim, cool blackness and feel the play of soft studs … so unlike … the wart! Which throbs in my inner elbow, a hard stud that promises nothing but pain. Imagine pressing it … eugh! Jesus Christ! Jee-suss Kerist! Hard, but squishy … and if I pressed it … what then … not control … but less control. Less control …

Well, bastard child. So here you are, snug in my hand, as if you’d never left, and the preview screen undulates gently across the room. 6.45 a.m.,
Good Morning Britain
. And good morning to you … I say. A simple salutation. To breathe freely I have opened the window and a fresh draught of privety air is wafting in from the front garden. In the distance I can hear the swish and roar of artics as they make up for lost time along the North Circular.

It is dawn … If I stretch out from my chair the bubble that encloses me comes too. Stretching stickily around my hand. Cling-film adhesion that turns me into a Cyberman. Time to stand up again, free my clothes where they’ve
melded to my body, move around the room a little, gently shaking my limbs. Another night… another dollar. What a doddle. Huh! Futile really to read so many books on self-improvement … Here … I’ll gather them up now and put them away on the shelf. What we need in here is a certain orderliness with which to face the morning. Ch-onk. They fall on to the shelves … and I’ll gather up these album covers that are fanned out over the floor … and stack them here … and now the free newspapers that silt up the wedge between my chair and the wall…
voila
. Now all I can see is a conventional room in a conventional house, with breakfast television about to be watched, by me: Company Director.

We went out on the town. That is, those directors of Ocean Ltd who weren’t rocking spasmodically in their rooms, or slavering over blue plastic spades. We had just finished opening the last line of credit we required in order to make the big purchase, and Gavin and I were in high spirits. We were just two more young men out on the town. There’s nothing quite like it, is there? That feeling that you’re somehow connected, at the centre of things. You’re walking down Old Compton Street and this is your burgh, your village.