It could be me, of course. Yes, it could be.
Now I nod in the direction of the ailing Damon (never known anyone so shockingly candid about his origins: he has ‘working class’ scribbled across his features like acne), who this morning sits with a mind as blank as writing-paper in his gloomy nook by the department door. Damon’s crepuscular nook is in fact the envy of everybody in the department except — another affinity — its Controller. The office was completely open-plan when I moved in here and only with the arrival of John Hain did we succeed in forcing the management into giving us our own cubicles. (Everyone agreed that this was a necessity because everyone likes saying, on the telephone and to each other, unpleasant things about everyone else.) The result is depressing in the extreme — it’s like a cramped honeycomb of round wooden telephone-booths (which I suppose is what they are), a toytown land of mazes and hidey-holes. The only quite good place, apart from Damon’s dark nook, is the bit surrounding the broad table in the central office area, where the clerical girls sit (they’re all pretty rough at the moment but turnover is high and you never know) and which I now skirt, getting a gap-toothed smile from the lame temp who does the proofs and whom I am seriously thinking of asking out.
In my capsule, to my potent gratification, I see that a card and two letters await me on the desk. I uncap my tea cup and thoughtfully light a cigarette, my ninth of the day, before inspecting them (I take a paper-clip and pry at it with my thumbnail; I break the match in half and rub the two sticks together; I get into gear). The card I read with only half-interest, as a run-in. It is from the hand of my foster-sister Ursula and so has no true bearing on my socio-sexual self-betterment. She is in town again, learning how to become a secretary (yes, you have to learn how to become one); she wants me to take her out to dinner — a flattering irritation. (Sometimes I think she’s the best friend I have. At other times I can’t imagine minding that much if she died.) The letters. The first is from a shop-assistant I talked to twice in Cambridge and have since tracked down to Cumbria; her burden is that there’s no point in me coming all the way up there just to see her (and Barry, her husband). The second is from a girl whose address I picked from the pen-pal section of a rock magazine; she turns out to be twelve, and an upholder of the view that there’s no point in having a pen-pal who lives half-a-mile away. Fair enough, ladies, fair enough: this is, by current standards, a pretty sexy start to the morning (Miranda didn’t, incidentally. Don’t ask me why not. She kissed me, she let me smooth her breasts, she went to bed with me, she even slept with me. But she didn’t. I wanted her to, I went on at her to. But she said she didn’t want to. Don’t ask me why.
Ah fuck it, my cock’s conked out anyway. It doesn’t work any more — it’s downed tools. It can’t even masturbate properly now. I keep on thinking it’s going to retract into my body, or drop off, or just disappear — what is there to keep it here, after all? It just wants to pull the blankets over its head and forget. Sometimes I have trouble finding it in the bath. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere,’ I say. ‘I used you to pee with only half-an-hour ago.’ Even when I’m allowed to kiss girls these days — even when, as with Miranda, I get to touch their breasts or sleep in the same bed as them — it doesn’t stir. I try to have fun with it, to be nice; I tweak it, poke it, strangle it — I monkey with it every which way. But it’s dead, dead. It wants reassignment. It wants out. And who on earth am I to tell it any different?); I am dreaming up something horrible to go and make Damon do when Wark, the mad ex-Stalinist, ducks hurriedly into my cubicle. He says,
‘It’s Herbert.’
‘Christ. How do you know?’
‘John Hain took him into his office. You could tell.’
‘How?’
‘You just could.’
At this point I turn towards the window. Before he had all his murky little teeth out, Wark’s voice was rapid and distinct. Now it is slow, drunken and wet, and I can’t cope with it for more than a few seconds at a time.
‘Of course it’s Herbert,’ says Wark, with sudden wistfulness, like someone identifying a line of poetry.
‘You really think so, Geoffrey?’
‘It must be him.’
‘Good. That’s very heartening,’ I say insincerely (insincerely not because it wouldn’t be heartening if it were Herbert but because Wark is much too mad for his information to be reliable. Wark no longer appreciates the difference between what is and what is not; he no longer has any choice of what he wants to think about). ‘Of course,’ I add, ‘it might be two of us. Not just one. Herbert and one other.’
‘Of course it could be. It probably is.’ Wark says this briskly, contemptuously. I can tell the thought has never occurred to him before. But Wark likes to behave as if everything has. (Wark is all fucked up, come to think of it: no mind, no teeth, no bottle — and no job? We have the equivalent of a mental sweepstake here on how soon it will be before Wark kills himself, or goes too tonto to continue.)
‘Still, it’ll be incredibly depressing for Herbert,’ I say to cheer Wark up. ‘I know he says it won’t, but it will. He’s too old to go back to being a down-and-out. Think of all the things he — ’
‘Terry?’ says a new voice.
It is Burns — balding, moustachioed, carrying a faint tang offish on marble. Burns and Wark dislike each other more than is customary even here, so I am rather taken aback to see the ex-schoolteacher enter my capsule and wedge the door shut behind him. This must be big.
‘We think it’s Herbert,’ I tell him in pre-emptive alarm.
Burns swirls a flat hand in the air. ‘It is Herbert. But not just Herbert. A Union chappie tells me John Hain is going to gut the entire staff.’
‘Of course he will,’ says Wark indignantly. ‘Bound to. Nothing else he can do.’
‘Jesus, no,’ I begin (that fuckpig wouldn’t dare), ‘he can’t, can he? Can he? How could he? He couldn’t.’
‘Terence,’ says a new voice.
Lloyd-Jackson!
‘The Controller seems to think he’d like a word with you.’
He can. Oh yes he can. John Hain has power over us, he owns us: he can do anything he likes to us (he can kill us if he likes). He’s got the power and — rarer — he’s got the bottle. He’s got nothing else, though. And, as I walk through the office area to his room, the air misting over with danger and urgency, I see myself from-behind, my craven tread, my hair, and beyond me, through the blue window, I glimpse that second figure up in the streets of the sky, that familiar, shuffling, grubby, mackintoshed caricature, Terry the Tramp. (Gregory, you heartless bastard, what did you ever do to be like you are?) I want this job. It’s mine. They gave it to me and I’m not giving it back.
(God, the sort of things people can become, and so quickly. As a child, when I looked at shop-assistants or parkies or milkmen — or anyone else going about their business — I assumed they had always wanted to be the things they were, as if there’d never been any choice in the matter, as if none of it could ever have changed. These creatures seemed unvolatile; surely they did not harbour vitality and appetite. But now I see that practically no one wants to be what they are. They may not especially want to be anything else, but, boy, they don’t want to be what they are.)
‘Morning, Terry. Kathy, leave us alone for a moment, all right? Sit, sit. Now. Tell me what you think of the job you do here.’
Don’t ask me. Tell me what to say. Tell me what to say and I’ll say it.
(ii) In a saner world, of course, one
would expect to be able to zoom
off to work in one’s expensive
green car — GREGORY
And my day — how does it start?
Unpleasantly. Ill. The flat I live in is an eldest son’s flat: it is designed for one person: it is designed for me. The spacious drawing-room, with its high knobbly cornice, serried bookcases, and white blaze of window, was, in days of yore, an ample stage upon which the blessed young Ridings could muse and wander, wander
and muse — then saunter down the curved wooden steps to the stylish vestibule, along the cupboard-walk to what was once a perfectly good bedroom, and off it a dressing-room, where a man could dress, and off that a bathroom, where a man could bath. Now we share it. Oh well.
Due, then, to the perversely imperial design of my flat, the day begins with a quite traumatic glimpse of its second inhabitant, Terence Service. The blacking-factory he works for, do you see, requires him to be at its premises no later than 9 a.m., and Terry, a good simple lad, likes at least a quart of some cheap, piping beverage before trudging off. This brings him through my room and, invariably his cumbrous passage summons me from sleep. I don’t need this. I find sleep an unkind mistress and am a diffident courtier in her ante-rooms. I don’t need this: I need my sleep. I have to go out every night, so I never get to bed till late. Anyway, I’ll part my heavy lashes to glimpse Terry’s canted, theatrical tiptoe — thighs aloft — for the kitchen door, and then, a few noisy minutes later, his harrowing return, equipped with a mug and possibly some starchy little snack. I wish he wouldn’t do it. It’s so embarrassing if I have a friend here. What am I supposed to tell them? What am I supposed to say? I think it’s only my enjoyment at watching him clockwork past, fancying himself so nimble, that stops my forbidding him ever to set a foot in here before lunch. Surely he could fix up some kind of device in his own room? I might well challenge him about it today.
I bask, at any rate, until I hear him leave my flat; I am planning outfits the meanwhile, and resolving in my mind the adventures of the night before. Either it will have been Torka’s, or else an expensive romp with Kane and Skimmer, my two chums. They’re marvellous fun — you’ll like them. We always go to the grandest restaurants. We’re always in those plush, undersea cocktail bars (we can’t bear pubs). We always love spending lots of money. We rage on late into the night and always end up doing mad things. Often I’m musty in the morning; I feel fragile until I have my Buck’s Fizz before lunch. It’s not a hangover, of course: I don’t have hangovers; only yobs have hangovers.
… I spring from my snowy double bed, and — silk-robed, in bikini pants, or quite possibly naked — saunter into the kitchen. Fresh orange juice, real coffee very black, a croissant, some rare honey. Then, as I draw my bath (you have to club your way through the miasma of Terry’s room for this purpose), I’ll brush my hard and brilliant teeth, poke fun at my gypsyish hair, trim my nails. In the hall — I am towelling myself with vigour — there will be a stack of letters, sifted through by Terence and placed intact on the windowsill; I select the most attractive of these, the missive most redolent of money and sex (which is what all letters try to be about), and peruse it while the sun dries the playful waves of my hair. Next I dress with the kind of to-hell-with-it abandon that only the naturally stylish ever dare attempt, salute my slanting demeanour in the vestibule looking-glass, tolerate the obsequious banter of liftman, doorman and porter, and sweep through the double glass doors. Then it’s the streets.
In a saner world, of course, one would expect to be able to zoom off to work in one’s expensive green car. Wouldn’t one. But some resentful, chippy, grimacing authority or other has now seen to it that parking is more or less stamped out in the bijou area of the West End where I happen to be employed. So I walk the streets, the same as everyone else, the same as you; I walk them gamely enough, head in air, ignoring alike the appreciative glances of the men, the wolf-whistles of the secretaries and shopgirls, the querulous cries of the newspaper vendors, ignoring too the great bus-borne ecologies of fat-faced identical Germans, check-trousered colonials and arachnoid Arabs. What is happening to the area — or to the city, or to the country, or to the planet? (I sometimes roar about at night terrorizing these monkeys in my virile green car: I adore their atavistic cowerings, at once submissive and panicky, as I bellow down on them, klaxons ablaze.) Get out, I think. Get out of my way. I’m trying to go to work.
Spryly I elude the wheeling, clueless hordes in the underground station. I select a no-smoking compartment and stand throughout the journey, whether ‘seats’ are available or not, usually with a cologned neckerchief cupped over my lips. Confidently I emerge to the February splendour of Green Park, pausing to buy a tulip from that delightful barrow-boy in Albemarle Street, and within seconds my keys are twinkling in the cold sunshine of Berkeley Square.
I work in an art gallery. Yes, the job is rather a grand one, as you’d expect. High salary, undemanding hours, opportunities for travel, lots of future. It’s all very relaxed and genial. Everyone knows what’s going to happen, short-term and long. I never have to do anything I don’t want to do. It’s hardly a ‘job’ at all really, in the sense of trading one’s days for cash: I just turn up here in Mayfair pretty regularly, behave more or less as I wish in fairly acceptable surroundings (chat, read the paper, ring my innumerable friends) — and there is this vast, blush-making cheque on my table, every Friday.
The answer is, of course, that I am the chuckling puppeteer of the two simpletons who run the place. Everything they do is in response to a twitch from my strings. They are called Mr and Mrs Jason Styles — a couple of early-middle-aged roués who jewed their way up from a Camden Passage antique shop and are now trying so hard to be decadent. Under their auspices, I need hardly say, the gallery is little more than a rumpus-room of socio-sexual self-betterment: they deal in down-market investment Victoriana, hang the curiosities of the rich, lease out their walls to the doodlings of the famous. They will, in short, do anything to get along. For instance, there is little doubt that I was given the job here on account of my breeding and looks; when I arrived to be interviewed for the assistantship, the Styleses heaved a moan of longing in unison, thanked me for my attendance, and dreamily dismissed the hopefuls queueing without. They are both desperate for me in a playful, candid sort of way and I do try not to be too abrupt with them — though Mrs Styles, in particular, grows bolder by the hour. I expect, at any rate, to be in complete control here within the next six months or so; already I am nursing along a school of youngish talent, and I have tentatively scheduled the first of my one-man shows for December.
The glass door wafts shut behind me. I swoop for the mail, refasten the lock from inside, and stride on into the gallery, whose cork walls are at present defaced by the loud ‘moodshapes’ of some celebrated hysteric or other. I flick on the silver spotlights and remove from the paintings any deposits of dust which present themselves to my eye. Silly old Jason once joked that I should spend the first ten minutes of every day here ‘cleaning the canvases’ — going round the gallery with a handbrush and rag! Had a good laugh about that. In the Styleses’ small and incredibly smelly office I remove my cape and curl up with the mail on their squat leather sofa. A postcard — she always writes to me at the gallery — from the exquisite Ursula, my sister, my love; she offers family news, endearments, and a delicious weekend tryst. She is coming down to London to be taught how to become a secretary. Ridiculous. She should come down to London to be taught how not to become a secretary. Still, it might amuse her for a while. Along with her note there are the usual eight or nine invitations — openings, launches, at homes; of these, perhaps three or four might get lucky. I glance at the arts pages of the dailies, synchronize my watch with the hideous fluted clock on the Styleses’ filing-cabinet, and wander back through the gallery to my desk, lodged in a gloomy nook a few feet from the door — annoyingly, there ‘isn’t the space’ for an office of my own: yet. Within two or three minutes Jason and Odette Styles — I wonder when it was that they made those names up — are shuffling and grunting in the porch, hugging themselves, stamping their feet. I glide up to let them in.
‘Good morning, Gregory,’ says Jason.
‘Morning, Greg,’ says Odette.
‘Everything all right?’
‘How are you today?’
‘I’m fine. Everything is fine. How are you?’ I say, in genial disbelief.
As a connoisseur of ennui, as satiety’s schola
r, I’m always rather taken aback to see them arrive here each day, still together, still arm in arm, still solicitously aware of one another as sexual beings. They are in their middle or late thirties; they have shared an office and a bed for ten years now, possibly even longer; they are both, by any reasonably humane standards, hell to look at. And yet — here they come again, and again, and again. They leave together too, which never fails to give me a special jolt. They leave together, they go home together; they drink and eat and drowse together; they turn in together; and they get up together again, and again. Phenomenal! ‘Ooh, it’s so cold today,’ says the thick-hipped woman to the disgustingly fit little unit of a man under whose whippety pummellings she has staked herself out on the rack of bedroom boredom. ‘Not much warmer in here. I’ll check the Thermaco,’ says the pepper-haired man to the faintly moustachioed, pungently menopausal hillock of a woman through whose doomed forestry he has cantered baying for a decade of neuter night-times. I look on appalled as, even now, they reach out to steady each other while rounding the unspeakable 3D abstract by the door. My God, no wonder they’re swingers, no wonder they play pimp and whore, no wonder they’re desperate, absolutely desperate, for a taste of me.