A vacuum cleaner is designed to cruise grandly round a carpet. It is not designed to be toted through a wet London Wednesday, with the traffic trailing its capes of mist. Painfully hampered, cruelly encumbered, Richard staggered on, the brown base under his arm as heavy as a soaked log, the T-shaped adjunct in his free hand, the tartan flex-tube round his neck like a fat scarf, and then the plug, freed from its broken catchlet, incensingly adangle between his legs. The "freshness and moral vivacity," the "bravely unfashionable optimism" and the "unembarrassed belief in human perfectibility" for which Amelior was now being retrospectively praised—all this would presumably get even better when its successor appeared, now that Gwyn Barry never had to take the vacuum cleaner in. Richard crossed Ladbroke Grove with his head down, not looking and not caring. The plug and cord snarled his ankles like a hurled bolero. The tartan tube clutched his neck in a pythonic embrace.
Once in the shop he let the whole contraption crash to the counter, on which he then leaned for a while with his head in his arms. When he looked up again a young man was standing over him and readying a foolscap document. Richard croaked his way through MAKE, model,
REGISTRATION NUMBER. At length they came to TYPE OF MALFUNCTION,
and the young man said,
"What's wrong with it?"
"How would I know? It cuts out all the time and it makes this screeching sound and the bag leaks all the crap out of the back."
The young man considered Richard, and this information. His stare and his biro returned to the relevant rectangle. The biro hovered there unhappily. He looked up for a moment—time enough for onerous eye contact. He looked down. The biro itself now struck you as gnawed, cracked and capless, and paranoid, conscious of its disadvantage. Eventually, under type OF MALFUNCTION, the young man wrote NOT WORKING.
"Yeah," said Richard. "That ought to cover it."
Beyond them, in the street outside, the old divisions of class and then race were giving way to the new divisions: good shoes versus bad shoes, good eyes as opposed to bad eyes (eyes that were clear, at one extreme, ranged against eyes that were far fierier than any Tabasco), different preparedness for the forms that urban life was currently taking, here and now. The young man looked at Richard with pain and with pre-weakened hostility. He had gone on working here much longer than he should have gone on working here, and so his eyes were as dim and marginal as the lights of a car left on all night and well into the next day. What divided the two of them, in the shop, was words—which were the universal (at least on this planet); the young man could look at Richard and
be pretty sure there were more where they came from. Display fixtures were tacked to the wall, decorative or labor-saving, white cones and spheres. Beyond, in the back, in a valved heap like the wet city, lay all the stuff that wasn't working and would never work again: the unrecom-pleted, the undescribed.
On his way home he looked in at the Adam and Eve. Seated in the corner with a pint of bitter and a packet of Wotsits, the birthday boy slipped the brown envelope out of his pocket: Richard Tull, M.A. (Oxon). At Oxford (to hear Richard tell it), Gwyn had worked round the clock for his middle second, whereas Richard had taken a formal first without ever lifting a pen . . . He removed a single sheet of paper that might have been torn from a child's exercise book: blue-lined, softly creased, suggesting much effort, and little progress. The letter had been heavily corrected by another hand, but it still said,
Dear Richard You are the writer of a "novel." Aforethought. Congratulations! Hows it done. First, you get the topic. Next you package it. Then, comes the hipe.
I am thinking of becoming "an author." Snap. Shake. If you would like to meet and discuss these issues over a few "jars" feel free to give me a bell.
Yours DARKO
Well-known writers get this kind of letter every other day. But Richard was not a well-known writer, and he got this kind of letter every other year (and they were normally about book reviewing anyway— though he did receive the odd scrawled note from hospitals and mental institutions where his novels were found in the libraries or on the book trolleys and stirred strange responses in depressives and amputees and other patients whose minds were disorganized by drugs). So Richard looked at this letter rather harder than a well-known writer would have done. And his scrutiny was rewarded: in the lower left-hand corner of the half-filled sheet, almost hidden by the fringe of the rip, it said, TPO. Richard turned the page over.
I know the wierd girl, Belladonna. Shes the one they all wan't. Jesus what a looker. You'r mate Gwyn Barry, is in love with her of TV fame.
On the whole, this sounded like excellent news. Richard finished his drink. What he was looking at here might turn out to be a serviceable plan B. Though as it happened he was feeling exceptionally upbeat about plan A. Richard, in fact, was full of hope.
When he got back he made two telephone calls. The first telephone call was to Anstice, his forty-four-year-old secretary at The Little Magazine. He talked to her for an hour, as he did every day, not about The Little Magazine and not because he wanted to, but in case she killed herself or told Gina that he had slept with her, once, about a year ago. The second telephone call was to Gwyn. Richard wanted to confirm their fortnightly snooker game. But Gwyn couldn't make it. The reason he (nauseatingly) offered was that he had spent too many evenings, just recently, "away from my lady." Gwyn, incidentally, wasn't just famous for being a novelist. He was also famous for being happily married. The previous spring a TV producer with a lot of time on his hands had cobbled together a series called "The Seven Vital Virtues." Gwyn had picked Uxoriousness. The program won wide praise, and two repeats, as an example of British charm. It was an hour long. It showed things like Gwyn helping Demi in the garden, and bringing Demi tea, and sitting there gazing at Demi in childish absorption while she talked on the telephone and absentmindedly rearranged lunch dates.
The weather wasn't great but it was still meant to be summer. Something had gone wrong with summer. But this is England—and that's nothing new.
Consider. The four seasons are meant to correspond to the four principal literary genres. That is to say, summer, autumn, winter and spring are meant to correspond (and here I list them hierarchically) to tragedy, romance, comedy and satire. Close this book for a second and see if you can work it out: which season corresponds to which genre.
It's obvious, really. Once you've got comedy and tragedy right, the others follow.
Summer: romance. Journeys, quests, magic, talking animals, damsels in distress.
Autumn: tragedy. Isolation and decline, fatal flaws and falls, the throes of heroes.
Winter: satire. Anti-utopias, inverted worlds, the embrace of the tundra: the embrace of wintry thoughts.
Spring: comedy. Weddings, apple blossom, maypoles, no more misunderstandings—away with the old, on with the new.
We keep waiting for something to go wrong with the seasons. But something has already gone wrong with the genres. They have all bled
into one another. Decorum is no longer observed.
Lady Demeter Barry had a driving instructor called Gary. And 13 had an older brother called Crash.
They were the same person.
Crash was his street name. It wasn't his real name, and it wasn't his professional name, even more obviously: for Crash was a driving instructor. His real name was Gary.
It is still not altogether clear how Gary came to be called Crash. Street names are by no means always descriptive, or even counter-descriptive. Among 13's acquaintances—among his brothers—there were several entirely nondescript personages with names like Big Cool and Lightning and Here-Behold. For instance, 13 had a little cousin called Ian whose street name was Emu. E stood for Ian; and Ian liked music: hence Emu. Brill. EMU was what Ian assiduously spray-canned all over the bridges and ramparts of West London, in between the more elaborate injunctions and imprecations and invocations like TOOL UP ZIMBABWE and FUCK THE POLICE and SONS OF THUNDER. Or tak
e another cousin of 13's: Link. Link was called Link not, as one might readily assume, because of his fantastically rudimentary facial features, but as a preferred alternative to Chains, a name that commemorated a certain Carnival riot during which Link had cleared an entire high-rise stairwell of police, with only these two four-foot lengths of humming, spark-spattering steel. Chains were what Link spent the following eighteen months in, which is probably why it was Link that stuck.
Who knew? Crash might have been called Crash because he was very big and made a lot of noise when he fell over. Crash might have been called Crash because of the predictable rhythm of his personal finances: the thing that always happened after the fortnightly boom of his paycheck. Most probably, though, Crash was called Crash because of his long-abandoned habit of sleeping in other people's houses: on couches, floorboards, in bathtubs ... A relative newcomer to the scene might intelligibly suppose that Crash was called Crash because of what kept happening to him in the cars at the driving school. Close my eyes and I see Crash presiding with arms unhappily folded over a ten-acre breaker's yard of totaled Metros. Or, by modest extension, one might assume that Crash was called Crash because of what kept happening to his students in their cars within days of passing the test. And their cars were burnished and German, with cruise control and the digitalized speedo: for the school was a fashionable one, and all the women asked for Crash— though not by that name.
Among his students was Lady Demeter Barry.
So: Steve Cousins in the dark interior of the office at the end of the mews with a book on his lap (he always had a book with him: today it was On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz), looking out. And Crash on the cob- bles among the burning roofs of cars, looking in. Neither knew if their eyes had met through this fierce division of light. Steve put his book aside. Crash bade farewell to another student, a rich teenage boy with the good build and a space-ranger short back and sides and Mekon cranium of the future.
"Crash mate," said Scozzy.
"Scozzy," said Crash.
Crash went to get the coffees from the perc. Like many young men in the neighborhood, Crash had once worked for Scozzy, as a salesman of cocaine. This fact defined the current protocol. Black Crash now stood bunched over the coffee nook, big, not fat, just big, and not hopelessly enormous either, by no means, not like some with the same black magnitude, whose mothers must have watched them grow with steadily diminishing pride. Scozzy experienced regret. Crash could have been useful. It was a real pisser that he wasn't more like his little brother 13, who was basically very dishonest—who was effortlessly dishonest.
"Forgot how you like it," he called.
And Steve told him: "Black. Two sugars."
The two men settled on the low sofa. The luminous track suit that Crash wore (none of that gear for Scozz: no warmup stuff, no fucking sweats) was well outshone by the heavy life that wavered from his face. Like 13 he talked London, but there were memories of Africa in him, like the great event of the nose, which resembled the back of a black bullfrog squatting on his face, and the token dreadlocks, done in little sprigs at right-angles from the head. Not real dreadlocks, of course; real dreadlocks remained religiously unwashed and ended up looking like a length of giant fag ash. His eyes were bright—even the blood in them was bright. Famously big on white flip, as if he was doing research: bedroom with a revolving door. Steve looked at Crash and thought there was no way in the world he was related to a trog like Link. And Steve knew, further, that in any evolutionary illustration charting the course from Link to Crash, he himself (Scozzy with his flared genes) would not be on Crash's right but somewhere in the middle.
"Tits?" began Crash when Scozz got the ball rolling. "A man need a rope and a pickax. And better take you climbing boots."
"She's racked," said Steve, not without grimness.
"Like them fucking things in the—freak vegetables. Marrows or
whatever, When they overdone it on the injections."
Steve flexed his neck. "Big tits is one thing," he said. "But you don't want them all over the gaff."
"She hitch them up. I tell you, she leaning backward like .. . prop in the tug-of-war." Crash laughed quietly, in admiration. "She don't want to fall over. All that lot come tumbling down on top of her."
In different company, Crash might have spent a contented half hour in similar vein before changing the subject—before moving on, say, to how Lady Demeter Barry was built from the waist down. But now he was suddenly wondering what he was doing here—talking tits with Scozzy. You didn't want to be doing that, not with him, not with this fucking neuro. You definitely didn't want to be doing that... Crash saw that Steve's sloped chin was puckering as his mouth hardened into a beak; dissatisfaction was also expressing itself through heat in the eyes. Reflexively, and in the present case not even mildly indignantly, Crash checked the air for a white-black interaction—our women: all this. He came up with nothing in particular. Maybe Scozz was just getting to the point. At the end of the day, whatever happened, Crash was going to give 13 a smack. He waited. He was at a disadvantage, of course. Because nobody, but nobody, knew about Steve's strange taste in tits.
Now Steve told Crash what he wanted him to do, framed as a series of suggestions. Crash looked elsewhere. Fellow instructors, students (the office was filling up as the hour turned), those girls behind the desk to the side: they would have found it unbelievable, seeing the two men on the sofa, that the black man feared the white, that the big man feared the small. But he did fear him. Many times he had seen Scozzy go about his work, in pubs, in car parks. And Scozzy didn't stop. When he started, he didn't stop. In such contexts, too, the big man was traditionally wary of the small, because the small man always made the first move. And then there was Scozzy and words.
"She's a happily married woman," Crash heard himself saying. "On TV as such."
"Listen. Driving instructors. Spend all day looking at parted legs. Seat belt on all right, darling? Allow me. And you. This is the brothers' time, son. You got latitude." Steve's breath moved closer, its flavor incredibly man-made, like the new breath of a fleet car. "Out there in the little Metro. Some rich flip sits herself down on your courting finger. And if she so much as blinks, you go: 'Raciss!' Don't bother you the other way though, does it." The breath came nearer still. The breath was just another weapon. "When they're down there, doing it for democracy. Or anthropology. Or some other reason. Enjoy it, mate. While it lasts.
Reparations—that's the ting. Yat. Slave trade is it."
Crash turned away from this for a moment. As it happened he had his own image of the slave trade, which he carried around with him in his head. This image was of a contained volume of absolute darkness; its sound effects were dull human hooting and the creak of boards at sea. He turned back. He was going to smear 13. Crash didn't drink as a rule but sometimes, when the pressure built too big, he got a bottle of scotch—he didn't give a fuck—and drank the whole thing. Not often. But sometimes, to sort out the stress, he got a bottle of scotch and threw away the top. (He didn't give a fuck.) Now Crash swallowed and said musingly,
"Got to eat bland for a day or two. Gut's all sour."
"You don't have to do nothing, Crash, mate. All I want's information. Advice: cut out the perfume. You reek of cheap ponce. You smell like a fucking minicab."
Yeah that's right, thought Crash. Scozzy was bad news, all bad news, terrible information from start to finish, like a catastrophic telecast that kept going on for hour after hour.
"This is it."
Demeter Barry was punctual: the stroke of noon. She came out of the sunshine and in through the glass door with her head lowered so that she seemed to be peeping upward and at an angle. The first thing you noticed about her from the waist up, actually, was the central line of her gray silk blouse: it was not quite sheer or true, wavering on the way down and missing her belt buckle, which was itself, perhaps, imperfectly justified.
"Hi Gary," she said.
"And how are you this
morning," said Crash in the deeper and more priestly and African tones he used for the driving instruction of white women. He turned to Scozzy, who picked up his book, and nodded, and extended his hand and said: "Steve Cousins."
As he walked down the mews Steve realized that this was the closest he had ever come to saying something he often came very close to saying: "Steve Cousins," he had almost said: "Barnardo Boy."
As one might say "Sound Recordist" or "Political Analyst" or "Poet and Essayist."
Of course, he could have said "wild boy," which was also true.
"What's your agent scene at the moment?" asked Gwyn Barry. "Have you got one?"
Gwyn and Richard were at the Westway Health and Fitness Center, surrounded by thirty or forty etiolated drunks: playing snooker. In the ferrety light of pool halls everywhere. Gwyn himself had had several beers, and Richard, naturally, was completely smashed. Eighteen tables, all in use, eighteen lucent pyramids over the green troughs and the bright bone balls; and then the multicolored competitors, Spanish, West Indian, South American, Pacific Rim—and the no-color Brits, indistinguishable, it seemed, from the great genies of cigarette smoke that moved between the tables like the ghosts of referees . .. England was changing. Twenty years ago Richard and Gwyn or their equivalents could never have gone to a snooker hall—Gwyn in his chinos and cashmere turtleneck, Richard in his (accidentally appropriate) waistcoat and lopsided bow tie. They would have stood outside, blowing into cupped hands, smelling the bacon grease, and scanned the stubbornly just-literate lettering on the basement placard, and moved aside for the donkey-jacketed and zoot-suited cueists weaving through the dead and wounded on their way down the crackling stone steps. Gwyn and Richard might have got in. But they wouldn't have got out. In those days the Englishmen all had names like Cooper and Baker and Weaver, and they beat you up. Now they all had names like Shop and Shirt and Car, and you could go anywhere you liked. "Why do you ask?"