White City Blue

  Staring at the picture, I began to understand what had made Knocker pause. Despite the spills of paint and the botched perspective, the flatness (Colin, as I say, saw everything in two dimensions), there was some odd radiance about the picture. It was something to do with the figures, not the background. Although badly drawn, there was something mysterious about them. A pale halo surrounded them in a slightly more dilute whiteness than the rest of the beach, as if they were enclosed in their own private air. Their faces were indistinct, but their expressions were meant to indicate joy, and somehow this was miraculously communicated in a few crude lines. One of the faces, the brown-haired boy’s, was blurred, indistinct. The other – the blond’s – was, in contrast, drawn with bold exact lines, delineating eyes, mouth, nose etc.

  I knew at once that it was meant to be me – although it looked nothing at all like me, Colin hadn’t the skill – and yet I didn’t understand why I was clear and Colin was blurred. Only years later did it occur to me that Colin could not see himself and used me as a kind of mirror, or sounding board. A lifeline, even, to the outside world.

  I stared. It was hard to explain; the thing was junk, but there was emotion in it, as if emotion had been layered on to the page directly. And the emotion was the one Knocker had asked for: love. Of course, none of these things came to me in words as they do now, but in a complex of feelings and intuitions, unarticulated. I understood why Colin had been embarrassed, though. Even at ten years old, you have learned that expressions of love – for boys, at least – are ridiculous, sissy, dopey. What possessed him to paint it I couldn’t imagine – it was like taking his clothes off in public.

  As I stared at it, I felt my skin creep with embarrassment. I realized that Knocker couldn’t have known it was meant to be us two, despite what I had thought to be his knowing glance towards me. And yet underneath the embarrassment – a taught feeling, a learned response – there remained another layer of emotion, which I could hardly face up to, that of a returning love, and of gratitude for the picture and Colin’s simple passion. I forced myself to shake it off, like a dog shakes off water, leaving only my embarrassment and a kind of rage at being violated. I never said anything to Colin; when the paintings were given back the next week. I avoided his eye and was relieved when, after the lesson was over, I saw him stuff the picture into his satchel before anyone else could see it. As ever, he had got a B for his efforts.

  The thing about it was – I know this is often said about childhood, and often wrongly, but in this case it seemed to be true, perhaps for the last time – our friendship was so uncomplicated, so without artifice. Or to be exact, the artifice was in the place it was meant to be, out in the open, codified, ritualized. On the games board, over the net, on the pitch. That’s where the complications were located – not in the friendship. The friendship was clear blue, unsullied. Which was odd in a way, because children – like their strange and distant relatives, adults – are stuffed to the brim with passions, and longings and needs, and reckless furies. I wonder now how we confined ourselves, how we cut ourselves off from all the dross and mess; or perhaps I have simply misremembered.

  Anyway. It was a golden time, a friendship without malice, or complication, or heartless calculation, a friendship as natural as breathing, an unspoken love that submerged and renewed.

  It didn’t last of course. I sold him out in the end. It wasn’t because of the painting. It was just… life, with all its blind hammerings out. I broke what there was of his heart, I cracked his soft little tortoise shell with one well-aimed blow. I didn’t want to, of course. It just had to be done. That’s the way it is with friends. Sometimes, whatever you’ve been through, however deep the love, you have to cut them out, cut them off. It’s all in the name of progress, of moving forward. Life’s movement requires a sort of ruthlessness or you get… bogged down. Things change, and, as they change, things break.

  Chapter Eight: The Art of Prayer

  I am at Veronica’s flat after finishing work on a Thursday night. It is less than two months before our wedding is due to take place, at the Church of the Holy Innocents by Ravenscourt Park, 200 yards from my house. I am waiting for her to come back from the morgue.

  That’s a nice phrase. That has a ring to it. ‘I’m just waiting for the wife to get back from the morgue. Oh yes. She chops up the dead to earn her crust, you know. The money isn’t so good, but she finds the work extremely satisfying. That’s so important, don’t you agree?’

  What am I doing? Marrying someone I’ve only known for a matter of months who spends a good forty hours of each week filleting people like a fishwife goes at a mackerel. I must be insane. Like Tony has said – since my proposal – I’m only thirty, I’ve got a good five years left in me before I need to be got, before the gut begins to sag, before my stock begins to drop, before Commitment beats out Freedom once and for all.

  And yet I ache for her. Sitting here, I imagine her in the car, stopped at red lights, stuck in traffic. I urge the cars in the jam out of the way, I beg the lights to change. Something in me calls out. It’s fucking weird. I don’t think I like it. I didn’t know love felt so much like dependency, like nakedness.

  Or is it love? Perhaps it’s just my todger talking, sending out static, blotting out sense. It can do that. It almost exists in order to do that. How are you meant to know any of these things? What does certainty feel like?

  I’ve been thinking and thinking, and I think this: I don’t think I can go through with this marriage. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to tell Vronky, but it never seems to arrive. I always back off. It’s not a matter of whether it’s what I want to do any more. It’s just all got too big to simply fold up and put back in a drawer.

  Or is that a rationalization? Perhaps I don’t want the right moment to arrive. Christ, I don’t know. I just wish things could be settled, one way or the other. Not knowing, that’s the definition of true torment. And the clock is ticking, layers of events are unfolding that make it harder and harder to back off. It’s planned that way, no doubt. History has arranged it thus, in order to better fuck everyone up. One of its specialities.

  The church is booked now, the hall is booked, the invites have been sent out, the car has been arranged, the honeymoon is bought and paid for. To go back on it now would just be so… inconvenient.

  I shuffle around the flat pointlessly, inspecting it nevertheless with a professional eye. I strongly advised Vronky not to buy it. It’s in a nasty part of North Kensington, a single bedroom in a converted house. No one has yet seen who lives downstairs. But there are endless comings and goings, steel doors and the constant faint complaint of some tetchy mutt with a close but impure relationship to a pit bull. It all suggests to me one thing: a crack house. But Veronica thinks it’s wonderfully gritty.

  She bought it because of its feel, because it seemed welcoming and friendly. I said to her, it’s a flat, bricks and mortar, you’re buying an asset, not Paddington fucking Bear. But she kept going on about its vibrations.

  What a paradox people are. This I know from selling houses. On one shelf of Vronky’s flat I can see this huge, intimidating volume, Gray’s Anatomy. Pure science. Right next to it, Astrology, Destiny and the Future of Mankind. Pure shite. How can someone so smart be so dumb?

  It’s a question I often ask of myself also.

  Anyway, she had her friend in who’s a feng shui master and this friend told her it was perfect. So that was that.

  Now I wander around, waiting for Vronky to get home, wondering if she might have been right, but doubting it. Idly, I study the other books on IKEA shelves which I have helped to construct. There are books on Sufism, Buddhism, Zen, Vedantism, Hinduism, Jainism – you name it, she’s started it. There’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, Emotional Intelligence, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. There’s Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Woolf (Virginia) and Wolf (Naomi). Toni Morrison, Jazz. An unread copy of Marina Warner’s The Beast and the Blonde. It’s your basic New Age Lite-cum-middl
ebrow thirty-something female canon. It’ll do. It gets me far enough away from Shepherd’s Bush, so to speak.

  The flat, then. Sure, it’s got nice big windows, bare floorboards, a decent-sized kitchen, high ceilings, original fireplace. All the bits and bobs that get the girls wet. But there’s stuff that worries me. First, the estate agents she got it through – Bartlett and Bugle. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that B&B are the dodgiest, shadiest, most reprehensible estate agents in west London – and I say that with a degree of admiration. They deal with freeholders who make Dirty Bob look like the Pope. B&B – or Bumfuckem and Billit, as we in the trade call them – knock themselves out half a percentage point cheaper than everyone else in the neighbourhood. Of course, just by sheer luck, they must shift a few decent properties, and maybe this is one of them. But I don’t like the look of the two big thirsty trees in the street out front, combined with a brand-new paint and plaster job inside. Just right for hiding any inconvenient cracks.

  Also, I’ve never heard of the freeholder, despite having sold property around here for around ten years now, and the extreme low level of the service charges over the past five years suggests something isn’t right. Everything points to a nasty surprise waiting in the wings, or in the roof space, or under the floor. Still, I suppose I admire her for doing what she wanted to do, buying the flat she wanted to buy. She’s very independent and I respect that. Up to a point.

  I sigh and look at my watch. She’s late. I can’t say I’m exactly looking forward to the evening anyway. I’ve resolved – since I’ve decided to ask Tony to be my best man – to make Veronica and Tony like each other, or at the very least tolerate each other. When they met that time in the pub, Tony spent the first half hour trying to charm her. Meticulously, she refused to respond, and after that he went into a sulk and they barely spoke. Tonight I’m going to try and mend a few fences.

  Unfortunately things have started going wrong already. We planned a quiet drink, the three of us, down the Anglesea. I was going to ask Tony there, oil us all with a few bevvies, and then do the best-man thing. Then Vronky said that she’d suddenly found out that someone called Christopher Crowley, who the same friend who does the feng shui believes is a spiritual genius, was putting in an appearance at Kensington Town Hall on the same night, that is to say tonight. It was only for an hour, so could she go to it and meet us afterwards? Fine, except that when I spoke to Tony, he decided he wanted to go too. I thought he was joking at first, but he insisted. Now we’re meeting at the Churchill Arms, all going to see this guru, then going down the Anglesea afterwards. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t let go. Veronica, innocent fool, was delighted, and started to say how that perhaps she’d got Tony wrong after all. If she only knew Diamond Tony’s other nickname: the Wazir of Wind-up.

  I hear Veronica’s key in the door. It swings open and she hurries in. She looks smart, well groomed, as if she’s spent the day quietly behind the screens at a bank. The red hair has nothing out of place. Her face is in a grimace, the small teeth just showing. She barely looks at me. Despite myself, I glance at her hands to see if there’s any blood on them.

  Hi, babes, she says, all of a dither. What time is it?

  I darken my voice a shade.

  Nice to see you too. Babes.

  She checks herself, stops in her tracks, then moves towards me with an apologetic expression creasing her face. She kisses me full on the lips, holds me for a second, kisses me again and shoots me a big sparkly smile. Then she continues on her interrupted route towards the bathroom.

  Sorry, Frankie. It’s been a bad day. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about it. What with your weak stomach. Anyway I know I’m late. Can you check that clock?

  I peer through to the kitchen, where the only clock in the house is located. Veronica by now has her coat off, has slipped her shoes off and is at the bathroom door.

  It’s just gone seven.

  Right. I’ve got about fifteen minutes. Is Tony still coming?

  I think so. We’re meeting him at the Churchill first.

  Strange choking sounds begin emitting from the plumbing system. Veronica is talking to me behind the door now.

  Isn’t that sweet? And I thought he.., Christ, what’s this?

  What?

  The water’s gone… yellow. No, brown. It’s filthy.

  Let it run for a while.

  More strange, apocalyptic sounds from the plumbing system. After a minute or two, I hear the toilet flush. I study the ceiling, noting small hairline cracks that work their way out from beneath the cornices.

  How’s the water?

  Better. I’m going to have a quick bath. It smells a bit of old eggs though. Listen, can you pass me my book. It’s just in my bag there. Red cover. The Art of Prayer.

  Got it.

  Stick it round the door, will you?

  I push the book round the door and sit down at the kitchen table to wait. There’s a small colour pamphlet that shows a kind of sun, or centre of emanating energy, on the cover. Written underneath, it says, ‘Christopher Crowley of the World Spiritual University: Power of Symbol, Call of Myth’.

  Inside, there is a small photograph of Crowley. He is white, handsome and tanned and wearing a well-cut grey suit. He has a Californian smile, although I understand from Veronica that he’s originally from somewhere in the Midlands.

  I pick at snippets from the rest of the leaflet. Somewhere on the back shelf of my conscious mind, I hear the water draining away from the bath. I carry on reading. The World Spiritual University, it turns out, is holding a number of seminars that month.

  – Thinking Positively. Releasing the power of the positive mind. Methods and techniques for PMA (positive mental attitude). How to disarm others’ negativity. How to harness the phenomenal power of thought.

  – The Art of Relationships. The four essential relationships. How to avoid being blamed and blaming. Ten principles of successful, harmonious and loving relationships.

  – Inner Values for Leading, Learning and Living. You are never more powerful than when you are being yourself. Shedding light on the inner recesses of yourself. How one leads not from the back, or the front, but from within.

  – Building Self-esteem. The secret of sustained success. How to discover your hidden, spiritual self. There will be exercises to help develop self-acceptance.

  – Managing Your Self. You cannot manage external forces of change. What you can manage is your ability to respond to change. This is your response ability, and every response is your choice.

  I yawn and put down the pamphlet. It all seems reasonable enough. I wonder why it makes me so irritated. I think because it threatens my basic world-view, philosophy and religion, which is No one Knows Anything. Maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? If no one knows anything, that must include me. Which means that one possibility is that everybody knows a lot.

  I check the clock again, walk to the door and yell.

  Seven-fifteen. It’s time we made a move.

  Immediately, as if she has been standing, coiled, behind the door, Veronica emerges. She is pink and smells of sandalwood, or at least what I imagine sandalwood would smell like if I had ever smelt any. The squashy nose is slightly wrinkly now as well from being in the hot bath. Her legs are about three-quarters exposed by an elasticated microskirt. On top, a white blouse of some kind of see through material. Her hair, gelled, has had the brightest part of the red toned down. She looks very sexy, the lazy eyelids somehow heavier than ever after the bath. She’s terrific in bed actually, a real romper; probably something to do with compensation for spending all day with death. She gives me a brief smile. Her eyes indicate that her mind is elsewhere, running through a private check-list. Mobile phone in bag? Got purse? Tampax – she’s due. A couple of johnnies, just in case. Keys. In her hand she’s still holding The Art of Prayer. For some reason this irritates me far more than anything in the pamphlet I’ve been reading. She moves towards the door. The way she moves is slightly stiff,
as if she has to work out which limb to put where before she places it like Bambi while he’s being tutored by Thumper. It’s not graceful, but it’s affecting, slightly gawky.

  OK. Let’s get off then.

  She pulls on a red knee-length wool coat, slightly flared from the hips, and opens the door. She sticks the book in the pocket, and I follow her out of the door.

  As we walk down the stairs, I say, Planning on a bit of a pray, then?

  I say this unnecessarily nastily. I can hear the edge of complaint. For some reason I can’t stop myself. Veronica simply ignores me.

  We get into the Beemer, the smell of soft leather mixing with the hypothesized sandalwood. She takes off her coat and throws it on the back seat. The book catches my eye again. It’s still irritating me. I feel myself gravitating towards a fight. She takes out a small packet of sugar-free chewing gum.

  Aren’t you going to say grace before you eat that?

  This time, she turns on me, teeth exposed.

  What’s the problem, Frankie? Am I doing you some kind of harm by carrying a book about with me? Does it offend your commitment to pig ignorance?

  I start the engine. Although I don’t want this, this is also what I want.

  Not at all. I’m a big fan of intelligent books. As you know.

  Emphasis on intelligent.

  Oh. And is this one not intelligent enough for your fiancée to be reading? Is it an embarrassment to you?

  I pull out into the street and towards Ladbroke Grove. An Escort, shaped like something that’s been trodden on, tries to push in front of me from a side turning, but I won’t let him go. The driver winds down his window and shouts something at me. I give him the finger and press doggedly on to the junction, braking aggressively. I myself have no idea why I’m making such a fuss about the subject. Something pulls me forward, though, further into the argument.