Must have been, because I told him about the raves.
How do you mean?
We must have been talking about the colour orange, because I told him about the way I used to go to raves.
What’s orange got to do with it?
When we’d finished clubbing we’d gather in the car park, sometimes hundreds of us, waiting, and then someone would put one of those orange flashing lights in the rear window of a car and we’d follow, for hours sometimes, until we were in the middle of nowhere, in a wood maybe, and the rave would start.
Bit risky, talking about that to a stranger?
He liked it, he was really interested.
What did he tell you about himself?
He told me a few things. He was quite chatty.
Try it on, did he?
Not as much as you have.
Pardon?
You heard what I said.
You don’t like it when people comment on your looks?
Just drop it, OK?
OK, fine. Sorry. [pause] So what did he have to say about himself?
Oh, the usual things.
[He said his flat on the hill was comfy and tidy. He said he’d tried, for a very long time, to cook something wholesome every night but the pull of the microwave had grown stronger by the day and almost every evening, nowadays, his machine went ping. The way he described it, his neighbour Harriet would’ve called the police if she hadn’t heard that ping. He lived a simple life, which was how he liked it.]
Did you feel OK with him? Did he seem fairly normal?
Yes, he was OK. Getting on a bit – a lot of baggage I’d say. He wasn’t put together quite right – as if he had the arms of a child. He wasn’t in proportion, somehow. Not completely normal. Still, he didn’t lay it on too much. He seemed like he was from another age. Could have been born hundreds of years ago, the way his mind worked. Always looking into the past. Trying to work out what happened when he was a kid, and thinking in such an old-fashioned way. I felt so different. My generation doesn’t seem to have all that shit going on. It made me think about my history course at college... everything’s happening so fast now, the whole world is speeding up. Every generation seems to be fundamentally different nowadays, don’t you think?
Don’t know, never thought about it. What do you mean about old-fashioned – in the way he thought?
It’s hard to define. Nothing was straightforward. Everything seemed to be encrypted, or an allegory, or a puzzle. He didn’t seem able to keep things simple, like we do.
He had trouble remembering, too?
Yes. He said he remembered very little from his past. Nothing felt real. He said his whole life felt as if it had been re-enacted by the Sealed Knot Society.
Did he tell you about his work?
Not that first day, no. But I got to know more about him. He always seemed to be there when I went in, and it would’ve been rude to sit at another table. He didn’t mind me smoking, either. ’Fraid I smoke too much. Life’s a bit of a bummer at the moment.
What sort of work did he do?
He worked for a delivery company and he took parcels and things all over the place. He drove a white van with a rainbow pattern on both sides. That rainbow thing became a bit of a joke between us. He was good at his job – he knew Britain’s roads inside out. If you wanted directions to anywhere you’d ask Duxie and he’d say something like take the A55 to junction thingymee and then the M56 to junction whatsit and then the M6 to junction thingamajig...
[Because life was a web of junctions for Duxie. He said there was a golden mean somewhere in Britain, probably – if he visited a certain number of junctions in exactly the right order he might arrive at Shangri-la or Camelot. Duxie’s mind worked like that. There had to be more to life than motorways and concrete, he said. There had to be some meaning to it all, somewhere.
Duxie’s van was scrutinised everywhere he went, followed throughout the day, every day, by an eye in the sky – he was tracked by satellite. It was the way of the world. At first he hadn’t minded, thought little of it. But he became more and more conscious of the satellite – unseen, undetectable – as it rotated above him in space. He began to resent it, and then he grew to hate it. He understood, now, why people went underground, politically and emotionally. He was uneasy even in his own bedroom: now and then he found himself scanning the sky through the window, wondering if he was being watched as he prepared himself for a furtive act. In his teens, as his sexuality got the better of him, when he’d sought relief, he’d imagined a row of relatives up in heaven, looking down at him over the edge of a heavenly parapet and shaking their heads, tut-tutting – and he imagined meeting them again, for the first time, up there in God’s presence, and he was sure to blush and stammer, look down at the floor, because they’d all seen him at it. Maybe it wasn’t like that. Maybe there was a heavenly fraternity in such matters. Perhaps all his dead relatives would do something quite disgusting, there and then, together, just to put him at ease. Maybe he ought to discuss it with his psychiatrist...
The constant scrutiny he endured, human and mechanical, had driven Duxie into his shell; his life was spent increasingly within his own imagination. His everyday work took on a robotic air as he constructed a rich and meaningful inner life based on dreams and daydreams. In short, Duxie lived in a fantasy world.
At a quarter to seven every evening, half an hour after the nightly ping! had been transmitted through the thin wall to Harriet next door, he vacuumed swiftly, had a wash, put on his old leather jacket and walked downtown to the snooker club.
Duxie was nothing much to look at. He was smallish – about five foot six – and he was losing his fur; a few stray wisps of light brown hair – silvered with a sprinkling of grey – fluttered around his bald patch as he plodded downhill. His face, which still bore traces of the acne which had ravaged his teens, was thin and unremarkable, though he had keen and intelligent eyes. He had a paunch and yellow fingers from smoking too much. Duxie was well past his sell-by date. He’d even started rehearsing his own deathbed scene. But a man could dream, and Duxie dreamt a lot. He dreamt he’d inherited a hole, and he either had to complete it – dig it out completely, tidily – or fill it in. In his dream he didn’t know which action to take. He had another dream, about a room. It was dark in there, he couldn’t see anything much. But he could feel a lot. Was the room getting lighter? Was he on the edge of remembering something? Inside the quilt of his dreamworld slept a mystery; things were being kept from him... nothing would come back to him from his early years. They were just a blank.]
Tell me something about the café.
Yes, fine. It was run by a nice Italian man called Stefano, really charming and talkative. He was helped by a small, red-haired man who was very lame. People said he’d had a nasty accident while exploring some caves. Duxie disliked him. He called him the Gimp with the limp. I liked it there, in the café. Some strange people went in there, like a big woman selling seafood – yucky things like that. It was quiet, with an old world charm of its own. It was a place for the wrinklies, people of my age kept away – but that suited me fine because I wanted some peace and quiet, and something a bit different. My boyfriend’s into clubbing, big time, so I was glad for a rest. There was an ancient jukebox in there and the music was from long ago, by people I’d never heard of – a lot of jazz and soul. Some Miles Davis, a bit of fusion jazz from Jan Garbarek, some old ballads from the 50s and 60s. The Gimp with the limp often played Big John to encourage the myth about his underground accident. The lighting was subdued. The whole room was painted in pastel greens, and there were lots of plants. It was a place from the past, with sad-eyed people, poets and burnt-out addicts. Duxie felt at home there.
Did he do drugs himself?
Perhaps. Hard to say. He knew a lot about them, but I couldn’t see any signs. Either he liked to give the impression he’d messed about with them, or he’d stopped taking them somewhere along the line.
Go on...
He had a regular seat in the corner where he could look down on the town below. He liked the harbour lights twinkling in the far distance. We had a good view from up there, with a big bay on one side of the harbour and a smaller bay on the other – they sort of matched each other nicely. Stefano made a big fuss of him when he went in. They were old friends, by the look of it. Stefano and the Gimp always wore identical tee shirts – they’d go through a crazy phase and they’d have words like
DON’T VOTE
IT’LL ONLY
ENCOURAGE
THEM
printed on the front. Almost as soon as you’d sat down there would be a steaming cup of cappuccino in front of you. The tables were odd, made of wicker with glass tops. They served excellent Danish pastries in there.
[Happiness: this was indeed happiness for Duxie, as he bathed briefly in a pool of contentment. The satellite above him was patrolling elsewhere, in the lighter realms of the world. He could rest in tranquil peace. He breathed on his coffee to cool it, but remembered that he was in no hurry and put it down. He ambled over to the music machine to select a Garbarek number: Mnemosyne perhaps, or Iceburn, or maybe he’d choose It’s OK to Listen to the Gray Voice because he felt a touch of empathy with the title. Driving a van with rainbows on each side tended to make one bloody-minded at times.]
Who else did he talk to?
Sometimes he’d chat with the ex-copper, a grizzly man with grey hair, cut short in a Number 2. He was a big, brooding bloke who seemed to be morose all the time. I bumped into him, often, on the seashore, early in the morning. He went down there early every day and walked about beachcombing, or sat on a rock, looking out to sea. He was always whistling a tune, the one that starts with (she sings) If you go down to the woods today...
Teddy Bears’ Picnic?
Yeah, that’s the one. The whisper was that he’d been drummed out of the force, but no one knew why. Duxie was wary of him and talked to him mainly out of politeness.
Anyone else?
Yes, there was another oddball, a really tiny fellah called Little Michael who joined us occasionally. He was a bit spooky, not because of his size. He was immaculately dressed in a dark suit and tie with a really white shirt, he looked like a miniature undertaker. Gave me the creeps. He came in with the Daily Mail under his arm but you knew he wanted to read Stefano’s copy of the Sun, really.
Any pastimes – did Duxie mention any hobbies?
Yes, he played snooker every day, upstairs.
Upstairs?
Yes, there’s a snooker hall above the café.
[The snooker hall was big and old and cold. Duxie climbed the stairs wearily and paused, every day, on the landing half way up. He stood on the cracked plastic floor tiles and viewed the world outside. He liked standing at this long gallery window with its expansive sheet of glass. The window took on a light green tinge from the neon sign advertising the café below. Sometimes he imagined he was in deep space, in a glass corridor, looking into the centre of a black hole. One day he stuck an orange Post-it note to the window with something he’d seen in a book written on it:
Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality
No one had said a word about it and it stayed there for weeks, until it fell to the floor. It lay in a corner for quite some time, curling up at the edges and gathering dust. Duxie’s first and only attempt at public existentialism had come a cropper, and he didn’t try anything like that again.]
You’ve mentioned children. Had he remarried?
No, he was still single. Not many takers, I’d guess. He wasn’t much to look at. He said his wife had started an affair, he hadn’t been able to cope, so he’d slept in his cab. That’s how he described it to me, and there was still a bit of sadness in his voice, like he’d never got over it.
[One week became two, three months became six. He’d watched them all, at a distance, and marvelled at how well they coped, how little his absence seemed to affect them. He’d been the one to clean their shoes, make their sandwiches, but the eldest child had taken over as naturally as if it had always been so. Although he got a welcome from them, Duxie had sensed a glass wall between them – he was no longer part of the family machinery. He imagined a corporate rejection. By the very fact that he was over here and they were over there, grouped together, he felt himself being pushed away. He became a ghost. There had come a time when he was faced with a simple choice: he had to fight his way back in or shrug his shoulders and retreat. He backed off. His visits faltered, weakened, died. And then they all moved away, swiftly, to Birmingham, without leaving so much as a note. Duxie despaired. Despite his keen sense of guilt, he felt bereft without them physically near him. And so he played out an elaborate game on the snooker table. It was his way of coping with it all. Sad, yes, he knew it was sad. The biggest sadness of his life.]
So he played snooker every night. Did you ever go with him?
No, I never did. He liked his routine, he didn’t want any disruptions. I sneaked up there once and looked at them all through a window.
[The usual scene greeted Duxie every time he entered the snooker hall, that was the main reason he went there. On the lower deck there were two rows of snooker tables – six on either side – nestling under their comforting pools of light. Then, up some steps, was the big boys’ table, where the best players in town played each other for a tower block of crumpled fivers. There was a small bar up there, and you got your pint in silence. Duxie usually played in a round robin with two mates. They were all drivers and they made small talk about the weather, soccer, road conditions, and the desperate girls who knocked on their cab doors every night, in the lorry parks, willing to do anything for a fiver.
Duxie’s highest break ever was 49. He was very average. So he spiced things up by playing a complicated game of his own. His friends had no inkling.
This was the game that Duxie played. The white ball represented the forces of Good and the black ball represented the forces of Evil.
The other colours: yellow, brown, green, blue and pink represented each of his five children, though he hadn’t seen them for years. Every time he potted one of the coloured balls he won a life for one of his children. He imagined a lorry bearing down on one of them at a pedestrian crossing, the child on the brink of running out into the road – but saved from certain death when Duxie potted the relevant ball.
The fifteen reds represented his aides-de-camp, his helpers in a nightly quest to ward off the forces of Evil. The highest break possible was 147, which had mathematical significance: 147 divided by seven made 21, and 21 divided by seven made three. All the cardinal numbers of magic were there.]
Any other hobbies?
Yes, he had a telescope and he looked at the stars when it was clear enough. He mentioned Saturn a lot because there’s a mission going on at the moment.
The Cassini-Huygens probe.
Yes, that’s the one – you know about it then.
It’s been in the papers a lot, and there was a question in the quiz last week.
That’s what he called the fly – Cassini. The fly that wouldn’t die. He didn’t explain it properly, but it was something to do with his past. He said the fly was bloody irritating and it refused to die, so he called it Mr Cassini. The name stuck, so every time I saw him I asked him how Mr Cassini was. I picked up on his Saturn mania. He said the Cassini probe was named after an astronomer who also gave his name to a dark ring which separates the other rings of Saturn – it’s called Cassini’s Ring, or the Cassini Division. The number seven cropped up time and again when we talked about the probe. Seven years of preparation, a seven-year journey through space... Duxie made a joke of it. He’d looked it up on the web, this seven-year thing. He said the body undergoes a complete change of cells every seven years. He’d made a mental list of things, like the seven-year itch, seven ages of man, seven deadly sins, seven virtues, seven works of mercy, seven years of plenty and seven years of lean, the seven sacraments. I suppose he had a thing
about death. He said that burying the dead was the seventh and last sacrament.
Wasn’t this an odd sort of thing to be talking about, to a stranger in a café?
Yes, I suppose it was. He certainly wasn’t normal. But there’s a history of clued-up drivers, isn’t there? Remember that taxi driver who won Mastermind?
Yes, I suppose you’re right. What else did he talk about?
There was something which was bothering him a lot, a hell of a lot. He was getting nuisance calls, and he had an idea who it was.
Something to do with his ex, perhaps?
No, it was someone from his past, he said. Someone who wouldn’t leave him alone. A man in a fez, he said, but I thought he was joking. I got the impression he’d tell me sooner or later, in his own time. He said he could talk to me about things like that. And I could see no harm in it – after all, I’d be gone in a week.
Did you tell him anything about yourself?
Not much, no. I told him why I was there. I’ve been having a really bad time at home, it’s affected my studies. My father can’t cope because my mother walked out on him after thirty-odd years of marriage.
Abusive?
No, not particularly. Just a pain in the arse sometimes. They used to row a lot.
Do you want to talk about it?
No, not now. Anyway, it’s not particularly relevant. But Duxie made a big thing of it. He was always asking me about it, always wanting to talk about it.
It was a big issue for him?
Yes, I think it was more of an issue for him than for me. He was preoccupied by it, he brought the conversation round to it whenever he could. He seemed really protective towards me. He told me he’d seen a little girl crying, on his way down to the café – she was kneeling by the front door in a hallway, with her face up against the glass... it looked like a druggies’ house, he said. I think it had triggered something inside him.
[That first night she walked into the café his heart went all over the place. She was very pretty, but it wasn’t that. He thought he recognised her, and his head went hot. He started trembling. Everyone looked at her. Who wouldn’t? She was beautiful. Straight blonde hair, creamy complexion, cornflower blue eyes. Full red lips. Lovely in every way. He watched her as Garbarek suffused the room. Above the café window there was a two-tone neon light in a strong italic script which said Stefano’s. It was about six feet long and Stefano’s was split into two so that the top half was green and the bottom half pink. She sat close to him, by the window, directly below the neon sign, and the pink of the light – softened by the glass – played lightly on her hair, giving her a supernatural, angelic look. She sat quietly on her own, reading and drinking coffee, smoking one cigarette after another. She seemed preoccupied, in a world of her own. He felt sure he knew that face. But there again, she could have looked out at him from a thousand roadside hoardings or from the pages of a hundred magazines. Was she in one of the porno mags he kept under his bed in the cab? No, she was too classy. No way. He studied her. She had dark rings under her eyes… very tired perhaps, or was she on drugs? Two small Elastoplasts floated on her arm, tiny hovercrafts at rest. He watched her and he watched her. He stayed far longer that usual. He watched the gimp with the limp circling her, emptying her ashtray too often, giving her free top-ups. He was after something… not her body, he’d never get that, not even as a supreme act of sympathy, the sort of gesture women were capable of making sometimes. He wanted to bend her ear probably. To tell her about his great adventure, the cave in the mountain. Duxie had heard it all too bloody often.]