During lunch, Michael told me the story of the BOX building ghost. But before that, he wanted to talk about Rachel. He admires Rachel a great deal. He thinks she’s a great artist. Michael has strong views on these things.
—She’s off to Warsaw, you know.
—Yes, I know. She called last night.
—Oh.
He was a bit put out that she’d told us. That his news wasn’t news. He made a sulky face. He makes a lot of faces, Michael. And he does voices. I think sitting at a desk all day doesn’t suit him.
—Well, he whined.—Did she tell you what it was?
—An old school friend?
—Isn’t that marvellous? You know, this is about the seventh or eighth one who’s claimed to be a schoolmate. This chap though also claims to have seen a photograph of him, of Max, behind a bar somewhere outside Warsaw. Some hideous little Polish dump full of vodka alcoholics and toothless Catholics, can you just imagine? He lives out there now, some EU chappie. Swears that it’s Max. On his life. Poor sod. And the really pathetic thing is that this fellow has told Rachel that he saw the photograph months and months ago, and recognised it then, and even pointed it out to his wife, or girlfriend or what have you, as in, Look, how strange, there’s a photograph of an old school chum, good old Max, wonder what he was doing here, and that it wasn’t until last week that he finally got around to searching for Max on the Internet and found Rachel’s website and discovered he was missing.
—Jesus. That’s quite elaborate.
—Isn’t it? People are elaborate, though. People are Byzantine.
I’m sure that one of these days the Max project is going to go seriously off the rails. Someone is going to find out that they’re being taken for a ride and they’re going to get really angry. Of course Rachel insists that such a thing could never happen because such a person would, were Rachel genuine, actually be taking Rachel for a ride, and a much crueller and more disturbing one, and anger, should it all break down, would be entirely Rachel’s prerogative. She insists that the room for mistaken identity is slim. The photographs, while slightly altered, are photographs of an actual distinctive person, with distinguishing features (a small scar over the left eyebrow, what looks like a mole on the lower right cheek, a handsome gap between the two front teeth), and could not be easily mistaken for somebody else. Similarly, the name she has given her missing brother, Max Poe, is sufficiently unusual to rule out that kind of confusion. And the dates she has come up with – of birth and departure and return and disappearance – are unalterable. Put all of this together, says Rachel, and it simply doesn’t fit any actual missing person. She’s checked. And when someone does approach her with some story about Max, Rachel goes through (so she tells us) a complicated checking procedure to ensure that it doesn’t amount to valuable information about somebody who is genuinely missing. By which I think she means that she checks any checkable details against files for those who went missing at the same time and the same age as Max did not.
But of course no one is deceiving her on purpose. What would be the point? Any deception involved is total, in the sense that the people who claim to have seen Max, or who claim to have known him either before or after he didn’t disappear, are deceiving themselves. Completely and utterly – almost religiously. And they’re doing it for a reason – it’s in their interest to deceive themselves. Because they are divided against themselves, like nations. They’re disturbed. And Rachel is flying out to Poland to have a chat with them. It makes me nervous.
Of course she’s aware of all of this, she’s talked about it. It seems to be the point of it, in many ways. I once tried to tell her that I was worried on her behalf, but I think it came across quite badly, as if I had accused her of something, which I suppose I had. Well, I don’t suppose. I did accuse her. I actually accused her of abuse – of the abuse of vulnerable, lonely people. She was astonished, and angry, and in turn she suggested that I was jealous of her – artistically jealous – and that if I wasn’t fulfilled by cartooning I shouldn’t take it out on her. Which of course may be true to some extent – I’m not really sure – but it distracted me and confused me and I lost sight of the point that I was trying to make, which was that someone at some time was going to discover that the Max they claimed to know didn’t actually exist, and they would feel fooled, and they might become angry, even dangerously so. After the argument with Rachel I went over all the same ground with K, who immediately saw what I had been trying to say, but insisted that the disturbing nature of the Max project was exactly the point of it, that Rachel was that kind of artist, and that her work was for that reason hugely interesting, and that her friends should really only offer support, that anything else would be useless, that she was a grown woman who was completely aware of what she was doing, and that it would be patronising to tell her to be careful. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, didn’t exactly comfort me. I was still nervous, and added to it now was a new nervousness, about myself and my own motivations and my own worth in terms of what I do and what I manage to understand. It left me feeling rather stupid, to tell you the truth.
Michael never seems nervous at all. Or stupid. I imagine that appearing stupid would be the worst imaginable thing for Michael. Ever. I think he would rather die than appear stupid. I envy him really. He seems to exist without any difficulty, as if everything is easy. He is a very calm man, a sort of still point, who’s always at the centre of some derangement or other. His mother is Catherine Anderson, who I mentioned – the Catherine Anderson, the actress. His father, estranged from both of them, is currently serving a jail term for a ridiculous fraud perpetrated against a children’s charity somewhere in France, or Switzerland maybe. I think Michael is quite embarrassed about his parents. It’s difficult to get him to talk about them, though I’m always trying, just because I’m so curious. I think they’re fascinating. He will talk about his father sometimes, in a disparaging tone, full of distance and tired amusement, as if he’s talking about the latest misadventures of a character from a soap opera. Even then he’ll only talk about him while we’re alone or with other close friends. About his mother he was never very voluble. I used to think that was a kind of modesty, as if he was afraid that people would think he was making himself interesting by invoking her name. But I don’t think that now. I just don’t think he likes her very much. We used to get the occasional reference to whatever it was that she was up to, and annoyance that she had turned up to see him unannounced, or that she’d wanted him to accompany her to some function or party or other and how he felt obliged but resentful, as if it was her who was using him. But lately, he doesn’t mention her at all – not since she gave a long interview to a Sunday newspaper in which she detailed her elaborate sexual history. I don’t think they’re talking.
So, over lunch, Michael told me the story of the building ghost. Or should that be the ghost building? Michael is an architect. He works for Edwards Patten Associates – the people who designed the Lacon Tower, among other things, and the new Technology Museum which won a big award last year. I like the museum. At least, I like the photographs I’ve seen of it. It seems rather elegant. The Lacon Tower, on the other hand, always looks to me like it’s about to fall down. It makes my stomach lurch a little every time I see it. I don’t like heights. Michael tells me that it contains movement in its line. He has a voice he adopts when he talks about his work, and I’m never sure if it’s just another one of his voices or whether it’s actually the real one. It’s quieter, more intense. He tells me that the design of the Lacon Tower is intended to convey forward momentum, like the bold cursive script of a self-confident person. I asked Michael about this, about whether it is really possible to speak about a building in other terms – to say that building design, architecture, is like something else, like people or water or air or handwriting. He admitted to me that he never thought of architecture in that way – as being like other things. He thought of it simply as itself – as function and line and, to some degree, intellectual occupation of a space. He thought about architecture – in other words, in the language of architecture – without the need to translate. He tells me that the similes of architecture are simply an interface with the lay community. A way of talking to the likes of me. Do you think that is true? I don’t know whether it’s true or