Meanwhile, at eleven-thirty on that Thursday morning as I sat astride the water closet, browsing through the letter columns of the Daily Telegraph, my face flushed from my purposeful efforts, the cheeks of my arse warm on the woodwork, as if on cue confusion was announced by the shrill imperious tones of the telephone. I waited a customary five seconds, as irritations welled, then nipping a turd in the bud, placed the Telegraph on the linoleum floor, stuffed three sheets of carefully folded Andrex into my orifice, and shuffled as if in a sack race into the stale disorder of my bed sitting room.
Bent at the knees, and leaning at a thirty-degree angle from the waist, I picked up the receiver and announced my name in a tone hopefully confident enough to conceal the fact that I stood there in a state of ridiculous vulnerability.
‘George Timmins,’ I said and cleared my throat.
‘Hello, George. How are you?’
Certain people are possessed of such unshakeable confidence in their own identity that the very chore of announcing their name seems a preposterous irrelevance. Such people are a source of considerable irritation to me. I have been known to replace the receiver on its cradle without uttering a sound. Only one other kind of person irritates me more. They conduct themselves on telephones in exactly the same lofty fashion but so distinctive is their voice that even after considerable periods of absence it is immediately recognisable. Such is the voice of David Adler.
It has a light fruitiness, modulated like an actor’s, caressing, sleepy, sensual, as if he has just woken up and you are the first person he thought of. (At eleven-thirty he probably was still in bed.) The flat London vowels only add to its persuasiveness, with its accentuated lilt, soft, slurred, flowing. It is curious to think that an accidental or genetic arrangement of the vocal chords, assiduously cultivated, can afford the basis of so much worldly success. The listener felt privileged to eavesdrop on David Adler’s intimate aloofness. And one look into those soft, large, grey-green eyes trebled the honour.
‘Who is that speaking?’ I asked sharply.
An indulgent sigh brushed its silky way along the impartial wires. ‘It’s David,’ implying who else could it be, and indeed, who else could it have been? ‘I’d like to see you.’
I had anticipated the request. In eleven years it had come some five times before. It usually signified some change in his material progress, a new flat, a more expensive car, a suite of offices more opulent, leather-bound and automated than the previous ones. And on five occasions I had shaved, changed my shirt and cleaned my teeth, then boarded the appropriate means of public transport to place myself in, or around, or by or outside the particular acquisition that he wanted to draw my attention to. Glumly I had nodded my indifferent approval, simulating a response only when he threw a glance at me. I would prod a button, or finger some paintwork, or pat a cushion. ‘Very nice. Very nice.’ He always seemed unperturbed by my palpable lack of enthusiasm. Indeed, it was questionable whether he was even aware of my presence, so self-absorbed did he seem in the obviously sensual pleasure of ownership, as if the motor car or room, whatever it happened to be, was not just the product of arduous human labour, an arrangement of brick or steel welded together by the labourer’s sweat, but had some kind of magical property of its own that conferred upon him a special privilege. The grey-green eyes glistened, reflecting in miniature the new icon, as if by some secret process of transubstantiation he had ingested it into his very being. And though the pleasure was shortlived like all mystical experiences (by the time he had helped me into my coat and thrust two crisp fivers into my damp and eager hands, the magic had already passed and he was bored) it had answered, nevertheless, some deep-seated spiritual need.
That I should be required to act as witness to this communion often gave me cause to ponder, usually at night as I lay back on my fetid sheets, my feet snug in their socks, steamy from the day’s labour, my right hand fondling affably my much abused and easily amused member. At such times the darkness around me, the raucous noises of the streets reassuring me, lying in wait to answer the call of my capricious libido, a box of Kleenex at the alert on the bedside table, tissue memorials to the nonconceived, between those moments of lights out and masturbation I muse over life in a kind of suspended animation. It came to me on one such occasion that David needed me to allay his guilt. And if this seems an admittedly banal explanation, no less true for its banality, it has a less analytic corollary which avers that he needs my presence BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE CAN DEFINE HIS PROGRESS LIKE ME.
Confusing? Perhaps. But when I make it known that I am thirty-five and David is thirty-four and that we have known each other for thirty of those voracious and life-consuming years, then perhaps my meaning is clearer. We began our relationship at the ages of five and four, confronting each other in check shirts and grey flannel knickers: he dug his grubby nails into my face and drew blood. For two years he dictated the course of my history with those nails and, when they proved insufficient, with studded boots that showered sparks as he slid along the way, until, somewhat uncharacteristically I now concede, while grappling with him in the street, he predictably clawing at my face, I seized his head and banged it hard three times on the grey stone pavement. My surprise action stunned him more than the kerb stone, and from then on a dialectical change took place as the Hegelians will have it, a change from quantity (three blows) into quality (his submission). I had negated his thesis.
Since that time he has tried to negate my negation. His rivalry took on more sophisticated guise, masking his deep-rooted respect for the kerb stone.
‘Well I’m rather busy just now.’
He laughed. ‘You’re probably lying around in that grotty flat. Look, come on over. I’ll give you lunch. You probably need a decent meal. And I need to talk to you.’
He was right about the lunch, and he usually gave a good lunch. But there were other considerations. Admittedly five summonses in fifteen years is hardly being at his beck and call, but why should I submit to his overture?
You will remember I had been called from the lavatory seat, and that I stood, my trousers round my ankles, inclined some thirty degrees to the perpendicular. Such a stance afforded me a view of the nether regions of a chest of drawers that stood by the telephone. Perhaps it was first the sunlight that attracted my attention for it highlighted a layer of dust of wondrous texture, like a rich extravagant carpet that had gathered beneath the battered mahogany of disorderly drawers. Next I chanced upon a crumpled Kleenex, thrown aside no doubt after a night of particularly reckless passion; no more than nine inches to the left of the discarded tissue was a small piece of fruit cake, and nibbling at the said piece of cake, its eye black and provocative, was a small furry mouse. Usually I take such manifestations in my living room as a matter of course, as an inevitable hazard faced by those who live in a state of disarray and dirt. But a combination of certain things, the telephone call, the stirrings of some dead rivalry, but most of all the extreme exposure of my condition, trousers at ankles, Y-fronts at calves, penis bared to the elements and, worse, to the needle-boned tooth of my rodent intruder, and (some homosexual anxiety erupting?) three sheets of Andrex plugged in my bum, all conspired to make me break out in a cold and shivering sweat. I lurched for my trousers and dragged them up my goose-pimpled legs, whose hairs were rising like a field of wheat. I banged the chest of drawers with my elbow, which did nothing to disrupt the early lunching and munching of my unwanted guest. A sharp kick seemed to make him only more resolved to stay. It was a conflict of wills, and already the beast of two inch length proved more determined than I.
At this point the forgotten receiver was saying, ‘Get a taxi and come over.’
‘Right away,’ I shouted, ‘right away,’ conceding ignominious defeat to both mouse and man.
I hastily replaced the telephone, rushed back to the lavatory, where anxiety moved my bowels to extravagant proportions. Wiped, washed, coated and hatted, I left my apartment without so much as a glance at that part of my home now requisitioned by an alien creature.
Chapter 2
The street calmed my quivering nervous system. The sky was a pale autumnal blue and the weak sharp-rimmed sun was lethargically reaching its highest meridional point. It was a time of the year when the season seems to brace itself with a kind