Engleby (23 page)

The man who encouraged them, this Powell, soon disowned them and warned they’d kill us because they were breeding too many piccaninnies. Someone said you shouldn’t use that word, and he said, No, no, it’s an endearment, it’s what my mother used to call me when she bounced me on her knee. Can that be right? Would you say ‘Little doodums is going to grow up and kill us all with his machete’? Or: ‘Darling possums is going to drown us in rivers of blood’? I don’t think so, Mr Powell. Yet people were always saying how clever he was! Treble youknowwhat in Greek, Brigadier at age 19 . . .

Then he didn’t say anything about West Indians at all any more. He seems instead – at the time of writing – to be devoting the rest of his life to a syntactical challenge: to speak on the radio for fifteen minutes twice a week without saying ‘um’ or ‘er’. Same Wolves whine, same delusional content, but grammatically accurate, even when, as he gets bound up in his clauses, his self-imposed challenge involves adding convolution upon anfractuosity – ‘Pelion upon Ossa’, as I’ve heard him put it – to bring the sentence to a ‘correct’ conclusion. Weird. More than weird. Demented. Poor West Indians – poor, poor people, to have been answerable to that bloke.

They’d be much happier going home, don’t you think? They’re trying to have a street culture in the pouring rain. It’s tragic. If we paid for them to come, why can’t we pay for them to go back – those who want to? Expatriation, repatriation, why take offence at a prefix? Why worry, if you end up where you want to be and someone else has paid for the trip? Then we’d know that those who stayed preferred it here and we could stop feeling guilty about it – and they’d stop feeling sorry for themselves.

That’s not considered an acceptable point of view, by the way. To whom is it not acceptable? To the
politicians
, oddly enough.

I was having all these thoughts as I walked back to the 1100, talking to myself. Then I drove home.

I pulled over just off Praed Street to listen to the end of Graham Parker singing ‘stick to Me’ at max volume on the car stereo. I almost jumped through the roof when a hopeful tom rapped on my window and stuck her fat face against the glass. I had to drive round the block a couple of times till I reached the end of the tape.

There’s been a development at work. The magazine, which is doing quite well considering half its contributors can’t spell, has offered to take me onto the staff. This involves a salary – my first. They say they’ll pay me £5,000 a year. This is £2,000 more than I grossed last year. That’s an increase of 66 per cent, which even in Mr Callaghan’s banana republic is somewhat above the rate of inflation.

Unfortunately, going on the payroll would mean paying tax at source, and although I haven’t done the sums exactly, I think I’d only end up with roughly £3,500, so my raise in real terms would be only £500, from which I’d have to pay my fares to work in Covent Garden. I’d also have to spend time in the office talking to semiliterate Stalinists.

I don’t know how I became a journalist. It’s not something I ever set out to do, though now I’ve done it I can see that it suits me temperamentally quite well. The other thing about journalism is that although at the top end (not at my mag, obviously) it seems to attract well educated, even intelligent, people, it’s basically quite unbelievably easy. You ask a question and write down the answer. You repeat the process a few times. Then you see what all the answers add up to, put them in sequential order with a simple linking narrative and go to the pub.

Even Batley could manage it, I should think. Even Plank Robinson could have done it. (Actually, maybe not Plank.)

Anyway, I went into the office, which is an old print works, suitably enough, off Endell Street and had a talk with the news editor, a woman called Jan Something. I suggested going out to lunch, but she recoiled as though I’d propositioned her. Luckily I’d stopped en route for two pints and a blue pill downstairs in the cellar bar of the Oporto, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, where a table of what I took to be military publishers were discussing print runs (small).

The mag office was completely open-plan with long trestle tables, piles of paper, typewriters and posters for rock concerts stuck to the bare brick walls. Unwashed mugs clustered on the top of filing cabinets. I could imagine everyone being too feminist or on their dignity to wash up. There were clouds of fag smoke from young men who were stuck to curly-wired phones. No sooner were they off one call than they dialled another. Flickwhizzgrind went the office pen as it turned in the number hole; urrgrrrwhrr went the dial as it countered back to zero. There was one office separated by a glass partition – perhaps the editor’s den, though there was no one in it. The wooden floorboards were stacked high with newspapers, rival magazines,
Rolling Stone, Time Out, Boulevard
; the work tables themselves were buried under typing paper, carbons, cuttings snipped from other publications, stacks of London phone books – the slim buff
A
–
D
, the fat pink
E
–
K
and so on. An air of agreeable studenty endeavour hung over the whole place.

I did a deal with the Jan person that I didn’t have to go into the office more than twice a week: once on Thursday for ‘conference’, when we discussed what would be in the next issue and once on a Monday to deliver my ‘copy’ – i.e. articles – and catch up on anything that had come in. The rhythm of the week was good because it meant that I did all my writing at the weekend, which could otherwise be so difficult to fill. The phone calls and ‘research’ I did on Thursday and Friday. Tuesday and Wednesday I generally took off.

Jan also mentioned ‘expenses’. This turned out not to mean a corner table at the White Tower, but reasonable reimbursement, on production of receipts, for directly work-related costs such as bus fares or photocopying. We haggled over the home phone bill and I won.

‘Cheers,’ she said as I left, ‘and don’t forget you’re seeing Matt and I on Monday.’

I thought for a moment she’d said ‘matineye’, an East End pronunciation of ‘matinee’. Was I meant to review it?

Then I remembered Matt was the production editor.

‘Me won’t forget,’ me muttered as me went downstairs.

Wednesday afternoon is cinema time. It’s usually the one at the top of Queensway, near the Porchester library, sometimes the Gate in Notting Hill, or occasionally I take the 1100 down to Fulham, have eggs florentine and a litre of house red in Picasso’s on the King’s Road then go to the Fulham Road ABC. I usually take a hip flask in to numb my critical faculty. (I’d drained it within the first half hour of
Julia
.)

I still like the cinema, however bad the films. Cowboy pictures I could never handle as a child, except
The Magnificent Seven
; for the rest, the costume and setting (dust, cacti, one-horse town) were too dull, and the older men looked silly in those hats, like bank managers dressed up. I really hated the identikit curly hairstyle of the obligatory woman in crinolines and the arch way she descended the steps to the bar, derailing the plot. For pulp, I preferred horror. I never failed to respond to moonlight – to hound dogs, long metal bell pulls, virgins in white dresses, blood on the teeth.

American cop thrillers are bad because you can’t hear what they say, and often the story turns on a side-of-the-mouth remark, indecipherable, that the stand-in was a fake or that the plant was working for the others. And the trouble with almost all ‘thrillers’ is that they don’t thrill; who but a child, who in their right mind, would care whether in the end they get the bullion out through Helsinki before the timer detonates the bomb in Berlin?

I still watch, though.

I engage with the story in my own way. I inhabit the sets. And I wear their clothes; I like the feel of them. I move house to the apartment in Santa Monica where Steve McQueen’s girlfriend lives. I make out with her room-mate. I wear Steve’s shoulder holster and drink with his buddy. I note the way he changes gear in the Ford Mustang GT-390 and feel the nub of the shift in my palm, long after I’ve ceased to follow or care which villain dumped which in the concrete overcoat and which one I’m waiting for at the airport, which one’s going to feel my hand on his shoulder when he comes barrelling through off the Miami flight.

These are things that help me if not lose then leave behind, what else, my self.

I was immune to the recent big-deal film,
Saturday Night Fever
, though Stellings told me he thought there was ‘something definitely going on’ in the title song. I like the Curzon because the seats are lush and few other cinema-goers choose the afternoon to see foreign pictures. I saw
A Woman Under the Influence
there, a film by John Cassavetes. I admired the woman and I didn’t see that she was as crazy as the others seemed to think. It was strong, repetitive, gripping – though there were moments when you could see the boom dropping in at the top of the shot! I never made that mistake, even as a stand-in sound man on Stewart Forres’s film. How bad would that have been? If Jennifer’s protests when she was being ‘raped’ by Alex Tanner had been made into a visible microphone just above her head?

I feel good when I leave the darkness of the cinema. It makes me feel my life is important. For a few minutes I stroll along the dark streets, thinking of myself as someone in a film – a man with a character, a destiny. I become aware of my clothes and my physical mass; of my quiddity, my value.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

I feel my sense of who I am drowned out by static. On the street, in the world, there’s too much extraneous filth and air and words.

I don’t find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

A lot of time has passed.

Is that good? I never know. I haven’t stopped to reflect and write, and that suggests that I’ve been busy.

Busy
is
good, isn’t it? Busy means we’re hard at it, achieving our ends or ‘goals’. Haven’t had time to stop, or look around or think. That’s considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it – another year gone, where did that one go? – tacitly, they’re proud. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it: you put your time where your priority is.

Suppose, though, you’re not sure that what you’re doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It’s easy, it pays quite well. But really it’s a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.

Because what you really ought to be doing is weighing up the facts. If the history of
Homo sapiens
so far were represented as a single day, an average human lifespan would represent a little over half a second. That’s your lot, that’s all you have of living, then you return to the unconscious eternity that came before and will close back over you – over your half-second. If the
whole
history of the earth (not just the brief
Homo sap
era) were represented as one day then your existence would be too small to measure. No sufficiently imaginative chronometer exists.

So what you must do – being an intelligent, thinking creature – is make a very careful, well-informed judgement about how best you can spend your one and only half-second. You analyse yourself and your abilities; you match them to the world, its ways and possibilities, and you make a solemn decision to do what would most contribute to the well-being of the world and of yourself.

Except you’ve got a deadline, Friday at noon. And your lover coming round on Tuesday. And there’s football on.

This ‘busy’ thing isn’t a commitment, it’s an evasion.

And what are we avoiding? Facing the problem of the one half-second. Because if that’s really how it is, if that’s time, then nothing is worthwhile and nothing makes sense.

If time is
not
really like that, then all might yet work out. And in fact – good news – we do believe time is not linear. The trouble is – bad news – that our brains can only
think
of it as linear, therefore we’re doomed to see our lives as pointless.

It’s funny, really. The most intelligent creature that’s evolved so far (we think) has a design flaw at the heart of its superior intelligence. It can’t grasp one of the dimensions it inhabits.

It’s as though we had longitude, but no latitude. How then would we navigate or reckon our position on the earth?

We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can’t hear it.

I see that a woman called Marguerite Walls has been found murdered in Leeds. It’s almost a year since the death of the last of these women in Yorkshire and the feeling, or hope, was that the killer had packed it in. It’s been a feature of life since I’ve lived in London: every three months or so another prostitute has been found dead in a red-light back alley in the merged badlands of Leeds and Bradford. Over the years, our magazine had done at least three long features on it.

This victim was found in a garden, half-hidden under grass cuttings and leaves. She’d been strangled, though, where the previous ones had been stabbed; she was in Farsley, not in itself a dodgy district; and, most important of all, she was not a prostitute. Ms Walls was a 47-year-old civil servant at the Department of Education and Science.