Grey Area (2 page)

Alternatively Lady Bob may react like the Recorder, whose fine lawyerly mind often attracts him to the triple bluff. He almost always sends a fair bunch of his people off, on the basis that we will think that he will think that we will think that he will think that it’s not worth going. While it’s true that this strategy has stood him in good stead, often allowing him to get as many as 694,672 people out of the city for the day (at any rate that’s what he clocked last August bank holiday), I think it’s as much to do with the fact that a high percentage of the Recorder’s people debouch through the east of London as any great tactical achievement on his part.

Not that I mean to be disrespectful to the Recorder – nothing is further from my mind. And why would I? After all, it is the Recorder’s people who have consistently increased the amount of ‘Good mornings’ they’ve bidden to my people over the past ten years. In the early eighties only about 900,000 of his people ever said ‘Good morning’ to my people, but now it more or less averages at that level, representing a compound increase year-on-year of over 0.96 per cent. Far greater – it has to be said – than the increase in salutations from Lady Bob’s people.

It sounds complex, doesn’t it? Quite a lot to take on board. Well, that’s the way I work. But the saddest thing I have to tell you is that I fear it makes hardly any difference to the outcome. Dooley isn’t capable of anything like this degree of foresight and calculation and yet I have to say that all too often as many of his people make it out of the city on bank holidays as mine; as many of his people get late reservations at Quaglino’s as mine; as many of his people get a seat on the tube as mine. It just isn’t fair. Simply by adopting the tactic that is no tactic, a kind of brutish
force majeure,
Dooley imposes himself on our society.

He farts – and 4,209 children are beaten and buggered. He coughs – and 68,238 sufferers from emphysema get promoted to cancer. He groans, turning on his day bed – and forty-seven of his people lose control of their vehicles and drive into the vehicles of forty-seven of my people. Dooley is a kind of elemental force. His weapons are pain, suffering, loneliness, and deprivation. He sneezes – and seven junkies overdose in squats off the Caledonian Road. Not for Dooley the subtleties of the snub, the cold shoulder, the dropped gaze and the backbite. He has no need of them, because he has no ambition save to remain as he is: Lord of the Underclass.

What is it with Lady Bob? Why is it so hard for me to get into work with her? Sometimes, lying awake on stormy nights, with the street lamps outside shining through the raindrops on the window, and making a stippled pattern across the floor of my bedroom, I begin to get the fear. The fear that somehow Lady Bob has mixed me up in her mind with Dooley. That she hasn’t been paying attention to the infinite deference with which I have courted her favour.

It’s my turn to toss and turn, to knead the duvet with my hands, as if it were some giant wad of sweating dough. Was it the 34,571 Valentine’s Day cards that I sent to several of her many divisions of secretaries and data-processing clerks? Or perhaps the 14,408 ever so slightly forward air-kisses that I bestowed upon 7,204 of her hair stylists, sales assistants and gallery girls? Maybe she felt a deep and lingering rancour when – for reasons that I am unable to divulge – I was obliged to break off 415 of the extra-marital affairs that my people were having with hers?

Who can say. But the fact remains that Lady Bob consistently invites me to fewer dinner parties than even Dooley. That smarts – that hurts. Only 210,542 invitations to meals of any sort last year – and of those a good 40,000 were children’s parties. Children’s parties! I ask you. Worse still, at anything up to 22 per cent of these parties my kids failed to come away with a party bag. Tears before their bedtime – and mine.

What can I do? Any overt move would be misinterpreted, of that much I am sure. I can feel in the very limits of my seething collectivity of consciousness the peculiar inlets and isolated promontories of our interaction. The eight of us – the eight that matter, that is – are like the tectonic plates that cover the earth. If one of us rubs up against any other we produce mighty forces that reverberate, affecting the other six. Given this, perhaps I would do better to concentrate my efforts on the Recorder, once more.

In the past I assiduously courted him. I would even have my people in the City deliberately form shooting syndicates to which the Recorder’s people could be invited. I made sure that the Recorder’s people were always asked to be the godparents of my people’s children. I formed suburban philatelic societies just so as to be able to invite some of the Recorder’s loners along. If one of my people was doing the Samaritans and one of the Recorder’s phoned in . . . well, you can be certain that they were given an excess of sympathy, a beaming out of true caring.

It was all to no avail. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t work (I know the Recorder thinks well of me, viz the ‘Good mornings’), it’s just that he didn’t reciprocate in any meaningful fashion – unless you count 34,876 items of junk mail, far more than my people have ever received from any of the other six’s lot.

I don’t want to have to stoop to the tactics of Lechmere and the Bollam sisters. I don’t want to have to associate with that perverse crew any more than I have to. Of course, I am protected to some degree by my covert association with Colin Purves. He’s a worthy sort of chap – you know the kind – not that imaginative, a plodder really. He’s the only one of the eight of us who commutes. He lives down at Tunbridge Wells with his wife. (He probably refers to her as ‘my lady wife’ whilst propping up the saloon bar in the local pub.) He takes the eight-twenty-two to Charing Cross every morning and then crosses via the footbridge to his office on the South Bank. I believe he’s responsible (if that’s the right word – ‘responsibility’ seems slightly too grand) for the stationery purchasing of one department, of one division, of one subsidiary of a multi-national oil company.

Lucky for Purves – having a desk job. It means that like me he has an opportunity to keep close to him the London phone directories, and the computer discs that hold pirated copies of all the electoral registers for London’s constituencies. Of course, neither of us has to have the physical evidence of all the people we control to hand, oh no. It’s just that Purves – like myself – finds it somewhat easier to get to grips with the job if he has some kind of a record of these multiplying blips of sentience.

I like to hold the directory that contains the listing of the biggest chunk of the people I am manipulating at any given time. It gives me the feeling that I am in some sense holding them, caressing them, tweaking the strings that shift their little arms and little legs, their little mouths and little heads.

I don’t get out a lot any more. Tonight is an exception. It’s nice just to sit here in the snug of the pub and watch the people laughing and drinking. It amuses me to try and guess which of them belongs to whom. That horsey-looking woman, yes her, the strawberry blonde with the Hermes headscarf drinking a ginger-beer shandy. Well, you would have thought she’d have to be Lady Bob’s or the Recorder’s, hmm? Well, you’re wrong, she belongs to the Bollam sisters. I know, I know, but you see, look at the sides of her neck, there’s a certain unresolved tension there in the tendons. It’s ever so subtle, but it’s enough for me to be able to tell.

And the man who collects the glasses. All stooped over, with his drowned-rat beard, and that absurd mulberry-coloured quilted smoking jacket, the lapels of which are encrusted with silly badges. Lechmere’s. In fact, he’s one of Lechmere’s voyeurs. A particularly gruesome one, I should imagine. What’s that? You’re surprised it doesn’t make me paranoid having him here in my local . . . No, no, don’t be ridiculous, it matters not a jot. We comingle freely – all of us. There are some of the other’s people very close to me indeed. Couldn’t get any closer if they tried.

No, no, I used to work, but I gave up my job at the bookshop to look after my mother. She’s almost ninety now and quite bedridden. It’s a fairly quiet life that Mother and I have. There’s not a lot of money, but there are a lot of bedpans to empty. An exciting interlude for the two of us is a visit from the health visitor, or an extra sausage from the meals on wheels. I suppose you could say that Mother and I are close – perhaps too close. I can sometimes guess what she’s thinking just by looking at her. The other way round? No, I don’t think so. How can I put it, Mother is just a trifle
déclassé,
a tiny cut below myself. And anyway – she’s one of Dooley’s and that really scuppers it as far as I’m concerned.

It’s strange the way that we all appear to have different motivations. Dooley acting apparently out of capriciousness; the Bollam sisters out of some perverted religiosity; Lechmere trying to see everything; Purves with his desire for orderliness – directing many many thousands of his rather dull little men to wash their cars every Saturday morning, and mow their lawns every Sunday afternoon, without fail . . . As for the Recorder and Lady Bob, well I wouldn’t presume, but I think I can safely say that they have everyone’s best interests at heart.

And then there’s me. Acting, I would say, with absolute probity. Attempting to make sure that there is a kind of organic unity in London, that people have their right position and estate. It’s entirely appropriate that it should be me who fulfils this role; occupying, as I do, a sort of middle-to-upper-middle niche. I can look in both directions, up and down the social scale, and check that to the best of my abilities everybody is in his correct place.

If 212 ethnic minority local councillors throughout the capital are getting a tad stroppy, then I make it my business to ensure that they’re knocked down a peg or two. What exactly? We-ell, I might have their children arrested for drugs, something like that. And if there are 709 little Sloaney women who fancy they are about to get their name in some glossy magazine, then I’m on hand to make sure the proof readers make the correct error.

It can be still more subtle than this. In one blissful twenty-four-hour period, a month or so ago, I engineered it so that 45,902 of my people found themselves dropping the wrong name. Good, eh? I am good, good at the task in hand.

It’s not snobbery! I thought I told you that at the outset. I deplore snobbery and it constitutes no part of my motivation. I simply believe that there is a natural order of people just as there is of things. A kind of periodic table on to which every element within every person can be fitted.

Anyway, it’s not a responsibility that most people would be prepared to shoulder. It can be gruelling work and of course there is no reward to speak of.

Yes, sometimes I do get depressed, very low. When I’m really down it amuses me to toy with this notion: that one of the little people might discover the truth. Discover not only that their freedom is a delusion; but that, furthermore, instead of being the hapless tool of some great deity, shoved up on a towering Titian-type cloud, they are instead jerked this way and that by a pervert in Bloomsbury, or a dullard in the Shell Centre, or an old incontinent in Clapton. Ye-es, it would be droll.

I’m sorry? Yes, yes, that’s right, that’s what I was leading up to. When it gets too claustrophobic at home, when Mother’s rasping snore gets to me, and the old-woman smell of flannel, medicaments and cabbage is making me retch, I come here and engage someone like yourself in conversation. Someone bright, enquiring and interested. And then I do tell them – tell them everything.

What’s that? Yes, of course, you are perceptive; naturally I can do this with impunity, because you’ll never remember anything I’ve told you. It will depart from your tiny mind when we part. For as I told you at the outset: there are really only eight people in London. And whereas I am fortunately one of them – you are emphatically not.

The Indian Mutiny

I killed a man when I was at school. I’m not just saying that, I really did. And you know the fact of it has eaten away at me for years. Even now, sitting in my office at the station, in the dead centre of a dead ordinary day, I get chilly and sweaty thinking about it.

It was a shit thing to do, a truly bad thing. When I was growing up – after it had happened – I didn’t dwell on it that much. It wasn’t as if I had beaten the back of his head in with a spade and watched his brains run out like grey giblets, or poisoned him so that he died kicking and thrashing, or stabbed him, shot him, or hung him ejaculating and shirting from a spindly tree.

Don’t get me wrong – these aren’t my imaginings. I don’t visualise things like this. Like I say, when I was in my teens, my early twenties, I didn’t think of it as actually murdering someone. I read my behaviour differently, innocently.

He was my history teacher, I was his pupil. He had a mental breakdown one day, actually in the class, while he was taking a lesson. He was hospitalised, but we heard that he killed himself a couple of weeks later. Killed himself by suffocation.

Years later I heard that what he had done was to shut himself in a tiny broom cupboard. He caulked up the cracks in the door. That’s how he died, sitting in the close, antiseptic darkness. That’s what triggered it, I suppose. Before that I might have suspected that I had more to do with his death than the other boys in 4b, but I didn’t know. When I heard how he died I knew that I had killed him.

Soon after that the dreams came. The dreams where I’m looking at the blade of the spade, or fastening the elasticated belt around his thick, red neck. It’s astonishing how many different ways I’ve murdered Mr Vello in my dreams. Murdered him and murdered him and murdered him again. I’d say that while I’ve slept I’ve probably killed Mr Vello at least two thousand times. And you wanna know the really queer thing about it? Every time I do him, I do him in a fresh way – an original way.

Some of the ways that I’ve dreamt I killed Mr Vello are positively baroque. Like shredding his buttocks to a pulpy mass, my weapon a common cheese grater. Or like pulling his head off. Just pulling it right off and sort of de-coring his body. Really icky stuff. I’m glad I can’t express this too well in words because it’s worse than any special effect you’ve ever seen. I don’t know where the dreams come from because I don’t see the world that way. I’ve never watched an operation, or been in an abattoir. I don’t go to horror movies. I’ve never even seen a dead person. So I just don’t know where I get all these vivid anatomical details.

Of course it’s the guilt. I know that. I’m not stupid – far from it. I’ve got the real gift of the gab. I can talk and talk. That’s what I do for a living: talk and talk. That’s what the kids at school said about me, ‘You can talk like a chat show host, Wayne,’ that’s what they said. And it was prophetic, because now I am a chat show host. I went straight from being a lairy kid to being a lairy adult. That’s how I really killed Mr Vello, of course, I killed him with my big mouth. I killed him by winding him up. Winding him up so tight that he shattered. He just shattered.

Yeah, I did him all right. But I can tell you I didn’t do it all by myself. I couldn’t have managed it without the Indian Army. Mr Vello came to us as a supply teacher. He wasn’t like the other teachers at the school. He didn’t wear PVC car coats, or ratty corduroy jackets. He didn’t speak with a cockney accent, or try and speak with one. He didn’t read the
Guardian,
or the novels of D.H. Lawrence. Mr Vello dressed like a retired Indian Army officer. I think that’s how he saw himself.

He was a solidly plump Yorkshireman in his mid-fifties. He always wore a blue blazer with brass buttons – the Yorkshire County Cricket Club badge was on the breast pocket. Mr Vello combed his hair back tight over his scalp. He had been using Brylcreem for so many years that the thin slick of his hair had become Brylcreem-coloured. Mr Vello’s face was moley rather than vulpine, but when he got angry, which he did with increasing frequency, his apparently friendly, diffident wrinkles seemed to get smarmed back with his greasy hair.

With the benefit of culpable hindsight I can place myself behind Mr Vello’s metal-framed spectacles and picture class 4b as it must have appeared to him when he first swung back the big wooden door and walked in on us.

Simmo was doing his drawing-pin trick. This was a bogus bit of fakirism whereby he placed three drawing pins on top of a desk and put his fat white hand over them. He then asked another boy to stamp on the back of his hand. On this occasion Simmo got it wrong – just as Mr Vello walked into the room he screamed and held up his hand. The three drawing pins were deeply embedded.

‘What’s all this?’ said Mr Vello, setting a pile of text-books down on the teacher’s desk.

‘Please, sir,’ gurgled Simmo (blood was beginning to flow), ‘please, sir, I’ve hurt my hand.’

‘Nonsense, boy,’ said Mr Vello, ‘now sit down and shut up . . . all of you: sit down, shut up and pay attention.’

But we didn’t. We never did. We just went on: flicking rubber bands; chasing one another around the desks; bashing and shouting. The majority, that is. But really there were three distinct minorities in class 4b: the Jews, the Gentiles and the Asians. 4b was a bipartisan culture, however, and power derived solely from the antagonism between the Jews and the Gentiles. We formed two gangs and called ourselves respectively The Yids and The Yocks.

The Asian boys were different. They were all first-generation immigrants, mostly East African Asians, expelled from Uganda and Kenya, but some Punjabis and Pakistanis as well. It could have been this factor alone, or perhaps it was because Asian families have a more pronounced tradition of respect for pedagogues, but none of the Asian boys was indisciplined or cheeky. On the other hand they didn’t exactly stick together. They certainly didn’t all sit together in the classroom. It was as if they had conspired to be unobtrusively unobtrusive. I reckon Mr Vello picked up on this immediately. Because it was the Asian boys who stopped buggering about first. They all sat down at their desks and got their books out.

Mr Vello saw the rest of us, immediately, for what we were: time-servers; time-wankers; ignorantly urbane boys – full of nasty decadences. The doomed scurf on the last polluted wave of our culture. He said as much, or rather shouted it.

‘You boys are ignorant,’ he shouted, ‘ignorant of discipline.’ He walked up and down the classroom batting the backs of heads with practised swipes of his wooden ruler. We yowled and yammered like the Yahoos we were. ‘But it isn’t your fault, you live in an undisciplined society and you are subjected to a banal cultural babble. You would do well to observe these Indian boys. They at least have been subjected in the more recent past to the rigours and responsibilities of imperial rule. Isn’t that right, boy?’ Mr Vello stopped by Jayesh Rabindirath, a thick oaf who was heavily moustachioed at fourteen.

‘Err . . . yes, sir. I suppose so.’

Mr Vello tried to teach us. He tried for weeks. But he just couldn’t hack it. Adolescent boys sense weakness in a teacher and go for it like piranhas sporting in offal. I think that in a quieter school, some nice prep where the kids were better behaved, Mr Vello would have been OK. But at Creighton Comprehensive he didn’t have a chance.

I think he was overwhelmed by the militancy of our philistinism, the utter failure of our didactic urge. Naturally we played up to this – me in particular. It took only four maladministered lessons for the situation to deteriorate to such an extent that the poor man couldn’t even talk for sixty seconds without being importuned by a battery of grubby paws, stuck out straining from the shoulder, at angles of forty-five degrees. ‘Please, sir! Please, sir! Ple-ease, sir!’ we all chorused, but as soon as he paid us any mind we would come up with some absurd request (‘Please, sir, may I breathe ?’), our subservience a grotesque parody of his assumed authority. Or if, in the course of attempting to instruct us, he managed to shout out a question, we would vie with one another to produce the most facile, the most patently weak, the most irrelevant answer.

I think I managed the worst example of this fairly early on. Mr Vello was attempting to discourse on the Crimean War; back to the class, he mapped out the battlefield at Balaclava with a series of mauve chalk strokes. We had all fallen silent, the better to stand on our desks and wigglingly shimmy our contempt for him. Without bothering to turn he flung over his shoulder, ‘Why were the Russian batteries positioned here?’

I came back triumphantly (God, have I ever been funnier?), ‘Because that’s where the little diagram said they should be positioned.’

We all fell about. I got eighteen consecutive detentions. God, how we (and me in particular) loved it when he got worked up. It was so comic, there was something cartoony about the colour contrast between his blue, blue blazer and his red, bursting, humiliated face. Rebellion was in the air.

It was during the lesson after that that Mr Vello first announced the establishment of the Indian Army. ‘Now then, boy-yz!’ He thwacked his desk with his ever-handy ruler to give his words emphasis.

‘Now then, boy-yz!’ we all chorused back, thwacking our desks with our rulers. Things really had got that bad. Worse still we all managed a pretty fair imitation of Mr Vello’s idiosyncratic accent and enunciation. This was marked by a weird alternation in pitch between the swooping vowels of Yorkshire and the clipped consonants of received pronunciation. We were all pretty good at doing Mr Vello, but I was the best.

‘Now then, boy-yz!’ he came at us again. ‘I have no patience any more with your in-disci-pline. None at all. I have noticed that your Indian colleagues maintain a healthier respect for authority than the rest of you, so I am going to adopt my own Martial Races policy.’

He got all the Indian boys to stand up and then he lined them up in the aisle in order of height. Jayesh Rabindirath at the front, behind him Dhiran Vaz, behind him Krishna Patel and so on, all the way down to the minuscule Surrinyalingam (no one ever knew his first name), a tiny blackened block of a boy, who wasn’t an Indian at all but a Tamil; however, Mr Vello chose to ignore this fine distinction.

‘I commission all you Indian boyz into my Indian Army.’ He paced the next aisle, ruler on one shoulder like an officer’s swagger stick. ‘It is no longer my task, but yours, to maintain ab-so-lute order amongst this miserable, unlettered rabble – ‘

As he spoke my attention sideswiped out the window. A bus had pulled up and shook in mechanical ague by the concrete bus shelter. I could see fat old women coming out of the library across the road from the school and donning plastic rain hats. Life seemed to be proffering a teasing and perhaps crucial juxtaposition. I raised my arm. Mr Vello whirled on me. ‘Yes, Fein?’

‘Please, Sir – ‘

‘Yes, boy?’

‘Please, sir, I want to join the Indian Army.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid, boy. Enlistment in the Indian Army is open only to boys of Indian descent. You, Fein, are of Semitic descent, you are a Levantine, not an Aryan, therefore you shall not be called to the Colours.’

‘Or the coloureds . . .’ Simmo sniggered in the corner.

‘But, sir, Mr Vello, sir,’ I kept on at him, ‘my dad says we’re Ashkenazi Jews, not Sephardim. He says we aren’t really Semites at all.’

And this was true. My father had a touch of the Mr Vellos about him as well, a fondness for the
Daily Telegraph
(ironed) and village cricket. A relentless autodidact, he had been much taken by Arthur Koestler’s theory that the Ashkenazi were in fact the descendants of the Scythian Khazars, Turkic tribesmen who had converted to Judaism in the seventh century. Dad discoursed on this in the garden of an evening, smoking a briar pipe (his plumed flag of utter assimilation).

‘Oh, and what are you if you’re not a Semite?’

‘I’m an Aryan, sir. My ancestors were Turkic tribesmen. My dad told me so, he’s really interested in Jewish history.’

Mr Vello was nonplussed, he left off drilling the Indian Army and took to his desk where he cradled his head in his hands. And here’s one of the sickest bits of this sick, sad tale, for Mr Vello really was a conscientious and unbigoted man – he was giving this matter of my lineage real thought, heavy consideration. The class was strangely silent. At length he stirred.

‘All right, Fein, I’ll make an exception as far as you are concerned, and in deference to your father’s scholarship. You may join the Indian Army.’

So it was that I became an Indian Army soldier. What a soldier I was: relentlessly enforcing the order I had so recently been determined to disrupt. With my fellow soldiers I patrolled the aisles of the classroom swiping hair-covered collars with my ruler, confiscating fags and sweets, strutting my skinny, flannel-legged stuff. I exulted in the power. My sharp tongue grew sharper still. And was discipline imposed? Did Mr Vello’s writ run class 4b? Did it hell. For in as much as I was an Indian Army soldier I was also its principal mutineer. I was the Fletcher Christian to Mr Vello’s Captain Bligh (‘Why did the mutineers throw away the bread fruit plants?’ ‘Please, sir, please, sir,’ ‘Yes, Fein?’ ‘Because they were stale, sir!’ Ha, ha, bloody ha).

Yes, it makes me sick now. Sick to think of it. Trim girlies come in and hand me things: write-ups and intelligence files on the guests I’m about to goose and humiliate, promote and patronise, fawn over and psychically fellate. That’s my job. But if only I could get Mr Vello back, get him on the show. I’d recant, I’d apologise, I’d vindicate myself, and in doing so I’d make him whole again, make him live again, abolish the ghastly Vello golem that parades through my unconscious.

He got worse and worse. In one lesson he insisted on giving us a graphic description of the way he prepared his vegetable patch in the spring. In another he showed how, while on hazardous service during the latter war, he was taught to signal using a windproof lighter and a pipe. The Indian Army grew restless. It wasn’t their idea, they just wanted to carry on being unobtrusively unobtrusive. After one particularly surreal lesson Dhiran Vaz and Suhail Rhamon got me in the corridor.