The Autograph Man (3 page)

MORE FACT
. On the magnificent mosaic that wraps itself around the Albert Hall, the following is engraved: “This Hall was erected for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences, and works of industry of all nations, in fulfillment of the intentions of Albert, Prince Consort.” He is dead, you see, by the time it opens in 1871, so whether his intentions are fulfilled is rather a matter for conjecture. Clearly, Victoria feels that intentions have been fulfilled sufficiently, for she opens it herself and praises the big red elliptical structure with its unfortunate echo problem; she visits it regularly throughout the rest of her life. We can even imagine her touring it alone sometimes, or maybe with one lady-in-waiting tracing the increasingly worn red velvet of the seats with her fingertips, ripped through by EGS, thinking of her dead husband and the fulfillment of his intentions. She feels very certain, Victoria, that she knows at all times precisely what Albert’s intentions were, or would have been had he ever thought about such and such a thing—she’s one of those types of women. She traces his death and her mourning around the country. She leaves a doleful trail of statues and street names, museums and galleries. Albert’s intention was ever to become something big in England. Something famous. Not just the awkward mustachioed slightly overweight German who brought us the Christmas tree, but something popular and loved. Victoria sees to it. Every new statue, every new building, causes someone to remark, “Ah, how she loved him,” while swishing their skirts and patting a little chimney sweep on the head in Whitechapel or wherever. She mourns in public, Victoria, and everybody mourns with her. That’s another reason they call it the good old days. Back then, people felt things in unison, like the sudden chorus that leaps from a country church when the choir starts to sing.

FINAL FACTS
: one could possibly, if one felt like it, date the current pliancy of the phrase “Arts and Sciences” to the inauguration of Victoria’s Albert Hall. “Arts and Sciences” did at one point mean Painting and Stuff and Petri Dishes and Stuff. It was quite a specific, stiff type of phrase and there wasn’t a lot of room in it. The Albert Hall (one could argue, if one had a mind to) helped change that. From the outset, you could go to see pretty peculiar things in that huge elliptical dome with the bad acoustics which caused every whisper in the stalls to be heard. In 1872, for example, you could see some people demonstrating Morse code (Gladys in Block M, Seat 72, to Mary sitting next to her: Q.
What’s he doing, Mary, love?
A.
Tapping something, I should say, dear
). In 1879, the first public display of electric lighting is given (Mr. P. Saunders, Block T, Seat 111, to his nephew, Tom:
Marvelous. Bloody marvelous
). In 1883, there is an exhibition of bicycles (Claire Royston, Block H, Seat 21:
I can’t see the point of that, Elsie, can you?
) and in 1891 the hall is registered as a place of worship. It is agreed that people can pray here now, if they want. And in 1909 they run a marathon.

Come on!

He’s finished! No legs left on ’im.

Go on, my son!

Oh, Go on Georgie, go on—for us, Georgie! Go!

Get the boy some water!

They just kept on running round that stage until the race was done. Now,
that’s
an art. And a science. Onwards: rallies by the suffragettes, the
Titanic
Band Memorial Concert, complete theatrical performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s classic saga
Hiawatha,
Ford Motor Show, Yehudi Menuhin (aged thirteen),
CLOSED FOR WAR,
Churchill television broadcast, Kray Twins boxing, trade fairs, Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Proms, acoustics “greatly improved by the installation of fibreglass diffusers”—otherwise known as “mushrooms.”

Okay, now shout! See? Ech (Oh, Oh, Oh)

Re (Dew Dew Dew) uced. Substantially. That’s nice, isn’t it?

Upwards: Muhammad Ali, Sinatra, ice skating and Liza Minnelli, tennis tournaments, the Bolshoi, the Kirov, displays of Mark Knopfler’s guitar skills, and Clapton’s, and B. B. King’s. Acrobats, contortionists, magicians, politicians. Poets. All kinds of parties. Very entertaining. Albert wanted arts and sciences, and Victoria delivered them year after year, and when she left this world somebody else delivered them year after year, until they too retired and passed the job to somebody new. And so it goes. There are many ways to remember the dead. One of them is to have Tracy Baldock, a dancer from Scotland who is down on her luck, and somewhat too large to achieve her dream—contemporary dance with a well-established European troupe—dress up as a mouse. You can have Tracy dress up as cartoon mouse for Disney’s
Holiday on Ice,
have her skate along the absence where a person used to be. That’s one way. Another is to have poor Mark Knopfler please his audience by playing “Money for Nothing” for the God knows how manyeth time, though he hates to do it, though it’s killing him inside—have Mark sing the words about the TVs and let Albert hear them, wherever he is.

Li-Jin and his son don’t know, as they walk under the arch of the entrance, jittery with anticipation, that they are about to take part in the latest episode of a very long wake. But they are both sharp enough to note the incongruity between these massive engraved words—
ARTS AND SCIENCES
—and what they are about to see. In answer to his son’s question:
“Well, Alex . . . I suppose it is an art. Beautiful movement. Graceful violence, this sort of thing. But also rather scientific—neck holds, trips. You need to time those things accurately, which is a kind of science, isn’t it?”

Rubbish answer. Alex-Li screws up his nose, unsatisfied.
“Well? Which is it, then, smarty-pants?”

Li-Jin pauses for a moment at the threshold, waiting to hear a better answer.

“Neither. It’s TV.”

Which, of course, is the better answer.

YHWH

Inside, the hall has the feeling of potential revolution that fun fairs and theme parks have: children find themselves in charge, adults discover their own sheer functionality. The fathers have a harassed, dazed look, trailing behind their sons like dim pets, carrying what has been passed back or dropped near them. The fathers are silent. The boys are having a four-thousand-person conversation. It rings though the tiered seating, circles with the echo and descends with a roar, and Li-Jin’s inside it, searching for his seats, with three mismatched boys trailing behind him like a gaudy college scarf.

It is a struggle, but Li-Jin gets his boys seated and settled in the end. He looks down to the stage, at that sad-looking empty square where pure space is under arrest, bound by rope three times over. He feels like he has not exhaled in half an hour. He is just about to when the fat man sitting next to him turns and, without any invitation, waves ten quid in his face and barks: “Fancy a flutter?”

Li-Jin repeats it back to him, uncomprehending. His English is about as perfect as it can be, but some tricks of British idiom (
“and there’s me thinking . . .”; “unbeknownst to her . . .”; “gone to the dogs”
) still prove troublesome.

The fat man is scornful.
“Oh, come now,”
he says, rolling the tenner into a cone and scratching his chin with it, “nothing heart-stopping. Simply this: Do. You. Fancy. A. Flutter.” He is so ugly. An alcoholic’s nose, broken-veined, a superfetation of carbuncles. Below this, a thick and dirty brush of a mustache. And he is persistent.

“A small bet,” he explains, “You understand . . . to give the thing flavor.”

Li-Jin says no thank you, explaining quickly that he “has a flutter, as you put it,” with his son, and gives a short, inadvertent, unmistakably Chinese bow in his seat, which ordinarily would make his son wince except he’s busy, hanging over the barrier with Rubinfine and Adam, spitting on people’s heads.

The fat man frowns, unfurls the tenner and forces it into the pocket of his trousers, a difficult maneuver given his size.

“Suit yourself.”

Feeling awkward, Li-Jin does exactly that: he suits himself. He turns back to look at the stage. He bites at the nail of his right thumb. He chews the top right off it. What was
that
all about? It’s made him nervy for no reason. He looks at the stage. Now that bothers him too. It is very busy with the preparation of nothing. What are all these people
doing
? Why all this fuss? After all, what do you need to do except allow two men to walk onstage, fling off their cloaks, bend their heads low and grasp each other? And yet little blokes in baseball caps run from one end of the stage to the other, shouting instructions. Massive speakers are lifted and then set down again. A white-haired man in a jogging suit walks round and round the ring, tugging at the ropes with a look of absolute concentration. A boy sets a bucket down in a corner and spits in it. Why? After a while Li-Jin’s eyes wander involuntarily left. This is a mistake. He is just in time to see his neighbor’s massive lips turning a gruesome smile. The lips curl too close to the nose; the mustache is lifted; wide, uneven teeth are revealed—Li-Jin is disgusted and cannot hide it—and now the man thrusts out his hand, and says, “Klein. Herman Klein,” again too loudly, grinning like a gargoyle. Li-Jin reciprocates, politely, but keeps his body language closed, as you do. Trying not to invite conversation. But this Klein is a physical man who violates Li-Jin’s space without even trying, and before Li-Jin has a say in the matter, he has lunged forward to give one of those double-handed shakes in which Li-Jin’s comparatively small hand is completely swamped, coming out of the exchange pressed and damp. Klein releases him, snorts and rearranges his bulk in the seat, opening his legs and crossing his arms across his belly, satisfied, as if he has won some unspoken competition. Li-Jin cannot remember the last time he was so quickly and thoroughly intimidated by another man.

“So!” says Klein, not looking at him at all now but up to the gods, where reckless children are craning over the balcony to get a better view. “Have you come from far? We are from Shepperton and now . . . well! Here we are. Well, well, well. Look at all this! And where are you coming from, Mr. Tandem?”

Li-Jin can hear an accent—not English, certainly European, he can’t tell where from. In his time Klein has come further than Shepperton, that much is certain, just as Li-Jin has come further than Mountjoy, but these conversations require a certain shorthand. So Li-Jin describes their journey, which in truth wasn’t so very bad once they were free of Mountjoy itself, though he makes it longer and harder in the retelling. He has found that men in England prefer it that way. Traffic, ring roads, pile-ups and the rest. But as he speaks, it becomes clear to Li-Jin that this man Klein will not follow the simple rules that govern such a conversation,
Two Men, Unrelated by Blood, at a Sporting Event in England,
a conversation which, in its etymological roots, is a close cousin of
Two Men, Unrelated by Blood, in a Dress Shop Waiting for Their Wives to Emerge from Changing Rooms.
Just nod; just match anecdote for anecdote. But Klein makes no response. Only when Li-Jin finds his tongue fat and dull in his mouth does Klein abruptly become animated once more.

“Like a good fight, do you, Tandem? Do you? Been before? The thing about wrestling is this: physicality. Don’t let any fool tell you different. Brawn. Muscle. Sweat. Titans!” This last word is rendered so loudly that Li-Jin concurs without meaning to; his head just wobbles assent like a wind chime. Meanwhile, the head of this man Klein drops without warning, his big rheumy eyes settle on the buckle of his own belt. Li-Jin wonders whether the man is actually all right in a
medical way,
you know, all right in the
head.
Maybe he should announce his qualifications. But then Klein returns like an animal that burrows for something and comes back with what it wanted.

“For myself, I work in the fancy-goods business. Gifts. Leathers. Bags. Jewelry. Small, fairly priced luxuries for ladies. Now, here is a fact: Ladies buy eighty percent of all the things that are bought on this earth, did you know that? Yes, my friend. They are the engine that drives the cogs to turn and turn. My father was a butcher and never knew where the smart money goes, but let me tell you, Tandem, I know. I have a small boutique in Knightsbridge. We get a better class of clientele—people whose names you would know if I told them to you! Famous! But no matter. And this is Klein the younger,” says Klein the elder, and, for the first time since the conversation began, Li-Jin spots a small dangling foot clad in a shiny black shoe, two seats along. Putting his hand behind the tiny boy’s back, Klein pushes the child into view, beyond the shadow of his own ripe stomach.

“My son, Joseph. And this, in a nutshell, is why we are here. Little Joseph needs to see Titans. Too many hobbies and not enough physical pursuits. Let these men be an example to him! It is my opinion that Joseph is too much of a little weed.”

Li-Jin opens his mouth to protest, but—

“Weed! He’s a weed! A little weeeeed . . .”

Klein says this in a slimy falsetto, hiding his pupils somewhere in the back of his head, batting his stubby eyelashes and tinkling the air either side of himself like a man playing upon two invisible keyboards. Li-Jin is instantly repulsed. He sees Alex, who has just spotted Klein, recoil in his seat. Against his nobler instincts, he wishes the man a million miles away from himself and Alex and the boys, away from anything he might pollute—not to mention this sad-looking child, Joseph Klein.

“To be great,” says Klein, dropping his hands, “you need to see greatness. Experience it. Be near it. He who lies down with the dogs gets up with fleas!”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose that’s right,” says Li-Jin slowly. He makes a point of looking kindly at the child, who has terror stamped on his delicate, pinched features. A boy like that should be blond by rights, but Joseph is a swarthy little thing, his hair black like an Indian’s, his big eyes darker than that. His ears are pointy. Li-Jin smiles firmly at him and lays his hand on his own son’s knee.