What You Make It (35 page)

The hallway was still clear of debris, and as far as I could see, utterly normal. As I crossed towards the front door, anxious now to get the whole thing over with – and wondering how I was going to explain the state of the back door to my parents – I noticed a faint tapping sound in the far distance. After a moment it stopped, and then restarted from a slightly different direction. Odd, but scarcely a primary concern. Right now my priority was getting out of that front door before the hall got any stranger. Feeling like an actor about to bound onto stage, I reached out to the doorknob, twisted it and pulled it towards me.

At first I couldn't take it in. I couldn't work out why instead of the driveway all I could see was brown. Brown flatness.

As I adjusted my focal length, pulling it in for something much closer than the drive I'd been expecting, I understood. The view looked rather familiar. I'd seen something like it very recently.

It was a barrier. An impregnable wooden barrier nailed across the door into the walls from the outside. Now I knew what they'd been doing as I finished nailing them out.

They'd been nailing me in.

I tried everything I could think of. My fists, my shoulder, a chair. The planks were there to stay.

I couldn't get out. I couldn't come back in through the right door, and for the moment they couldn't get in through the wrong door. A sort of stalemate. But a very poor sort for me, because they were much the stronger and getting more so all the time, and because the house was still going over and now I couldn't stop it.

I strode into the kitchen, rubbing my bruised shoulder and thinking furiously. There had to be something I could do, and I had to do it fast. The change was speeding up. Although the hall still looked normal the kitchen was now filthy, and the fifties fridge was fully back. In a retro kind of way it was quite attractive. But it was wrong.

In the background I could still hear the faint tapping noise. Maybe they were trying to get in through the roof.

I had to get out, had to find a way. I tried lateral thinking. You leave a house by a door. How else? No other way. You always leave by a door. But was there any other way you
could
leave, if you were in, say, a desperate emergency? The doors … The windows. What about the windows? If there was a right door and a wrong door, maybe there were right and wrong windows too, and perhaps the right ones looked out onto the real world. Maybe, just maybe, you could smash one and then climb out and then back in again. Perhaps that would work.

I had no idea whether it would or not. I wasn't kidding myself that I understood anything, and God alone knew where I might land if I chose the wrong window. Perhaps I'd go out the wrong one and then be chased round the house by the two maniacs outside, as I tried to find a right window to break back in through. That would be a barrel of laughs. That would be Fun City. But what choice did I have? I ran into the living room, heading for the big picture window. Through the square window today, children.

I don't know how I could have missed making the connection.
Possibly because the taps were so quiet. I stood in the living room, my mouth open. This time they were one jump ahead. They'd boarded up the fucking windows.

I ran back into the hall, through into the dining room, then upstairs to the bedrooms. Every single window was boarded up. I knew where they'd got the nails from, because I'd spilt more then enough when I fell, but how… Then I realized how they'd nailed them in without a hammer, why the tapping had been so quiet. With sudden unpleasant clarity I could imagine the suited man clubbing the nails in with his fists, smashing them in with his forehead and grinning while he did it.

Oh Jesus.

I walked downstairs again, slowly now. Every single window was boarded up, even the ones that were too small to climb through. As I stood once more in the kitchen, amidst the growing piles of shit, the pounding on the back door started. There was no way I could get out of the house, and I couldn't stop what was happening. This time it was going over all the way, and taking me with it. And meanwhile they were going to smash their way in to come along for the ride. To get me. I listened, watching the rubbish, as the pounding got louder and louder.

It's still getting louder, and I can tell from the sound that some of the planks are beginning to give way. The house stopped balancing long ago, and the change is coming on more quickly. The kitchen looks like a bomb site and there are an awful lot of spiders in there now. Eventually I left them to it and came through the hall into here, only making one or two wrong turnings. Into the living room. And that's where I am now, just sitting and waiting. There's nothing I can do about the change, nothing. I can't get out. I can't stop them getting in.

But there is one thing I can do. I'm going to stay here, in the living room. I can see small shadows now, gathering in corners and darting out from under the chairs, and it's quite dark down by the end wall. The wall itself seems less important now, less substantial, no longer a barrier. I think I can hear the sound of
running water somewhere far away, and smell the faintest hint of the dark and lush vegetation.

I won't let them get me. I'll wait, in the gathering darkness, listening to the coming of the night sounds and feeling a soft breeze on my face as I sense the room opening out, as the walls shade away, as I sit here quietly in the dark warm air. And then I'll get up and start walking out into the dark land, into the jungle and amidst the trees that stand all around behind the darkness, smelling the greenness that surrounds me and hearing the gentle river off somewhere to the right. And I'll feel happy walking away into the night, and maybe far away I'll meet whatever makes the growling sounds I begin to hear in the distance, and we'll sit together by running water and be at peace in the darkness.

‘I've found God,’ the man said.

I groaned inwardly, and tried to will him not to sit at the table. I knew I was unlikely to succeed, because he didn't have a lot of other options, but I gave it my best shot anyway. I was in the Shuang Dou, it was dark outside, and I had only just started on the mound of food which was arranged around me in a neat semi-circle. I didn't want company. I wanted to be left alone.

The Shuang Dou is not at the prestige end of the Chinese restaurant market. Basically it's a take-away, with an even smaller waiting area than is usual, into which they've shoe-horned a couple of small tables for patrons who can't wait until they get home before eating – or who don't have a home to go to in the first place. It looks like the interior decor was done by someone extremely lazy about twenty years ago, and I don't expect it would survive anything more than a desultory glance from a health and safety inspector. Even the menus, which are printed – like those of every other Chinese restaurant in the land – to fold neatly into three, are rather haphazardly creased just once, across the middle. On the other hand the food is cheap and good, and the kitchen area is right there behind the counter, so you can watch the proprietors cooking your dinner. It seems to be run by one small family, the youngest member of which spends the evening in a papoose on the woman's back; her older sister takes the customers' orders and gives back change with faultless accuracy and an eight-year-old's engaging seriousness. Their parents are always friendly, in a guarded way, and I go in there so often that the patriarch generally has my order cooking before I've finished giving it, wielding wok and MSG with cheering skill and professionalism.

I was somewhere comfortable, in other words, surrounded by foil containers of food, and I wanted to just sit there and eat. I didn't want a conversation with someone strange, especially if it was to be about God. The guy sat down on the end of the table and opened his own container, which held a large portion of something noodle-based, possibly the squid chow mein of which the owners are justifiably proud. He squirted an alarming amount of soy sauce over it from the pot on the table and started eating with the plastic fork provided. Another of the other things I like about the Shuang Dou is that they don't force you to eat with chopsticks. Sure, it can be fun, when you're in the mood, or when you're surrounded by white linen and paying £40 a head; but when you really just want to get the food down your neck it has to be said that a fork is a better tool for the job.

The man munched meditatively through a couple of mouthfuls of his chow mein and then looked up at me, still chewing.

‘I have, you know,’ he said affably. ‘I've found him.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, quietly, taking care not to catch his eye. While I don't believe that madness is communicable through eye contact, I believe that mad conversations most certainly are.

‘You think I'm bonkers, don't you?’

‘Hmm,’ I said again, with a slightly different inflection, trying to suggest that while I was in no way impugning his sanity, personality or intellect I'd really rather just eat my special fried rice in peace. Special fried rice is a big deal to me. I'm a bit of a bore on the subject, to be honest. If I had to give up every other dish in the world and subsist only on that, I could do it without a second thought. At the Shuang Dou they prepare it differently to most places, cooking the egg last and laying it on top of the rice like a very thin and tasty omelette. I just wanted to sit and eat it.

‘Not surprised,’ the man continued, and I began to sense, with a mixture of relief and dread, that my participation in the conversation was unlikely to be required. While this meant I wasn't going to have to get involved on an active level, it also
meant that he was probably not going to stop talking. ‘Not surprised at all. I'd think the same thing myself.’

I stealthily reached for the soy and dripped a healthy dose over my Singapore Noodles. Perhaps if I kept my head down he'd come to believe that while God was real I was imaginary, and talk to the table instead.

‘At first I thought “Who'd have thought it, eh?” I mean – you'd hardly expect him to be living in Kentish Town, would you?’

At this I found myself looking up, unable to stop myself. The man smiled genially at me, jaws still working. Seeing him properly for the first time, I saw that he was somewhere in his mid-forties, dressed in a dark and elderly suit with a grey sweater underneath, a generic blue shirt and an old but neatly knotted tie. His hair was grey around the temples and his face was rather red, either through an afternoon spent out in the cold or a couple of decades propping up bars. The whites of his eyes were a little grey, but not ostensibly insane.

‘I mean, sounds a little odd, doesn't it?’ he said, tilting his head and waggling his bushy eyebrows in a way evidently meant to indicate the world outside the window.

‘Hmm,’ I said, indicating cautious agreement. Kentish Town, I should explain for the benefit of those unacquainted with it, is a smallish patch of North London just above Camden and below Highgate and Hampstead. Many, many years ago it had the distinction of being at the very edge of London proper, a last stop before the countryside – and at that time was of considerably more note than, say, Camden. The Assembly Rooms pub, just across the road from the tube station, used to be a staging post or something. Nowadays, Kentish Town is just part of the sprawl and a not very attractive part at that; it has little of the cohesion of surrounding areas, and is instead a rather vague lumping together of roads, rail tracks, pubs and people. It's an interstice, a space between other places which has been filled by accident rather than design – like the corner of a cupboard which gets stuffed with the things you can't find another place for. It has none of Camden's joie de
trendiness, and is a long, long way from Hampstead or Belsize Park's easy wealth. It's just a bit of London, and I live there because it's cheap.

‘But then I thought about it a bit,’ the man continued, ‘and it makes perfect sense. Very convenient for the centre of town – just a couple of stops on the Northern Line – cheaper than Camden, quite a good little minimart down past the Vulture's Perch pub. And the food here's not bad, of course,’ he added, winking at the little girl behind the counter.

‘You're saying God actually lives here, in Kentish Town?’ I asked, in spite of myself.

‘Oh yes,’ the man said comfortably.

I looked back at him levelly, trying to work out whether this made him more – or less – mad. In some ways it was preferable to born-again religious mania; simpler and less grandiose, at least. On the other it was clearly not the pronouncement of someone who had all his chopsticks in one hand.

In the background one of the woks hissed suddenly as the owners strove to fulfil a telephone order.

‘Whereabouts, exactly?’ I asked.

The man looked at me for a moment, nodding, as if conceding that this was a reasonable question. ‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘Never been able to follow him all the way home. But it must be around here somewhere. Convenient.’

‘Why convenient?’

‘Because this is where he has his shop,’ he said. ‘Just round the corner from here, in fact.’

‘His shop,’ I said, thinking I was beginning to understand. ‘You mean, like, a church?’

‘No, no,’ the man said breezily. ‘Electrical shop. Second-hand mainly, though there's some newish stuff in the window. None of it's exactly
state-of-the-art
though.’ The italics were his, not mine. He uttered the phrase as if aware he was being rather conversationally daring, and hoping that I was as up with the times as he was, and could follow his meaning.

I nodded slowly, wishing I'd had the sense to keep my mouth
shut. Remembering that I had some Hot and Sour soup, I opened the polystyrene carton carefully and spooned up a mouthful. I have a tendency to eat all of my courses at the same time, which has driven more than one ex-girlfriend to distraction.

‘You must have seen it,’ the man said. ‘Near that, oh, what d'you call it? That restaurant. Spanish. All those little plates of food. Quite good, in fact.’

‘The tapas place,’ I said, hollowly.

The man smiled happily. ‘That's the one. Forget the name. Between there and the estate agent's, little way up from the Assembly Rooms pub. You know the one I mean?’

I nodded but didn't say anything, mainly because I wasn't sure I wanted to prolong this nonsense. Also because I was trying to picture the shop he was referring to. I couldn't, quite. I knew the Assembly Rooms well – just enough of a local to be enticing, just enough
not
a local that you could go in there without any real danger of being stabbed, it sat where four grey and busy roads intersected in a ragged non-crossroads. A couple of shops further up the road was the bedraggled and dusty tapas restaurant. I could remember peering through the window once and deciding that it would just be too much of a health risk; and, as my patronage of the Shuang Dou shows, I'm not overly fastidious in such matters. I could also remember the estate agent's, which stood out on that stretch of road because someone had spent a little money trying to make it look as if it wasn't situated in some particularly depressed area of an East European town. I knew there were a couple of shops in between the two, but I couldn't picture them.

‘You look, next time you pass that way,’ the man said, and I realized abruptly that he was standing, wiping his mouth with a paper serviette. ‘You'll find I'm right.’

He nodded, winked at the people behind the counter and walked back out into the night, leaving me feeling obscurely irritated; as if by quitting the conversation before I had he'd somehow made
me
out to be the lunatic. As I watched him disappear down the cold and lamplit street, I spooned another
mouthful of Hot and Sour into my mouth, failing to notice that it contained an entire red chilli.

By the time I'd finished coughing, and had thanked the lady owner for the plastic cup of water she brought me, the man had disappeared. When I'd finished my food I crossed the street and walked directly down Falkland Road to my apartment. It was sleeting, and getting late, and I wouldn't have bothered going round the long way to check what was between the estate agent's and the tapas bar even if I'd remembered.

Two days later I walked out of the tube station at about three o'clock in the afternoon, serene with boredom after a long meeting with one of my clients. I write corporate videos for a living – telling people how to sell hoovers, why they shouldn't refer to their co-workers as ‘wankers’, that sort of thing. If someone offers you a job writing a corporate video, just say no. Seriously. Just don't get involved.

It takes about five minutes to walk from the tube to where I live. Mostly that's a good thing. When you know that once you get indoors you have to sit at the computer and write a corporate video, it can seem less ideal. On days like that, you can find yourself wishing it was a four-day trek over mountainous terrain, involving sherpas, a few of those little horse things and maybe even an entire documentary team to shoot lots of footage of you getting frostbite and wishing you were back at home.

It was in this spirit that instead of heading diagonally across Leighton Road and up Leverton Street, I walked across the road and then past the Assembly Rooms up Fortess Road. It was only as I was passing the tapas bar, whose name I once again failed to notice, that I remembered the conversation I'd had in the Shuang Dou. Mildly excited at the prospect of anything which would delay my return home, I slowed my pace and looked at the stores between the restaurant and the sloping glass of the estate agent's up ahead.

When I saw the shop I felt a brief quiver of some strange emotion, probably just because I hadn't expected it to be there
at all. I found myself casting a quick glance up the road, as if concerned that someone should see me, and then wandered over to the window.

The shop looked like the standard type of electrical store to be found in areas of London which aren't aiming to challenge Tottenham Court Road's domination of the consumer goods market. Some of the products in the window were evidently second-hand, and – as the man had said – those which did look new were hardly cutting edge. Tape-radios with tinny three-inch speakers and shiny plastic buttons. Plastic Midi systems which looked like they'd fracture at low temperatures. Video recorders from the days when Betamax was still in with a shout. There were other things in the display, however. A pile of storage units, evidently for sale. A wide range of alarm clocks. A faded poster of ABBA.

Surely
that
couldn't be for sale?

I couldn't see beyond the display into the shop itself, and reached out for the door. Only when I'd unsuccessfully tugged on it did I notice a handwritten sign sellotaped to it on the inside.

‘Back later,’ it said. I smiled to myself, wondering if that's what Jesus had left on his door. Then I tugged at the door again, obscurely disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to go inside. Probably it was still just a desire not to go back home and get on with earning a living, but I suddenly wanted to see what was there.

Instead, I had to trudge round the corner and down Falkland Road to meet my doom, in the form of thirty pages of still-unwritten shite about customer care for Vauxhall dealers.

At five I sat back from the computer, mind whirling. When I'm writing corporate videos I tend to visualize the facts and opinions I'm supposed to be putting into them as recalcitrant, bad-tempered sheep, which are determined to run away from me and hide in the hills. After two hours I'd managed to worry most of them into a pen; but they were moving restlessly and
irritably against each other, determined not to pull in the same direction. It was time to take a break, before I decided the hell with it and started shooting the little bastards instead.

I put on a coat and wandered down the road to the cigarette shop on the corner, stocking up on my chosen method of slow suicide. As I did so I wished, not for the first time, that cigarettes weren't bad for you, or at least that I didn't know they were. That knowledge made every single one I smoked a little internal battle – never mind the
external
battles which cropped up every now and then, when some health freak gave me a hard time for endangering their life. These people, I had noticed, were invariably rather fat, and thus were doing their own fine job of reducing their own life expectancy; but that doesn't seem to be the point any more. What
we
do is fine – it's what those other bastards are doing to us which we won't stand for. I remembered reading a short piece in a recent
Enquirer
entitled ‘How to stop your co-workers from giving you their colds’. After a line like that I'd expected advice on how to prevent deranged typists from injecting me with viruses, or marketing executives from coming over and deliberately breathing in my face. But no, it had been things like: ‘Have a window open’, and ‘Eat vitamin C’. In other words, advice on how to stop
yourself from
acquiring the communicable colds which – through no fault of their own – other people might have.