NW (13 page)

Felix, listen: you can’t buy a woman. You can’t buy her love. She’s gonna leave you that way. Love’s gonna leave you anyway so you might as well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious.

Felix passed in front of the Valentine kid with his leg in the air and arrow primed. Who would be happy for him? His thumb hovered over the roller ball on his phone, moving back and forth through the various digits of his siblings, but connecting with each a potential headache that made him hesitate and finally put the handset back in his pocket. Tia would have her children underfoot, and her loneliness and boredom turned easily to jealousy, even for things she cared nothing about, like cars. Ruby would only want to know what the car could do for her—when she could borrow it, where she could drive it. She lived in her twin’s spare room, had nothing and no-one, and pitied herself deeply. She expected charity always, while simultaneously wanting the best of everything. Why’d you buy that wreck? Fool. Both twins had a horror of second-hand goods. Grace, too. He wouldn’t be telling her anything about it until it looked like it had just rolled off the assembly line. Devon was the only one who might be interested, but you couldn’t call him, you had to wait for him to call.

•  •  •

F
rom Felix’s pocket a digital orchestra played a piece of classical music from an aftershave advert from his childhood. He answered it joyfully, but his love sounded stressed and skipped the hellos. “Did you go see Ricky?” “Nah, sorry—forgot. I’ll call him.” “How you gonna call him? I ain’t got his number—have you?” “When I go back I’ll go past.” “Downstairs called. The leak’s gone through the floor.” “I’ll go see him, chill.” “Where are you?” “At my dad’s.” “You show him? What did he say? Tell him I can order some more copies off the Internet. Actually let me chat to him.” “Yeah, man. He’s looking through it. He’s into it. Told a lot of stories—you know how he is. Trip down memory lane, innit. Listen, I gotta go.” “Put Lloyd on—” An ambulance passed Felix on the street. “I’m on the balcony—he’s in the bathroom. Listen, I’ll call you back in a bit. I gotta go.” “You gotta go! I gotta work.” “True!” The conversation descended into baby talk, and then briefly turned explicit. Grace was fond of proclaiming her “nastiness,” although in bed she was tame, almost prudish, and in their six months together Felix had not quite managed to unite the girl on the phone and the one in his arms. “I love you, baby,” she said, and Felix repeated it passionately, trying to return himself to that moment of optimism before he’d answered the phone. Weird to think she was only a few streets from him, at this moment. Her manager in the background said something about a booking for twelve at two—she was gone again without saying good-bye. Like a ghost on your shoulder and then vanished, the everyday miracle. He remembered when you turned the dial with your finger. Sometimes lines crossed and four ghosts spoke. And now Felix Jr. and his nieces spoke to videos of each other. You wait long enough, the films come true—and everybody acts like it’s nothing. Still, he was glad he got to see the future. Touch and go for a while. A comic book reader, sci-fi fan, it had always been obvious, to Felix, that the future would suit him. Hollywood had nothing on Felix when it came to imagining the future. He didn’t even have to go to the movies anymore, he could just walk down the street like this and see the whole damn spectacular just playing in his mind. Script by Felix Cooper. Directed by Felix Cooper. Starring Felix Cooper.

Anflex, my darling, how will you be getting home?

Particle transfer. See you in a second, my dear Gracian. In a nano-second.

Shit like that. Just rolling in his brain. Sometimes he went and told a whole film in words to Grace, and she was totally into it, and it wasn’t just because she loved him: the fact was that the films in Felix’s mind were blatantly better than anything people paid good money to see. Now Felix collided with a real live young man leaving a glass-walled video emporium, walking backward through the double doors while waving good-bye to his friends, still wrestling with their joysticks. Felix touched the guy gently on the elbows, and the stranger, with equal care, reached back and held Felix where his waist met his back; they both laughed lightly and apologized, called each other “Boss” before separating quickly, the stranger striding back toward Eros, and Felix onwards to Soho.

•  •  •

O
n her street he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and typed:
On yr St. U free?
The answer came back:
Door open.

He had not stood on this street for three months. His phone buzzed again:
Five mins please. Why not pick up cigs?

This addition was annoying: it put him back in the wrong position. He made his way over to the unventilated corner shop and spent a hot ten minutes in the queue, trying to finesse the brief speech he thought he had decided on, realizing in fact that he had decided on very little. Why did he need to come down here and say anything at all? She didn’t matter anymore. News of her irrelevance should reach Soho without any effort on his part; she should just walk out of her front door and sniff it in the air. “Don’t need this,” said the woman at the counter. She handed him back fifty pence. Someone behind him sighed; he moved aside quickly with the shame of a Londoner who has inconvenienced, even for a moment, another Londoner. The box of fags was in his pocket. Here was the change in his hand. He couldn’t remember anything about the transaction. He was sweating like a fool.

Outside he tried to calm himself and realign with the exuberant mood in the street. The sun was an incitement, collapsing day into night. Young bluds had stripped to their bare chests as if in a nightclub already. The white boys wore flip-flops and cargo shorts and drank import beers from the bottle. A small gang danced mildly in the doorway of G.A.Y, on autopilot from the night before. Felix chuckled into his chest and leaned against a lamppost to roll a fag. He had the sense that someone was watching and taking it all down (“Felix was a solid bloke, with his heart in the right place, who liked to watch the world go by”) but when that fancy was finished there was nothing else for him to do. A car with tinted windows rolled by. It took a moment to put together the fearful child in the passing reflection with what he knew of his own face. He looked up and over to her door. It was open; two of the girls stood on the doorstep chatting amiably with the Somali drivers, one doorway along. Felix squared his shoulders, put a cheerful limp in his walk. (“Sometimes you got to do what you got to do!”) But there was no kind of smile you could bring to these girls that would make them go easy on you. Chantelle was cutting her eyes at him when he was still twenty yards away. By the time he reached her she had already, as far as she was concerned, dispensed with greetings; she got a grip of his thin hooded top between two fingers, examined its material briefly and then released it again, like a filthy thing picked up off the floor.

“You look summery. Jesus Christ. Mr. Sunshine.”

“This ain’t hot to me tho. I’m skinny—I need the layers.”

“Long time,” said the white one with the sour face, Cherry.

“Been busy.”

“Wouldn’t bother with Her Majesty upstairs, if I were you: get better down here.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Felix, and showed his gold teeth, but he had never been sure if upstairs truly was a separate world. Her Majesty upstairs swore it was. They used to argue about it. It didn’t matter now.

“Can I go?”

They were both big girls and it was their evergreen joke not to move for him, he had to squeeze between them. Felix led with his bony shoulders.

“Like a chicken bone!”

“Pure rib!”

Cherry pinched his backside—three floors up he could still hear cackling. He rounded the last banister. Classical violins were going at it, you could hear taps running hard in the bathroom. At the threshold he was wreathed in steam.

“Felix? Darling, is that you? Door’s open! Is Karenin out there? Bring the bastard in.”

Karenin was on the mat. Felix gathered him sloppily into his arms. The cat’s huge weight kept displacing itself: it wasn’t possible to hold up its backside, belly and neck at the same time, something always fell through the gap. He whispered into its ear—“All right, K”—and stepped inside. This same fat cat in his arms, the yellowing old playbills and photos on the wall, the boxes full of sheet music for a non-existent piano, sold to a pawnshop before even Felix’s time. The old-school everything. He knew it all too well. The grimy sameness, the way nothing was ever refreshed. She called them antiques. Another way of saying there’s no more money. Five years! He dropped the cat down on the chaise: spring-less, the seat sunk to receive it. How did he ever come to know this place? Unknowing it would just be the restoring of things to their natural, healthy state.

“Annie? You coming out?”

“In the bath! S’heavenly. Come in!”

“Nah, you’re all right. I’ll wait.”

“What?”

“I’LL WAIT.”

“Don’t be ludicrous. Bring an ashtray.”

Felix looked about him. On a clothes hanger hooked to the window frame an outfit hung disembodied and flooded with light. Purple jeans, a complicated vest with safety pins on the front, some kind of tartan cape, and below on the floor a pair of yellow leather boots with heels of four or five inches, all of which would be seen by no-one except the boy from the off license who delivered her “groceries.”

“Can’t see no ashtray.”

Piled on top of various envelopes and pages of newspapers were small mountains of spent fags and ash. It was hard to maneuver—some attempt at reorganization was under way. Towers of paper dotted the floor. It was worse than his father’s situation, yet he saw now that the spirit was much the same: a large life contracted into a small space. He had never visited one then the other in quick succession like this. The sense of suffocation and impatience was identical, the longing he had to be free.

“Dear Lord—by the Pavlovas. ‘The Russian bird with the long face.’ Underneath her.”

He would never again have to pretend to be interested in things in which he had no interest. Ballet dancers, novels, the long and torturous history of her family. He stepped over a glass coffee table to where eight photographs of Pavlova formed a diamond on the wall, echoing the pyramid of fags below, the only decoration on a small side table.

“If full, use the plastic bag on the doorknob,” called Annie. “Empty into.”

•  •  •

H
e did as he was told. He came into the bathroom, put the packet of fags in the ashtray and the ashtray on the lip of the bath.

“What you got them on for?”

She ran her fingertips along a pair of mother-of-pearl vintage sunglasses: “This is a terribly bright bathroom, Felix. Blinding. Could you? My hands.”

What looked like a single breakfast oat sat on her bottom lip, painted over with scarlet. Felix put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. Even in the few months since he’d last been here the lines under her eyes seemed to have lengthened and deepened, fanning out beyond the shades. The powder she’d doused herself in gathered lumpenly here and there and made everything worse. He retreated to the toilet seat. It was the correct distance. She made a little adjustment to the costume—plumping up the big brown pile of hair, and letting the wet strands fall around her made-up face, framing it. Her narrow shoulders rose out of the bubbles, and he knew every blue vein and brown mole. She was grinning in a certain way that had started the whole thing off, the day he watched her bring up a tray of tea to the film crew on her roof, hair tied in a headscarf like one of those women in the war. The thin lips drawn back and an inch of shiny gum all round.

“How’ve you been, Annie?”

“Sorry?” She cupped her hand facetiously round her ear.

“How’ve you been?”

“How have I been? Is that the question?” She leaned back into the bubbles. “How have I been? How have I been. Well, I’ve been fucking desolate, really.” She tapped some ash, missing the ashtray, dusting the bubbles. “Not entirely due to your disappearance, don’t flatter yourself. Someone at Westminster Council has taken it upon themselves to reevaluate my claim. Because somebody else, some
citizen
, took it upon themselves to notify the council. My money’s been frozen, I’m reduced to a rather tragic diet of grilled sardines. And various other necessities have been severely reduced . . .” She made the unhappy face of a child. “Guess who.”

“Barrett,” said Felix sullenly; he would have her in any mood but this one. He discreetly scanned the room, and soon found what he was looking for: the rolled-up twenty and the vanity mirror, peeking out from behind a leg of the old-fashioned tub.

“He’s trying to bankrupt me, I suppose. So they can all just get on with charging some—”

“Russian a thousand a week,” murmured Felix, matching her word for word.

“I’m sorry I’m so boring.”

She stood up. If it was a challenge he was equal to it. He watched the suds slink down her body. She had a dancer’s frame, with all the curves at the back. What he was now confronted with had only a pale utility to it: breasts, like two muscles, sitting high above a carriage of stringent pulleys and levers, all of it designed for a life that never happened.

“You might pass a girl a towel.”

A dingy rag hung over the door. He tried to reach around her to drape it chastely over her shoulders, but she sunk into his body, soaking him.

“Brrrr. That’s cozy.”

“Fuckssake!”

She whispered into his ear: “The good news is if they claim I’m out and about I might as well go out and about.
We
might as well.”

Felix stepped back, got on his hands and knees and stretched an arm under the bath.

“According to them I’ve already been out. I’m in Heaven every night dancing it up with the Twinks, without my knowledge. Sleep-living. Maybe this is the start of a whole new life for me! For God’s sake, what are you doing down there? Oh, don’t be such a bore, Felix. Leave that alone . . .”

Felix re-emerged holding a silver-handled mirror from a fairy tale with four thick lines of powder cut along it, crossed by a straw, like a coat of arms. Annie stretched her arms out toward him with the wrists turned up. The veins seemed bigger, bluer.