The Quantity Theory of Insanity (26 page)

We fell in with some girls at a pub on Cambridge Circus, the way that sailors on leave do in Hollywood films. It had never happened to me before … I put it down to Gavin. They were red and brown in tailored suits and didn’t make a habit of this kind of thing and laughed a lot and had conspiratorial nods and catchwords which passed between them. And Gavin and I were interested in them and talked to them about their jobs and their flats and got to know
them, because this was our night already and we were young bucks, as it were, loose on the town.

And I remember going on from the pub. This less concretely than before, everything still funny, but with an edge. One of the girls said, ‘What do you do then?’ And I said that we had this company, Ocean Ltd, and gave her my card – stupid really – because she wasn’t in business. Sitting in La Capresa scrunching on breadsticks and drinking red wine that grabbed at my throat. When they went off to the toilet – and God knows why I remember this because it really isn’t important – Gavin asked me to sign a guarantor release on the Ocean Ltd fund account. At least I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. At the time I just signed it. He was always giving me things to sign in my directorial capacity, and on this occasion, being a young Turk, it seemed the right thing to be doing in La Capresa, taking out my thick fountain pen and snaking my bloody signature across the hairlined box … and then … that’s it. The rest of the evening was the rest of the evening. And I know I didn’t go home with one of those girls, because I never do … and I know that Gavin probably did, because he always does. And I don’t know why this business of signing the form is swimming at me now out of my memory, because it really isn’t important at all, is it?

Standing now on the oblong of stairway that is the half-landing. Appalled by the little banks of fluff that have accreted in the gap between the nap of the carpet and the corrugation of underlay. Appalled also by the thin dustfall on my children that dulls them. I’m a pale face at a window on a half-landing … I’m a half-remembered surreal poem, learnt by rote in school, years ago. I’m on my way upstairs to make a tour of inspection, but I can’t get further than
this. Transfixed again by a miniature world, where the brass rods that hold tight the tread are Nazca lines on the floor of some delusory desert. Because everything, as it were, contains everything. And this half-landing has as much right to be considered the world as any other, wouldn’t you agree? That’s a rhetorical, rhetorical question, maybe the first of its kind, tee-hee! As long as you can be miserable in good surroundings.

Hoo … It might be a mistake to go upstairs, there’s something a little strange about the giant tortoise that my bed has become, stacked as it is with the fruit of Ocean Ltd’s labours. And I don’t think that I’ll be able to repeat my book-tidying act. I don’t want to be upstairs when Gavin rings, because I hate having to run to answer the phone. As it is I can float downstairs. I feel sustained by lines of credit, that flow like the purple bars, like the bright bars of my childhood, but lighter, filmier, wavier. I float downstairs at the centre of a net of lines of credit, they undulate slackly around me and then gather me together and whisk me back into the living-room. Breakfast television is on the cards and Gavin may phone at any moment. I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s wearing lederhosen and standing in an international phone booth that looks like a giant, porcelain-sided stove. We’re in split screen: me in my chair, he in his stove; and he pushes his phone card – emblazoned with a double-headed eagle – into the cast-iron fissure … Clinks and kercherunks and whirrs as the line springs into action triggering circuitry across and over the continent… but no … no ring here. Perhaps he’ll ring in a little while.

Here’s the studio swimming into view. And it makes me feel nauseous. The unreal quality of that manufactured
space, intended only to contain posturing presenters. Chipboard pouffes encased in oatmeal twistpile, turquoise striped banquettes … It is a slab for displaying human fish … I can’t bear to watch them swim into view and ‘O’ at me fatuously … I’ve more pressing problems, like flatness of taste … and the malignant wart … Have you met one another? I say here – and mark this – that this wart is cancerous. It represents a new and virulent form of cancer that is peculiar to me. This is an implosive cancer, other cancers infect cell after cell in a chain reaction, but this cancer works in on itself, nullifying cells which turn into heavier and heavier dead matter, glutinous matter, nailed into the pit of my elbow. The symptoms? Well, flatness of taste for one, flatness of mouth taste, eye taste, ear taste. Smell? Ferrr-geddit. The only palliative is chemotherapy … and the side-effects can be disturbing …

What I need to consider, as the television wetly observes me, is some kind of strategy that will make Gavin phone me, now. I’m sick of waiting. I’m aware that there are certain rituals that I can perform which will make him phone me. Never underestimate the power of magic. We may think that cause and effect are billiard balls that strike one another, but we know that we can tip the table. And that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to tip the table.

What is it that keeps me here, sitting, stiffening, in a repro Queen Anne chair, bought from a mail-order catalogue, when I could be asleep? I could be lying in between warm, brushed cotton sheets, enjoying that special, infinitely sweet, morning sleep, that turns one’s aching body inside out like a sock. Instead, I’m rigid, upright,
staring, waiting. I’m going to compile a list of the things that stop me sleeping and act upon them forthwith:

1. The wart

2. Lack of appetite

3. Waiting for Gavin to ring

Appetite and the wart and Gavin are all intimately linked. I realise this now although it’s been staring me in the face all night. If I can do something about the former, the latter will fall into place. (I’m just kidding about all of this – really, believe me – just to keep me occupied. I don’t really think I can influence Gavin by acts of magic, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?) I see the wart as a hungry thing … actually as a hungry entity. You notice that I can speak quite openly and casually about the wart at this stage? That’s because the wart isn’t hungry at the moment. The wart is the bivalve that determines my cycle, my expansion and contraction. What I need to do is give it some real nourishment, something that will completely assuage it. Since the wart owes its very existence to the founding of Ocean Ltd, the act of sating its relentless hunger will necessarily bring about the completion of Ocean Ltd’s business. You have followed me so far I hope?

The wart takes in matter and massively condenses it. If you like, it is the biological equivalent of a black hole, infinitely heavy. And what about the meal it requires? Well, this must be a combination of real food: spicy mushrooms, tandoori chicken wings, stale bagels, morello cherry conserve, squares of processed cheese – and material relating to Ocean Ltd. To whit: invoices, bills of lading, delivery notes, customs declarations, spreadsheet analyses
and a couple of brochures, one for the product – the children’s scrapbook – and one for Ocean Ltd itself.

I will have to travel to assemble the ingredients of my spell. Into the dining-room to fetch the Ocean Ltd material and then to the kitchen to get the food. Before I go, let me take stock. Is this the only course of action left open to me? Or can I get by with a plainer, more matter-of-fact view of my world? I say ‘my world’ advisedly, the truth of the matter is, can I make my world elide gracefully into being ‘the world’ again? A world of housecoats, washing-up brushes, bilateral agreements, tax returns, sexual encounters and stand-up comedians. Can I?

No. Emphatically not. Things have gone too far. I never should have started that nonsense with the solid tubes of brightness. I’ve made my epiphenomenal bed, now I’ll have to stand in it. Up. And to the dining-room. Gather the necessary papers and continue walking with an easy and unhurried, a supremely natural gait, into the hall. ‘Good morning, watercolour.’ ‘Good morning, table.’ The kitchen is quite light now but I have to see what I’m doing so I’d better put on the strip light. Aha! The mushrooms warble a greeting, the chicken wings hunch on the draining board. Off with their packaging!

I have everything assembled now. Lain out in a pattern on the table top. One question remains … how to eat it. Oral intake is inconceivable. For one thing there is the flatness … the wart’s fault … and for another the gorge which continually deposits freight lift-loads of metallic saliva in my mouth. No, I’ll have to absorb the potion through my skin. Sandwich a spicy mushroom between two invoices, package it like some strange dim sum and press it into the hollow of my neck, rub down its crinkly,
greasy softness. Open my tired shirt … take squares of processed cheese and feel them bind into the spindly hairs on my chest … not long now … stale bagels are to be ground up in the hand and the crumbs dropped down the front of my trousers, together with torn squares of laminated 275 gsm art board … morello cherry conserve on my forehead … nothing is sticky when you immerse yourself in it … plaster the triple-leaved invoice on to the gungy mess … the best till last … the wart itself… the chicken wing… like a foetal arm … roll up the sleeve and spread the turmeric paste on to the wart … Jesus, that hurts! But yes it feels good … it feels good … What’s that! A trill in the living-room … a ‘spung’ and then a trill… the phone is ringing … it worked … I rush out of the kitchen … I can feel crumbs falling down around my crotch … the conserve gums up my eyes … emulsifiers and E207 additives are speedily imploding into the wart … I only have a limited amount of time …in the livingroom the first peal is sharp, hectoring, insistent … that was quick! I made it from the kitchen to the living-room in the time it took the phone to fully connect … but where is the phone … Where is the phone! … I can’t see it anywhere … I haven’t used it for two days… I don’t know where it is… Stop. Where’s the ringing coming from … Not in here at all … I can hear it through the floorboards … It’s coming from the bedroom upstairs … And I’m up there before the thought has even taken form … but I can’t find the phone anywhere … The ringing is coming from the testudo that covers the bed … it’s one of the children! I tear the packaging from its sylvan form with scrabbling nails, the plastic bubbles pop between my fingers … the corrugated cardboard is strangely slick … My Children … with their
buttons and their bows … with their little rubberised penises … one of them is calling to me … But which one? Not this one … not this one … not this one … I tear off jacket after jacket … And now another one starts … and another … and another … Upstairs and downstairs … in the living-room … in the kitchen … in the hall … in the back bedroom … until all hundred gross of them are pealing away in a synchronous cacophony … pulsing like some insane electronic cicadas … pulsing in and out … expanding and contracting … expanding …

‘I can’t stand this any more, I’m getting out of here.’ Jim was cradling the plastic rim of the Ford Sierra’s steering wheel in his forearms and staring blankly through the windscreen. I noticed, completely inconsequentially, that his forearms were angled as if they were part of the car’s controls – perhaps some kind of overarching indicator levers. And then he was gone; he elbowed the door open, slid sideways and jack-knifed his feet out of the car with a suddenness that sent the rest of his body pivoting after them. After that he was off and running. He vaulted the grooved steel barrier that divided the carriageways and bolted across the eastbound side of the motorway, narrowly evading the oncoming traffic which was whipping through the long, low chicane as if to purposefully taunt the banked-up vehicles not heading west. There was a chorus of Dopplered hoots which rose and then fell and he was gone into the close darkness.

The door rocked gently on its hinges and wafted a little more petrol and diesel fumes into the passenger compartment. The night was as warm and as vinyl as the interior of the car. It was as if the motorway, the central reservation, the screed, unfinished banks – all of it – were enclosed in some larger, staler, automotive interior. The sky was flatly two-dimensional; an all-encompassing, bug-smeared windscreen, stippled with dried, dirty droplets.

For a full three minutes after Jim had got fed up with waiting I thought that things might still pan out. By rights in a situation such as this, left, unable to drive, in the passenger seat of a car hopelessly jammed on the M25 in the middle of the night, the scene ought to fade out. It was a natural ending. But after three minutes the traffic started to edge forward and I panicked. Eventually, irate fellow motorists – family men, stock controllers and solicitors’ clerks – in beige leisure wear and patterned Bermudas, got out of their cars and pushed the Sierra across the two nearside lanes and on to the hard shoulder. Then they got back into their hatchback Daihatsus and Passat estates and ground off, with infinite pains, towards the tangle of striped cones and panting JCBs which marked the genesis of the jam.

I was left sitting. The knob atop the steering column of the Sierra clicked on and then off – what a drama queen – sending a false message of hopeful hazard, nowhere.

Two hours later a truly fat man buckled the belts round the car’s axles, pulled the lever on the back of the pick-up and an electric motor whined. The cable pulled taut and yanked the front of the Sierra up in the air. We got into the cab and started off towards scored and grooved exit roads, ranged around the orbital road like the revetments of some modern hill fort, marking our way back into the Great Wen. The AA were unsympathetic; the nominated garage man wanted cash. It was almost 3.00 in the morning when I woke Jim’s wife up. The source of the trouble was crouched, looking crippled on the steep camber of the road, its knob still clicking. To give her credit she paid up without a murmur. The truly fat garage man went on his way. Jim’s wife, Carol, gave me a blank look of sad resignation and shut the door quietly in my face.

Jim and I had spent the day up in Norfolk. ‘I like flat places,’ said Jim, ‘places where the sky has a chance to define the land. I’m fed up with the tiny proscenium arch of the Home Counties. If I wanted to act on my day off I’d join an amateur theatre company.’ He tended to talk like this – in the form of a series of observations, which hammered out a Point Of View. One that couldn’t be argued with, only acknowledged, or assented to. We had spent the afternoon wandering from village to village. Jim took a lot of photographs with his new camera. He was a good photographer, his photographs were always artfully uncomposed; they were visual asides. He only took pictures where objects in the foreground could insidiously dominate the scene. He wasn’t interested in people, or nature for that matter. Naturally enough, Jim had a view on photography as well: ‘It doesn’t mean fuck all. It’s a toy – that’s all – not some potent weapon for transforming reality. You point it at an object, you press the button, and a few days later you see the “thing”, and can’t resist a little gasp of wonderment.’