The Quantity Theory of Insanity (29 page)

Jim didn’t wait for the end of Stein’s answer. He was already disappearing through the brown swing-doors. It was left for me to inch my way out of the row of seats where we were sitting, grating past, and offering my bunched crotch to a number of disapproving faces. The last thing I saw as I went out the door was the chairman doodling with a finger on the dusty tabletop.

Jim was pacing back and forth in the lobby, in front of a noticeboard covered with a tatter of posters, flyers and hand-lettered advertisements. A flyer for next week’s open lecture was prominently displayed. ‘An authoritative exposition of recent developments in the Quantity Theory of Insanity’. Obviously the School’s policy was to offset one dull, minority interest lecture, against another, popular, general interest one. It was strange, it hadn’t really occurred to me before, but for a culture that was supposedly unaffected by the end of an era we certainly showed a lot of interest in esoteric theories. Jim shot an angry glance at me and shrugged. ‘I didn’t expect anything better from him.’

‘Oh, I don’t know, it didn’t seem like such a bad lecture to me. Admittedly I dozed through a lot of it.’

‘Oh yes, Stein is clever all right, but he just doesn’t understand. He’s an academic. Even if he does study contemporary events, he still renders them microscopic by looking at them through the wrong end of his theoretical telescope. Waiting isn’t like that. It’s an immediate, physical experience. If he saw Carlos in action, then he’d understand.’

Jim turned on his heel and walked off towards the exit. From behind I noticed how strange he looked, with his long muscular torso and silly little legs. He reminded me for a moment of nothing so much as a PG Tips chimp. His
millenarian rants could easily have been a voice-over. Perhaps the real Jim had just been going, ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh! Ahh! Ahh!’ His tartan shirt was coming out of his trousers and the collar was dandruffy. He wasn’t looking after himself. I followed him out through the lobby feeling guilty, as if Jim had heard my thoughts about him.

Outside on the pavement. In the cold, dark, night-time canyon of Houghton Street, I found Jim standing with the two couriers I’d seen him with at lunch. Ginger was expostulating as I came up, while the character with the triangular hairdo stood back, arms folded. They were all too preoccupied to notice me. I heard the following:

‘Carlos doesn’t want anyone else in on it. Carlos couldn’t give a fuck about anything but the job.’

‘But he’s exactly the kind of person we need to convince. Sooner or later Carlos will need to reveal himself… and then …’

‘And then, cobblers!’

‘I’m not waiting around to listen to this bollocks.’

This was hairdo. He had a peculiar falsetto voice for such a large man. As he voiced the sentiment, he picked his helmet up off the saddle of his bike and pushed it down over his head, with a hermetic ‘plop’. This was effectively the end of the conversation. Ginger put his helmet on as well. And without any farewells the two of them turned over their engines and peeled off, out on to Aldwych. Leaving behind an acrid smell.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked Jim as we turned out of Houghton Street and walked down towards the Strand tube station.

‘Nothing, really. Nothing worth talking about.’

‘Come off it Jim, you owe me an explanation. Those
blokes weren’t doing a late pick-up. At least I didn’t see you sign for anything. They were talking about me.’

‘Yeah, well I did tell them that you might be interested …’

‘In what? Interested in what?’

‘In meeting this Carlos fellow.’

‘I don’t even know who he is. How do you know I’d be interested in meeting him?’

‘Well, you were interested in Stein’s lecture. And Carlos isn’t dissimilar, excepting that he’s something of a leader, as well as a teacher.’

‘Leading what? Who does he teach?’

‘This little group of motorcycle couriers. I suppose you’d think it was all a little bit cranky. Another facet of my overriding obsession. But these bikeys have cottoned on to almost the same set of ideas as I have myself.’ He paused. ‘They’re fed up with waiting.’

‘Well, I’d be fed up with waiting if I were a despatch rider. It must be an incredibly frustrating thing to do. Doesn’t it have one of the highest occupational death rates? I’m sure that’s because they get frustrated and then they make mistakes.’

‘You don’t understand. These people are operating at the limit.’ Jim was getting worked up. He was going into rant mode. He stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me, arms akimbo, twitching. ‘They’re shooting methedrine, or basing coke, or snorting sulphate. They’re driving at all hours of the day and night, existing at a level of frayed neural response that we can only faintly imagine. They’re operating not at the level of other traffic, a straightforward level of action and anticipation, but at the level of nuance, sheer nuance. They perceive the tiniest of
stimuli with ghastly clarity, and respond. Think of it, man. Weaving your way through heavy traffic astride a monstrously overpowered motorcycle, always pressured to meet a deadline, the ether plugged into your helmet. They have to mutate to survive!’

After this little outburst we carried on walking in silence for a while. We were going down Essex Street past one of the world’s largest accountancy firms. Between the slats of a three-quarters-closed Venetian blind I could see a man in shirtsleeves. Still crouched, at this late hour, over a flickering monitor in the pool of an Anglepoise. As I glanced at him he pushed a button and the figures on the screen scrolled upwards in a stream of green light.

Jim was breathing heavily, but he’d calmed down a little. I didn’t know what to say, I was curious but I didn’t want to provoke him. For the first time I had the sense with absolute clarity that Jim had teetered over that fine, fine line between eccentricity and madness. Eventually I spoke. ‘These despatch riders, Jim, do they believe in “waiting” as well?’

‘Of course, of course, of course. They are the real waiters. Waiting is ground into them. Every moment could be an arrival, at a pick-up or drop-off, or the ultimate dropoff, death itself! No wonder they understand what is happening. They exist at the precise juncture between the imminent and the immanent! Carlos has seen their potential. He is a man of extraordinary powers, he understands that the future will belong to those who clearly articulate the Great Wait!’

We were standing in the forecourt outside the tube. A few late office workers mingled with the eddy and flow of tourists, who moved in and out of the entrance in their
bright pastel, stretchy clothes. It was a clear night and the neon sign above the National blipped its message across the flat water. I took Jim’s upper arm in what I hoped was a firm, avuncular sort of a grasp.

‘Jim, don’t you think you’re letting all this rather get to you? I think you’re overtired and overworked. I’m sure you’re not spending enough time with Carol. Why don’t you take a rest for a few days? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, the world will wait for you.’ His response surprised me.

‘Well, yes, er … you could be right. She has seemed a little distant recently. She can’t cope with my insomnia, you know. Perhaps you are right. But even so, you should meet Carlos, he isn’t a crank, or a freak. His powers are real enough, believe me. I’ve never had any truck with any kind of cults or mystical twaddle, have I?’

No, he never has, I thought to myself, after we had parted and gone our separate ways. And perhaps there is something in what he says. My eyes flicked across the tracks, between which lay the typical refuse. I picked out Jim’s figure at the far end of the platform. His shoulders were hunched and he’d inserted his body between a dangling sand bucket and a coiled, canvas hose in a wooden cabinet. It was as if he was trying to restrain himself. It was clear from his posture and his blank stare what he was doing. He was waiting for a train.

I tried not to think about Jim for the next couple of days. If he was having a breakdown of some kind there was probably very little I could do for him – and if he wasn’t. Well, after Norfolk and Stein’s lecture I didn’t really want to see him for a while, anyway. I needed a change of company; I needed to spend some time with people who
were a little less heavy. I went out in the evenings to films and parties, I got tipsy, I had yelping conversations with people I had just met. Conversations in which each yelp seemed, at the time, a touchstone of empathy. At the time, that was.

But try as I would I couldn’t shake Jim. He nagged at me and I knew it was because I should at least try and help him. The image that stayed with me most clearly – appearing as a flickering ghost when I switched on my terminal in the morning – was of Jim in the old lecture theatre, his arms clutching the seat back, his face distorted.

After a week I was really anxious. Jim hadn’t been in touch, which was unlike him. I resolved to go and see Carol, his wife. After all, I reasoned, before the whole ‘waiting’ thing took off we used to see quite a lot of one another. I had been in the habit of regularly having dinner at their house. Childless couples have a tendency to adopt single people and try and feed them up and marry them off. And this is the way it had been. Carol had invited me to a series of Tuesday evening affairs where I’d eaten spinach and tomato lasagne and met a number of her female colleagues.

After a while the Tuesdays had petered out. I missed them. I missed the atmosphere of somewhere where people cooked on a regular basis; and I missed seeing Carol, who I liked. And who, despite my failures as a potential pair-bonder, never seemed to judge me. She was one of those people who had a tremendous sense of containment about them, her physical presence constantly emitted the quiet message that she was fine just as she was, she was content to do x or y, but it wasn’t really necessary. When she and Jim had married their friends had called it ‘a marriage of
opposites’. It was significant that over the years no one had seen fit to add to this observation.

Carol worked at home as a freelance editor. So I could be sure of finding her in if I called unannounced. I took the morning off work and the train out to Wandsworth. Their flat was across the Common from the station. As I walked over I felt the morning’s catarrh slop and gurgle in my chest. I had a bitter, old iron taste in my mouth and felt considerable premonition.

Jim’s Sierra was crouched on the steep camber of the road outside their flat, like a beetle redesigned by committee. I walked up the tiled path along the privet hedge and pushed the intercom buzzer. After a while there was a crackle on the speaker.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Carol. I need to talk to you, about Jim.’

‘Hang on a minute, I’m not up yet.’

I waited for more than a minute. But when I saw, through the glass door panel, the door of their flat swing open, it wasn’t Carol who emerged. It was a young man. A tall young man, who came to the door, opened it, and walked past me with a cheery nod and a cheerier ‘Good Morning’. He tucked his arms energetically into his windcheater and jauntily walked off down the road, implying that he was off for a day’s hard work. One that he was looking forward to.

A few minutes later Carol came and let me in. She was wearing a dressing gown patterned with pastel blooms. She was superficially groomed but there hung about her the subtle, sour smell of someone who’s been making love in the morning. I followed her down the corridor and while I sat at the kitchen table she made me a cup of coffee.

‘So what about Jim?’ Carol panted, vigorously depressing the stainless steel plunger of the cafetière.

‘Just that I think he’s having a breakdown, Carol. I think he needs help of some kind. I haven’t seen him for the past week; the last time I did he was absolutely raving.’

‘I haven’t seen him either. I haven’t as much as clapped eyes on him. You know he’s cabbing in the evenings now?’

‘Cabbing? What on earth for? Not for money, surely.’

Carol laughed and pulled a twist of inky hair away from her face. ‘Oh no, not for money. To relax him. That’s why he does it. He says it relaxes him.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Maybe, maybe, but you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, believe me.’ She said this earnestly, and sat down opposite me, an identical coffee mug cupped in her hands.

I believed her. Whatever part the young windcheater played in her life there was no doubting her affection for Jim. If she couldn’t influence him, no one could.

‘He comes back from work every evening and goes straight out again. I don’t think he actually takes a lot of money. He’s more intent on keeping in touch with his friend Carlos.’

‘So you know about that.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And the despatch riders. What do you think?’

‘Well, strictly speaking, I suppose he could be right, but it strikes me that there’s enough that’s obviously wrong with the world without becoming obsessed by the intangibles.’

I took the train back into town. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was expected at work. I thought I might
walk into Soho and drink some espressos at the Bar Italia. The clear, sharp light of the morning had given way to the kind of intense sepia tone and gritty air that precedes a summer storm in London. The sense of rising barometric pressure was tangible. I felt oppressed and confused by my talk with Carol. I still couldn’t accept that there was nothing to be done for Jim. It was if those who loved him were just waiting for something awful to happen.

I trailed my damp, stinging feet along Oxford Street and turned into Soho Square. There was a gust of wind and a peppering of grit flew into my eyes. For a moment I was blind. I leant against a wall while the tears gathered and flowed down my face. When my vision cleared I saw Jim.

He was standing, leaning on the inside of the door of his car, talking to another despatch rider. This despatch rider was even more singular than the others I’d seen with Jim. He had the regulation jacket and bright, vinyl tabard. But instead of boots and leather trousers he had on baggy, green cords and battered trainers. He was propped on his bike, a battered, black 250 MZ, regarding Jim with slight disdain. His head was quite repulsive. He looked like a failed albino. His hair was the palest of gingers, his face putty-white, his features were soft and vestigial, his eyes the pinkiest of pinky-blues.