PATRICK THOMPSON

Seeing the Wires

Dedication

For Em

Epigraph

Even in Dudley, ritual murder is frowned upon.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Five

Part Three: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Four: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Nine

Part Five: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Six: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Thirteen

Part Seven: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Eight: Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Seventeen

Part Nine: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Eighteen

Part Ten: Sam, aged twenty-five

Chapter Nineteen

Part Eleven: Sam, aged thirty

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

Sam, aged thirty

Chapter One
I

When I was a student, I used to have a job on the building sites. Nowadays, I steer clear of building sites. It was a different story then, though, because of this loan that the country had been good enough to arrange for me. I had known for some time that at some point the country or, to be more specific, the Bastard And Shitwit Building Society (I’ve changed the names, for legal reasons) would want their money back.

I’d spent it. I’d spent some of it on useful work-related things like books and pens and paper and all of that. I’d spent far more of it on having a nice time, and from the way the professionally unemotional creatures at the B&S Building Society behaved, I wasn’t sure they’d understand about having a nice time. They certainly wouldn’t understand about me paying for it with their money. I suppose it was their money, really. Technically. Then again, they’d given it to me, and anyone could have told them I was unreliable. If they’d asked Jack – my best friend, who we’ll get to presently – he’d have told them flat out: do not lend this man any money. Jack never did. Jack knew me well. Until I went to university, we got on tremendously. After that, I didn’t see much of him until I stopped being a student. He didn’t like students. He preferred groups like Psychic TV, and filling himself with metal odds and ends. He’d been spending a lot of time with Eddie Finch, who worked on one of the local papers. I’ll tell you about them later on.

To be honest, I didn’t go to university because I had a great career planned. I went because things were uncomfortable at home. There were family troubles.

I’ll tell you about those later on, too.

The building society and I exchanged letters – theirs frank and to the point, mine circumspect. They agreed that I could pay back all of the money I owed them at thirty pounds a week for the rest of my life, with the clear hint that if I didn’t keep up, they’d find a far worse arrangement.

‘You’ve had a lucky escape,’ the manager, Mr Fallow, advised me.

I had, I thought. I might have been forced to work there until the debt was cleared. I told him how grateful I was, shook his hand, and left him straightening his tie.

I had a degree – a second in Historic Peculiarities, which we’ll get to presently – and I was more or less able-bodied. How difficult would it be to get the sort of job where I wouldn’t even notice the loss of thirty pounds a week?

As it turned out, very difficult indeed. The only office jobs going were for people inputting data, and they paid low wages. I was not qualified to be a team leader or supervisor. I knew this, because during the course of what felt like several hundred interviews several hundred people told me so. The building society became concerned, and started writing to me with helpful suggestions. To give me that extra bit of impetus, they charged me for each letter. When I asked why, they explained that it was to cover their administrative costs. They charged me for that letter too. I doubted this. I had seen their adverts in the job pages and they paid around three pounds a day. They were charging me fifteen pounds a letter. It surely didn’t take one person five days (or five people a day each) to write a letter three lines long with my name misspelt at the top of it.

I wrote to them, including these calculations, and asked them to take into consideration the administrative costs incurred in the writing of my own letter. If they would pay thirty pounds into my account, that should cover it.

They paid the money in. Mr Fallow was nothing if not fair. Then they sent me fifteen letters explaining that they had done so, charging me fifteen pounds per letter. I could no longer afford food or rent. I explained this to my landlord, Mr Jellicoe, who said, ‘Don’t have food then.’

At least he didn’t charge me for the advice.

I spread my job-searching net a little wider. I ruled in some areas I had ruled out. I considered more physical jobs. Eventually, I got a job on a building site on the bleak outskirts of Dudley, helping to dig the foundations of what turned out to be the ugliest factory in existence.

It was easy enough work.

I would rise at seven, get washed and dressed, and be at the bus stop by eight. Some time later, a white Bedford van would pull up, and I’d hop in. I had to use the van. I could have walked to the site – I live in Dudley, and it was less than a mile away – but collection by van was a condition of the job.

‘That’s what it’s there for,’ the foreman – Mr Link, who we’ll get to presently – told me.

I would get into the back of the van and spend a short, uncomfortable journey bouncing about on a stack of shovels, picks, and hefty sacks of gravel and sand. The van was driven by Darren, a short youth with a good-sized collection of foul language and a full head of very black hair, which looked dyed. The van was co-piloted by Spin, a black man who never spoke at all. They would pull into the bus stop and I would clamber into the back and settle myself in among the implements, and as I closed the rear doors someone at the bus stop would say something disparaging.

I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world, but in Dudley the bus stops are where old people gather when they aren’t gathered at the post office. They like bus stops. They don’t like people jumping the queue. I wasn’t in the queue, strictly speaking, but they didn’t like me getting into a van at the bus stop before they had a chance to get on a bus and go to town and complain about how much everything cost and how many worrying new vegetables there were nowadays. I wouldn’t have minded one or two of the less obviously incontinent ones getting in the van and having a lift but we only went to the building site and there were no queues there for them to stand in.

There were trenches. I helped to dig them. I thought that building sites used mechanical diggers for the foundations. I asked Mr Link about it.

‘Well, we could,’ he said. ‘But you cost a lot less and the last JCB we had got stolen.’

‘Stolen?’

‘Joyriders. I can’t see what joy there is in a JCB, myself. I’d rather have a Jag.’

He did. It was part of being a foreman, Darren explained. The foreman had a Jag and everyone else shared a van and did all the work. That was the building trade according to Darren. It seemed simple enough.

Mr Link had – as well as the Jag – thinning black hair containing thick black grease, presumably placed there deliberately. He had sideburns several years after they were last fashionable and several years before they were next fashionable. He had watery eyes and looked uncomfortable in the hard hat he had to wear because of regulations. The main purpose of hard hats, Darren told me, was not to protect the heads of workmen. The main purpose of hard hats was to make visiting dignitaries look twats.

‘Office people,’ said Darren, ‘never get the hang of hats.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘There you go, Spin agrees.’

Spin nodded again.

‘Thing is,’ said Darren, dragging on his cigarette, ‘the thing is, some people are hat people and others are foremen and managers. That’s what it is.’

He smoked on. Working on a building site apparently consisted of a lot of smoke breaks interrupted by short periods of digging. I was able to keep up with this and the wages were higher than I would have expected. I saw a light at the end of the overdraft. I paid Mr Jellicoe some of the rent he thought he was due and began to reimburse the building society. Things were, I thought, on an even keel.

II

One day – it was summer, and the sky was clear and blue, but because we were in Dudley the temperature was cheerlessly low – I was digging foundations when I turned up an old coin. It was nothing special – a shilling, slightly dented and much corroded – but Darren had a look.

‘We find things sometimes,’ he said. ‘Digging. You turn things up.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘Once found a bone,’ said Darren, ‘off of a dog we reckon. Well, Spin thought it was a dog, anyway. He knows his bones, does Spin. Used to do archaeology at the Poly.’

‘What, Spin was a student?’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘We all were,’ said Darren. Looking at him, I doubted it. He must have caught my expression.

‘I done Social Anthropology,’ he explained, ‘at Cambridge. Bloody freezing and flat, Cambridge. Course, I finish the course and get ready for one of those graduate jobs, thirty grand a year and more holiday than workdays. That’s when I realized Social Anthropology might not have been the course to go for. Same with Spin. There’s no call for archaeologists. At least he gets to do digging, keeps his hand in. Only person on the site hasn’t got a degree is Mr Link.’

‘What?’

‘Left school at fifteen, self-made man, blah blah. Don’t get him started on it. What did you do then?’

‘When?’

‘When you was a student. I mean, the rest of us was students but don’t look it. You look like a student. Only poorer.’

‘I did Historic Peculiarities.’

‘You did what?’ Darren dropped his shovel. It seemed like a strong reaction. Most people just said it was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

‘Historic Peculiarities.’

Darren and Spin exchanged a look.

‘Is that one of those new courses?’

‘It was. There were only three of us doing it. I don’t think they run it any more.’

‘Well,’ said Darren, picking up his shovel so he’d have something to lean on. ‘Well. So, what was that all about then? Historic Peculiarities?’

III

Historic Peculiarities, explained Janet Blake – senior lecturer in Historic Peculiarities – was the study of missing bits of history. We knew what had happened at time x, and time y, but did not know what had happened between them. Historic Peculiarities attempted to find the links between apparently disparate events. In practise, this involved a lot of creative writing and very little analysis.

The typical Historic Peculiarities exam question would be along the lines of: ‘The Spanish Armada – The Fire of London. Connect.’ There was no typical answer. The best way to answer a Historic Peculiarities question was to write as much as possible in the time allowed without ever committing yourself to a point of view.

I took the subject because I was interested in history and peculiar things, interests I shared with my best friend Jack. He didn’t go to university, he got a job in a printing company on the outskirts of Oldbury. While I was spending money I didn’t have on having a good time, he was spending his time earning money so he could spend it on his hobby, which was body piercing.

We’ll get to that later.

I did a three-year course in Historic Peculiarities. There was the option to do a fourth and perhaps continue as far as a doctorate, but the building society weren’t keen. I was still interested in history and peculiar things. The building society was still interested in regaining its money. So I gave up Historic Peculiarities and became, for several months, a digger of foundations.

IV

‘Got you,’ said Darren. ‘It was one of those complete bollocks courses. Thought I’d picked a bad one. Bloody hell. So, how much do you owe the bank then?’

‘Building society,’ I said. ‘A couple of hundred, now.’

‘Lucky sod,’ said Darren. ‘I still owe them me first born, and Spin’s had to sell one of his kidneys.’

They both smiled. Darren pocketed the grubby shilling that had sparked off the conversation.

‘Tell you something,’ said Darren. ‘You know the castle?’

Of course I knew the castle. Dudley Castle is hard to miss, in Dudley. It isn’t as though there’s a lot else to distract your attention.

‘There were some historic peculiarities up there,’ said Darren, ‘so Spin was saying. Witches, warlocks, comets, Templars and all sorts of stuff. You could have done a thesis on that. You might have got a first then, like Spin.’

Spin nodded, silently.

‘What sort of things?’ I asked. I’d lived there for twenty-five years, and it was the first I’d heard about it.

Before Darren could tell me, Mr Link turned up, a hard hat sitting uncomfortably on his head.

‘Darren, Spin,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘I can never remember your name,’ he told me.

‘Sam.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Historic Peculiarities. And these two are Archaeology and Anthropology. Once upon a time, we used to get actual workers. Now they’ve all done City and Guilds and set themselves up as limited companies and all I get is students paying back their overdrafts, drinking me out of teabags and chatting about social awareness. Which is all well and good in its place, but it doesn’t get trenches dug, does it?’

We shook our heads.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘and there it is. Now. How are you at heights?’

‘I’m okay with heights,’ said Darren. Spin made a gesture indicating the same. It was a complicated gesture, and it went on for a little while. He raised his hands above his head and looked up at them, and nodded. He drew his hands down past his face, looked left and right, and shrugged. He held out his arms and mimed balancing, while nodding. He looked down and held out both hands, thumbs up. He clapped. Mr Link nodded at several points during the gesture, and then the ending caught him by surprise and he forgot to nod in the right place.

‘I don’t like heights,’ I said.

‘Don’t like them, or won’t do them?’ asked Mr Link.

‘I don’t like them. I get dizzy and then I freeze.’

‘Vertigo. Fair enough. You can stick with trenches. You don’t have to go up, to do trenches. Down is preferable, I always think. But not too far down, because then it gets claustrophobic. A strange thing: all the students we hire want to do the digging. Never the walls or the scaffolding. Personally, I think it’s to do with Dudley. There’s old stuff all over the place. The castle, the mines, the railways. If you ask me, they should bulldoze the bloody lot of it and start again with a few decent roads and a car park and maybe a pub, but that’s just me.’

‘What will we be doing?’ asked Darren.

‘Scaffolding,’ said Mr Link, in a tone of voice that suggested he’d already told them once.

Spin went into another series of hand movements.

‘What?’ asked Mr Link.

‘He’s dubious as to scaffolding,’ explained Darren, acting as an interpreter.

‘Dubious?’

‘He believes that it acts as a receiver or transmitter of messages from elsewhere, being as it is a matrix of regular angles constructed in tubiform metal. That’s when it’s up, obviously. When it’s not, it’s just a pile of tubes in the back of the truck.’

‘Tubiform matrix?’ asked Mr Link. ‘What, and you got all of that from him waving his hand about?’

Darren nodded.

‘Hell’s bells,’ said Mr Link.

Darren and Spin stood patiently.

‘Well?’ asked Mr Link. He switched to jovial mode. ‘Either of you up to working on my tubiform matrix? Only it’d be nice if you’d get on with it, because we’re expecting a message from Arcturus and we need the scaffolding up before it gets dark. Besides, we might be able to make use of it when we put the top beams on this thing.’

He indicated the framework of red metal struts: six large ones to a side and a network of smaller ones connecting them. Trenches ran around the outer limit of the structure. I had helped to put them there.

‘What’s it going to be?’ Darren asked.

‘Factory,’ said Mr Link.

‘What sort?’

‘Finished, if we get the scaffolding up. Come on.’

Mr Link led Darren and Spin to the pile of metal tubes and hefty brackets. The brackets looked like something that might have come from a medieval dungeon, and that made me think about Jack, because Jack is a body piercing aficionado and he looks like the sort of thing medieval dungeons might have used in their adverts if they’d had newspapers to place them in.

‘While we’re erecting Luke Skywalker’s radio set, would it be okay if you carried on with the trenches? Only I seem to remember that we had this agreement where I paid you and you did work. You seem to be interpreting it slightly differently, in that I pay you and you stare vacantly into space.’ He sighed. ‘Students.’

‘Ex-students,’ I said.

‘Even worse,’ he said. ‘Feel like digging?’

‘Oh yes,’ I lied.

‘Good, because it would trouble my conscience greatly if I had to sack you because you were useless.’

He often gave us these pep talks. I think it was something to do with morale.

V

Other than Mr Link and the physical problems – blisters, aches, herpes – working on building sites was fun. It was like playtime. At school the only time you were allowed to mess around in mud was at lunch break, unless you were in remedial class. You weren’t allowed to handle tools.

On building sites mud and tools were only the beginning. After that there were mechanical things, scaffolding, swearing, and tea.

There were pranks, too. I had to go to Supplies and get a left-handed screwdriver. Darren sent me to get a spirit level with a slower bubble. Spin asked me to get something but I didn’t know what he meant. It was something that rotated, but I wasn’t tuned in to his gestures and Darren was out getting some dents knocked out of the scaffolding. I was the new boy, so I was the stooge for all of the pranks. I didn’t mind, as it passed the time and I wasn’t often injured.

After a while I noticed that I was still the new boy.

‘We’re a good team,’ explained Darren. ‘Mr Link likes to stick with people he knows.’

Spin nodded.

‘It saves training people up. You’re the best we’ve had, so far.’

I was pleased. I hadn’t been told I was the best at anything by anyone before. Except for Jack, who said I was the world’s best wanker.

‘Well, you’re the only one, really,’ said Darren. ‘No one wants to do trenches these days. Most of them go into burgers until they get something in an office.’

Spin mimed frying burgers with one hand, and picked his nose with the other. I hoped that was part of the gesture.

‘I don’t mind trenches,’ I said. ‘I like digging.’

‘You’re still the new boy, though. Can’t be much fun. Get all the jokes played on you. Haven’t you had any offers yet? Office jobs?’

‘Not yet,’ I admitted. I hadn’t applied for many. I worried about that, but not enough to do anything about it.

‘We’ll have to do better jokes then, won’t we? Can’t keep sending you to Supplies for things that don’t exist. Don’t worry, me and Spin’ll think of something new while we do the roof.’

They went up the scaffolding. All that afternoon I watched them, wondering what they were up to. I couldn’t hear anything Darren was saying, and Spin’s gestures were difficult to follow. I was a bit worried, to tell the truth. They buried one of my boots once, filled the replacement with hot tar and I scalded my toe. They were boisterous, as my mother used to say of schoolyard psychopaths.

So I had an idea. I would strike first. I couldn’t get them to fetch something from Supplies, because they always made me do that. I couldn’t fill their boots with anything. It had to be something mild, just enough to make them think twice. And it would have to be Darren. I had no idea what Spin would find funny, other than me with hot toes.

I thought about Darren’s hair. It had looked dyed the first time I saw it. After working with him for a few weeks I was sure that it was dyed. From time to time it would start to look less black, and thinner, and then he’d go off to fetch something and come back with a head of glossy jet hair and inky fingers. I was suspicious.

A weak spot, I decided. That night I popped into a pharmacist’s and bought a quantity of Grecian 2000. I took it home, wrapped it in brown paper and addressed the parcel to Darren. I wrote on the back:

‘If not delivered, return to Building Standards Office.’

The next day I left it next to the kettle in the Portakabin that was our headquarters, after Darren and Spin had made their way up the scaffolding. I left it leaning against a packet of Hobnobs and then got on with digging. The foundations were widespread, and it was difficult to keep close to the Portakabin. I didn’t want to miss anything. Darren and Spin didn’t seem to want to come down. Most days they were down every few minutes, for tea or cigarettes. That day they were happy in the scaffolding, thirty feet up, basking in the drizzle. I tried not to look as though I was hanging around. I noticed I’d dug the foundations much deeper than usual that day. If I wasn’t careful we’d end up with a leaning warehouse. I didn’t think Mr Link would like that. I kept going off and digging, trying to leave myself with a clear view of the Portakabin at all times. I angled around, turned back on myself, dug where I’d already dug. I thought about putting the kettle on and attracting them down with tea, but then they’d know I was up to something. I never made the tea. I knew how, but it didn’t interest me.

It was lunchtime before they came down. Darren made for the Portakabin, patting his pockets and frowning.

‘No fags,’ he said. ‘Here Spin, do us a tea. I’ll pop down the shops and get some. Want anything?’

Spin indicated his preference and Darren made his way off the site. Spin entered the Portakabin. A moment later he emerged and looked about. He held the parcel. He shook it. Hearing an engine, I thought that it would be Darren returning with his cigarettes and whatever it was that Spin wanted. A tongue, perhaps. Then I remembered that Darren had walked to the shops. It was Mr Link. He pulled up close to Spin and got out.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. Spin handed over the parcel and gestured at length.

‘By the kettle?’ asked Mr Link. ‘I don’t think so. Post comes to the office, not out here. Let’s have a look at it then.’

He opened the parcel and inspected the contents. His face grew bleaker. He was never exactly a bundle of joy, but this was as grim as I’d seen him.

‘I think we’ll be having a word with our student friend. Mr Haines, could I trouble you to pop out of that deep pit you’ve dug for yourself?’

I considered hiding.

‘There’s no point hiding down there, the foundations are square and we can find you. Come on.’

I dragged myself up to ground level and squished over to them. Mr Link raised the Grecian 2000 and looked at it.

‘Getting old isn’t funny,’ he said. ‘You’ll find that out one day.’

He looked at Spin. Spin gestured at length, and then held his sides.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Link. ‘I see. So this was a prank, then? This waste of company time? Bit of a laugh? I have nothing against a bit of a laugh.’

Spin raised his eyebrows.

‘Is this your idea of a joke?’ Mr Link asked me. I nodded.

‘Fair enough. Jokes happen on building sites. But I think we’ll have no more. And we’ll say no more about it,’ he said, surprising me. I’d expected to get the sack. Perhaps I really was the best temp they’d had. Anyway, it did the trick. It must have done. They only played one more joke on me.

VI

To cut things short, I used to work on the building sites. After we finished that factory, we moved to the other side of town and put up a warehouse and then we did some office buildings in the classical warehouse style. My overdraft became smaller despite the best efforts of Mr Fallow and his staff. I worked on sites as far away as Wolverhampton and Tipton, despite the language barrier.

The buildings were always the same. I mean, they had different functions – this one was a hospital, this one an office, this one a luxury hotel with many and varied facilities – but they all looked like warehouses.

‘That,’ Mr Link would say, surveying whatever we had just finished bundling together, ‘is what a building is meant to look like. Square, straight, flat on the top and no fancy business.’

Darren and I had decided that Mr Link genuinely believed this. Strange beliefs and superstitions were common on building sites. Spin believed that scaffolding formed matrices that could tune in to otherworldly broadcasts. Darren believed that if he dug far enough down, his trench would connect with the mines that ran under Dudley and he’d be able to tunnel under the off-licence and get all his drinks for free. Mr Link believed that all buildings should be cuboid and without decoration or, ideally, doors and windows. I believed that I was at the beginning of my life and things would turn out okay without me putting much effort into it.

‘Square and straight,’ Mr Link would say. The rest of us would look at each other and try to get away. ‘Nothing fancy. Gargoyles and curlicues and all of that are all well and good for cathedrals, but the modern building is regular. Solid. No weaknesses in the structure.’

This was clearly untrue. In high winds the warehouses we put up fell apart, great sheets of prefab spinning off into the night like a giant conjuror’s playing cards. The structures were riddled with weaknesses, apart from the foundations. Those were solid.

‘Some of them fall down,’ Darren said.

Mr Link gave him a poisonous look. ‘That,’ he said slowly, ‘is because there are weak spots. Windows! Doors! How can we make a solid structure when there are parts of it that open?’

‘It’s sort of fashionable to have doors and windows,’ said Darren.

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that it was traditional to have doors set into buildings so that people could enter and leave them.

‘That’s the thing,’ explained Mr Link. ‘If it was a decent building, they wouldn’t want to leave.’

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that he had thought of something else he could be doing. Darren and I went with him, leaving Mr Link looking at our latest construction – a theme pub on the main road between Stourbridge and Wolverley – and thinking how nice it would look without the windows spoiling the purity of the architectural line.

One morning, the building society sent me a letter including a monthly balance. There was a note of congratulation enclosed, signed by Mr Fallow. My account had become positive for several days. It had since become negative again, of course.

They charged me £15 for the congratulatory note.

The next month, there were more positive days. My account went from red to black, like an infected wound. I no longer needed to work on building sites to pay off my overdraft. I was able, instead, to look for a less well-paying graduate job.

I said a farewell to Mr Link and the gang on a Friday at the end of a bright and cold February. We went to the pub.

‘I knew you’d be going,’ said Mr Link. ‘You’ve been even less use than usual these last couple of months.’

I waited for him to say something good about my trench-digging abilities. He sipped his stout instead. Then he looked up.

‘I’m always sorry to see a good worker go,’ he said, ‘and I’m seeing one go now.’

I was startled and grateful. He caught my expression.

‘Bloody hell, not you,’ he said. ‘Our Spin here is leaving today. Got a job with local radio.’

Seemed about right, I thought. Spin had always had this thing about receiving signals.

VII

I left the building trade and got a job with the local council. I can’t say which one, because they’ll sue. I worked in the banking section. This made me think of heavily defended vaults and leather-topped desks, for reasons known only to my subconscious. The reality was less impressive. In a large open-plan office – much like the interior of one of the buildings I used to dig foundations for – rows of desks were set regular distances apart. The distances had been chosen to minimize what the team leaders had learned to call Unauthorized Human Interaction, which is to say chatting. There was a lunch hour which it was mandatory to take but which, it was hinted, might better be used for working in. There was an agreeable overtime rate for which no one qualified. A shift system meant that you always had to get up too early and always got home too late. At Christmas a certain amount of jollity would be tolerated: a few strands of sparse tinsel stapled to the ceiling tiles for twelve days.

I would get in at 7.30 AM, regardless of which shift I was on, because I couldn’t afford a car and the bus service was unreliable. I would switch on my computer so that the people in IT would know I was there.

IT was housed on the top floor in a chaotic office full of dangling wires and tangled cables and parts of things that had become dislodged. IT was not subject to the same rules as other departments. IT had a different timescale. They would say, I’ll be there in five minutes. They would arrive in anything up to a month. Everyone wanted to work in IT but there was no way to get there without having arcane and detailed knowledge of Babylon 5.

After logging in, I would look out of a window until nine when a few other people would start to trickle in. I would open up a spreadsheet or two and mess about with figures.

I would do that for eight hours. Then I would go home.

I once asked the man at the next desk to mine – a breach of council policy but I was in a daredevil sort of a mood – what happened to all of the figures we put into spreadsheets.

‘Well,’ he said, pushing his spectacles onto his nose, ‘when we finish each sheet they are amalgamated into another spreadsheet and ratified against a third spreadsheet held at head office. If they match, they are themselves amalgamated into another spreadsheet. Each of these transactions is logged on a fifth spreadsheet. This fifth spreadsheet is checked against the performance timetable laid down in the spreadsheet kept at area headquarters, and then the results of all of these cross-checks are entered into a spreadsheet.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they bin it and we start all over again.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me. His spectacles – the perennially unfashionable type with a heavy black frame – began their descent to the end of his nose.

‘What?’ he asked, confused.

‘Why? Why do we do all of this work just to have it thrown away?’

He looked at me some more.

‘Because they pay us to,’ he said, and never spoke to me again.

VIII

I still work there. I’ve moved up, or rather across. Diagonally, really. I’ve moved diagonally. I now lead a team of six people. I know the names of four of them. I meet with other team leaders and we discuss our teams as though we were talking about badly behaved pets. I have been on courses designed to encourage bonding between staff, and I have not been in any way encouraged to bond with staff.

I’m like everyone else out there in the world of meaningless office jobs. It’s what I do in the daytime to pay for the rest of my life. It’s what I do to pay for what I do.

The rest of my life is far more interesting. For example, there’s my best friend, Jack who can’t go through those metal detectors in airports without bells going off and guns being drawn.

Chapter Two
I

After working on building sites I was glad to have a job in an office. I wanted a job in an office. I also didn’t want one. I wanted to be unconventional, but I didn’t have the money for it. An office job would provide the money to be unconventional, but an office job was all about being conventional. I had to fit in to make enough money not to fit in.

Having an office job meant being unconventional in less exciting ways. I would put paper clips in the drawing pin box. I coloured in red sections of the year planner that should have been coloured yellow. This wasn’t the sort of anarchy I’d imagined when I listened to the Sex Pistols all those years ago. So an office job was conventional, I was right about that. I was only wrong about the money.

I must have got something wrong somewhere. I had less money than when I was a student earning nothing. In those days there had been more money to spend. Working on building sites the money turned up in envelopes and there was no mention of tax. Working in an office, the money didn’t turn up. Once a month I got a piece of paper explaining where most of my wages had gone and how much of them I could keep. Then the B&S Building Society kept the rest. I began to want to work on the building sites again, getting fat little envelopes at weekly intervals and telling B&S nothing about it.

I had outgoings. I had to pay the rent and buy groceries and bus passes and other non-frivolous items, like cigarettes. Cigarettes aren’t frivolous; the health warnings prove it. I don’t like smoking, but not being able to afford to smoke makes me want to smoke. It wasn’t as though I had money to burn. I didn’t even have money for firelighters. My wages belonged to everyone but me. Leaving little for entertainments. Once a week I’d go for a drink with Jack and get mildly confused. We usually went to the Messy Duck, a quiet pub which was situated down the road from the zoo, standing alone next to an area of ground designated unsuitable for buildings. I would look over the ground with my practised trench-digger’s eyes, spotting the greasy pools of rainbow-topped water, the cracks leading down to the mineshafts, the thrown bricks and the broken glass, the condoms.

I couldn’t understand that. There must have been better places. Even in Dudley.

The Messy Duck was a quiet pub. I’d been in louder monasteries. You often got the impression that you were keeping the landlord up. He was a thin man with sad eyes and an off-putting manner. At around ten he’d switch off the jukebox and unplug the fruit machine. Between ten and half past he’d yawn pointedly. After that he’d just turn off the lights and stand by the door, holding it open. I would feel uncomfortable and intrusive, but it didn’t bother Jack. He seemed to like being in uncomfortable situations. That helped to explain his hobby, I suppose. He would have to enjoy being uncomfortable. How else could you explain his piercings? They were all about discomfort. If they didn’t bother him, they bothered the people around him.

Jack was coloured and studded. I didn’t know the full extent of it – I didn’t want to know, there were parts of him I wouldn’t want to see in any condition, with or without rivets – but I knew that it was extensive. I imagined bolts and studs connected by chains. I imagined nails driven into areas of unnatural colour. I didn’t know what sort of tattoos he had. I doubted whether he went for the old-fashioned tigers and hearts with daggers. He’d prefer something more modern, like Celtic twiddles and spirals, or perhaps barcodes.

I could have been wrong. For all I knew he had a portrait of Britney across his pectorals and Made In England etched across his scalp. I found out what he actually had much later, under distressing circumstances.

We’ll get to that later.

‘Why?’ I once asked him. ‘Why go through all the pain and risk? All those stories you hear about people getting tattoos at little shops then going down with leprosy and melting into their cornflakes. Why not stick with jigsaws?’

‘It’s not that painful mate,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as going to the dentist.’

‘I thought you enjoyed going to the dentist.’

‘I do,’ he said, surprised. ‘Except the noise of the drill.’

‘So you like being hurt? It’s a masochism thing?’

‘No. It hurts, but that’s not all of it. That’s the start. You break your arm, you’ve got a bond with any other bloke with a broken arm. Start a conversation like that.’ He clicked his fingers without making a noise. He’d never got the hang of it. ‘Everyone pierced is with you. Everyone else is waiting to come in. It’s a ritual thing isn’t it? I don’t know, mate. You’re the fucking graduate. Why do you think I do it?’

‘Because you’re unstable.’

‘Could be that, granted.’

He had a mouthful of beer and looked thoughtful. At that time the eyebrow ring was new, and he was swollen and intrusively red. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had to look at the wound.

‘You do it for attention,’ I thought out loud.

‘Course I don’t. What about all the stuff you can’t see? How’s that attracting attention? Take away the stuff in my face and I’m normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were.’

‘At least I don’t set alarms off at airports.’

‘You don’t go to airports. You don’t go anywhere. That’s what this is. That’s why you don’t get it. I’ve gone somewhere else. I’ve become someone else. I’ve taken my body and changed it.’

I wasn’t sure about that. The more I knew about body modification, the more I thought it was all to do with filling in blanks. If you weren’t complete, if your identity wasn’t fully drawn, then you coloured yourself in or nailed a new identity to yourself. It was all about superheroes. Outwardly, they were normal, but under the clothes someone else, run through with metalwork, extravagantly tinted.

‘I set off alarms,’ he said, ‘because I transmit. I have wires and connections. I’m a radio. I pick up traffic reports. I pick up messages people like you don’t get. I send out signals.’

‘You’re sending some out now,’ I said. I’d known Jack for many years but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he wouldn’t produce a knife and lay waste to the local population. Which, at the moment, was me. I looked for help. There was the landlord. He would be useless. It was down to me to deal with Jack’s insanity. I’d always thought he might have a screw loose. Possibly an actual screw, somewhere around his genitals. So I did what I had to do. I let Jack carry on, and I nodded from time to time. I can’t help it. I’m British.

‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’

‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.

‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.

‘The scaffolding?’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.

That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.

‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow. I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’

He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.

‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.

‘Perineum ring,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’

‘I know what it is. I meant, “What?”’

‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.

‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’

‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’

‘So it’s the bus, is it?’

‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’

Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.

‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’

‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’

I got the next round in.

‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.

‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’

‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.

‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.

‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.

‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.

I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.

Jack emptied his glass.

‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.

‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’

I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’

‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’

‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.

‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’

Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.

‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.

‘Is he?’

‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’

‘Because he drinks?’

‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’

‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’

‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’

‘He’s always fucking drunk.’

‘There you are then.’

I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.

It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.

I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.

I must have been picking the wrong girls.

Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.

He had a few more drinks.

‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’

‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.

‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’

‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’

Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’

‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.

I’ll tell you about her later.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’

‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’

‘Lisa is different differently.’

He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.

‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.

‘This is different,’ he insisted.

‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’

‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’

‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’

I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.

‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’

‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’

That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘How’s the niece?’

‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’

‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’

‘Four.’

‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’

I did know that. I liked it that way.

‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’

‘We fell out. Family things.’

‘Oh yes. Right. So I’ll pick you up about eleven then, and we’ll go and see what they’re up to these days.’

Wonderful, I thought. That’d be a smashing day out.

II

The next day I waited for my hangover to leave and Jack to arrive. My money was on Jack getting there first. Eddie Finch had turned up eventually, and he was better at drinking than I was. Reporters are like that because they don’t have to get up and go to work in the mornings. Although I knew I couldn’t out-drink him, it had seemed important to keep up. It was my competitive edge.

I fed the hangover coffee and Nurofen until it calmed down. Jack turned up late, driving his van. He’d had it for years, since we were seventeen. It had been his first car. It looked like it might have been his grandfather’s first car. The last time I’d seen it, it had been blue. He’d sprayed it white.

‘A white van gives you the freedom of the road,’ he explained on the way to my brother’s house. ‘People see a white van, they know it’s going to go all over the shop. White vans have their own rules. Cut people up, park on lawns, run over dogs and children. It’s accepted … What the fuck is she doing?’

‘The speed limit?’

‘Not in this baby, baby,’ he said in what he thought was an American accent.

‘Hasn’t your sister got a baby?’

‘Little boy,’ Jack admitted. ‘Called it Liam.’

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘No it fucking isn’t. Hold on, I can skirt round this lot.’

After a short and frightening trip, he pulled up on the pavement outside my brother’s house. My brother is older than me, and married, and has a child. For those and other reasons he thinks he’s more grown up than I am. He may be right. I never fancied growing up. There didn’t seem to be an alternative, though, unless you killed yourself young.

The last time I’d seen my brother we’d argued. It’s what brothers are for. When we were young we used to quarrel over anything – what colour the curtains were, how high the sky was, anything at all. Ten minutes later it’d be forgotten. We always got over them.

Jack rang the doorbell. I looked at the front garden. Tidy, with children’s toys. A plastic tractor, a deflated ball, a duck on a stick. A wooden one. The door opened and Tony, my brother, stood looking at us, confused.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Visiting,’ said Jack. ‘Thought I hadn’t seen you for a while. Nor your Caroline. She in, then? And I’ve never even met the sprog. What is she now, two?’

‘Going on five,’ said Tony, giving me a grim look. Perhaps he hadn’t got over our last argument after all. Caroline appeared behind him, carrying a tea towel and a small child endowed with her mother’s blonde hair and her father’s brown eyes.

‘Whassit?’ asked the child, giving us a look. She didn’t seem shy. She looked at Jack.

‘Whassit in his face? Why’s pins in it?’ She reached out a small hand. Jack leaned closer.

‘All right there kiddo,’ he said. ‘I’m your uncle Jack, and this is your uncle Sam, but we won’t worry about him.’

‘Jack!’ cried the child.

‘Sam,’ said her mother, with considerably less enthusiasm. ‘Been a while. Didn’t get your letters. Suppose the post office must have lost them.’

‘Too busy with keeping out of the way,’ said Tony. His expression was easing. ‘Come in then, the house prices’ll drop if you stay outside. Is that your van?’

‘Mine,’ admitted Jack.

‘Good. It’ll piss them right off. They’re all scutters down the road.’

He led us to a small, comfortable lounge. There were fewer chairs than people. To make room Jack sat on the floor, wincing on the way down. At once the little girl toddled over to him and poked at him with a podgy finger.

‘Look!’ she said, tugging at one of his facial rings.

‘Is she okay doing that?’ asked Caroline.

‘Sure,’ said Jack, ‘she could do it for England. Here hold on, trouble, let’s pop one out and you can have a look at it. What’s this one’s name, then?’

‘Samantha,’ her mother said.

‘Named her after your brother-in-law? Lovely gesture.’

‘You must be joking,’ said Tony, brightening. ‘Fine start in life that’d be, named after the ugly one in the family. Named her after someone I used to know, as a matter of fact.’

Caroline gave him a hard little look, which he pretended not to see. The house smelt like a laundry, I noticed. There were drying clothes on all the radiators. Jack unsnapped an eyebrow ring and gave it to Samantha who examined it intensely.

‘Jack!’ she exclaimed, handing it back to him. ‘Another!’

‘I haven’t got that many I can do in polite company, sweetheart,’ he told her. I always felt awkward around children, as though they might vomit on me or ask me something appalling. Jack seemed suited to it. I suppose he was colourful.

Tony disappeared into the kitchen and returned with tea in sad mugs. Mine had faded Muppets on it. I took a sip. It tasted strange. I thought about the pranks on the building sites. Some of those had involved tea with added ingredients.

‘Milk powder,’ explained Caroline. ‘The little monster gets all the real milk.’

‘Not a monster!’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack’s got fings in his face.’

‘Things,’ Tony corrected her. ‘Not fings. And we don’t talk about people.’

‘Do,’ said Samantha. ‘Do too.’ She looked at Jack. ‘Mummy and Daddy talk about Sam,’ she said. ‘Not me. A bad one. Is she here?’

‘I think she might be,’ Jack said, looking at me. I could see him storing that one up for later use.

‘Here, I’ll put the television on,’ said Tony. ‘We like the television, don’t we?’

‘Jack!’ said Samantha, and then forgot she was standing and fell over. ‘Bump,’ she said, ‘ouch.’

Tony and Caroline exchanged a look. It was the sort of look you only get to exchange once you’re a parent. I like children, although I don’t think they fit in with my lifestyle. Being single makes having children difficult, especially for men. Caroline hoisted Samantha up and aimed her at Jack, and Tony ferreted the remote control from under a cushion and turned on the television. It crackled.

‘Growly,’ explained Samantha. ‘Jack? Whassit in the nose?’

Jack began to reach to his face, before being distracted by the television. I looked to see what had caught his interest. It looked like Dudley Castle.

‘Dudley Castle,’ the narrative informed us, ‘has not survived intact.’

‘What’s this?’ asked Tony. ‘Can’t be Time Team, that’s Sundays. And I can’t see anyone in a woolly jumper.’

‘They have a lot of woolly jumpers,’ said Caroline.

‘Only one each,’ said Tony. ‘Woolly jumpers and a small piece of pottery that they find every week because they take it with them. What’s this?’

‘Views of Dudley,’ said Jack, scanning the TV guide. ‘A documentary. Five sites of interest in Dudley.’

‘Five?’ asked Tony.

‘Well, it doesn’t specify who’d be interested,’ I said. ‘If it’s sites of interest to traffic light fans they could do it.’

‘Charity shops,’ suggested Jack. Samantha was still looking at him, entranced. I felt a pang of jealousy. She was my niece. Jack had a nephew of his own, and I didn’t see why my niece had to like him. I wasn’t even sure why I did.

The view on the television changed, passing from the view of the town to what looked like a dull row of houses.

‘And this is of interest, is it?’ asked Tony. Caroline shrugged.

‘Turn it over,’ said Samantha. ‘Tweenies.’

‘Hold on,’ said Jack, paying more attention to the screen than it seemed to merit. ‘Just a minute there, I want to watch this.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s interesting, you know? This is where we live.’ He tuned the rest of us out. Samantha whiled away the time by pulling at his piercings. The documentary spent a while dawdling around the row of dull houses, and then took in some other equally dull views, the old railway tracks down by Dudley Port, a set of new houses on the Russells Hall Estate, a grubby factory on Pear Tree Lane, the collapsed priory that lay in pieces behind the college. One or two other houses featured, but they could have been anywhere. Jack sat entranced.

‘Boring,’ said Samantha. ‘Boring on the telly. Tweenies. Tweenies.’ For the last word she used a register only available to small children and military experiments into sonic weapons, a sharp squeal that punctured your head like a frozen skewer.

‘Sorry, kiddo,’ said Jack, ‘I’ve been hogging the box.’ He turned over and we tuned in to the Tweenies, and very bright they were. Jack didn’t seem to be watching it, though. I was watching him. Tony was watching me, and so was Caroline. They were both watching me but in different ways and I didn’t want to catch their eyes. Jack was looking at the set, and absently fending off Samantha, but he wasn’t really with us. He’d gone into himself, I thought. In fact he’d gone much, much further.

Before long, we’d all be going there with him.

Chapter Three
I

I’ve had more girlfriends than you might think likely. But they don’t stick around for long. They’re like summer colds: they turn up, send you light-headed for a couple of days, then two weeks of headaches and it’s all over. There have been quite a few of them and all but one of them have gone their own ways. There have been several, but in terms of time spent together they don’t add up to a single long-term relationship. That’s total time together. I’m not adjusting for moods and tantrums.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful here. It could be worse. Some people are surprised I’ve had a girlfriend at all, let alone one you could take outdoors in daylight. And they’ve been convenient. They haven’t overlapped. I’ve had friends with overlapping girlfriends and it always ends up with shouting. There are reprisals and cars have to be resprayed. It’s all too much trouble. I’ve stuck with girlfriends who don’t overlap, but they haven’t stuck with me.

I was in town getting a new bus pass, thinking about girlfriends. It was summer in Dudley: the time of year when the sky goes a brighter shade of grey. There seemed to be more young people than the year before, but there always seemed to be more young people than the year before. It was me, getting older. It couldn’t be many more years before I’d go out in the middle of summer in thirty cardigans and a flock of coats. I watched pretty girls teetering on the edge of adulthood, poised on the brink of stretchmarks and hoovering.

The travel centre is next to the bus stop, and it’s got a queue in it. The queue has been there since the travel centre opened, and it hasn’t got any shorter. The travel centre was moved to the bus depot five years ago. Before that, people had to queue in the town centre, where the travel centre used to be before it was knocked down so that the council could build some new public toilets by the market before the smell from the old public toilets led to an epidemic.

The queue isn’t there because the people working in the travel centre are slow. They’re not slow, they’re friendly and efficient. I’m biased about this, but take it from me, considering the sort of things they have to deal with they’re bright and lively. There are two young women in very crisp blouses with well-ordered haircuts. Straight fringes. Behind them is a door, and behind that you can see part of an office. An older woman sits in there and sometimes comes out and looks at everyone in the long queue the way you’d look at an unexpected boil on your scrotum. She has hair that’s been forced into a state beyond tidiness. It’s pulled away from her face, not without good reason. For many years I thought that no one knew what she did, but I now have insider information.

The two girls sit on low stools behind small windows in a Perspex screen with fingermarks all over it. There are fingermarks next to the ceiling. Someone must have stood on the counter to do it. In front of one window is an old woman trying to get a bus to a village that fell into the sea sixty years ago. In about half an hour, she’ll try to pay with a money-off voucher for shampoo. In front of the other window is a woman trying to buy a student pass for her son, who isn’t with her. She’ll be going through all the possible variants.

‘Well, he could go to Birmingham by bus, then get the train to Cardiff, and then get the local line to his digs. How can we do that?’

It turns out that we can do that by filling in eighteen ninety-page documents, while everyone else waits and the old woman by the other window gets older. After filling out the documents and handing them over, it turns out that the woman can’t have any passes or tickets because her son has to sign everything, twice. Besides, he might be better off with a super saver plus for part of his journey but he’ll need to go to Cardiff to see about that.

The old woman remembers the name of the village she wants to go to, and it isn’t the one she’d been talking about after all. That was something she saw on television.

The mother decides to leave it, she’ll pop back later and bring her son along. He’ll need a passport photograph, but he won’t be able to get one at the travel centre because the photo booth is broken. There are two obnoxious children in it, surreptitiously pinching one another under the sign asking parents not to let their children play in the photo booth. No one claims the children. Everyone ignores them, secretly hoping that they’ll do themselves some severe harm.

The mother’s place at the window is taken by another woman with a son who also needs a student pass or a free ticket to somewhere. This time the student is with her, looking bored and mumbling. The old woman gets her return ticket to Barmouth, which hasn’t fallen into the sea and is where she wanted to go all along, and discovers that she has to pay for it. This hadn’t occurred to her. She’s about a hundred and fifty but she hasn’t got the hang of shops. She produces a purse and begins taking very small coins from it, one by one. Her ticket will cost her eighteen pounds something, and she’s prepared to count small change until she gets there.

The son won’t tell the girl behind the counter where he wants to go. He mumbles embarrassedly. He can see the bright white shape of the girl’s bra through her crisp white blouse. He tries to look away, but it’s difficult. He is hunched over the form because he has an erection. He’s seventeen and his mother is with him. He puts together a series of unlikely fantasies involving himself and the two girls and many of the other people in the travel centre, including the old woman with the endless supply of sixpences and, of course, his own mother.

Everyone else has the right money, and they have it ready, and they know what they want. One of the two children in the photo booth swears meaninglessly. No one pays any attention.

I know all about the travel centre, because I get my bus pass from it. Once a month my bus pass needs renewing and the travel centre is where I have to go to renew it. I stand in the queue and, in the fullness of time, I get to the front and get another month’s travel on the randomly driven and unevenly scheduled buses.

For months I noticed one of the girls serving there. She was attractive, I thought. I noticed her eyes. I also noticed that she was at the other window, whichever window I got to. As I only went there once a month the chances of getting to her window were low. At twenty-eight day intervals I would look sideways at her while someone else sorted out my bus pass. She had a name badge on, but I couldn’t read it at that angle. Once, while I was trying to make out her name I caught the girl who was serving me eyeing me the way you’d eye a cockroach in the butter dish. From her point of view, I was glancing sidelong at her colleague’s chest. I looked at her chest instead but it didn’t cheer her up.

I began to consider getting a different type of bus pass, so that I could go in at fortnightly intervals.

I don’t know what it was that I found attractive about her. I find strange things attractive. This has been a bonus, considering some of the things I’ve been through. She had neat hair and tidy features. She had angular cheekbones and a straight nose. It looked as though someone had gone over her face with a geometry set, sorting it all out and getting it symmetrical. She had dark eyes. I couldn’t say what colour they were because I was always off to one side of her and never less than three yards away. I wanted to know. She was thin, and I liked that. She had wrists like a sparrow’s ankles. She didn’t have any rings on her fingers. This was good on two counts. Firstly, it meant that she wasn’t married or engaged. Or that she was, but she was embarrassed about it. Secondly, it might mean that she didn’t like jewellery, which was a good thing. I couldn’t afford to buy jewellery.

I was planning birthday presents for a girl I had never spoken to. Things were getting serious before they’d had a chance to be frivolous. The next month I arrived at the front of the queue and found that I was yet again at the wrong window. I went to the back of the queue again. I had a feeling that I needed to move the relationship forward. Speaking to her, for example. When I got to the front of the queue, I thought, I’d ask her out.

I waited for what felt a ridiculously long time, moving forward in slow shuffles, hoping she wouldn’t go to lunch or die of old age before I reached her. Over the dandruff-strewn shoulders of grubby Midlanders I watched her dark eyes. She called the main office to ask about timetables. She advised people where to get off. She gave bank cards to the third woman, who came out of her small office blinking and sullen to check them. A person away from her, one transaction away, I lost my nerve and went home.

I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. I got most of it from down the back of my sofa.

A month later I went through the same procedure, but this time I kept my nerve and asked her out.

Her name was Judy, which wasn’t surprising. She said she’d go out with me, which was. Her eyes were a very dark blue. If they’d been a shade of paint, they’d have been called something like Midnight Shades. Her fringe was so straight it looked like it’d cut you if you touched it. She either had a local accent or a cold. I was so stunned when she said that she’d go out with me that I forgot to get my bus pass.

I had to find change for a month’s worth of bus travel. There was nothing left down the back of the sofa. I had to buy things that only cost four pence so that I’d have the ninety-six pence fare in change. Even in Dudley there isn’t much that only costs four pence. Some of the buildings, perhaps, or the freedom of the city.

Even without a bus pass I had to travel to meet Judy. We met at pubs and at the cinema, where I tried to find out what she wanted to see while looking as though I was deciding. There’s a ten-screen cinema close to Dudley; nine of the screens show the latest blockbusters, and the other one is closed for cleaning. We saw the latest blockbusters, and I bought us four pence worth of assorted sweets from the pick’n’mix booth.

If you’re ever in the position of having to spend very little money on confectionery that’s paid for by weight, go with marshmallows. They don’t weigh much at all and they’re bulky.

With our bag of two marshmallows we’d sit and watch Arnie save the day, listening to stray parts of the soundtracks of other films. As the lights went down Judy’s eyes would get darker. I had trouble not looking at them. I had trouble not looking at Judy.

We passed the two-week mark, moving into what was, for me, new territory.

She kept on going out with me. What was wrong with her? I kept buying her small quantities of cheap marshmallows and meeting her when the travel was cheapest. She seemed to like it.

One thing led to another, and that led to itself, repeatedly.

The time came to introduce her to my friends. I didn’t know where Darren and Spin had got to, and I didn’t have friends at the office. It’d have to be Jack. If she wasn’t put off by Dudley pubs, and sweets with the consistency of sandy snot, then she might just be able to take Jack.

I asked her if she’d like to meet him, and she said yes. He said he’d like to meet anyone who’d go out with me for more than a month, as it would constitute a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I arranged a date and we got together.

II

Jack got on with Judy. Sometimes I didn’t like how well they got on together. I was jealous in two directions. I didn’t want to be jealous at all. I wanted happiness and joy. I wanted enough money to pay back the building society all of their correspondence-producing costs before they went bankrupt. I wanted more money than that, really. I wanted enough money to buy an island, hollow it out, and live under an imitation volcano with a swivel chair and a cat and a stack of underlings in boiler suits. I had to keep things in perspective, however. On my wages I wouldn’t be able to buy an island for several hundred years, and that wasn’t allowing for island inflation.

I could always lower my sights and sponsor a traffic island. That can’t cost much. Companies do it, at least in the West Midlands. You’re in the traffic, beside the latest traffic island, and there next to the discarded shoe and the McWrapper is a sign saying:

This traffic island is sponsored by Keegan’s Home for the Bewildered.

That can’t cost much. The only time people see the things is when they’re stuck in traffic, wondering whether there’s a reason for the traffic jam and hoping it’s a juicy accident. So the name of the company becomes subconsciously linked with stress and waiting and death and no one uses the company ever again, and the managing director in his Portakabin somewhere outside Tipton waits by the dormant telephone until the receivers come and shut him down. Still, at least it’s something to look at while you wait for an accident you can get to before the emergency services arrive and hide all the body parts.

This could just be me.

I told Judy about my days at the office and she told me about her days at the travel centre. I had always known it was a bad queue to be in. Many strange people stood in it. Dandruff was rife, coughing was likely, gaudy skin diseases drew the attention and there was the smell of people who misunderstood the use of soap. There would be strange men in combat gear and huge women with foul tattoos and hairstyles copied from ’70s footballers. There would be someone in a faded Queen concert T-shirt. There would be a young woman with the sort of eyes you normally saw on a dead fish.

I thought the queue was bad and I only saw it from the back for one hour each month. Imagine, Judy said, seeing them face-on for eight hours a day, six days a week, shuffling towards you to ask you for tickets on the space shuttle. She’d spotted me months ago, among the living dead. I was always going to the other window, and she thought I fancied Lynn, her partner. I did fancy Lynn but I didn’t mention it. You can only push your luck so far before it falls to the floor and shatters. I asked what happened in the office at the back.

Maureen happened there. Maureen was a supervisor and was in an age range starting at sixty. There was no upper limit. She spent the day in the back office. She had a chair and a desk and a packet of Rich Tea biscuits. She had a calendar with pictures of pigs on it. She had a few framed photographs of children. Judy thought they were her grandchildren. Lynn thought they were her victims. No one thought they were pretty. Maureen had a kettle and a sink and she could check bank cards. She liked checking them. She enjoyed it more if they turned out to be invalid. She had twenty/twenty vision and all her own teeth. She had a medical complaint which was never specified but which meant that she was unable to take incoming calls. Lynn had to take them.

Lynn was a blonde midget, full of energy from the tips of her toes all the short way up to her uncontrollable frizzy hair. She fidgeted in her chair all day. I was careful not to call her perky while Judy was in earshot. Since I didn’t know how far Judy’s hearing range extended, I never called her perky at all. Not out loud. She was, though. She had a perky bosom. I had often tried not to notice it. Of course, I had once stared blatantly at it, so as to divert attention away from the amount of attention I had been paying to Judy. Lynn remembered me looking at her chest. She thought I was a pervert, but gradually mellowed. One night, Judy and Lynn came out with me and Jack. The idea was that Jack and Lynn would hit it off, so that we could go out as two couples instead of one couple and a straggler.

Jack refused to hit it off.

‘She’s a midget,’ he said. ‘What am I, Billy fucking Smart?’

‘Billy fucking Stupid,’ I told him. We were in the men’s toilet in the Curdled Milk, a Dudley theme pub. The theme seemed to be bad taste and watery beer, but I might have been missing something. Jack was missing something. He was missing the urinal, completely. I wasn’t looking at his dick – well, you don’t, do you? – but there was a glint of metal from its vicinity. Perhaps that accounted for the spray he was producing. I moved to stand some distance behind him but I still didn’t feel safe.

‘She’s not a midget,’ I said. ‘She’s compact.’

‘Compact? She needs to sit on a cushion to reach the table. That’s a fucking dwarf, chief. If I showed her this she’d run a mile.’

‘If you showed anyone that they’d run a mile.’

‘Shows how much you know. I showed it to your girlfriend and now I can’t get her off the phone. On all day and night she is. Out-fucking-rageous. Can’t get enough of it.’

‘I didn’t know she was into scrap metal.’

‘Ha ha. At least she isn’t a fucking midget.’

‘She might be. Film stars are all midgets. It’s well known.’

‘What about Robert De Niro?’

‘Midget. All done with camera angles. He can’t reach the top shelf in the newsagent.’

‘Robert De Niro doesn’t go to newsagents, he has people to do it for him. He’s seven feet tall in his socks. He’s a wiseguy.’

‘He’s an actor. And he only ever plays the same role, so it’s hardly difficult.’

‘Oh?’ Jack looked round, doing up his zip. ‘And what role’s that?’

‘He always plays Robert De Niro. Every film he’s in, he’s himself.’

Jack was affronted. He was a fan of Robert De Niro. I had been, but it was something I was trying to grow out of. You can’t be impressed with New York gangsters when you leave puberty. It has to go the way of Clark’s Commandos and Action Man.

‘You talking to me?’ asked Jack. ‘There’s nobody else here.’

‘Too true,’ I said, leaving him to it.

Chapter Four
I

Eddie Finch met Judy at a party thrown by a friend of someone Jack knew. The party looked as though it had been thrown with some force, if not much accuracy. It was held in all of the open areas of a three-storey town house on the more expensive side of Stourbridge. There was a spiky record playing somewhere, and someone said that someone who’d once been one of Pop Will Eat Itself was being the DJ for the night. Judy talked to me but I couldn’t hear her. I could only hear the record. I was trying to identify it.

I do that with music. I can’t help it. Instead of listening to whoever I’m with, I try to work out what the song is. It isn’t deliberate. It’s my ears. They prioritize. Music over conversation. That may be something to do with the conversations I usually get caught in at parties.

Judy sidestepped a slug of red wine that fell to the carpet with a thud. She looked at me and said something. I laughed, hopefully appropriately. A thin white man with thick dreadlocks gave me a stare that might have cleared the student union bar. It didn’t work in Stourbridge, even on the more expensive side. I gave him a look of my own.

Judy tugged me between people who felt as though they were made of elbows and broomsticks, my can of Supa Brew Ice Special brimming over with high-alcohol, low-taste lager. I saw what she’d seen; Jack, reeling down the stairs, carrying a glass that might have been full before he’d tipped it over a quantity of guests.

Although he’d invited us, Jack wasn’t sure whose party it was. He was fairly sure, he’d said in the Frog’s Sister earlier that evening, that his friend Craig knew someone at the party. It would all be okay. They’d be happy to see us. We could get some drinks from the off-licence on Nail Street and drop in. I wanted to stay in the Frog’s Sister. It was quiz night, and they had easy quizzes if you knew your Black Sabbath albums. When Jack went to the bar to get another round in for himself – ‘You’ve got loads there mate, you don’t need another one’ – I asked Judy whether she’d like to go to the party. I tried to make it sound unappealing.

‘It’ll just be like a student party,’ I said. ‘Lots of people in a house, someone crying on the stairs, someone being sick in the bedroom, lots of people we don’t know. You know.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Judy. ‘I haven’t been a student. I don’t go around with students. I don’t know enough about student parties to know whether I want to go to one or not. It’s just as well you’re here to help me with it, otherwise I might go out and have some fun or something.’

I don’t pretend to know everything about women. I know they like to go in clothes shops for hours picking up things they don’t like and saying how horrible they are. I once asked Spin about it and he shrugged.

‘That’s a shrug, chief,’ Darren said. ‘Easy one. No one understands women, not even women.’

I didn’t understand them. I understood Historic Peculiarities well enough to pass exams. If there had been an exam for understanding women my paper would have been returned with a cutting comment on it and I’d have been forced to retake it the following September. I knew that Judy was in a mood without needing to know anything else. There were clues. She kept putting things down forcefully. She answered questions with sharper questions. She’d mentioned not being a student. That helped. She thought that I was patronizing her by telling her what the party would be like. Add that to her bad mood – and I was usually careful not to add anything to her bad moods, they seemed to get along well enough by themselves – and that was enough.

‘We could go,’ I said. ‘If Jack’s going. I mean, it’s Friday night. It’s not as if we have to get up tomorrow.’

‘Yeah well, if it’s no trouble for you. I’d hate to put you out.’

Just then I wanted to put her out of the window of a moving train, but these tender moments are what makes a relationship special.

‘I’d love to go with you. When I was a student I didn’t go out with anyone like you.’

‘What, female?’

No, beset by inexplicable mood swings. I mean, come on. If I was stuck with a twenty-eight day cycle that sent me insane one week in four – I’m not a biologist, so I might have got some of the details wrong on this – and it started in early adolescence, then by the time I was twenty I think I might just have got the hang of it. I might think, hold on, he hasn’t stopped loving me after all. I might think, I know, I’ll just tell him what the problem is and that’ll be that. I might think, hold on, it’s three weeks since last time this happened, it’ll be menstruation, just like it was last month and the month before that and every other bloody month, and there’s nothing wrong.

Jack returned from the bar with drinks for himself. He’d got a pint and a short. I wanted a pint and a short, and I had half a pint. Judy was drinking gin and tonic.

That’s another thing. If I was female and heading towards the ovary-popping time of the month, I’d steer clear of gin.

Then again, I’ve had plenty of bad times on whisky, and I’ll still drink that if there’s any going.

‘You coming?’ Jack asked, downing his pint. ‘You’ll get in with me. You stick with me,’ he said, arranging himself around Judy and talking into her face from close range, ‘and we’ll be fine. I don’t know about this miserable git though. We might have to dump him somewhere.’

‘Yeah,’ said Judy. ‘What’s wrong with you tonight?’

She drained her gin and tonic and stood up. I followed her to the party, via the off-licence.

II

We got in with no trouble. The man who opened the door didn’t recognize us, but he didn’t live there and he didn’t give a fuck. I know this because he told me so. He told all three of us, one by one and then all together. He took my shoulder in his hand and told me from very close range.

I don’t know what he’d been drinking, but it wasn’t mouthwash.

I shrugged him onto Jack and went into the hall. Everyone was drunk and talking too loudly. A girl was crying on the stairs and another girl was comforting her by pointing out the pitfalls of all male humans. I seemed to be in a themed evening. Then, looking at the male humans in the immediate area, I saw that she had a point. Girls grow up and become women, boys become men but the growing up part gets left out. Some boys were dancing. Some were singing. Some were involved in competitions involving drinking. No one was winning.

‘They’re not worth it,’ said the girl on the stairs who wasn’t crying. The other one gathered herself and looked around. From where she was, halfway up the stairs, it must have seemed like Dandruff Central. I had thought that the long-haired look had died out with the end of grebo, that short-lived Midland sound that sounded exactly like the Midlands – industrial and stupid. I had been wrong. The hall was packed with leather jackets and straggling unwashed manes, ripped jeans and split boots. It was as though Marilyn Manson had been decanted into a kaleidoscope. From the horde came the smells of cider and patchouli. I didn’t see many tattoos. They weren’t well enough off to have tattoos.

Tattoos arrived, in the form of Jack.

‘Stone me,’ he said, ‘what’s this, fucking Donnington? What’s that fucking music?’

He went in search of it.

‘Are we going to have a drink?’ Judy asked me. I nodded. I had four cans of Supa Brew Ice Special and a bottle of the cheapest red wine. You have to take a bottle of the cheapest red wine to parties. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether it’s six hundred bikers in a clapped-out semi or a dinner party with minor royalty, it’s only polite.

I gave Judy a can of Supa and opened one myself. It tasted terrible. If it hadn’t had the alcoholic content of Dean Martin, it would have been undrinkable. It tasted so bad that you could forget what it was doing to your body. Supa comes in packs of four and costs less than either embrocation or lighter fluid, which come in packs of one. It isn’t advertised. It’s gained popularity through word of mouth. Which is strange, because once you’ve had a can or two, you can’t speak.

I’m not very good at drinking. I can drink as much as the next man, but I’ll fall over a long time before he does. I know my limits.

But I can’t stick to them. I recognize them as I see them receding into the distance far behind me. I’ve had one too many, I’ll think. Better have one or two more.

Then I start on the shorts.

We didn’t have any shorts with us, so once the cans were gone I unscrewed the wine bottle and swigged from that. Judy began to move in and out of my field of vision. So did everything else. The red wine stains became more widespread. I had them on my clothes. I had them on everyone else’s clothes. I found myself in the bathroom, with my forehead against the tiles above the bath. Someone had been sick in the bath. It wasn’t me. I had been sick in the sink. Remembering that, I was sick down the wall I was leaning against. I rested on the floor and listened to people knocking on the door. There was some very bad language. I was sick in the bath.

A chunk of the evening vanished.

I was on the stairs. There were more stairs than I remembered. I trod on a stair that wasn’t there and had a rest at the foot of the stairs for a while. A pair of men looking like the bastard offspring of a terrible union between Lemmy and himself helped me to my feet and spoke to me. I couldn’t understand anything they said. They sounded like warthogs. They looked like warthogs. The man who had once been in Pop Will Eat Itself walked past us. He looked like a better-known warthog.

Another chunk of the evening vanished.

I was outside, sitting on the drive. It was uncomfortable. Someone had been sick on it. It wasn’t me, I was sick on the lawn and on a cat that had been up to no good in the shrubbery. Legs were next to me. I looked up them. Standing over me were Eddie Finch, Jack, and Judy.

‘Eddie!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you were here tonight.’

They exchanged looks.

‘He’s always like this,’ said Judy. ‘He’s too wussy for this sort of thing.’

‘Always was,’ said Jack. ‘Used to throw up if he had Woodpecker, and that’s pop.’

‘How much has he had?’ Eddie asked.

‘Half a pint,’ said Judy.

‘As much as that?’ said Jack. ‘He’s getting to be one of the big lads.’

‘Wine,’ Judy added. ‘Two cans of Brew and half a pint of wine.’

‘Well most of the wine’s on the garden,’ said Eddie.

‘Two cans of Brew? Call a fucking ambulance,’ said Jack.

‘You’re an ambulance,’ I said. I knew I’d got the joke wrong, but they were all drunk and I thought I’d get away with it

‘There, he says he wants an ambulance. He knows he’s overdone it. Stick to the Vimto, mate.’

I noticed that Eddie had put his arm around Judy, and that Judy didn’t seem to mind. I told them both what I thought about that. I tried to tell them, anyway. The words came out overlapping and stretched.

‘Yeah mate,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve had a bit too much tonight. See Eddie? He’s going to take Judy home. Put her to bed, mate. What you’d be doing if you weren’t on the drive of this charming residence. I’ll take you to mine, you sleep on the floor. Throw up on the floor and I’ll murder you. Fair play? Fair play. Eddie’s got his car here. Haven’t you?’

Eddie nodded.

‘Shame you’re nobody special,’ said Eddie. ‘Good story if you’re famous, drunk in Stourbridge. Good story if you do criminal damage on the way home.’

‘Useless bloody story if it’s just Sam on the pop,’ said Jack. Judy leaned down to kiss me. She came in too quickly and I flinched. Jack and Eddie picked me up.

‘Now the walking thing,’ said Jack. ‘We need to do the walking thing.’

We were in the park, close to the lake. Another chunk of the evening had gone. It was like having your life edited by the British Board of Film Classification. All of the scenes ended in odd places and some things were missing altogether. A duck quacked a series of little quacks. It sounded like it was laughing. I was sick in the duck pond.

‘That’s the vomiting thing,’ said Jack. ‘We’ve done that. We’ve done a lot of that. We don’t need to do it again. It’s not helpful. You don’t like it, I don’t like it, and I’m fucking sure the ducks aren’t happy about it. The walking thing. This is Mary Stevens Park, and I don’t live here. I live at my house and we have to get there in time to go to bed. Now do a straight line. Not into the lake. Leave the cat alone, Sam.’

I was in Jack’s kitchen. There were noises from upstairs.

‘Lisa’s up,’ said Jack. ‘Because of what you did to the cat.’

I was sitting on a chair that seemed to slope in all directions at once. Jack was sitting opposite me. He slumped his elbows on the table then put his face close to mine. His nostrils twitched and he moved a little further away.

‘I never got to tell you, did I?’ he asked. ‘Eddie got in the way. Must have known there was a story coming. I was going to say, do you remember when we were twenty? When we killed those five people?’

I threw away a chunk of the evening.

I was in bed. It was a hard bed, and the room was doing acrobatics. It did flips and cartwheels and somersaults. I could smell vomit. Perhaps it was the cat from four or five memories ago. The smell surrounded me and I fell asleep in it, just like Jimi Hendrix. Except that I woke up the next day.

III

In the morning anything could have happened. I wouldn’t have known about it. I didn’t wake up until the afternoon. By that time the smell of vomit had become the smell of dried vomit.

Someone had been sick on me in the night.

Jack gave me a cup of coffee and some helpful advice about drinking, and then I went home. I remembered Judy leaving with Eddie. Eddie didn’t strike me as reliable. What was Jack thinking of, letting Judy go off with Eddie Finch? Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys for an exclusive. Come to that, Eddie Finch would have sold his grandmother’s kidneys just for a laugh. I didn’t know what he might have done to Judy for a laugh. I’d be sure to count her kidneys the next time I saw her.

She was at my house, waiting for me. She made me a cup of tea and made me have a shower. After the shower she sniffed me and told me to take my clothes outside and burn them.

‘Don’t bother getting out of them either, you drunken bastard,’ she said.

I had a feeling she was upset about something.

‘I’m sorry I was drunk,’ I said.

‘Drunk? I can cope with drunk boyfriends. They’re easier than sober ones. At least they’re honest. But there’s drunk and there’s paralytic. How did you get home?’

I didn’t know. That had fallen out of my head.

‘I knew it,’ she said, scrunching her face. A scrunchy face on the girlfriend means, Sam’s in trouble.

‘We went to the park,’ I remembered. ‘There were ducks.’

‘Lovely. You and Jack went for a stroll in the park. I was driven home by Eddie Finch, who has always wanted to be a rally driver. How do I know this? Because he drove me home at seventy miles an hour, going sideways for a lot of the time. He has fog lamps and bumper stickers and roll bars. There’s you, puking all over the wonders of nature, and there’s me, being driven home so fast I got there before I went out. Of course, I had to sleep with him. He’d driven me home, it was the least I could do.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘I may be. We’ll have to see.’

‘How many kidneys do you have?’

‘What?’ Judy went to the living room and came back with a cigarette. She had started smoking after going out with me for a few weeks. I’d tried to give up but it hadn’t worked. She hadn’t tried to give up. She claimed she didn’t smoke much. If she didn’t, either my cigarettes were evaporating or we had some woodlice in the wainscoting that were going to have chest problems when they got older.

I didn’t know what wainscoting was. I thought it was something low in the house, around the level of skirting boards. Or was it on the roof? I wasn’t sure. I did know that I shared the house with woodlice. I presumed they were busy eating the floorboards from under me. If you went into a dark room and switched on the light, there would be one or two woodlice in the middle of the room, heading for nowhere in particular.

Woodlice have an interesting life cycle. As I understand it, based on personal observation, there are four stages in the life of a woodlouse. Firstly there is the not-existing stage. You don’t see baby woodlice, perhaps because they’re the size of molecules. You do see them when they get to the second stage, which is pretty small woodlice. Then they become pretty big woodlice, and then they become unmoving woodlice that turn out, on closer inspection, to be empty shells. If you turn them over, all of the workings have gone. They’re empty. No legs, no feelers, just shell. How do they get to the middle of the floor when they’re empty? Why do they go to the middle of my living room floor to die? Where do their insides go?

All of these questions. Woodlice made less sense than women. Silverfish were also peculiar. Every now and then one would turn up in the kitchen sink, zipping about and looking at the leftovers in the plughole. You can’t catch silverfish. I’ve tried. They’re too fast, and if you do catch one, you open your hand and there’s no silverfish. There’s a little patch of silver powder. Woodlice turn into empty shells when they die, but silverfish go one better. They turn into glitter dust. I’ve been plagued by strange insects ever since I moved into the house. Perhaps I was cruel to them in a former life.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Judy asked.

I knew this question. It didn’t have a right answer. If I told the truth – that I had no idea what she’d been talking about because I’d been thinking about woodlice and silverfish – I’d be in trouble. If I lied, she’d ask me what she’d been talking about and I’d be in trouble when I didn’t know. There are a couple of wildcards for this – decorating the kitchen, say, or buying some new curtains for one of the rooms upstairs – but you can’t rely on them.

‘I think I’m going deaf,’ I said, trying a new approach.

‘Going bloody mad, more like,’ said Judy. ‘Why don’t you listen to me?’

‘I have a headache.’

I did an expression of pain and contrition. Judy did an expression of grim disbelief.

‘What, and it’s got your ears? I have headaches and they don’t affect my ears. Is it something peculiar to you? Or a new plague that I’ll be reading about in New Scientist?’

‘I need an aspirin.’ I went to the kitchen cupboard where I store my painkillers. I hadn’t got any. ‘I haven’t got any.’ I sat down again.

‘You haven’t got any because you didn’t get any, and you didn’t get any because you didn’t pay any attention to me when I told you you’d run out.’

‘How did I run out? There was a full box in there.’

‘I had a couple.’

‘You did? Why?’

‘I had a headache. Now, I told Lynn I’d go into work this afternoon. So I’m going into work this afternoon, unless that’s going to put you out. I told you all about it yesterday.’

‘Oh yes,’ I lied, nodding. I didn’t remember that. Perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to her as I should.

It’s not my fault, of course. Men will bear me out on this. Women don’t tell you anything all night long. Then on comes a programme you want to watch and off they go, rattling away, asking you about frocks and wallpaper and other things you can’t make sense of. It’s almost as though they’re interested in it all. I don’t know how their minds work at all. Sometimes I hug Judy and half expect her to vanish, leaving a big powdery stain on my clothes.

She went to work and I went to the shops to get painkillers. When I got back I offered the woodlice some, but they didn’t pay any attention.

‘I know how she feels,’ I told them, and they trundled across the draining board in search of bigger crumbs. I remembered what Jack had said. He’d said we’d murdered five people. He was obviously wrong. He’d got his wires crossed, which was bound to happen given that he was run through with them. I hadn’t murdered anyone. I didn’t have what it took. I got nervous just pushing woodlice off the draining board.

PART TWO

Sam, aged twenty

Chapter Five
I

I’m Sam. I’m twenty. I’ve been twenty for more than eight months now, and it’s been a short eight months. Time seems to be speeding up the older I get. I worry about that. I worry about a lot of things. Time used to run a lot slower. A year used to be a year and now it’s six months. Time’s devaluing. It’s being hit by inflation.

‘Take the time to think about it,’ my mother used to say. Not about anything in particular. She just used to say it. She still does. She’s got a stack of things she says that mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t think they mean anything to her, either.

‘In a bottle on the roof.’

‘Because Y isn’t Z.’

‘You’ve got more books than Jack Robinson.’

‘Take the time to think about it.’

So I took her advice. She says I never listen to her, but I do. I did about this. I took the time to think about time. It’s going faster and it’s leading us the wrong way. I read a lot. This is why my mother told me I had more books than Jack Robinson. I don’t know who Jack Robinson is but if he’s got fewer books than I have then he’s in a bad way. I have a friend named Jack who has a small number of books – ones with bright covers, mainly, thrillers about soldiers outnumbered in the jungle, war stories for boys – but he’s not called Jack Robinson. He’s called Jack Ives.

According to my mother, Jack Robinson hasn’t got much of anything. I have more shoes than Jack Robinson. I have more sleep, nights out, nights in, cheek and bad manners than Jack Robinson.

If I ever meet the poor bastard I’ll give him some of my leftovers.

Trouble is, these sayings came from somewhere. They meant something at one time. Language has got all fucked up. Not in the same way as time, which is going too quickly, or the weather, which passes too slowly, but it’s still in a tangle. We don’t know what it means. We know what we mean by it, but we don’t know where the words came from. Words can do a lot, properly applied. Words can do everything.

Everything is words. Everything is defined by language.

With training you can make words do different things. Point to different objects. Make those objects different.

I think that I can cheat death, to tell you the truth. I’m cutting through some things here. There’s more to it than I’m letting on. This is fair enough. I had to work to know what I know. I’m not going to hand out any details for free.

I came to magic gradually. I used to read fiction. A lot of science fiction, when I was younger, along with the usual dragons and wizards nonsense. I grew out of it years ago.

In all fantasy novels there’s a wizard and his name has one X and one Z and one C in it because all wizards favour the letters on the lower left-hand side of the keyboard. He has an apprentice from the town nearby. The apprentice is an adolescent boy as imagined by a nun; full of the desire to become better and go further and he’s never masturbated.

The apprentice’s father – a blacksmith – was killed by raiders led by a man with more Xes in his name than the wizard. The son wishes to learn magic so that he can go and beat the shit out of the bad guy and his henchmen. The bad guy is one-dimensional, his henchmen are just names.

The apprentice learns magic, goes on a quest, meets a maiden, doesn’t fuck her and doesn’t seem to want to, vanquishes the bad guys and has a chat with a dragon.

Not necessarily in that order.

I was twelve, heading into adolescence. I was reading these terrible novels, which seemed to have been transcribed from the minutes of role-playing games.

Don’t get me started on role-playing games.

I knew that all the dwarf bullshit was of no literary value. I wasn’t fooling myself. But come on, I was twelve and I could read books that claimed to be written for adults. My classmates could barely read the instructions for videogames.

I wondered why I read this nonsense. I studied my motives. If this sounds calculating, fair cop. If there was any point to adolescent angst, it was to motivate you. It wasn’t something to sit on the stairs and mope about. Here was this energy and this growth. What did I want?

What the heroes of those terrible fantasy novels wanted. What their spotty virgin readers, living with their parents at the age of forty, wanted. I didn’t want to kill the bad guys. I didn’t suffer from bad guys. They ignored me. My friend Jack was friends with bad guys.

I became friends with Jack when I was thirteen. I did it deliberately. I’m not going to kid you about that. I saw that he had a lot of friends of the unfriendly sort, and I learned what he was interested in – metalwork, mostly – and I pretended to be interested in it. I knew him a long time ago, my mother used to say. It’s one of the things she thinks I didn’t listen to. I don’t remember Jack before we went to school. Once we got to school, I needed him. Having a friend with bad friends saves you a lot of trouble.

Don’t go after the bad guys. Get them on your side. It’s easier and quicker and they always fall for it. You only need two or three phrases to start a conversation:

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