The sky was low. It hung like sacks of black ink over the city, and I thought that if it burst we would be drowned and discoloured equally, and the stubby buildings stained indelible, like useless thumbs stuck in the air. What a mess. What a collapsing, stupid, pitiful mess.
I felt sick. I felt a terrible clarity of sickness, as if I’d been drawn sick by some malign illustrator of this Sunday morning set-up – sick man walks through cold empty streets, green-faced, shuffle-legged, all his pale damp skin barely holding him up. I blew my nose and discovered blood on the tissue. Is that a haemorrhage in there somewhere? A tumour behind the eyes? I don’t know. In my stomach there was a dull persistent ache close both to hunger and a full bowel, but it was something else entirely – a kind of nausea of tedium, a miserable self-disgust, and I was full of it. My feet were weary, and they dragged – either I dragged them or they dragged me, I don’t know. I could not have decided. I had no energy for anything. Not for decisions or directions or despair. I walked. That’s all I did. I walked and things went by me.
I think now, sitting here in this expensive rosewood glow (I have no idea what kind of wood it is), that I was still lucky then. Just at that particular moment, having left David’s, walking through a Sunday of calm predictable blankness, despite my sickness and my inability to act or think or to think about acting, or to know what I was thinking (or doing for that matter, as I later discovered) – despite all this it was a lucky moment. No, of course it wasn’t. But I was still capable then, if only I’d known it, of turning things around. I think I was. I feel that it would not have been, at that point, too late, probably. I may be wrong. But I believe that, had I known what to do just then, Sunday morning, under the ink of heaven, everything unwritten, I might have been capable of a positive action and it might have proved the end of things. The resumption of things. The return. If only my automatic feet had taken me home. If only the clutter of maps in my head had thrown up a route of reversal; a way of retracing my steps to the street where I lived, to the home I still had, possibly.
But there was nothing in me other than a sickness. Or an absence of wellness. I was distended, malformed, incapable. All the streets ran at me and touched my clothes and ran away again. I didn’t know where I was. I doubled back on myself, hesitated, went forward in one direction until there was no point going in another, and then went in another. The sky swung at me and I was smeared across the temple and the cheeks by a black spittle of undrawn pictures. Nothing was in me. Everything pressed against me from outside. From elsewhere. The ruins of things suggested themselves. A rewind of events coiled up in my head like razor wire. I kept on seeing the crumbling ceiling of the sports centre. I kept on seeing the impossibly dead body of K, limb cut from limb with a kitchen knife, draped severally over the side of the bath and the hall table. David’s innocent, returning face, having seen no such thing. I kept on seeing the dog that came after the rain. I kept on seeing the slaughter of a million spiders and the wars of the Second Council and the seas of Crease Bay turned red from the hordes of Westorn dead.
I became mad.
Then, somewhere, I was outside a little café that I didn’t recognise, called Arthur’s, and I was thinking that I should eat. I was thinking that I should be out from under the glare of the gunmetal clouds, where I could sit with a cup of tea and try to make myself understand something. I had slept well, and dreamlessly, the night before, relieved no doubt that I was not a murderer. Or most likely not a murderer. But I was exhausted. So exhausted that my suspicion was that I had in fact been dreaming all the time. I wondered vaguely, as you do, whether I was still dreaming, but that thought never wakes us from anything, does it? It just walks with us lazily for a few steps and then falls away.
Arthur’s seemed full. Its windows were steamed opaque. A couple entered clutching newspapers, and the clatter of crockery escaped. Would fresh air not be better for me, for a while, rather than the fumes of other people? I could not decide. I stood at the edge of the pavement opposite the door. I wondered if there really was an Arthur, or whether, like Eric’s, the name was older than those who used it, something meaning someone else, but orphaned and then taken on again by others. I suddenly remembered the woman I had seen in Eric’s on the Friday morning, buying a mousetrap, and almost immediately I found myself looking into the roadway by the kerb, as if I might find a mouse there, my mouse, as if there might be that kind of repetition in the world, as if there might be a second chance. There was no mouse. Of course there was no mouse. Why would there be a mouse? There was a crushed beer can and a little pile of ashes and butts, where someone had emptied a car ashtray. But there was no mouse. Dead mice are not a regular thing in the gutters. But for some reason I felt that there must be a mouse. Somewhere. I just wasn’t seeing it. I paced up and down for a minute, and craned my neck, and peered for a while at a strange misshapen organic mass that could have been, I supposed, a dead mouse in the later stages of decomposition, but was more likely to be a piece of rotting fruit. I stepped into the roadway to look at things from there. I walked a little way east and a little way west of Arthur’s, searching for the corpse of a mouse, like someone looking for a lost wallet. There was no mouse anywhere. I felt a strong peculiar swell of disappointment.
Arthur’s was surprisingly busy. It seemed strange to find all this activity so close to the empty streets. Most of the tables were occupied by couples or larger groups, sitting chatting or working their way through piles of newspapers, eating various types of breakfasts, drinking coffees and teas from white cups, looking young and healthy and prosperous. One couple huddled together in front of a laptop. I found a table beside the clouded window, and felt, on my own and with nothing to read, quite self-conscious, as if I had walked on to a stage. A woman stared at me with bemusement from an adjacent table. I probably looked homeless. Which of course I was, I suppose. I had two bags with me – the original overnight bag which I had taken myself, and David’s holdall stuffed with bits and pieces including my sketchbooks and notebooks. I rummaged around in there and considered taking out a pen and drawing some of the people. There was something so smug and calculatedly urban about them that they almost called out for caricature. But I found that I was far too concerned, for reasons which I did not understand, about what they might think of me to express in drawing what I thought of them.
I was annoyed.
At the bottom of the bag I found a science-fiction novel. I presumed it was David’s. On the cover was an elaborate but remarkably stale rendition of an insect-like creature at the controls of some kind of spaceship. It looked as if it had been carelessly copied from H. R. Giger’s designs for Alien. I broke the spine and laid the book flat on the table in front of me as a refuge, from where I stole occasional glances at my surroundings.
Actually, the novel wasn’t David’s at all. How could it be? I remembered after a while that a woman from one of the publishing houses that I’ve done some work for had sent it to me for some reason. I had started it and forgotten about it, and found now that I could not bring myself to read a word of it. There were far too many invented place names. It reminded me of David’s cracked creations and my own stupidity. There were maps on the endpapers.
A woman brought me a menu and I ordered coffee and an orange juice and when she brought those I ordered a small fried breakfast by pointing to it on the laminated card, unable, for some reason, to speak. I had already eaten at David’s, and really didn’t want much more than the coffee, but I felt that I had to order a meal. It looked like the kind of place that might have a minimum charge. And she looked like the kind of waitress who would make a fuss. A benign fuss. She looked like she would coo at me and tell me that I needed some feeding up. Something like that. While I waited for my sausage and bacon and scrambled egg I wiped a sleeve across the window and wished that I’d stayed on the street.
Something odd happened at Arthur’s that I want to mention. There was an incident. It was not a very serious thing in itself, and no one in the café really noticed it, I think, apart from the waitress. But it worried me, and taken with some of the other things that were happening to me, things that I’ve told you about and things that I have yet to tell you about, as well as the fact that the same thing happened again later in the week, fully, then I should really tell you about this now.
The waitress came and set my plate down in front of me, and by that time I was actually quite looking forward to it, and people had stopped looking at me, and I was more relaxed and quite pleased with what had arrived. Nice-looking bacon, some lovely toast, perfectly fluffy scrambled eggs. So I said Thank you. Except I didn’t. I didn’t say Thank you. I said More ay a. I intended to say Thank you. Those were the words that I formed and those were the words my brain sent to my mouth, but those were not the words which I spoke. More ay a, I said. Which is not anything that means anything to me. Embarrassed, I immediately said I mean thank you, except I didn’t. I said Push goosh a far liddle. That is what I plainly heard myself say. I looked up at the waitress. She was smiling, if hesitantly, and I cut my losses and said nothing more, just nodded. She may have thought that I was foreign. It didn’t seem to bother her that much.
It put me off my food really. I sat there with my head bowed testing out words on myself. Thank you. Yes please. Breakfast is good. This bacon is very nice. These sausages are lovely, although the eggs could be a little warmer. I had no problem with any of it. I read a little from the science-fiction novel.
Forward Charger III had been closed for nearly six years following the Grak attack. Hudson knew that there would be little there of use, but he hoped that there might be some power units they could salvage, even some weapons. If the Grak had left anything. He doubted it. The Grak were vicious, barbaric. They had slaughtered the entire population in less than seven hours.
People were starting to look at me again. I shut up. There were small, neat stainless-steel salt and pepper shakers on the table. Plain, like little canisters. I liked them. I shook salt on to my plate. I pushed aside the food and emptied the salt container completely and then slipped it into my pocket.
When I left I made a point, when I’d paid, of saying, clearly and distinctly, Thank you very much. Which was exactly what I did say, thankfully. My waitress looked a little startled, and the hubbub of the place seemed to diminish for a second, but I was relieved.
Before I’d left David’s I had taken a mug from his kitchen. It was a stupid mug, white, not even clean. It said DAVID around its body in big red letters. It was tea-stained on the inside. I had put it in my bag.
I had a plan now, it seemed, after leaving the café. I couldn’t remember creating it, but there it was. I needed to be somewhere still. From where I could take a little time to become calm. I was, I knew, slightly confused. In a state. If I could spend some time in a safe place, a place where I would not have to concentrate on anything other than myself, then I could start to think about going home. Rachel was away. I would go to Michael’s. I called him. His phone was off. But I could spend some hours there, working things out, and then I could talk to K. Negotiate my return.
A state. By the time I got to Michael’s I was sweating, and did not feel well. It was a muggy day. The sky was still oppressive. What I had eaten of my second breakfast had done me no good. I felt bloated and queasy. I felt post-operative, as if the meal had been an invasive procedure conducted under a light and sickly anaesthetic. Also, my temporary incapacity with language had disturbed me, and I was conscious that I had behaved badly with David. And hanging over that was the memory of the day before, and my stupid notion that I could do him some harm. And before that my even more stupid notion that I had killed K. And over all of it, my departure from everything – which I felt as a dull ache, an imprecise agony which I could not locate but which reverberated through me in terrible, suffocating waves.
Did I hurt you?
I wanted nothing more really than to lie down and close my eyes. Michael would understand. He understood everything. There was nothing that he could not accommodate. I was sure that he would, for example, allow me to lie on his bathroom floor, close to the friendliest of household appliances – those that empty and cleanse us. Where we can mumble to ourselves and never have it heard. Where we can be silent and never have it broken. Where we can rest and be recovered. Michael would let me in and he would provide a cold glass of water and access to the white tiles of his bathroom, and the taps and the handles. And I could spend a day there, sleeping, shitting, vomiting, coming back.
I tried to call him again, and again I was connected immediately to his answering machine, which suggested to me that he was still in bed. Which was fine. He would answer the door, he would let me in. All the better if he was not finished sleeping and wanted to go back to bed. That would be ideal. It would give me time.
I dragged my bags through the streets. In my pocket I felt the salt canister press uncomfortably with each stride I took. What was that for? The day looked the same, but the air was different, warmer, staler, as if someone had breathed on the city. It felt thick and damp and I thought of mushroom soup and old bread. Nothing I thought of was good for me. I walked some steps with my eyes closed, and took then to seeing how far I could go blindly. But I stopped when I very nearly walked into a litter bin, opening my eyes within a foot of it. I remembered my shin, still sore. I went on with open eyes, looking at everything with great interest for a while, as if I really had been blind, and was astonished now at the level of detail available in the world. Everything has been put here, you know. Every single little thing – made and manufactured and placed by man.
I stopped suddenly as I turned into Michael’s road, disturbed by two sudden thoughts, and a third, which was horrible, but which came slowly crawling after the others like the mangled survivor of a car crash that I had not noticed occurring. The two thoughts were these:
• I had stolen now, for no reason that I could think of, two items – one from David’s home, and one from the café – and I did not understand why.
• Michael might have company – someone who might have stayed the night – which would make my presence difficult for him.
And the third thought, which startled me to such an extent that I dropped my bags:
• Michael lives miles from the neighbourhood which K and I share with David. He lives in a completely different part of the city, one which is unreachable except by bus or train. And yet, I had walked. I had simply walked from the café to his road. And it had taken a matter of minutes. How? How could it be explained?
I can’t overemphasise the effect this third thought had on me. I felt it as an actual noise, like someone had clapped their hands inside my head – as an unbalancing actuality. It was as palpable as the wall with which I was now supporting myself. This was happening too often. Twice is too often. First, there had been the blankness surrounding my departure from my own home. And there had been the desperate, idiotic way in which I had tried to fill in that gap. Now there was this. Another gap. I simply could not have walked. Not in the time that had passed. What had I done now? Who had I killed this time? David? The waitress from Arthur’s? And what was Arthur’s after all? I had never seen it before. I didn’t even know where it was now. I wasn’t sure that I could find it again.
I slumped and I groaned. It was impossible that I could be so stupid. So unrelentingly stupid, all at once, after so many years of relative intelligence. And yet here I was, at a loss to know how I had travelled so far in such a short time. It was as if I had stepped through some ellipsis of the streets, going from one side of the city to the other in a single unlikely step.
And of course I hadn’t. It took me probably a good five minutes of astonished gawping at the way I had come and at where I found myself to realise that I had taken a bus after leaving David’s, and had then taken another, and that I had found Arthur’s not in my own neighbourhood, but in Michael’s, and that the reason I could not remember these things was that I knew them already, and I had more important things to be worrying about, and my mind was simply taking up the slack, proceeding automatically with the mundane operations of buses and directions and the like, and that this was evidence, if it was evidence of anything, of a great mental agility on my part – that I could delegate the nonsense of navigation to my subconscious. I should be relieved. I should be impressed. I should be proud of myself.
Slowly, gingerly, as if I might crumble or snap, I swallowed and picked up my bags and moved on down the street, paying attention to every step I took, to Michael’s house.
Michael is one of the few people I know who lives in an actual house, rather than a flat. It’s small, but it’s beautiful. Or, at least, I have always thought of it as beautiful. But when I stood in front of it in my flustered state, it looked more ominous than welcoming. It is very narrow, squeezed between two looming five-storey apartment blocks, though not attached to either. It is flat-roofed. Its windows are small. Its brickwork is yellowish and stained and in need of repair. Worst of all, from my point of view, the upstairs windows’ curtains and blinds all seemed to be open. Although when I thought of it I could not remember whether Michael’s bedroom was at the front or the back of the house.
I rang the bell. It made an old-fashioned ding-dong noise which Michael probably thought was cute. There is a little garden, tiny really, and I turned and examined it. The grass was almost non-existent. A scrap of mud and cracked concrete was what it amounted to, with an anaemic shin-high hedge behind the old railings. The railings seemed to have been recently repainted. There was a tree, or the corpse of a tree, about my height, in the corner away from the house; and a border of nothing against the yellow wall. A large green plastic council wheelie bin stood on the footpath.
I rang again. I put down my bags. I played with Arthur’s salt shaker in my pocket. There was no one there.
I knocked. It hurt my knuckles. I pressed the doorbell and kept my finger on it for four whole ding-dongs. I called him on my phone.
Hard luck, caller. Leave me a message and I’ll certainly get straight back to you.
I sat down on his doorstep like a child. I didn’t know where to go. When I was very young my father once drove me to my school early on a Saturday morning for some kind of sports practice. Swimming maybe. He dropped me at the gate and promised to be back at midday to pick me up. The school was deserted. There was no sign of anyone. I panicked. I don’t know why. I’m not sure why I thought it was such a terrible thing that I be on my own for a couple of hours, outside, in an environment that was familiar but altered by silence, and the absence of any human voice or footstep – of anything like me. But I did. I thought it was terrible. I sat in floods of tears in the middle of the playground for about twenty suicidal minutes before another boy turned up. He had made the same mistake, missed the cancellation notice as I had, and he laughed at me, and took me home on the bus. I was embarrassed of course, and afraid that he would tell my friends. But at the same time I could have hugged him. He told no one. He must have seen how much I trembled. Perhaps he trembled too. Perhaps I saved him as much as he saved me. But I don’t think so. I doubt it. There’s something … I shouldn’t even remember things like that. They are so trivial. They are absolutely nothing. But I do. I remember them in the way that other people remember child abuse or car crashes or the death of their mother.
There’s something wrong with me.
I stared at Michael’s doorstep, and at the path, and at the trampled grass that was dying beside it, and at the thin ditch of rubbled clay by the wall of the house. And I thought again in tiredness and in blankness, like a kid that builds comfort out of details, and then scares himself with details, that all of these things had to be put there by someone. By human hands, man’s fingers. I stared at the few square inches between my feet, of simple concrete and the cover of a drain. In all this vast city, of countless territory and endless spaces and places and dead ends and rundown nowheres where your eye would never linger for a second unless lost, there is no part that has not been made by someone. Some workman, at some point, in the course of an exact historic minute, poured that concrete and smoothed it. Someone put that drain cover there. Even the grass. Someone planted it, scattered it, rolled it, flattened it, did whatever it is they do to make grass grow among inventions. The street, the houses, the trees, the parks, all of it placed. Placed just so. Layer upon layer, over the course of years, over countless years, countless people have designed and planned and constructed and placed every square inch of it. There is nothing naturally occurring anywhere. You can probably unravel your entire life thinking such thoughts, waiting for your father to come back and get you.
A man was staring at me from the rolled-down window of a people carrier across the street. His lips were moving, like he was talking on a telephone. Hands-free, presumably. I coughed and drew my bags to me. What must I look like? Where would I go?
Home, I thought. Go the hell home.
The windows of the people carrier were black. Tinted deep black, they reflected a curved reversal of Michael’s house. I stood and shuffled miserably. I felt no better. I was grubby and defeated. I would go home to K. And I would probably cry.
The man was wearing sunglasses, and he peered at me, and although I tried not to look back, he was simply too ridiculous to ignore. He had a drooping moustache that arced over his upper lip and fell to two points on his jawline. His head was shaved. He seemed to be dressed in a T-shirt and braces. He seemed to smile. Nod even. I expected him to say something as I passed, and I expected his voice to be that of a Mediterranean villain. A Sicilian, I thought, probably. He had the swarthy skin. But he said nothing.
And not only are all things placed by people, but so are all people. Constructions that we glance and categorise, with hardly a thought. They might as well be cartoon characters, for all the attention we pay them. Pre-summarised by what we know of the world, and how we carry that. And they do it to themselves. And I to myself, and you to you. What are you wearing? Why are you wearing it? What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What are you thinking? From where come your thoughts? What on earth makes you think that they’re yours at all?
As I reached the corner, and wondered how angry K could conceivably be, I heard an engine start up, and knew without looking that the Sicilian in the blacked-out people carrier was coming after me. I thought about being alarmed. I considered fear. He might have a gun, a machete, a broad-blade knife, a heavy chain of spikes, a razor-sharp daisy-cutter lance emerging from his hubcaps. But I was too tired and too fed up and too weary of all the strangeness, and too aware of how much of it was my own creation, and in any case, I could not really take his moustache seriously. Not his moustache, driving that car. The categories were mismatched. That’s where comedy lives. I’m sure it’s been the death of millions.
He was moving at my pace, right by my side, though he had closed his window. I stopped. I stopped and turned and faced him. He stopped too. My own reflection looked back at me, squinting and buckled, as if I was something underwater preparing to shout at the sky.
—WHAT? What do you want?
My voice sounded ridiculous to me. Why on earth was I trying to assume a kind of brawling, half-drunk street slur? I went for it again, enunciating my vowels and consonants.
—What? WHAT – DO – YOU – WANT? Hello? HELLO?
I sounded like a terrible actor making a mess of an audition.
There was a whirr, and I expected to see myself disappear and the Sicilian to take my place, maybe pointing a snub-nosed Mauser at me (is that a dog? I mean a gun of course, but that may be a dog that hunts rodents or something), but instead it was the rear window that lowered. The back seat. A face emerged, half smiling at me, and there was – or did I imagine it? – a breath of lovely calm, cool air. I knew the face. At first I didn’t know how I knew it, but I was so certain that I did that I smiled, apologetically, as if sorry for shouting at a friend’s car. I imagine that celebrities get that a lot. People thinking that they are friends. People being polite by mistake.
—I’m so sorry, dear. This must look like a kidnap attempt.
I stood up straight. I had never met her before.
—Which it isn’t, obviously. Please forgive us. You were at the door of the house around the corner. Number 48. Weren’t you, dear? Do you know who lives there?
It was Catherine Anderson. The Catherine Anderson. She was wearing what looked like a tracksuit. There is probably a different name for it. For the type of tracksuit that celebrities wear. It was a dark navy. She wore a baseball cap with a logo that was familiar but I can’t remember now. She wore sunglasses that were like the windows of her people carrier in miniature. Her skin was a perfect honey colour, as if she was coated in something. She was very small, I thought. Not short, but slight. Thin. Or narrow – like Michael’s house. She was very beautiful. She looked about eighteen.
—Yes, I … Hello … I’m … I’m a friend of Michael’s.
—Well, I thought as much really. You looked like you might be. I’m his mother. I’m Catherine. How do you do?
—I know. Very well. Hello. Nice to meet you.
She looked me up and down a little. She took her time with it. I felt very grubby. Stale and peculiar. Dogs don’t bring mice home and dump them on the kitchen floor. Cats do that. Snub-nosed mousers.
—What’s your name, dear?
The question arises as to how much I should tell you about what happened between Catherine Anderson and myself. She is, after all, famous, and you will probably want to hear about her just because of that. That even the most boring of details about her will be entertaining to you simply because she is who she is. And that I should therefore not tell you anything at all, because to tell you would simply be pandering to that stupid fascination we all have for details about people who aren’t supposed to have details, who are supposed to have only headlines and highlights and the big-picture perfection of famous and wealthy and glamorous lives. Add to that the fact that she will feel, I’m sure, that some of the things I could tell you would be breaches of confidence on my part. Not that she ever explicitly said that what happened between us was private – I mean, why would she? – but there were things that did happen, or things that I found out about, which should probably, for decency’s sake, remain private. Things which should probably remain private even if they were not about Catherine Anderson at all, but about some utterly anonymous citizen instead, some private person completely unknown to the public at large. Even then, you might think, these are things that I shouldn’t put down here. Some things are just beyond the pale. Because they are so completely personal. As I’m sure you’ll agree as soon as you’ve heard them.
Because I am going to tell you. And not because it’s Catherine Anderson. I could say that I’d tell you even if it was about someone you’d never heard of. But the fact is that what I’m going to tell you could only be true of a famous person – a wealthy, pampered, publicly adored, glamorous, beautiful person. And it’s right as well for me to tell you this because it does directly affect, in some odd perpendicular way, what has happened to me. It tipped me off, if you like, about what was going on. What was breaking up.
—You look miserable, dear. You look completely exhausted. Was Michael expecting you?
—No, not exactly. Do you know where he is?
She smiled at me, very broadly. It was quite dazzling.
—Darling, I don’t know a thing about him. Why else do you think I’m camped outside his wretched little house like a stalker?
She is charming, and of course I’m not immune to that kind of thing, or, for that matter, to the very notion of celebrity itself. Who is? No one is. Even when we hate them, the hate is generated by the same machinery that generates adoration, and machinery like that, when you see it up close, is pretty impressive. I felt a little frisson of excitement just to be talking to her, to somebody as famous as her. And, of course, I was conscious of my own excitement, and how idiotic it would appear to her if I were to reveal any of it. So I spent most of my time while I was in her company trying to downplay, in my own mind, the very idea that there was anything remotely impressive about being famous, and as a result I probably came across as a little bored, a bit distracted, not really very interested. And it struck me after a while that most people probably do this when they meet a celebrity, and that most celebrities must find it slightly odd – that people are so bored by them – and must therefore put in a little extra effort in an attempt to be interesting or entertaining or whatever it is that they feel they must be, and that such efforts are bound to make them appear slightly frantic, overeager, far too fond of themselves, with the result that people find them irritating, and when the encounter is over they feel that the celebrity they just met is a real overbearing pain is the arse, while the poor celebrity probably wonders why, if everyone is supposed to love them, no one seems to like them very much.
She asked me to join her in the car.
I think all she wanted, at first anyway, was information. She thought that I might be able to tell her things about Michael. I really didn’t want to get into the car. Well, I did. But I didn’t. I did because it seemed lovely in there – cool and calm and quiet and comfortable. And I did because of where it was – it was the inside of Catherine Anderson’s car. But I didn’t want to get in there because I had yet to shower that day, and I had been sweating, and I was carrying bags and was awkward and uncomfortable and didn’t look at all at my best, and I was embarrassed about the fact that what she was doing was a little odd. I didn’t really want to end up having a row with Michael. He would instantly conclude that I had been swayed by his mother’s fame to take sides against him in some way. Michael would think me childish and simple and idiotic. He would be angry at me, convinced that I had slighted him; or that I had, through my star-struck naivety and general cluelessness, given away something about him which meant nothing to me but which would alter entirely his difficult relationship with his famous, beautiful mother.
—Come on, dear. I’ll break the air conditioning if I leave the door open too long. And Itsy will be annoyed. Let’s not annoy Itsy.
Itsy. He turned out to be Scottish, and his voice was a lovely lilting thing, with no edge. His shoulders though, they flexed and twitched and the back of his neck was like an animal part. He seemed possessed of terrible potential. She used his name as a threat at various points. Not directly, you understand – always as if the threat was to her, and that if I didn’t do something or other, I’d get her in trouble with Itsy. He was wearing a white T-shirt and braces. On his upper left arm was a tattoo of a snake, coiled around his bicep like a rope, its head hidden somewhere under the short sleeve.
As soon as I was in the car, piling my bags in the corner like a schoolboy, perching on the seat like a bird, she had Itsy take us back to the parking space opposite Michael’s.
—It’s humiliating. It really is. I mean, people do this to me. They stake me out. Press bastards. Photographer bastards. Weird bastards. They sit outside the apartment or outside the house, in their darkened cars, and they wait and they wait – all day, all night, all the next day – just waiting for me to make the smallest slightest teeniest move, and they pounce. Animals. And here I am, doing the same thing, outside my son’s house. As if he was off-limits to his own mother. It’s embarrassing to me. I’m aware of it. It makes me cringe.
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. She was looking idly out of the window towards Michael’s house, which was on her side, and every so often she would swing her head all the way around to look at me. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be saying, or doing. Why was she stalking Michael? That’s what I wanted to ask, but it seemed so like the obvious question that I thought it must have already been answered and that I had missed it, and if I asked it now I would appear stupid.
She looked at me directly, as if waiting for something. I nodded again.
—So why am I doing it? That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?
—Well, yes. I was just going to say. Yes. Why are you doing it?
—Because he hasn’t spoken to me in about two months. Because I haven’t seen him in six. Well, I’ve seen him, but he hasn’t seen me in about six months, and every time I call him he hangs up, and because the last thing he said to me, I swear, can you imagine anyone saying this? he said, Why don’t you just stop being my mother and carry on being you.
She looked at me as if it was a devastating, terrible thing to have said. But I actually couldn’t really see it. It sounded vaguely generous to me. I don’t know what I did with my face. Catherine Anderson seemed to peer at me as if she wasn’t sure whether I would be of any use to her at all.
—Does he have a girlfriend? At the moment?
—I don’t know.
—Where does she live?
—Well, I don’t know of any girlfriend actually. So I don’t –
—No, of course. How do you know him? Have you known him long?
K and Michael met at university. They have been friends ever since. I told her some of that. She nodded. Then she announced that she had met K. She remembered it well. She described K to me, but the person she described was not K. She shrugged, as if it was possible that it was me who was mistaken rather than her.
—Michael so rarely brought people home, after that incident with the boy.
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
—But there was that girl last year, wasn’t there? The black girl, very pretty, they came down to the house one weekend. In the country. Michael hasn’t been there since. I really thought … She was allergic to the cats. Or the dogs. Or something or other. Spent a whole day sneezing before Michael found her some tablets. She was a bit quiet, watchful. I don’t know what happened there, do you?
—That was Monica. I don’t know what happened.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. The relationship with Monica had ended in the same way that most of Michael’s relationships have ended – with Michael becoming suddenly, and almost pathologically, bored. He seems to tire very quickly of people who love him. I should have told Catherine that. But I think she knew it anyway.
—I used to think Michael was queer of course. For years I thought he was queer. I think that may be part of the problem. Well, how was I to know that he wasn’t? There was a thing with another boy, you see, when he was young. Really quite young. And I discovered them. My God. They were like two little baby mice, all naked and wrapped up together. It was very cute. I laughed, which was probably not the right thing, was it? But it just looked so sweet and innocent. They were terrified of course, though my God I don’t know why; there were more queers around during Michael’s childhood than there were women. And I went out of my way, out of my way, to make sure he understood that it wasn’t a problem, that I loved him unconditionally, that I was proud of him and he could have his boyfriends over if he wanted to and I wouldn’t mind, that he was my lovely son and there could never be a problem. I was the textbook perfect mother. Except it turns out that it was sweet and innocent – that for Michael it really was a bloody phase.
She stared at his front door and sighed. Her skin is remarkable. She must have had work done, and when she turned away from me I found myself looking for the signs. But I could see none.
—Perhaps if I had scolded him, been mean, told him he was disgusting, perhaps he would have liked me more. He’s embarrassed by me. He always has been. I don’t know what it is about me that is so embarrassing, but there you are. Mind you, mind you …
She turned round to me again.
—Being camped outside his house hoping to be able to talk to him, hoping for a glimpse of him, it is embarrassing, isn’t it? Mortifying. And you have no idea how hard I’ve tried to repair things between us. And he’s been, oh, he’s just been so stubborn. If only he’d offer me something. Some affection, some access, some way into his life, no matter how small. Then I wouldn’t have to do this. Do you find him stubborn?
—Well. I don’t know really.
—I’m sorry. I’m embarrassing you now. I don’t even know you. But you look so trusting. I trust you. Michael doesn’t tolerate rogues. Not as friends. I know that much about him. And you’re no rogue, are you? I can see that. I don’t know any of his friends though. He never introduces me.
She looked away again and I thought she was crying. I wondered if she was drunk. I could smell nothing but the lightest, most summery of perfumes. But I noticed that there was a little boxy cabinet set into the space in front of where we were sitting. Like a little hotel minibar. It looked exactly like the one that I have here in my room in fact. Perhaps a little smaller.
—He tells me nothing, you know. Nothing. He resents me. He seems to think that it’s a terrible cheek of me to be his mother. It makes it more difficult for him to ignore me completely.
She wasn’t crying. She sounded angry.
—I bought him that bloody house. Look at it. It’s hideous. What were we thinking? Perhaps he did it on purpose. Forced me into buying him something ugly. I’ve been here for hours. Staring at it. He doesn’t know this car. And he’s never met Itsy. I saw him here on Thursday. Thursday night. He came home alone. Walked down the street carrying his briefcase and some shopping, and in he went. He picked up some litter beside his gate. Threw it in the bin. He yawned while he was rummaging for his keys. He had to put the shopping bag down to open the door. And in he went. Lights then. Coming on and going off. Itsy tried to talk me into calling on him. Ringing the doorbell. Is there a doorbell?
—Yes.
—What sound does it make?
—An old-fashioned ding-dong-type sound.
—Really?
—Yes. You know, ding, dong.
She smiled at me.
—That’s the one we had in the old house. When he was a boy. Where he grew up. He used to love it. He’d race to the door from wherever he was. You’d hear ding-dong followed by the pounding of Michael’s feet racing to the door from wherever he was, shouting I’ll get it, I’ll get it. Jesus Christ. What a stupid woman I am. When was the last time you saw him?
—Friday. We had lunch.
—You must tell me all about it. While we drive. I’ve had enough of it here. It’s like looking at a gravestone. Itsy, drive us somewhere.
—Anywhere.
—Anywhere it is.
It’s a cliché really, isn’t it, the idea of the very famous being very lonely? I began to think, as Itsy drove us aimlessly around the city, that Catherine Anderson was one of the loneliest people I’d ever met. Maybe that’s why I told her more about the weird things that had happened to me on the Friday than I had intended to. I told her about the mouse. I told her about lunch with Michael. I told her about the scary dog. I told her about the swimming pool, and about talking to Michael briefly about the Australia-shaped stain. She listened, and as she did so she seemed to warm to me, as if I was more entertaining than she had expected. But she did not seem to understand any of it. Or seem much interested, except in the parts that related to her son. That’s really all she asked questions about. What he ate. What he wore. What he had talked about. What he was working on. Whether he had a new phone. She went as far as checking the number I had stored for him, as if afraid that he might have changed it because of her. He hadn’t. I told her about leaving K. She asked some questions about that. Mostly baffled, incredulous questions, most of which I could not answer. She said that it was all very sad – as if it was a finished thing, historical, about which nothing could now be done. She asked where I had stayed. So I told her a little about David. I didn’t tell her what had happened because I thought that it would reflect badly on me. I invented a returning flatmate whose presence had made it impossible for me to stay on. Immediately, she offered me a bed.
—I insist. I really do. It’s not as if I don’t have the room. And you were going to ask Michael could you stay with him. Weren’t you? Well, he would expect me to make the offer. It’s politeness. If you can reach him later then maybe you can go back to his place. But for the moment, I’ll take you in. I will take you in. I insist on it.
I was unsure whether she was doing a favour for me or for Michael. I was unsure too about her tone of voice and some of the ways in which she said things. There was a lot of acting to it, a lot of inflecting, and what was probably, for the most part, irony and self-deprecation. The way she said I will take you in. She had made it sound half charitable and half predatory. She was playing. She was in complete control of her voice and its register and of all that it implied. There was truth hidden in it, but there was self-defence as well, and I couldn’t quite pick up on where that started and where it ended.
I’m sure it’s part of her skill. Her talent. To make you feel that the conversation she’s having with you is the most important conversation she’s had in months. I’m sure it can’t have been the case that it actually was the most important conversation she’d had in months. Of course, it may be that everyone assumes, when they’re talking to someone like Catherine Anderson, that any sincerity or profundity they glimpse is either faked entirely or manipulated in some way to make them feel special, and that they therefore dismiss it, don’t rise to it, and for this reason people like Catherine Anderson never actually do get to have any genuinely heart-to-heart, important conversations. And that’s why they tell everyone everything, as if privacy is a strange, old-fashioned concept that has no interest for them.
She told me about her work, or rather, about the complicated reasons for the fact that she was not doing much work; she told me, in fragments, about Michael, and in more detail about the scarce facts of their estrangement, and about her labyrinthine speculations that fleshed it out. Firstly, she had dismissed it all as a simple sulk. Then, in an explanation that I could barely follow, and felt that I shouldn’t, it was something to do with Michael’s deeply repressed erotic fascination with her. Then she had wondered about a misplaced loyalty to his imprisoned, disgraced father. But none of her theories satisfied her, and she turned to me every now and then for something new that I might be able to tell her about Michael. Some detail that would allow her to understand what was going on. I don’t think I was able to help.
—We have both lost loved ones and we don’t know why.
This was not true. I could see that. I couldn’t believe that she couldn’t see it as well. And yet she seemed to have missed the essential difference.
—Perhaps we can comfort each other a little. Perhaps we can offer each other that.
And she put her hand on my arm.
Perhaps the trouble is that no conversation, no encounter with a person like Catherine Anderson, can ever exist on only one level. It has undercurrents and subtexts and counter-narratives built in. It has her magazine history, her chat-show biography behind it. It has her fame and your non-fame threaded through it like a curious path that you feel you should stick to, and which rings alarm bells when you leave it and stray into the unscripted undergrowth, where the snakes and spiders loiter. I imagined, in the space of a tenth of a second, an elaborate scandal in which I might become mired: THE FAMOUS ACTRESS AND HER SON’S FRIEND. I’m sure I’ve already read such a story somewhere. Perhaps the trouble with talking to someone like Catherine Anderson is that all possibilities seem entirely clichéd.
Her hand stayed on my forearm for about thirty seconds. She said nothing. She just smiled at me, and let me run through all the connotations of comfort that I could think of. Thirty seconds is quite a long time. It constitutes an awkward silence. But the only awkwardness was mine. I nodded my head, and shook it, and made a couple of hesitant noises, and reddened, and eventually smiled crookedly back and turned to look out the window.
—There is comfort in understanding. Isn’t there? We understand each other, I think.
And her hand gave me the lightest of squeezes and was gone.
Catherine Anderson is not lonely. She is famous. They look quite alike, but they’re two different things. The lonely don’t have anyone else in their lives. The famous have everyone else in their lives, and probably, quite often, don’t have themselves. I worked this out. It’s a bit pat, I know, but it’s a bit true as well, I think you’ll find. She was able to tell me things that any normal person would consider private, because privacy has nothing to do with her any more. Or maybe what I mean is that privacy is her currency. Her life and her thoughts and her fears, and her loves and her losses, and her body and her choice in clothes and her face and whether or not she’s had work done, and her sexuality and her waistline and her decision to wear trainers, all of them are our business. They are things that in the rest of us are of no importance at all. We don’t think about them. Or we keep them to ourselves. But they’re the things which define her. That’s what celebrities do. That’s how you become one. Not by being good at something like acting or singing, not really, but by living inside out, revealing what other people hide, and hiding what the rest of us would never think of obscuring, or pretending that we didn’t do – like going to the supermarket or filling in forms or missing the bus or being badly dressed on a day off, or being just mostly, day after day, ordinary.
Itsy drove us along the river for a while. I saw the back of his neck crinkle, ripple like the hide of a beast, like an alligator looking left and right as he turned us through pedestrians and parked cars and around the long bright worms of lazy traffic. He said nothing unless Catherine spoke to him, which she did only to say, Take the left here, Itsy, or What time is it? or What kind of car is that, Itsy? It seemed a long way to her apartment. While I thought about fame and privacy and manners, she talked about perceptions.
—They all said, the papers all said, that we were having an affair. And we let that go. We went out a few times. But actually we couldn’t stand each other. He has something wrong with his ears, you know. It’s why his hair is so long. You never see his ears on the screen. They’re withered. Melted and pink. Like shellfish. He’s hung like a horse, I grant you, but he thinks like one too. He’s boorish, very old male, 1974, very boring. I couldn’t stand his company. You have nice ears.
I wasn’t completely sure who she was talking about, or why she was talking about him. She had mentioned several names, most of which I knew, in the way that you know the names of mountain ranges on the other side of the world, or of some extinct species of ape. She complained about newspapers and journalists and photographers. Specific ones. She told me their names. She talked about security.
—Of course it’s a two-way thing, but really, they are wild. If you give them the slightest hint of an inch they will take a mile. They are wild. They’re savage. You need to learn how to contain them, how to control them, how to throw them the odd scrap so that they don’t rip you to shreds out of starvation. But throw them too much and there’s a feeding frenzy, and you’re fair game, and they move in on you, they circle and they snarl and they pounce, and they will tear you to pieces and chew you up and spit you out. I’ve seen it happen. Molly Peters was a friend of mine. Poor cow.
It took a moment for me to recall who Molly Peters was – just a moment. Of strain. Although it seems ridiculous that anyone would have to reach for the details of that pathetic story.
—Oh, don’t look so sad. Look at you. You’re like a poor sad puppy.
She laughed, and flapped her loose hand against my thigh.
—I make it sound too serious. I shouldn’t complain. I have people to get in their way when they can, but they can’t stop them. They can’t be stopped. And I’m aware of the ironies, the contradictions. I need them. They need me. It’s … what do you call it? … oh, there’s a word that I thought of. It sums it up. Itsy, what did I call it, the way the press and us coexist? What did I call that?
—An ecosystem.
—An ecosystem. An ecosystem. Is that what I called it? Is that right? I thought it was something else.
Itsy shrugged his shoulders and mumbled something that was indecipherable to me.
—Ecosystem then. Everything in balance. Everything depending on everything else. But the simplest alteration in … anything, could throw the whole thing into chaos. I’m sure I had a better word. Never mind.
She drifted off into a mumble. She seemed terribly dissatisfied with ‘ecosystem’, and I could imagine her on a film set, deciding that there was a problem with the script. And then she drifted back again.
—And sex. They want to know all the time about my sex life. And I make things up and let them say what they want, because after a while it’s all the same. There was a story years ago that I had had an affair with a racing driver. Do you remember that? No, but you’re young, aren’t you? You’re a puppy. Well, they ran this story, and it is now widely believed, that this racing driver and I had a passionate, passionate affair. They say passionate. They print passionate. What they mean is that we were fucking like dogs in the street. In the pits probably, or whatever you call it. The pits? Or is that tennis? In the pits. On the bonnet of his car. That’s what’s between the lines, and that’s where people read now. And anyway, this story has been around for so long, and I have had it believed of me for so long, that I actually, now, cannot remember if it’s true or not. I knew him of course. He was a nice man. Small, like a jockey. Marvellous body, I seem to remember, smooth and muscular like a farm boy, and I like a boyish type, you know, I just do, I can’t help it, you’re quite boyish, you should shave, and I seem to recall wonderful sex and jokes about his helmet and all kinds of nonsense. But I’m not sure if I’m actually remembering that or whether I just heard it said about us. I’m really not sure at all. Which is quite ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s my life I recall or something the press made up. Are you all right?
I’m not sure why she asked whether I was all right. Perhaps it was part of the script. Or perhaps I really was exhibiting the growing confusion I was feeling about whether or not Catherine Anderson, the Catherine Anderson, was coming on to me. I thought that she might be. And I was sure that I must be wrong. It was Catherine Anderson after all. And I hadn’t even showered. Nevertheless, she had leaned over to me, her face next to mine, her shoulder and arm pressed against my shoulder and arm, and I could smell her peppermint breath and a scent like early sunshine.
—I suppose what you’d say is that if he was any bloody good I’d have no trouble remembering. What age are you?
My phone rang. I fumbled around in my jacket looking for it.
—Sorry.
—That’s all right. Itsy, go along the canal. Along the canal and then home. Let’s get home.
It was David. Had we not been on our way home anyway? It didn’t occur to me not to answer, possibly because I was so flustered, but also because David, I thought, might be something of a relief. Something low-key and predictable. I was wrong.
—It’s me, it’s David. I’m … I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. Hello? Please come back. You were right, you were absolutely right, and I’ve been such a complete moron.
He began to sob. I shifted the phone to my other ear. No one has ever told me that I have nice ears before. I wanted to tell David about it. It would make him laugh. Catherine raised her eyebrows and mouthed a questioning K at me. I shook my head.
—David. Um. I’m sort of busy …
—I’ve been so fucking stupid.
The cursing again. He never curses.
—I’ve been utterly ridiculous. I’m very sorry. I should never have kicked you out. I’ve been living in a stupid, made-up fucking place. I’ve been living in Paddorn. I’ve been so obsessed with making a stupid made-up pathetic fantasy fucking fiction real that I’ve messed up my real life and everything is inside out and I can’t stand it, I really can’t.
We had turned on to the canal. Catherine had moved away from me slightly, and was looking out of the window. I assumed she was politely trying not to overhear.
—David, it’s not really a good time. Just at the moment.
—I’ve really fucked up, haven’t I? I’ve really made a complete mess of everything. And Mark … Mark was …
At this point he more or less began to wail, and I found it difficult to make out any of the words which were scattered among the tearful gasps and the cries. There were little gasps from Catherine too, and I was conscious that she was touching me, and I thought that she had picked up on the distress somehow and was sympathising, and it took me a minute to realise that it was her arse that was touching me, and that the noises she was making had nothing to do with David. She had turned in her seat to face out the side window, and as a result her bottom was brushing against my thigh. She had cupped her hands against the glass and was emitting little bleats of pleasure. I didn’t know what was going on. Then I saw what she was looking at. There were swans on the canal. Big white beautiful swans, gliding along the smooth surface like a child’s trick with magnets. About half a dozen of them, their long necks confused in my line of sight like a lattice of thrown white ropes, their bodies a cluster of wet pearls, like a bright spurt of seeds scattered on the water. Catherine Anderson seemed to be moving her arse back and forth along my thigh.
—David. Get it together, for God’s sake.
—Come back. Please. You need to fix things with K. You need to sort it out. I’ve been so selfish. You can stay here as long as you want. I’m so, so sorry.
Itsy was driving very slowly. I checked to see whether he was looking in his rear-view mirror at me but he wasn’t. Catherine was looking slightly to the left now, back at the swans as we moved away from them, and her bottom was pressing harder against my thigh, and moving, and she lifted it slightly so that it was encroaching on to my lap.
—David, it’s OK. I’ve got somewhere. It’s fine. Forget it. I’ll talk to you soon.
And I hung up. Which I shouldn’t have done. That’s now clear. But I did. I wasn’t trying to get rid of David so that I could somehow start reciprocating Catherine Anderson’s attentions. That’s really not what I was interested in at all. I was simply confused. Flustered. I could manage only one thing at a time, and while it seems in retrospect that I chose the wrong thing to manage, that is nevertheless the choice I made. It seemed more urgent. And yes, I know, I could simply, while still talking to David, have moved out of range of Catherine’s arse. Just shuffled over to the other side of the car, which was probably wide enough to allow an escape, but the idea somehow didn’t present itself. Or I could have said, Do you mind, I’m on the phone here, with a distressed friend. But I was in her car. Her black-windowed fame car. Catherine Anderson, with her famous arse on my lap. And I suppose that it’s instinctual – when there are two things attacking us at once we tend make a judgement as to which is the more immediately dangerous, and we concentrate on that. And David, it seemed to me, could wait. While Catherine Anderson plainly could not.
—Sorry. Excuse me. I …
I don’t know what I said actually. But I held my innocent hands in the air and moved myself out from under her bum. She said nothing. She just turned around, and smiled at me, and sat back in her seat. As if nothing had happened. She gave a shivering sigh and said:
—God, I love nature. Hurry up, Itsy. We need to get home.
And although it seemed clear to me that the sigh had been about the physical contact, about the pleasure it had given her, it might have seemed to someone else that the sigh was simply about her pleasure at seeing the swans. And although to my ears We need to get home had sounded breathy and suggestive, there was actually nothing in the words that could be held against her. And I began to doubt that anything at all odd had happened other than that she had turned in her seat and looked out the window and as a result her bottom had brushed against my thigh and I was actually just being grotesque and ridiculous, and it wasn’t Catherine Anderson’s fault if I was filthy-minded and flattered myself so much to think that she might have that kind of interest in me.
For the rest of the journey she talked about her childhood love of ballet. And I have no idea whether, as a child, Catherine Anderson genuinely dreamed of starring in Swan Lake, or whether this was a bit of background detail suggested to her by a publicist, or by her own inner publicist, or whether she had heard it about someone else, or whether it was actually, pathetically, true, and it just seemed to her that to embrace the clichés made them less diminishing. I really have no idea which it was.
And I bet she doesn’t either.
Catherine Anderson’s apartment is pure cinema. By which I mean that I’ve never seen anything like it except in a movie, and also that being in it is a little like being permanently framed and lit and directed. I couldn’t help feeling that I was always watched, in the same way that a film is watched. I felt that I had to do interesting things, say interesting things, in order to live up to my surroundings. Even when on my own, I behaved with great circumspection. I considered each movement before I made it, each tilt of my head, each hand gesture. I monitored my facial expressions, keen that they should never clash with the set. Even in the shower I was self-conscious – in that slightly narcissistic way of the actor whose character is pleasingly sophisticated, competent, attractive, deserving of a home such as this.
I was there for about three hours. Possibly a little longer. I don’t see the point in going through all of it with you. There are pertinent points. There are gaps. You should be able to fill in what you want to fill in. We arrived, I was shown, by Itsy, to a guest room, where I shaved and showered and changed my clothes. I joined Catherine in what she called ‘the drawing room’, which is huge and hugely comfortable, and has an aquarium built into one wall and what looks like the entire city built into another – it is in fact a floor-to-ceiling window with the most remarkable view. She had changed. The track-suit had been replaced by a short dark skirt and a blue blouse. It looked quite schoolgirlish. We ate a salad which was brought to us by an Asian lady who wore a little pinafore. We drank some superb white wine. We talked. Then there was an unfortunate misunderstanding, and I was asked to leave.
It wasn’t a misunderstanding so much as an inadvertent trespass. On my part. Itsy showed me out. He stood over me silently as I regathered my bags, and he walked me down to the street. He wore an almost apologetic expression, which was some comfort. As if to say, She’s mad, don’t worry about it. And I think she probably is mad. I thought it at the time, and I think it now. Except that at the time I thought her madness was gross and inexplicable, whereas now I feel that it’s interesting and distressing and in some strange horrible way admirable, and it is for this reason that I don’t feel so terrible for telling you about it.
The point about Catherine is that she lives, utterly, in an artificial world. Everything about her is not fake exactly, but false, in the sense that it is a role she has been asked to play, and while some of it is certainly based on her own personality and on her own innate character and characteristics, it is not complete, it is not the whole story. She is a very beautiful and intelligent woman who has been shoehorned into a space that is not quite hers. Not fully hers. She is not living a natural life. Her life is constructed – comprised as it is of comfort and luxury and money and protection on the one hand, and exposure and judgement on the other. She’s not a person so much as an entertainment device. She is given wealth and general affection in return for being a PlayStation.
What happened was this.
While we drank wine, Catherine talked some more about the men with whom she has been involved. These are famous men, and although their names are of course well known, I’m not going to name them here. I’m not going to link them specifically to the things that she told me about. Suffice it to say that she seemed to delight in telling me increasingly explicit details about her sexual relationships. It was a jokey, giggly conversation to begin with, in which she described them physically, and at first innocently, saying that so-and-so had, for example, lovely eyes, or very strong, sexy legs. Then she turned to the size of their penises, and their sexual stamina, which was amusing enough. It was all simple salacious gossip, and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest that I didn’t have fun hearing it. But as she talked on, and as we drank more wine, and as Catherine began to go back to men she had previously mentioned as having, for example, lovely brown eyes and an average but inexhaustible penis, she would reveal more, and then more again, as if she could not mention them without mentioning some new secret about them, and these secrets became increasingly physically detailed and carnal and base, and I became increasingly uncomfortable.
She told me about the peccadilloes and preferences of famous men. She told me of the man who greatly enjoyed having Catherine shave his scrotum. Of the man who could not achieve an erection until she slapped his face. Of the man who liked to masturbate into her handbags. I began to weary of it, and I began also to feel that Catherine was filling my head with these things in preparation for something. I was still not sure what her interest in me was. I still juggled the idea that she wanted to sleep with me with the idea that I was mad to think that she wanted to sleep with me. She poured more wine. She told me more details of famous men and of what they wanted. Of the actor who wanted her to insert the heel of her shoe into his ass. Of the man who liked to be pissed on, fully clothed, repeatedly, during the course of long days in foreign hotels. Of the very famous singer who liked her to beat him, to thrash his body with her hands and with whips and with chains, who liked her to hurl abuse at him and spit at him and force him into all the physical humiliations he could think of. My head spun slightly. I did not want to hear any more. And I really did not want it to lead anywhere.
I went to her room, her bedroom. I wasn’t supposed to. But that was not the trespass. If she had caught me in her bedroom I don’t think it would have been a problem. It was a beautiful bedroom. I was looking for the bathroom. The main bathroom. It is a big apartment. My room, the guest room, seemed to have disappeared. In fact, I later discovered, it was down a different corridor, reached by a different exit from the drawing room. But in any case, when I had excused myself, Catherine had waved me out this way, and had told me either second on the left or second on the right, I wasn’t sure, she had been laughing and her words were garbled. And I had opened a door and it had plainly been her room, and I had taken a brief glance around and was on my way back out when I noticed that there was an en suite bathroom there, on the left, I could see the glint of a tiled floor, and I headed for it, perhaps a little drunkenly, thoughtlessly, without much, certainly, in the way of thought – not thinking for a moment that the woman who had just been telling me of how she used to pee all over an expensively suited Hollywood actor in a hotel suite in Cannes, would mind for a minute me using her bathroom.
It was very large. A circular marble bath took up one corner. There was a big shower as well, with an elaborate system of nozzles and dials. The floor was marble. There were various rugs. There was a seat in front of a lit mirror, with other smaller mirrors on extendable arms, and there were various bottles and jars and tubes and tubs and containers of varying shape and size and colour lying around. I was not supposed to be there. On the floor there were a few items of underwear, and one leather belt. The lighting was recessed into the ceiling and the walls, and into the ledge around the bath. There were no windows. I was supposed to be in the main bathroom. And this was plainly not that.
In the middle of the ceiling, suspended on some kind of telescopic pole, around which coiled a couple of cables, was a very hi-tech-looking camera. To my left, the doors of a mirrored cabinet lay slightly open. It was filled with electronics. There were things that looked like DVD players, and a little screen, and various tiny green pinpoint lights, some of which flashed, others of which were off, others of which were fully on. I had to look at the shower and the bath and the toilet to reassure myself that I had not walked into the screening room by mistake. There were a couple of slim remote controls sitting on a shelf. I was confused, and then thought to myself that this was her safe room. Is that they call it? There was a film. The inner chamber in a wealthy house where the walls are thick and the door steel and it is filled with the most delicate and sophisticated electronic systems and you could hold out there for days. Strange to have it in your bathroom, but also, I supposed, quite practical. Then I saw the tapes. Are they tapes? I don’t know. They’re probably discs. They are probably digital storage things.
Each little rectangular, almost square, tape was in its own plastic box, and labelled, in small neat writing, almost as small as David’s.
I was still thinking about security. I thought that they were some kind of CCTV surveillance record. And as soon as I thought that, as soon as the letters were in my mind, were spelled out to me, I dismissed them. I dismissed the idea entirely, and scolded myself for being so bloody stupid, and instead I thought – She’s taping herself having sex.
I looked for the slot where I could play one of the things, and found it, but when I tried to enter 11: 2005, it seemed to be jammed. I quickly realised that it was jammed because there was a tape already in there. Beneath the slot was a row of buttons such as you’d find on a DVD player. I pressed Play. The small screen fired up and flicked at me something blurred, quick, of colour, double, brief, and it filled then with that curtain of grey static snow, of chain mail absence, that signifies a memory that is blank and waiting to be filled. I pressed Stop. I pressed Rewind. There was no whirring noise. I waited a minute. There were flickering digits, a countdown from the low hundreds to a sudden zero. This was some kind of digital thing. Binary. More can be fitted into the world when everything is reduced to Yes/No, On/Off, Empty/Full. It stopped automatically. I pressed Play.
My mother tells me that when I was a very small child, still in my pram, I used to hate people looking at me, pinching my cheek, grabbing my toes, telling me in wide-eyed baby talk that I was simply adorable. I would either bawl at them, or screw my little face up into something horrible and splutter and seethe and hiss, furious until they backed away. As if the very idea of being told that I was a lovely little thing, good enough to eat, annoyed me so much that I wanted to show how ugly I could be.
Catherine Anderson, since you want to know, records herself defecating. The camera hanging from the ceiling points directly at her toilet. On one side of the split screen you can watch her pull down her tracksuit bottoms and lower herself on to the seat and you can watch her face exert and wrinkle and sigh with the process of shitting. On the other side of the screen is the feed from another camera, a different camera. It took me a minute to work out what it was. It seemed very bright, indistinct, an oval. Then, as Catherine sits down on the left of the screen, the brightness on the right adjusts, and the image becomes clear. It is Catherine’s arse, on the toilet seat. The second camera is inside the bowl. As her face works on the left, her anus works on the right. It pushes out and opens and from it emerges a single file of dark slugs, a line of short hard creatures from a cave. And after each one is expelled her anus remains briefly open like a mouth, and then closes, slowly, like a mouth that is finished speaking.
—You shouldn’t be in here.
—I didn’t –
—I never said you could come in here. You little fucking cunt.
—I’m sorry. I didn’t –
—Get the fuck out of my home. ITSY!
And so on.
It occurred to me then, but only fleetingly, and not in the way that was to have such a profound effect on me a night later, that Catherine Anderson is just an extreme example of the condition shared by all of us. All of us. The condition of not being in the world at all. Of being instead on a human platform, made not just of things, but of history and culture and our ingestion of both of them, of being in a created place that is separated from the world by a layer of human clutter. That everything is human. And all we see is this layer that we have thrown over the world, like a carpet put down on a floor. And all that Catherine Anderson is trying to do with her hidden cameras and her filmed shitting, is to rip up the carpet. Rip up the carpet and see what’s underneath. And I think that to do that is to become mad.
Because we are not alone here.
Underneath the human carpet there is a writhing in the darkness. Like a spluttering sea.