It was a thin afternoon for tourists in Trafalgar Square, and the birdseed man, who was wearing thermal gloves and a baseball cap with ‘I Love New York’ on it, sold Spencer two bags of yellow grit for the price of one. He said, ‘It’s your lucky day,’ as he handed them over, and Spencer asked, ‘Starting from when?’ but received no reply. The Square looked rather fine in the low sunlight that streamed along Pall Mall, turning the windows of South Africa House crimson and jewelling the KFC boxes that blew between the fountains.
Spencer positioned himself just under Nelson’s Column, filled both hands with birdseed and held them out at arm’s length, feeling like a combination of the crucified Christ and the Scarecrow in Wizard of Oz.
For a moment nothing happened, and then there was a mild commotion in his immediate vicinity and two smartish buff-coloured pigeons landed on his right hand and started devouring the seeds with cartoon-like velocity. Next a hideously diseased, possibly leprous, one-legged grey pigeon landed on his left hand, balanced precariously on its warty remaining foot and quite deliberately pecked Spencer on the wrist. He shook his hand violently to dislodge it, dropping most of the seed as he did so, and suddenly every pigeon in Greater London was in the air, heading towards him like a bomber squadron, wheels down, flaps set, tails flattened for landing. The sky was black with bodies, and the world only fitfully visible behind a screen of wings. He cringed as pigeons banked and swooped and landed and took off again; the ground was hidden beneath a shifting carpet of feathery backs and the air vibrated with the throaty calls that he had always found pleasantly soothing, and which now sounded like the rallying cries of an army crazed with bloodlust.
Covering his head with his arms, he ducked and ran. The carpet exploded into a wall of wings and then he was through, and safe, and all at once aware that he was being videoed by a party of Japanese pensioners. He counterfeited a casual wave and walked away, trying to look like someone who was really enjoying himself.
His other assignment was within easy reach. The London Pride (‘Sixty Sights in Sixty Minutes’) was a double-decker bus painted in an ill-advised combination of yellow and purple. It departed at twenty-minute intervals from just outside the National Gallery, employing a very old man in a fake Beefeater costume to stand on the pavement shouting, ‘London Pride, HAWL the Sights,’ at passers-by.
Spencer hesitated for a while, overwhelmed by inertia at the prospect. There were only three passengers on the lower deck, and two of them had their eyes closed. The third, a small child, stared fixedly through the window at Spencer, her finger up her nose to the second joint.
On some invisible signal the Beefeater changed his shout to ‘London Pride, departing in FUHIVE minutes’ and the engine started. Spencer climbed on board very slowly.
‘How much is it, please?’
‘Three pounds downstairs five pounds upper deck,’ said the driver in a monotone, his eyes fixed on a far and invisible horizon.
‘Five pounds, please.’ He placed a note on the change tray.
‘No drinks or ice creams, no standing up while the bus is in motion, no getting off except at designated stops.’
‘Right.’
‘Commentary is in English.’
‘Fine.’
‘In the event of traffic problems the company reserves the right to alter the route.’
‘OK.’ A green ticket whirred from the machine by the cash tray. ‘Anything else I should know?’ asked Spencer. ‘Any hints or tips?’
The driver swung his head round with the weighty slowness of a JCB and looked at him through half-closed eyes.
‘Just checking,’ said Spencer. ‘Thanks.’
His favourite seats – or rather Mark’s favourite seats – the ones right at the front that gave the illusion of driving the bus, were already occupied by a group of Americans – west coast queens by the look of them, tanned, fit, gorgeous and dressed in the kind of subtly expensive colours that people who regularly sit on London bus upholstery know not to wear. One of them was in the middle of an anecdote, and Spencer was given only the swiftest of inspections, five pairs of eyes registering cursory approval, before he sat down a few rows back and the storyteller picked up the thread.
Spencer hoped they appreciated their privileged position. He had once witnessed Mark paying two small boys a pound each to move, just so he could sit there and enjoy his usual thrill of going round corners six feet ahead of the front wheels, the nose of the bus apparently veering psychotically into the opposite lane before swinging round in a majestic curve.
‘London Pride departing in THUREE minutes.’
There was a five-pence coin under the seat in front. Spencer picked it up and used the milled edge to scratch at a crusty stain on his left shoe. Earlier in the afternoon he’d been stitching up a cut on a drunk’s hand when the man had flopped his head over the side of the couch and been copiously sick all over the floor, the wheels of the dressings trolley, and Spencer’s Birkenstocks. He’d run them under the tap but had obviously missed a few spots. In fact now he looked at them closely, he realized that the laces would have to go through the washing machine before they were presentable. As would his trousers, which had a pink stain just below the left knee, incurred when he’d accidentally knelt in a puddle of Hibiscrub, the lurid antiseptic soap of which they used gallons in Casualty. He’d been in the process of scrabbling around on the floor helping to pick up a pile of X-rays which had fallen off the reception desk and slid in all directions.
‘Better get them in order, or we’ll be ripping the spleen out of someone with a sprained ankle,’ as his consultant, Mrs Spelko, had remarked jovially. Since she had a voice that could vibrate lamps in the next room, there had been a volley of worried looks between the waiting patients.
It was the kind of remark that meant that Spencer, now into the second month of his contract, was learning more about damage limitation than emergency treatment. Mrs Spelko was tiring to work with; she was wide and vigorous and brought extra noise and panic to a department that was already lacking in neither. There was an easy brutality about her, as of someone who’d learned their bedside manner on the battlefield, dipping bleeding stumps into hot tar, and when she surged through the waiting room, patients leaned away as if avoiding the scythes on her chariot wheels. It was her voice, though, that caused most of the trouble; she seemed to lack an internal volume control, so that all statements, however mild in intent, emerged with booming clarity. Thus ‘Dr Carroll, you smell of vomit’ and ‘Can someone get rid of that idiot in cubicle seven’ could both be heard within a ten-metre radius. The man in cubicle seven – a fretter, rather than an idiot, who had unshiftably decided that a pulled muscle was a heart attack – had turned out to be a solicitor’s clerk, and Spencer was unsure whether the apology he’d managed to wring from Mrs Spelko (‘if I had to apologize to every stupid patient I’d be here all day’) would be sufficient to prevent litigation.
‘London Pride departing in WUHUN minute.’
The front row of the bus began a noisy count-down.
‘British seconds,’ shouted one of them, ‘remember they’re much slower than US seconds.’
Spencer dropped the coin on the floor again and looked out of the window at the weaving lights of the rush-hour traffic circling Trafalgar Square. It counted as the first sight of the promised sixty, he supposed, a tiny tick on the list.
‘Fifteen… fourteen… thirteen…’
Spencer heard the slap of the doors closing downstairs and the bus eased forward into the stream of traffic. There was a cheer from the front row, and then ironic boos as it stopped immediately at a red light. ‘England’s full of goddam reds,’ one of them shouted in a John Wayne voice.
The pedestrians streamed across, the amber light began flashing, and then the roar of a motorbike tore past the bus, changing almost at once to a scream of rubber followed by the horrible, distinctive crump of metal and glass colliding. The bus, which had just started forward, stopped with a jerk, and Spencer glimpsed the riderless bike scraping an arc on the tarmac just in front of them.
There was a collective, horrified ‘Whoah’ from the front seat, and then Spencer, mentally gritting his teeth, was hurrying down the stairs. As he flipped the emergency exit lever on the bus door, the driver shouted ‘Oi’ and for a moment he heard a stampede of feet above him.
A crowd had already assembled, and he pushed himself to the front with a series of ‘excuse me’s. There was a lot of shouting going on, but in clearly defined strands, like the layers of a soundtrack. The ground was strewn with plastic shards and the bike lay with its front wheel tucked under the stove-in boot of a black cab; beside it knelt the cabbie, swearing monotonously. In the centre of the road stood a tiny elderly nun, leaning on two sticks and repeating the word ‘Maniac’ over and over again in a clear but tinny voice, like a stuck record. The biker lay prone with his head almost under one of the wheels of the bus, but he was clutching one of his knees with both hands and a reassuring stream of muffled obscenities was audible from beneath the helmet. A woman squatted by him, fiddling with the visor.
‘I’m a doctor,’ said Spencer, kneeling beside her.
‘So am I,’ she said, and lifted the plastic shield.
‘My fucking knee,’ said the biker, clearly.
‘Hi there.’ It was four of the Americans from the bus, arriving in a pale flurry of cashmere and leather.
‘Hello,’ said Spencer, confused.
‘We’re doctors,’ said the one with the floor-length camel coat, ‘can we help?’
‘I know it’s fucking broken. I don’t need six fucking doctors to tell me.’
‘I think we’ve got it covered, thanks,’ said Spencer.
‘Oh, OK.’ The spokesman straightened up amiably.
‘Need a hand?’ A plethoric man in a double-breasted suit was waving from the second row of spectators. ‘I’m a GP.’
‘Just fuck off.’
‘We’re fine thanks,’ said Spencer.
‘No skin off my nose,’ said the man, disappearing into the crowd again.
‘Is it hurting anywhere else or is it just the knee?’
‘Maniac.’
‘Fucking leave me alone,’ shouted the biker, desperately, at the little nun. She had shuffled over and was poking one of her sticks at his midriff. Spencer caught the rubber ferrule before it could do any damage, but with surprising energy she pulled it out of his grasp. He caught it again. She used the other stick to hit him on the knuckles. He grabbed the other stick as well. There was an impasse.
‘Tenner on the nun,’ shouted someone in the crowd.
‘Excuse me, sister.’ The fifth American had emerged from behind the bus and was extending a hand pacifically towards her. ‘Do you think you ought to come and sit down? You’ve had a very nasty shock.’ She turned a whiskery face towards him.
‘What?’
‘You’ve had a shock,’ he repeated, more loudly, and in what Spencer realized was an English accent. ‘You should come and sit down.’ She looked at him, doubtfully, her jaw trembling, and he placed a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘I’m a doctor,’ he said.
The crowd stayed on, but there was no blood and, apart from the appearance of a troop of Danish Venture Scouts with first-aid experience, little drama, until the ambulance emerged unexpectedly along the wide pavement beside St Martin-in-the-Fields, the siren eerily amplified by the high wall, and the blue light beating off the pillars. Spencer stood to one side as the crew scooped the biker onto a stretcher with breezy skill.
‘Busted patella?’ said one, after the woman doctor had spoken to him. ‘You’ll be playing football in a couple of months.’
‘Thanks,’ muttered the biker, subdued. The police had just been over to take his details, and were now huddled with the Americans, one of whom was drawing a diagram.
As the ambulance drew away, Spencer could see the fifth member of their party, the English one, sitting on the steps of St Martin’s beside the nun. Taken in isolation he was clearly not as glossy as the others, and sported a bristly black crew-cut and a Nivenesque moustache. He caught Spencer’s eye and waved, then was obscured for a moment as a yellow-and-purple bus drove between them, venting a huge cloud of exhaust from its rear end. It took Spencer a second or two to realize it was the London Pride.
‘Hey!’ he said, feebly, but the bus had already swung round the corner and headed off towards Pall Mall, the lit upper deck completely empty.
‘I believe the tour-bus driver can be dragged through the courts on a number of counts,’ said Greg conversationally, his personalized ballpoint poised above a notebook. The party was wedged in the corner of a smoky pub on the Strand, all swirly carpets and chipped glass ashtrays, a couple of hundred yards from the site of the accident. With much the same speed and efficiency as the ambulance men had displayed, Spencer had been scooped up by the American party, introduced to each of them, congratulated on his role as Good Samaritan and bought a double vodka.
‘Count one, failure to give a statement to the police after an accident. Count two, theft of property – that is, the burnt-orange scarf which my aged maternal grandmother knitted for me with her own, arthritic hands and which I left draped over the back of the seat. And count three, failure under the trades descriptions act – is that the correct name for it, Miles? – ’ the Niven-moustache man nodded ‘– failure under the trades descriptions act to deliver the stated promise of sixty sights in sixty minutes.’
‘We saw one sight in one minute,’ said Miles, ‘so I suppose the ratio was correct.’ He had an occasional twitch, Spencer noticed, a tendency to screw up his eyes and then blink rapidly.
‘I always hated that scarf,’ said Greg’s partner Reuben, a spectacularly handsome blond. ‘I’d say it was worth paying five pounds never to see that scarf again. I might even have paid twenty.’
‘You never told me.’
‘I didn’t want to hurt you, Greg, because I know how sensitive you are about your grandmother’s presents. Besides, if you got rid of it she might have knitted you another one in an even uglier colour.’
‘Oh it all comes tumbling out now…’
Under the laughter, Miles leaned across to Spencer. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, quietly.
‘Yes, fine.’ He’d started to think about how long it was since he’d been in a pub, just sitting and chatting. Months, probably. Maybe as long ago as Easter. ‘Just drifting off a bit.’
‘Doing long hours at the moment?’ Seen in close-up, the moustache was more George Orwell than David Niven.
‘Peculiar hours, really.’ Miles raised his eyebrows interrogatively. ‘I’m working in Casualty, so it’s a shift system – we do a whole day, then a morning, then a whole night, then an afternoon. It’s a clever way of ensuring that we’re all tired, all the time.’
‘So you’re a surgeon?’
‘No, no, thank God,’ said Spencer, horrified at the suggestion. ‘A G P trainee – I start in General Practice in February. This’ll be my last hospital job ever, I hope.’
‘I heard that “thank God”,’ said Reuben accusingly. ‘You realize that if it wasn’t for surgery we wouldn’t be here? We actually met Miles at a surgical conference in Carmel. Admittedly he thought it was just a casual acquaintanceship and didn’t realize that three months later we’d arrive on his doorstep demanding entertainment.’
‘But he’s such a gentleman,’ said the one with the beard, whose name Spencer had forgotten. ‘Never a word of complaint. Not even when he realized we were staying the extra month. And bringing the maid.’
They all laughed and Miles twitched modestly.
‘What sort of surgeon are you?’ asked Spencer.
‘Eyes,’ said Miles. ‘I don’t know anything about legs, so I stayed clear of the accident.’
Spencer stared. Blinky Blaine. It had to be.
‘We’re walking in London at night,’ said Reuben excitedly, as they left the pub. ‘Everyone told us not to do it because it’s supposed to be too dangerous. But look, here we are!’ He waved his hands in mock terror.
‘You’re a bunch of fucking poofs,’ said a passing man.
‘Thanks for the info, Mr Ugly,’ replied Reuben.
‘If you’re going to Piccadilly then the theatre’s on your way, isn’t it?’ asked Miles. He and Spencer were slightly ahead of the others.
‘Mmm,’ said Spencer, distracted. He knew he had to do it. ‘Can I ask you something? You’re not… your surname’s not Blaine, is it?’
‘That’s right,’ said Miles, surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because you used to treat a friend of mine.’ And he used to do impressions of you for days afterwards, he didn’t add. ‘I don’t know if you remember him – Mark Avery?’
‘Mark? Oh, of course I remember him.’ Miles blinked, and gave his moustache a stroke. ‘He wasn’t the forgettable sort.’
‘I know,’ said Spencer.
‘I heard he’d died. I was very sorry.’
Spencer felt his eyes begin to fill, as usual. ‘Yeah,’ he said lamely, ‘me too.’
‘How long ago was it?’
‘Four months.’
‘Not long.’
‘No.’
There was a pause, during which his nose began to run in sympathy. He searched ineffectually for a tissue, and was rescued by Miles, who wordlessly passed across a handkerchief. It was the ironed, monogrammed kind, on which it seems sacrilegious to wipe one’s snot, and Spencer dabbed tentatively rather than blew.
‘Thanks.’ He wondered what to do with it; he could hardly give it back.
‘You’re welcome. My mother gives me twelve every Christmas.’
‘Oh, OK. Thanks.’ He tucked it into his pocket and smiled awkwardly. ‘It was the double vodka, I think.’
‘Nothing wrong with a good weep.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I tell myself. About eight times a day.’
‘So how long had you known Mark?’
‘Oh – about ten years now.’ He found himself sighing involuntarily – a deep, almost theatrical exhalation – something he did so often lately that last week he’d spent a fruitless couple of hours rooting through the hospital library trying to find a physiological explanation for the habit.
‘And where did you meet?’
‘An ABBA concert. Such a cliché, I know. I was standing behind him in the choc-ice queue and he needed some change. He was wearing an Agnetha wig and a badge that played the first line of “Fernando”.’
Miles nodded in recognition. ‘I had one of those.’
‘And we were lovers for a while but that didn’t really work out. And then we were friends, and that… lasted.’ He nodded, too many times.
They walked in silence for a while, retracing their steps past Trafalgar Square. Behind them Greg and Reuben were struggling with the harmonization of ‘Feed the Birds’.
‘Mark wasn’t a doctor, was he?’ asked Miles, suddenly.
‘No, a civil servant. Why?’
‘I was just remembering – he always came to see me with a typed list of questions, with the medical terminology absolutely correct, all very well researched. Was that you?’
‘Well, I helped. But he was a great list man. Never happy without a ruled page in front of him. You know the type.’
Miles nodded.
‘In fact…’ Spencer hesitated. Mark was his specialist subject, his favourite topic; given the slightest encouragement, he could talk about him all day, every day, any aspect, any amount of detail. Yet sometimes, mid-monologue, he would detach himself, draw back and wonder whether the listener was actually listening, or whether they were simply indulging a grieving friend, letting him yammer on therapeutically.
‘What?’
He realized that Miles was still waiting for him to continue.
‘Oh, well… he’s the reason I was on that bus at all. He organized this year for me. He said he didn’t want me moping round, so he made out a list of all the things I’d never done in London. I promised to tick them off within twelve months.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, touristy things… Madame Tussaud’s… Harrods Food Harrods the Tower of London… Pie and Mash shop –’
‘You’re kidding!’ Laughter increased the twitch.
‘Oh, I’m barely scraping the surface here. It’s two pages long: Changing of the Guard… Billingsgate fish market… Lord Mayor’s Show… Cockney Pub –’
‘What’s that?’
‘Fake pearly kings playing the old Joanna.’
‘Oh my God.’
‘He said he wanted to break me of my middle-class gay cultural snobbery. And get me out of my flat.’
‘And how many have you done so far?’
‘About half a page.’
‘Any recommendations?’
‘Yes, don’t go and see The Mousetrap. It’s shit.’
Miles laughed and then stopped suddenly, as if bitten. ‘Oh. I just got it.’
‘What?’
‘Mark and Spencer.’ He caught Spencer’s eye. ‘Sorry.’
‘Good to meet you, and many thanks for the display of traditional nun-wrestling,’ said Greg, shaking his hand as they stood amidst the crowd outside Phantom of the Opera.
‘And are you two going to stay in touch?’ asked the bearded one, archly. Spencer glanced at Miles, a bit embarrassed, and then looked away.
‘Spencer knows where I work,’ said Miles, with dignity. ‘And if he wants company when he watches the Changing of the Guard, he can ring me there.’
‘Guards? Changing?’ said Reuben, looking round wildly. ‘Where? And why wasn’t I invited?’
Spencer could hear the phone ringing as he approached the outer door of the thirties mansion block in which he lived. His flat was on the ground floor but by the time he’d fiddled with two sets of keys, the answerphone had clicked on and he entered the living room to the sound of his god-daughter’s piercing voice: ‘Helloo! Spence-a!’ then, aside, ‘There’s no one there,’ and Niall’s voice hissing in the background, ‘Leave a message then.’
Spencer picked up the phone. ‘Hello, Nina, I’m here.’ There was breathing at the other end. ‘It’s really me,’ he said, ‘not the answerphone.’ There was a further pause, and then Niall took the phone.
‘Well you’ve really puzzled her now. Not there/there; she’s completely thrown. (Do you want to say hello to Spencer? No?) She’s off, I’m afraid, no stopping her, straight to the kitchen to see what Nick’s doing. Anyway –’ he took a pause for breath ‘– how are you?’
‘All right.’
‘Only all right?’
‘Well,’ said Spencer cautiously, ‘all right’s quite good on the scale of things, I think.’
‘How’s that list going?’
‘I’ve fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and… well, just the pigeons really, since I last saw you.’
‘Are you up for a bash on Saturday? We thought we’d go to a salsa club. The sitter’s booked. You could stay over, see Nina at breakfast.’
Spencer paused. ‘Can I think about it?’
‘Ah no, that means you won’t come, I know you. Go on, it’ll do you good. It’s only the Cally Road – two stops on the tube and you’re there. Bit of a dance, tip a few beers down you, see those Brazilian boys in their little shorts.’
‘Well I’m not –’
‘And Nina was only saying yesterday that she wanted to show you her new backpack with the teddies on that she currently only takes off to get into the bath, and to be honest the bloody thing’s going to disintegrate before too long so you should take your chance while you can.’
Niall was like a tidal wave, and Spencer gave up. ‘All right then.’
‘Yes! Result, Nick!’ He heard a distant cheer. ‘Right, well I’ll give you a ring on Saturday, make the arrangements.’
‘OK.’ He wondered if he’d be able to fake a last-minute cold. Or a bout of gastroenteritis.
‘See you then.’
‘Bye.’
Spencer put the phone down, and stood for a moment, listening to the chirrup of the crickets. He’d grown so used to the sound that these days he only noticed it after the cessation of something loud, like Niall, or when it ceased altogether, signalling a visit to Pet World. He roused himself to inspect his inheritance, which took up most of the wall space in the living room: a series of glass tanks containing, respectively, a spider, a small green lizard (together with three as yet uneaten crickets), five African landsnails, and a very expensive chameleon that remained resolutely the same colour despite the wide variety of attractive backgrounds that Spencer had provided. On the wall above them was a colour-coded chart, detailing in Mark’s four-square handwriting their hygiene requirements and dietary whims.
None of them seemed to have died or deteriorated since the morning, but it was rather hard to tell. As pets went, he had to admit they were pretty dull; he looked after them conscientiously and, in return, they stayed in exactly the same place, twenty-four hours a day. The chameleon sometimes swivelled its eyes, and Spencer had once seen the spider apparently biting its fingernails, but that was it. The only one to whom he’d become attached was the tortoise, who lived not in a tank, but behind the magazine rack. He was also the only one to have a name: Bill, after Mark’s grandfather, reputedly the slowest driver in the world. On first moving into Spencer’s flat, Bill had roamed widely, often taking up a hopeful position just beside the fridge, and occasionally venturing as far as the bedroom where he had lurked among the shoes. After Spencer had stepped on him, one bleary contact lens-less morning, Bill’s chosen territory had narrowed, and now he was seen only rarely, a wrinkled head peering round the edge of Reptile Monthly, checking that Spencer’s feet were nowhere in sight. This evening he was invisible, though the pages of one of the magazines were moving slightly.
Spencer kicked off his shoes and went into the kitchen. He kept the London list pinned to the tea and coffee cupboard and he put a tick by ‘Feeding Pigeons’. His pencil hovered beside ‘Sight Seeing Bus’. Did this evening’s micro-journey count? He had a horrible feeling that it didn’t. After all, if he’d paid for his ticket for The Mousetrap and then the performance had been cancelled due to a bomb scare, he wouldn’t, in all conscience, have been able to claim he’d seen it. Though he’d still have been able to guess every single jackbooted nuance of its apology for a plot. ‘I could’ve sicked up a better play,’ as Fran had put it. No, it was the act of actually sitting through the experience that really counted. He compromised by appending a very small tick, and then put the pencil back in the drawer.
Next to the list was a photo of Mark, and he looked at it for a while. It had been taken only a couple of months before he died but it showed someone who appeared not ill, but introspective. A shadow pattern of leaves lay over his face, softening the sharp cheekbones, camouflaging the Kaposi’s that splotched the left side of his nose, and he looked at the camera with gravity. A beautiful look, full of self-knowledge and dignity. And yet… the leaves were those of St James’s Park, and Mark’s reason for going there was in the hope of seeing one of the resident pelicans swallow a pigeon whole, as they were rumoured occasionally to do. Spencer smiled faintly, and then it suddenly occurred to him that Miles was probably the last person, ever, who would make the Mark and Spencer joke.
He took half a lettuce from the fridge and, returning to the living room, dropped it into the snails’ tank. Horns weaving, they glided towards it and began a slow-motion feast, gummy mouths pasting the leaves with mucus. He peered closer. What had appeared at a casual glance to be tomato seeds scattered across the glass floor seemed, on closer inspection, to be clusters of glutinous eggs. The phone rang, and he reached for it without taking his eyes away from the tank.
‘Hi, Spence.’
‘Oh Fran, I’m glad it’s you. I think my snails are having snails.’
‘What, right now? Are you sending out for towels and hot water?’
‘No. They’re still at the egg stage. Hundreds of them.’
‘Kill them now.’
‘Do you think I should?’
‘Well they’re not going to be easy to find homes for. Maybe nearer Christmas…’
Spencer sighed. ‘How do you think I should kill them?’
‘A doctor asks me that.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Pour boiling water over them. That’s what I do with slugs – they sort of dissolve.’
‘Oh God, how disgusting. Let’s change the subject.’ He sank onto the sofa.
‘You all right, Spence?’
‘Yeah. Just tired. What about you?’
‘Gotta have a talk. I’ve just found out I’m in Dalston for life.’
‘What?’
‘Can we meet up? I haven’t seen you since we went all the way to Poets’ Corner and it was closed.’
Spencer ignored this dig. ‘Daytime? I could do tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Yeah, all right, I can wangle that. They owe me at the moment. And Spence…’
‘Yes.’
‘Can I choose the venue?’
He sat limply on the sofa for a while after putting the phone down, listening to the soft crunch of snails eating lettuce. After a while, another sound penetrated his consciousness, a slow rustling. He concentrated hard, and tracked it down to the magazine rack; Bill was eating the back cover of Hung and Heavy, working his way up a chain of small ads. There seemed no enthusiasm in the task, no light in the boot-button eyes – it was as if he were at work, in a dull and relentless job with no holiday on the horizon. The cucumber and carrot which had been placed on a saucer beside him only that morning, lay limp and ignored. Was he missing Mark too? Did tortoises eat paper?