A True Story

The tragic story of something that happened to me in 1998 when I was living in London.

I was in a taxi. I was a lawyer. It was 1998, and it must have been when I was working on the D. fraud case. I can't remember where I told the taxi to go, but it must have been to collect some documents, I was forever going to collect documents from offices suspected by the investigating team, of which I was a member.

He drove, I looked about me: on the floor of the cab I found a small white envelope. I picked it up.

Inside it a piece of white "Basildon Bond" paper, folded. I opened it. A handwritten note said, "When you get this I will be dead".

I read the date on the note, it was yesterday's. I looked again at the envelope: there was a sender's address on the back. I told the cab to go there.

He drove. The address was in Camden. I remember the cab turning from the original destination, along Regent's Park, past the mosque. I remember September trees and sharp sunlight. Autumn, the air was fresh and clean. We stopped to allow some children with a teacher in a crocodile going over a zebra crossing, their little legs pink in the cool day, perhaps they were going to the zoo. We passed a woman in sunglasses with two whippets, brightly dressed tourists turning a map around, two tramps smoking on a bench.

The driver went north through some residential streets to a large house, a villa. The garden was muddy, there was barely grass where a lawn should have been, the tree in the front was a threadbare hawthorn. The house needed painting, the stucco was coming off in slabs, raw brick beneath. The door was painted green, faded, there was a white piece of paper stuck on it somehow.

I gave the driver a bank note, he drove away. I ran to the door. I became aware then of another man rushing up to the door too, he was in a dark coat. The paper on the door was a sign, it said, "do not come in if you are squeamish". We looked at each other: I saw his sallow complexion, his unshaven face, his dark hair. I wonder what he thought of me. We banged on the door with our fists and he cried, "Open up! Open up!", but there was no response. Simultaneously, we threw our shoulders hard against the door. It gave little, but I heard a creaking. We launched ourselves at it again, the hinge burst from the frame with a crack.

Then we kicked at the door until it fell. We ran into the hall. There was a strange silence there. We looked at each other. He was a cautious man like me. With an instinct we lurched into the kitchen.

There was a kitchen stool lying on the ground; there was the man who had written the note, hanging from a rope attached to the light flex. He swayed gently to and fro. I did not see his face.

I looked over to the other man but he was not there, he was gone. I ran into the hall, I saw a door ajar, I pushed it open, there obscured by piles of books and papers, a table. On it, a computer and an open telephone. I picked up the phone; I could get a tone. I called an ambulance.

I stood there for a moment looking at all the books everywhere I remember one title, "Bacteria and their Destruction". Perhaps the man was a microbiologist.

An ambulance arrived, the police too. I told them what I knew, then I left.

What divine sensibility could allow such awful grief? I wondered.

A nose like Jo Lo's

*

New Service Offered.

A new department has opened at Angeloni's giant flagship superstore in Florianopolis, Brazil.

 This department can be found next to the cosmetics counter, just behind the cleaning products. Angeloni's proudly claim that you can find a replacement here for any part of your body. There are over 1000 parts to chose from in a range of skin tones and sizes, both male and female

. I went there to find out. I'd decided to replace one of my fingers, because I had managed to scald myself a few days earlier, and there was an unsightly red blister on my index finger. After waiting in a long queue, I was greeted by a sweet-natured man, somewhat camp, not unlike a hairdresser. He showed me their range of index fingers and I was able to find one that matched closely. "after a couple of weeks you won't notice the difference. They grow to match your skin tones, " he explained. 

 I remembered then that I also wanted to see his noses. The birthday of my girlfriend was approaching and she had often complained about her nose. "I'd also like a long thin nose, " I said to the assistant. "Jewish?" "I was thinking of something more in the Roman line" He had two sizes. "Don't you have something a bid more like Jo Lopez?" I asked. The sales assistant told me that an order was coming in in a week's time, "but we do an express delivery service". This came as something of a relief as Danielle's birthday was in two days time. Angeloni's would gift wrap the nose and deliver  by special courier direct from the factory. Together, the nose and the finger came to just $55.

*

The Summerhouse - An Annie Story

So, I said

Yes, said Annie

I was standing there looking at the shop windows, thinking how sorrowful they were. I remembered a conversation with Annie. With Annie, everything had a certain brisk likeliness. She didn’t care whatsoever what anyone else thought either, except so far as it entertained her.

I was thinking about this time we’d been in the woods at the back of her parents’ house. The woods were ash and beech. We used to go there to smoke cigarettes when we were 16.

I wonder if her parents knew about the smoking? They were liberals and reasonably wise, and I think they did know, but thought it a minor sin, not worth creating bad feeling over. That was a good thing about Annie’s house, you felt that you were in the world of adult choices.

There was a rotting summer house. You could sit there in when it rained, hidden from the house by laurel bushes. One evening I’d taken some whisky there and sat listening to the wind softly hushing in the trees and it grew darker I’d felt this romantic frisson, which I had chosen not to act on. I still wonder if Annie had felt a frisson too? I know I chose not to act on it because I was young and knew it and knew that I wasn’t ready for that sort of thing, but, idiotically I am unable not to regret it.

On reflection, I think Annie had probably known what I was feeling, being able to sense things like that, but she didn’t think of me in that way. She thought of me more like a brother.

I remembered being with Annie in the creaky summerhouse with the smell of damp timber and having conversations like that.

Billy's Dinner

This is a story about Billy. It is all absolutely true.

I met him at the underground station in North London and went to his house for dinner. Then there were some conversations with his children whose behaviour, when not illegal was at least vile.The children were fifteen and seventeen. I hoped they wouldn't show, but they did. Both slouched manacingly in the kitchen while I ate, watching me. One of them had recently been prosecuted for sticking a knife into another boy on the Edgware Road. I wasn't sure which one it was: I didn't want to ask. perhaps it was the one leaning against the wall, scratching his groin. Or it might have been the one with the peirced nostril.

I began to feeel quite sick. Not sick in the normal way that you might resonably expect to feel after eating dinner at Billy`s. I mean really very sick indeed.

So they drove me to a hospital and was laid up there for a week, which were largely taken up with vomiting.

I left hospital quite angry about Billy`s cooking, even for a time wondering if he might have intended to poison me .

As soon as I was out on the street I called him.

"Billy you bastard."

"Sorry mate," replied Billy.

It wasn`t all bad news. there was a twenty pound not on the floor of the phone box and I went straight to a pub nearby and had a few.

In the bus station

This fellow reminded me of a character from a Scorcese film.

However, he is probably totally innocuous: a junior accountant, an administrator for a glazing firm or a manager for a car hire company.

The Smoking Man- An Annie story.

*

   I’m at the bus station an hour early waiting for Annie in the little restaurant. There’s a guy there, sitting, smoking. That’s all he’s doing- smoking very slowly, puff puff puff, puff. The cigarette is held quite daintily between his index and middle fingers at their ends (I wonder how it occurred to him that that was the easiest way to hold a cigarette? Surely there is less chance of it being crushed if you hold it in a v, like Churchill and his cigar?). He holds the smoke in for along time. His lungs must be big or his throat long or both, because it seems forever before the smoke comes out, first in a long jet of smoke, like the smoke form a steam train.. Then after a while, it drifts out in a soft cloud. It lingers there. The face of the guy isn’t sad but somehow I imagine that it ought to be. I wish I weren’t like that, thinking people should be sad for no reason at all. It’s so still in the restaurant that the smoke hands around lingering before it disperses too. I guess it’s what he likes doing most. He’s got some beer in a bottle there, but he’s not sipping. Annie won’t be here for an hour but I couldn’t think of anything better to do than wait in the bus station. I thought that maybe if I went to the bus station I’d be closer to her.

*

Short stories, vignettes

I have always been curious about seedy places, and the people who inhabit them. It's something I like in Steinbeck and in Malamud and Tom Waits.

I'm going to write some pieces inspired by the bus station and put them on here. Some will be very short, barely a paragraph, more like vignettes.